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I had to reread Hume’s ‘Of abstract ideas’ a few times to get it, but I think I understand it now. First he says that it is absurd to think that we have an idea that represents all different shapes and sizes of, for example, ‘man’, because that would seem to require and infinite capacity in the mind. He then goes on to argue why it can’t also be the opposite: that our general ideas represent no particular degree of quantity and quality, and thus I suppose are just kind of blueprints with the appropriate ratio among these quantities/qualities.

Firstly, he talks about how you can’t separate the the particular degree from the quality/quantity you are dealing with. Hume says, “But ’tis evident at first sight, that the precise length of a line is not different nor distinguishable from the line itself; nor the precise degree of any quality from the quality.” So he basically just asserts that it is evident.

Secondly, he argues that since all experience is particular, all of our impressions are of particular things with particular degrees of quality/quantity. And according to his own definition of the principle by which our ideas come to be, “all ideas…are nothing but copies and representations of them (impressions), whatever is true of the one must be acknowledg’d concerning the other…An idea is a weaker impression; and as a strong impression must necessarily have a determinate quantity and quality, the case must be the same with its copy or representative.”

Thirdly, Hume seems to be making a very similar point to the second. Everything in nature is individual, therefore everything has a particular degree of all of its qualities/quantities. This is therefore absurd in ideas to have an object without degree (his second point), “since nothing of which we can form a clear and distinct idea is absurd and impossible.” I guess by the latter he means that since our ideas are of particular degree (of a once perceived impression of this degree), that whatever cobbled together idea of the imagination we come up with must not be impossible since it is composed of ideas of parcular degree. There is one sentence in this paragraph that I can’t quite decipher, “But to form the idea of an object, and to form an idea simply is the same thing; the reference of the idea to an object being an extraneous denomination, of which in itself it bears no mark or character.” After that he just goes on to say that just as it is absurd to say we have ideas that have quality but no precise degree, it is likewise equally absurd to say that the ideas have quality/quantity “that is not limited and confin’d.”

Hume’s first point seems arcane, and I’m not sure what the reasoning is behind this argument that degree and quality can’t be separated. The second depends on his own definition of terms, which seems to be a very weak reason. The third follows the second with his idea of this copying of impressions into ideas, and just extends the second argument to the case of unlimited degrees. Anyways, Hume’s point is that our images in the mind are only of particular objects, and that these are applied an universals/abstract ideas.

It seems to me that in order to find a resemblance among particulars, to the extent that I am able to form some general/abstract idea and identify further particulars of as to yet unencountered degree, would have to point to a faculty that isn’t recognizing particular degree, and is instead recognizing the form. Hume seems concerned with the particular idea, the idea that comes to mind, that when someone says ‘triangle’, the idea that I have is my abstract idea of ‘triangle’, and according to his own principles, it must be of an encountered particular.

In continental philosophy there seems to be these themes of taking responsibility for your life, being engaged in the world, making your life a project, living your life like you mean it, etc. Would those who live such a life find any inspiration from such ideas? I’m assuming not, other than making them conscious of what they are doing, which might just serve to derail them if they allowed themselves to be distracted by them. Who would be interested/eager to hear such ideas? Might it not be people who are not living such a life? And what purpose do these ideas serve but to simulate the theoretical experience of such a life. Carpe Diem, just like all the t-shirts say. As if merely understanding concept is to realize the existence it professes. Because, presumably, to understand an idea, for it to speak to you, is to be ready to receive the idea. If you think your life is fine, and you hear something about being thrown into the world and living dangerously, these ideas aren’t going to mean anything to you. And like I said, they may not make any sense, or sound like child’s play, to those who perhaps lead such a life. And that just leaves those who are fixated on some image of what they want to be/wish they were/etc. Like those basement disproportioned geeks who like superhero comics. The philosophy is an escape, allowing us to temporarily imagine what it would be like to exist in such a way. These ideas often act as a lozenge taking the place of the lives that they profess.

Philosophy is the notes that fill my notebook, preventing me from finishing what I’m reading.

Afraid to get ‘out-of-your-head’, retreat back to your fortress of convictions (armor), go ahead and reinforce yourself, mirror walls reflecting your image infinitely.

To share ideas is fruitful. Mutual inspiration is a thing of beauty. But being so enamored with one’s idea, with the aesthetic pleasure of an idea, that you take it to be your own, is a despicable and selfish act, vain and gluttonous like some fiendish Gollum.

Yet greater mouthfuls of shitcakes are rarely heard outside of the halls of philosophy. Rational animals…acutely rational animals…excessively rational animals…grotesquely rational animals…pornographically rational animals.

What in the fuck are we talking about?

Does one go into great debt to study philosophy? Does one borrow beyond forseeable means for out-of-state tuition and for living expenses due to forgoing a paycheck for years? For philosophy? There is something very unbecoming, almost embarrassing about paying for philosophy. Forget even that Socrates/Plato explicitly saw wisdom for money as anathema to philosophy. Like existing as something that should not have been. I’m probably just feeling insecure and jealous of those who got funding.

In an episode of ‘The Philosopher’s Zone‘ called ‘Is it art?’ Alan Saunders talks to Arthur C. Danto about his theory of indiscernables. If you have two identical objects, but one of them is a work of art, and the other is an ordinary something-or-other, how can you tell which is which? He talks of an Andy Warhol show he’d seen, and begins by talking about a photo of Warhol in front of some duplicated shipping cartons:

You couldn’t have told from the photograph that these were anything except shipping cartons. Because until 1964 nobody saw them as anything else. And what Warhol had done had been to duplicate them. Now, my interest in this show – you’ve got two objects which are to all outward appearances indiscernable, but one is a piece of avant garde art and the other is just a utilitarian container. And I thought, well that raises the question of what is art in a very different form than had ever been raised before…What Warhol did was to put it in a different way: how, if you have two objects which look exactly alike (are, as I’ve put it, indiscernable), one being a work of art and the other one not. What’s the difference?

This idea of indiscernables struck me as similar some other ideas…

This is a quote from the end of ‘The Courtier and the Heretic’ by Matthew Stewart (speaking of the continental rationalistic reactions to the scientific revolution):

All begin with the conviction that there is some vital aspect of experience which escapes modern thought. All maintain that the purpose of life begins where modernity ends. All claim to discover the special and elusive meaning of existence through an analysis of the putative failures of modern thought. And all remain indissolubly attached to precisely that which they oppose. (311, Stewart)

And this is a quote from Simon Critchley’s ‘A Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy’ where he is describing the feeling one might have at a hypothetical end of science where everything has been explained, “…not an explanatory gap that might be closed by producing a better, more comprehensive theory, but more of a felt gap.” (6, Critchley)

A few other ideas along these lines that I don’t have quotes for offhand are: Aristotle and Kant’s ideas that there is a difference between someone just going through the motions, and someone performing an identical act out of earnest, appearance and reality, and another example being how to tell if someone is conscious or a zombie.

These examples seem to point to what could be a decent definition of philosophy. Danto says:

…I thought that it had the character of any classical philosophical question where you’ve got two things that can’t be told apart but are momentously different. Like in the beginning of Descartes’ Meditations Descartes says: well, what better evidence can I have than what the senses provide me with. And then he says: well, that would be true if only I knew I were sensing, because as a matter of fact, I’ve dreamt that I was having certain experiences and the dreams were very vivid and I would’ve had no idea that there was nothing in front of me, nothing being perceived until I woke up and realized that I’d been dreaming…

This brings up another idea: how do we account for the ability to have such a felt gap epistemologically? My theory is that philosophy is this: the intuition of a “felt gap”, and the elucidation of this. If it were more than just a “felt gap” then it would be empirically testable. So, some exception must be found between what was previously indistinguishable. This could be called a philosophical instinct of sorts.

This is a quote from the late Robert Solomon in a lecture on Kierkegaard:

There’s a comment in Nietzsche which I’ve always found extremely revealing, and, of course, many people believe this, especially if they’re not philosophers. But what a philosopher tends to argue, however abstract or abstruse it might be…what a philosopher tends to argue typically has to do with his or her personal problems. There’s a sense in which philosophy is personality rendered explicit is some rather difficult words. (Robert Solomon from lecture 7 ‘No Excuses’)

I hope this quote will serve as an impetus for this blog and I hope I will continue to have something to say on this topic. My other site findphilosophy.com may be a more general site of thoughts on this and that, and an overview of philosophy. Fuckphilosophy.com may be the opposite, or maybe this will just be a more personal blog, and findphilsophy will be more topical. I don’t know.

But what would it mean for these exceptions to come from within (your mind, as opposed to the external world)? The capacity for allowing exceptions in the external world would seem to be one that would equally allow for exceptions coming from within. As in the empiricist/Lockean sense of the external world as mental representation, thus the two realms aren’t so remote. This capacity doesn’t necessarily mean that such exceptions-from-within must exist, as/or in a Spinozean way, that there are necessary corresponding phenomena of mind (though that is an interesting idea: our mind’s capacity for producing exceptional intuitions as beging learned from a willy-nilly/capricious nature). But this point need not be argued that these internal intuitions exist.

I’m going to make a leap here: once we start to receive exceptions from within, we are intelligent. The extent to which we receive (or produce) intuitions to which we find/take exception in/to, is the extent to which we are intelligent/brilliant. It is the zombie that finds nothing of note coming from within, in the analytic truth sense of the predicate being entailed in the subject; the intuitions of consciousness being ‘entailed in the subject’. It is the robot that behaves according to what is entailed in him. Our capacity for being struck by an intuition, of admitting exceptions, goes beyond the capacity of such a robot/zombie, thus such exceptions are a mark of intelligence. I’ve compared this ‘unintelligent’ robot to an anaytic truth, thus intelligence could be defined in comparison to synthetic judgement, in which something additional is introduced (although not a necessary truth). (And in the Kierkegaardean/existentialist sense of not really existing.)

Here is a little recap, since looking back i’m not sure of the coherency of what was written above. The first paragraph starts with an example of the ‘what must be necessary…’ method, and ends with a thesis about the role of this method being central to philosophy. In the second paragraph I start with the example of the philosophical instinct (kinda self-referrential). Then, instead of trying to support my thesis that this method is central to philosophy, I move on to applying this method (’what must be necessary…’) to this philosophical instinct. I didn’t have to use an example from philosophy (the problem of universals) in the second paragraph, but that was the train of thought I followed, and looking back on it, using this ‘what must be necessary…’ method on the philosophical instinct would have to give us what must be necessary for the philosophical instinct, and this is a much more interesting topic than the initial thesis. Then I make the leap to what it is to be intelligent/brilliant.

This is from an article on autism and deception: “True deception assumes the deceiver knows that (1) other beings have minds, (2) different beings’ minds can believe different things are true (when only one of these is actually true), and (3) you can make another mind believe that something false is actually true.” This is a good example of a priori reasoning: without concession to experience, trying to unpack what must be entailed from the comfort of your armchair. I want to argue that such ‘what must be necessary…’ arguments are one of the central methods of philosophy. (through a series of digressions) (thus lacking a necessary connection, but more of a story of some likelyhood to account for it)

Take, for example, some previously taken-for-granted aspect of experience that now resonates with a slightly different ring, strikes you as strange (as I had defined philosophy elsewhere). The example I was thinking of was universals: at some point it dawned on someone that the fact that I can identify x as one of a type, that I must have some criteria by which I judge it as such. Obviously, in order for this to occur… or, rather, what must be necessary for this to occur? (Since it wouldn’t exactly be obvious, since that was kinda the point, that it was previously seamless.) At the very least, for this above described intuition to strike you as such, it would seem that you would need to have bundled into this intuition the idea that this previously-seamless phenomenon might not be seamless – that things might not be as they seem.

In order for one to realize that the scene might not be seamless – that things might not be as they seem – it seems like there must be at least 2: as-it-seems, and as-it-is (or as-it-might-otherwise-be). Thus we are able to account for skepticism as an organizing principle in the philosophical endeavor. There would be no philosophy if we weren’t able to see things any different than they appear. Possibly another way of saying this is that our mind must allow for exceptions, exceptions to the rule, which is of course the case with respect to the external world since we are able to learn from special-case experiences. When it comes to dealing with the external world, we have to be plastic – allowing for exceptions.