FT24017: Thought as Reality

    Aristotle viewed the reality as forms of inseparable matter that moves from one contrary to another. Potentiality exists and it actualizes itself from within its being. Much later we have carved out these changes and compose things as separable. German Idealist like Kant and Hegel go back to this way but not abandoning the science of separability. What they concoct is reality mediated by thoughts. This mediation is not the Aristotelian sense, but returning to that state from vantage point we know we lost this connectedness. 

    Language is seen as the glue that hold being together for Idealism. It is given that the world is seemingly atomized in the way it shows us, but as we ponder it we realize it's atomization is irrelevant in our conception of it and in a deeper way our conception of reality is also a mirror to what reality is. In this way it very much like glue and we few things as separated when we don't understand them. An example of this would be how we view the environment and our transportation as separate but knowing our transportation, I'm meaning cars here that use gas engines, take part in the environment by either polluting the air. In a naive way we see a car and a cloud as separate and we only see they relate by thinking more and conceptualizing the relatedness.  

    The car example is a simple one. Knowledge is gained by reason which seems to be empirically gathered. Empirical observations are isolated and disconnected. Reason sees the connection and makes concepts whole which returns back to Aristotle's philosophy of seeing being as stark boundaries that are internally unable to be broken apart.

FT240011: Space and Kant

    Space and mind have a similar arrangement for Kant. Our minds heavily analyze what's in space but Kant does want to distinguish that space is independent of our experiences and our on looking is all but contingent. In a way--a mind outside a mind.

    Space though is filled with concepts just as we have in our mind and we are attuned to it. This is also similar to Heidegger's idea of 'dwelling' in that we are not simply observing but making our observations our own. Another feature is space must be similar to our way of observing for this to work.  Hegel wants to nuance this familiarity as he sees our mind and the world as intimately combined but through a process of negation. 

    Hegel's negation means we recognized the phenomenal world is mind but outside of our mind. Is this different from Kant seeing Space and mind as fundamentally the same? Kant seems to limit our experiences in a way umpires do in the sense of calling balls and strikes but Hegel does not see so clear a separation. Kant sees limits between mind and the world while Hegel is persuaded that these limits are also a distinction the mind makes. Kant's view can explain the world as we observe it while Hegel may not grant this directness in observation and convinced we always observe from a distance and the world is ourselves that we make inverted by observation. 

    Hegel makes us work harder to fully understand existence making the content of phenomena. One reason to think this is he doesn't define space like Kant does. Kant views space as where phenomena happens and Hegel thinks this clearly defined place for events is problematic and the reason that Kant then quickly limits what space can ultimately be in terms of our understanding of it. Kant sees space as a mind we cannot fully fathom working independently from us. Our roll in observing makes little difference in its appearance and we lack a certain agency. 

    Kant's limitation separates us from connected whole we were part of in earlier philosophies and something Hegel responds to giving us back this connection setting a framework where Heidegger's idea of 'dwelling' can make sense where it would seem unimportant in Kant's framework.

FT24009: Contraries, Movement, History, Recognition

    Aristotle's mind thought in contraries and being moving from one to another is a process of becoming from potentiality. Virtue was a process of arriving at the perfect point such as a healthy weight contrasted to being overweight or underweight. The people who are virtuous are distinct from those who are not. Everything is connected and in some coherent thing and even if you chopped something from it, it would be a piece of that thing rather than a mixture of other things underlying it. Being is granted and doesn't wear a mask and trying to find mysteries behind the thing other then what is is would go against what the thing is. 

    Hegel's dialectical method from basic perception to absolute knowing invokes the Aristotelian contraries but since it's a historical development it is about arriving at an end point that cannot be overshot. In Hegel's system someone can lack absolute knowing but cannot have a gross amount of absolute knowing. The Stoics mused about whether it's possible for a wise man to lose his wisdom and agree that wisdom is obtained and cannot be lost since that would be foolish and contrary to wisdom. But virtue must mean more than having and lacking for it to be meaningful. 

    Virtue is a quality of a person and not measurable. This means it cannot be measured like the distance between two cities. Having and lacking is the most simplistic of measurements as it either is or isn't. The boolean values of a program are not truth or false as qualities but something arbitrarily assigned to make a program work. Why does assigning true and false to something amount to a simplistic measurement? In the stack of logic values can be true or false like was said earlier to get a result of the program we want. There is no requirement for us to actually assume these values to be the case. We could internally feel otherwise and only assign truth to get our desired result. We could think nothing of it and run the program thousands of times.

    Hegel's arrival at absolute truth come about from a large body of thought. Aristotle's thought begins where Hegel has stopped. Aristotle's world is already absolute and his task as a thinker is to extend the actuality to the world. The difference of thought is seen in the two thinker's ethics. Aristotle's ethics is personal and how we fit in with society while Hegel see's this as regular work-a-day petty matters which are in the shadow of a state that decides what is ethical. Hegel puts emphasis the finding and defining what is ethical while for Aristotle what is ethical is already written in the logos of the world and noticeable when we deviate from it. To define what is ethical would mean one does not know what it is to begin with and likely not a mind that obtains it. What is most virtuous is what is least moved.

FT24007: Technology of Cognition

    Hiedeggar sees technology separately from the crafts of ancient Greeks that informed Aristotle's causes. The causes Aristotle uses apply the clarity of our senses. We wonder about the things that appear to use. Technology is something different in that we anticipate something unseen in our observations that has to be elucidated. This elucidation is not based on observation but a testing of a framework we apply to our observations meaning because we don't directly observe it we have to imply it is there. This goes beyond mere imagination because as we adopt these assumptions we have greater agency than when we don't. 

    One example Hiedeggar gives is a cultivating a farm. A field is easy for us to imagine growing plants from it. With technology we see more than what a field is to increase the growing capacity of the earth. Particularly we imagine all the components of invisible matter that composes the field. Hegel wants to do this with philosophy. In the early stages of his phenomenology, he states that philosophies prior to his only promote a 'love of wisdom' rather than achieve actual wisdom. Much of how he attends to this project is to go into the mind past what is clearly spoken about in cognition to make a science of cognition.

    There is a characteristic problem with atomizing cognition which Hegel is keenly aware of. The relation between Subject and Object is not so separate. When we atomize cognition, we atomize it through our cognition. Plants will still grow in a field we make obscure to increase its growing capacity even if we don't study why as a farmer benefits from science even if the farmer doesn't study science and knows nothing about why the field grows more plants. The mind atomizes itself through itself and to use this new science of the mind the mind must study itself. For the field to be fertile it must have the enhanced fertilizer and must deliver the nutrients to the plants and the plants have to assemble this into their bodies. In philosophy the mind is the field and must do all this work for itself. For it to benefit from these studies it must know all the bits that are needed rather than rely on plants to grow for it. 

    What happens to this heightened sense of self-awareness.  It does not seem to go as far as Nietzsche's overcoming of man. Hegel does not promote a self that creates its own values as this self is still planted in Reality that cannot be ignored. In Hegel's project we may not even change what it is we are doing but just have a more intense and realistic understanding of who we are. Unlike many technologies receiving boundless funding now, there does not seem to be gains to be made with this science that we promise by atomizing things like biotechnology and computer science. We are still in the middle of our humanity and its limitations that aren't broadened from where we started.

     

FT24004: The Will in the Present

     The will is located in the present. It is not an integral part of our history and it isn't clear what the future holds. The will is a fundamental part of an individual and exist at the same time as we think. Our present does not stay the same and our will is fundamentally different in different parts of our life. Our actions are provoked by our will and commands us to focus on certain things rather than others.

    Philosophers attribute certain qualities to the will and what motivates it--re: Nietzsche et al. These qualities seem to exist prior to any formation by experience and experience can even tarnish the will. Yet we also see the will develop in philosophies like Hegel. We experience as we will and this experience we have to understand and see how it fits with our willing. Hegel has a passage contrasting the will of the heart vs. the will of the world which focuses us on how we actively have to measure our will with reality.

    This constant reoccurring projection of our will into the present has an iterative nature and each present vanishes into another present. If there were no source of change each present would be the same present much like some coral in a the sea staying the same until it dies. Defining the self as the will is problematic in that it doesn't account for why this will changes and why we choose to disregard our will much like how Hobbes defines the our contract in society. 

    With our experiences, we filter these presents differently even if there is no fundamental change in what we will. There has to be some connectivity with the past that forms our present--even if the present us is what is most real meaning what we exist in. The shaping process of our intellect is very much the accumulation of past experiences. The past shape is also a limited shape and this contrasts with present which opens itself to many possibilities. The present using the past shape to slightly nudge the past shape is a part the will plays in but does not define a person fully.

    The will as a thing separate from anything else cannot be subject to ethics. Alone it has no account for where it has been and where it needs to go. We can account for this because the will is integrated into how we think and our memory of the past. Even though our wills are important in our existence in the present it is not what makes us ourselves.