Experience and Immersion

The Magical Flower of Winter is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it. It deals with philosophy, science and our views of the world, with an eye on the metacrisis and our future. Sign up to receive new essays here:

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Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Jacobus Johannes van der Leeuw - The Conquest of Illusion¹

In this essay I will focus on experience, what I mean by this term and why I have chosen to use it over other alternatives. In trying to understand what experience is we will return to the concept of immersion, a central aspect to experience that describes its primary relation to a world we are immanent in. This investigation will take us back to epistemisation, and we will revisit the concepts of the epistemic and the ontic. In doing so we arrive at parts of a framework and process for understanding reality and our relation to it, and I close this essay by pointing to the perennial nature of this process.

Throughout this project I have used the term “experience” where it could be argued I could just as well have used “consciousness”, “life” or “mind”. Using “experience” has been a deliberate choice, as in my view reality is first and foremost experiential. In my first essay I wrote

The fact that we have an experience at all has become transparent to us, and only what we experience, the content, is what modern science attempts to account for. The that-ness of being is always there and so we have largely forgotten the complete and utter wonderment that it should be something it is to be at all. 

“Consciousness”, “life” or “mind” are all overlapping with the conception of that-ness as the primary aspect of reality, but I believe they have been too muddled by centuries of cultural and scientific development to sufficiently and clearly circumscribe the aspect of experiencing, “that it should be something it is to be at all”. “Life”, “to live”, “living”, has connotations and interpretations from the contexts of biology and geography (among many more) that go beyond the aspect of experience that, obviously, is part of life. While capturing some of the worldliness that “experience” doesn’t, the conceptual structure centered on life is far too bound up in a separation between the living and non-living. Ortega y Gasset is one proponent of this conceptual cluster: “Life is what we are and what we do; it is, then, of all things the closest to each of us.”² I will return to Ortega y Gasset and his metaphysics of life below.

“Mind” is too synonymous with “mentality” and “thinking”, which while certainly being a capacity that has a hand in shaping our experience, is fraught with dualist presuppositions of “mind” as opposed to “matter”, and “mind” as a capacity for “thinking”, while “experience” is that “direct thing”, which could certainly be understood as resulting from a capacity, but which is not that capacity. “Consciousness” is perhaps the most charged of these terms. Similar to “mind”, it too has baked into it the notion of capacity. Looking up the definition of consciousness by various writers³ one usually finds that common to all of them is that consciousness describes our capacity for experience. “Conscious” is an adjective, while “consciousness” is a noun, and as such describes a state or a quality, thus “being conscious” is a state described by “consciousness”. But a state of what? What is in this state? It must obviously be a something, a substantive. But this then presupposes a dualism, the very dualism that has led to centuries of philosophical trouble. On the other hand, “experience” can be both a noun and a verb. Obviously, our entire language is built around the subject-object distinction, which “experience” cannot transcend, but at the very least we avoid the dualism directly by zeroing in on the that-ness of “experience”. William James saw something similar in his Does Consciousness Exist (1904):

To deny plumply that "consciousness" exists seems so absurd on the face of it—for undeniably "thoughts" do exist—that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny, that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. 

“Experience” is in its verb-form descriptive of the process that experiencing is. And as a noun it captures the essence of what experiencing contains. Importantly, “experience” too is a word, a metaphor, with its own inherent limitations and inevitably individual and contextual interpretations, but at least to my mind (my thinking) it is perhaps the best term we have that captures that it is something to be. And why not use “being”? This is the domain of fundamental ontology, and while it certainly covers the existence aspect of experience, it in some sense is too bound up with ontology generally. The existence of a stone is of a different order than (and secondary to) the existence of our experiencing, a difference that the term “being” fails to convey. To answer the general question of being, I hold that we must first answer the question of experience.

One could certainly go over the meanings and interpretations of other terms here, but this should suffice as justification for my choice of using “experience”. Below and in the next essay, I will attempt to show how the dichotomies inherent in the epistemic (e.g. subject-object dualism) is a natural part of the process of thought, of epistemisation. 

Immersion

That circumstance, that world, in which, like it or not, we have to live, we cannot choose; but without our leave and without knowing how it happened, we find ourselves tossed into it, shipwrecked in it, and, in order to sustain ourselves, we have no choice but to keep doing something, to come forth, swimming.

José Ortega y Gasset - Some Lessons in Metaphysics 

Heidegger, in his magnum opus Being and Time, set out to reawaken the quest into being itself. In the preface, he quotes from Plato’s Sophist, and presents the aim of his work:

“For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’ [‘seiend’]. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” 

Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’ [‘seiend’]? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of being [Sein]... The aim of the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of “being” [“Sein”] and to do so concretely. The provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being.⁴ 

Heidegger narrows his question of the meaning of being in on exactly the that-ness of being, the kind of being that is concerned with its own existence. This he names Dasein, from Dass-sein, «that-it-is», as opposed to Was-sein, «what-it-is», a distinction of existence and essence. Heidegger understood that being, that our having an experience, is inseparable from time, that without experience there is no world, and without time there is no experience. As pointed out in The Theory of Relativity, this notion of time that is entwined with experience is not spatialized “physical time”, an artefact of our abstraction, but, as Bergson contended, time as duration:

There is no doubt but that for us time is at first identical with the continuity of our inner life. What is this continuity? That of a flow or passage, but a self-sufficient flow or passage, the flow not implying a thing that flows, and the passing not presupposing states through which we pass; the thing and the state are only artificially taken snapshots of the transition; and this transition, all that is naturally experienced, is duration itself.⁵

To Heidegger this temporal aspect of being, and time as the answer to the question of the meaning of being, was inextricably linked to being-in-the-world. By this neologism, Heidegger places “being” as inseparable from “being in a world”, that to be is to be irreducibly directed “outwards” towards something other, towards a world. Being in this world is a historical and traditional process, and as such being-in-the-world is immersion, in being we are immanent in the world. Immersion is thus that irreducible and always present aspect of “tension” and intentionality in experience, a tension between self and other, past and future. This is echoed by many others, among them Ortega y Gasset in the epigraph to this section and here: «Just as no one, to quote an Arabian saying, can leap away from his shadow, so no one can leap away from his life, and, therefore, everything with which we have contact, everything that pretends to exist for us, must somehow present itself within our own lives.»⁶

In Being and Time Heidegger applies (or appropriates) phenomenology as the science with which he will answer the question of the meaning of being. By phenomenology is meant that approach to our experience that investigates the that-ness of experience, that takes as its subject the very process of experiencing, introduced by Husserl in the early 20th century. In his later work Husserl develops the concept of the life-world, which bears similarity to Heideggeres being-in-the-world, Ortega y Gasset’s world, and what I have termed immersion: «Primarily, life-world connotes the ‘world of experience’ (Erfahrungswelt) as immediately given, already there, ‘taken-for-granted’ or ‘obvious’ (selbstverständlich). Husserl often contrasts the life-world as ‘intuitive’ (anschaulich), ‘real’ (real) and ‘concrete’ (konkret), with the world of science as ‘objective’, ‘ideal’ and ‘abstract’.»⁷ To Husserl, the life-world is both the horizon and the ground of our scientific inquiry, which I would extend to all of the epistemic. In other words, experience, the that-ness of being, the ontic, as immersion in reality is both the ideal limit of the epistemic (horizon) and the foundation for it (ground). In order to gain an understanding of this a return to epistemisation might be elucidating, as well as a renewed discussion of the epistemic and the ontic. 

The Epistemic and The Ontic Revisited

The greatest is that which disappears when it is seen or known.

Karl Ove Knausgård - My Struggle: Book Five

The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue. No, I must not try to think, simply utter. Method or no method I shall have to banish them in the end, the beings, things, shapes, sounds and lights with which my haste to speak has encumbered this place. (In the frenzy of utterance, the concern with truth.)

Samuel Beckett - The Unnamable

I introduced the term epistemisation in Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument:

The pre-linguistic can play no role to the linguistic, to meaning, because the thing named, the essence, the meaning object, the thing-in-itself, disappears from the equation that our world is made out of. I term this epistemisation: any epistemic process (linguistic, conceptual, mathematical, empirical) epistemises the ontic. The instant we move away from just experiencing, to structuring experience, talking about it, measuring it, the ontic has already evaporated. From the point of view of the epistemic everything is always-already epistemised. The ontic is, epistemically, an unreachable limit.

In World Views I discussed this process in the context of metaphysics and our world view, and I said the following: 

The only statement we can make about reality in itself, is that it is, prior to any epistemisation, but primordially dependent on an experiencing subject to be for. This mutual co-dependence and co-existence between experience and reality is primary… We cannot talk about Ultimate Reality, the ontic, only about its co-dependent manifestation and co-existence as experience.

And later

Our model of reality becomes transparent to our eye, and we mistake it for a reality-in-itself. We cannot speak about the ontic as such, only of epistemisation, because to speak of the ontic is to make a leap we cannot by any means justify. The ontic can only be experienced, not known.

Our primary evidence, the thing we cannot doubt is our experience. By stating that experience is primary, I am not professing an empiricism, though this is part of the full picture, but rather that experience is the raw condition of our existence and that any structuring of experience, any and all epistemisation, is dependent on us as experiencers and theorisers. As Strawson stated: ”…experience is itself the fundamental given natural fact; it is a very old point that there is nothing more certain than the existence of experience.”⁸

We come up against the limits of language here, but what I want to say is that our most fundamental experience is experience, that the most solid fact of, or the indestructible background to our lives is that we have an experience. This is the ontic, as I use this term⁹, the that-ness of experience, the source of existence. I realize that some of what I have written about the ontic might give the idea that it is just another word for “reality-in-itself”, but as I hope has been made clear through this project, this interpretation rests on the (particularist) model where there is a reality-in-itself¹⁰. This not being the case, the ontic takes on new meaning. It is on a particular world view, a particular metaphysical model of reality, that we end up conceiving of static objects as fundamental, rather than the wholes of which they are part, that we see only instants and not the enduring processes from which the instants are abstracted. It is the enduring and thick tension out of which the world is made, not out of the parts we reduce the tension to.

The ontic, the that of experience, is distinguished from the epistemic, the what of experience. An important point to be made is that the variation of experience as we experience it is not the epistemic, but rather that the epistemic is what we “preserve” of it. Memory and representation is a structuring of ontic experience that constitutes epistemisation, a process that is fundamentally reductive and limiting. In Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson writes

That life is a kind of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it the mechanism of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole? The real whole might well be, we conceive, an indivisible continuity. The systems we cut out within it would, properly speaking, not then be parts at all; they would be partial views of the whole. And, with these partial views put end to end, you will not make even a beginning of the reconstruction of the whole, any more than, by multiplying photographs of an object in a thousand different aspects, you will reproduce the object itself.¹¹

He expresses the same in The Creative Mind: 

..we are easily persuaded that by juxtaposing concepts to concepts we shall recompose the whole of the object with its parts and obtain from it, so to speak, an intellectual equivalent. We shall in this way think we are forming a faithful representation of duration by lining up the concepts of unity, multiplicity, continuity, finite or infinite divisibility, etc. That is precisely the illusion. And that, also, is the danger.¹² 

The ontic cannot be recovered from the epistemic, because ontic experience is enduring and a whole, while the epistemic is static and in parts. The epistemic can only approximate the ontic. This is why from the epistemic, the ontic is only ever an ideal limit, the horizon. In Pragmatism: A New Word for Some Old Ways of Thinking, William James writes

When we talk of reality 'independent' of human thinking, then, it seems a thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is just entering into experience, and yet to be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen, before any human conception had been applied. It is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that wherever we find it, it has been already faked.¹³

James follows this up in A Pluralistic Universe:

We live forward, we understand backward, said a danish writer; and to understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other. This treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the concepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective and post mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them and project them into the future. We cannot learn from them how life made itself go, or how it will make itself go…¹⁴

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness can you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or d'emblée, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist substitutions to your heart's content.¹⁵

Our enduring experience is thick according to James, just as I have argued elsewhere¹⁶, and the whole that reality is, is irrecoverable from its deconstruction. Ortega y Gasset also speaks about the process of epistemisation in his Some Lessons in Metaphysics, and I quote at length:

Always, when we say of something that 'it is thus' or 'is so', ‘is this' or ‘is that other way', we have abandoned the thing as it first appeared before us and have substituted a thought of our own, an interpretation. The thing in itself, on its first arrival in our lives, is neither thus nor so, this way nor that; it is, in short, naked of any being. The earth is here beneath my feet or under the foundations of the building in which I find myself. It has, in my life, a primary role which is to uphold and sustain me. But suddenly it shakes, moves from side to side, ceases to be firm and to sustain me. It is then that I make a question of it… As we will see, to think and to say are the same thing, and it is no mere chance that in Greek, logos should mean both things. The thought does not exist without the word; it is essential that thought be expressly formulated. That which is unexpressed, unformulated, that which is mute, has not been thought, and, as it has not been thought, it is not known, and it remains secret. Therefore, to speak - that is, to think - is to make manifest, to declare or to clarify, to discover, what is covered or hidden, to reveal the arcane. 'To say', to say something is to make manifest that which previously existed in a latent and larval form… Language is in itself a science, the primogenial science which I find already made in my social environment; it is the elemental knowledge which I receive from the community in which I live and which then imposes on me an interpretation of things, a repertory of opinions about their being. Language is, par excellence, the commonplace, the vagrant, casual knowledge in which all my own thought, original and genuine, must inexorably have its dwelling.¹⁷

The epistemic, as language, as sign, as representation, is inextricable from interpretation, because the workings of the epistemic are holistic, meaning is what it is in relation to the whole¹⁸. Our being-in-the-world, our immersive experience, is bound to the process of epistemisation, making it irreducibly hermeneutic, without which we would have no background against which to anchor our always-novel ontic experience. Naively, we rely on a metaphysics that provides an absolute and solid ground on which we can stand, but as our investigation has shown, the ground we stand on is shaky and provided for holistically by our immersion in a world and our world view. The criteria for grounding our world view is not stability but flexibility, manifested by our immersion in a holistic order. This understanding of the ontic and the epistemic, of the life-world as an immersive and holistic context created through epistemisation, thus grounds our experience. This is a groundless ground¹⁹, as it is not that absolute ground we naively expect. Ours is a self-upholding being, for what else can an immersive and immanent existence be? It is against this contextual background that all new experience is cast, and in turn is shaped. We are afloat in this sea of experience, but our hold on an epistemic background gives us the ability to swim. This is also Whitehead’s understanding, as I read him:

What is the status of the enduring stability of the order of nature? There is the summary answer, which refers nature to some greater reality standing behind it. This reality occurs in the history of thought under many names, The Absolute, Brahma, The Order of Heaven, God. The delineation of final metaphysical truth is no part of this lecture. My point is that any summary conclusion jumping from our conviction of the existence of such an order of nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate reality which, in some unexplained way; is to be appealed to for the removal of perplexity, constitutes the great refusal of rationality to assert its rights. We have to search whether nature does not in its very being show itself as self-explanatory. By this I mean, that the sheer statement, of what things are, may contain elements explanatory of why things are. Such elements may be expected to refer to depths beyond anything which we can grasp with a clear apprehension. In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness. My demand is, that the ultimate arbitrariness of matter of fact from which our formulation starts should disclose the same general principles of reality, which we dimly discern as stretching away into regions beyond our explicit powers of discernment...²⁰

Nature is process, it is organism, and the static objects we discern in the process that is our experience of nature is solely due to epistemisation. Further, Nature is, and here I paraphrase, “self-explanatory in its very being”. Nature is self-grounding, its enduring stability not grounded in some Absolute further down. Ortega y Gasset said it as well:

…our life is our being. We are whatever it is, and nothing more. But that being is not predetermined, not resolved ahead of time; we must make its decisions ourselves, decide, for example, what we are going to be, decide what we are going to do when we leave here. This is what I call 'sustaining ourselves in mid-air, upholding our own being'.²¹

Life is deciding what we are going to be (becoming). This is the power we have, this is the co-dependent and co-creative capacity we have in the process of epistemisation. And such a capacity is anathema to a conception of reality as independent of us. 

What can now be said about phenomenology as the science of the being of beings, or any other approach to the ontic, to the that-ness of experience? All will remain approximative, we can only get close to it from the edge, but the ontic will forever recede from our grasp. No science, no epistemic, will explicate reality, the irreducible experience is always needed. The only “account” one can have of the ontic is experiential, thus it all comes down to praxis, which may very well be communicable, but whose non-epistemised fruits never will be.

What we can circumscribe is the epistemic, its order as we co-create it, and the process we can know and not only experience is the process of epistemisation. Have we as such progressed since Being and Time? Have we rediscovered being or answered the question of the meaning of being? No! And in part this is because being is not a state, but a process itself. We cannot encapsulate being or experience in some system of knowledge, because this presupposes that we can reduce it to the epistemic. But as should be abundantly clear by now, experience is a whole, reality is a whole, irreducible. The ontic evaporates by the process of epistemisation, making our epistemic efforts endless. As such there is no end to the epistemic, to science, philosophy or language. That there are no ultimate theories is a superficial consequence on this view. But realizing this, as well as the limitations of any given epistemic framework, we are in a position of having a choice in where the next generation starts by what we teach them. Teaching such a view of reality will be hard, but that our only reason to continue as we do is because it is easier or simpler is part of the very stance that teaching a new view of reality as one of co-dependence and co-existence can and must alleviate. 

The Ontic Projection Fallacy

In World Views I introduced the ontic projection fallacy as 

any and all attempts at further explicating reality in itself, accounts that are not fundamentally built around the co-dependence and co-creativity of reality and experience and accounts that attempt to go beyond the statement that reality is.

This is a fallacy of inference beyond the domain of inference, as the ontic is irreducible to the epistemic. Our abstractions about the world come about through the process of epistemisation, and while these may seem recurring, objective or lasting, they are just abstractions, and not our full experience. I will here enumerate a few examples or general categories of this fallacy, as I think doing this can further illuminate the workings of reality.

First are projections of seemingly absolute notions that we find in our epistemic onto the ontic, examples being “The One”, “The Absolute”, “Mind” and “God”. We can call the ontic whatever we like, but any term for it will necessarily color it by connotations and associations to the name given, colorations that can be said of the what of experience, and not the that of experience. I’m sure that me using “the ontic” colors or will in the future color my meaning in ways I am at present unaware, but such is the nature of language. This is obviously not to deny the ontic, but to deny what can be said of it outside of our experience. I will return to another perspective on this in a later essay that relates to the more general conception of the sacred. 

Second is projections from our current theory of the world into the past. We are prone to think of the past as something fixed, as something absolute, because we preserve it in our memory and in our representations, and we see aspects of it preserved in the world. But just as all copying is imperfect and changes what is copied, so all memory and representation is imperfect. More importantly, on re-experiencing a memory or experiencing a representation of the past, your experience of it is completely unique and distinct from the original: your context has changed. On re-experiencing or learning something new about our past, our memory of the past will change, though this process is mostly transparent to us as any discontinuous breaks would be damaging. Just the same, our having a model of what the past was like is forever just a model, though there are certainly good reasons for believing models that are coherent with our present experience and representations over those that are in contradiction. And belief is the crux of the matter, we can only say that we believe the past was so and so on a model. The “past in itself” is however just as evanescent as all other absolutes. 

Third are projections from our experience to other’s experience. I brought this example up in a footnote in Artificial Intelligence and Living Wisdom: other minds are beyond the reach of the epistemic “because other’s experience is co-dependent and co-creative with our own experience, just as reality is.” There is not something it is for me to be you, there is only something it is to be you, just as there is only something it is to be me. We can only ever epistemically approximate what it can be like to experience what it is to be someone else, but any such approximation is based on our own epistemic model, which in turn is based on our own experience, and not on any objective model. Certainly we can posit that our model must share a great deal with other people’s due to our being products of a shared evolution and past, but this posit is itself based on a model. This is again not to imply any absurdity, reality and our experiences are still coherent, based on a holistic working rather than an objective and absolutist background. 

Some other examples of the ontic projection fallacy would be theoretical projections from a given model of the world to universal or a priori laws, as well as projections to the “pre-linguistic” or “subconscious”. These latter two have been more or less dealt with in Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument. For the case of universal or a priori laws, these can not be reduced to the epistemic as we have seen above: the universal is just another “absolute”, the ontic forever evades the grasp of the epistemic. What about the view I am advocating? Is not my project itself an attempt at providing a universal framework for how reality works? Indeed it is, but explicating how epistemisation works and what its consequences are is not the same as saying anything about the ontic. I believe a view built around epistemisation that acknowledges what can and can’t be said about the epistemic and the ontic is one that avoids the fallacy by adjusting the focus back on our experience of the world rather than our model of a world-in-itself, a view that consequently is coherent with our experience. 

Perennial Philosophy 

From the quotations and sources used in this essay you might wonder why I have focused on philosophers of a century past. The material in this essay could equally well have been based on the ancient Greek philosophers or the non-dual philosophies of Advaita Vedanta or Mahayana Buddhism, to mention a few. My reason for not doing so boils down to the paradigmatic variance of meaning²²: to most contemporary readers the entry bar would be excessively high if one additionally has to struggle with a historically incommensurable conceptual lexicon. My motivation has been to put into focus the perennial nature of these questions of philosophy and metaphysics, and furthermore to illustrate an aspect that we can infer from the holistic view itself: philosophy and science can never end, because such a conclusion relies on some absolute to which philosophy and science approximates. As Wittgenstein remarked:

One keeps hearing the remark that philosophy really doesn't make any progress, that the same philosophical problems that occupied the Greeks keep occupying us. But those who say that don't understand the reason it must be so. That reason is that our language has remained constant and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. So long as there is a verb "be" that seems to function like "eat" and "drink", so long as there are the adjectives "identical", "true", "false", "possible", so long as there is talk about a flow of time and an expanse of space, etc., etc., humans will continue to bump up against the same mysterious difficulties, and stare at something that no explanation seems able to remove. And this, by the way, satisfies a longing for the transcendental, for in believing that they see the "limit of human understanding" they of course believe that they can see beyond it.²³

In lieu of any transcendental absolute, what science and philosophy approximates towards is the mutual holistic background to our experience, our shared life-world, which by being holistic is continually in a process of coherent change. In The Blue and Brown Books, Wittgenstein writes that doing philosophy is like arranging books in a library - the position of a single book or a series of books within the whole shifts as we go about it²⁴. We know that all problems will have to be solved before any single problem can be solved, because everything will have to be revisited. In the quest for securing the foundations of knowledge absolutist philosophy has developed the very position that is antagonistic to how our knowledge works: it does not need a ground to stand on, but a holistic flexibility to cohere in, and by fastening it to a ground we remove the very aspect it relies on for its workings and coherence with experience. «Life is not a mystery to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.»

In being shared, reality is pluralistic, each of our experiences are parts of an ever-changing whole. In the next essay I will investigate what consequences can be drawn from this pluralism combined with the observation that from a holistic view there can be no permanent states of stasis at any level of experience or life, that reality is always novel. This will further inform an understanding of perenniality, that in all spheres of life and reality, it is ceaseless creative change that is primary and that arrested, final or utopian states are ideal and illusory limits of our abstractions.

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References

Beckett, S. (1958). The Unnamable. Grove Press. [1953]

Bergson, H. (1965). Duration and Simultaneity. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. [1922]

Bergson, H. (1998). Creative Evolution. Dover Publications. [1907]

Bergson, H. (2010). The Creative Mind. Dover Publications. [1934]

Braver, L. (2014). Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: MIT Press. 

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Harper. [1927]

James, W. (1995). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Dover Publications. [1907]

James, W. (2018). A Pluralistic Universe. Forgotten Books. [1920]

Knausgård, K. O. (2010). Min Kamp. Femte Bok. (My Struggle #5). Oktober Forlag. 

Moran, D. (2012). Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.

Ortega y Gasset, J. (1971). Some Lessons in Metaphysics. W. W. Norton & Company. [1966]

Strawson, G. (2006). Realistic Monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13, No. 10–11 (3-31). 

van der Leeuw, J. J. (1928). The Conquest of Illusion. Knopf. 

Whitehead, A. N. (1997). Science and the Modern World. Pelican Mentor Books. [1925]

Wittgenstein, L. (1969). The Blue and Brown Books. Blackwell. [1958]

Wittgenstein, L. (2005). The Big Typescript, TS. 213 (C. G. Luckhardt & M. E. Aue, Eds.; C. G. Luckhardt & M. E. Aue, Trans.). Wiley.

1. This quote is often (mis)attributed to Søren Kierkegaard: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00017219

2. Ortega y Gasset (1971) p. 35.

3. Hoel has compiled a list of definitions of “consciousness” from distinguished neuroscientists that all center on experience. 

4. Heidegger (1962).

5. Bergson (1965) p. 44.

6. Ortega y Gasset (1971) p. 54.

7. Moran (2012) p. 181.

8. Strawson (2005), p. 4.

9. In conflict with Heidegger’s distinction of the ontic and ontological as beings vs the being of beings.

10. Kicking a stone and experiencing the impact of this other is not indicative of an external and independent world, but is indicative of the ontic. “World” as a term cannot be applied because this is to reduce it and implicate it in a web of meaning which can only cause confusion. “External” presupposes spatiality. “Independent” presupposes a notion of relation. Why is “ontic” better? Maybe it isn’t, but the way I have used this term in opposition to the epistemic should at the very least make clear the relationship between the sayable and unsayable, our experience as we experience it and our experience as we conceptualize and communicate it. Importantly, this is not only a linguistic distinction, a mincing of words, but it reveals something primordial about reality and our relationship to it, and our knowledge of it.

11. Bergson (1998) p. 31.

12. Bergson (2010) p. 140.

13. James (1995) p. 248-249.

14. James (2018) p. 244.

15. James (2018), p. 261.

16. See The Theory of Relativity.

17. Ortega y Gasset (1971) p. 97-99.

18. See Language and Meaning. 

19. See Braver (2014).

20. Whitehead (1997), p. 94.

21. Ortega y Gasset (1971), p. 42.

22. See World Views.

23. Wittgenstein (2005) §90.

24. Wittgenstein (1969), p. 44-45.