Philosophy Discussion Forums

BG: Constant opposition is all you do. Try to understand what a person is saying first, then you are free to go after it on points you disagree with . To understand such a term as eternal present, you have to ask what it could mean. Religious institutions?? What did I say at all that would lead you to think this is a relevant part of the discussion that has been about the precise opposite of this?
Heidegger and eternal present?? Foucault and eternal present?/I have never even heard these philosophers mentioned in t he same context as such a thing. Foucault is dangerous,. Sure. So what. Why bring up Foucault? Where are you?

Yes, I can share, and do it for the asking. Are you asking?

Yes, I am asking what “eternal present” means. What does it mean?

Ah, good question. Reading Heidegger, Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Rorty and others,we get this picture of the structure of an experience. I have an experience of this cat at my feet, but what is really going on in the simple apprehension of this visual event such that I know it's a cat, at my feet, is harmless, and so on? Heidegger gets really detailed, and his instrumentalism in defining language puts him of a footing with Rorty and the pragmatists that lay the foundation for pragmatic thinking. It;s not that these thinkers are the same, and such things can be argued endlessly. i am here simply presenting the essential idea:I know cats because i have seen them my whole life, and these prior experiences of cats are multitudinous and diverse. Every time I see a cat, or someone mentions the word, these memories light up as an unconscious background, and it is this background (see Husserl's Ideas. He talks a lot about what is IN the presence of the apprehension of things) is what Heidegger calls regions, and regions rise and fall in proximity as experience moves from one thing to another. Heiddeger helped me understand how to think about what it is to know, and that it is a matter of taking the object AS a symbolic instrumental intermediate, and interpretative intermediate, that characterizes knowing. Pragmatists look at the taking AS in terms of a formal structure of pragmatic engagement inthe world: so many experiences I have of cats, but how did I get these? It was through the dynamic of problem solving, as when I heard "cat" and there was this moving image; and then a cat bit me; and then at here and there. It all is a dynamic learning process reified into an understanding that abides with every cat experience. THIS cat history IS what we call existence; it is the aggregate of all of our vast learning in the world that makes for the feeling of presence as such. Presence, by the pragmatist view, of tings in the world is reducible to a matrix of past experiences.
The profound consequence of this view is that it has a pragmatic ontology: Being is IN time, or, is time; daseinis not IN time; it IS time, because time is reducible what occurs in a problem solving matrix. All terms are.
Why do I go into this? Because it is front and center when it comes to answering your question. Kiekegaard is my current hero. He looks at this model and takes reason (he of course had Kant in mind, as well as Hegel) to be a very, very different thing from the palpable world that is Real before our waking eyes. This interpretation of reason and it synthetic imposition on the world is About something that is qualoitatively different from reason. See his Repetition. What is this existence, this air we breathe, this matter we touch: it is NOT reason at all; it possess nothing that is rational (Husserl et al came much later). So: reason is what this arch of knowing, and I think the pragmatists are right int heir characterization, in which one PREDICTS the future via the PAST's rational grasp of the world, is where Heidegger gets his das man, though Heidegger is not the same on this, obviously. Kierkegaard inspired him, for Kierkegaard took this to be a corrupt and primitive (yes, sinful: that was K. He had this Christian thing. But so what, he is great to read) relation with the world. This dominance of reason, of the dynamic pragmatic (I add) that feeds the future with the past.
But is it possible to to not live in this manner? Yes. Forget K. and H. and all the rest. The eternal present is what lies before you sans the conditioning, and the closer you get to realizing what it is to clear the mind of the past and experience it as it appears, int eh concrete actuality, the more authentic you are, the more you realize your own true nature.
Why eternal? Because finitude's very nature IS this experiential dynamic K calls sin, the Buddhists/Hindus call samsara, or karma (forget about reincarnation for now). Thought itself is what binds us to our unhappiness; thought itself is time and eternity is timeless by definition.
A tough cookie in all this.

It just doesn’t work for me because it looks like mysticism claiming to be something else. The last two paragraphs just seem to slip away from what went before.

Of course we’re limited to written words, but I still find myself having to add the structure beneath the pattern you’ve laid out (forgive my analogy.) I don’t say this out of disappointment it’s just your own way of saying something that doesn’t correspond to my experience. It’s likely a matter of subjectivity - you go too deep too quickly and so we may agree, but there’s no way of saying for sure if the concepts are not readily present (which I don’t think they are.)

Hereandnow wrote: ↑September 1st, 2018, 3:29 pm eternity is timeless by definition

What do you think, can this timeless present lose its being? Reincarnation after all? If it loses its being, isn't it time after all? My view is that eternity means time without an end. Being is eternal, and time is the "nucleus" of being as Heidegger suggests in the last pargraph of Being and Time.

So time is the key component of the internal structure of existence, and timelessness only means ignoring the past and the future. Not worrying. Having faith?

Tamminen
What do you think, can this timeless present lose its being? Reincarnation after all? If it loses its being, isn't it time after all? My view is that eternity means time without an end. Being is eternal, and time is the "nucleus" of being as Heidegger suggests in the last pargraph of Being and Time.

So time is the key component of the internal structure of existence, and timelessness only means ignoring the past and the future. Not worrying. Having faith?

Not worrying? If there was nothing to do about the matter of being here, then worrying would be absurd. But nirvana is about the assumption that is something you can do. You can escape, liberate yourself. this is tricky: Greta thinks we would be better of if self consciousness were to phase out in future evolution, and there is something to this, for when a Buddhist meditates and time vanishes, not unlike reading a good book and "forgetting" about the act of reading and everything else altogether, consciousness of the moment, reflection, that is, the second guessing of things, is put aside. Sartre does an interesting analysis of this in Transcendence of the Ego, where he argues against Husserl. I have forgotten the argument though.

The question is, in the self annihilation of the meditative act and the disappearance of existential time,that is, time as the lived anticipation of the future from the past (this IS time and nothing more) do we "lose" being. If being is H's dasein then the answer seems yes. It is dasein that is the problem, for dasein is the heart of attachments in the world: we care. But what is the self? H assumes there is no alternative (as far as I have read), Buddhists, Hindus, and many others asserts there is, in fact, the alternative is your true self. First, the time that vanishes is time int he world, but this time may be grounded an "eternal time" what Kierkegaard calls the eternal present. Here, the langauge falls away. Better to meditate, see for oneself what all this means, because it is especially true here that the proof in in the pudding: Feel the liberation, and time fall away, then ask if you have lost of gained. Buddhists will tell you you have gained immeasurably.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑September 2nd, 2018, 10:15 am time as the lived anticipation of the future from the past (this IS time and nothing more)

You say time is nothing more? I say time is the succession of presents. Time can be experienced as the eternal present, but nevertheless there is always the next present, and the next, and so on until there perhaps is no next present, or then there is always the next present. This is what I think time is. It does not depend on whether we care or not. We are all in the same boat here.

The future is only known by you he present. The concept of time is abstractly extended.

Tamminen
You say time is nothing more? I say time is the succession of presents. Time can be experienced as the eternal present, but nevertheless there is always the next present, and the next, and so on until there perhaps is no next present, or then there is always the next present. This is what I think time is. It does not depend on whether we care or not. We are all in the same boat here.

Sure, this works very well. But it is a practical world, scientist's world you are in, and I agree with it as long as we understand there are serious limits in this. Taken as an empirical concept, one that has its meaning drawn from observation with the intent to measure, classify, produce, make appointments and so on, we can chop up time into pieces and compare, standardize; I mean, it's obviously very useful. But as to an analysis of its nature, it is not a succession of eternal presents at all. There is no such thing, except in the abstract.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑September 2nd, 2018, 4:51 pm Sure, this works very well. But it is a practical world, scientist's world you are in, and I agree with it as long as we understand there are serious limits in this. Taken as an empirical concept, one that has its meaning drawn from observation with the intent to measure, classify, produce, make appointments and so on, we can chop up time into pieces and compare, standardize; I mean, it's obviously very useful. But as to an analysis of its nature, it is not a succession of eternal presents at all. There is no such thing, except in the abstract.

I am not sure if you understood what I tried to say. I am speaking of subjective time and its phenomenology. It has nothing to do with measuring or classifying, and it really has the phenomenological structure of "the lived anticipation of the future from the past", as you say. In spite of this, we have our next moment, next presence, and if there is no next presence, time ends. It is our existential situation, and something else than saying that the world goes on without us. Internal and external descriptions of existence are perhaps incompatible, but I think the same way as you seem to think, that the way science describes reality is in the end secondary and has little to do with what really matters.

Tamminen
I am not sure if you understood what I tried to say. I am speaking of subjective time and its phenomenology. It has nothing to do with measuring or classifying, and it really has the phenomenological structure of "the lived anticipation of the future from the past", as you say. In spite of this, we have our next moment, next presence, and if there is no next presence, time ends. It is our existential situation, and something else than saying that the world goes on without us. Internal and external descriptions of existence are perhaps incompatible, but I think the same way as you seem to think, that the way science describes reality is in the end secondary and has little to do with what really matters.

But I was responding to your "time can be experienced as the eternal present, but nevertheless there is always the next present, and the next". The way i see it, it if the notions of 'next, and the next after that" are part of conscious experience of the world, it is not the eternal present, for it is the very nature of finitude to divide like this. One could counter that such a concept of eternal present is inherently impossible and unachievable since it precludes having any kind of experience at all, and I wold have to agree with this. Nonetheless, taking up the world and "suspending" most of what the makes time, time by suspending thoughts about the mail coming, a meeting tonight, getting gas for the car, and so on, and attending only to, say, your breathe, as in kriya yoga, reveals, the more it is practiced and the more everyday concerns are dropped, something of a genuine timelessness. The next, and the next after fall away because these are simply suspended, and a qualitative change occurs in the depth of subjectivity.

Of course, you can observe this affair from the outside, as we are just talking about it,and say, this kind of thing can still be measured in temporal units of some kind, but that would be from the outside looking in. From the inside, where time is "forgotten" time is absent, as it is in the mind of an infant at the mother's breast, though in this case, quite without conscious awareness all.

I think time falls away when we are not qualifying the world with time words and practical contexts. Will I be on time; what time does the bus arrive; and so on. I think these concepts ARE time, the concept. And when Einstein talked about space/time it was a vocabulary of terms with pragmatic value that he was "really" talking about.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑September 3rd, 2018, 4:03 pm The next, and the next after fall away because these are simply suspended, and a qualitative change occurs in the depth of subjectivity.

A qualitative change that does not anticipate death (Heidegger), or ask what it means to die (Kierkegaard)? Kierkegaard had his leap of faith, but how can we reach this peace and balance? The "next" is always there, and we do not know what it is. But then, perhaps we need not know. When the "next" comes, let it come. Faith without God. Pure faith. Is this our religion?

Perhaps we don't need to "know' at all. My religion is the struggle to get this right. Kriya yoga today, Kant tomorrow, the prajnaparamita the day after, long walks in solitude (no solitude, no religion) and the unfolding of the world before me. Really, quite a thing, this philosophy.

Tamminen -

Try reading “My Stroke of Inisght.”

Burning ghost wrote: ↑September 4th, 2018, 3:22 am Tamminen -

Try reading “My Stroke of Inisght.”

See her famed TED Talk on YT to get an idea of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

Really, what she saw of herself during the stroke was disassociated, and thus she was not just "little Jill" but felt herself to be more to be seamlessly part of her broader environment.

While there are many differences, there's some similarity with astronaut descriptions of the experience of looking down on the Earth - that ennobling sense of feeling like you are part of something greater than the small self.