To know a thing in any way, one must think of it, and thinking of it one is lead to think deeper about this thought, taking it into a new order of thinking, and as we ascend through the orders, which is a function of the mind thinking, we come to know better what the thing is, regardless of the accuracy of this knowledge, it is knowledge according to the capacity of the mind, as much as it can know, since there is no knowledge that is neutral of mind itself or rather neutral of knowing-subjects, as in there is no brute knowledge, as it is a result of the act of knowing, and that act is more about relationship of apprehension between us as the knowers to the knowledge, often people conceive of knowledge per se, but this is not possible, since that does not exist without a mind to know it, of course not denying that reality and truth exists independently of us or any rational agents for that matter, but we necessarily interact with them through the medium of the mind and through the act of thinking in order to acquire their knowledge, we must therefore come back to the point of the possibility of knowledge as conceived of as objective and independent of whether any minds maintain it as knowledge, but for now we need only reflect on the structure itself, which is unbounded insofar as we can always ascend or descend from the thought to its object or making that thought an object of thought itself as well, terminating the chain only on two possible points either tautology or its contradiction or we can get tangled up in the levels of thoughts never finding the stopping point.
Level 0: The thing (X)
Level 1: Thinking about X
Level 2: Thinking about [thinking about X]
Level 3: Thinking about [thinking about [thinking about X]]
...and so on
In a way philosophy is a prime example of a commentary of this same structure, thinking of a whole chain on this chain, a recursive function of the whole in the whole, since the philosophers comment and philosophize which initiates a chain of thinking-hierarchy on thought-hierarchy which open themselves up to new commentary, in a way there will always be new philosophical systems and new questions raised up by such that will always need new answers and critiques to those answers, and so on. And it is very easy to look back with anachronistic goggles on the ones before and see what they did trivial when we are priming ourselves for the same judgement in the future, but each doing so from his own chain of commentary that is contained within a specific mind which would like to see progress as inevitable so this supposition is what is read back into the past, when if we brought the ancients into the present they would see philosophical decadence and incoherence in what we have done thus far and could only describe it as sophistry which they have dealt with, with extraordinary insight, this is because one unknowingly deals with the whole when thinking, thus he also deals with thoughts he has not even thought of.
Now aside from this brief commentary on philosophy, when it comes to this self-referentiality, knowledge is often defined, by those who think of it as independent of states and capacities of mind and thinking agent, in a way that makes it so exalted as to be impossible to grasp, and to make the word ‘knowledge’ itself superfluous, since most if not all of what we can claim as knowledge cannot reach the standard that is set, when knowledge as we defined earlier is much attainable and also it is not a dichotomy of either knowledge or ignorance but a matter of degrees, since it depends on our mental explorations of the levels of self-referential thought that resolves into generative tautologies i.e tautologies that seem to generate insight about the structure of the object of knowledge and of the whole structure of the world, as any knowledge of a thing is in a way a knowledge of the all, given that all things are interrelated in a web with each node being wholly impossible to isolate in itself.
These generative tautologies that I mentioned are very prevalent in philosophical thinking, we might quote some to show what we are talking about: Aquinas’ “Deus sit ipsum esse subsistens (God is subsisting act of being itself)”, the law of identity in logic as well “A=A”, Parmenides’ ontological axiom “What is, is”, Descartes’ “Cogita ergo sum (I think therefore I am)” and so on. On each of these examples great edifices of philosophical thinking is built and maintained even if on first look they seem to be terribly trivial and uninformative as to be functionally meaningless and this might be responsible to the dismissal of philosophy as word-games and sophistry for most of those uninformed about it, even what I am doing here might seem so to untrained eyes as well.
Now for each of these examples, and what makes them truly generative, is that they unfold into a whole network that is an image of the whole world, this seems to be in alignment with the self-referentiality of thought, the result of deeply hierarchical chains of thought that terminate in tautology that contain within them the seed for the whole chain, as opposed to empty tautologies or ones that are definitional that operate on first-order or second-order self-referential levels mostly that either terminate on the same level or can unpack one or few layers of meaning from it.
These two, compression and unpacking, are both analogous to the ascent and descent mentioned earlier, both are the same as abstraction and concretization of ideas resulting from thought, and both necessary for deeper knowledge of the world and of its beings, parts and objects which pull the mind constantly into the act of contemplation, just as inhaling and exhaling are both necessary for breathing in order to live, something that is lost on both Idealist and Empiricist tendencies which content themselves with unidirectional movements.
On the other hand, our ascent through the levels of self-referential thought, can terminate at contradiction, which is opposite to tautology, and as such also share the same proprieties as it, only in an inverted sense nevertheless, and thus if a tautology contains the seed of the whole network and structure of reality, contradictions serve the same purpose but for the boundaries of the world generated and what lies beyond the boundary of the world i.e non-being.
This can be thought of as generative either inwardly in the case of tautology or outwardly in the case of contradiction and the same analogy of inhaling and exhaling operates not only when it comes to ascent and descent but also on the level of tautology and contradiction, the two levels being axes of the mental space, horizontal for tautology and contradiction, vertical for ascent and descent, at the center of which lies the descended transcendent which is the concretized abstract and the reconciled contradiction that is the contradiction integrated and resolved where all of the four are unified and made truly immanent and accessible.
ASCENT
(Abstraction)
^
|
|
CONTRADICTION <────────●────────> TAUTOLOGY
(Boundaries) CENTER (Foundations)
Non-being | Being
Outward | Inward
v
DESCENT
(Concretization)
Now by the nature of our thinking and expanding on this, not that we have acquired a view from nowhere but within the chain elaborating on it itself, this itself is not only the superstructure of the whole chain or rather crosswise hierarchy, but made possible also due to it being that this structure operates on each level and manifests itself in microcosm and macrocosm of the self-referential thought, each act of meta-thought is itself thought not divorced from it but doing an act of the same nature but of a different mode, to claim otherwise is to make the possibility of thought given what we have already elaborated incoherent and access to other meta levels impossible.
Furthermore considering this account of thought and knowledge, what would these things mean for objectivity of knowledge, absolute knowledge and certainty, a question which we skipped earlier, now as for objectivity it is that when a statement is true to all minds, not that one disagreeing make it false, but rather even it is true in spite of disagreement because it is necessary for any process of thought and if negated makes rational thinking impossible and even one who disagrees is implicitly affirming them and using them to make the argument for his denial and usually what is termed objective truth is a generative tautology or is derived directly from it or from the structure it generates, and we are certain insofar as we know these, but the further we descend the less the degrees thereof on account of the multiplication of interpretive choices, contingent factors and other variations.
However one could ask how come, with all the various generative tautologies we can formulate, one can ground them ? Certainly not that each one stands by itself, and that there must be an underlying principle that unites all such things, of course the results are important, if each stand by itself we have uncontrolled pluralism and we open the flood gates for “anything goes” kind of relativism, that could only be shut by having such a grounding principle, and from what I elaborated so far, we can think of many possibilities and come to a satisfying answer but we should concern ourselves with the structure of things still, but let us just state for now that these multiple tautologies can operate within one unified framework and they are not necessarily incommensurable, and the work to be done is to establish such a framework.
But one must ask as well about the subject doing the act of intellection, as any act of thinking is proper to a mind which is always subsists in a rational agent, this thinking agent can think about other agents as objects of thought or of himself, this thought of one’s self is itself self-reflexive and can also be self-referential in deeper self-reflection, it poses a different kind of structure and one that is deeply more layered than the one we posited before, since now the subject is both thinker and thought at the same time, both the subject and the object, and definitely the modes of self-referentiality multiply greatly when we consider the subject operating not just as thinker but also as an emotional and acting agent, but for the moment we only will consider the mode of thinking.
This complexity I mentioned as opposed to thinking of objects is due to that in object-oriented thinking the subject and object are clearly distinct, but this is not so for self-reflexive thought since the knower and the known are one and the same, while of course it is practically possible, since we operate in this mode of thinking almost daily but we must examine how it is possible for this to be.
It is that subject and object are not ontological categories but rather modes of being, because of it were an ontological category, it would be the case that thinking of one’s self divides the person irrevocably into two and with each level of thought it further splits into powers of two, which would be very much absurd, and it would also be the case that a being or a person can exist in different modes simultaneously and also that in each mode one fully subsists fully for it to be possible to know one’s self.
This also clarifies that we think even for the case of objects distinct from our person in their modality and not on the level of their ontology, this is why it is possible to maintain that reality exists independently from mind while also being accessible through the mind without any issue of an unbridgeable metaphysical gap.
But for the case of self-reflexive thinking itself, what happens is that when one ascends through meta-levels thoughts of himself, he introduces modalities in which he is fully represented and thinks and is thought about within those, without requiring to step outside of one’s self and see himself from a third-person perspective.
Thus this also shed light on the ontology and modality of objects both of sensible and intelligible natures, which both exist independently, and are distinct in nature but unified through the mind, which thinks of their mode of being in the same way, and it is not that the ontology of the objects is unknowable, but that the ontology of them per se is not an object of knowledge in the first place, but their mode of being is the object of thought and knowledge, and as such, it is a category error to talk of knowing the ontology itself instead of the mode, it is as if one talks of hearing colors or seeing sounds.