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#15152365
Atlantis wrote:No, the noble is inherently good. To be good in order to become noble won't work. In other words, the good needs to be selfless, like the wise man in Confucianism or Daoism. The truly wise doesn't know he is wise.


"Noble" refers to the nobility, their power and their social status, not to their "inherent goodness". Nietzsche doesn't believe in such a thing. The powerful give themselves the valuation of "good", through their will to power. The slaves (the common, those of low status), reject that valuation and define the powerful as "evil" and themselves in contrast as good, again motivated by their will to power.
#15152368
Rugoz wrote:"Noble" refers to the nobility, their power and their social status, not to their "inherent goodness". Nietzsche doesn't believe in such a thing. The powerful give themselves the valuation of "good", through their will to power. The slaves (the common, those of low status), reject that valuation and define the powerful as "evil" and themselves in contrast as good, again motivated by their will to power.

Indeed. @Atlantis seems to be adopting a quasi-Buddhist interpretation of Nietzsche. In reality, Nietzsche's rejection of Schopenhauer also entailed a rejection of Buddhist morality along with Christian morality. Nietzsche took much from Schopenhauer's philosophy - not least the importance of the concept of 'Will' as a metaphysical category - but he came to utterly reject Schopenhauer's mysticism and his ethics, which he saw as sneaking Christian morality in through the back door, in the form of Eastern Buddhism. Nietzsche once, in his early 20s, described himself as a 'Schopenhaueran', but he later developed such antipathy towards Schopenhauer that he tried to conceal his philosophical debt to him entirely, barely even mentioning his name.
#15152637
Potemkin wrote:Indeed. @Atlantis seems to be adopting a quasi-Buddhist interpretation of Nietzsche.


I'm not really into Nietzsche's thinking. So, it's possible that I interpreted him from a Far-Eastern point of view; however, it's more Chinese than Buddhist. Perhaps the problem with Nietzsche was that he limited his philological studies to Indo-European languages and ignored Chinese.
#15152638
Atlantis wrote:I'm not really into Nietzsche's thinking. So, it's possible that I interpreted him from a Far-Eastern point of view; however, it's more Chinese than Buddhist. Perhaps the problem with Nietzsche was that he limited his philological studies to Indo-European languages and ignored Chinese.

Every thinker has limitations; indeed, as Goethe once said, the definition of a genius is that he's simply a man who knows his own limitations - both personal and cultural. I was merely pointing out that @Rugoz was correct to suggest that you were misinterpreting Nietzsche. Nobility, for Nietzsche, had nothing to do with "goodness" in a Christian, a Buddhist, nor even a Confucian sense. It's all about the Will and it's all about Power. This is what Nietzsche got from Schopenhauer, even as he rejected Schopenhauer's mystical transcendence of the Will....
#15152643
Potemkin wrote:Every thinker has limitations; indeed, as Goethe once said, the definition of a genius is that he's simply a man who knows his own limitations - both personal and cultural.


Isn't that more related to modesty than to a voluntary limitation of one's scope of enquiry?

During Nietzsche's days, in the West, knowledge of Far-Eastern philosophy in general and Chinese thinking in particular was still very limited.
#15152646
Atlantis wrote:Isn't that more related to modesty than to a voluntary limitation of one's scope of enquiry?

I really don't think that's what Goethe meant, @Atlantis. My interpretation was that Goethe was pointing out that it is at the boundaries between things that we discover new things. And boundaries, by definition, are limitations. Personally, I relate it to Wittgenstein's assertion that "To see one's life as a completed whole - that is the mystical." It is through recognising limitations, seeing things as completed, self-contained wholes, that we can achieve new insights. This is what we mean by the word "genius". It has nothing whatever to do with a sense of personal modesty.

During Nietzsche's days, in the West, knowledge of Far-Eastern philosophy in general and Chinese thinking in particular was still very limited.

Agreed, but he had the example of Schopenhauer to draw upon. And we know that Nietzsche read Schopenhauer in his youth, and that his thinking was profoundly shaped by his writings.
#15152771
Potemkin wrote:I really don't think that's what Goethe meant, @Atlantis. My interpretation was that Goethe was pointing out that it is at the boundaries between things that we discover new things. And boundaries, by definition, are limitations. Personally, I relate it to Wittgenstein's assertion that "To see one's life as a completed whole - that is the mystical." It is through recognising limitations, seeing things as completed, self-contained wholes, that we can achieve new insights. This is what we mean by the word "genius". It has nothing whatever to do with a sense of personal modesty.


The ideal of the Renaissance was the man of universal knowledge. No limitations there. Knowing the whole invariable has to mean transcending limitations.

The compartmentalization, categorization of analytical Western thinking precludes knowledge of the whole. We can recognize the whole in each part in the sense of Indira's net in which the universe is like a huge net in which a precious stone is located at each intersection in which the whole universe is reflected in each stone.

Agreed, but he had the example of Schopenhauer to draw upon. And we know that Nietzsche read Schopenhauer in his youth, and that his thinking was profoundly shaped by his writings.


Yes, but I doubt the Schoppenhauer could have had a very profound knowledge of Buddhism or Eastern philosophy at the time.
#15152783
Some could say that Rousseau was dangerous. He is known for saying, "Men are born free but everywhere in chains." That statement only is enough to start a revolution.

He talks about a person's desire for freedom. Yet he believed that a person will want a leader if that leader can satisfy their wants, even if it goes against their base nature to want to be free.
#15152820
Atlantis wrote:The ideal of the Renaissance was the man of universal knowledge. No limitations there. Knowing the whole invariable has to mean transcending limitations.

With respect, I still think you're missing the point, @Atlantis. After all, Goethe himself was the greatest modern example of a 'Renaissance man'.

The compartmentalization, categorization of analytical Western thinking precludes knowledge of the whole. We can recognize the whole in each part in the sense of Indira's net in which the universe is like a huge net in which a precious stone is located at each intersection in which the whole universe is reflected in each stone.

But this was exactly what Goethe meant - each point contains, in some sense, the whole, and each part is limited. The recognition of those limits is not because of any false modesty, or any refusal to think of the totality; instead, it means examining the boundaries of our own knowledge and sense of being. The worst sort of dullard is the type who mistakes his own limited perspective for the totality of things, and therefore thinks that he knows it all. That type of dullard cannot see his own limitations, and therefore mistakes the part for the whole, and ironically cannot see the totality of things any more than he can see his own limits. This is what Goethe meant when he said that the definition of a genius is a man who knows his own limitations, and (by implication) can therefore see the totality of things, or at least catch a glimpse of it. The smug dullards of this world can see nothing which isn't directly under their noses, because they think that nothing exists beyond their own noses. They erase all limits, and therefore understand nothing.

Yes, but I doubt the Schoppenhauer could have had a very profound knowledge of Buddhism or Eastern philosophy at the time.

It's 'Schopenhauer', and you clearly haven't read him.
#15152827
Thomas Young is said to be "the last man who knew everything". He lived in the early 1800s. There will be a link at the bottom.

In a real sense, it was already too late. A Renaissance man was a warrior, and a man of culture and letters, and perhaps dabbled in the arts. The intellectual world was expanding fast, even back then.

The thinkers you are arguing over here worked in the 1800s, for the most part. It's a bit like trying to use science from nearly 200 years ago. It just doesn't work, there have been a lot of work done in the generations since. Early Modern, Late Modern, Early 20th, Late 20th, and the emergence of the philosophy of science as a leading discipline in philosophy.

Let me try a different analogy, you're putting a Model T in a Grand Prix race...

"They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy”—a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or“subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using."
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_ ... Everything
#15152849
@Potemkin, you don't have to read Schopenhauer to know that he can't have had a very profound knowledge of Buddhism or Far-Eastern philosophy because that knowledge simply wasn't available in Western languages at the time.

Nothing what you said contradicts what I said. I didn't talk about "false modesty", I talked about humbleness in the face of the things we don't know. That has nothing to do with limits. The limitations or compartmentalization of analytical science effectively precludes a holistic approach. We can see what that leads to in everyday life as limited "scientific" evidence is used as an absolute proof of a point of view, for example in favor or against lockdowns.

The hubris (ie. the opposite of the humbleness I talked about) of people like Trump who think they are in possession of the truth irrespective of any facts to the contrary is obvious. But that is certainly not what I would have considered a holistic approach, and if you are honest, neither do you. The intuition of a direct truth can only be a "glimpse", which is turned into its opposite as soon as it is formed into a concept or dogma.
#15152862
Atlantis wrote:@Potemkin, you don't have to read Schopenhauer to know that he can't have had a very profound knowledge of Buddhism or Far-Eastern philosophy because that knowledge simply wasn't available in Western languages at the time.

His knowledge was not as extensive or as deep as it might have been, but he had read the Upanishads (in translation, of course), and had some grasp of the abstract concepts involved. In fact, his philosophy would not really have been possible without having read Eastern philosophy/religion, specifically the Vedanta Hinduism and Buddhism. Again, I get the strong impression that you've never actually read Schopenhauer. Given the influence he has had over German thought and culture - particularly people like Nietzsche, Wagner and Thomas Mann &c. - this surprises me.

Nothing what you said contradicts what I said. I didn't talk about "false modesty", I talked about humbleness in the face of the things we don't know. That has nothing to do with limits. The limitations or compartmentalization of analytical science effectively precludes a holistic approach. We can see what that leads to in everyday life as limited "scientific" evidence is used as an absolute proof of a point of view, for example in favor or against lockdowns.

Indeed. But this one-sided dogmatism is a result precisely of the refusal to recognise limits. To think that one's own perspective has no limits is the fundamental error of a dogmatist.

The hubris (ie. the opposite of the humbleness I talked about) of people like Trump who think they are in possession of the truth irrespective of any facts to the contrary is obvious. But that is certainly not what I would have considered a holistic approach, and if you are honest, neither do you. The intuition of a direct truth can only be a "glimpse", which is turned into its opposite as soon as it is formed into a concept or dogma.

Wittgenstein once said that "our lives have no temporal limit in exactly the same way that our field of vision has no edge." The refusal to recognise one's own mortality is closely related to the refusal to recognise the limits of one's individual perspective. If I delude myself that my field of vision has no limits because it has no edge that I can see, then I will equally delude myself that I am immortal because my existence has no end that I can experience. The arrogance of Trump is of a piece with his dullness and narcissism - he thinks he is the be-all and end-all of everything, because he has no limits. His limited personal perspective is the universal perspective, therefore he is always right. He refuses to recognise his own limitations, and he is therefore not "a very stable genius", but is in fact a narcissistic dullard who understands nothing.
#15152867
Potemkin wrote:
Wittgenstein once said that "our lives have no temporal limit in exactly the same way that our field of vision has no edge."



“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

I want to say I do not care for Wittgenstein. I have not studied his work. However, I think he's talking about what I think I will call group-ness.

We tend to think of individual achievement. But what made that possible is institution in which it happened. We prob had an Einstein thousands of years ago, but guys living in caves don't do theoretical physics...

Researchers used to race each other, the work is heading to some conclusion. One of them will get there first, but even if everyone involved died in a plane crash, some young postdoc would pick up the ball and run with it.

Think of this as not seeing the forest for the trees.. You will die, but the discipline, the team, will carry on. He may also have been reacting to some extreme individualism that was running around in philosophy at the time.

Edit:

I was wrong.

"Wittgenstein concludes that the only correct method in philosophy is to confine oneself to what can be spoken, and, whenever others try to say the unsayable (ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, etc.), to point out to them that they are speaking nonsense (6.53). He then acknowledges that all the propositions of the Tractatus are themselves nonsensical.."

I knew he was a Logical Positivist, but I'd forgotten how goofy they were.

"Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion of meaning).[1] This theory of knowledge asserted that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful."

They tried to put thinking in a straitjacket, it didn't work. When they tried to create a universal language of science they wound up proving such a thing was impossible. Yup, they blew themselves up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
#15153028
Potemkin wrote:Wittgenstein once said that "our lives have no temporal limit in exactly the same way that our field of vision has no edge." The refusal to recognise one's own mortality is closely related to the refusal to recognise the limits of one's individual perspective. If I delude myself that my field of vision has no limits because it has no edge that I can see, then I will equally delude myself that I am immortal because my existence has no end that I can experience.


Our temporal existence obviously has limits. It would be foolish to think otherwise. Yet, the universe or reality (Wirklichkeit) is not limited by our temporal existence. The universe (or reality) either exists or it doesn't exist, but there can't be limits to it. It even transcends our notion of existence or non-existence. There can't be a beginning and an end because then we would have to investigate what was before or after.

The problem is awareness. Are we capable of transcending the rational thought processes of our temporal existence or are we limited to the straightjacket of our rational mind? If the latter is true, then we can never gain any knowledge. Our field of vision is the sharper, the narrower its focus, but by narrowing the focus, we lose sight of the whole. If we want to determine the location of a subatomic particle with absolute certainty, we cannot know its velocity, and vice versa.

I really don't care about who promulgated what philosophy. There are specialists for that. I do believe that our rational thoughts are only the outer drags of a cosmic mind that continually keeps on rising up in our temporal mind. To become aware of it is not to become a dullard like Trump, on the contrary, the dullard pursuing his pet theories has closed himself off from the life-feed of the cosmic mind. All creativity in religion, the arts, science or daily life draws on the life-feed from the cosmic mind.
#15153031
Atlantis wrote:Our temporal existence obviously has limits. It would be foolish to think otherwise. Yet, the universe or reality (Wirklichkeit) is not limited by our temporal existence. The universe (or reality) either exists or it doesn't exist, but there can't be limits to it. It even transcends our notion of existence or non-existence. There can't be a beginning and an end because then we would have to investigate what was before or after.

The problem is awareness. Are we capable of transcending the rational thought processes of our temporal existence or are we limited to the straightjacket of our rational mind? If the latter is true, then we can never gain any knowledge. Our field of vision is the sharper, the narrower its focus, but by narrowing the focus, we lose sight of the whole. If we want to determine the location of a subatomic particle with absolute certainty, we cannot know its velocity, and vice versa.

I really don't care about who promulgated what philosophy. There are specialists for that. I do believe that our rational thoughts are only the outer drags of a cosmic mind that continually keeps on rising up in our temporal mind. To become aware of it is not to become a dullard like Trump, on the contrary, the dullard pursuing his pet theories has closed himself off from the life-feed of the cosmic mind. All creativity in religion, the arts, science or daily life draws on the life-feed from the cosmic mind.

You're definitely a child of the '60s, @Atlantis. :hippy: :lol:

There's no point pursuing this any farther. I'm done here. :)
#15153044
Atlantis wrote:The problem is awareness. Are we capable of transcending the rational thought processes of our temporal existence or are we limited to the straightjacket of our rational mind? If the latter is true, then we can never gain any knowledge. Our field of vision is the sharper, the narrower its focus, but by narrowing the focus, we lose sight of the whole. If we want to determine the location of a subatomic particle with absolute certainty, we cannot know its velocity, and vice versa.


What is your sense of what the whole is or being able to maintain a sense of it?
My impression is the whole here is that of the absolute immediacy of things, experience not mediated by language which breaks down the conceptual barriers of language, between subject and object.
But this but a moment or part of consciousness ...
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/being1.htm
Being is the immediate, that is, un-mediated, given in itself and not by means of something else. But right from the outset, Hegel makes it clear that "neither in Heaven nor on Earth" is there anything that is not equally mediated as immediate. "Being is immediate" is not an absolute, but a relative truth. To elevate it into an absolute (like the ancients and like the gurus of "awareness") is one moment or stage of the Absolute Idea.

and I think you correctly note the focusing in of the mind but you seem to denigrate the necessity of analytical thought as a precondition in fact for conceptualizing a whole with richer concepts.
Is not a word already a generalized concept that goes beyond any immediate limited experience and begins the process of a concept already developed by generations of people.
Spoiler: show
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/psycri05.htm
Any word is a theory. To name an object is to apply a concept to it. Admittedly, by means of the word we wish to comprehend the object. But each name, each application of the word, this embryo of science, is a critique of the word, a blurring of its form, an extension of its meaning. Linguists have clearly enough demonstrated how words change from being used. After all, language otherwise would never be renewed, words would not die, be born, or become obsolete.

Finally, each discovery in science, each step forward in empirical science is always at the same time an act of criticizing the concept. Pavlov discovered the fact of conditional reflexes. But didn’t he really create a new concept! at the same time? Did we really call a trained, well-learned movement a reflex before? And it cannot be otherwise: if science would only discover facts without extending the boundaries of its concepts, it would not discover anything new. It would make no headway in finding more and more new specimens of the same concepts. Each tiny new fact is already an extension of the concept. Each newly discovered relation between two facts immediately requires a critique of the two corresponding concepts and the establishment of a new relation between them. The conditional reflex is a discovery of a new fact by means of an old concept. We learned that mental salivation develops directly from the reflex, more correctly, that it is the same reflex, but operating under other conditions. But at the same time it is a discovery of a new concept by means of an old fact: by means of the fact “salivation occurs at the sight of food,” which is well known to all of us, we acquired a completely new concept of the reflex, our idea of it diametrically changed. Whereas before, the reflex was a synonym for a premental, unconscious, immutable fact, nowadays the whole mind is reduced to reflexes, the reflex has turned out to be a most flexible mechanism, etc. How would this have been possible if Pavlov had only studied the fact of salivation and not the concept of the reflex? This is essentially the same thing expressed in two ways, for in each scientific discovery knowledge of the fact is to the same extent knowledge of the concept. The scientific investigation of facts differs from registration in that it is the accumulation of concepts, the circulation of concepts and facts with a conceptual return.
...
In Engels we find a good example of the presence of abstractions and the participation of thought in every scientific fact. Ants have other eyes than we have. They see chemical beams that are invisible to us. This is a fact. How was it established? How can we know that “ants see things that are invisible to us”? Naturally, this is based on the perceptions of our eye, but in addition to that we have not only the other senses but the activity of our thinking as well. Thus, establishing a scientific fact is already a matter of thinking, that is, of concepts.

To be sure, we will never know how these chemical beams look to the ants. Who deplores this is beyond help [Engels, 1925/1978, p. 507].

This is the best example of the non-coincidence of the real and the scientific fact. Here this non-coincidence is presented in an especially vivid way, but it exists to a certain degree in each fact. We never saw these chemical beams and did not perceive the sensations of ants, i.e., that ants see certain chemical beams is not a real fact of immediate experience for us, but for the collective experience of mankind it is a scientific fact. But what to say, then, about the fact that the earth turns around the sun? For here in the thinking of man the real fact, in order to become a scientific fact, had to turn into its opposite, although the earth’s rotation around the sun was established by observations of the sun’s rotations around the earth.

By now we are equipped with all we need to solve this problem and we can go straight for the goal. If at the root of every scientific concept lies a fact and, vice versa, at the basis of every scientific fact lies a concept, then from this it inevitably follows that the difference between general and empirical sciences as regards the object of investigation is purely quantitative and not fundamental. It is a difference of degree and not a difference of the nature of the phenomenon. The general sciences do not deal with real objects, but with abstractions. They do not study plants and animals, but life. Their subject matter is scientific concepts. But life as well is part of reality and these concepts have their prototypes in reality. The special sciences have the actual facts of reality as their subject matter, they do not study life as such, but actual classes and groups of plants and animals. But both the plant and the animal, and even the birch tree and the tiger, and even this birch tree and this tiger are already concepts. And scientific facts as well, even the most primitive ones, are already concepts. Fact and concept form the subject matter of all disciplines, but to a different degree, in different proportion. Consequently, general physics does not cease being a physical discipline and does not become part of logic because it deals with the most abstract physical concepts. Ultimately, even these serve to know some part of reality.


The matter is of course how one gets past the analytical grounding to a synthesis, one has become conscious of the parts but many false problems occur in trying to put back together what have been abstracted as independent of each other.
Marx summarizes such a process quite succinctly...
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3
If I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.

Because in this process, there are abstractions which are more 'concrete' in that they better reflect the essential relations and nature of a thing.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#abstract
So in short, ‘abstract’ means simple, and isolated from connection with the whole, whilst ‘concrete’ means the combination of many abstractions.

So how one begins to grasp the whole is of course impossible if one is confined to analytical thinking, but it sets the stage for a synthesis that allows one to penetrate past inessential attributes and abstract what is particular to a thing not as an isolated object independent of other objects but as underpinned by a universal particular. That is, instead of abstracting the sameness/likeness of things, one identifies the real particular thing which explains all other particulars. It contains the qualities of the larger phenomenon to be examined.
It was Goethe who came up with this concept of a concept that is also empirical in nature that allows one to penetrate into the nature of a thing due to containing all the essential properties of the whole.
How can we grasp a process as a whole?
This doesn't lead to some unified sense of all of reality, finding the particular unit of analysis is always a pressing task in different fields. To know one isn't to know all as they all require the work of analyzing and then synthesizing concepts before one can identify the particular in some case.

So while reason is seen a limiting due to its capacity for narrow focusing in on things rather than attempting to hold all of reality in one's mind, that is at the same time it's strength and it's the ability to help construct actual knowledge of the world. To wish otherwise would be to wish to experience the perception of chemical beams by ants. And in using concepts that are developed through generations, we always engage in the knowledge that is beyond our individual temporal existence, as we can, ideally access the wealth of humanity's knowledge. You don't reinvent the wheel, you use it and go further because you already have the wheel.
#15153087
@Wellsy, to *function* in our temporal existence we need rational thought. But it's purely *functional*, it can't give answers to the human quest for awareness. So, I don't "denigrate" rational thinking, but I recognize its limitations. Human logic is dualistic; the primate reaches out with his hand to "have" or "not to have" the fruit. Having the fruit means "existing" (we can eat), and not having means "not existing". Curiously, the Chinese character for the verb to have is a hand holding a piece of meat 有.

Thus, human rational thinking is conditioned by our existence on this planet. It would be very foolish to think that the universe has to comply with human logic. The so-called "natural laws" are manmade. Human analytical thinking is just compartmentalizing reality into more or less arbitrary categories for our convenience. We don't have to pose rational thinking and intuitive thinking in opposition to each other, the one inspires the other; however, rational thought without inspiration is just a dead shell.

Going one step further we could also say that the world is created anew in every instant and that continuity is just an illusion, like the illusion of movement created by the 24 frames/second of a movie film. Thus, we get rid of the absurdity of the big bang theory as the beginning of the universe because the universe is created anew at each instant.

@Potemkin, you are good at categorization :up:
#15153174
Atlantis wrote:@Wellsy, to *function* in our temporal existence we need rational thought. But it's purely *functional*, it can't give answers to the human quest for awareness. So, I don't "denigrate" rational thinking, but I recognize its limitations. Human logic is dualistic; the primate reaches out with his hand to "have" or "not to have" the fruit. Having the fruit means "existing" (we can eat), and not having means "not existing". Curiously, the Chinese character for the verb to have is a hand holding a piece of meat 有.

Thus, human rational thinking is conditioned by our existence on this planet. It would be very foolish to think that the universe has to comply with human logic. The so-called "natural laws" are manmade. Human analytical thinking is just compartmentalizing reality into more or less arbitrary categories for our convenience. We don't have to pose rational thinking and intuitive thinking in opposition to each other, the one inspires the other; however, rational thought without inspiration is just a dead shell.

Going one step further we could also say that the world is created anew in every instant and that continuity is just an illusion, like the illusion of movement created by the 24 frames/second of a movie film. Thus, we get rid of the absurdity of the big bang theory as the beginning of the universe because the universe is created anew at each instant.

@Potemkin, you are good at categorization :up:

I agree that human thought is conditioned by our existence and experience on the planet but there is something that makes me worry how far you might put a gap between the limits of human's ability to know and the world itself. I agree that it's not the case that the universe complies to human logic, but humans only develop their knowledge in submitting themselves to the world itself. It feels rather Kantian in that they often pose human perception as setting limits on human experience where as you go with Hegel and instead of one-sidedly emphasizing the structure of the human mind, the human mind is itself an active product of the world of objects.
Part of this point is an emphasis on human activity as the basis of human thought rather than posing a passive individual subject who perceives things.
Man's needs necessarily direct his attention to reality.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm
Piaget bases his theory on what are supposed in psychoanalytical theory as two opposite forms of thought determination - the “pleasurre principle” and the “reality principle”. Vygotsky deals with this irrefutably and in true Hegelian style:

“the drive for satisfaction of needs and the drive for adaptation to reality cannot be considered separate from and opposed to one another. A need can be truly satisfied only through a certain adaptation to reality. Moreover, there is no such thing as adaptation for the sake of adaptation; it is always directed by needs”. [Thought and Language, Chapter 2]

And our representations of reality are indeed not reality itself but this is to think of knowledge one sidedly instead of seeing how theory informs practice. Theory independent its object is meaningless and leads to the psuedo problem of relating it to the object. Where in an actual activity, it already has meaning in guiding one's actions as it is a reflection of the action.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm
At first hand, transformation of the material into the ideal consists in the external fact being expressed in language, which ‘is the immediate actuality of thought’ (Marx). But language of itself is as little ideal as the neuro-physiological structure of the brain. It is only the form of expression of the ideal, its material-objective being. Neopositivists, who identify thought (i.e. the ideal) with language, with a system of terms and expressions, therefore make the same naturalistic mistake as scientists who identify the ideal with the structures and functions of brain tissue. Here, too, the form only of its material expression is taken for the ideal. The material is really ‘transplanted’ into the human head, and not simply into the brain as an organ of the individual’s body, (1) only when it is expressed in immediately, generally significant forms of language (understood in the broadest sense of the word, including the language of drawings, diagrams, models, etc.), and (2) when it is transformed into an active form of man’s activity with a real object (and not simply into a ‘term’ or ‘utterance’ as the material body of language). In other words the object proves to be idealised only when the faculty of actively recreating it has been created, relying on the language of words or drawings; when the faculty of converting words into deeds, and through deeds into things, has been created.
...
The ideal, as the form of social man’s activity, exists where the process of the transformation of the body of nature into the object of man’s activity, into the object of labour, and then into the product of labour, takes place. The same thing can be expressed in another way, as follows: the form of the external. thing involved in the labour process is ‘sublated’ in the subjective form of objective activity (action on objects); the latter is objectively registered in the subject in the form of the mechanisms of higher nervous activity; and then there is the reverse sequence of these metamorphoses, namely the verbally expressed idea is transformed into a deed, and through the deed into the form of an external, sensuously perceived thing, into a thing. These two contrary series of metamorphoses form a closed cycle: thing—deed—word—deed—thing. Only in this cyclic movement, constantly renewed, does the ideal, the ideal image of the thing exist.

The ideal is immediately realised in a symbol and through a symbol, i.e. through the external, sensuously perceived, visual or audible body of a word. But this body, while remaining itself, proves at the same time to be the being of another body and as such is its ‘ideal being’, its meaning, which is quite distinct from its bodily form immediately perceived by the ears or eyes. As a sign, as a name, a word has nothing in common with what it is the sign of. What is ‘common’ is only discovered in the act of transforming the word into a deed, and through the deed into a thing (and then again in the reverse process), in practice and the mastering of its results.

And they aren't arbitrary systems unless you think language is meaningless and not a means of reflecting aspects of reality in a general form. The signs themselves have no natural connection but they develop a normative reality within a type of project/activity. Hence specialized language for different fields of expertise which is only grasped by the experienced.
Indeed, the emphasis on the passivity of reified thought is indeed emphasizing the dead rather than the creative living aspect in which thought has to strive with contradictions and problems.

Indeed one can pose reality in such a way and that gets to the limits of causality going ad Infinitum and hitting a wall as it can only explain so much and isn't the level at which everything can be explained. Many explanations are intelligible without being causal but this bothers a lot of scientific thought that looks primarily for causal relationships and soon finds that they are limited due to the many effects and relations between things.
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