Value wrote
Would you disagree with this?
Don't think about intentionality yet. First get the epoche and the direction it takes one. Husserl's is a method, not an abstract argument. Take this cup before me which I recognize in all the usual ways. What is it that makes it so familiar? It is the "predelineation" of the affair. In Heidegger's terms, roughly speaking, seeing the cup is an historical event, always already cups and their places, uses, features and so on "ready to hand" as Heidegger put it, an established affair. And this cup here is an instantiation. (This kind of thinking is sort of derivative of Kant/Hegel, in part: When we observe an object, it is the universal that is deployed in understanding what lies before me that gives us the knowledge claim about the object. Hence the "rational realism" of this kind of thinking.) The presence apart from this is impossible, for the understanding is not intuitive but historical. So the cup is already understood Prior to the actual encounter because memory pre-cognizes, you might say, in an automatic processes of our existence, you know, waiting for a bus or planning dinner. You look at your watch already aware of what watches do, how they look, and the rest. This is a key part of what phenomenologists are telling us, that a descriptive account of what lies before you at the basic level of inquiry finds TIME to be most fundamental, and time has a structure that goes back to Augustine (see his Confessions, bk 11): past present and future. this is internal or subjective time, not everyday time and not Einstein's time, but the more elementary presupposed time that is about the structure of consciousness that receives the world in the first place, before Einstein could even begin. I observe the world in a past/present/future continuum; I AM a past/present/future continuum. Objects are events-in-time and outside of this is nonsense because knowledge claims at all are inherently time claims. Again, very important to see this on this point, because the epoche is telling us to reduce this temporal setting only to the most bare essentials such that when I see a fence post I suspend everything I know about fence posts, and leave the bare presence of what-is-no-longer-a-fence post to reveal itself.
This suspension or "bracketing" has been called the German gelassenheit, a term used by Amish and others. It is a yielding, if not to God, then to the world to see as clearly as possible, free of the presumptions of interpretation. And this is at the heart of givenness discussed here. Just the opposite, really, of what you call prejudgment. Much closer to the Buddhist's world in which judgment is altogether suspended. The simple "thereness" of the world is allowed to come forth.
Of course, this is much debated, and sad to say this kind of thing is why philosophy has such trouble. We are simply put together differently. A dyed in the wool analytic Anglo American philosopher will not touch such thinking for givenness is just impossible to conceive (Wittgenstein's influence and the positivism he encouraged). On the other hand. Is this right? Yes and no. One cannot deny that without language all one can do is stare mindlessly, like an infant child, for it is in this symbolic existence of ours that the edifice of knowledge is built.
But does this invalidate intuitive knowledge? Yes, for the most part. Knowledge is propositional, and as Rorty put it, there are no propositions "out there." Propositions don't reach out to other things. They don't have this "reaching out" epistemic. But what of Value? As an example, it is not like the color yellow: reduce yellow to the mere qualia of being appeared to in a yellow way, and frankly you run directly into Heidegger's (and Kierkegaard's) famous "nothing". See Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics? You can argue the yellow qua yellow remains "other than" the knowledge claim about yellow, but when you try to give this analysis, it falls flat, and one finds oneself in Heidegger's world of hermeneutics. there is this great passage from Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art that makes this world pretty clear:
What art is should be inferable from the work. What the work of art is we can come
to know only from the nature of art. Anyone can easily see that we are moving in a
circle. Ordinary understanding demands that this circle be avoided because it violates
logic. What art is can be gathered from a comparative examination of actual art works.
But how are we to be certain that we are indeed basing such an examination on art
works if we do not know beforehand what art is? And the nature of art can no more be
arrived at by a derivation from higher concepts than by a collection of characteristics
of actual art works. For such a derivation, too, already has in view the characteristics
that must suffice to establish that what we take in advance to be an art work is one in
fact. But selecting works from among given objects, and deriving concepts from principles,
are equally impossible here, and where these procedures are practiced they are a
self-deception.
Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.
My underscores. You see how Heidegger's mind works? Forget about there being some world "out there". There is only this world, our dasein, which is our existence, and IN this dasein, others and Others, things and people that are NOT me, make an appearance. This is not idealism.
To understand what my favorite French post Husserlians are saying, one has to step back from this strong hermeneutics, and encounter the world anew. It is in ethics and aesthetics that the world speaks! Now, you take issue with this:
On the one hand philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger have argued about an aspect of which one should not speak, since it cannot be captured within the context of language, while on the other hand there is the term Absolute that is to provide a qualitative basis for concepts such as ethical absolutism.
As substantiation for the idea you gave an example about suffering.
This "aspect" you speak of is traditional metaphysics, which presumes to speak of absolute foundations of being. As with Leibniz's monadology or Spinoza's Substance or Platonic forms and so on. The idea I defend takes a rather delicate look at this. Husserl thought there was something undeniable in just being in the midst of the world, and this was the intuitive grasp of the bare presence of things. Not a tree, but a structured presence of time, object relations, static and genetic phenomenology, and on and on. This guy is meticulous! His reasoning is that pure phenomena discovered in the epoche are intuitive absolutes---can you really deny something is occurring now? You can play Descartes with many things that are said about what is happening, but you cannot deny there is a presence before you. And, since epistemology and ontology are simply two sides to the same coin, this indubitability translates as an ontological absolute, a claim about What Is, about Being. So how is it that one can possibly apprehend an absolute? Only through an identifiable form of discovery, and this would be phenomenology. The "eidetic" essence of an object must include an epistemic dimension, a way to know it, simply because we do in fact know it. This makes knowledge at this level absolute, if still a work in progress.
Heidegger thinks Husserl is trying to walk on water. Derrida thinks Heidegger is trying to walk on water (see John Caputo's account of this in his Radical Hermeneutics). In steps Levinas, the post-contra-Heideggerian" Heidegger is right accept he leaves out the most important part, ethics and the absolute of ethics! I won't go into this because it gets too entangled in the details and frankly I am still working on this. But consider, Levinas's face of suffering in the Other presupposes (begs the questions about) an analysis of metaethics (and metaaesthetics, says Wittgenstein), that is, the question about the nature of the ethical "good" and "bad". I think the argument I laid out shows how this analysis has to go.
The idea that the world might be saying something (speaking) in the case of suffering seems to be invalid in my opinion.
Proof is in the pudding: stick your hand in a pot of boiling water. Is there any ambiguity in this? There IS ambiguity in more entangled affairs, for example, if sticking your hand is boiling water will deliver others from some other suffering, then one has to weigh the matter, working through a culture's established thinking and sentiment, perhaps; but such entanglements (and most ethical problems are embedded in this, and are thereby made ambiguous) are factual in nature, and facts are contingent (you would have to work this one out: facts contingent? The moon being closer to the earth than the sun, contingent?? Yes, because facts are language constructs, and language is "made" not discovered. I don't know how your thinking goes here, but for me, it is a foregone conclusion. You can argue about this. It is a worthy discussion). When I say the world speaks, it goes no further than the pure phenomenon one encounters in the scalding of the flesh. This is not a language event, and all we can and should do is describe it. That is phenomenology (it is also the way natural sciences work, of course). Of course, we take up the pain IN language as I am now writing about it, but there is something going on here that is not like the usual qualia, not like being-redly-appeared-to, as they say. that powerful sensation of boiling water on living flesh is an affair of radical Value. It tells us this is bad. But this term 'bad' belongs to language and propositional expressions, and, as Rorty put it, propositions are not "out there" just as truth is not out there. They are only in a language "game", and this obviously goes to Wittgenstein's insistence that value cannot be spoken: language games are contextualizations, and this grounds truth in contingency(Rorty has a serious problem defending his ethics, given his denial that there is a metaphysics of ethics, as there is no such thing as metaphysics at all! See Simon Critchley's critical paper, which I can't find now or I'd name it).
As you've noticed about phenomenology, "out there" and "in here" are not to be conceived as localized and separate. This is a very hard part of the equation. The stone I see is not, nor can it ever be conceived as apart from the Being that encompasses us both. It is not that its Being IS an idea in my head. Rather, it is that AS OTHER than my self, something "over there" and "not me", it is transcendence. That stone in its phenomenological over thereness (meaning, look; it's over there, and it's not me. this is what the descriptive account tells us) transcends my Being. Husserl held that because of the nexus of intentionality, we are thereby epistemically connected to the stone in the requisite way to validate a knowledge claim at the intuitive level (and the "naturalistic" level). Levinas, I believe thus far in reading him, holds this as well, but in his thinking, there is a metaphysics of alterity in the Other person that imposes an ethical imposition on our existence. As above, I see, and I refer to my claim in this, the deeper presupposition in this thinking: what IS the pure phenomenon of, call it positive and negative value? For this descriptive account, one needs to go to the determinative source, which is in the concrete actuality, the "presence" or the "givenness" of the reduced phenomenon itself. See Michel Henry and the way he underscores the clarity of the feels and smells and sights that one takes in once the presumptive interpretative field has been cleared. This is a Husserlian move to release the stone from, to put it simply, memory. This should sound a bit familiar. It is aligned with the Zen koan and the meditative approach to enlightenment. Husserl, of course, was no Buddhist. He was, as Derrida calls him, a Greek!--for he favored a systematic and "scientific" thesis for philosophical enlightenment. But what really happens when one starts "reducing" the world to its essential givenness? Practicing this daily? For me what happens is something quite impossible, by contemporary standards.
It was argued that intentionality, the ability to have sensual attention for the world at all by which one could manifest suffering, must directly originate from the pure source of quality. Therefore, the world originates from ones ability to sense, which would include that suffering.
In the case of suffering one is dealing with a fundamental aspiration, the essence of value.
That aspiration concerns qualitative authenticity that in the face of the Other (which includes 'the world') fulfils the fundamental moral question "What is good?".
To return to the Absolute and ethical absolutism.
As mentioned in my previous reasoning I believe that one can at most claim that the world is an aspired world, and within that aspiration there is a place for moral good and wrong but the difference would be that it wouldn't be a pre-Given good or wrong and there is a responsibility within the context of the aspiration that originates from the pure source of quality to make the world good.
More simply said, I believe that morality is about the question "What is good?" rather than the determination of what is supposedly actually good.
When morality is fundamentally dependent on the question 'What is good?' that might give rise to the idea that morality is subjective but that isn't the case when one factors in the fundamental requirement of respect of the Other.
From this perspective, it is respect that fundamentally underlays the world and intelligence.
I would have to get back to you this. I don't off hand recall his The Set of Problems Pertaining to Noetic-Noematic Structures in chapter four of part three of IDEAS I, and this is where Husserl's discussion lies. As I see it, and partially recall, Value as such is discovered in the "hyletic data" which will be later taken up as "givenness" (see Being Given by Jean luc Marion). I don't recall how Husserl dealt with it, exactly, but I am sure he systematized it and, contra Levinas who is explicitly a religious thinker, failed to see the profound nature of this. Very strong systematic thinkers are almost always dismissive of Value simply because they do not experience the world with any affective priority. Husserl talks a lot about intuition, but he is no "intuitionist" and certainly not a mystic. Quite the opposite.
But then, I am a "threshold" existentialist, a mystic in the Eckhartian sense. I defend a thesis of radical indeterminacy that assaults one's sensibilities at the "end" of the Husserlian reduction. This reduction has a radical Eastern counterpart, which is "neti neti" or, as we call it, apophatic theology: approaching God through negation of established interpositioned knowledge claims.
- By Gertie
- By Sy Borg