Postcards:

For all things philosophical.

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commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

Heavy stuff, Walker.

I believe it would be fair to say that your assertions arise from a materialist's perspective. I say this not has challenge but as explanation of my epiphany.

If my understanding of your position is improving, would I be correct in assuming that nothing cannot be experienced in reality, and therefore cannot be? And since the absolute is grounded in reality, and nothing cannot be experienced in reality, it cannot exist as a concept. It seems, then, that it is the relationship you referenced that breaks down the concept of nothingness. There must be a relationship between thought and the physical, the absolute. Since nothing cannot be experienced in reality, it cannot be "internally experienced" as thought.

Am I catching on?
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

On second thought, the absolute is not experience so much as the basis of experience, perhaps the object of experience.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

But how can I know if what I experience is based on an absolute or on a false absolute? Is there no possibility of illusion? How is this resolved?
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

And to d63, thanks for the even heavier meta-stuff. I must confess that I am not familiar with the continental approach. Please assist me by providing some guidance I can apply to researching this approach. Also, I am not familiar with D&G and I am beginning to think that I have pathetically misinterpreted Wittgenstein.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

As for the tenet that an object, when observed at different points of time, is the same object: how do you square this against the idea that time is merely a construct of the mind?
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

Is it the belief that an object changes through time that further defeats the dualistic idea of nothingness? After all, even if it were to be an observable experience of an absolute, nothingness would not change.
Last edited by commonsense on Wed Apr 19, 2017 5:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

To both,

I realize I have some catching up to do (e.g., Continental approach, Lacanism), but do not give up on me. I am finding this discourse to be fascinating. It would pain me terribly if either of you were to drop out.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

I watched an episode of The Carbonara Effect on television. It gave pause to wonder how we can tell whether we are having an experience or witnessing an illusion. How could we be certain that telekinesis is not based on an absolute? Is the absolute in this case the revelation that not all experiences are real? Are there unreal experiences (thoughts) and if so could there be thoughts without related experiences?
Last edited by commonsense on Fri Apr 21, 2017 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
d63
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Re: Postcards:

Post by d63 »

“What interests me about many of the essays collected here is that I could not write them today. I could not write them today because both the form of their arguments and the form of their arguments and the form of the problems those arguments address are a function of assumptions I no longer hold.” –once again from Stanley Fish’s intro to Is There a Text in this Class….

These are the very first words that Fish starts the book with. And they are important in that they define very mode of operation that Fish is working in. But in order to get at it, I have to describe a recent change in the mode of operation I am working in. I use to assume that I could just keep skimming over text because what was of import to my individual process would latch to my individual filters –the ones I have developed along the way. But I’ve recently come to the conclusion that what that results in is me just repeating what I know without ever getting beyond it. I have therefore decided that my study points at the “library” will consist of me going over and over the first chapter until I get comfortable enough with it enough (to bleed it for all I can (to move on to the next.

And what I have extracted in that process (and in reference to the quote above (is that Fish’s book is basically a history (via individual essays (of how he went from his initial position to his concept of the interpretive community. This is why every article starts with Fish’s critique of what he was doing at the time.

The important thing to note here is how Fish doesn’t just tell, but rather shows. He applies his criticism of the formalist approach via temporality by applying the effect of the temporal on his process as concerns his process and engagement with literature.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

I promise to attack Fish from time to time at least to provide you some diversion from resting on what you already knew prior to Fish.
Last edited by commonsense on Wed Apr 19, 2017 10:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

Do you know of any way that I could obtain a copy of Fish's book on the cheap?
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

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.
Please pardon my ignorance above re word game.
commonsense
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Re: Postcards:

Post by commonsense »

commonsense 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.
Please pardon my ignorance above re word game.
Anyone, am I garnering any semblance of understanding about a word game when I posit the following example:

Whenever I say to my very smart dog, "Let's go for a ride in the car", he runs to the kitchen door, stands there and wags his tail vigorously. The dog exhibits the same behavior if I say, "Car," or "Ride." And if my very smart dog is sitting on the car seat and the window is rolled up and he grunts in a specific way, I'll roll the window down. Ordinarily I would consider these behaviors to be Pavlovian, except that I could say the same about the builder's assistant B in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

How does my example hold up? Is it worthy of a counter argument or should it simply be dismissed out of hand?
d63
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Re: Postcards:

Post by d63 »

“I met that objection by positing a level of experience which all readers share, independently of differences in education and culture. This level was conceived more or less syntactically, as an extension of the Chomskian notion of linguistic competence, a linguistic system that every native speaker shares. I reasoned that if the speakers of a language share a system of rules that each of them has somehow internalized, understanding will, in some sense, be uniform.” –once again from Fish’s intro to Is There a Text in this Class

Now in terms of the Deleuzian/postmodern model of the text and reader being systems interacting within a kind of meta-system, we can easily see why Chomsky’s linguistics would be brought into the mix. And we can further see how all this works under the counsel of the evolutionary model, that which is the source of the overlap between them.

But I would also like to bring into the mix and overlap the Jungian archetype, that which I believe is propped up by Chomsky’s linguistic systems. The thing to understand is that (as I read him when I did (Jung tended respond to accusations of mysticism by rooting the archetype in the structures of the brain, by seeing them as expressions of those evolutionary structures. He did attempt to give them a scientific basis. And I would humbly argue that it is this very scientific basis that Fish anchors his Interpretive Community in.

To me it all comes down to brain plasticity and the role it has played in our evolution: that interaction between individual organisms, the object before them and the environment that surrounds the object, and the other organisms they are sharing the experience with. In this sense, the text that Fish focuses on (that is as a literary critic (is not as different from a group of primates staring at a fire as we might think.

And here we justify expanding Fish’s argument for the Interpretive Community (via the postmodern understanding of “text” as anything that can be interpreted (much as Rorty supposedly did Kuhn. We are justified in hijacking Fish for postmodern purposes –that is whether he likes it or not.
Walker
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Re: Postcards:

Post by Walker »

commonsense 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.
Please pardon my ignorance above re word game.
I cannot help you to imagine nothingness because there is nothing to imagine.

People, dogs, and black holes are not nothingness.
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