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Fri 22 May, 2009 11:33 am
I was just skimming through an old post and came across this post
Fresco:
“Ontology (existence) and epistemology (knowledge) are inseparable. An extension of this non-dualist position is that all "things" imply a "thinger". Things and observers are mutually co-existent. There is no "reality" independent of this co-existence. In as much that we take "observers" to species or culture specific, each is involved in its own "reality". So "trees" may not "exist as such" for "birds"....perhaps "perchfulness" instead etc. Only by evoking an "ultimate observer" or "God" can "reality" be ontologically independent of other observers.”
If I am correct, what you are saying fresco is that essentially “reality” is not as independent of our consciousness, as we would believe it is. In saying that ontology and epistemology are inseparable, you imply that what we “know” to exist is what “exists”, and what “exists” is what we “know”. Because we label the “things” that “exist” in “the world”, our “knowledge” of these “things” is not some much “discovered” or “uncovered” so much as it is essentially created by us as we perceive “things” and then label them.
It’s not that we actually discover “trees”, “stones” etc, but we perceive different things and then label them “trees”, “stones” etc. Because of this, the things that we call “tress” do not exist in the reality of birds; they do exist, but birds don’t understand them as “trees”. The reality of birds is not the reality of humans etc.
This idea stems from the simply notion that we label everything we see in the “world”. This understanding of “reality” is very similar in nature to the one that Roquentin, the protagonist in Sartre’s “Nausea” eventually conceives of.
The trouble I have with this is that it affectively reduces truth to subjective creativity, but there is a world which does actually exist, regardless of whether there are “thingers” or not. I suppose its just a slightly uncomfortable feeling, and I feel like one of Sartre’s characters. It just undermines the scientific pursuit of truth itself.
@existential potential,
You' ve skipped a salient point.
Quote:Things and observers are mutually co-existent. There is no "reality" independent of this co-existence
I'm not advocating solipsism which your conclusion implies. Both "thinger" and "thinged" could be thought of as aspects some of "field of interaction" or "fundamental substrate" which can never be "observed". We are "thrown" (Heidegger) into this interactive field in which relations/communications/labels are
a priori for conscious beings with particular physiology. We cannot escape "prior enframing". All we can do is negotiate its modification.
So I am questioning the very meaning of this sentence
Quote:there is a world which does actually exist
.... "actually" and "exist"...for whom?
NB "scientific truth" is "what works best for the moment".
@fresco,
So seeing as “thinger” and thinged” are part of the same interactive field, which means that they essentially have the same ontological status as anything else, what you are saying is that there is only this field of interaction.
I suppose my question would be what causes us to structure that field as we do, if it is not because there is an “actually existing world”, which is separate from “us”?
@fresco,
could we not also say then, that there are only appearances?
this a quote from Nausea: "things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them...there is nothing".
@existential potential,
Quote:what causes us to structure that field as we do
"We" don't do it.
There is "a structuring". (Ref Prigogine/Capra/Marurana)
"Causality" is a derived psychological concept of higher "cognition"which operates in "the observer realm"(Maturana). Its
philosophical status is problematic (Hume).
Your quote about "nothing behind them" is a phenomenologica position wgich eliminates "noumena" (Kant/Husserl)
(I will be off line for a week. Try googling the references)
@fresco,
doesn't your position also eliminate the "noumena" also, seeing as you deny an actually existing external world?
@existential potential,
Trying to pick up on my thoughts here I would say that the
division noumena/phenomena is the problem. That division, which all of us use to "get through the day" essentially excludes the seeking of a vantage point in which there is an ontological non-dualistic resolution. Now it may be that such a quest is untenable...it may be that language -the currency of of communication and thought - is predicated on the "gold reserves" of dualism. Such a view is embodied in "the ineffability of transcendent awareness" familiar to meditators of various pursuasions. However, there are some (Maturana for example) who are prepared not merely to remain in silent contemplation of our seduction by language (gold) but to attempt to analyse our "barter system with the world" from first principles. This is where the claim for a vantage point becomes intellectually interesting and challenging.
To illustrate, you might try...
http://www.oikos.org/vonobserv.htm
...if I've not already suggested it.
I don't have time to write a lot (but it's good to be back - I remember always seeing good stuff from you fresco). It is interesting how contemporary research into German idealism is beginning to come up again, which bears a lot on these questions. How much time have you spent studying Schelling, fresco?
@Thalion,
Thalion,
Sorry, Schelling is unknown to me (bar my quick googling just now). If you see similarities here I will take a closer look.
@fresco,
Schelling is the second of the three famous German idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). Roughly speaking, their project was an attempt to go continue in the spirit (if blatantly contrary to the letter) of Kant's critical philosophy. There were several criticisms of Kant's philosophy when it first came out that claimed that it could not establish the scientific objectivity that it claimed to or was possibly even nihilistic (Jacobi's original use of this word was to designate the inability to prove the existence of an external world). Schelling, along with other romantic contemporaries, believed that knowledge of an external world was possible only if there were a complete identity between subject and the object. Otherwise, it would be impossible for the subject to extend its knowledge to the outside world. This was, in short, a refutation of Kant's proposed solution to the question "how is synthetic a priori possible?" For the idealists, knowledge is only possible if the subject and the object are one. For Schelling, this was called the Absolute, an expression Hegel also used in a different way, which was a basis for his claim that all reality is the Absolute becoming self-conscious (all knowledge is knowledge of itself).
@Thalion,
If you have time to read it, I'd very highly recommend the book "German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism" by Frederick Beiser.
I am not sure exactly where I stand on this issue. I go back and forth between a Kantian and an idealist view. I follow Kant as far as he argues that reason cannot extend beyond possible experience, but transcendental idealism cannot adequately ground objectivity. That is a leap that can only be explained by positing an identity between the subject and object, which in turn, makes the fact that representations occur contrary to my will completely incomprehensible.
@Thalion,
I will look at Schelling.
In the interim a possible solution to your "representations contrary to
my will" lies in the dissolution of "self" as being independent of "an observation event". Self as "an entity" may be situationally evoked, rather than being an axiomatic entity (a la Descartes).
@fresco,
That's essentially what Kant did. For some reason people, people place Kant in the Cartesian tradition. On the contrary, Descartes takes the self as axiomatic as you say, while Kant says we don't know anything about the self other than referring to it as the formal conditions for the possibility of experience (Kant's "transcendental ego"). The problem, though, is that there is a very real sense in which the self something other than this unifying structure of apperception: I have perceptions of my body as one body among other bodies. I feel like people are uncomfortable with Kant's claim that we do not have knowledge outside of our representations (since we lack knowledge of the object independent of our representation) because we this *other* representation of, say, a photon "causing" our representation by hitting our eye. I feel like you need both standpoints: You need a transcendental theory to explain experience, but that theory itself seems to imply the existence of a materially existing world that the self exists in.
@Thalion,
Hmm, I am trying to suggest to that you take a deflationary view of "self".
According to Maturana the biologist, when we speak of "photons" or allude to "sense data" we are in what he calls "the observer realm" which is a different ball game to what he calls "the praxis of living". What we call "science"...the attempt to predict and control...is an activity of the "languaging" of homo sapiens which is always bounded paradigmatic relationships. According to M, "cognition" is another name for the general life process and has nothing to to with "self awareness" or the self as a "unity of apperceptions". IMO this goes some way to seperating epistemology from anthropocentricity.
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