From: "John Foster" <borealis-AT-mercuryspeed.com>
Subject: Re: Only that which exists can be studied
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 22:47:21 -0800



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Straathof" <janstr-AT-chan.nl>
To: <heidegger-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2003 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: Only that which exists can be studied


> John wrote:
>
> >As Bradley wrote in his "Apperance and Reality", 'ideas are not
> >real'....which is kind of self-evident. He claims that there is only one
> >idea which is real, and that is the 'whole' of Reality, the composite
world
> >experienced in the moment. What he means by 'experience' is what I mean
by
> >'felt' or 'feeling'. Heidegger agrees with this too, and the 'umvelt' is
not
> >analyzable when it is experienced. Thus ideas can be separated out about
the
> >felt and sensed world of immediacy, but these 'ideas' are not real. The
real
> >are the actual in the world of now. Heidegger refers to this as
> >'affectivity', alluding of course to De Anima, Ari.
>
> hi John,
>
> Bhaskar claims that ideas are real*, viz. in the sense that ideas have a
> (potential) causal efficacy. Ideas are phenomena with causal power.

I did say that ideas have existence; however the range of ideas we often
have are lacking in efficacy; in fact some ideas are potential destructive
of humankind. Most ideas do not have much efficacy, and may be
inefficacious. Some good ideas have efficacy, tremendous efficacy. What
Bradley is suggesting is the Kantian belief that ideas lack reality. God is
an idea, for which some claim they have an 'intellectual love for'
<intellectualis dei>. Of course what they actual love is the idea of God,
the deity. I suppose that God is truely unknowable, and for that what we
claim to know about God is a 'representational' form, a deity, we have
constructed, which may be very much the best imitation derived from our
collaborative senses. Man needs God, but God does not need man, hence Homo
sapiens brief time on this earth. All species eventually become extinct [The
Golden Rule, Stephen J Gould, paleontologist].

I guess I would be called an agnostic...I don't know, but I know the deity
mankind has constructed: benevolent and wrathful.

What Bradley is claiming is that in 'experience' we know directly only the
phenomena which present immediately to our senses, but not just the five
senses, but also feeling [emotions and value]. What he says therefore is
that each idea about a 'particular' is lacking in some reality since what we
experience in the moment is a 'whole' rather than a single real particular.
If ideas therefore represent only one aspect or side of a particular, then
the ideas themselves cannot have any reality; they are representations of
the particular, since we cannot know directly the whole, except our
immediate experience of our inner and outer reality, which no amount of art
and persuasion can reconstruct.  I have to agree with this, and also believe
that the only real idea is one of the whole which is felt 'immediately' much
like Hegels' 'indeterminant immediate'; ideas therefore are representations
of only a small part of what is experienced; however art can transmute the
real, as opposed to simple ideas, to create 'secondary illusions'; Bradley
does not use the terms primary and secondary illusions, but he uses his own.

Meister Eckhardt suggested that God does not like ideas, because that would
limit the being of God. The only idea which is real is the idea felt in a
transitory moment regarding the One, much like in Plotinus, and this
experience is, or has, a direct connection with the highest principle
<arche>, but it is not an idea by itself but also an intuition.

Of course Kant also said that every object which is, which exists has for it
an intuition, thus ideas themselves are lacking in intuitions; ideas can be
know 'symbolically' through symbolic intuition but this requires a
'synthetic imagination' which is a large field of relatively unexamined
life. It is the last frontier of philosophy in my opinion, and one which
will save life on this planet from darker men. Of course I may have lost
you, but there....

But it is true some ideas have 'real efficacy' and that is not what I
denied.


> Furthermore ideas have the tendency to endure and proliferate. An
> idea, whether true or false, causes people to reason and act in certain
> ways. The idea that Iraq poses a threat to world peace gives reasons to
> the US and its allies to act in the way they do. The idea that dancing
> is good for living well gives reason to parents to send their sons and
> daughters to ballet schools. And so on.
>
> yours,
> Jan
>
>         "Friendship is the only source of inner peace." [Epicurus]
>
>
> -----------
> * "Ideas, and ideational connections (including category mistakes,
> logical contradictions etc.) are part of everything, and everything
> is real. To deny the reality of a part of everything (of anything),
> such as ideas (or say persons, or consiousness, or agency, or values
> - or mind, or body) extrudes or detotalizes it or them from the world,
> that is the rest of the world of which they are in principle causally
> explicable and causally efficacious parts. This inevitably produces an
> implicit dualistic or split ontology" [Bhaskar; JTSB, 27:2/3 -1997]

This would imply that all ideas have efficacy, regardless if there is any
connection between the ideas and their real referents. Many mistakes have
been made believing in the power of ideas to effect change; however, that
does not also imply that all ideas lack efficacy, since even 'bad ideas'
have efficacy.  Ideas are real only as 'mental phenomena'. It is difficult
to say if basic life forms have any ideas, and whether if they did have
ideas, they would be benefitted by ideas. Certainly consciousness,
reasoning, logic, and representational concepts must correspond to some
outer reality, or they would not confer any adaptive advantage for the
organism with the capacity to reason, use logic, and think conceptually.

Peace be with all,

JohnF




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