The People Doing the Being in the Fifth Century BC or there abouts

Damn

 In the corridors of meaning the symbol "immanent" finds a formal definition in one of those silicone dictionaries that goes something like this : "...  the Latin, to remain within ..... existing or remaining within; inherent, intrinsic, or permanently pervading a domain, subject, or reality. It describes qualities or forces that are fundamental and internal to something, rather than coming from the outside."

 The Immanent Socrates, was the Socrates that wasn't going to be changed from the outside. And I think Plato's point in both parts of the dialogue he wrote entitled Parmenides was to demonstrate relationships between the inner and the outer self. When the young Socrates had his chance to meet the great Parmenides, that master of the Philosophy of Oneness and his sooty boy, the very good looking sidekick Zeno, Socrates listened to Zeno read one of his lectures, and at the end of the sermon Socrates had the gall to suggest that neither Parmenides nor Zeno seemed to know what they were talking about with their rambling theory about a Perfect Oneness they insisted the universe consisted of.

 Changing Socrates' mind, the mind of a man who agreed he didn't know anything, he was just asking questions, wasn't going to structurally happen. Socrates could have just been polite, he might have just nodded his ugly head, pretending to agree, but because Plato had a story to tell and a  lot of points to make, he didn't.

 And so, when Plato presented his analogy of the cave, his Ideal Forms out there casting shadows, the Immanent Socrates was not able to think of the Ideal Forms as an objective truth off in the distance, an objective truth the gods had seen as they emerged from the Hyperuranion, the realm beyond the heavens, and which we mortals had also seen as we emerged from the Hyperuranion. But with us mortals enduring a birthing canal to see us into the world while the gods had a chariot to take them ready made to Mount Olympus, we people while we may have witnessed the Ideal, if Plato was to be correctly understood, and some of us might still be persuaded or taught to remember Ideal bits and bobs, the hellish trauma of entering the earthly plane had caused us to catch degrees of amnesia, maybe PTSD allergic reaction even, which made us wonder whether Ideal Forms actually existed, anywhere, and if they did we probably weren't meant to see them, or touch them, or even smell them.

 No, far from them being behind a hill on a plane faraway, the Immanent Socrates saw fleeting moments of the Ideal Forms in everyday objects, in love, peace, justice, beauty, tables and comfortable chairs. Those fleeting moments soon passed, but they were real, they were here on earth and not beyond the heavens.

 Yes indeed, Plato wanted to save Parmenides from the viseral torment of an afternoon with Socrates, after all Parmenides was visiting from Southern Italy, he was on holiday. Of course the world was a perfect circle of eternal nouns and Zeno was so frightfully clever with his paradoxes even if Socrates wondered whether most of Zeno's paradoxes were actually truisms. 

  And so, here we are with our Being around Objective and Subjective:

 Under Socrates: We are active participants. The objective truth is a living spark that flares up between us and the world in specific moments. We learn by engaging, feeling, and chasing those fleeting views. Rock on Coleridge.

 Under Plato: We are broken, amnesiac prisoners. True reality is somewhere else, totally independent of our lived experience. Our subjective feelings are dangerous distractions; they are just us falling in love with the shadows on the cave wall. Rock on Kant

Whatever it is, is. It must be! It cannot not be.

Spider Lily

  I would like to make sure I got this roughly correct. In the West our discussions about "Being" began with Parmenides, who, after disputing Herclitus' idea that all is Flux, declared "Whatever is, is. It must be. It cannot not be." And Parmenides did this because he needed something more certain and constant than ever-changing? He wanted a reliable fortress of nouns.

 "Yes. Bang the drums. It was a big day sometime in the Sixth Century BC and you've captured the precise psychological and philosophical pivot point that set the entire trajectory of the Western mind."

 Are you telling me Parmenides was chicken-shit?

 "I wouldn't say that! He was uncomfortable with the theoretical approach to the world and the universe Heraclitus was proposing."

  

Founders of Western Thought Patterns and early understanding of what Being represents.

Naked Ladies

 "Comrade I am going to have start at the beginning. Objective and Subjective are symbols. What we are looking for I think is an understanding of what those symbols represent in us people. What they have purported to mean over time. It seems to me that Plato's Ideal Forms came from somewhere, in response to something, I suspect they are an understanding of Objective."

 "This is my understanding of Ideal Forms. The ideal form justice is perfect justice. The ideal form of a circle is a perfect circle. Plato had decided our mind knows what a perfect circle is, it knows what  justice is is because ideal forms preexist us?"

 "Socrates argued that ideal forms were not separate from objects, they didn't exist out there in a perfect place but existed within objects.  Socrates suggested that when we see a beautiful thing, or a just thing we are participating in a fleeting view of an idea of beauty or an idea of justice, it's a temporal moment, fleeting, and soon it is gone.  In our understanding of subjective I believe we need a dasein of some sort, an understanding of Being and what or who is doing the Being."

"OK!"

 "Well?"

 "Well What?"

 "Did Plato's thoughts about Being follow Permenides' Philosophy of Being, which went like this : Whatever is, is. It must be. It cannot not be. Conversly whatever is not, is not. It cannot be. It must not be."

 They love the antecedence of knowing stuff, don't they! Like a family tree. What we got here are three names of ancient Greek People, all of whom lived in different places, yet they either knew each other, or knew of each other. If you like, you can look upon them as the Founding Nosey Fathers of that collection of cultures that produced the iterations of chocolate on the outside, ice cream on the inside that ultimately became the Klondike Bar before surrendering to the inevitable and diving into the hellscape of choices called the Bread Aisle because there lay Real Being. 

 The names we "hold" sacred are these. Heraclitus. Parmenides. The third name is a duo called Plato and his teacher Socrates. If you have to know Socrates was ugly as sin to look at, he was nervous of his wife but nothing else, he loved the sound of his own voice and he was far too lazy and poor to write books. Plato on the other hand was a big, tall, broad chap who had trained as a wrestler and all that hearty bro stuff that goes along with naked wrestling.

Heraclitus was of the opinion that all things were Flux. Endlessly moving around, never stopping. You couldn't step into the same river twice. What is here today will be gone tomorrow, so gather ye rosebuds while ye may. The words to remember about Heraclitus are "Flux" "Movement" "Time like an ever flowing stream."

 Wherever else your mind goes, never underestimate the Heraclitus Observation. The Flux, Movement, Time Conundrum has yet to be  solved by a Western Mind unless it's a mind that prefers to wallow in the heuristic of straightforward answers, and ignore awkward questions like, What is an algorithm?

 Our second nosey parker, Parmenides, looked at the Heraclitus Observation and concluded that if Heraclitus was correct, everything was in flux, never staying still, then we could know nothing with any degree of certainty, there would never be a a still place were things could just be. Heraclitus agreed with that, it was rather sad, but when all is Flux you don't get to go where you're going, instead you're always going somewhere, you're always becoming something, but never actually becoming anything. Heraclitus then made mention of the possibilities in logic as a means to answer the "question why" which after all was the main preoccupation of people who had not much else to do because they had land and slaves and trading interests.

 And yes indeed, Heraclitus was an ancient Greek who lived in what is now called Turkey which was then part of the Persian Empire, he wasn't a big fan of people, he had no problem with taking what pleasure he could from an existence amongst them in miserable uncertainty with a good 80% chance of things getting much worse. He was the much respected Schopenhauer of the Sixth Century BC.

 Parmenides, who lived out west, in what was called Greater Greece, his part of Greater Greece is now called Southern Italy, while understanding Heraclitus' greatness, he apprehended the need for what on these pages we have taken to calling Nouns. The word apprehended means "grasp" as in understand, and "grasp" as put someone in the back of a police cruiser. Change in a world Parmenides wanted apprehended was the illusion, he decided. The true reality - what he called the "true being" - must be one, eternal, indivisible, unchanging, and perfect whole. And this indivisible perfect noun gave meaning and purpose to the joyous becoming of verbs.

 Go ahead, argue all you want. Tomorrow Baxter and I and our silicone comrade yack on about the third Founding Nosey Father, Socrates and his student Plato, with particular attention to a point about fleeting glimpses Socates made about Plato's Ideal Forms.  

Kant, Coleridge, Plato and their abuse of the medieval subjective

Shade

 This is how an etymologist might approach the word Objective, the word Subjective and Kant's influence on English Language Usage:

 "He - Kant - makes the objects of experience to be at once real (as in real) and phenomenal (as in what goes on in the mind) and .... these objects of experience..... what Kant generally means by the objective character of a proposition is the force which it derives from the thing itself compelling the mind, after examination, to accept it." 

 It is attested by 1838, of persons, art, writings, etc., "unbiased, impersonal, intent upon external objects of thought rather than one's sensations; setting forth external facts of matters as they exist or are supposed to exist and avoiding one's emotions and personality." 

And of course it was influenced by this sense from the 1500's of the subjective as ,"characteristic of one who is submissive or obedient," from Late Latin subiectivus "of the subject, subjective," from subiectus (a feminine word) "lying under, below, near bordering on," figuratively "subjected, subdued."

The final area for Etymologists is Objective, Subjective as used in early Modern English : "relating to or of the nature of a subject as opposed to an object," hence "existing, real" (which was the common later meaning of objective)

In these wanderings through meanings it sometimes helps to think of Kant's "Existing in the mind" this way. The "Mind" is thought of as "the thinking subject" and it is this "thinking subject" that was the meaning that caught on with Kant and his front row contemporaries. This way in 1767  in art and literature, "personal, idiosyncratic.... was ..... characterized by prominence given to individual mental operations."

 For Kant a human mind isn't a bucket that collects, it is an active processor. When the real thing hits our mind we send it through a sieve that reduces it to space, time, cause and effect, which gives us an object with adverbs we then pass this along to our consciousness - here defined as awareness - with a "do what you can?"

  In other words, Kant split the world into two separate zones. One zone was a Real Thing with a real presence in the world - the thing in itself - called The Noumenon. And the other zone of thing is a presence in the mind - the thing-as-appears in the mind - called The Phenomenon.

 "And what about the Ancient Mariner?"

 English speaking Poets like Coleridge who had partied with German idealists like Kant came away with the an infectious idea that an "I Am" - a subjective appearance in the mind - the phenomenon - was as good a judge as any of what lay beyond the Curtains of the Mind.

 "And what about Plato?"

 He, and this was well over two thousand years ago, would have looked at the medeival understanding of subjective, the fundamental, bedrock of reality and he'd have agreed that yes indeed "In 1300 AD When you're talking about this or that Subjective Thing you're talking about my Ideal Forms."

 "What about now?"

  Plato might have rolled his eyes, looked at his sundial and answered with something like : "I think I might have mentioned something about caves and shadows on cave walls. Let's see, I died on the 7th day of Thargelion during the Arthonship of Theophilus. When did Kant die?"

"12th of February1804."

"I blame the Romans! I cannot believe it's taken you this long to realize that shadows are cast by real things, and those shadows are all we got to work with, not the real thing that casts the shadow."