Favorite: "It is, moreover, to be remarked in regard to the form of thinking, that thinking is a positing, and a positing is an opposition to another; hence, an 'op-positing', and that, therefore, all opposition rises immediately and purely from thinking, and is produced by thinking."
@@saintsword23 Ha! To posit is to oppose-it makes me wonder if all contents of consciousness are somehow "op-posing," by their very narrow and fragmentary nature, the Totality or infinite potentiality of "the All," so to speak. This hypothetical Infinite would perhaps be closer to an "absolute" which Hegel seeks for within the realm of thought alone.
@@robbydyer4500 Don't get confused here. It's that all opposing is held in the mind, not that the mind is all opposing. One of the transcendental ideas is identity though. Kant didn't have a notion of set theory in his day, but today we would say sets are a transcendental idea. We talk about about what belongs in a set and does not belong in a set. Although that's not to say the mind makes opposite sets out of everything, it does put things in and out of sets (often with fuzziness).
@saintsword23 Forgive me, it has been a year since my original comment, and I have now relistened to the chapter with full engagement and scrutiny. What I am loosely understanding here is that thinking "posits" an object, and "op-posits" a subject (ego) as a simultaneous byproduct. You are adding to this model the act of mentally associating various objects together in categories of identity, or sets, which could either be a consequence of further mental acts of differentiation or perhaps a necessary function of the initial positing itself (or both). It is then conjectured that in the act(s) of mental categorizing and associating, further oppositions are formed, in order to (perhaps/necessarily fuzzily) demarcate what is recognized as identical (and thereby identified/identifiable) from what is not identical, and other-which "other" could conceivably, to me, be thrust back into the "living knowledge" of self-contemplation, which experiences itself, via its reflection in the total unity of world-extension, as infinitely not-yet-differentiated. Please correct any errors you may notice here. My last from-the-hip comment came from a confusion indeed of the subject-object opposition that I am loosely inferring here with the supposed opposition between single units or "fragments" of conscious experience isolated within temporal moments or snapshots, and the hypothetical totality of all possible experiences, or unity of all experienced or imagined "moments," which I fully acknowledge as my own interpolation into this discussion. What is it that precisely differentiates one singular, present experience within time from another, or from a hypothetical or otherwise inferred extratemporal standpoint? Is it possible to differentiate the mind itself from a supraordinate "potential mind" that simultaneously exists outside of immediate experience and also includes it, as part of a greater whole? What would the mental nature of that greater whole be, and could it be posited, intuited or apperceived within "living knowledge"? These are my own "extra-Kantian" musings.
@@robbydyer4500 I think you're seeing what I'm seeing. Some of your language at the end of your attempting to explain how you understand me turns a bit mystical and I had trouble comprehending though. I will say I have immense interest in the mind bending back on itself to comprehend itself...I just couldn't follow what you were trying to say there is all. But essentially, yes, categorizing phenomena into sets seems to be at least a transcendental idea if not the root of cognition. Like you I'm unsure if the idea of a set comes first and enables the subject/object distinction (SOD), the SOD enables the idea of sets, or that they coarise. I'll have to contemplate that more.
Found the part where Fichte denounces atomism pretty funny. I can understand prioritizing the fact that extended objects are conceptually infinitely divisible, but saying "it's just obvious" seems like a poor argument.
This issue suffers from the same issues the parallel argument over whether the universe is infinite suffers from, in that our minds have synthetic a priori notions of extensibility and division in mathematics that we, through a category error, try to apply to empirical questions. The former notion is captured by the synthetic a priori proposition "There is no number so large you can't add 1 to it." The latter by "There is no number so small you cannot divide it by another positive real number." Both of these notions are mathematical and it's a category error to then apply them to the empirical world without justifying some link between them.
@@saintsword23The principles of logic, which are universal in us and we are insepparable from the universe, must apply also to the universe. Any kind of infinite regression, where in the process of explaining it ends infinitely, is fallacious. So it is also fallacious doing this to the universe.
Favorite: "It is, moreover, to be remarked in regard to the form of thinking, that thinking is a positing, and a positing is an opposition to another; hence, an 'op-positing', and that, therefore, all opposition rises immediately and purely from thinking, and is produced by thinking."
Hegel destroyed in a sentence.
@@saintsword23 Ha!
To posit is to oppose-it makes me wonder if all contents of consciousness are somehow "op-posing," by their very narrow and fragmentary nature, the Totality or infinite potentiality of "the All," so to speak. This hypothetical Infinite would perhaps be closer to an "absolute" which Hegel seeks for within the realm of thought alone.
@@robbydyer4500 Don't get confused here. It's that all opposing is held in the mind, not that the mind is all opposing.
One of the transcendental ideas is identity though. Kant didn't have a notion of set theory in his day, but today we would say sets are a transcendental idea. We talk about about what belongs in a set and does not belong in a set. Although that's not to say the mind makes opposite sets out of everything, it does put things in and out of sets (often with fuzziness).
@saintsword23 Forgive me, it has been a year since my original comment, and I have now relistened to the chapter with full engagement and scrutiny.
What I am loosely understanding here is that thinking "posits" an object, and "op-posits" a subject (ego) as a simultaneous byproduct. You are adding to this model the act of mentally associating various objects together in categories of identity, or sets, which could either be a consequence of further mental acts of differentiation or perhaps a necessary function of the initial positing itself (or both). It is then conjectured that in the act(s) of mental categorizing and associating, further oppositions are formed, in order to (perhaps/necessarily fuzzily) demarcate what is recognized as identical (and thereby identified/identifiable) from what is not identical, and other-which "other" could conceivably, to me, be thrust back into the "living knowledge" of self-contemplation, which experiences itself, via its reflection in the total unity of world-extension, as infinitely not-yet-differentiated. Please correct any errors you may notice here.
My last from-the-hip comment came from a confusion indeed of the subject-object opposition that I am loosely inferring here with the supposed opposition between single units or "fragments" of conscious experience isolated within temporal moments or snapshots, and the hypothetical totality of all possible experiences, or unity of all experienced or imagined "moments," which I fully acknowledge as my own interpolation into this discussion. What is it that precisely differentiates one singular, present experience within time from another, or from a hypothetical or otherwise inferred extratemporal standpoint? Is it possible to differentiate the mind itself from a supraordinate "potential mind" that simultaneously exists outside of immediate experience and also includes it, as part of a greater whole? What would the mental nature of that greater whole be, and could it be posited, intuited or apperceived within "living knowledge"? These are my own "extra-Kantian" musings.
@@robbydyer4500 I think you're seeing what I'm seeing. Some of your language at the end of your attempting to explain how you understand me turns a bit mystical and I had trouble comprehending though. I will say I have immense interest in the mind bending back on itself to comprehend itself...I just couldn't follow what you were trying to say there is all.
But essentially, yes, categorizing phenomena into sets seems to be at least a transcendental idea if not the root of cognition. Like you I'm unsure if the idea of a set comes first and enables the subject/object distinction (SOD), the SOD enables the idea of sets, or that they coarise. I'll have to contemplate that more.
Nice
Thoughts on Kants epistemology?
Sick new avatar dude
Thanks
Found the part where Fichte denounces atomism pretty funny. I can understand prioritizing the fact that extended objects are conceptually infinitely divisible, but saying "it's just obvious" seems like a poor argument.
This issue suffers from the same issues the parallel argument over whether the universe is infinite suffers from, in that our minds have synthetic a priori notions of extensibility and division in mathematics that we, through a category error, try to apply to empirical questions. The former notion is captured by the synthetic a priori proposition "There is no number so large you can't add 1 to it." The latter by "There is no number so small you cannot divide it by another positive real number."
Both of these notions are mathematical and it's a category error to then apply them to the empirical world without justifying some link between them.
@@saintsword23The principles of logic, which are universal in us and we are insepparable from the universe, must apply also to the universe.
Any kind of infinite regression, where in the process of explaining it ends infinitely, is fallacious. So it is also fallacious doing this to the universe.