i.kurtzer (971114)
my belated reply did not seem to go through, if it did and then this is excess
then oopsie and thanks for your patience.
reply to bill (directly) and bruce g. and rick (indirectly) and hans (even less
directly, hi hans)concerning the subject/object dichotomy which i feel is an
arbitrary association and not philosophically fruitful.
me:
how that unity of
experience, the steam, is AFTERWARDS TALKED into two, the me and the > >
other, the subject and object , or reified into "things" like self or soul
is a mistake.
bill:
At that level of discourse about all I can say is "No, it's not a mistake,
so there."
What level of discourse? What i'm doing is first answering that persons can
make mistakes even with regard to how they _consider_ their experiences. That
is, they can and do talk differently and wrongly about something true and
common . If not then why have philosophers disagreed so far??? the only other
possibility to the humble admittance of being sloppy and forgettful is to
captiulate to han's world models and a philosophy of utter arbirtarism. That
is not acceptable.
>"Absurd" means "it makes no sense to me in terms of my premises." If a
person is told that something he says is absurd, he is being told he's too
stupid to see the absurdity for himself. The use of this term usually
indicates a strong conviction on the part of its user that the user can't
defend.
If i came across as an a-hole i apologize. In fact, for myself intelligence is
moot to good philosophy. Only an _unwillingness_ to step further is needed
while still capturing the fullness of our lives. The ghost-agent "i" is for
me just such a bad step. If it only means personal, then o.k. we can all
identify persons, or if meaning only one other kind of experience then o.k. we
can all identify certain kinds, but as a reason or as a something extra beyond
a _kind_ of experience i say you've stepped too far. I qualify the absurd
with "as if" but "as if" is also "is not".
All you can say is _what is experienced_.
but this has to be done very carefully as we can see how much philosophy has
improved over two thousand years.
Your thoughts say to you, "There is NO awareness, no Observer of the
Observed." I'm sure you are aware of such thoughts. You could also think,
"There IS awareness, an Observer of the Observed." You would be aware of
that thought, too. You could switch back and forth between those thoughts
at will, if you were willing to try the experiment. After a while, you
would see that neither thought is relevant; they are only thoughts. The
thoughts can't influence the fact that you're aware of them while they're
happening: what they say in thought-language is irrelevant to the fact of
observing. The fact of observing comes before all else, including all that
you think about the fact of observing. Your thoughts may reject that fact,
but you don't. You go right on observing.
Again something goes away and something remains. And that which remains is
knighted "me" or the observer for no reason outside of relative constancy.
Why the something extra--these subjects of experience? I agree that the FACT
OF OBSERVING comes before all else. But how did this subtle "you" get snuck
in. It seems more like a syllogism that says for every observation there must
be observer. But why does this have to be? This observer is not a hypostatic
relation.. so that this observer is observer forever, forever not-subject.
No, instead this "observer" is realized differently with respect to what is
emphasized and what continues. Smack your head hard enough and you can see
that what remains is self-identified. I suggest a hierarchy of experience is
consistant with this. That our experience is a compounding of kinds, and
self-identification is possible to any kind so that no kind is more
substantially "me" than another excepting an arbitrary cut and paste. All
moments pierce differently as different kinds and are discriminable even
further within the kinds but all are bound in being personal--experiences are
personal but this does require anything extra--whether "egos", "souls", "Mind"
, or "I" .
i.