Postcards:

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commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

Walker wrote:Nothingness is a word game because nothingness cannot be imagined.

There is no real opposite to everything outside of the word game.
I think a word game and a bona fide concept are not mutually exclusive. As one can see, you and I, without acrimony, are taking turns in a word game. And yet there exists a concept of a black hole, a uniquely difficult concept to imagine, but a concept nonetheless.
Walker
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Re: Postcards:

Post by Walker »

commonsense wrote:
Walker wrote:Nothingness is a word game because nothingness cannot be imagined.

There is no real opposite to everything outside of the word game.
I think a word game and a bona fide concept are not mutually exclusive. As one can see, you and I, without acrimony, are taking turns in a word game. And yet there exists a concept of a black hole, a uniquely difficult concept to imagine, but a concept nonetheless.
A black hole does not cause everything to not exist.
There are things other than black holes.

I've heard black holes are doing their thing right now.
I exist right now, and I assume you do too.

Somethingness is, nothingness is not, and cannot be.
Nothingness is beyond a human’s capacity to imagine, because there is nothing to imagine.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

Walker wrote:
commonsense wrote:
Walker wrote:Nothingness is a word game because nothingness cannot be imagined.

There is no real opposite to everything outside of the word game.
I think a word game and a bona fide concept are not mutually exclusive. As one can see, you and I, without acrimony, are taking turns in a word game. And yet there exists a concept of a black hole, a uniquely difficult concept to imagine, but a concept nonetheless.
A black hole does not cause everything to not exist.
There are things other than black holes.

I've heard black holes are doing their thing right now.
I exist right now, and I assume you do too.

Somethingness is, nothingness is not, and cannot be.
Nothingness is beyond a human’s capacity to imagine, because there is nothing to imagine.
Language and mind, words and thoughts, are inexorably intertwined, are they not? Then let me ask this: what do you see when you close your eyes? Is there a word for what you are seeing?

If there's a word for it, there's a concept of it; if there's a concept of it, there's a word for it.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

commonsense wrote:[quote="HobbesChoice]Nothingness, is a concept designed by humans.
True, but trivial. Anything we can think of is a concept designed by humans. Nothingness deserves no more, no less.
d63 wrote:nothingness is basically a potential implied by Being.
Is there anything that does not have the potential to become something else? What are your thoughts?[/quote]

Ah, but anything that is immaterial does not possess the possibility of becoming something material.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

commonsense wrote:
commonsense wrote:[quote="HobbesChoice]Nothingness, is a concept designed by humans.
True, but trivial. Anything we can think of is a concept designed by humans. Nothingness deserves no more, no less.
d63 wrote:nothingness is basically a potential implied by Being.
Is there anything that does not have the potential to become something else? What are your thoughts?
Ah, but anything that is immaterial does not possess the possibility of becoming something material.[/quote]

But does something that is immaterial have the potential to become something else that is immaterial? What about truth, for instance? In the material world, a true statement has the potential to be a false statement. However in the immaterial world, truth is a pure concept and falsehood is everything that is not truth. In this sense, truth cannot become something that it is not- agreed? Dag Nabit! My argument has turned such that it supports Walker's, especially about black holes.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

commonsense wrote:
commonsense wrote:
commonsense wrote:[quote="HobbesChoice]Nothingness, is a concept designed by humans.
True, but trivial. Anything we can think of is a concept designed by humans. Nothingness deserves no more, no less.
d63 wrote:nothingness is basically a potential implied by Being.
Is there anything that does not have the potential to become something else? What are your thoughts?
Ah, but anything that is immaterial does not possess the possibility of becoming something material.
But does something that is immaterial have the potential to become something else that is immaterial? What about truth, for instance? In the material world, a true statement has the potential to be a false statement. However in the immaterial world, truth is a pure concept and falsehood is everything that is not truth. In this sense, truth cannot become something that it is not- agreed? Dag Nabit! My argument has turned such that it supports Walker's, especially about black holes.[/quote]

Now hold on there- something that is material can become something else that is material, through physical or chemical processes, for example. So, there must be a process for the immaterial to change. I suppose that if a thought can be refined, revised or redacted, it can be changed into something else that is immaterial.

Examen fugerit vida aetas non statim finis. So what comes next?
d63
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Re: Postcards:

Post by d63 »

"In practice, this resulted in the replacing of one question -what does this mean?- by another -what does this do?- with "do" equivocating between a reference to the action of the text on a reader and the actions performed by a reader as he negotiates (and, in some sense, actualizes) the text. This equivocation allowed me to retain the text as a stable entity at the same time that I was dislodging it as the privileged container of meaning. The reader was now given joint responsibility for the production of a meaning that was itself redefined as an event rather than an entity." -from the intro to Stanley Fish's Is there a Text in this Class

As should be clear to anyone who has read anything I have been writing, for the next few days (of the present immersion (we're going to be covering some familiar territory that works in the overlap I have been seeing for some time now: that between Delueze and Rorty. This should seem obvious given the first part of the quote:

"In practice, this resulted in the replacing of one question -what does this mean?- by another -what does this do?- with "do" equivocating between a reference to the action of the text on a reader and the actions performed by a reader as he negotiates (and, in some sense, actualizes) the text."

As almost everyone on my Deleuze and Rorty (via pragmatism (boards know: the issue of and privilege given to what a text does as compared to what it means is a cornerstone of understanding both of them and even directly stated by both.

But to get a better understanding of why this is so, it would be better to focus on the second part in the hope of traversing the subtleties involved in terms of evolution:

"This equivocation allowed me to retain the text as a stable entity at the same time that I was dislodging it as the privileged container of meaning. The reader was now given joint responsibility for the production of a meaning that was itself redefined as an event rather than an entity."

I would also note the overlap with Deleuze & Guatarri's claim: that a book does not reflect the world as much as form a rhizome with it. I would further note William Carlos William's description of the poem as a machine made of words as well as Andy Warhol's claim to be a machine that that produces art. And the very use of the term "machine" should be enough to establish a connection (via sensibility (between the artists I have quoted and D & G's machinic production.

Unfortunately, my granddaughters are pushing grandpa's on-call duties. So I just want to set this up with Fish's use of the term "event" -a term, BTW, used by Deleuze in Logic of Sense. If we look at William's point, we see that the poem (or the experience of it (doesn't lie in the words on the page (the text), but rather the kind of resonance that occurs between the reader and the text.

Anyway: duty calls. I look forward to your participation.
d63
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Re: Postcards:

Post by d63 »

And sorry commonsense and walker. Didn't know this discourse was going on. Will try to get back to it.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

commonsense wrote:
commonsense wrote:
commonsense wrote:
Is there anything that does not have the potential to become something else? What are your thoughts?
Ah, but anything that is immaterial does not possess the possibility of becoming something material.
But does something that is immaterial have the potential to become something else that is immaterial? What about truth, for instance? In the material world, a true statement has the potential to be a false statement. However in the immaterial world, truth is a pure concept and falsehood is everything that is not truth. In this sense, truth cannot become something that it is not- agreed? Dag Nabit! My argument has turned such that it supports Walker's, especially about black holes.
Now hold on there- something that is material can become something else that is material, through physical or chemical processes, for example. So, there must be a process for the immaterial to change. I suppose that if a thought can be refined, revised or redacted, it can be changed into something else that is immaterial.

Examen fugerit vida aetas non statim finis. So what comes next?[/quote]

Nothing isn't the opposite of everything. Nothing is just the absence of everything. Happiness, for instance, has its opposite in sadness. The absence of happiness, however, could include many things (sadness, hunger, fatigue, rudeness, nervousness, to name a few) or, not of necessity, nothing at all. How do you see this?
Walker
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Re: Postcards:

Post by Walker »

commonsense wrote:Nothing isn't the opposite of everything. Nothing is just the absence of everything. Happiness, for instance, has its opposite in sadness. The absence of happiness, however, could include many things (sadness, hunger, fatigue, rudeness, nervousness, to name a few) or, not of necessity, nothing at all. How do you see this?
- Happiness isn’t everything.
- Neither is a black hole.
- Nothing cannot exist, not even as a concept.
- This is all repetition that hasn't been touched.
d63
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Re: Postcards:

Post by d63 »

"Once the subject-object dichotomy was eliminated as the only framework within which critical debate could occur, problems that had once seemed so troublesome did not seem to be problems at all. As an advocate for the rights of the reader, I could explain agreement only by positing an ideal (or informed) reader in relation to whom other readers were less informed or otherwise deficient. That is, agreement was secured by making disagreement aberrant (a position that was difficult to defend since the experience with which one had to agree was mine)." -once again: from Stanley Fish's intro to his Is There a Text in this Class....

I mainly bring this quote in to emphasize the overlaps at work between Fish’s literary criticism and philosophy, as well as to redeem myself to my Deleuze and Pragmatic habitations (or playgrounds if you will (which I have been pestering with it.

It’s all there. And the mention of the subject-object dichotomy pretty much cues us in to it. But I would note how in this quote:

"Once the subject-object dichotomy was eliminated as the only framework within which critical debate could occur, problems that had once seemed so troublesome did not seem to be problems at all.”

:Fish basically turns to the same solution as both Deleuze and Rorty did: resorting to the materialism of thinking of humans as nodes in a complex system. And as this quote shows:

“As an advocate for the rights of the reader, I could explain agreement only by positing an ideal (or informed) reader in relation to whom other readers were less informed or otherwise deficient. That is, agreement was secured by making disagreement aberrant (a position that was difficult to defend since the experience with which one had to agree was mine)."

:he did it explicitly for the perfectly democratic purpose of undermining the old Platonic notion of knowledge being some kind of corporate hierarchy justified by some transcendent criteria. However, here he is more Deleuzian than Rortyan in that he is looking at the relationship between text and reader and their given interpretive community as a kind of interaction of systems whereas Rorty worked in the more superficial, accessible, and practical expressions of that interaction of systems. Still, we must admire Rorty for his ability (in the sense of a generous teacher: much like Jaspers (to explain that expression in historical terms.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

Walker wrote: - Happiness isn’t everything.
- Neither is a black hole.
- Nothing cannot exist, not even as a concept.
- This is all repetition that hasn't been touched.
Last edited by commonsense on Mon Apr 17, 2017 12:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

commonsense wrote:
Walker wrote:
commonsense wrote:Nothing isn't the opposite of everything. Nothing is just the absence of everything. Happiness, for instance, has its opposite in sadness. The absence of happiness, however, could include many things (sadness, hunger, fatigue, rudeness, nervousness, to name a few) or, not of necessity, nothing at all. How do you see this?
- Happiness isn’t everything.
- Neither is a black hole.
- Nothing cannot exist, not even as a concept.
- This is all repetition that hasn't been touched.
You have written some great stuff, but I'm just not sure that I am understanding your meaning correctly. Here's where I'm having difficulty:

I agree that happiness isn't everything and would never assert that it is. I don't understand what point you were making with your statement that happiness isn't everything. How does this statement apply to the discussion? I mean happiness isn't everything and yet it still has a null set. I would say the same about a black hole. Perhaps I've overlooked something where I said that the opposite of nothing has to be everything. Perhaps I misled where I might have meant to say that the opposite of nothing is anything rather than everything.

I don't know what you mean when you say that nothing cannot exist, not even as a concept. Maybe you were joshing me? You used the word 'nothing' to describe nothing as well as to describe the concept of nothing. You're pulling my leg, right?

And what do you mean by "repetition that hasn't been touched"? I must be a little dense, because I don't get what this is referencing.

You've made good points. Naturally I think mine are better, but I'm willing to be won over to your side of the argument. Please keep it up.

d63
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Re: Postcards:

Post by d63 »

Had a thought tonight:

It may well be that one of the biggest failures in the analytic’s sometimes smug dismissal of the continental approach is its failure to see its common ground with it. I mean whatever you are pursuing, it always about understanding systems to the extent that, because of your comfort with them, you are able to (via creativity (to adjust them in new ways. In this spirit, the analytic first pinned its hopes on language then turned to science. This is demonstrated in Wittgenstein who started out with full faith that truth could be fully approached via the logic of language only to eventually recognize how reality always seems to overflow the language we use to describe it. This is why he eventually recognized the value of language games.

Now I would note how Deleuze and Guatarri, in What is Philosophy, paralleled Wittgenstein’s earlier work in recognizing the import of conceptual play for the sake of creating yet more concepts. In other words, the main difference between D & G’s model is their focus on concepts as compared to the analytic’s focus on language which is, by its inherent nature, beholden to mental concepts.

Granted, I’m fucking this up: this writing at the edge of what I know –as Deleuze suggests I do. But let me try a different approach. Take Stanley Fish’s approach that brings Temporality into the issue of text which is static in nature. The text is always changed by the moment in time it is being perceived. And this is laid out as well in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition in which an object we are observing in space is always the same thing at different points in time. And we can see how this could all lead to the postmodern blur that we experience with postmodern and poststructuralist thought: the Lacanian Real overflowing the symbolic order.

The thing is, in order to arrive at these understandings, we have to surrender to systems of thought that get us to them. This means that whether we are taking the analytic or continental approach, we will always be dealing with conceptual schemes overflowed by reality. We can only see the object as different at each point in space and time because we understand the concepts of space and time and their effect on our perception.
Walker
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Re: Postcards:

Post by Walker »

Anything that is comprehended can only be comprehended in relation to an absolute, even if that absolute be the belief that there is no absolute, limiting as that is to comprehending all phenomena. All philosophy is the search for the true absolute against which all is measured. Once found, all thought orbits the reality of the absolute that is not a concept, and not an experience, but is that upon which concepts and principles form. The absolute is not life, for life only exists in the realm of dualism. Indeed, existence itself only is, in the realm of dualism. The absolute is found in non-dualism, a holistic awareness also described as non-differentiation that encompasses and enfold differentiation.

This is where language begins to breakdown in its logical descriptive service to communication. For, in order for awareness to exist, then relationship must exist, and existence implies two. Awareness of another is the dualistic reality of differentiation defined by the perceptual capacities of various biological forms required for survival of an organism.

Naturally the question arises, since perceptual differentiation as dualism is the reality which causes interacting humans to continue existing long enough to perpetuate the species, what is the nature of non-differentiated reality? In Buddhism, it is called emptiness and understanding of emptiness can be conceptually approached through the simple intellectual process of failed self-identification. The experience of emptiness is not an experience, for experience requires two, as does any concept.

The functionality of imagined concepts such as nothingness, as descriptions of reality, logically breaks down. What is known of reality can only be conceptually described via the limitations of intellectual communication because existence only is, within relationship. Yet, because awareness does exist as emptiness without an object, and does not require relationship with a thought or thing, then awareness without object is that which does not change, i.e. emptiness, which cannot be imagined but can only be non-experienced (given the limiting dualistic requirement of relationship that defines experience). All that we perceive, thoughts and things, comes from emptiness and returns to the emptiness that is the undifferentiated all, which cannot exist as defined by the constraints of dualism, and yet does exist.
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