rubbercok3000

Hey man honestly from what you have posted you have really given me some hope!! I live in an area populated by evangelical Christian thinkers that view any other thought process other than literal Bible translations as "Satanic". I have always found a lot of validity in the pratice of meditation because it really lets you just sit and "see" your current condition physically and spiritually. It is good to know that there is someone else who respects the eastern pantheistic thought process which really have been verified by science no doubt. Kant really is an interesting fellow in that he beleived that all religons were equal to an extent. They are all trying to explain something that by defintion is "infinite" and "unformed". Most, if not all of the people I have ever met that follow eastern paths are in good physical and mental health and respect other forms of life. You seem to be no exception. It is very tiring here in America to see the fundamentalist Christians say that a person like you is going to hell while they are overweight themselves and treat there families poorly. Mindfullness and being aware of what you are doing seem to be basic necesities. That is why I find Taoism and Budhism so attractive is because it focuses on the here and now and how to improve yourself and how you interact with the "system" of things.

That part about the man in the circle is far out man!!! I will have to get up the time and courage to try that. It would be very hard to just look inside that small box and would increase your concentration quite a bit I would reckon.

Thanks for your replies man. Take care!!!

rubbercok3000

BTW Farren I will check out that book. In fact currently I am reading a couple on Shamanistic cultures and it is by the far the most interesting spiritual path I have encountered. It may seem primitive to some, but I think it has a lot of uselfulness because it is free from political and cultural pressures today that would try and twist its intended purpose.

johngalt

From my perspective, i would just refute it with everyday things that happen. An example would be if you dropped your pen. You are seeing a pen drop, no matter who else sees it is seeing that your pen is dropping. Everyone perceives dropping a pen, so whether everyone is wrong...

Well, hope you find some answers.

JP2

I'd be inclined to agree, but I think Kant used synthetic a priori concepts not as a necessary precursor to experience in-itself, but rather as a means to form a foundation from which "objective" reality could be realised. Whether or not synthetic a priori concepts (that is, our comprehension of spatiality and temporality and the way we project these outwardly onto the world) can be demonstrated to be truly a priori (it would be more of a psychological/physiological issue now - do infants, for instance, have this a priori capacity to comprehend time and space?) the significance of these concepts for Kant was that they were able to lead him away from the pesimistic scepticism of Hume, who denied the possibility of synthetic a priori concepts and thus of any possible rectifying the "ontological rift" separating the internal and external worlds (I'm presuming Hume had such a dualistic view?).

Haha, I don't think so. I've only every heard it pronounced phoenetically (i.e. with the "a" pronounced like the "a" in "bat") or with the "a" elongated (pronounced "Kahnt" or something like that) but never "cunt". Still, it'd probably be fun to walk around saying that the greatest philosopher of all time was "I. Cunt" I'd suppose.

John Page

Agreed, but I think this leads one toward a conclusion that for higher order experiences to occur one must have some prior conceptions for current experiences to be mapped onto.

Example, how can one think "That's a chair" without a priori knowledge of what a chair is? Obviously how the mind starts to build up its knowledgebase is a key issue - and thats where ontology comes in - how does our knowledge come to be? Are our brains hard wired to know spacetime?

Cheers, John

Farren

I'm not so sure. Someone told me an anecdote some time back about a (possibly thier) philosophy lecturer stating "And yes, folks, it is in fact Cunt". I think this might have been widely enough corrupted like Murry Gell-man's "Quark" (intended to be pronouced Quork, widely corrupted to Kwark), that even those in the know have inherited the corruption.

Afrikaans here in South Africa has a lot in common with both German and Dutch. "Kan" (can, as in can you...?) in afrikaans is pronounced "Kun" and "Van" is pronounced "Fun".

I was thinking the same thing. Wouldn't it be just grand to be able to say "oh, Cunt is inspirational!"

mhc

Kant was correct, buy his own definition.
The thing-in-itself (the trascendentally real) is apart from the transcendentally ideal ( the thing as given in human sensibility.)
The Ding An Sich is by definition that which is apart from human sensibility.

John Page

..and so am I, by mine. A thing-in-itself can be an object external to the human mind or internal to the human mind. The form of a thing-in-itself could be an external material object, a memory of that external material object or an imagined object. It is the latter two forms of thing that we can know directly and they are not transcendental. An external material thing, however, can only be known indirectly through sense data and is interpreted by our mind/brain.

Thus, I argue, there is no need to introduce and explain the concept of "transcendent".

Cheers, John

Torben

I don't think people can ever experience the Ding an Sich. We are bound by our senses, and the characteristics of an object, e.g. a pen falling to the ground, is a result of the interaction of the object (and its actions) and our senses.

You wouldn't doubt that the black color of the pen is a result of the interaction of light, the pen, and your eye, would you?
The sound of the pen hitting the floor isn't there either! The sound is a function of our ears interacting with the world around us. A falling tree in the forest makes no sound, when no people are around! But the air probably vibrates the same way as when we hear the tree

What we perceive as reality are symbols of that reality. The symbols may represent the object, but it can never be the object. As for the psychedelics story, I don't see how you escape the bottom line: you need interaction between your mind and the object to acknowledge it. The nature and feeling of the interaction may change when doing drugs, but you're still experiencing the interaction, not the object.


As for the pronunciation of Kant, it's not cunt in German. It's more like a British "can't", only pronounced much faster.

Cheers

mhc

I'm with ya on this Torben.
My question now is:
By what warrant to we propose the Ding an Sich, if it is unknowable?

mhc