Pluralism, Not Relativism

[DocWatts]

18 hours ago, aurum said:

My point is that bracketing the question of The Absolute and metaphysics risks shaping how you understand experience in ways that may go unnoticed.

Understanding of the two, what reality is and how we experience reality, cannot be cleanly separated.

Again, this is just my critique. If you feel your approach is more valuable for what you're exploring, then by all means pursue it.

I've appreciated the constructive criticism.

Half of the fun of doing philosophy are these types of dialogues, where a domain of shared interest is approached through a complimentary set of lenses, each attuned to a different focal point. Very much in keeping with the type of Perspectival Pluralism that I'm encouraging.

Your point about bracketing metaphysical questions is a fair one. You don't have to look further than  scientific realism to see how it can give rise to Performative Contradictions - where ontological commitments are smuggled in under the guise of neutrality, while denying any metaphysical framing.

I'd also argue that just because bracketing can be done poorly, doesn't negate its role as a useful tool when wielded skillfully. The type of bracketing I'm doing is a form of phenomenological metaphysics  - agnostic toward certain metaphysical claims that fall outside the scope of the inquiry, rather than dismissive of metaphysics as a whole.

Traditional metaphysics, from Plato to Hegel to Whitehead, takes an 'outside-in' approach to ontology. Where you start from the Absolute (or some fixed metaphysical ground), and try to work your way backwards to our situated, everyday position within Reality.  It treats ontology as a study of what fundamentally is.

What I'm doing is taking an 'inside-out' approach to metaphysics, which starts from our situated, everyday experience - and tracing how that experience gives rise to categories, distinctions, and ontological inferences. From this vantage point, ontology becomes a kind of reverse engineering - not in order to deny capital 'R' Reality, but to understand how our access to it is structured.

The divergence between these two approaches is rooted in a deeper disagreement over what ontology is for. On one view, ontology aims to describe Reality as it is in itself — timeless, essential, absolute. On the other, it aims to understand how Reality is experienced — how we carve meaning out of the undifferentiated.

Edited Wednesday at 10:17 PM by DocWatts

[aurum]

2 hours ago, DocWatts said:

I'd also argue that just because bracketing can be done poorly, doesn't negate its role as a useful tool when wielded skillfully. The type of bracketing I'm doing is a form of phenomenological metaphysics  - agnostic toward certain metaphysical claims that fall outside the scope of the inquiry, rather than dismissive of metaphysics as a whole.

But are these claims outside the scope of inquiry?

I understand that you are bracketing metaphysics for pragmatic purposes rather than denying it.

At the same time, you are tackling fundamental questions about experience. And I have a hard time seeing how that can be accomplished without either introducing more metaphysics or deeply limiting the analysis.

Either choice will have tradeoffs, but I tend to favor a holistic approach when possible.

2 hours ago, DocWatts said:

What I'm doing is taking an 'inside-out' approach to metaphysics, which starts from our situated, everyday experience - and tracing how that experience gives rise to categories, distinctions, and ontological inferences. From this vantage point, ontology becomes a kind of reverse engineering - not in order to deny capital 'R' Reality, but to understand how our access to it is structured.

How does one understand accessing capital 'R' Reality without understanding what is capital 'R' reality?"

Also, why is an "inside-out" approach more effective in this case?

Edited yesterday at 12:10 AM by aurum

[DocWatts]

13 hours ago, aurum said:

How does one understand accessing capital 'R' Reality without understanding what is capital 'R' reality?"

Also, why is an "inside-out" approach more effective in this case?

Because it starts from where we actually are — rather than taking the end-product of a long chain of abstractions and treating that as our starting point.

Think of it like this: color vision isn't a 1:1 representation of the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form. This would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, human perception evolved to use just a narrow slice of that spectrum — the part most relevant to our survival needs as living beings.

Likewise, we don't reside within a raw, undifferentiated Reality - this too would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, our minds enact a curated version of Reality — one that’s intelligible, livable, and scaled to our cognitive and existential capacities. My term for this human-sized slice of our shared Reality is the Life-World: that shared, experiential world that serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it.

Because we can't completely step outside of our human perspective within Reality, any generalizations we have about capital 'R' Reality will contain the fingerprints of this situated starting point. Mind you, that doesn't invalidate the conclusions we draw - it just means that any inferences we draw about The Absolute will necessarily reflect our own relationship to it.

Just like physics is still valid despite the fact that it's not exhaustive of Reality, when we talk about The Absolute what we're necessarily talking about is our relationship to the Absolute. The Absolute may be what-is, but our relationship to what-is is always partial.

That's my working thesis, anyways. True to the spirit of Pluralism, there are usually multiple vantage points we can approach an issue from that are each valid without being exhaustive. Being-As-Absolute and Being-As-Understanding are no exceptions to that.

Edited 23 hours ago by DocWatts

[aurum]

9 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Because we can't completely step outside of our human perspective within Reality, any generalizations we have about capital 'R' Reality will contain the fingerprints of this situated starting point.

This is a false assumption.

Claim: the Everything-point is actually possible. And if you did experience the Everything-point, it would radically recontexualize Life-World in a way that cannot be comprehended strictly from a Life-World perspective.

9 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Just like physics is still valid despite the fact that it's not exhaustive of Reality, when we talk about The Absolute what we're necessarily talking about is our relationship to the Absolute. The Absolute may be what-is, but our relationship to what-is is always partial.

Disagree.

The Absolute can be understood on its own terms, not through relationship.

9 hours ago, DocWatts said:

That's my working thesis, anyways. True to the spirit of Pluralism, there are usually multiple vantage points we can approach an issue from that are each valid without being exhaustive. Being-As-Absolute and Being-As-Understanding are no exceptions to that.

Multiple approaches can definitely have value.

The masterstroke, in my opinion, is integrating them all together.

Edited 15 hours ago by aurum

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, aurum said:

Multiple approaches can definitely have value.

The masterstroke, in my opinion, is integrating them all together.

Very true! But the rub is that there are also multiple valid meta-perspectives for integrating the same territory. Pluralism might not necessarily go all the way down (agnostic on this point), but it does run quite deep.

[aurum]

3 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Very true! But the rub is that there are also multiple valid meta-perspectives for integrating the same territory. Pluralism might not necessarily go all the way down (agnostic on this point), but it does run quite deep.

I respect your agnosticism on this. Good sense-making means knowing what you know and what you don't know.

What would be examples of valid meta-perspectives?

 

[zurew]

On 2025. 05. 14. at 9:27 PM, aurum said:

They could make that exact same move. But if their metaphysics relies on assumptions, partiality or finitude, it will be internal incoherent and should be discarded.

For instance, I could design a metaphysics where unicorns are God. But this is contradictory because unicorns are finite and therefore cannot be God.

What this all leads to is that there can only be one correct metaphysics, which is the Absolute. And the Absolute is revealed with awakening, not merely deduced with logic.

If the claim is that their version of metaphysics would be necessarily internally incoherent, there are ways to prove that in principle, I just doubt that it will be ever established by anyone. 

Some presups claim kind of similar that the Christian God is logically necessary and therefore all other views necessary entail a contradiction in them - but of course, none of them could defend such a claim.

 

I take when you say "there can only be one correct metaphysics" to mean there is no other view that can account for all the facts. I dont think thats true.

Like I can grant that the Absolute is true, but even in that context , you can tackle and change certain properties of the Absolute presumably , because not all parts are logically necessary - this is similar to the idea "okay the Christian God created the world, but him creating the world is compatible with a God who has a slight preference for Eve to not eat the apple and also compatible with a God who is indifferent whether Eve eats the apple or not.

 

Like just going with any God model where God has these two properties (all knowing, and all powerful) - you can suddenly explain all the facts of the world and there is no contradiction in such a God creating a world like this - but such a God could have a variety of other properties and preferences and desires - so you can have a million different versions of a such a God (each slightly different from the other, but all sharing the all powerful and all knowing property). Asking the question of "which one is logically necessary from the 1 million?" would be a bad question because none of them would entail a contradiction even though each is slightly different from the other.

 

 

 

On 2025. 05. 14. at 9:27 PM, aurum said:

How do you know (epistemology) what reality is? Through direct experience, or Being (ontology). To know is to be, and to be is to know.

I think thats one way of knowing and it has its own limitations, just as other ways of knowing.