/lit/ - Literature

>>19855860

>>19856002

>>19855860
>retard falls into religion because he’s bothered by reality
Shocker

>>19856068
You didn't have to call me a retard :(

>Has anyone, materialist, metaphysician, or whatever Schopenhauer believed in, offered a claim to total and comprehensive certainty?
Leibniz and Spinoza, Hegel (drawing on both). Some Wolffians (Leibnizians). Kant claimed pretty robust certainty for his method (as a modified Leibniz-Wolffian), within its own bounds, but of course everything else outside of those bounds is radically unknowable.

Basically what you want are strong logicists/rationalists who believe in the metaphysical reality of their logic. Aristotle arguably approaches this since he clearly thinks he has given an adequate description of the "furniture of the world," that language and reality are at least isomorphic, but of course the ambiguity in interpreting Aristotle lies in interpreting exactly what he thought this isomorphism consisted in.

Hence the debate over the reality of universals: Are they real? Are our concepts/ideas of them the same as they are "in rebus se" (in the things themselves)? Or do our universal-ideas somehow "refer" or "connect" to the universals in rebus se? Or is the structure of the things themselves ONLY isomorphic to our conceptual description (i.e., there is something like causality, and real things, and we can interact with them meaningfully and reliably with conceptual thought, but our thoughts aren't "related" to the things other than this correlation, co-relation)? Or can we even go that far - should we be radical nominalists/pragmatists and assume that our ideas are only ever provisionally "referential?" But then what about very fundamental ideas, like causality, that seem necessary for having ANY relation whatsoever - do they at least exist both in our minds and in the things themselves? (Hence Hume and Kant.)

What about a progressive inquiry into the structure of things themselves that begins with the simplest possible assumptions (Descartes, Locke)? Does this reveal a "physical" nature to real reality?

All philosophy stems from this problem of how thoughts about things relate to things. Only once you answer that question, either at the beginning or the end of your philosophy, can the "certainty" of your system be discussed (is it a referential certainty? a kind of highly adequate description? is it conceptual IDENTITY with the real structure of the world?).

>>19856306
Schopenhauer won't satisfy you: he does a Kantian transcendental analysis of experience along streamlined British empiricist lines, but then freely and frankly admits that he has no ultimate explanation of the "why" or "how" of the ultimate principle of reality itself (for him, the Will). The Will is just "there." Somehow, the Will unfolds itself in Ideality (Representation), and one of the primordial aspects of Ideality is the principle of sufficient reason (the various forms of causality and groundedness that beings have). But notice how the principle itself of making cause/ground attributions FLOWS FROM the Will, as one of the first stages of Ideality. It thus can't be "backwards-applied" to the Will itself, which is ITS ground. But we just tried to backwards-apply it by saying the Will is the "ground" of the very principle of grounding, which is circular.

This paradox compels us and conveys us to the realisation that the primal being of reality is beyond all Representation, prior to it, more primary than it. Even our attempts to say things like this themselves dissolve into paradox: "primal," "prior," "primary" all obviously relate to "firstness" as an analogy of causal sequence - what comes first in a chain of events or a logical sequence is the cause of subsequent effects. What comes "first of all" is the Ultimate Cause, or Kant's Unconditioned, about which Schopenhauer is in agreement that we can have no non-paradoxical knowledge. Kant simply left the Unconditioned an "empty" Idea (it is abstractly thinkable but not non-paradoxically intuitable), but Schopenhauer said that beyond the Ideas of Kant is a direct intuition of the Will.

This direct intuition is only possibly because we ARE the Will, so we perceive it by analogy in all other things, from irrational "forces" of nature (e.g. gravity is not explicable or accountable rationally, it just IS; it is not analogous to a determinate link in a chain of reasoning, but to the WILL, a fiat of nature) to animal wills and our own desires. But the ultimate just-is-ness of the Will can never be accounted for. We can only "see" and "feel" the Will by analogy in other things.

Schopenhauer is basically a platonist in this respect. Bergson did a very similar thing with his elan vital or duration, which is not deduced or held logically accountable but primally and sympathetically intuited at the heart of all things, based on an originary intuition of it as the ground of our own consciousness, leading to a recognition that it is the ground of all things.

>>19856310
This platonist solution to the problem of how the ultimate reality, that grounds rationality and logical accountability, can itself be "held accountable" for a (rational, logical) account of its own nature, which is obviously a paradox, isn't new. It's the solution many scholastics ultimately opted for. It goes back to Plato and to Philo's use of it in relation to Christianity. One high point of it was Nicholas of Cusa's "docta ignorantia," Learned Ignorance, which is the Ignorance one has about ultimate Being once one properly and wisely recognises (i.e. by becoming Learned) the ultimate insufficiency of all knowing TO that ultimate Being.

Some philosophers stop there, a position that is often called fideism, or fideism plus nominalism. But a lot of thinker claim direct mystical knowledge, a bit like Schopenhauer, of the primal unity. For Plato and the neoplatonists, and many Christians, this mystical knowledge (gnosis), a higher form of knowledge than the discursive, which all discursive knowledge is merely a vehicle (propaedeutic) for attaining, is the result of a lifetime or several lifetimes of ascetic work. For Philo the Jew and also many Christians, all this is true, but God's grace is also emphasised: gnosis is not a technology, gnosis is the work you perform to beautify and elevate your soul to be worthy of God's bestowing the vision upon you, but ultimate that vision is contingent upon His choice and goodness. This again is a way of emphasising the "creaturely" nature of contingent, discursively understandable being in relation to the unknowable-except-through-special-means Creator.

This way of dignifying the Creator as the summit of mystical insight has a long tradition that often involves the deliberate invocation of paradox. Sometimes the ultimate ground of Being is called the groundless ground or the infinite, or the Ab-grund (the ever-receding Ground, the fathomless or "abyssal" Ground). Cusa designated its nature as the "coincidentia oppositorum," the coincidence of opposites, i.e. the reconciliation of paradoxes, emphasising that all knowledge naturally ends in these paradoxes at the threshold of gnosis and either no knowledge or only non-conventional knowledge can move beyond that threshold, to a state literally indescribable WITHIN conventional knowledge.

>>19856318
Aside from some fideists, who sometimes deny mysticism altogether and simply limit themselves to obedience to the revealed law (but this also makes faith/grace a kind of demi-mystical insight, necessary for recognising the revealed law as THE Law), the somewhat rarer position I mentioned way above is that of Leibniz and Spinoza, who believe that extremely heightened conceptual (discursive) knowledge actually does attain adequacy with the things themselves, including the highest/divine things. For Leibniz, thinking "purely" was effectively "seeing as God saw," but obviously this opens up all kinds of questions. For Spinoza the line between seeing things "sub specie aeternitatis" and deducing them with pure rationality is notoriously hazy and it's controversial exactly what role Spinoza gave to quasi-mystical "intuition."

And even Leibniz and Spinoza acknowledged limitations on human capacity for pure thought. For Leibniz, most thought is "blurred" (which is why ordinary consciousness only "sees" particular matter existing in, ultimately non-real, space and time. For Spinoza, the classical Cartesian aspects of things that we experience are only two modes of a Substance with infinite modes. And of course, just like with the fideist who smuggles non-discursive "insight" into his system at least for the recognition of revelation, Spinoza and Leibniz have effectively turned "pure thought" into such a rarefied and specific thing that it transcends ordinary discursive thought and becomes quasi-mystical. Hegel's "pure thinking" should really be understood in this Spinozist-Leibnizian light, but he also left the nature and consequences of such thinking notoriously vague.

Basically if you dig down into any system's explicit or implicit claims to be "certain" (correct, complete), you're going to find one of three things:
>either they just don't think about it very much because they're working at a more applied level
>or they are pragmatists/nominalists, working at a more applied level BECAUSE they thought about the paradoxes of ultimate truth/certainty and have no immediate solution to them
>or they are ultimately forced to give a precarious account of their discursive "adequacy"/"reference" (in which case they get caught in Hume/Kant sceptical traps quickly, or fall into quasi-mysticism like Leibniz/Spinoza)
>or they are ultimately platonists or fideists in some way

Schopenhauer is somewhere between 3 and 4 since he gives a quasi-rationalist deduction of Ideality but he ultimately grounds it all on an intuitive (non-discursive, platonist) grasp of pre-discursive, pre-ideal Being.

Also worth mentioning is that the Islamic, Jewish, and scholastic attempts to solve these problems for logic in the Middle Ages were much more sophisticated and technical than is usually thought nowadays. They had very complex, quasi-"transcendental" philosophical psychologies.

>>19856329
Sorry I meant to say one of 4 things there. Also it's worth looking into apophatic/cataphatic theology, and Eckhart.

>>19856329
The hero /lit/ needs but doesnt deserve.

Seriously anon, thanks for that reply but get outta here. You are too pure for this place. God bless you.

My diary, unironically

>>19856378
How do you know all this? How can I come to know this myself? Are you illuminati?

>>19855860
No, because you literally can't refute epistemological solipsism. There's no way to prove that anything exists except your own mind.
>but cogito ergo sum
All that shows is that something must exist in order for thought to happen. It offers no statement about what that existence is like—it's not even necessarily different from mind itself.