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So if we can reject the nature that created the essences then we might be able to perceive something else other than essences. It would be hard but it would be possible.

Not so much reject, but to acknowledge that ‘going back to the source’ to find the ‘purest form’ is a habit of knowledge. We will find it very hard to delve under culture. Go to my Derrida and Writing as Language thread, it explains how we live on the outside, that the language of mathematics for example, is not most pure when we counted with sticks and stones, or whatever, it is supplementary – this means that something like the square root of minus one does not exist in real world terms at all- we have to invent rules for that to be, so mathematics as a language is in its ‘purest form’ in its most unnatural state. That’s the principle anyway.

I like an old Bertrand Russell quote regarding the latter part of your post –

Fanatics are always so certain and wiser people so full of doubts.

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5. Noun [spoiler]cigar[/spoiler]

Maybe I misunderstanding what that means.
Articles here are phrases like ‘of the’ ‘in that’ ‘on the’ – maybe we have the wrong term here, but that’s what we mean in this thread. Feel free to alter the structure before a game.

FYI: Spoilers are spoiled in the email notification for a thread.
I don’t think I can do anything about that. I always come to the forum first, so I don’t view emails often.

Answer: Give demonstations centrifugally near the cigar!

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@”Kenneth”

https://ontic-philosophy.com/Thread-Surrealist-Word-Game

Come and play – read the rules first.

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I have moved this thread as it seemed more suited here.

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Yeah, so on rejecting essentialism I don’t know how you feel about ontology.

If there are essences, they come out of social constructs. As thetrizzard pointed out in the Foucault and Essences thread, it’s relational through power dynamics. Essences have to be, if they do indeed exist, after the fact BUT they are still a priori to each human in society as culture can pre-dominate the nature which preceeded it.

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yes I’m sure the weight of this tradition continues to shape minds…..

I didn’t want to send this thread into a rant about Christianity as all inherently bad, I hope you understand, I like Robert Solomon’s take on Nietzsches’ view of Christianity (or rather Heidegger’s take on Nietzsche on the subject) where he points out aside from the moral issues, Christianity did a great job of spiritualising our experience.

for Foucault its always about the function of the claim in terms of power and it’s the dominance of the institutions that make the claim to be ‘true’ (the human sciences)…..

Thanks for pointing out it’s the human sciences, some times I get confused there.

Foucault seems to point out how necessities can’t be known through discourses, as he believes power itself may be another discourse that is just too deeply engrained to get under. Force is the key point here, definitely. Authors have authority.

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Please feel free to upload any PDF’s you have to the forum, the upload limit is unlimited, but each file can be no larger than 1MB.Most PDFs are well within that size anyway.

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Do you think there is a notion of essences that is Christian that is still affecting our interactions now?

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Are you asking how do we know if we have an essence or not and how do we find out? I’m trying to formulate the question first and why it is important, before trying to figure out what there is.

It’s important to know how our notion of essences influences our thinking and how they differ in certain philosophies and the implications for those differences.

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Yes, essences/essentialism is referring to a quality and attributes of things, be they mental or material, that is absolute and irreducible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essence?wprov=sfsi1

It can imply a creator, or it can be self-created, either way, the problem carries with it an undeniable quality of a thing. It’s religious because it pressuposes layer after layer of foundations, its religious because it can be another word for soul.

It’s interesting because the way we explain things can lead to the creation of essences, when in fact, language can refer to itself.

To sum up – an essence is the absolute quality or attributes of a thing, we have inherited this way of thinking from religion. It implies causes that may not actually be anywhere. This can lead us into infinite regress where we constantly have to justify one cause with another cause into infinity.

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For sure. We can at least explore alienation, why some are more alienated than others etc. That is the role of philosophy and why it isn’t the same as empirical science as we only have reason to try and figure out what there is and how it works. We can also review erronous assumptions made by psychology and possible errorsof thinking from habitual thought we have inheritedfrom other discourses unconsciously, essentialism is a very religious concept when you break it down, like we are oblivious to it, it’s like a hang up from Christian thought that seems to stay under the radar.

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@”notathoughtgiven”

This thread should be relevant to our discussion on your forum.

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Maybe I should be clearer about this. The state of alienation implies essentialism – some thinkers like Marx speak of false consciousness, where as Foucault would say ‘who knows what’s real anyway?’.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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I enjoyed revising this.

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See my thread on Aporia, Duty and Secret. It offers an interesting breakdown of conversationsin politics I find. I took notes from the Derrida Critical Reader and put them in the post.

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