Philosophy / Illiterature / Comedy

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Form of Forms

I have this theory, and it feels right. Of all things it concerns the Form of Forms. Now I'm not even sure which philosopher is famous for speaking of this, if any. I picked up the phrase somewhere and ran with it. Perhaps I am offering a creative misreading. Who can say? We cannot see above our own minds. That makes perfect sense to me. My sense of confidence when it comes to understanding a philosopher is based on the beauty and power I get from the thought.

Absolute Idealism is also Absolute Realism, as I have mentioned in other blogs. Some might interpret it differently. In my view, the whole advantage of Absolute Ism (how's that?) is that it escapes what now seems to me like the utterly needless confusion of the mind/matter game. Both mind and matter are abstractions, forms, essences, and they are not, in my opinion, eternal forms.

Kant screwed us all up with his things-in-themselves. Oh I see the practical value in things-in-themselves. But they are philosophically disastrous. They do not hold water. And things-for-us is also useless or redundant, and still suggests duality.

We have to back up, I think, and get phenomenological. Ah, but phenomenon still hints at noumenon. Oh well. I believe phenomena derives from "shining." If we look at our lived personal experience, what do we find? How do we experience life? Well, we see hear taste touch smell, etc. And simulatanouesly we think and feel. So life is obviously the unity of conception, sensation, and emotion. However there is no reason this could not be described with other basic terms. Those are the best I can come up with just now.

We experience a structured reality. Our reality is formed. If we look/think at this form carefully, I think we experience too kinds of form. Spatial form or visual form is continuous. Obviously we as humans sometimes break up this continuity as much as possible, but our sense of space is continuous. We don't see holes in space. And more important we have geometric intuitions of continuity, and also of paradoxes like points without extension. How thin is a Euclidean line? How sharp is the point of a Euclidean cone? How perfectly can we imagine a circle, a square, a triangle or a straight line?

Here's the tricky part. How many points can we fit on any line? And I am talking Euclidean points without extension. As many as we want? Can we build anything as straight as we can imagine perfect straightness? And I don't just mean beyond visual recognition. I am asking the reader to think whether humans can organize physical matter into an ideally perfectly straight line.


If the mind is just a concept, and concept is just a concept, then what can we mean really by "mind" and "concept"? Oh we can use them practically. But what about logically? What about dialectical coherence? Form is a better word, perhaps, because it doesn't lean toward the subject or the object, both of which are abstractions, concepts, forms.

As I argued in another blog, I think we should distinguish between Form and sensation, even though
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our sensations are automatically interpreted as Forms, essences. I think Form is laid against sensation like a measure. Form helps us cut the visual field into meaningful objects. I argue that objects are nothing but Forms combined with sensation. And that therefore abstract objects or just remembered everyday objects are no less real in a logical sense, even if from a practical point of view it makes all the difference in the world.

I think there is a place for philosophy that ignores or resists the practical. The practical man is happy with sophistry. And he will call this sophistry truth. Because logical coherence is not his goal.

This idea of mine is quite radically philosophically and perhaps insignificant as far as practical application goes. I think Wittgenstein was saying as much or almost as much in the TLP. All our essences are accidental. The only essential essence is empty essence. Essence is unification. The number 0 is close but no cigar. It is still determinate. What I am pointing at is the utterly indeterminate Form. And this would be an abstraction from all Forms, in order to synthesize what they all have in common. Well, they are. They exist. Existence isn't a property they say. Because it's always there. Because Form and Thought are the same thing. To think about nothing is to think about a Form that is. Thus the notorious "presence of an absence." Being is. Nonbeing is not.

Why are all of our essences but one accidental? Because they are created and destroyed in relation to experience, and this experience is not only Formal or conceptual but also sensual and emotional. A concept like the self is invented. It's quite useful, quite justified practically. But close investigation shows its imperfection. Wittgenstein did this is the TLP. Absolute Solipsism is the same as Absolute Realism. The self only exists in relation to a non-self. The non-self is justified practically but not philosophically. Why? Because there is no way to draw an honest line logically between one aspect of our experience and another. The so called self is made of sensation, emotion, and associated concepts. This is completely similar to all other accidental concepts. The self is a popular notion because of human society and the pressure put on us to be responsible. The pronoun "I" reinforces this questionable concept constantly. I feel this is where Kant went wrong. He was too practical perhaps to go all the way. What is this transcendental apperception of unity? Does it unite all experience? But it itself is a concept. Is it a set that includes itself? Or do we learn this sort of concept from experience. I argue that this sort of concept, and the unity of the "I" in general, is learned, not given. Yes, we live in different bodies, but even this is the imposition of Form. And all forms are accidental, except the Form of Forms, or Absolute Form, which is empty unnamable Form. It must be inferred. Any name is already too determinate.

If all Forms but one are temporary, created and destroyed, then there can be no perfect science or philosophy. There can be no God knowable conceptually to man. God is a concept. And this concept is related to other concepts, sensations, and emotions. But science too is vulnerable. Causality is also just a concept, an extremely useful and popular concept, but one that is accidental in my opinion. I think causality is learned. Abstraction is unification.

The form of forms is a finite empty unity. Nonempty forms are still finite unities. And to say unity is really the same as to say finite. Is this why time is experienced as a sequence? Because we can't hold more than one unity in our mind at once? But if we say events are simultaneous, is this not a unity?

Pure negation cannot be conceived of. The Form negation is an abstraction of what all negations have in common, which is that they negate something. We can infer t

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