 Abstractions, reifications, hypostatisations
[verbal nouns, abstract nouns, adjectival
nouns, gerunds, gerundials, etc.], correspond
to what is "meant" in the 'sense'
of a speaker's intention in communicating
opinions, judgements and ideas in relation
to an unspecified entity, or the generality
of entities with which the abstraction is
considered to be suitable or opportune and
with which it is semantically associative,
and which was/were responsible for their
original historical creation as linguistic
conveniences in the first place.
Abstractions are not
significations which correspond to actual
denotata which can be found in the real world,
but are designata which refer to unspecific
universalistic generalisations concerning
entities and events.
Abstractions are vitally
necessary insubstantial components of the
ideative meaning of all intentional utterances,
but are not themselves a "part"
or 'property' of the object encountered in
perception, i. e., 'LOVE' is not a 'part'
or 'property' of the lover, but reflects
the manner or the way the generality of lovers
exist whilst they are in a state of loving
- or [put another way] the state of loving
in which they exist whilst they feel emotions
of love or act out loving behaviour.
There is usually accurate identification and absolute objectivity of meaningful correspondence achieved between the noun: 'Joe Bloggs,' and the real-world denotative entity which corresponds to that signification and is actually reading these words on the screen at this moment.
If there is more than one Joe Bloggs, then
the addition of a simple qualifier
such as: 'of Earl Road, Memphis,' or 'aged 27, or 'the composer,' is often enough to establish the noun Joe
Bloggs as a genuine referent of an
actual
existing object referred to by the
linguistic
expression: Joe Bloggs.
We are habituated to an awareness that we
have never in the past and will never in
the future confront the irreal object "LOVE"
anywhere in our experience.
In this respect we are cognitively already
aware it is not real. If this is the case,
then when we use expressions such as: 'I hope to find love one day,' or 'love doesn't obey the rules,' then we are actually using the word love
as a figure of speech in which the word 'love'
is used to refer to a human person that we
will love and who hopefully will love us
in return.
We are aware that an irreal
'object' cannot exist, for that which is
not really an object cannot be a real-world
existing entity. WE know that to find 'LOVE'
we must find an actual real flesh and blood
person to love or to love us, for love is
a state or activity of human beings, and
if we exclude human beings as possible ultimate
enactors or enablers of these states or activities,
we will fail to trace, identify and perhaps
experience the actual originative or seminal
denotata which gave rise to the abstraction
in the first place - which is the loving
states and activities of human beings.
If one attempts to subject any abstraction such as 'Love'
to the same identificatory, designatory,
or denotational reduction as one can reduce
the noun Joe Bloggs to: 'he whom I am referring to,' one proceeds down a torturous corridor of
designation or identification of the origin
of the significatum 'LOVE' until one finally
arrives at the REAL source of the word -
which turns out to be a manner or state of
behaviour of a real flesh and blood human
being, and it is human beings and other real-world
entities which are the source and progenitors
of all abstractions.
All abstractions are
ultimately reducible to entities.
Heidegger could never grasp this fact, but
rather reified the semantic structures of
these 'irreal objects' [which inhere in the phenomena and give
them their communicative sense.] into quasi-entitic
independent actualities.
HIS GREATEST
MISTAKE
His greatest ontological [and pathological]
mistake was of course to reify the entitic
presence of human entities and other real objects
into the notorious 'reificational object'
'BEING' and it's gerundial alter-ego 'Dasein,'
which was the final step in his comportment
away from reason and responsible rationality
to irrationality and unreason, and led inexorably to his attraction for and move
towards his historical assignation with 'destiny'
- his membership of the Nazi Party and fanatical
adoration of the supremo of all abstraction
- Adolf Hitler.
Some transcendentalists have an obsession
with the fact that those people who realise
that abstractions are not in themselves real
and are ultimately denotataless should not
use these abstractional significations if
they don't believe that they exist in the
real world.
Nominalists see nothing wrong with applying
the products of their neurological activity
to philosophical problems, nor in communicating
these ideas to others via the meaningful
linguistic codes that we call 'language,'
and see no difficulty in using denotataless
linguistic coding, as long as they themselves
are aware that these abstractions are merely
instrumental for conveying meanings concerning
the activities and states of the real entities
from which they are ultimately derived and
associated.
In many respects Heidegger's phenomenology
can be described as a preoccupation
with
the irreal or unreal, in that what
he seems
to be interested in is not so much
the actuality
of entities, but the factuality of
phenomena.
Now for someone
to be
obsessed with that which doesn't exist over and above that which does exist seems to me to be a very weird kind of ontologist?
The implemental
use of
the useful fiction we call abstraction is fine in natural language or regular
speech, where it can be used to convey meaning
conveniently, quickly and economically,
but in areas of communication such as philosophy
or [even more so] in ontological investigation,
the foolhardy and unthinking employment of
unspecified abstraction is verging upon the
felonious, risible and unscholarly, which
accounts for the suppressed giggling [which
I have personally witnessed] that goes on
behind the backs of Heideggerians in the
university 'corridors of shame.' |
Evans Experientialism 
