ebola?
Bluelight Crew
Hi. I'm trying to establish a master thread to discuss our different approaches to metaphysics (that is, epistemology + ontology, a search for the fundamental properties of being, etc.). This bears zero relation to the colloquial term
"metaphysics", meaning something like "study pertaining to magic or the spiritual plane"..
Feel free to discuss, debate, describe, put forth more formalized writings, etc.
I will begin by trying to outline my view (my best guess):
My general metaphysics follows most closely the tradition of American Pragmatism (Dewey, James, some Quine, etc.), friendly to the phenomenologists (esp. Merleau Ponty, reaching back to Marx, and forward into Bourdieu). I am most antagonistic toward logical positivists.
To explain my position (mostly just John Dewey's):
I hold that:
1. "Nature, "as such", is fundamentally 1 thing. There is not matter counterpoised to spirit. And yet nature is at the same time composed of an indefinite number of smaller parts. There is at the same time the one and the many (echoing the Greeks).
1 a. Natural processes give rise to "culture", a special part of nature (the definition of culture used here will be a bit odd).
Culture is human beings' (and perhaps other life's) interaction with (often a response to) nature and the products of this
interaction, which are also part of the interaction. Culture is also "about" nature, part of culture being an attempt to
"represent" nature. Culture is both of nature and in nature.
Thus, because culture is part of nature, nature is self-referential. Culture is also about itself (take our current conversation,
for example), so there is also this smaller recursion. Already implicit, the relationships between nature and culture is
mutually constitutive, "antagonistic" (the nature-culture interaction sets the two against one another), and reciprocal (nature
brings culture into being, but culture transforms nature). In short, the two relate dialectically.
2. This particular culture-nature relationship also presents the possibility of resolving subject-object duality. It is the subject-object interaction that is ontologically primary, rather than either subject or object standing as prior entities. The subject-object interaction in turn "presents" subject and object as its aspects.
3. The world is not composed of things per-se. Rather, all is flux, ie, all is "process". Actor and action fuse in the encompassing "processes". This process ontology allows the subject-object interaction to be ontologically primary, rather than the actors who carry out processes. Here, Dewey is defying the common sense understanding of how the world divides, congruent with language's grammar.
3. a. Processes are indefinite things, whose borders blur into one another. Yet there are borders. Again, the one and many
superimpose.
3. b. Organisms' activity (especially human investigators) creates objects out of processes, but these objects are
"non-exhaustive" and "incomplete". Different situations exhibit different degrees of definiteness and include different
objects (not completely ephemeral but never static).
4. We've already cut at general ontology in 3 different ways,
a. as nature and culture, jointed dialectically.
b. as subject and object, joined as aspects of an interaction.
c. as a process, setting objects as emergent in a stream of flux.
Let's do a "4th cut", related to part "c", adding in a temporal dimension. How does change occur? As Dewey puts it, how do situations develop? Firstly, the situation, the organism-environment interaction, is primarily a qualitative whole, presenting a unique quality of some sort, incomparable to other situations, non-transportable as a type of "object". Secondary to this quality, however, is "secondary experience", the process through which the (human) organism transforms the situation into discrete, transportable objects according to goals emergent in the organism-environment relation. It is crucial to note, here, that that the quality is logically primary over the objects of secondary experience, but qualities are not temporally primary. The objects of secondary experience play a crucial role in determining the quality, as it presents itself, and as the organism-environment interaction transforms that quality. However, the objects of secondary experience only have meaning set in context, insofar as they are set in relationships with one another and the quality of the situation. So here again we have another one-many relationship, this time set dialectically.
5. Taking into account 3 and 4, this ontology clearly favors the continuous over the discrete, but situates the discrete, providing an account of how it is possible. In short, the (human) organism, in goal-driven interaction with its environment, creates/discovers discrete objects, to use as tools in pursuit of its goals.* While situations are at (logical) root continuous, one quality blurring into another as the stream of time moves along, pockets of discreteness bubble up as conceptual moves are made, presenting the illusion of being immutable and internal, but depending on qualitative wholes in flux to anchor their meanings.
*I say "create/discover", as the two are facets of the same process when we interpret experience as non-dual.
...a bit less unfinished, but I will still continue to fill this out.
ebola
"metaphysics", meaning something like "study pertaining to magic or the spiritual plane"..
Feel free to discuss, debate, describe, put forth more formalized writings, etc.
I will begin by trying to outline my view (my best guess):
My general metaphysics follows most closely the tradition of American Pragmatism (Dewey, James, some Quine, etc.), friendly to the phenomenologists (esp. Merleau Ponty, reaching back to Marx, and forward into Bourdieu). I am most antagonistic toward logical positivists.
To explain my position (mostly just John Dewey's):
I hold that:
1. "Nature, "as such", is fundamentally 1 thing. There is not matter counterpoised to spirit. And yet nature is at the same time composed of an indefinite number of smaller parts. There is at the same time the one and the many (echoing the Greeks).
1 a. Natural processes give rise to "culture", a special part of nature (the definition of culture used here will be a bit odd).
Culture is human beings' (and perhaps other life's) interaction with (often a response to) nature and the products of this
interaction, which are also part of the interaction. Culture is also "about" nature, part of culture being an attempt to
"represent" nature. Culture is both of nature and in nature.
Thus, because culture is part of nature, nature is self-referential. Culture is also about itself (take our current conversation,
for example), so there is also this smaller recursion. Already implicit, the relationships between nature and culture is
mutually constitutive, "antagonistic" (the nature-culture interaction sets the two against one another), and reciprocal (nature
brings culture into being, but culture transforms nature). In short, the two relate dialectically.
2. This particular culture-nature relationship also presents the possibility of resolving subject-object duality. It is the subject-object interaction that is ontologically primary, rather than either subject or object standing as prior entities. The subject-object interaction in turn "presents" subject and object as its aspects.
3. The world is not composed of things per-se. Rather, all is flux, ie, all is "process". Actor and action fuse in the encompassing "processes". This process ontology allows the subject-object interaction to be ontologically primary, rather than the actors who carry out processes. Here, Dewey is defying the common sense understanding of how the world divides, congruent with language's grammar.
3. a. Processes are indefinite things, whose borders blur into one another. Yet there are borders. Again, the one and many
superimpose.
3. b. Organisms' activity (especially human investigators) creates objects out of processes, but these objects are
"non-exhaustive" and "incomplete". Different situations exhibit different degrees of definiteness and include different
objects (not completely ephemeral but never static).
4. We've already cut at general ontology in 3 different ways,
a. as nature and culture, jointed dialectically.
b. as subject and object, joined as aspects of an interaction.
c. as a process, setting objects as emergent in a stream of flux.
Let's do a "4th cut", related to part "c", adding in a temporal dimension. How does change occur? As Dewey puts it, how do situations develop? Firstly, the situation, the organism-environment interaction, is primarily a qualitative whole, presenting a unique quality of some sort, incomparable to other situations, non-transportable as a type of "object". Secondary to this quality, however, is "secondary experience", the process through which the (human) organism transforms the situation into discrete, transportable objects according to goals emergent in the organism-environment relation. It is crucial to note, here, that that the quality is logically primary over the objects of secondary experience, but qualities are not temporally primary. The objects of secondary experience play a crucial role in determining the quality, as it presents itself, and as the organism-environment interaction transforms that quality. However, the objects of secondary experience only have meaning set in context, insofar as they are set in relationships with one another and the quality of the situation. So here again we have another one-many relationship, this time set dialectically.
5. Taking into account 3 and 4, this ontology clearly favors the continuous over the discrete, but situates the discrete, providing an account of how it is possible. In short, the (human) organism, in goal-driven interaction with its environment, creates/discovers discrete objects, to use as tools in pursuit of its goals.* While situations are at (logical) root continuous, one quality blurring into another as the stream of time moves along, pockets of discreteness bubble up as conceptual moves are made, presenting the illusion of being immutable and internal, but depending on qualitative wholes in flux to anchor their meanings.
*I say "create/discover", as the two are facets of the same process when we interpret experience as non-dual.
...a bit less unfinished, but I will still continue to fill this out.
ebola
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