Something of a response to Levi Bryant/LarvalSubjects on “hylephobia.”
Thinking on a Walk in the Woods: The Ideality of Matter and the Materiality of Ideas
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3 responses to “Thinking on a Walk in the Woods: The Ideality of Matter and the Materiality of Ideas”
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A bit of a name-dropping ramble but nice try however, even the matter-soup in this construct is posed as independent of mind – even if mind were “somehow” able to impose its own form on this soup. But of course there is no matter-soup outside of what mind “projects” as it were. Form as an emergent property of mind does not depend on any sort of mind-soup but the projection whereby matter seems to “exist” does not, in any event, have much to do with the everyday ego-consciousness.
Matter is not “pre-thinkable” oh my, and why would that be? Matter merely forms the projected background from which, within which, being allows itself to be.
Matter does not partake of time it is merely the record of change from which time is then introcepted.
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This issue cannot be resolved (except by tour-de-force) by philosophers who refuse to accept the ontological distinction between compounds of matter arrayed in organic and inorganic configurations.
All life – beginning from the original centrality of earthly cellular existence and experience – is characterized as a locus of anschauung (life has outlook) whereas inorganic matter has no such point of integration with reality.
Each electron certainly has being (‘reality’ and ‘force’) – but no single electron has ‘outlook’ and no compound of electrons has outlook (not even the electrons that make up my body have outlook) therefore experiences no ‘existence’ vis-a-vis other forces.
Mind, with its powers of anschauung, looks upon this unrelatedness and sees relation under law, thinks the manifold into the ‘existence’ of related force, but all such relation is controlled by purely external, physical, electro-magnetic determinations of motion in space.
In my opinion (and that of I. Kant, I think.)
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From one side (Higher Self) life can be described as arising along with the fall from grace into the world of “name and form” and from the other (the personal self) it can be seen as the evolution of consciousness through primitive life-forms into intermediate living entities and at last emerging fully formed through Homo sapiens.
For the personal self in the world it is the capacity of material reality able to support individual realization of living species that indicates the presence of One Self alone but for the One Self Alone, this capacity is entirely the work of its own expression as by discrimination, intuition and projection in order to accomplish the intent of expression being the acquisition of experience.
Unless one has noticeably participated in breaking the mask of oblivion in this very life then consciousness is confined to a strictly limited outlook involving discrimination exercised moment to moment through the eyes of the personal self only. To phrase this another way: as long as one finds oneself living in this life on Earth as a human being, walking around in an objectively perceived external world then one is wearing the “mask of oblivion”. If this idea is understood then several questions arise. Among these are the following:
1) What is the nature of this mask?
2) How has the mask been developed?
3) How may one rid oneself of the mask?
4) What is the nature of the realization arising when the mask is destroyed?
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?