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The unconditional is what we are dreaming of, praying for, what we desire. What we affirm. We are loyal to it, it’s what we are commanded by and what we are responding to. It’s a complex of callings – what is calling to us.

Caputo calls this a mostly Jewish religious modality – which is interesting as my thread on Plato when I discuss Kabballah defines it as ‘to recieve’, which means recieving an evocation, to provoke. 

No finite relative conditional construction is ever adequate to the unconditionals. The undeconstructable is a call that we can never adequately answer. It is a call to which we are already responding. It’s not our doing, it is what is being done to us. It’s not a projection – it a projectile coming at us.

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I laughed when Caputo says ‘anything that is un-deconstructable has not yet been constructed’ as Derrida explicity makes it clear that Justice is un-deconstructable. 😀

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I made a dualist error – it should be the mind of the body.

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Couldn’t have said it better @”Kenneth” – all of the economic systems have their flaws, maybe the very concept of economy is something we need to review and stop thinking of ourselves as the owners of the Earth, owning, buying and selling the world by dividing it up is something we should be able to overcome and grow out of.

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1. Reality is real.
a. Only reality is real
b. Only things are real
i. For the moment the test of thingness is if in principle it can be felt, seen, smelled, heard, or tasted. Here, at least, neither numbers, love, justice, nor any ideas at all, are things.

Reality is more complex than this. There is also the movement of things. The movement of things creates a difficulty for the “S is P” form of sentence, because it is described as a relationship between one thing and another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_motion

Also, what do you think ideas are if they are not real, do you mean they are not physical? Why have two different words for physical and real?

Thanks for commenting @”Burk”

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Divination by means of the mind and body through memory. That is the temple of Mant.

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I’ve a question for you. Taking in account
variables, which ‘ism’ favors the individual 
most as far as respecting a person and
the person’s right to choose and prosper?

Why have any ‘isms’ to begin with? I suggest you read my threads on capitalism, especially the parts about collective action problems which occur when we all follow our own self-interest – I don’t think self-interest should be at the center of making decisions and niether should a market. As regards choice and prosperity, this only works if you have some footing, otherwise the choices are not good enough.

A most interesting, and baffling to historians,
is the story of the S. Koreans from poverty
to now being the 11th richest economic 
country.

Not really baffling – the west poured money into their economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_Motors#History Capitalists may not appear to be ideologues, but it’s funny how they would pour lots of investment into S.Korea which is right next to a Communist country.

OECD listed several factors among the reasons for poverty in Korea. First, public social spending in South Korea is low. Social spending by the government in South Korea was 7.6% of GDP in 2007, compared to the OECD average of 19%. This can be explained by the Korean traditional reliance on family and the private sector to provide such services. Second, Korea’s dualistic labour market, in which a significant number of workers are hired only on temporary contracts with low wages and benefits, results in high inequality in wage income – so as soon as you are too old to contribute to the economy, you are someone else’s problem.

I simultaneously blame and thank Irvine Welsh a) for glamourising that culture into which you ventured and b) for giving you the template to transcend it (in the form of Renton) (so maybe unconsciously you knew this and had to play the character / archetype for a while)..

Haha, I think Welsh was important for me as he gave me a language to associate with the herd, I just didn’t understand the people on the estate before that and I felt like the estate was all there was to aspire to in my mid-twenties, so I had better learn to accomodate it and tolerate it. He'[s like a text book for chav relations! But yeah, in a way, getting on with such dullards leads to thier world of heroin and envy, but at least I had the most powerful discourse to get out when I hit the limit. There’s one line in ‘Porno’ when Renton is talking to Alison (the woman who lost the baby with Sick Boy); where he says she always had him sussed out as a ‘winner playing at being a loser’, which I always considered to be true for me.

I think you were ready for philosophy…looking back now….Nietzsche gave you the tools to start to reinvent yourself and Rubsy gave you the loving gestation space in which to transform (she is truly a blessing)….you’ve come a long way my friend, and the transformation continues, I love your enthusiasm for philosophy it has inspired me to return to the subject

We all need space and this is something capitalism does not offer, you need kindness and love from others for that and a society without insecurities and self-doubt, which capitalism breeds no end.

I’m glad we are on the same page and this is why this forum is important to me, so that we can connect with others who want to do better with their lives and learn what is beyond the veil.

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Corey on Wittgenstein- it’s not only the mind that thinks.

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Interesting, thanks for providing the links. Keep it up!

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The opening part of the Goethe one describes Goethe about to write down the poem, it describes his own experience of grasping the forms that haunt him which he tries to put down on paper. This is a strange literary device, as we are not actually reading the poem, we are back stage as it were. I think the next part is Goethe talking to some people backstage of the performance (which never happened for Goethe, he died before the play was performed).

Goethe spent his entire life writing this poem.

Again you show yourselves, you wavering Forms,
Revealed, as you once were, to clouded vision.
Shall I attempt to hold you fast once more?
Heart’s willing still to suffer that illusion?

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I know it looks like a silly question, but it really isn’t. Every word in a philosophical sentence that is composed of propositions can have presuppositions too – something tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument or course of action. Also see: https://ontic-philosophy.com/Thread-What-are-propositions

I’ll take a few definitons of meaning here and we will see which one gives us the simplest possible means of explaining meaning.

1.

intend to convey or refer to (a particular thing); signify.

In this instance, meaning works only if there is a particular thing, but what if we decide to create a meaning that is not already defined, if it is synthetic and yet-to-be? How can you signify something that is yet to be created, or the possibility of it hasn’t yet materialised and upon reflection, there is a point in your life where there was the possibility and then the creation and then there was the ‘thing’, but at the same time upon reflection, your life would not having meaning without this thing.

Synthetic = the opposite to analytic. If something is analytic, then it is a matter of fact, something true by definition and present. Synthetic on the other hand, requires more information in order for it to be defined, it is something absent, it requires a relation of ideas in order for it to be true.

This is where values come into the picture, which again brings in the statistical element, as you have two states to compare, one with meaning, one without, or less meaning, irrelevant meaning etc. I remember seeing a few questions in an occult forum I was on that used to ask questions like ‘what is the meaning of this candle and how it has burned?’; immediately you can’t give an answer as it doesn’t relate to anything else.

intend (something) to occur or be the case.

This definition implies force, either from yourself or from others, or both. 

have as a consequence or result.

This one is after-the-fact, similar to the definition you gave before of what the meaning of life could be, imposed on by others.

Other definitions are in the ‘mean-spirited’ variety, which also includes skill, or lack of, unkindness, cruelty etc, but what is interesting here is that mean is still related to the other kind of mean mentioned above, it’s about give and take – what properties are left over to examine once force and supposing has occured, expectations of what comes next – future projection, all of these definitions require valuations.

Take a look at the statistical usage:

mean3
miːn/
noun
noun: mean; plural noun: means
[list=1]
[*]1.
the value obtained by dividing the sum of several quantities by their number; an average.
“acid output was calculated by taking the mean of all three samples”

[*]2.
a condition, quality, or course of action equally removed from two opposite extremes.
“the measure expresses a mean between saving and splashing out”
synonyms:
middle course, middle way, mid point, central point, middle, happy medium, golden mean, compromise, balance, median, norm, average
“trying to find a mean between frankness and rudeness”

[/list]adjective
adjective: mean
[list=1]
[*]1.
(of a quantity) calculated as a mean; average.
“participants in the study had a mean age of 35 years”
synonyms:
average, median, middle, halfway, centre, central, intermediate, medial, medium, normal, standard, middling
“the mean temperature”

[*]2.
equally far from two extremes.
“hope is the mean virtue between despair and presumption”

[/list]

As we pointed out earlier, life is not predefined, so meaning as definition only does not really work in the question. Also, if we consider our meaning of life to be what is the best possible outcome before we die and are dead, we enter another problem. Death is an unknown state and so can’t be compared with a known state – even though in common sense we will probably see life as better than death no matter what the meaning, or in some suicide arguments we may reverse that statement and proposition, it does not make it true.

Welcome to the world of philosophical logic! 😀

That’s what I meant by ‘never common sense’. In my opinion, the philosophical term ‘meaning’ is all about value equations and in common sense terms, we often say ‘my life on average has been like such and such and has always been about‘, but calculating averages can be problematic when one takes into account the third definition of meaning we looked at, which exposes inequality and instability, which is why mean calculation is a better means of calculation. Also, the variables will continue to change and eventually we ourselves will not be able to calculate the ‘mean’ and so it’s up to someone else to calculate the total mean of your life!

Note how here, ‘means’ is about getting from A-B and prior to that, we use average as about something up to now only, but sometimes meaning can be future projective.

Maybe it’s competely unknowable and so we can only say truthfully that meaning is not fixed and subject to valuation as oppositions change, valuations change and new possibilities emerge, either through our own creation or what is imposed upon us.

I think the only thing to do when someone asks this question, all you can do is start laughing at how impossible it is.
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This is another interesting wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(philosophy_of_language)

Pay attention mostly to how ‘meaning is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they mean (intend, express or signify)’.

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What does ‘mean’ mean?

The same thing that it does in the question.

Never common sense! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/  😉

Also see: https://youtu.be/k52wcLOKzkU

‘Mean’ comes from the statistical usage of the term, as opposed to averages, mean is the better way to measure what’s in between.

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The commentary on time and substance is interesting- I think I can see a development of the eternal return in Nietzsche in this chapter.

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The commentary on time and substance is interesting- I think I can see a development of the eternal return in Nietzsche in this chapter.

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