Another interesting point of comparison is Lovecraft’s shoggoths and the philosophical ‘chimera’. The latter is used as the exemplar of nonbeing, “that which in no case actually is” from Plato through the Scholastics and Hume up to present idiom. The Chimera of myth (a lion with a goat-body extending from its back and a serpent for a tail) like the shoggoth implies a sort of arbitrarily, horrifically recomposable living matter (=X) or concrete hallucination, which can bear all empirical predicates in its domain just on the condition that none can be specifically true. Which has, on the one side, a clear relation to the Kantian thing-in-itself and its successors, and on the other, of the gray goo and paperclippers of technological speculation; not to mention, in our present, the versatility and power to assimilate of capitalist markets and commodity production. There’s a weird coupling of nonbeing, beingness itself, and artifice—an artefactual, protean nothingness—here that seems to echo Heidegger’s view of ‘modern technology’ as dissolving the world of singular things into an on-demand stock of thingsness; and stories like The Thing, The Andromeda Strain, and Annihilation.
Not going anywhere in particular (necessarily?) with this, just a pet subtopic...
The thing-in-itself indeed ties somewhat more clearly to the HPL mythos beings, in that they are (by majority; or at least the major ones in the pantheon) supposed to not be three-dimensional in the first place. The thing-in-itself is the object without having to be rendered by any specific observer’s point of view.
While in (most) philosophy one doesn’t examine a topic which is able to cause anxiety, the notions themselves do negate a possible anxiety which would be caused by any examination, in my view. Again, even the notion of the thing-in-itself is formulated as a singular point in a plane: you cannot analyze it to anything, because by definition it connotes impossibility to analyze or attribute qualities to it. It exists only as an idea of difference.
To use a simple example (not for you, who obviously are familiar with the notion), and to tie this to Parmenides (and Plato) which I mentioned in passing in my article:
While a desk gets picked up as something in 3D space, with form, size and other qualities, theoretically one can assume that the same object (desk) still would exist as something, even if its observer had no ability to sense space, position, movement or the other core qualities humans pick up with the senses. So the desk, assuming it exists for any observer regardless of what abilities that observer has, will have some unknown qualities that aren’t dependent on observation; in this sense it is a thing as it is, a thing-in-itself, not to be known and distinct from any view we have of it.
Useful to note that while Kant made the term more popular, the thing-in-itself was already a known term in Plato’s time and is mentioned frequently (eg) in the dialogue between Socrates and Parmenides.
Another interesting point of comparison is Lovecraft’s shoggoths and the philosophical ‘chimera’. The latter is used as the exemplar of nonbeing, “that which in no case actually is” from Plato through the Scholastics and Hume up to present idiom. The Chimera of myth (a lion with a goat-body extending from its back and a serpent for a tail) like the shoggoth implies a sort of arbitrarily, horrifically recomposable living matter (=X) or concrete hallucination, which can bear all empirical predicates in its domain just on the condition that none can be specifically true. Which has, on the one side, a clear relation to the Kantian thing-in-itself and its successors, and on the other, of the gray goo and paperclippers of technological speculation; not to mention, in our present, the versatility and power to assimilate of capitalist markets and commodity production. There’s a weird coupling of nonbeing, beingness itself, and artifice—an artefactual, protean nothingness—here that seems to echo Heidegger’s view of ‘modern technology’ as dissolving the world of singular things into an on-demand stock of thingsness; and stories like The Thing, The Andromeda Strain, and Annihilation.
Not going anywhere in particular (necessarily?) with this, just a pet subtopic...
The thing-in-itself indeed ties somewhat more clearly to the HPL mythos beings, in that they are (by majority; or at least the major ones in the pantheon) supposed to not be three-dimensional in the first place. The thing-in-itself is the object without having to be rendered by any specific observer’s point of view.
While in (most) philosophy one doesn’t examine a topic which is able to cause anxiety, the notions themselves do negate a possible anxiety which would be caused by any examination, in my view. Again, even the notion of the thing-in-itself is formulated as a singular point in a plane: you cannot analyze it to anything, because by definition it connotes impossibility to analyze or attribute qualities to it. It exists only as an idea of difference.
To use a simple example (not for you, who obviously are familiar with the notion), and to tie this to Parmenides (and Plato) which I mentioned in passing in my article:
While a desk gets picked up as something in 3D space, with form, size and other qualities, theoretically one can assume that the same object (desk) still would exist as something, even if its observer had no ability to sense space, position, movement or the other core qualities humans pick up with the senses. So the desk, assuming it exists for any observer regardless of what abilities that observer has, will have some unknown qualities that aren’t dependent on observation; in this sense it is a thing as it is, a thing-in-itself, not to be known and distinct from any view we have of it.
Useful to note that while Kant made the term more popular, the thing-in-itself was already a known term in Plato’s time and is mentioned frequently (eg) in the dialogue between Socrates and Parmenides.