Papus79 wrote
TY. It sounds interesting, ie. that I’d want to get my mind around it. Any Husserl recommendations in particular?
Also for my view on the topic of philosophy and engagement with it – I really see my inclinations and what I’m after more in line with alchemy and esotericism. It’s a playing field and one of the goals when you’re on that playing field is taking what you have in front of you and find ways to make it less crap (in an open, breathing, durable, really adaptable framing rather than a utopian single-parameter sense). That also means that if certain information sets would leave me feeling stuck or doomed that I need to find, as Eric Weinstein would put it, ‘other orchards’.
The thing about Husserl is reading, say, his Ideas I, it is dry, a bit demanding in parts. Kant helps, at least to get through the "Copernican revolution" that opens the door for transcendental idealism. If I am making it sound like an enterprise and not just a selection of texts, then this is right. Apologies. Husserl's
Cartesian Meditations presents things with clarity, until you get to the middle/end, perhaps, and then Fink's Sixth Meditation which is frankly difficult.
I have everything, and much more, on PDF. I can make them available if you like via, what is it called, cloud sharing?
I really think it’s social paradigms that mangle the possibility of these holding still at all. If it really becomes ‘need to know’ time (some suggest AI is where this becomes a reified rather than speculative problem) then we’re apt to take it more seriously because it has real world consequences in less of a war of belief sense (which is perennial) and more of a US vs USSR kind of way which is fine-pointed and urgent.
Social paradigms? Then the question goes to what it is to be social and what this has to do with those historical ontologies. But I would simply begin with asking what material substance is. The moment you begin to describe it, define it, you find yourself outside it, talking about properties. The term actually is a
contingent term, as it relies on contexts of meanings to construct its meaning, but then, it is not meant to be contingent, but absolute, that unseen substratum that makes predication possible. One has never observed material substance. Defining it as extension in time and space only makes matters worse, for these are contingent as well. What is time? It only makes sense IN the contexts of events or IN theoretical equations. By itself it makes no sense at all.
Metal substance? A nonsense term. The only thing that can make sense is talking about things and events. So what is a thing or an event? This is a very long discussion. Heidegger's Being and Time is a profound work on this. Time IS an event, and that event is us, that is, the "empirical" us. And so on. What about subjectivity? For me, this is where the entire discussion gets down to foundations. Husserl's Ideas I is fascinating; tedious, but fascinating. He observes that when we have encounters with the world, we do not experience its objects in the present, for an object is always eidetically (ideationally) bundled, and it is this eidetic-bundled-actuality that is an object. What is this bundling? Well, there is a theory of intentionality that focuses on the relational dynamics: an object is there, I know it, so what is analysis if this relation? See
Ideas I.
Social paradigms are what Husserl calls the "naturalistic attitude". One has to make a dramatic move to the phenomenological attitude, and this requires the epoche, a suspension of science's assumptions about objects. Husserl's is a "method" of changing perceptual awareness so that the :present" becomes more clearly intimated. I am reading Jean luc Marion on this very idea:
Being Given argues that Husserl is leading us to a , well, miraculous disclosure of what is "impossible" embedded in experience. This is the "eternal present". I argue that such a concept describes Buddhism's ultimate end. Meditation is an event in time whereby time is the construction of reality out of the past into a future unmade, and is annihilated. this is what it means to cease thought, affect, concerns, anticipations, caring and so on. The Buddha nature so vaunted as being there, always, already, is what is there already "beneath" the meditative struggle-not-to-struggle, and nibana, the Pali word, is what the Abhidhamma calls absolute reality, is the present unconditioned by time (thoughts, affect and everything that describes Being in the World, as Heidegger put it).
You see, I go Eastern on these matters.
Phenomenology is far better than the Abhidhamma at describing what Buddhists do (real Buddhists, the ones who are ready to overthrow the world) are far better at doing.
It is not that I take such matters as people and their politics/geopolitics lightly. I just do not see such esoteric matters as the above intersecting these.
I interpret this more as the place where consciousness becomes a kind of brute fact, whether it’s primary or simply something of a right-angle nature to matter (thinking of Landry’s Transcendent a bit which also seems to map to the way Alan Moore would speak of the 4th dimension, as did plenty of Paul Foster Case and Ann Davies discussion of the matter in BOTA). Mysticism attempts to strike out at another domain which seems to have its own congruent rules just that they seem significantly more loose in certain ways than they do here.
I suppose I draw a line between mysticism, an occult movement with its signs, symbols, and membership, and the designation mystical to something that is what issues from the world but is not totalizable, that is, subsumed by ideas. Husserl and Fink would settle for transcendental (as opposed to transcendent, which would be entirely beyond reckoning, like seraphs and cherubs. Wittgenstein would call this nonsense and he would be right). Metaethics is like this. But as for BOTA and the like, I don't see it. It is not that there is nothing to it, but I address this as I do popular religions: One has to separate the, say, uncanny feelings, the sense of awakening or being near an important threshold of sublimity, on the one hand, and on the other, what is said about these. The latter is an interpretative imposition, and one has to be very careful so as not to find oneself steeped in contrived jargon and beliefs. The former I take very seriously. The reason why I find phenomenology so apt is because is IS very careful. I think, as I have said, that meditation is a kind of final frontier for enlightenment/liberation, and that yes, there really IS such a thing. But how to think not within a tradition of ethereal practices, but within the logical soundness of well formed arguments, this is what assures that illusions are kept at bay. Tricky, really: Phenomenology is THE way to describe mystical experiences, and I can say this because if there were something other than this, it would be found out by phenomenology. It is open, looks closely at the structures experience. What is mystical is within phenomena, not inferred, not discursively reasoned out, but in the giveness of the world.
It's because it makes the move from everyday attitudes to phenomenological second order thinking, that is, thinking ABOUT thinking, about affect, about all we experience being in the world, that makes this truly foundational. Ontology is a second order thinking that is presupposed by enlightenment in the "mystical" sense, and to see this one has to make a break from the naturalistic attitude. The elaborate spiritual hierarchies of ancient religious metaphysics has to yield to its own foundations, and one, in the long run will have to reduce such ideas to their phenomenological
givens.
Here is, as Fink put it, discovery is its own presupposition. And what is revealed is not so much brute fact (Wittgenstein's
Tractatus is helpful here. What are facts?) but, errrrrr, absolutes, or, absolute "facts". Dangerous territory here, interms of responsible thinking, but a major part of Husserl is this magnetic draw toward things themselves, and the closer you get, the better you are at weeding out naturalistic, empirical claims from what is there, before your waking eyes, the more powerful existential intimations becomes. And words fall away, religion and its doctrines fall away. This is the brass ring of philosophy and religion: one's world is liberated and enlightened, and one no longer needs to read, obey, adhere, join, and so on.
Being Given by Jean luc Marion is extraordinary carrying forth the torch lit by Husserl.
I was listening to Will Durant’s ‘Philosophy of Spinoza’ (book read on YouTube) and it was interesting to hear that Spinoza sort of just accepted snobbery and narcissism as people doing what they had to do in order to survive in a rough-and-tumble world. Seems he had pretty deep insight into how that worked.
I think philosophy has this effect on people, and should have this effect, because it is a second order of thinking altogether, and requires a stepping away mundane affairs, and taking on a perspective not unlike a parent would have on a child's affairs. Very condescending. And people do not like to be condescended to. But if a person is to make it first priority to understand the world of being human at the most basic level, then things turn to a radical separation. Alienation is a common existential theme, and really, the only ones who get it are the ones already alienated, are possessed by that eerie sense that they are no at home in the world, and they simply want to get the bottom of what this is about. Philosophy is a kind of calling for them, and phenomenology actually responds to this, gives it articulation, looks at the structures of experience and reveals its "presence" IN the mundane.
I don’t think there’s a possibility of getting most people interested in philosophy, just that if you can in some way triage certain ‘moves’ off of the playing board as invalid, particularly where they’re not only objectively wrong but antisocial in their implementation and results – that’s where I think this could at least cut away at some of the kindling and make a tighter radius or cluster of places and ways in which people can be wrong. This is sort of like where in murk and uncertainty the cottage snake oil industries and grifts thrive robustly, and sometimes those snake oil doses also pull on finding an outgroup and figuring out how to expropriate their stuff in the old Russian kulak manner.
But where does this reductive triage point to? To what end? What you say here is really precisely to my point: you find yourself in a reading labyrinth of reductively settled themes and theories. What IS this final bank and shoal (I do like Shakespeare) from which one can make the critical move outward, to
enlightenment? I think the Buddhists and Hindus found something long ago (putting aside the bad metaphysics) but they couldn't talk about it very well. Who does talk about it well? Phenomenologists. Certainly not all spiritualists, these thinkers. But if a person has that "eerie" intimation I spoke of above, phenomenology provides the Archimedean leverage to make it happen. Phenomenology is inherently alienating! (But this is ambiguous, isn't it? Because alienation requires being alienated from something. From the phenomenological perspective, it is the general lot of people who live out their lives like objects, programmed machines, never questioning; Heidegger called the question the "piety of thought". He and phenomenlogists generally think this foundational questioning is the center of something profoundly meaningful. Of course, to pursue this is to exacerbate one's alienation from worldly affairs! As monks and nuns do.
I have to wonder if this means ‘idea’ in a particularly narrow sense? Ideas as far as I can tell can as often be baskets of related content and their connections, if it’s declarative in nature rather than oppositional (eg. Atheism vs. Christianity or Darwinian Evolution vs. Biblical Creationism) then you have a basket of content whose opposite is….? It doesn’t seem like that would be universally applicable.
He is referring to logic. To even entertain a proposition, from the most mundane to the most radical, it is impossible to conceive of this unbound to the constraints of logic. One cannot talk about something beyond reason, for example. This is just a manner of speaking, for a closer look reveals it is a contradiction, for one has to conceive of something beyond conception to make sense of it.
Mystical insights, to speak loosely, are not beyond reason. Imagine if there were, in some extraterrestrial mission, the discovery of a new color. It would be an intuitive discovery and logic would be well and fine with it. Buddhists talk about "absolute reality" in the Abhidhamma and Witt. would call foul! But they are not making some impossible claim. They are referring to something revelatory, something novel that presents itself to awareness. Witt cared nothing for such things that I have read. He just wanted to stop all talk about metaphysics, things beyond and above what can be said. They "saying", I am responding, is not bound by reason's laws, but by content, and this is what holds matters hostage to day to dayness. Reason has no content itself, and it entirely open to all possibilities. If there Is something better than reason, reason will find it out. The Buddha was in no way at all irrational.
What I see that causes me not to go here – we’re in a very, very structured universe. So much so that it gives far more pain than pleasure. It’s structured enough that plenty of people turn to meth and fentanyl to solve their problems or end up taking their own lives in more blunt ways. When things are that rigid it suggests to me that we're dealing with a system that has coherence all the way back around behind our experiences of self - even the subjective isn't all that much more fungible than the objective world and you learn those rules by experimentation and seeing just how many things don't work in interior space.
No, and yes, Husserl would say. You are operating in the natural attitude. One has to step back, and out of this. There is this division: On one side there is the daily living, and all issues gravitate to this place. On the other is the phenomenological reduction, central to phenomenology. You might want to give a listen to the following. The speaker talks too fast, is reading, but, oh well. If you have a mind to, give some time to this, starting at 40:00 minutes into it, for something to the point here. It is long, there's jargon, refers to other philosophers, and in this regard can be tedious. But the ideas are there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m_3oXb ... hyOverdose
This discards that we live in a painfully solid world with equally merciless consequences. I’m not calling it Pollyanna, it seems almost more black-pill.
Not really. It is simply not talking about ethics here. It is talking about what happens track down our ideas that "think" the world. I say, "look, there is a dog!" to deconstruct 'dog' is simply to make inquiry as to the what this event IS, this referring to a dog. If I ask the question in a mundane way, I am told, perhaps, about its species, breed, the luster of its coat, perhaps about how well fed it is, how its bark is high pitched, and so on, virtually indefinitely. But track down ALL that can be said and there is no finality to anything. The truth is not supposed to work like this. So truth ends up endlessly deferential, deferring to something else. Of course there is a lot more to this, and Derrida can be exasperating, and I don't rea much of him. But as I read "around" him, it is clear he takes up the the world phenomenologically, only to contradict Husserl in tht there is NO pure/brute apprehension of the present.
But the merciless consequences: I argue a lot about this. My position is a little complex. In the end, I conclude that this world is understood as if eternity were separable from finitude. It is not. I won't go on about it unless you want to, But I side with Levinas, ethics is first philosophy, these merciless things--what are we doing here in this place? It is ethically impossible, or, apodictically not possible, like causality, we are bound to a metaethics that resolves the world.
An odd thesis, you might think, but I think there is no way around this.
It seems like this should encapsulate better somehow. It’s somewhat clear that human knowledge is a kind of flotilla, it’s about self-consistent observations and so much of physics and the very big, the very small, consciousness research, etc. is an attempt to enlarge that flotilla more (which when you really think about it – this is all it can ever be because we’re really unlikely to find some absolute source causation and I’m not sure we’d have any idea how to even test for such a thing as we still end up with an uncaused cause which seems incoherent).
Of course. But this kind of thinking is pre-phenomenological. Once you see the world through the epoche, the phenomenological reduction, it all changes, for the "naturalistic attitude" is suspended.
What do you call something that attempts to interpret the current state of knowledge and draw deeper conclusions from it? I know the popular term for this is ‘Philosophy of Science’ although when we talk about science we’re talking about a rather specific set of claims that can be reliably recreated in a laboratory, in some sense you could have a broader base to include the odd, the non-testable, non-repeating, etc. but I’m not sure what the name would be. That by and large is what I’d be interested in at present (although admittedly – some naïve hope that it isn’t just another way to blow ourselves off the planet).
Current state of knowledge? I call it irrelevant to the matter at hand. I call it, a field of interests outside those of philosophy. Philosophy is concerned with what empirical science presupposes, not what it says. A geologist understands carbon dating, say, but this is not philosophically important at all. Rather, is asks, about the knowledge structures that make assertions possible, e.g.
Philosophy of science is just scientific speculation. The nontestable is a reference of empirical observations. Non testable suggests something outside this, something that is confirmed not from inferences that lead to principles grounded in inductive logic, but something there, in the fabric of things that serves, as Fink put it,
as its own presupposition! Nothing supporting, justifying save itself. An absolute. Husserl thought the reduction reveals this. Its not being testable is a matter of interpretation. A hard issue, this one. He thought his method, epoche, gave philosophy the bedrock of all sciences.
I think that does more to clarify my point – that if they’re looking at form only they’re missing context, and the ‘scientific bearing’ does its best to exclude other considerations. I don’t think that’s a given with metaphysics in general, just a particular variety where anything but form is seen as unhip.
Philosophy, too has entirely dismissed this. Heidegger famously presented the whole self, human dasein. He was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Not that he was right about everything.
So it wouldn’t if a scientist ducks a request to give an opinion on a non-scientific matter, it’s another thing if (as reductive materialist) they make a positive claim that anything other than the physical and matter is BS. That’s where they get into asserting a certain kind of materialist / physicalist frame and it doesn’t seem to be informed by much of anything other than whether they ‘fit in’ or are seen as conventional enough to be worth doling grant money out to.
I asked a physicist what material matter is. She said no one knows. Of course, she was right. It is simply a place holder term that has limited use. The trouble with the term is that it serves to bypass inquiry, so we go about ignoring it, and let religion address the eternal affairs. This only leads to confusion. Phenomenology is the way out of this messy business because it doesn't deal in such bankrupt terms, choosing to attend only to the world as it is, leaving out explicitly impossible ideas like res cogitans and res extensa. Empirical scientists are not philosophers, so they don't take up the issue of ontology at all (unless you're talking about the term in its popular modern uses, as in the ontology of knitting).
Until someone declares that consciousness is an emergent property like the rest, then we’re left trying to figure out even how debate what should be in what category under what criteria. The hollowing out of properties in the more conventional sense, ie. where it’s sensory data as you’re focusing on, seems to fall back on some variant of ontic structural realism and in turn it seems like Landry’s philosophy seems to map on to one of the variants of OSR that would hold relationships as primitive but both properties and objects not.
Consciousness as an emergent property runs into the same problem as thought "emerging" from brain activity: Whatever it emerges from can only be conceived in the emerging consciousness, so in order to affirm that from which it emerges, there must be a way affirm what is NOT the emerging property, that is, assume a perspective that is not that of consciousness. Or: how is it possible to to even conceive something outside of consciousness if all conceiving is conscious conceiving? This is Wittgenstein's point. It's like affirming what is beyond thought and logic: the act of affirming is inherently logical.
Ontic structural realism? Relationships as primitive but both properties and objects not?
I think we really need a reciprocal view of Darwinian evolution for this. Some way to frame it that perhaps considers that it’s riding on the back of a deeper process that may very well be doing the exact same thing but participating in a different manner. To some degree I think the re-emerging sort of materialism-oriented panpsychism that people like Philip Goff propose seems to fit this bill, and also seems to take a shot at not only how biogenesis wouldn’t be a problem (in that sense the ‘RNA world’ could move things right along to cells just fine because it, pre-cellular organic compounds, would have some semblance of desire and optimization).
It is generally not well received when a claim that talk about evolution, materialism, biogenesis, organic compounds, and other language that belongs to empirical science is prephilosophical. Not that it's wrong, it is simply not about basic assumptions. Analytic philosophy is at work in this
tendency to look to the natural attitude for insight, and it goes nowhere. Put all ideas in abeyance and behold the world, what you see is not biogenesis or organic compouds. It is an event unfolding and it has analyzable features and this is the beginning of philosophy. All theory issues from this primordial reality, the giveness of the world that is simply assumed in science. It is the reductive center for all basic thinking, and, per above, is its own presupposition.
Helpful to see Husserl's pov is Anthony Steinbach's
Mysticism and Phenomenology
.
I know how off putting this is, but frankly, phenomenology is the only way to proceed if one wants an exposition of the world at the level of basic questions.
Donald Hoffman brings this up all of the time – ie. that the brain does a wonderful job of showing conscious correlation but can’t, at least as we’re currently framing it, say anything on the more specific subjective content like the taste of coffee or chocolate.
I am actually talking about objective content, like that brain that we all see and affirm is there, before our eyes. Conscious correlations? Correlative to what? How is it possible to conceive of something correlative consciousness if all events are OF consciousness? to say consciounsess is correlative to object X, one would have stand apart from consciousness and make the judgment from a third pov. ???
The taste of coffee is here most proximal to judgment, As a taste, it is relatively free of doubt, for while one can question whether it is coffee actually, or just a very good simulation, one cannot question the immediacy of the taste itself, nor, as the line of thinking goes, the structure of thought that attends it. We think about many things, but what is there, in our midst, in the "present" encounter, is the thought itself AS a thought, not its referents, the things out there, buses and planes and shoes and socks.
Perhaps you see where Husserl is trying to take us. He wants to suspend all of the purported knowledge that fills our everydayness, so as to uncover the reality that is actually there, antecedent to this everydayness, and this everydayness includes science. And perhaps you can see how this serves to describe the meditative event whereby all entangled thought and affect is terminated (ideally), and one encounters oneself in the eternal present. I am sure Husserl's method is the definitive exposition of the East's mystical claims about liberation and enlightenment. Far better than anything Eastern philosophy has to say.
I cringe a bit at the word ‘knowing’. Our knowledge, or at least its context, is only ever partial. Sure, it’s an event but its never ‘knowing’ in the profound sense.
This actually gets to one of the reasons why I’m interested in reading Landry, he’s trying to break the mystery at the boundary of subject and object by the way his three modalities go round with each other. It may not be 100% correct but it gives me another way of thinking about the whole problem that isn’t locked into that binary of ‘in here’ and ‘out there’.
And if you find the three modalities a compelling concept? What has happened in the "finding"? It's like any other argument runs along the lines of analytic thought, so that once you read Dennett, say, and you are convinced qualia is a nonsense term, or perhaps the Gettier problems, the challenge to traditional epistemology, is worked out better than earlier because someone discovered a logical back door, then what has changed besides the fact you now have a better argument? These things go nowhere. The assumption of analytic philosophy is that all that can be done in the name of progress is to become a parasite on empirical science, a mere technical extension, so that, he, well, now we know; it is biogenesis! which is just one more notch on the belt everydayness. Kierkegaard realized that this is what had become of the church in his time, and philosophy was Hegelian, hyperrational, as if our living existence were a play of rational discourse waiting for the next logical inference.
We are an actuality that makes an existence, which is about value and metavalue, ethics and metaethics. That is, what makes the world important is meaning, and there are in our world powerful, extraordinary meanings that are always already there, unregarded, and beyond the totality of our paradigms (our standard ways of understanding). This why I take meditation so seriously: it is a method, a radical extension of the Husserlian epoche, that in real time "purifies" experience, if you will.
That gets to some of the controversy as well with whether quantum noise is actually random or just complex process that we’re seeing too late and which looks like noise to us. We also have the double-slit experiment which does a whole other strange thing of suggesting that probability is a thing that’s ontologically real rather than just being an epistemic plug where humans try to describe truly complex systems (like weather stating 80% chance of rain)
Whatever underlies quantum phenomena, it cannot violate the law of sufficient cause, and I say this not because I know the physics, but because causality is apodictic. Arguments only provisionally suggest a violation of causality. I don't know where this will go, but we are bound to this principle, and when talk turns to some sui generis condition of being that allows for things to appear ex nihilo, then we have to be inclined to assume it is in error. It simply comes down to talking Real nonsense to talk about things just appearing spontaneously.
This is where I feel like people tend to beat up on Donald Hoffman’s conclusions but what he and Chetan Prakash are saying with Conscious Realism is describing all of reality as a network of conscious agents where our senses and framing are drastically reduced and honed to a Darwinian fitness landscape where we see as little as possible of actual reality to conserve on what’s important to winning games of differential success (and those traits that win reciprocally get selected for).
What will happen is this, according to, well, me: The investigations into the private world of a self, the interiority of experience, will lead only to one thing, which is the self' itself. There will come the inevitable juncture where there is a revelation that objective talk has been, all along, about that generative "originary" basis of the entire generated world we call reality; then all eyes will turn to phenomenology, a
personal examination of one's own interior. And here lies the eternal present. Perhaps you would find Eugene Fink's
Sixth Meditation interesting. I get some of my insights from here. (I have it, of course, on PDF.)
I go way beyond Hoffman, from what I've read. Beyond the extravagant claims produced in the margins of scientific speculation. I make claims about the primacy of impossible revelatory experiences. Bu then, so did the Buddha. See the Abhidhamma (a little absurd in places, but then, it is very old.)
I’m saying ‘black box’ from the perspective that you have a mysterious category where it’s not likely that it’s internal processes that yield its results are mysterious but rather that you can’t see those processes and thus are easily at a loss as to how to even get a fingernail under it. It’s also a term used often in programming when you’re stuck using 3rd party providers and that the programming of those 3rd party API’s and other features are ‘dark’ in that you don’t have access to them to gain competency as to how they operate.
But what is this fingernail, and where does it lead? It is, in my thoughts, pragmatic only. This entire landscape of events we call reality is a process that endeavors toward value, not "truth" (this follows Nietzsche, but then N was too crazy with pain to see. It also follows Rorty, the American pragmatist). Truth is a problem solved. My car breaks down I have a wrench, screwdriver, a manual, and what are these, their definitions, their essences, if not a to-be-used, ready to hand. Language is like this, too. When I speak, write, it is an execution of internal successes had during childhood when I learned the words, their sounds, associated them with objects, and so on. Each word a "consummation" of a problem solved, and I got "right" when others affirmed, celebrated my youthful competence. At the basic level, language is utility event, and its embeddedness in the world is a fusion of utility and actuality/value, an entanglement, a pragmatic entanglement. What I argue is that truth seeking, that fingernail, is an affair of the interiority in a matrix of problem solving that will ultimately resolve in a problem solved, consummated in what Buddhists call nirvana, what Hindus call Brahman: primitive names, if you read the myths, for something incredibly profound about our existence. I think when a person sits and meditates seriously, there is in this a radical putting aside of the pragmatics of language and its affective entanglements. One finally is in the present, not in the temporal rush of the past's immediate claim on the future (das man, again. Heidegger, and his ilk, hold that most people go through life robotically, like children with no capacity to pull away from affairs and ask questions. When one does this, one has a realization that the firmament beneath all we say and do is empty. Science chases its own tail, so to speak (see my icon, the snake swallowing its own tail, because ideas led to other ideas, defer to other ideas, endlessly deferential. This only ends when questioning turns to actuality, the self's interiority).
So its true that we receive language, authors, systems of thought, pretty much all of our tools for participating in society (outside of bodily functions) from other people (although technically we get bodily functions from our parents – so it’s biological rather than cultural information).
I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that your sources are always thinking for you. IMHO the moment you start aiming for consilience between ideas and trying to reconcile them against one another you’re doing something different – you’re straightening out the map and congruency testing it. To me that’s where rote conformity ends because that’s a process that’s engaged in for the sake of smashing convention when its convention for its own sake.
I am thinking about the actual moment when the thinking sits there before you, and you "observe" the words in production as you think, as they emerge. The question arises, is this line of thought the "me" I have been looking for in the effort to discover my own identity? As a rule of apophatic thinking, if one can observe a thing, then the thing observed is not the one observing; there is the "distance" between the seat of subjectivity and that which is observed. I am thinking right now, but I stop identifying with thoughts spontaneously produced when I pull away to think about those thoughts AS thoughts. Have I merely changed themes, like talking about cats, then about the weather? Or has something else occurred? Phenomenologists take this kind of things as existentially significant, this "crisis" of identity in which one becomes alienated from the world by putting the world and its spontaneous language production under review.
This is very, very different from science as we know it, this pulling away from being "inside" the production of experience, and identifying oneself as a lawyer or a teacher or a father, and so on, to stand apart from all that would make a claim on who one is. It is a radical departure from everydayness.
I think I stated it as well as I could earlier, where it doesn’t make contact for me is – left alone – you are what you read is an incredibly profound claim that, IMHO, when unpacked better translates ‘what you read adds more building blocks to the future you’. Both that rephrasing and, I think the actuality of the situation, are both less profound.
It's only as profound as one can make of it. To know that you know, see that you see, and so on, can be registered as very alienating. One has to acknowledge that reality and truth is constructed by thought and thought is not just an innocent bystander, but a dynamic part of what we take as Being.
Sorry about the length. I'll keep it shorter.
- By Cathal
- By Stoppelmann
- By Eckhart Aurelius Hughes