William Blake and Gerrit Gong

[mfbukowski]

21 hours ago, USU78 said:

The era Joseph was born into, as well as its immediate antecedent, evidence to this here piper that the Child in the cloud spoke to more than merely one  ... and that He wept for joy at that now lost but magical era's productions.  And, no, old buddy old pal, that weren't no "FWIW."  That were a main course.

And let's never forget Swedenborg!

[Kevin Christensen]

10 hours ago, MiserereNobis said:

Wow yet again. That was quite an interesting read; thank you for sharing it. I felt Bloom was representative of the best of academia. He was objective yet understanding, stance-based yet open. His comparison of Joseph with the modern church felt right on from my point-of-view, yet he obviously held respect for both. He implied a disbelief in Joseph's claims, yet placed him alongside Emerson and Whitman (and just for emphasis, two American greats!). I think he was quite fair in his assessment.

Thanks again for sharing.

 

Speaking of Emerson and my time at SJSU, Professor English let me to a comparison of Joseph Smith and Emerson for my American Literature class.  It was supposed to be six pages but I went on for 32, mostly showing them saying very similar things, not really emphasizing that Joseph Smith's comments were typically dated first.  I'd by this time read Ninian Smart's book Worldviews and had picked up on his model of mysticism and the numinous as describing poles on a spectrum of experience.  Emerson, I noted was mostly a mystic, with his impersonal Oversoul, whereas Joseph Smith blended mystic and numinous experience, a "close embrace with the other" as Smart puts it.  The interesting exception for Emerson is in Threnody, on the death of his son, when Emerson turns away from his impersonal Oversoul and the mysticism of Nature and gets meaningful comfort from a personal God who gives him a personal assurance in words that he will see Waldo again.

Best

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[clarkgoble]

20 minutes ago, MiserereNobis said:

I read an interesting book that was simply a compilation of writings about mysticism by the founders of modern physics. It's intriguing that all of these Nobel prize winning scientists (you know the list: Heisenberg, Einstein, Plank, Schroedinger, etc) believed in mysticism in one form or another and had had mystical experiences.

It's called "Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists."

One always has to be careful with these though to contextualize them. Einstein, for instance, had a conception of God that was Spinozist and what he means by mysticism isn't what the typical mystic means. There frequently was a certain platonic element to many of these early 20th century thinkers though. Some, such as Godel, were explicitly platonists. Plank basically was as well. Interestingly Heisenberg, who moved to a kind of neo-Buddhist platonism, had a conception of what this meant completely at odds with Einstein's. Heisenberg adopted a kind of transitory idealism. Einstein, while having idealist elements, effectively wanted to remove the place of minds from physics. As I said he was a more hard core Spinozist and when he speaks of minds, observers or the like, he means something quite different from Heisenberg.

4 minutes ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Speaking of Emerson and my time at SJSU, Professor English let me to a comparison of Joseph Smith and Emerson for my American Literature class.  It was supposed to be six pages but I went on for 32, mostly showing them saying very similar things, not really emphasizing that Joseph Smith's comments were typically dated first.  I'd by this time read Ninian Smart's book Worldviews and had picked up on his model of mysticism and the numinous as describing poles on a spectrum of experience.  Emerson, I noted was mostly a mystic, with his impersonal Oversoul, whereas Joseph Smith blended mystic and numinous experience, a "close embrace with the other" as Smart puts it.  The interesting exception for Emerson is in Threnody, on the death of his son, when Emerson turns away from his impersonal Oversoul and the mysticism of Nature and gets meaningful comfort from a personal God who gives him a personal assurance in words that he will see Waldo again.

Most of Emerson's views are just standard neoplatonism. There's an interesting contemporary history trend of seeing neoplatonism in Joseph Smith as well. Some are more strained parallels than others. However it's undeniable that the structure of some things like D&C 88 or 93 are very neoplatonic in nature. The big difference is (and you see this in the later conflict between Brigham Young and Orson Pratt) that Joseph doesn't really care about the oversoul or Mind. God to be God is fundamentally an anthropology. Whereas mystics usually are going the other direction. This is why when Pratt attempts to "materialize" a more traditional neoplatonic conception of the Christian God via a Stoic like ontology Brigham Young objects so much. We worship God the person, not the abstract attributes of God.

The problem of course is the old one of what the unity of God consists of and what the ground of existence is and how they are related. While Pratt's solution is quirky due how he ties the Oversoul to the then scientific aether as well as adopting an atomistic ontology, he does recognize some fundamental issues most Mormons since have avoided. It's not clear if Joseph saw those issues. The discussion of light and truth in D&C 93 for instance appear to get at the fundamental problem of knowledge and communication that even Pratt left out of his metaphysics.

 

Edited November 28, 2018 by clarkgoble

[mfbukowski]

8 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Reality is only unknowable to the degree it's not in experience. The reality manifesting itself in experience is by definition knowable.

So what the Sam Hill have we been arguing about?

Maybe it's the same problem I have with @hope_for_things in even keeping that word "reality" for the underlying unknowable causes of experience - as per Rorty below.

If "reality" is what is experienced then it cannot be something unknowable "manifesting" itself.

That gives two opposite meanings to the word

I know you turn off siggys so I will re-quote my siggy Rorty quote.

But this is a beautiful thread- let's take Rorty to another one if you want to take this up yet again for the billionth time.

This thread is for Blake.

But here is the Blake in Rorty, and I only mention it to point out Rorty's link to Romanticism found of course throughout pragmatism, and to show how Rorty speaks of human intelligence creating the world as we know it

In short one cannot speak of "reality" as that which "is not in experience" as you have above  and then you turn around and use the same word to say it is "by definition knowable" because it IS in experience

That's a pretty strange "definition" for something which is both knowable and unknowable!

That's why Rorty speaks of the "effects of causes which do not include human mental states" for what is unknowable because humans cannot experience it.

One does not call "reality" unknowable !

That is the purpose of his distinction here

Quote

 

 " To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states.  To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

     Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.  The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.  Only descriptions of the world can be true or false.  The world on its own- unaided by the describing activities of human beings- cannot."   Richard Rorty- Contingency Irony and Solidarity, P 5.

 

 

[mfbukowski]

19 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

One always has to be careful with these though to contextualize them. Einstein, for instance, had a conception of God that was Spinozist and what he means by mysticism isn't what the typical mystic means. There frequently was a certain platonic element to many of these early 20th century thinkers though. Some, such as Godel, were explicitly platonists. Plank basically was as well. Interestingly Heisenberg, who moved to a kind of neo-Buddhist platonism, had a conception of what this meant completely at odds with Einstein's. Heisenberg adopted a kind of transitory idealism. Einstein, while having idealist elements, effectively wanted to remove the place of minds from physics. As I said he was a more hard core Spinozist and when he speaks of minds, observers or the like, he means something quite different from Heisenberg.

Most of Emerson's views are just standard neoplatonism. There's an interesting contemporary history trend of seeing neoplatonism in Joseph Smith as well. Some are more strained parallels than others. However it's undeniable that the structure of some things like D&C 88 or 93 are very neoplatonic in nature. The big difference is (and you see this in the later conflict between Brigham Young and Orson Pratt) that Joseph doesn't really care about the oversoul or Mind. God to be God is fundamentally an anthropology. Whereas mystics usually are going the other direction. This is why when Pratt attempts to "materialize" a more traditional neoplatonic conception of the Christian God via a Stoic like ontology Brigham Young objects so much. We worship God the person, not the abstract attributes of God.

The problem of course is the old one of what the unity of God consists of and what the ground of existence is and how they are related. While Pratt's solution is quirky due how he ties the Oversoul to the then scientific aether as well as adopting an atomistic ontology, he does recognize some fundamental issues most Mormons since have avoided. It's not clear if Joseph saw those issues. The discussion of light and truth in D&C 93 for instance appear to get at the fundamental problem of knowledge and communication that even Pratt left out of his metaphysics.

 

You are a great historian of philosophy.

But classifications tend by nature to be highly ambiguous.

I like primary sources myself and forget about "isms".   Look at what the guy has to say and forget about classifying it. 

"Neo-Buddhist platonism"?

Ah yes that tells me exactly what he thought!  Don't have to read him now!! 

 

Edited November 28, 2018 by mfbukowski

[clarkgoble]

15 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

"Neo-Buddhist platonism"?

Ah yes that tells me exactly what he thought!  Don't have to read him now!

Well I was replying to someone who had read him. <grin> And the line before Neo-Buddhist focused on his conception of transience which gets at what in Buddhism he was attracted to and that Einstein objected to.

But you are right that most categories break down if pushed too far.

15 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

So what the Sam Hill have we been arguing about?

What experience is. Fundamentally we disagree about that. By and large we agree on the role of experience but not its nature.

 

Edited November 28, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Bernard Gui]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

To me poetry is the highest human activity because it explores truths which ironically cannot be said- and yet through symbolism and metaphor and all else it brings as tools to the table-  it allows one to reconstruct in one's own mind something close to the thoughts of the author.

In that way it is like music- which is non-verbal direct emotional communication- yet to me it does not contain conceptual information.  Poetry can do both.

But I am sure my dear friend Bernard will have a lot to say about that. 

 

Music is the highest expression of abstract thoughts and feelings. Many composers attempt to replicate or evoke the physical world with musical sounds, such as birds, locomotives, storms, mountains, whales, animals, rivers, the ocean, the seasons, battles, etc. I used to teach a college music appreciation class. When we discussed program (representational) music I played several pieces unknown to the students and ask them to guess what the music was attempting to describe. They occasionally got the general concept, but never the specifics - the Moldau River, the Grand Canyon, the Little Train of the Caipira, Summer, Wellington’s victory over Napoleon, The Pines of Rome, etc. Unless a text is attached (either as the title, program notes, or words set to the music) it is extremely difficult to do.

IMO, prose or poetry can be enhanced by setting them to good music. That’s why we hardly ever used to sing the hymn “If You Could Hie to Kolob” (not exactly the epitome of religious poetry) until it was set to the beautiful music of Ralph Vaughan-Williams, and now it is a staple in our services. The marriage of excellent text (scripture, prose, or poetry) with excellent music is the most powerful way to communicate specific thoughts, hence the immense and enduring popularity of Handel’s Messiah. 

And then there’s the importance of competent performance.

Edited November 28, 2018 by Bernard Gui

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Well I was replying to someone who had read him. <grin> And the line before Neo-Buddhist focused on his conception of transience which gets at what in Buddhism he was attracted to and that Einstein objected to.

But you are right that most categories break down if pushed too far.

What experience is. Fundamentally we disagree about that. By and large we agree on the role of experience but not its nature.

 

How about it's  Essence?

And of course I have read Heisenberg.   No essence there for sure.

Edited November 28, 2018 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Bernard Gui said:

Music is the highest expression of abstract thoughts and feelings. Many composers attempt to replicate or evoke the physical world with musical sounds, such as birds, locomotives, storms, mountains, whales, animals, rivers, the ocean, the seasons, battles, etc. I used to teach a college music appreciation class. When we discussed program (representational) music I played several pieces unknown to the students and ask them to guess what the music was attempting to describe. They occasionally got the general concept, but never the specifics - the Moldau River, the Grand Canyon, the Little Train of the Caipira, Summer, Wellington’s victory over Napoleon, The Pines of Rome, etc. Unless a text is attached (either as the title, program notes, or words set to the music) it is extremely difficult to do.

IMO, prose or poetry can be enhanced by setting them to good music. That’s why we hardly ever used to sing the hymn “If You Could Hie to Kolob” (not exactly the epitome of religious poetry) until it was set to the beautiful music of Ralph Vaughan-Williams, and now it is a staple in our services. The marriage of excellent text (scripture, prose, or poetry) with excellent music is the most powerful way to communicate specific thoughts, hence the immense and enduring popularity of Handel’s Messiah. 

And then there’s the importance of competent performance.

Oh absolutely!

I know you mean, like Bob Dylan,  man, of course.  Like Wow dude.   I mean the immortal line and the repeated chant that  will last forever- "Ever-body must get stoned" 

No but seriously you are right.

You put the Mo Tabs  with Come Thou Font of Every Blessing and you get something........ far beyond language and yet universal and instantaneous in its direct communication.

"Here's  my heart- take and seal it....."

 

 

[clarkgoble]

59 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

How about it's  Essence?

And of course I have read Heisenberg.   No essence there for sure.

Heisenberg has an ontology somewhat similar to what's claimed today by object oriented philosophy. Interestingly Heidegger was a big fan of Heisenberg's philosophy and Heisenberg wasn't a fan of Heidegger. I wouldn't say there's not an essence, but what essences there are aren't platonic but more like Aristotle's version of forms. (IMO)

So Heidegger has essences but they're not your father's essences but something different. While I personally don't think Heisenberg has quite the equivalent, I do think in practice he has essences that are ultimately constituted out of nothing. That is it's pure potential.  Heisenberg doesn't fully explain how his philosophy is tied to Aristotle although he touches upon it at times. I confess I'm reaching my memory here though since it's been ages since I last read Heisenberg and compared him to Heidegger and Heidegger's appropriation of Aristotle. Doing a quick Google though I found this:

• …The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater… was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality…The probability function combines objective and subjective elements. It contains statements about possibilities or better tendencies (“potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy), and these statements are completely objective, they do not depend on any observer; and it contains statements about our knowledge of the system, which of course are subjective in so far as they may be different for different observers…If we compare [the quantum mechanical relationship between matter and energy] with the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form, we can say that the matter of Aristotle, which is mere “potentia,” should be compared to our concept of energy, which gets into “actuality” by means of the form, when the elementary particle is created.

[mfbukowski]

5 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Heisenberg has an ontology somewhat similar to what's claimed today by object oriented philosophy. Interestingly Heidegger was a big fan of Heisenberg's philosophy and Heisenberg wasn't a fan of Heidegger. I wouldn't say there's not an essence, but what essences there are aren't platonic but more like Aristotle's version of forms. (IMO)

So Heidegger has essences but they're not your father's essences but something different. While I personally don't think Heisenberg has quite the equivalent, I do think in practice he has essences that are ultimately constituted out of nothing. That is it's pure potential.  Heisenberg doesn't fully explain how his philosophy is tied to Aristotle although he touches upon it at times. I confess I'm reaching my memory here though since it's been ages since I last read Heisenberg and compared him to Heidegger and Heidegger's appropriation of Aristotle. Doing a quick Google though I found this:

• …The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater… was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality…The probability function combines objective and subjective elements. It contains statements about possibilities or better tendencies (“potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy), and these statements are completely objective, they do not depend on any observer; and it contains statements about our knowledge of the system, which of course are subjective in so far as they may be different for different observers…If we compare [the quantum mechanical relationship between matter and energy] with the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form, we can say that the matter of Aristotle, which is mere “potentia,” should be compared to our concept of energy, which gets into “actuality” by means of the form, when the elementary particle is created.

Sounds like secondary sources to me. 

Their observation of the "reality" of the argument may not be mine.  I have to get my own "testimony" of the author.    Do his writings give me burning in the bosom?  Is he right?

And even  just comparing two philosophers is something I avoid but as I said we have derailed this beautiful Blake thread yet again.

[Calm]

5 hours ago, MiserereNobis said:

For those who aren't aware, there is the William Blake archive: www.blakearchive.org

One of its great features is that you can compare various "editions" of his illuminated books and see how his changes to the coloring affect the overall tone and meaning of a poem. It's also nice to get a good transcript of his writing -- sometimes (like in Jerusalem) deciphering his script can be difficult.

I'm actually starting the British Romantics today with my AP English classes. We begin with Wordsworth (today it is "London, 1802") to get a grasp on the overall concepts, then hit Coleridge and then on to the next generation: Shelley, Keats, Byron. I end with Blake because he is easier for the kids to grasp once they've had a good tour of Romanticism.

Along the way we study neo-Platonism to understand some of the philosophical underpinnings.

It's a great way to end the fall semester and I'm excited about it

 

 

Sounds like fun.  Much more interesting than the AP English class I took....of which the only thing I remember is hitting San Fran's ACT Shakespeare productions (which was fantastic, would have loved more) and Moby D-ick (which was too depressing for me to enjoy).  Your students are lucky,

Edited November 28, 2018 by Calm

[Bernard Gui]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

Oh absolutely!

I know you mean, like Bob Dylan,  man, of course.  Like Wow dude.   I mean the immortal line and the repeated chant that  will last forever- "Ever-body must get stoned" 

No but seriously you are right.

You put the Mo Tabs  with Come Thou Font of Every Blessing and you get something........ far beyond language and yet universal and instantaneous in its direct communication.

"Here's  my heart- take and seal it....."

Dylan....when he first appeared, a friend described his voice as that of a coyote with its hind legs caught in barbed wire.

And then there's the poetic genius of "I wanna hold your HAND, I wanna to hold your ha-a-aaaand, I wanna hold your hand." But it sold, didn't it.

Edited November 28, 2018 by Bernard Gui

[USU78]

6 hours ago, MiserereNobis said:

For those who aren't aware, there is the William Blake archive: www.blakearchive.org

One of its great features is that you can compare various "editions" of his illuminated books and see how his changes to the coloring affect the overall tone and meaning of a poem. It's also nice to get a good transcript of his writing -- sometimes (like in Jerusalem) deciphering his script can be difficult.

I'm actually starting the British Romantics today with my AP English classes. We begin with Wordsworth (today it is "London, 1802") to get a grasp on the overall concepts, then hit Coleridge and then on to the next generation: Shelley, Keats, Byron. I end with Blake because he is easier for the kids to grasp once they've had a good tour of Romanticism.

Along the way we study neo-Platonism to understand some of the philosophical underpinnings.

It's a great way to end the fall semester and I'm excited about it

 

 

Hey there, fellow buddy English teacher!  I gave it up in 1981 and went to law school.  Some days I wish I'd stayed in the classroom.

[USU78]

5 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Oh absolutely!

To me poetry is the highest human activity because it explores truths which ironically cannot be said- and yet through symbolism and metaphor and all else it brings as tools to the table-  it allows one to reconstruct in one's own mind something close to the thoughts of the author.

In that way it is like music- which is non-verbal direct emotional communication- yet to me it does not contain conceptual information.  Poetry can do both.

But I am sure my dear friend Bernard will have a lot to say about that. 

 

Both tell you in your mind and in your heart.

[USU78]

5 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Speaking of Emerson and my time at SJSU, Professor English let me to a comparison of Joseph Smith and Emerson for my American Literature class.  It was supposed to be six pages but I went on for 32, mostly showing them saying very similar things, not really emphasizing that Joseph Smith's comments were typically dated first.  I'd by this time read Ninian Smart's book Worldviews and had picked up on his model of mysticism and the numinous as describing poles on a spectrum of experience.  Emerson, I noted was mostly a mystic, with his impersonal Oversoul, whereas Joseph Smith blended mystic and numinous experience, a "close embrace with the other" as Smart puts it.  The interesting exception for Emerson is in Threnody, on the death of his son, when Emerson turns away from his impersonal Oversoul and the mysticism of Nature and gets meaningful comfort from a personal God who gives him a personal assurance in words that he will see Waldo again.

Best

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Now you're bringing me joy!

[USU78]

5 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Reality is only unknowable to the degree it's not in experience. The reality manifesting itself in experience is by definition knowable.

...  to the extent it is experienced, it is experienced "in here" and not "out there," and thus whether the manifestation as experienced has really been "known" by the experiencer is very much in doubt.

G-d's eye view:  we just see that darkly, through a glass.

[USU78]

5 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Which we know because it is "sweet" 

And yet we still have the tacit assumption of "correspondence" to some unknowable reality.  Totally inconsistent

We know we have perceived a phenomenon as or nearly as G-d experiences it when He reveals the perception's sweetness.  Yes?

[USU78]

Here's a bit on Blake's early life:

Quote

 

Visions were commonplaces to Blake, and his life and works were intensely spiritual. His friend the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that when Blake was four years old he saw God’s head appear in a window. While still a child he also saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields and had a vision, according to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61), of “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Robinson reported in his diary that Blake spoke of visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters.…Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultiv[ate]d.” In his essay “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake wrote:

I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation… ‘What’ it will be Questiond ‘When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’

Blake wrote to his patron William Hayley in 1802, “I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily & Nightly.” These visions were the source of many of his poems and drawings. As he wrote in his “Auguries of Innocence,” his purpose was

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

He was, he wrote in 1804, “really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.” Blake’s wife once said to his young friend Seymour Kirkup, “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”

 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blake

I can well see poor Emma saying something similar about Joseph:  poor woman's husband was absent in Paradise, even if he was sitting across the room from her.

 

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, USU78 said:

Both tell you in your mind and in your heart.

Yes you  are right of course because they are inseparable-  !

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, USU78 said:

We know we have perceived a phenomenon as or nearly as G-d experiences it when He reveals the perception's sweetness.  Yes?

Yes I think that is a good way of seeing it that  I had not considered!!

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, USU78 said:

 “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake wrote:

I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation… ‘What’ it will be Questiond ‘When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’

But not always.....  I love this one and mentioned it before.  Here we have the round disk perhaps darkened by the storm between the waters of chaos and emerging dawn and therefore the struggle between good and evil embodied- while Elohim lays hands upon Adam and at the same time the snake already has hold of him.   Were it not for the natural man, we would have nothing to overcome.  And could that spot on Adam's left palm foreshadow the Second Adam, the restorer of Light? Next time when I am at the Tate I must remember a magnifying glass....  maybe next year!  

http://www.william-blake.org/Elohim-Creating-Adam.html

Edited November 28, 2018 by mfbukowski

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, USU78 said:

...  to the extent it is experienced, it is experienced "in here" and not "out there," and thus whether the manifestation as experienced has really been "known" by the experiencer is very much in doubt.

That’s exactly the dispute I have with Mark. I deny that experience is experienced “in here.” That’s why I’ll sometimes criticize Mark for being Cartesian which I know shocks him because he likes to accuse others of being Cartesian. Nearly all my experiences are of thing a Cartesian might call “out there.” To me the very divide of inside and outside just typically doesn’t work. There’s simply experiences there.

The idea of inside or outside is a secondary (and possibly flawed) inference from experience. So I infer my experience of this iPad I’m typing on as “outside” but why? That’s not part of the experience beyond it being part of the experience that it’s in my hands and thus outside my body spatially. But if I’m thinking of mathematics it’s not part of my experience that it’s in my head. It’s just there. Some might infer it’s in my head but again there’s nothing in the experience that indicates that. About the only thing I experience as in my head are headaches and sinus infections.

So why the insistence on an external world that presupposed an internal world? The internal world seems dubious. 

[mfbukowski]

12 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

That’s exactly the dispute I have with Mark. I deny that experience is experienced “in here.” That’s why I’ll sometimes criticize Mark for being Cartesian which I know shocks him because he likes to accuse others of being Cartesian. Nearly all my experiences are of thing a Cartesian might call “out there.” To me the very divide of inside and outside just typically doesn’t work. There’s simply experiences there.

The idea of inside or outside is a secondary (and possibly flawed) inference from experience. So I infer my experience of this iPad I’m typing on as “outside” but why? That’s not part of the experience beyond it being part of the experience that it’s in my hands and thus outside my body spatially. But if I’m thinking of mathematics it’s not part of my experience that it’s in my head. It’s just there. Some might infer it’s in my head but again there’s nothing in the experience that indicates that. About the only thing I experience as in my head are headaches and sinus infections.

So why the insistence on an external world that presupposed an internal world? The internal world seems dubious. 

I have asked you before not to characterize my position because you never get it right and still have not.  I do  not make that distinction in experience either way- experience just is. There is nothing to be said about it.  It is Dasein.

Quote

There’s simply experiences there.

Where exactly is "there"???   There is no there- there  is  only experience.

This is not my thread but I consider this discussion here as a derail and I will not participate.  If you want to get into it yet again, I will be glad to respond on another thread. 

Edited November 29, 2018 by mfbukowski

[USU78]

On 11/28/2018 at 9:42 AM, Kevin Christensen said:

The interesting exception for Emerson is in Threnody, on the death of his son, when Emerson turns away from his impersonal Oversoul and the mysticism of Nature and gets meaningful comfort from a personal God who gives him a personal assurance in words that he will see Waldo again.

Regardless of what our heads lead us to write or say or commit to, when things matter, the heart's needs dwarf the head's.