V. Christodoulides wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:15 pm
You are welcome Federica. Thank you very much for your response and for providing various resources for study! I have a lot of digging to do.
Hi V, Those are a few entry points that have been particularly helpful for me, and there is surely a lot to dig into! Another approach is to make it a living group discussion right in this thread, as we are doing.
V. Christodoulides wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:15 pm
First of all, you are right
except when it comes to our own self. Our own mental inner life is known directly by our own selves. The noumena are knowable in this case. Schopenhauer has pointed out this missing fact in Kant's philosophy with his book, "The World as Will and Representation". We know our own selves directly and immediately as 'Will' without the need for representations or inferences. However, when it comes to your own 'Will' for example, I do not have direct access to it, like you do. I only have indirect access through the use of representations and inferences. The same goes for the 'Will' of the rest of the world at large. We, incarnated humans, seem to be behind a very very hard-to-penetrate "screen of perceptions" that seems to distort almost everything that passes through its lens. We do get hints of this underlying unity though. One way is by escaping the confines of our dashboard in so-called "transcendent experiences" of felt union with the world or even with another individual being, wherein there seems to be a merge of two previously dissociated consciousnesses. A possible and interesting second way seems to be the conscious and focused act of deeply contemplating the readings of our very dashboard. They too have something to tell about this unity. The dashboard with its readings is an intrinsic part of reality and thus all it can possibly be
truly about is the underlying unity. Everything, no matter how distorted it may seem, is an aspect of this underlying unity.
Yes. I recognize I have simplified a lot by making BK's approach the same as Kant, and Schopenhauer. My aim was to highlight the common aspects.
V. Christodoulides wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:15 pm
(Before I move on to your 2nd paragraph, I want to clear up something. I think that we may be using two different definitions for the word 'framework'. For me, every attempt trying to explain reality, including your philosophical approach, falls under the characterization of 'framework-based'. What you are trying to communicate to me is certainly
pointing to our lived experience that is beyond the philosophical framework itself, but I do not see how any Idealistic theory differs from this. Analytic Idealism for example,
points to the same lived experience. The difference between different theories is only that they try to explain and describe the same lived experience in different ways.
By framework-based approach I mean the intellectual activity that results in a model of reality (the framework), i.e. an abstract construction that we conceive as a representation of reality, a replica of it. One builds the model by setting an ontological prime first, and then conceiving a whole philosophical model, for example. Or by observing a phenomenon, and later trying to extract a model from observation. This is the largely predominant approach to cognizing. Bernardo does that, modern scientists in any field do that. The common approach is to think about a certain reality, trying to describe it.
The path of living thinking that I referred to above does not do that (so I have to disagree with you).
Instead of letting our thinking activity fill up with a series of certain contents (whatever they might be, including inner life, as in psychology for instance) which then occupy it and catalyze our attention, the living thinking approach expands attention to the activity of thinking itself, rather than only what it is occupied by. This is a very different activation and exertion of thinking activity. As Cleric puts it, in living thinking we go from:
Cleric wrote:a bunch of loosely related concepts that aim to build a floating replica of the supposed 'reality-in-itself', to an actual living process which ingrows, fuses with the World Content, similarly to the way the network of plant roots penetrate the soil. In similar way our thinking organism grows into the World and the cognitive experience of this is what is called harmony of the facts. In other words, this process is not something that we observe from the outside but it's the experience from within thinking activity that grows and feels reality.
You will find more context in the Time-Consciousness Spectrum, but probably the most useful post to grasp why this is not framework-based is
this.
V. Christodoulides wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:15 pm
The Kantian paradigm has been overcome by the Schopenhauerian one and now Analytic Idealism is refining and updating the latter according to new knowledge and insights (scientific and otherwise). Analytic Idealism pertains to the field of analytic philosophy. So, how has it been overcome exactly? And how did you come to the conclusion that humanity has evolved, in the way you are describing, around the end of the 19th century? Also, what do you mean by the "path of living thinking"? (Excuse me if the answers are to be found in the links you provided. I haven't read everything yet.)
Completely legitimate questions, V! I tried to provide a telegraphic hint, but you are right, there are tons more to say. You would find the starting point to the answers at the links, yes, especially to the first and last of your questions, that have a common answer. The exact way to overcome the Analytical Idealism paradigm in direct experience becomes clear together with the understanding of what is meant by living thinking. As I tried to outline above, we can first imagine the normal way to use our operative system 'thinking' (that is, thinking about something) as a 'bidimensional' type of activation of thinking. In other words, we can think of this or that content - thus we can roam on a 2D plane - but the 'mechanism' of our thinking gesture is always the same, that is we apply thinking to this, or that, or that). However we could also uncover an unsuspected depth of thinking (as a metaphor, how our thinking activity can roam on a 3D plane) by noticing that we can regulate not only the specific content we think about, but also the quality of the 'thinking gesture'. We can leave it fully engulfed into the manyness of this or that content - in a way, oblivious of itself - or we can recollect it, zooming out of all content, to focus on the activity of thinking as pure activity. In this experienced depth of thinking, we don't produce a framework, we experience our being part of the fabric of reality directly. And we can of course also find alternation of the two extremes - manyness of content versus oneness of thinking-reality - through philosophical-phenomenological inquiry, ideally in association with the practice of exercises.
I didn't want to be too unpolite and only refer you to links, so I have tried to provide some form of initial response. But please know there's x times more clarity and insight at the posts I have linked.
V. Christodoulides wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:15 pm
I more or less agree with your 3rd paragraph. Humans do evolve through stages, and indeed the connection between spirit and man was stronger back then. However, I am not sure this was a different stage in the evolution of human consciousness per se. There were no fundamental differences, as far as I'm aware, between humans back then and modern humans. They were much more in touch with the spiritual aspect of reality because of their openness to such ideas and possibilities. We, modern humans, have not lost this potential, but we have restricted our own selves to a self-imposed limiting picture of what we truly are and are capable of. We are less open to the possibilities as a culture. Furthermore, can you please explain to me how this ancient way of living is different from the more recent breakthrough you are proposing?
It's not a breakthrough, but a continuous transformation of consciousness through time, similar to the growth process of an individual, from childhood, to teen-age, to adulthood, to old age, as an analogy. But please allow me to put this question on hold, because a proper answer would take us far away from the entry point (plus I am not sure I would be able to provide a great account of that trajectory). We can certainly come back to this. The main idea to uncover (not posit) is that the unfolding of human civilization is not only mad of an unfolding of outer historical events plus evolution of thought, but is also an evolution of the human body-soul-spirit(=thinking) organization
itself, meaning that the type of thinking gestures, the quality of thinking activity man has been able to operate through time has been constantly evolving too.
V. Christodoulides wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:15 pm
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that our innate perceptions and cognitive activity themselves already segment the world before we even try to put it in frameworks. This innate segmentation comes with being a normal individual human that is naturally limited in its ability to fully experience the holistic nature of reality. Our very senses for example, already cut this unified reality into different bits and pieces -> (visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory). I do admit though that there is indeed a real argument to be made about frameworks' tendency to further segment reality. But since I believe that philosophy can only be shared through frameworks, the point is to come up with the frameworks that best retain, and point to, this holistic aspect of our lived experience. I am totally with you here. In that reality is basically one and we should strive to experience it as such.
You are not wrong, the process of perception-cognition is a delicate one to be experientially inquired, and we do "segment" perception, as you say. We do that by means of concepts. There is much more to say here to elucidate cognition, from perception through concepts and ideas, which is exactly the way through which clarity can be reached that philosophy cannot only be shared by frameworks.
V. Christodoulides wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:15 pm
Now, I still don't see how have these problems been solved by your approach, or how they are only a byproduct of our faulty way of thinking and thus do not really exist. Idealism, through Analytic Idealism, has almost entirely solved the decomposition problem by the way. There is a clear and plausible argument made as to how the problem is solved. The only thing left is finding the full explanation for the mechanism of dissociation. My opinion is that an explicit account of how exactly this process functions on the universal level to bring about the appearance of multiple dissociated mental complexes is necessarily hard (if not impossible) to obtain while in incarnated dissociated form. But, since this pursuit is quite recent, this remains to be seen. If you ask me personally, I am more than satisfied with what basic explanations we already have. For reference, you can take a look at this short
essay from Bernardo and/or this longer
essay from Bernard Carr that utilizes a more scientific approach to tackle this.
I will come to your last paragraph in another post. Thanks for the links!