The question of externalities always leads us back to the qualities of perception. Most people quit the inquiry with the conclusion that there is an outer world, outer space, case closed. This approach is very comforting. It upholds truckloads of assumptions.
I wonder, though about this. Isn't it ultimately true that there is no external perception? So, if anything we can perceive is due to the inner quality of perception, how do we know that the inner perception is registering an outer world?
Put another way, there is always an inner facet to any external perception, so anything we can perceive cannot be fully and completely an external phenomenon. At the very least, a quality of ourselves must participate in the perception.
Thus to perceive the forms, the five solids, and the unmoveable mover means that there is a quality with at least some of us that participates therein. This means that it is impossible for source to be fully external from our subject-object assumptions.
Exactly so! As well as the fact that perception is really something internal and that the senses receive only sensations which as themselves would never amount to the representation of a world such as we normally believe ourselves to be in, even the idea of something absolutely transcendent such as Alexander of Aphrodesias' god, cannot actually be completely severed from our own being because it is still an object of our consciousness. I had basically been turned off Aristotle and his school when I was in college. I didn't think there was much to them at all. I thought they were just empiricists with preventions lol And I really liked Plato so I felt I didn't want to read anything by them. But another author on here wrote some excellent things about Aristotleanism so I thought I'd give them another shot. There are some very interesting aspects to their philosophy which I can appreciate now. But I still think Plato and especially Plotinus were the masters
Artistotle represents, at least to me, what can be concluded from a shared reality, from the assumptions and definitions and appearances and differences that make up what our perception and interaction with it tell us are the conditions of existence. I think his philosophy, when taken in such context, is truly excellent.
The issue I run into with Artistotle is that his enshrining of difference actually precludes any participation in essence. Difference means that the unmoveable mover is external by necessity. External notions then become easily reduced to buzz words and baisic concepts, thus the Abrahamic idea of god, which bears no resemblance to a transcendent participation, but is the subject of endless circular consideration.
You'd like what Heidegger says about the interpretation (or misinterpretation) of Aristotle's theology by medieval Abrahamic thinkers. Heidegger says that Aristotle is often read back through the lens of the scholastics which covers over what was originally a very open and fresh theology having very little to do with the concept of god as a person (or persons). I think Heidegger is right, though he also regards Aristotle as the pinnacle of Greek thought which I wouldn't do. Some of Aristotle's immediate successors did not share his concern to transcendentalise the god. In fact for Theophrastus the “heavens’ including the celestial bodies were the purest manifestation of god or the visibility of the divine mind.
Indeed, I do find a great deal of veracity in Heidegger. It's interesting that he would view the culmination of Greek thinking as a transcendence, or expansion beyond the human condition.
The heavens as the purest expression of the divine does uphold the sense of division between earth and sky. I'm not at all certain, however that there can be any satisfactory mediation between them if one must place them in any way in absolute positions. Mr C, I don't know if you would agree, but I cannot escape the notion that if we limit our understanding to physical senses we inevitably run head first into the supreme difficulty of how to approach non existence. There is no actual sense organ with which one can interact with non existence, and yet we all know very much that non existence is a significant feature of our lives.
As an example, I would offer money. Money, essentially is unreal. If we still use actual physical money, what we really see are a series of assigned meanings, belief systems. I recently wrote about the madness of gold. Its all quite fascinating that the guiding force behind money is what can't be truly nailed down or fully encompassed, an unreality.
Plato, and Parmenides both deal very centrally with unreality, but Aristotle? I don't believe he broached the topic, but If you have any examples I'm all ears.
I think if we limit our understanding to the physical senses we miss reality and are trapped in illusion. Aristotle placed more weight in the sensual world than the kind of philosophers I think you or I would be drawn to
Yup, I don’t think our sense of reality comes from the senses. Taken by themselves, they can’t install us in reality, which is of itself. I like the idea of the autó — that which constitutes reality as self-constituting, and ourselves as well: we steer our bodies, but we have no direct vote in whether our cells do or do not do their work. The autó is what is irreducible; it does not let itself be dominated or fully positivised.
On the other hand, unreality is where we primarily move. In determining what things are, we start from their real moment, but in discerning them we de-realise their content into fictions, percepts, and concepts. Ramón Turró shows how the certainty we share about moving in reality does not come from the senses, and he looks for its precursor in the cell, arguing that hunger is the origin of knowledge: metabolism as our primary vector of discernment and non‑negotiable physical relation to the real.
Right up my alley, thank you. I’m putting together a workshop on Parmenides and Heraclitus and have been reading Zubiri on the parallels and differences between the Greek/Aristotelian view of nous and being, and the Vedantic one. Here's a fragment:
"Primitive Indian philosophical literature does not rest on the verb as-, “to be”, but on the verb bhū-, equivalent to Greek phyein, in the sense of being born and engendering. All the exuberant richness of the intellectual nuances of things is expressed through the innumerable forms and derivatives of this second verb: things are bhūta-, engendered beings; the entity is bhū, the born one, etc. The verb as- by contrast has no other function than that of a simple copula, so inconsequential that Indian thought never truly arrived at the idea of essence. It is not that Vedānta absolutely lacks something equivalent to our notion of essence; but it is only a remote equivalence.
For the Greeks, essence is a purely logical and ontological feature: it is what in things corresponds to their definition and what gives them their proper nature. The Indian, on the other hand, always subordinates these notions to others that are more elementary and of a different character. For him, essence is above all the purest extract of the activity of things, in the same sense in which we still use the word today when we speak of an “essence” in perfumery. So much so that one of the most primitive names for what we call essence is rasa-, which strictly means sap, juice, generating and vital principle.
This difference reaches all the way to the very idea of being. Whereas for Parmenides and for the Greeks in general —to put it somewhat schematically— the characteristic of being is “to stand”, to persist and, therefore, to be immutable, not to change (akíneton), for Vedānta being (sat-) is rather that which possesses itself in perfect stillness, in unalterable peace (shanti-). This opposition between Eleatic stillness and Vedāntic calm or peace cannot be forgotten in favour of external analogies, and keeping it in view prevents us from hastily identifying on and sat-.
Indian thought is the reality of what Greece —and therefore the whole of Europe— would have been without Parmenides or Heraclitus: in Aristotelian terms, a speculation entirely about things without ever bringing the “are” into play; something that, very remotely, recalls gnosis. This slight variation in the target of thought was enough to give rise to Parmenides and Heraclitus.
By interpreting Brahman as universal soul —the identity of ātman and brahman— the Indian arrived at a kind of ontogony. By taking Nature as a force of being, we will arrive at an ontology. But one more step is needed: that will be the work of the generations immediately after the Persian Wars. From that point on, Wisdom will no longer be a simple vision of Nature, but a vision of what things are, of the principle and substance that makes them be, of their being."
Possibly, but I think your distinction comes later than Parmenides' and Heraclitus. I suspect that with them the religious intuition which appears in the Upanishads was still central. I think it was with how these were received later by Socrates' generation that was the point of departure for the enterprise that would become 'scientific philosophy ' as opposed to intuitive wisdom. Very interesting though!
Yes, I agree; Zubiri’s fragment is an a posteriori observation that I ripped out of context. I share it because it seems relevant how an apparently slight difference in language can mark the path toward a more “scientific” philosophy, in contrast with that intuitive knowing which is no less deep, but perhaps less suited for later articulation. We’ll keep investigating!
That's exactly so and actually it's something I've been grappling with recently - you got there first! I couldn't quite put it into the rightly worded question but I was looking for where western thought took a decidedly 'objective' orientation as distinct from subjective reflection. I think Alexander of Aphrodesias (and I'm really not that extensively read, at least in regards to the Peripatetics!) took the most extreme objective paradigm for approaching the understanding of the world, but I think there seems to have been a pretty strong reaction against that with the Neoplatonists. It's all so incredibly interesting. It's such a bloody shame humanity spends so much time and effort destroying things rather than actually enjoying our intellectual capacity!
The question of externalities always leads us back to the qualities of perception. Most people quit the inquiry with the conclusion that there is an outer world, outer space, case closed. This approach is very comforting. It upholds truckloads of assumptions.
I wonder, though about this. Isn't it ultimately true that there is no external perception? So, if anything we can perceive is due to the inner quality of perception, how do we know that the inner perception is registering an outer world?
Put another way, there is always an inner facet to any external perception, so anything we can perceive cannot be fully and completely an external phenomenon. At the very least, a quality of ourselves must participate in the perception.
Thus to perceive the forms, the five solids, and the unmoveable mover means that there is a quality with at least some of us that participates therein. This means that it is impossible for source to be fully external from our subject-object assumptions.
Exactly so! As well as the fact that perception is really something internal and that the senses receive only sensations which as themselves would never amount to the representation of a world such as we normally believe ourselves to be in, even the idea of something absolutely transcendent such as Alexander of Aphrodesias' god, cannot actually be completely severed from our own being because it is still an object of our consciousness. I had basically been turned off Aristotle and his school when I was in college. I didn't think there was much to them at all. I thought they were just empiricists with preventions lol And I really liked Plato so I felt I didn't want to read anything by them. But another author on here wrote some excellent things about Aristotleanism so I thought I'd give them another shot. There are some very interesting aspects to their philosophy which I can appreciate now. But I still think Plato and especially Plotinus were the masters
Artistotle represents, at least to me, what can be concluded from a shared reality, from the assumptions and definitions and appearances and differences that make up what our perception and interaction with it tell us are the conditions of existence. I think his philosophy, when taken in such context, is truly excellent.
The issue I run into with Artistotle is that his enshrining of difference actually precludes any participation in essence. Difference means that the unmoveable mover is external by necessity. External notions then become easily reduced to buzz words and baisic concepts, thus the Abrahamic idea of god, which bears no resemblance to a transcendent participation, but is the subject of endless circular consideration.
You'd like what Heidegger says about the interpretation (or misinterpretation) of Aristotle's theology by medieval Abrahamic thinkers. Heidegger says that Aristotle is often read back through the lens of the scholastics which covers over what was originally a very open and fresh theology having very little to do with the concept of god as a person (or persons). I think Heidegger is right, though he also regards Aristotle as the pinnacle of Greek thought which I wouldn't do. Some of Aristotle's immediate successors did not share his concern to transcendentalise the god. In fact for Theophrastus the “heavens’ including the celestial bodies were the purest manifestation of god or the visibility of the divine mind.
Indeed, I do find a great deal of veracity in Heidegger. It's interesting that he would view the culmination of Greek thinking as a transcendence, or expansion beyond the human condition.
The heavens as the purest expression of the divine does uphold the sense of division between earth and sky. I'm not at all certain, however that there can be any satisfactory mediation between them if one must place them in any way in absolute positions. Mr C, I don't know if you would agree, but I cannot escape the notion that if we limit our understanding to physical senses we inevitably run head first into the supreme difficulty of how to approach non existence. There is no actual sense organ with which one can interact with non existence, and yet we all know very much that non existence is a significant feature of our lives.
As an example, I would offer money. Money, essentially is unreal. If we still use actual physical money, what we really see are a series of assigned meanings, belief systems. I recently wrote about the madness of gold. Its all quite fascinating that the guiding force behind money is what can't be truly nailed down or fully encompassed, an unreality.
Plato, and Parmenides both deal very centrally with unreality, but Aristotle? I don't believe he broached the topic, but If you have any examples I'm all ears.
I think if we limit our understanding to the physical senses we miss reality and are trapped in illusion. Aristotle placed more weight in the sensual world than the kind of philosophers I think you or I would be drawn to
Yup, I don’t think our sense of reality comes from the senses. Taken by themselves, they can’t install us in reality, which is of itself. I like the idea of the autó — that which constitutes reality as self-constituting, and ourselves as well: we steer our bodies, but we have no direct vote in whether our cells do or do not do their work. The autó is what is irreducible; it does not let itself be dominated or fully positivised.
On the other hand, unreality is where we primarily move. In determining what things are, we start from their real moment, but in discerning them we de-realise their content into fictions, percepts, and concepts. Ramón Turró shows how the certainty we share about moving in reality does not come from the senses, and he looks for its precursor in the cell, arguing that hunger is the origin of knowledge: metabolism as our primary vector of discernment and non‑negotiable physical relation to the real.
Right up my alley, thank you. I’m putting together a workshop on Parmenides and Heraclitus and have been reading Zubiri on the parallels and differences between the Greek/Aristotelian view of nous and being, and the Vedantic one. Here's a fragment:
"Primitive Indian philosophical literature does not rest on the verb as-, “to be”, but on the verb bhū-, equivalent to Greek phyein, in the sense of being born and engendering. All the exuberant richness of the intellectual nuances of things is expressed through the innumerable forms and derivatives of this second verb: things are bhūta-, engendered beings; the entity is bhū, the born one, etc. The verb as- by contrast has no other function than that of a simple copula, so inconsequential that Indian thought never truly arrived at the idea of essence. It is not that Vedānta absolutely lacks something equivalent to our notion of essence; but it is only a remote equivalence.
For the Greeks, essence is a purely logical and ontological feature: it is what in things corresponds to their definition and what gives them their proper nature. The Indian, on the other hand, always subordinates these notions to others that are more elementary and of a different character. For him, essence is above all the purest extract of the activity of things, in the same sense in which we still use the word today when we speak of an “essence” in perfumery. So much so that one of the most primitive names for what we call essence is rasa-, which strictly means sap, juice, generating and vital principle.
This difference reaches all the way to the very idea of being. Whereas for Parmenides and for the Greeks in general —to put it somewhat schematically— the characteristic of being is “to stand”, to persist and, therefore, to be immutable, not to change (akíneton), for Vedānta being (sat-) is rather that which possesses itself in perfect stillness, in unalterable peace (shanti-). This opposition between Eleatic stillness and Vedāntic calm or peace cannot be forgotten in favour of external analogies, and keeping it in view prevents us from hastily identifying on and sat-.
Indian thought is the reality of what Greece —and therefore the whole of Europe— would have been without Parmenides or Heraclitus: in Aristotelian terms, a speculation entirely about things without ever bringing the “are” into play; something that, very remotely, recalls gnosis. This slight variation in the target of thought was enough to give rise to Parmenides and Heraclitus.
By interpreting Brahman as universal soul —the identity of ātman and brahman— the Indian arrived at a kind of ontogony. By taking Nature as a force of being, we will arrive at an ontology. But one more step is needed: that will be the work of the generations immediately after the Persian Wars. From that point on, Wisdom will no longer be a simple vision of Nature, but a vision of what things are, of the principle and substance that makes them be, of their being."
Possibly, but I think your distinction comes later than Parmenides' and Heraclitus. I suspect that with them the religious intuition which appears in the Upanishads was still central. I think it was with how these were received later by Socrates' generation that was the point of departure for the enterprise that would become 'scientific philosophy ' as opposed to intuitive wisdom. Very interesting though!
Yes, I agree; Zubiri’s fragment is an a posteriori observation that I ripped out of context. I share it because it seems relevant how an apparently slight difference in language can mark the path toward a more “scientific” philosophy, in contrast with that intuitive knowing which is no less deep, but perhaps less suited for later articulation. We’ll keep investigating!
That's exactly so and actually it's something I've been grappling with recently - you got there first! I couldn't quite put it into the rightly worded question but I was looking for where western thought took a decidedly 'objective' orientation as distinct from subjective reflection. I think Alexander of Aphrodesias (and I'm really not that extensively read, at least in regards to the Peripatetics!) took the most extreme objective paradigm for approaching the understanding of the world, but I think there seems to have been a pretty strong reaction against that with the Neoplatonists. It's all so incredibly interesting. It's such a bloody shame humanity spends so much time and effort destroying things rather than actually enjoying our intellectual capacity!
Bloody shame indeed, we need the Logos back! I'll look into Alexander, thanks for the cue.
This is just beautiful! 😊😊😊😊😊💜💜💜💜💜👏👏👏👏👏
Thank you also for the footnote, which is so appreciated!
And thank you, Aria!!🙏🙏🙏🍀🍀💚💚