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How many instances equal an essence?
- Thread starter Straw Dog
- Start date
Love the subject line. 
The "thing in itself" isn't properly a real metaphysical pose, but a grammatical one. We can think about and describe the thing in itself (absolute), or the thing in relation (relative). We think about and can describe all things in these ways.
It can mean that. The instance is the freeze-frame, a snap-shot of a pose. The instance in itself can still be put in relation, though.
That's a beautiful image. I think they can and do, but what emerges has its own essence apart from anything else.
Instants are significant to astrology--specifically, to significance. The "coming together" you described of instances to pose essence is the image painted in the symbols of each astrological chart, made starkly obvious in the hoarary (the chart of this moment).
Yes, there is no metaphysical position justifying a thing-in-itself. Thinking and language are instant and relative. We may describe a thing-in-itself using absolute terms, but the terms themselves do not reveal an absolute or essential reality.
What evidence is there of an emerging essence beyond what we think and describe? How can we separate this 'essence' of a thing from the instances?
Assuming an essential reality or identity seems to be an anthropocentric illusion.
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None, but that doesn't prevent it from being what we mean with our words when we de-scribe. We pose it with words, like a sculptor's stick man. We pose instance, we pose essence. We scuplt 'the world' out of base existence, and then step into the script.
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things. ~Alan Watts
Aristotle, who brought us the identity, specified his rules as those of thought, word and meaning. Metaphysics since then has been altered by men with words.
I think there's an important lacking component in the accounts of Kant and others who rightly noted that a separation or distinction between the a word or construction used to refer to a thing-in-itself and it's "absolute or essential reality" (alternatively, the distinction and divorce between language and the objective reality we describe with it). Namely, words/terms/etc. are imperfect representation of their referents, but they are also imperfect expressions of concepts. We might even think of subjective experience as a kind of network of some sort in which exists the subjective sense of self (the first-person perspective; the "I/me" or "mind"), the concepts that we have about the world, the language we use to express these concepts, and the reality we relate via our imperfect expressions of our approximate/imperfect concepts to as mediated by our sense of self/first-person ("I/me") perspective.
All of these are of course inter-related. For example, our first-person perspective is what allows us to consider the entirety of what makes us up from a physical perspective (I can talk about my body, my brain, my arms, all the atoms that make up my body, etc.). It is quite fundamentally both irreducible (we cannot reflect upon our current sense of self-awareness, because doing so requires that we use our current self-awareness), and is so such that we can separate this first-person perspective from everything else, such that I can have concepts of "tree", "car", "hope", etc. That is, without this irreducible first-person ("I/me") perspective, I couldn't interpret any perception as I do because there I lack the fundamental distinction between my sense of self and "other-than-me". This sense/perspective thus enables me to form concepts about reality, but also mediates their formation and my conception of them. For example, I form the concept "tree" only as I experience instances of trees, pictures of trees, the use of the word (in print or speech) of "tree(s)", etc., all through this perspective/sense. I certainly can't form the concept "tree" based any other experience than my own. The closest I can get is the descriptions/representations (in word or print or art) that others produce. Such descriptions/representations, though, do affect my concepts. Thus we already have a link between language and the mediation of concept formation via the sense of self/1st-person ("I/me") perspective.
However, my use of language also shapes my concepts of reality. This gets a bit technical, but things like salience, entrenchment, category membership, radial networks, etc., are all ways in which my use of language (as well as others') can shape the concepts I have. For example, I don't know much about botany. I know the names of a bunch of plants but for most of them I don't know what they look like and to the extent I do in some cases they look too similar to other for me to distinguish them. So the concepts (and therefore categories) of "flower", "bush", "weed", etc., are for me fairly vague.
A long time ago, I was watching TV with some other people and was impressed that one individual was able to recognize on site the names of the guns in the move or show we were watching. So I bought a few books that listed, with pictures, most guns in existence, and started reading magazines about guns (e.g., Guns & Ammo, Tactical Weapons, etc.). After a while, I was able to recognize guns. More importantly, I gained a vocabulary that changed my concept of guns as I could describe for example PDWs (personal defense weapons) in relation to carbines, machine pistols, and sub-machine guns. I could categorize guns by manufacturer, by caliber, by stopping power, by function (sport, hunting, combat, competition, etc.), etc. I could associate the military's m-9 with the name given to it by Beretta, or relate an m-4 to carbines made by Bushmaster or Stag arms.
After I started training, my experiences as well as more vocabulary allowed me to further mold my concept "gun" and other related concepts. For example, I could appreciate the difference between the kind of rifle a police/LE sniper requires vs. a military sniper (the former shoots at targets that are very close- around the engagement range for infantry units in urban warfare- and requires extreme precision, while the latter often requires much more power and range). Terms like "stopping power", "over-penetration", "kick", etc., either added to my concepts or both added to them but also extended the sense of existing vocabulary.
If I did the same thing with botany, my conceptions of "weeds", "flowers", etc., would likewise change as I began to associate to instances of the concepts more and more particulars and divide them by and according to increasingly "finer" and numerous concepts and the corresponding lexical expressions of these.
In other words, the ways in which language, concepts, and the sense of self/first-person ("I/me") perspective interact are quite intricate, but all of them share a separation from objective reality. So on the one hand we have this complex set of relations and mediations through which we organize and conceptualize our experiences and perceptions, and on the other a strict division between the entirety of these interacting components and "the-things-themselves".
Thanks for clarifying. I noticed that you frequently draw from the ideas of Aristotle. Perhaps I'll study some of his works next. Any recommendations?
I appreciate your response. There must be a real, objective context in which we independently, albeit imperfectly, interact with. There may be a process or progress towards more efficient interaction within any given environment, but I doubt that perfect interaction without deficiency is possible.
Banjankri
Active Member
There is no essence.
How did you reach this conclusion?
Can you deduce any useful principles from your observation ?
Banjankri
Active Member
There is only experience, which can be divided into meaningful and meaningless. Everything is basically meaningless, and we apply description/meaning on top of it. This is simple common sense.
Essence must be the source, by definition, and the source of our experience is the meaningless sphere.
Since "essence" means something to us, we end up looking for meaning is meaningless sphere. Obviously, this cannot work.
This meaningless sphere is devoid of being, which tells us that essence must be without being. But it cannot "be" without being. Thus I say that there is no essence.
At this point transcendental religions start, claiming that they can go deeper by transcending both meaning and meaningless.
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ether-ore
Active Member
To me, an instance and it essence are two different things. For example: and single individual is an instance of a human being. Essence is that individual's characteristics plus the way in which he interacts with others.. Otherwise, did I miss something about the purpose of this question?
They were only meant to be exploratory questions. It's clear now that there was some confusion on my part regarding the terms being used.