Six Paradoxes from Hume:
1)The PARADOX OF OWNERSHIP
The mind does not posses perception nor does perception own the mind. On the contrary the mind is itself is constituted by the ownership of its perceptions. What owns has no reality beyond its act of ownership. Perception become merely a way to register ones owning of perception. That is a way to account in that ownership for it.
Ownership is very different from possession in that:
a)It implies no verb to Be. To possess something I need to be alive, but a dead man owns, just as much as a live.
b)Ownership is collective without being individual. Many men might posses a piece of land, and both land and men be seperate, and yet a company is collectively owned, and has no reality beyond that collectivity.
c)And yet for all this collectivity, owning is exclusive (if not individual). As I own something, a mine is given as that which owns, a mine which as I own it gives me as the owner. I might possess a farm with my wife, brother or friend, but as I own my piece of it, I own it alone, even though that owning must be collective!
d)Owning defines in itself its own relationships. To Own a house or a person is to have nothing which frames the freeing beyond the ownership. The house or land remain the same . The right of the house to be owned, and be a home, is therefore what itself makes the home.
Ownership is not itself ever precarious. As I own it I am clear a mine which owns is given. What is impossible is pulling out a possession beyond the circumlocuation of ownership What is precarious is then ones ability to always own the same thought, when what one owns is constantly shifting in it nature, and metamorhising into other perceptions. All composition, all ownings must straddle many acts of ownership, all the way up to the point beyond which one is.
2)The PARADOX OF UNITY.
Unity is essentially collective. An idea is unified be it the perception of a single instance or the perception of a table. The unity remains essentially he sam. Tehre is no separate domain of synthesising therefore. And yet the picture is complicated by a number of facts’
a) The Unified arranges the mind in terms of intensity. That which gives itself exclusivity in unity, and has no existence beyond its being owned in unity, in the most intense, with though unties which involve many thoughts being necessarily less intense.
b) The most intensity thoughts are therefore the least in duration. Those unities which straddle many perceptions existing as unified in themsevles, and yet having a polymorphous identity.
This last point gives the paradoxes of ideas which are identical that that of which they re the idea of, an yet polymorphous for all that. Moreover this diversity clearly has its own momentum. A idea of a triangle, or of a table, will as it is the idea it is, as it is the uity it is, naturally involve and constant slippage between ideas which elsewhere are independant. Unities are therefore ant counter point. One unity will straddle many others, in which it is caught, and between which it necessarily functions. In this series of unities, the ‘unifying’ thought will merely exist as a perception like ll th others. A member in the set of thoughts it somehow gives,
Unity will therefore both be absolute, and yet is very inexcreblity is itself a source of diversity.
3)The PARADOX OF INTENSITY.
Each perception might be unified in itself, and yet perceptions themselves have a geography of intensity. Each instnsity can therefore communicate itself to following thoughts, or to those thoughts with which it is contiguous to. Intensity is that which slips between unities, that which cannot be givien in one or other of them, but rather that which radiates out. Each intensity exist therefore as a potential epicentre. And yet as all intensities do so, these epicentre only have effect if the geographies s of the mind is mapped out, or better charted. Each epicentre must therefore be arranged within other epicentres to create local places of intense thought, local agglomerations- nor does the mind exist beyond these maps.
Are then three clear ways to arrange intensity:
a) Contiguity. Each perception spontaneously moves into the next. Each thought therefore always borrows from the previous’ intensitiy, and owns it parts as its own
b) Resemblance, each intensity will invariably be caught up with other perception with which it is like, and will blend its own power.
c) Cause and effect. This is the geographic conjunction pure and simple, As a mind links together past contiguities all of which ressemble one another, it creates an idea of a natural conjunction. Each conjunction, remain the conjunction of unequals whose link is merely defined in the ability o radiate into one another, so as one given the other also lights up and bekons the mind onward.
Intensity is therefore only intense as it is born in prisoned. That is it only becomes something able to communicate itself as something different from the rest, as it is conifed in someway, by which it can be clearly commincated. An intensity id therefore only intense as it has its own geography.
4)The PARADOX OF TENSE.
If all that is owned are perceptions, then there is clearly no real difference between past present of future. Or rather the difference does not lie in the perceptions itself, but rather in their arrangement. Any one perception will no doubt have both ‘moments’ or memory and moments of present thought within it, which differ only in intensity. That is only in their ability to bleed into other perceptions. Tense exist are ways to arrange agglomeration of perception, and allow then to orchestrate there relation with own another. Each perception is at once the past and the future as it is the past. Each past or future is merely a past amongst all the others absolutely possible.
Moreover as there is no being beyond these tenses its makes no sense to ask what is real and what is imaginary. Nature itself remains utterly hidden therefore, and the reality we enjoy if given by these arrangements. And yet this does not stop, sinister and elsewhere other stories existing. Natures unity might be hidden that threfre merely the subject of our guess work, and yet the world is no illusion, and not idealistic. We merely live in this realities legacy, and the real plot is always somewhere strange hot and foreign.
5)The PARARODX OF A UNTIY OF METAMORHOUS.
If a perception is a unity, which gives itself hen it cannot of itself by perceived. On the contrary at it is given, as an owned it is automatically already over, and within the next perception. That is, the truly unified implies the perceptions is itself unknowable by the individual, even those it defined that person as owning Each owning must therefore imply a second relationship, quite elsewhere, in which one ‘owns’ that perception – or perhaps better perceives what it means to own that perception that unity: What it meant to be that which perceived these things. Each perception therefore embodies others, and yet is itself available to be embodies in other perceptions, from which nonetheless remains absolutely different. And yet, for the mind itself this thought is by definition imperceivable. The mind will simply naturally turn from one way of viewing the world into the other, with little or no forwarding. Each perception therefore absolutely naturally produces others, in which its ‘reality’ is perceived.
A case will therefore demand a cause as something anterior and posterior to it. In this effect the cause is given as that which caused this idea, that which some how paved the way for what is now, and therefore that which that what is now is itself giving.
Moreover this giving itself is bottomless. A single link can resonate across all the following difference, which follow on from it/. However in this process there will be clear breaks, Each single perception embodies, and yet that that in which it is embodied itself becomes a subject of perception, it also mutates into other thoughts. That is it always becomes composite, and caught up in others. The ‘ones in which it is given become themselves creative of the sense it is in many other thoughts. And yet they will only do so, as long as one can follow the lines of intensity, in which there are always caught up within myriad others.
And yet this being with others is itself parasitic of the intensities they straddle, Each perception will therefore give itself immediate protension, and claim to be able to arrange far more that its immediate domain, and will, as it is given warp the world in its favour. Of course for individual themsevles, as in itself a perception is weak, this distortion need not matter, the problem only comes when many perception are habitually given together.
The Paradox is therefore that unties are theselves evel as they are undified only thought through others.
6)The PARADOX OF IDENTITY.
Once the last point is realized, a final point emerges. There is nothing natural in identity, beyond its constant fabrication of a means of ownership. This fabrication runs across perceptions, as it makes the attempt to claim that the bodies unity is the same as the essential effect only unity created. It aim is therefore to produce a feedback, where thought, which are given by composite conjuctions of perceptions and the ideas beyond them, are of themsevles no different from the ideas they themselves determine. Duration ha a critical role in this process. Both because it is only in a duration that he myriad embodying perception, and the idea embodies can be conjoined. Moreover, once the juncture is given, it is in duration that the essence of the new idea will embody itself as something other and different. IT will take the duration as a part in its idea, that is take up the variablity in the giving of the idea as the idea itself, as what it is in the idea that conveys reality. The idea, and its embodiment become thereby comprehended in a single essence. This essence will the be free to define the condition is subsequent realizations.
These subsequent realization involve several extra dimensions:
a)As an identity includes a perception within it, is open up to the difference of resemblance. Ironically perhaps therefore an identiy by including perceptions within it extends beyond the unity which spawned it, and naturally necessarily included other ressembling perceptions as its possession. One can possses such an identity itself, and can lie through it, only at the cost of a mongrolization of the thought.
b)Identity has a different relationship with difference. A unity will by itself be what it is and nothing more. In might compose itself within a difference, and yet will never confuse itself in that difference. This confusion is the natural ground for identity. Identity therefore makes this difference its own principle of unity. Thoughts which are therefore seperated in time and space, will become under the under the egress of the identical which naturally engrosses difference as its own possession.
c)Once this move has been made the very fine question is opened u a to how difference a difference actually needs to be. This is o course an matter of empricism. The question always coming down whether the perceptions can ride piggy back on ressemblance and causation, and so straddle differences in which it is given or not. And yet there is here the extra dimension of duration. Given that the identical is necessarily in flux, some change will occur.
d)Moreover there is clearly no clear cut off in this process, What characterizes the identity is after all not a standard but a shifting claim that two incompatible are in fact one and the same, There is therefore ability no reason for an identical to exactly hold itself within a unity. Indeed in a sense an identiy cannot, as uits very premise was that it could replace that unity.
e)However the situation is of course further complicated by the fact that the past is a perpetual presence within the embodiment of any identity, The past will itself be constantly up dated, and moved according to the new thought and claims. The entire system will therefore have a circumlocuation logic of its own. As the past changes the point of identity, which then changes the present and the past.
Each identity will therefore run across many tenses, which it will pull in the interest of its single great tense, its single being, it claims to possess that which really can only be owned.