Lagayscienza wrote
We are born to suffer (and perhaps experience some joy) and die, because that is what the universe has been able to produce out of the raw materials and the available energy on a planet like ours. I know that would be no comfort to a little girl scavenging on a garbage dump in a country of vast inequality. But I cannot think of any other answer. And if phenomenology, or religion, can give that little girl a truer answer, and not just a salve, I'd love to know what it is.
Hope this is not too tedious.
You know by now that phenomenology is essentially a reduction down to "pure", if you're Husserl or Fink or Henry or Marion (Heidegger didn't talk like this), phenomena. The grandfather of this kind of thinking is Kant, and in order to address your question about the girl and her plight, one should have to come to grips with how phenomenology works through Kant, the unqualified rationalist, meaning his ethics is a rationalist ethics, too, which I find frankly perversely wrong minded. But Kant illustrates the method of philosophizing.
Just a quick look: Kant wasn't interested in the way we usually think about the world, and your references to "available energy" and the "planet" are entirely off the table. One simply not thinking about facts. One asks the question, what is reason? and instead of looking historically what Plato said or Hume or Aristotle, though he obviously DID read all of these and was influenced, but his work is not an analysis of what they said, he wanted to find out the nature of reason itself, and for this, one has to look at the way it appears in actual rational judgments that are there as a kind of scientific data, Kant being the "scientist" committed to "observation" of what is discovered in analysis. ALready, it is clear that this will be an apriori study, not empirical, since judgment itself is not among objects in the world. So, how is it that I judge things and he famously draws on Aristotle's categories.
He ask questions like, given that I know a cup here and a cup there and everywhere I see a cup i judge it to be a cup, implicitly or otherwise, there must be something in the judgment that unifies these particulars that is unseen in the particulars, a principle of "cupness". Sounds almost like Plato, this form of cupness, and the connection is genuine. Plato's metaphysics is not far from Kant, roughly speaking, but Kant is far and away the superior scientist. Anyway, his arrives at the pure form of judgment itself. Now, it is the endeavor of recent analytic thinking to explain these categories of pure reason of his in Pragmatist terms (Rorty) or historical terms (Hegel, Heidegger) and Heidegger is probably right, but he is right because he saw that no matter what we say these forms are, our saying will always be an interpretation, and the actuality before us, the pure form in this case, will be only conditionally or contextually true (Derrida), but really this springs from Kant, who knew that we could not "speak" what pure forms were; they are transcendental, as Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus.
Kant was never refuted in the essential philosophy of transcendence. He was analyzed to death, and still is, for two centuries, but never essentially refuted. Because he cannot be. See Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy on this, by Robert Hanna, who also wrote The Fate of Analytic Philosophy, From Frege to the Ash Heap of Analytic Philosophy. To remove metaphysics form philosophy has been like removing air from lighter than air flying: goes nowhere .
To speak about the girl and the ethical ground of her situation, now. Note how Kant was not at all interested in what was outside of the object of his interest, just as any scientist would be. The geologist in not concerned with material physics or ceramic engineering. There has to be focus, which is what the term reduction is all about. Kant reduces the scope of inquiry, bracketing all that is irrelevant. So he is not going to talk about the incidentals of the my judgment that I am gaining weight or whatever. Just whatever makes reason what it is as evidenced in these actual affairs. Phenomenology works just like this, a suspending of things you don't want to know. Science works like this.
Instead of reason, let's look at value. I want to know what it is as it appears and only what is there in this very limited presence of the actual occasion of its existence. The sciences are grounded in empirical observation and may not leave this horizon possibilities. Here, it is value qua value, or, the phenomenon of value. Will there be "purity" discovered, as Kant found in reason? Importantly, note that Kant's analysis was a search for a pure abstraction, I mean, the pure form of an affirmative judgment is...what? There is nothing in the palpable experience of things that shows itself as reason. As massively interesting as the Critique is, all it can possible produce is the form existence/experience has. The content he calls sensory intuition. Period. Here, we look for value and this is anything but vacuous form. It is the girl's suffering, the cold at night, pangs of hunger. So we arrive at the first premise, if you will, of our argument, which is the palpable presence of value. One has to look at this the same way Kant looked and judgment.
Pain is inherently bad. A bold statement, because of philosophers like Mackie who are reductionists of the worst kind. See in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong how looks for ways to explain things like a lawyer looking for precedents: analytic philosophers look into the world of existing language possiblities ONLY. He goes after Moore's non natural property, in favor of an alternative complex definition of the Good.
This moves immediately from the phenomenon itself, and onto a world of analogous ways the term is used.
Now, there is an analogous way to look at science, as in Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions that puts emphasis on the prevalence of paradigms that rule the direction of inquiry. One can't imagine Newton taking up inquiring into the Doppler shift in a light spectrum. But there is in science the most important assumption that what stands before one as the evidential bottom line is the Archimedean point of that stabilizes the world one does, and Mackie completely ignores this, which is why a say analytic philosophy knows a great deal about arguments, but very little about the world. They leave it to science to look at the world, and draw on their conclusions, ignoring the Kantian legacy, phenomenology, altogether.
Philosophy thereby loses it metaphysics and becomes a handmaiden to a thesis that cannot even begin to think about the girl and the ethical issues she presents. There is a very good reason science doesn't talk about ehtics or aesthetics: one cannot see these as one sees an elephant or salinized h2o. One cannot see the badness of hunger and misery. And since analytic philosophers are let science do their observations for them, they also have nothing to say.
But value, generally speaking, the ooh's and ahh's and yums and ughs of our world, not only cannot be dismissed like this is, to be honst, stupidly done, fashion, it is the most salient feature of our existence. Fancy that! The one thing that lies at the very core of what our existence is all about, thrown into a closet as if it were nothing at all. Look at Mackie chasing "the Good' around in the complexities of what the word means in its relations to moral judgments here, and other entanglements there. It is a conceptual entanglement that has no regard for the very thing the inquiry is all about at the basic level: value-in-the-world. What is this?
First observe. Put a lighted match to you finger. Is the empirically descriptive "factuality" of the event exhaustive of the observational evidence? Is what is there before you accountable in terms of the way the term The Bad can be made sense of in ordinary terms? I think I tried to talk earlier about the contingent and non contingent Good, and Mackie touches on this, but his whole book is meant to deny the latter without even giving it an honest glace. I am talking about excruciating pain. Now we do, not the Kantian reduction, but the value-phenomenological reduction, and suspend everything but the pain qua pain, observe the phenomenon like a geologist observes quartz or a stratum of rock, not missing a speck. There is IN this the extraordinary presence of what we can only call "the Bad", an awkward locution, but who cares, language makes it awkward.
The Bad is transcendental. Wittgenstein wouldn't talk about it because it was too important. He calls divinity "the Good" in Culture and Value. Analytic philosophers cannot deal with Witt on this. Russell called him a mystic. Wittgenstein said goodbye.
The girl's horrible situation is now elevated to metaphysics, and the bad things she experiences are metaethical in nature. Couple this with my claim here about epistemology and ontology and you have a rough sketch of the essence of religion: Our world is, analysis reveals, a meta-world, and therefore the issue of this girl has its grounding in the very visible ethics here at hand in our affairs. And what do we see? Good is defined by this impossible gravity toward something tha tis metaphysically qualitatively defined. The definition is impossible, for it issues from the world itself: pure value, that being-in-the-pain of the occurrent event is not reducible. It cannot be reduced to anything else, Derrida's difference/deference applies to language, but this is not language, this suffering. Language is out the window, and yet the window is always there, which is language under erasure (Derrida).
There is, in this, something truly profound. Can't say what it is. The girl's world is not to be conceived as a particular under a general heading, a universal. She "exists" and this analysis is about the transcendental nature of her existence. The individual cannot be categorized.
- By The Beast
- By Fanman
- By Pattern-chaser