“If error is foreign to philosophy, if it cannot be that which philosophy strives to avoid, this is for no other reason than that philosophy is ill equipped to deliver us denotative truths about reality or the world. Philosophy is not an empirical practice, even among those who call themselves empiricists. It is never a matter of making true or false statements about states of affairs in the world, but rather a practice of creating and critiquing concepts. Philosophical claims pertain not to referential truths but rather to the medium of basic concepts that free a region of experience so that referential judgments might be made at all. Before one can discourse about the world, the sense of the world must have already announced itself.” –Levi Bryant: Difference and Giveness
One of things that is emerging for me in this study is the similarity between philosophy, as a form of conceptual play, and mathematics and even science. In the sense of conceptual play, philosophy, given the armchair discipline it is, must admittedly also work with the isolated systems of the abstractions we create. This, for instance, is why paradox is the field in which philosophy dominates. We use the concepts of space and the way distance breaks down into infinite digress in order to establish why it is Zeno’s arrow will never reach its target. But that doesn’t mean any one of us would go prancing around between an archer and their target. One would think us smart enough to recognize the difference between reality and conceptual play. But at the same time, doesn’t this suggest a similarity between what the mathematician and the philosopher does? Doesn’t the mathematician also play with numbers (quite often (simply for the sake of playing with numbers –that is with no regard to whether what they’re doing actually refers to reality or not? But it is this kind of play, a sort of brainstorming, that can lead to some very real implications.
(At the same time, some of the most dangerous people in this world are those who want to bypass the play, because it doesn’t serve their serious purposes, and get to the real implications. These people want to own reality.)
The last sentence:
“Before one can discourse about the world, the sense of the world must have already announced itself.”
:refers to the initial encounter with the object/event in which, for a split second, we are completely stupid and intuitive. This is the point at which the sensible is bombarded with information but hasn’t quite processed it. At this point, the mind/brain complex starts repeating the different singularities through the different faculties (in a sense similar to Dennett’s multiple draft theory) until it composes them into a coherent concept. At this point, the object/event is being passed back and forth between the sensible and thought. The important thing to recognize here is that, given this process, there is no hierarchy between the sensible (intuition) and thought (concept). There is only a relationship that produces our experience of reality. Our initial encounter with the object/event is naturally creative. This is reflected in language in the way we listen to what the other has to say and base our understanding of it on similar sentences we have heard, then proceed to answer it with a sentence unlike any we have spoken based on previous sentences we have uttered. Our encounters, like the language we use to describe them, are inherently creative.
It just seems like philosophy should reflect that.