IndieAgora

It may not be possible to escape from notions of essences, or metaphysics altogether. We can only offer our due diligence toward the subject. Derrida sees this as a symptom of logos which is the inward rational principle of all things. I believe this is nothing but narcissism, we believe the universe will echo back to us, even if we see the universe as indifferent, we ourselves will be indifferent.

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.

A philosopher once stated, "Those who grasp Reality
don't know Fantasy and those that grasp Fantasy
don't know Reality."
But what exactly is Real that constitutes Reality,
that is the crux.

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.

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.

But what exactly is Real that constitutes Reality,
that is the crux.

Maybe that is our arrogance showing to think there is such a thing as reality. When reality is just how we explain the universe from what we gather from our experiences and senses.

How many times have senseless arguments have risen because we think we know reality. That two people can sense and experience the same thing and come up with two different explanations for it. Who is right and who is wrong? Both are right, because both are providing an explanation that works for them. Works for them because of how their mind fits everything together to come up with that explanation. Since we are unique as individuals it would be natural that two people would come up with two different explanations. Sometimes there is general overlap because of shared experiences but more often than not their will be differences.

So for each of us their is a reality that our minds conceive. But we need to realize that reality is just an perception fo our mind. That it is not real and will vary from person to person in small and big ways.

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.

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.

Your explanation for the language of mathematics makes it more clearer to me what you mean. We want something that explains without adding or supplementing concepts that are not part of pure form. Yes mathematics help explain what we where doing when counting with sticks. But eventually mathematics as it was developed as a language ran into that problem of the square root of negative numbers. So it add the concept of an imaginary number to define it which is not part of the pure form.

That the same thing with essences. That it starts off fine explaining consciousness but as it is developed it runs into the same problem that mathematics did. That it invents things to make it itself work as language of consciousness. So to understand consciousness better we need acknowledge that and start over. Finding something that explains it without adding on things. That its language describes the pure form and nothing but the pure form.

This might be of interest: http://davecormier.com/edblog/2011/11/05/rhizomatic-learning-why-learn/

I'm still very much in the dark about these two thinkers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who are part of Michel Foucault's thought.