What is the most abstract concept or idea you have come across in lit or philosophy? No math or science!

What is the most abstract concept or idea you have come across in lit or philosophy? No math or science!

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
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You are the absolute biggest faggot in the universe, known or unknown.

read terence mckenna i guess. that should satisfy you for a bit.

>No math or science!

What does 'abstract' even mean, if it doesn't involve math or science?

Veeky Forums could be said to be made of abstraction; the answer to the question would be something philosophy-related or possibly deciphering those hieroglyphics that they call "Finnegans Wake".

You can't prove that

Philosophy is inextricably linked to math and physical science. There is no categorical difference. There is only a spectrum, in which philosophy occupies the more foundational, theoretical, and speculative end.

'Finnegans Wake' is not "abstract". It is a work of art that's massively entertaining to the philologically-inclined.

you cant prove most philosophical concepts, much less abstract ones. you are the absolute biggest faggot in the universe. no math or science involved.

Thanks for saving me that explanation. I knew it was going to be needed.

Philosophy is linked to neither math nor science - they all share a common relative in logic.

short of reading classic works of philosophy like nietzsche or camus or something, im not sure. try dosty, he has some heavy themes. not really sure what you mean by abstract tbqh. finnegans wake was written in a nonlinear fashion, but i wouldnt call the overall themes abstract

Not quite. Read a book some time.

Maybe you should; it seems you don't have a good grasp on math, science, or philosophy, Ignatius.

You just proved yourself wrong because I am not OP.

X=the biggest faggot in the Universe
Y=OP
Z=Me

Z != Y
You claim: Y=X
Therefore Z !=X

QED punk.

this is completely wrong, i dont even know where to begin really.
obviously philosophy has its place in science - theres an entire branch of philosophy dedicated to it. but to say that it's inextricably linked to math and physics? thats bonkers, lad. no one applies the fucking scientific method to philosophical concepts. largely maths has no place at all in the more abstract ideas. do you have any sources on this line of thought? i think its a bit bizarre that you'd think there's no categorical difference.

Science is natural philosophy.

4 centuries ago...?

not reading this sorry

and also now

cool ty

You have no clue what you are talking about. Maybe you will learn a bit about what philosophy actually is after you graduate high school.

Multiplicity as used by Bresson and Deleuze is a recent one.

thanks for the response! hope you have a good day. maybe pick up a good cup of coffee and a danish

Except that's a bunch of horseshit.

The transcendental unity of apperception.

philosophy noob here im not sure if i understand. basically what he's saying is even if we analyze and identify the constituents of our own identity/being, that analyzation is inherently biased and therefore differs from how others will inevitably perceive us?

kill yourself. i bet you talk in a slow amphibian voice like every other drug user

Except that the scientific method originated as a philosophical concept

To abstract further than this is to stop having meaning.

So many edges.

That's roughly it - except he's not so much saying here that your own self-knowledge will be different from what other people believe about you; rather, your own self-knowledge (the fact that you perceive yourself as a physical body surrounded by objects in space, and that you know your inner self as contemplating, wondering, desiring, imagining over time) will never reveal to you or to any other human what you fundamentally are, what your being-in-itself is. Space, time, and everything in them are merely appearances, merely the results of your mind's innate ways of functioning; what you are apart from space and time and the subjective functions of human understanding - what you are independently of all forms of human knowledge - is not something you can know.

>You can only know knowledge.
Next you're going to tell me you can only see sights, and that is somehow terrible.

Kant argues in depth and detail for the claim that knowledge is only of things-as-appearance, not of things-in-themselves. The physical universe is the domain of appearances; take away all human minds (maybe all other animal minds too), and there would no longer be a universe of stars, planets, nebulae, or even empty space and time. So if you're suggesting that his assertion is trivial, or in line with commonsense and naive concepts of "knowledge," you haven't grasped it.

I'm saying his language is overblown, not that the statement is wrong or particularly bad.

Gnostic truth / God / Tao / persisting nothingness.

The concept of any absolute is the pinnacle of abstract in this world. Funny enough, the majority of humanity operates on the abstract, and not the real.

This

>these thinks share a common link
>but they aren't linked

I'm drinking again because of you.

what criteria or metric are you using to measure abstractness?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

...

I'm not sure what "overblown" means in this context, but Kant couldn't have really made the points he was trying to make without technical, subtle, and far-reachingly abstract language, often worded in complex combinations.

>Kant couldn't have really made the points he was trying to make without technical, subtle, and far-reachingly abstract language, often worded in complex combinations.
So your previous posts were nonsense then?

Open to interpretation

Identity. (as in 'For all x, x = x')

No, not at all. But the more comprehensive account that would explain what deeper rationales those posts are based on, and what implications they have for the broader range of human concerns, can't be grasped without more technical language, more intricacy, and many, many more paragraphs.

Do you mean transitive identity?

As in
A=B
B=C
thus A=C?

mfw locke tries to just go around this.

>too abstract 4 u

Right, and ı'm not contesting that, but you wouldn't say you need to know all the atoms that make an elephant to know what it is, would you? Language is itself a tool of abstraction and focus, so it follows that the more you spend explain or reflecting upon an object, the more or more specific words you would need, making the thing more "obscure", as it requires the listener/reader to follow throughly upon the thought processes and choices of the speaker/writer, and "the point" has become much farther away--a process that is deceptibly simple, because it's nothing more than time acting as it always does.

No?

He said abstract not concrete

you've got a point here. i guess to kants possibly mathematical mind, summing it up with complicated verbiage is more rewarding? a test of the readers knowledge? also it does trim all additional excess explanation. like a mathematical theorem.


also git gud

Lacan and Derrida obscurantism

I mean identity. The relation that each thing has to itself and to nothing else. This is, of course, transitive, symmetric, and reflexive.

It's not obvious that 'personal identity' is just identity restricted to persons, rather than, e.g., being parts of the same temporally extended thing, so saying it's not transitive isn't necessarily bad.

The Essence.

>the physical universe

Don't you mean the sensitive universe? I think physical is related to something objective, not the way we perceive it or measure it.

I mean sensible not sensitive FUCK.

But math and science are the most abstract concepts possible. They're mostly literal nonsense.

My sex life.

OP wants ideas coming from philosophy or literature. Why is it so hard for you autists to accept that?

That's a little vague.

>also git gud
Well, this discussion and the other Kant thread certainly have made me interested in him, so to the backlog he goes (my precious backlog, you're the river that never runs dry). Now iirc, ı do remember someone posting Kant pretty much said in one of his prologues that he could have made the thing "easier", he just did not want to (which is a perfectly fine reason to me).

>Multiplicity as used by Bresson
What is that supposed to mean?

>unknown
>concrete

Pick one.

>abstract philosophy
>no math or science

Nice try, buddy.

I drink every day. I'm tortured by my existence.

> you wouldn't say you need to know all the atoms that make an elephant to know what it is, would you?

Right, I would not say that - unless we were defining "to know what it is" as "to know absolutely every physical thing about it," which seems too exhaustive (and Kant would say that we can't ever divide matter so much that we arrive at some most basic constituent, atoms or otherwise; a "smallest physical object" isn't really possible, or even properly conceivable, he argues).

> Language is itself a tool of abstraction

If you mean that language can go from the more specific, the more determinate, to the more general, the more vague (as in "my dog Scruffy" --> "dogs" --> "mammals" --> "vertebrates" --> "organisms") then I agree.

> and focus

I'm less sure about what this means in the context of language, but if you mean that it can take the opposite course, and go from the more general and vague to the more contentful and specific - thus focusing in on those more determinate attributes of things that make them more easily imaginable than extremely abstract words like "being" and "cause" - then I agree.

> so it follows that the more you spend explain or reflecting upon an object, the more or more specific words you would need

Right - and I guess in our attempt to describe an object to ourselves or to others, we could search for more and more words at the same level of generality/specificity, not just using words that are more and more generalized or more and more specified.

> making the thing more "obscure", as it requires the listener/reader to follow throughly upon the thought processes and choices of the speaker/writer, and "the point" has become much farther away

Here's where I disagree. I don't think that an increase of words, of whatever generality, makes a description more obscure; the more information we provide about something, the more completely and clearly (that is, the less obscurely) we can conceive it. What a longer description might add is difficulty in attaining that conception, because it can take a long time to read through all the words, understanding each on its own and in connection to the others, following the speaker's line of thought; but the finished conceptual product of this difficult process will be less obscure than a shorter, less detailed description.

I think much of Kant's obscurity is due to the fact that he's describing thoughts that are at such a level of generality that he *can't* offer more information without descending to a lower level of generality; but such a lower level would use words that (while a bit closer to the concrete level of tangilbe, perceptible objects) could only yield analogies for the general thoughts he wishes to express, rather than literal examples at the same level of generality. (He does offer such analogies sometimes, but they always run the risk of misleading.) Such obscurity owes to the unavoidable abstractness of the subject-matter more than to long-windedness.

They're largely the same. The physical world is the one our minds construct automatically from the raw sense data given in sensibility - so without minds, our senses and the physical world would equally cease; neither is a thing-in-itself. Collective experience can teach us that, once we've all automatically constructed this collectively known appearance called "the universe," some people's physical sense organs are affected by spatially external objects in exceptional ways (like when a person is sick and tastes food in a disturbed way, or when a person has nerve damage and everything feels burning hot to the touch); also, all healthy people will be affected in certain ways by spatially external objects that, nonetheless, don't reveal a property that the physical object itself has (such as colors being produced by the retina). These are distinctions we can draw between the physical world as we sense it, and the physical world as it exists in space apart from our physical organs - but this is still only a distinction made within the domain of phenomena, of empirical appearances, and does not reach to the division between things-as-appearance and things-in-themselves.

>I don't think that an increase of words, of whatever generality, makes a description more obscure
I don't think that either, that's what the quote marks were for. And ı find we're not really in disagreement here, because what you referred to as "difficulty" was what ı was talking about when referring to time's action.

When ı said the object was "obscured" it was not an obscurity in the sense of veiling, but of distance from the object: too close and it's out of focus, to close and you can't see it wholly unless you look at everything, and both ways you can't tell what it is as you're looking.

>the finished conceptual product of this difficult process will be less obscure than a shorter, less detailed description.
But only to one that has gone through the process, which is admittedly "difficult".

>Such obscurity owes to the unavoidable abstractness of the subject-matter more than to long-windedness.
But do they become less obscure if no one else can read it? If you give mankind access to the tallest mountain, without making it a smaller mountain, so that only those who could climb it were those that already could without permission, has the generality profitted?

Thanks for the info, friend. Which of Kant's works is this from?

Birth of Kronos / Retrojection of time (Schopenhauer)

The 'Inverse World' (Hegel)

Synthetic Unity of Apperception (Kant)

Transcendental Auto-affectivity (Henry)

The Absolute Flow (Husserl)

Critique of Pure Reason, A107-108.

>Birth of Kronos / Retrojection of time (Schopenhauer)

This is fucking crazy; although he took this over from Kant, I like how he gives more of a detailed description of it over several of his works, whereas I don't recall Kant going into the same kind of detail.

>But do they become less obscure if no one else can read it? If you give mankind access to the tallest mountain, without making it a smaller mountain, so that only those who could climb it were those that already could without permission, has the generality profitted?

Well, I think people *can* read it, as long as their personality/intellect/patience isn't totally opposed to the abstractness and density of it - just as mountain climbing is open to all those who are not physically disabled. And just as a person might need to physically train their bodies in preparation for reaching the summit, so a student of Kant will probably need to study much of the history and context that informs Kant's thinking and vocabulary.

>math
>logic

Yeah until you realize your never gonna be able to take enough mushrooms to be on his level

Just what you feel in your heart bro

kys

I just got the biggest irony boner

Abstract one might say

Boompy

Well, that's not that bad. I mean, if nobody else knows them, either, what's the big deal?

>those "I"s.

You're a faggot

I love you too, user.

stoned ape theory
DMT - the spirit molecule
mind-body problem of philosophy

decent places to start

McKenna pls go ur sposed to be dead

The big deal is that, according to the argument, the very constraints that structure your experience into an intelligible, law-governed whole are also the constraints that limit your knowledge to appearances. Even your most penetrating introspections don't provide you with knowledge of what you most fundamentally are.

I think most people would be taken aback by the notion that, fundamentally, they are not physical bodies, and are not even the inner personality they might think of as their soul; but maybe for you, this is meh.

i need to get dinner what the fuck should i order i cant decide dont want to spend more than like 8 bucks tops

i think i might just get chinese food although i always feel shitty after but i dont feel like riding citibike all the way down to one of those arabic fried chicken joints by the train station

sounds like a tough life bro

all of those choices and shit

COMMUNISM

>I think most people would be taken aback by the notion that, fundamentally, they are not physical bodies, and are not even the inner personality they might think of as their soul; but maybe for you, this is meh.
What are we then? And why is that important?

> What are we then?

Kant would say that we can't know - that we can't have theoretical insight into what our fundamental being is like (unlike objects in the physical domain of nature, which we can have such insight into) because our fundamental being is deeper than the forms of space and time by which all knowable objects are conditioned; your fundamental self is a knower - it can know the spatiotemporal universe, which is its mental representation - but as the Upanishads (which Schopenhauer would point to) ask: "How can the knower be known?"

> And why is that important?

To put it in the simplest terms: It's been a pretty central theme of western philosophy to investigate personal identity - to "know thyself" - if only for the sake of unraveling its mysteries. But aside from that more abstract interest, it can be helpful for human societies to understand what we are and what we are not, what we can know and what we can't, what we can accomplish and what is beyond our reach; this can help us set more realistic goals for ourselves, can help us avoid errors - rather than choose systems of economics, of political elections, of scientific inquiry, based on a severly flawed concept of what it means to be a human.

>it can know the spatiotemporal universe, which is its mental representation - as the Upanishads (which Schopenhauer would point to) ask: "How can the knower be known?"
Is that not an answer of sorts? And really, isn't this quest never ending? It seems like trying to put fire out with gasoline.

>this can help us set more realistic goals for ourselves, can help us avoid errors
But what is it being "realistic" to, given our reality is conditioned by ourselves? How can you try to be more faithful (or unfaithful) to a standard that can't be known?

Personally, ı've wondered at times what it is ı am, what is the thing that is feeling, behind the body and behind the mind; the closest ı've got to a satisfactory answer was thinking of it as a film, in that a film isn't what it is projected on, nor what is being projected, not who projects it, nor who it is being projected for. But, well, to begin with that implies ı am, which ı can't say ı'm sure of.