Philosophy Discussion Forums

Hereandnow wrote: ↑August 30th, 2020, 9:25 am

Atla wrote
As a nondualist, this phenomenology business comes across rather bizarre to me. Do we analyze experience, trying to find its underpinnings and such? However, what we are analyzing experience with is also experience. And everything being experience, it also has no underpinnings, so what are we actually doing?

Sure, science in general is even worse off in this regard, it avoids the issue of experience entirely, pretends that it doesn't even exist (if they venture beyond instrumentalism). Even though all of science and everything science studies, is also happening in experience.

By my lights, that is pretty insightful. Professional philosophers (analytic ones) know this, they just are so convinced by Wittgenstein that it is folly to discuss what is not discussable. That whole Tractatus is nonsense, says Wittgenstein himslef, and he was only trying to point the way out of speaking nonsense, which philosophical traditions are so full of. Metaphysics is not, not true; rather, it speaks nonsense, no sense at all, as in, the present kind of France is bald (I think that one is Russell): not true, not false. Just nonsense.

Wittgenstein says things like, logic is transcendental, value is transcendental. What does he mean? It's that one cannot conceive of logic without using logic; it can never get "behind" itself to "see" itself. This is a devastating idea for metaphysics (of course, Kant said the same thing 200 years ago); and value simply is not observable. Take all the descriptive, logically formed facts, states of affairs of the world,and there will be no value; there will be "yums" and "ughs" of course, but nothing in the facts that makes a yum "good". But there is no denying that a yum or an ugh has something beyond the merely factual. It is the source of all of our ethical shoulds and shounldn'ts, but since this good and bad never make an OBSERVABLE appearance (outside of us being IN it, tortured by Nazis, eating Haagen dazs, say), that makes it off limits to inquiry and argument. W notoriously turned his back (literally turned his chair around) when the discussion turned to ethics.

Philosophers in the Us and GB have taken this to heart, and their discussions are very rigorous and very clear, but because they observe this strict line between sense and nonsense, they have become like Wittgenstein and turn their chairs around when it comes to talk of Being, existence, reality, metavalue, transcendence, or any other lofty theme that steps over that line. Our caring, our moods, and the entire irrational dimension of our existence becomes reducible to what is clear and scientifically affirmable, like neuronal activity and C fibers firing. They want propositional clarity! And not the vague talk about things unclear.

The trouble with this is impossible to calculate. It constitutes a dismissal of the powerful realities that make us human, and it turns wisdom into a cerebral game. Phenomenology, on the other hand, goes where philosophy is well, designed to go: to the threshold; it is a nonreductive embracing of what lies before us as it presents itself. It does not deny science at all; it simply says science is not proper philosophy. For this, one has be honest and allow the world to be duly represented as it is. It takes seriously what has been marginalized by rigid, conservative analytic thought: to love, hate, have passion, seek beyond the formulaic. In this thinking, it is science that is marginalized, yielding to the broader ground of experience-in-the-world.

Unfortunately, to see this as a compelling idea, one has to be drawn to it in the first place. One has to look at the world and ask seriously, in a non academic way, what it means to exist, be thrown into a world to suffer, love and die. Matters like this have always been religion's prerogative. Now religion is all but undone among thinking people, but these matters, these profound matters that have driven cultures and beliefs for centuries are OPEN to philosophy without the drag of religious dogma.

I speak of it as if phenomenology were a kind of philosophy of religion, and to me, it is, for it allows the exposure of religious themes to appear as they are, as part of the structure of experience. "Throwness" is a Heidegerian term. But then, Heiedgger was, in the end, no religious thinker, nor was Sartre. One has to go into this to dig out of it one's own place.

If the matter turns to underpinnings, the question would be, underpinnings to what? How about the underpinnings, the "white whale" underpinnings, of suffering? Ahab was not after a whale, but the reality that put the whale forth--this is what is responsible for taking the leg, not an animal. Or, the underpinnings of P, as in S knows P. well, as a friend of mine said, you're never going to get that tart to your dessert plate. Just ask Wittgenstein. He was right: all that lies out there is just transcendence, for to posit is to do so in logic.

That outthereness gets really interesting though. It is born out of in-hereness, for it is in here that we acknowledge it. If W were entirely right, this would be nonsense, but it isn't, our being thrown into existence without a grounding, a reason, a Truth. It's not nonsense at all. Transcendence is PART of immanence. But this takes some thinking. Ethics, instead of being a chair turning issue, becomes front and center. The self, the world, our being in the world, as well. See,m if you ever find your self curious, Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and his epoche, the phenomenological reduction. But like I said, one has to drawn to this. One has to have a kind of passion to go beyond the play of logic.

This is sort of an argumentative forum, so I'll say that actually there is nothing divine about experience, well none that I'm aware of anyway. It's simply what existence is like. And the contents of the male human mind are easier studied via psychology. I don't understand this obsession with phenomena at all.

Atla wrote
This is sort of an argumentative forum, so I'll say that actually there is nothing divine about experience, well none that I'm aware of anyway. It's simply what existence is like. And the contents of the male human mind are easier studied via psychology. I don't understand this obsession with phenomena at all.

Well then look at it like this: If your interest is strictly to arrive at an understanding of what the world is at the level of basic questions, aka, philosophy, and you realize that experience is not a "mirror of nature" as Rorty put it, but an opaque processing plant that manufactures meaning, logic, propositions and their truth values, appetites, ethics/value, affect, and all the rest, then you are obliged to read philosophy that reflects this. It's like in the study of rocks and minerals and not being satisfied with the mere spectacle of what they do in the world, but wanting to look at the structures that underlie what they do, the crystalline structures and their molecular composition, and the particle physics behind this, and the geological age that provided the compression, and so forth. This is exactly the kind of thing phenomenology does with experience, the manufacturing plant that makes the world, the world.

Read Heidegger, just the first few pages just to see the kind of thinking that goes into this. You will find the language off putting as you go, but then, this is true for all serious work.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑August 30th, 2020, 11:14 am

Atla wrote
This is sort of an argumentative forum, so I'll say that actually there is nothing divine about experience, well none that I'm aware of anyway. It's simply what existence is like. And the contents of the male human mind are easier studied via psychology. I don't understand this obsession with phenomena at all.

Well then look at it like this: If your interest is strictly to arrive at an understanding of what the world is at the level of basic questions, aka, philosophy, and you realize that experience is not a "mirror of nature" as Rorty put it, but an opaque processing plant that manufactures meaning, logic, propositions and their truth values, appetites, ethics/value, affect, and all the rest, then you are obliged to read philosophy that reflects this. It's like in the study of rocks and minerals and not being satisfied with the mere spectacle of what they do in the world, but wanting to look at the structures that underlie what they do, the crystalline structures and their molecular composition, and the particle physics behind this, and the geological age that provided the compression, and so forth. This is exactly the kind of thing phenomenology does with experience, the manufacturing plant that makes the world, the world.

Read Heidegger, just the first few pages just to see the kind of thinking that goes into this. You will find the language off putting as you go, but then, this is true for all serious work.

I tried reading Being and time, but unfortunately such writings usually make me physically nauseous after a few pages, I can't continue.
I may have misunderstood, but he seemed to be doing the exact of opposite of what is required to understand Being: he seemed to be addressing the question of the Being of entities. Being can't be understood as long we don't realize that in the real world, there are no entities at all.

HAN

If other people are only recognised as existing as part of my experience/''interpretative field'', then their reported experience isn't something I can rely on in a way to slide from ''my interpretive field'' to broader ''we'' claims about the 'external world'. You either say you don't know, OR place them ontologically as part of the experience, OR as independantly existing fellow experiencers. If it's the latter, then you've made an assumption that an external world exists, independant of your experience, which you can know something about.

Or that externality appears before us and we have to analyze this phenomenologically.

Sorry that's not good enough. As far as I'm concerned you lose any warrant to make claims about ''we'' and ''us'', if you don't even assume I exist as anything beyond your experience of me.

That is why you should distinguish between knowledge claims and ontological state of affairs claims. You can't slide between the two or ignore the difference. You can't buffer your own interpretation of your experience with what I say about mine, and still place me as just another part of your experience.

Atla wrote
I tried reading Being and time, but unfortunately such writings usually make me physically nauseous after a few pages, I can't continue.
I may have misunderstood, but he seemed to be doing the exact of opposite of what is required to understand Being: he seemed to be addressing the question of the Being of entities. Being can't be understood as long we don't realize that in the real world, there are no entities at all.

Well, dasein IS an entity. It is not, however, a present at hand entity, a thing. One has to stick with it and read through the difficulties. In the beginning he is simply throwing the reader into his terminological world, but later, all the things he runs through so quickly, he goes into in detail.

One has to study this. It is not readable in the usual sense. Pretend you have an exam to take, or a lecture to give. You will find you can actually do it.

But then, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the true foundation for German Idealism, and Heidegger is following Kant. Read Kant first, and Heidegger will be easier. One does need the Copernican Revolution Kant talks about to begin this properly.

Anyway, if you want to read this, or Kant and would like to talk about it, let me know.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑August 30th, 2020, 9:07 pm

Atla wrote
I tried reading Being and time, but unfortunately such writings usually make me physically nauseous after a few pages, I can't continue.
I may have misunderstood, but he seemed to be doing the exact of opposite of what is required to understand Being: he seemed to be addressing the question of the Being of entities. Being can't be understood as long we don't realize that in the real world, there are no entities at all.

Well, dasein IS an entity. It is not, however, a present at hand entity, a thing. One has to stick with it and read through the difficulties. In the beginning he is simply throwing the reader into his terminological world, but later, all the things he runs through so quickly, he goes into in detail.

One has to study this. It is not readable in the usual sense. Pretend you have an exam to take, or a lecture to give. You will find you can actually do it.

But then, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the true foundation for German Idealism, and Heidegger is following Kant. Read Kant first, and Heidegger will be easier. One does need the Copernican Revolution Kant talks about to begin this properly.

Anyway, if you want to read this, or Kant and would like to talk about it, let me know.

Well I will read them if anyone can show me a valid insight of theirs I didn't already consider. I'm coming from a scientific angle, and am only interested in finding the optimal basic philosophy for my theory of everything. Nondual philosophy is both simpler and deeper than any Western idealism I've seen, and it resolves the questions of being in general, and human being, perfectly.

Atla wrote
Well I will read them if anyone can show me a valid insight of theirs I didn't already consider. I'm coming from a scientific angle, and am only interested in finding the optimal basic philosophy for my theory of everything. Nondual philosophy is both simpler and deeper than any Western idealism I've seen, and it resolves the questions of being in general, and human being, perfectly.

Just keep in mind that "any Western idealism I've seen" has very limited content given that all Heidegger is to you is nausea. To encounter the best ideas takes work, a tearing down of assumptions that everyday thinking imposes on thought. Common sense is simply common.
A last world on Heidegger. Here is a website that is short and sweet and gives an account how two of his basic ideas work: http://compendium.kosawese.net/term/pre ... -zuhanden/

Hereandnow wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 10:18 am

Atla wrote
Well I will read them if anyone can show me a valid insight of theirs I didn't already consider. I'm coming from a scientific angle, and am only interested in finding the optimal basic philosophy for my theory of everything. Nondual philosophy is both simpler and deeper than any Western idealism I've seen, and it resolves the questions of being in general, and human being, perfectly.

Just keep in mind that "any Western idealism I've seen" has very limited content given that all Heidegger is to you is nausea. To encounter the best ideas takes work, a tearing down of assumptions that everyday thinking imposes on thought. Common sense is simply common.
A last world on Heidegger. Here is a website that is short and sweet and gives an account how two of his basic ideas work: http://compendium.kosawese.net/term/pre ... -zuhanden/

Thanks, yeah I guess I'll have to pass. When it comes to what I consider to be ontology, one thing we have to realize is that in the real world, there are no separate systems, entites, interactions. THAT is what happens when we properly tear down the assumptions of every human thinking.

Heidegger seems to do the opposite, he takes the everyday convention of such separate interacting things, and then perverts it into his different modes of being. I mean this is all fine, but why call it ontology. It's just male human psychology.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 10:18 am To encounter the best ideas takes work, a tearing down of assumptions that everyday thinking imposes on thought.

When those assumptions enable human beings to solve real problems and answer real question, tearing down those assumptions seems to me a pointless academic exercise that produces nothing of value. Exactly the kind of thing that rightfully gives philosophy a bad reputation.

Gertie wrote
Sorry that's not good enough. As far as I'm concerned you lose any warrant to make claims about ''we'' and ''us'', if you don't even assume I exist as anything beyond your experience of me.

That is why you should distinguish between knowledge claims and ontological state of affairs claims. You can't slide between the two or ignore the difference. You can't buffer your own interpretation of your experience with what I say about mine, and still place me as just another part of your experience.

But this concern about my experience of you is not a point of concern regarding phenomenology. It is a given that there are other people, other things, for this is the way the world presents itself. The matter of showing what this is about, explaining "otherness" is not one that cancels out otherness, it is about explaining it.

If you have a hard time regarding the assumption that others exist at all, the problem you are dealing with is not the phenomenologist's, but the analytic philosopher's! Read Quine's theory of Radical translation and the indeterminacy of language. there is this paper written by David Golumbia that puts Quine and Derrida (the infamous denier of objective knowledge) on fairly equal footing regarding knowing others and other things. This issue rises up across the board and it has never, nor will it ever be resolved. Read Wittgenstein's Tractatus: It is simply absurd to think, he says, that you can extract knowledge claims' content from the logic that is used to construct it. Rorty, the same. Dewey, the same. All Kantian on this simple matter: talking about "out there" is simply nonsense. (Of course, in the post Heideggerian world, there is extraordinary work with this idea).

Phenomenology, Heiedegger's and others', simply accepts that there are others, trees, chairs, people, for this is what is presented to us in the world. It does get a bit odd, but it goes like this: I know there is a world around me, and there are things and people that are there, and not me, but "me" here is defined phenomenologically, that is, as an entity that puts the stamp of "mine" and "me" on things that are contained within the "my" of being. Other things, people, are other, and I take them in through my dasein, personal human agency of in-the-worldness. You are clearly there and you have an agency like mine, an in the worldness. In fact, a big complaint about Heidegger is that his views of others are so strongly averse to what others do to one's own dasein: they keep questions at bay while encouraging dogmatic conformity to "the they". H thematizes the inauthenticity of existing this way, this going along with others, being blindly led and never realizing the freedom of one's authentic existence: standing before the future, unmade, and bringing forth existence out of the endless possibilities that lie in waiting out of one's personal and cultural history.

Matters of solipsism and idealism don't come up but objects are simply there, forged out of experience (see Dewey's Art as Experience and Experience and Nature), and the idea and the sense impressions are of-a piece. things are not "out there", as some metaphysical assumed things, and discovered; rather their meanings are made when we take them up. We are passive and inauthentic if we simply move anonymously through affairs. But to be a creator and make one's own life from the stand point of freedom, the present, where choices are made. Another "petty" (like solipsism) issue is freedom: how to address determinism. Freedom does not hang on such a problem. It is there, in the affairs we encounter. I am not a tree or a stone; I make my own "essence" though choice (or, I become very tree-like if I just never raise questions. Sartre called this bad faith). Determinism contra freedom is pseudo problem; there is choice, which arises when questions are put to things. I can sit here and write or jump out the window. The fact that choice does not occur ex nihilo is obvious. Choice is defined phenomenologically, not in intuitive apriority (causality).

Hereandnow wrote: ↑August 30th, 2020, 9:07 pm

I should probably ask you this in the thread on Being and Time, but re "tearing down assumptions," since you brought it up here, what would you say is what Heidegger is even trying to address with respect to being?

Heidegger says things like, "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of being" and that he's going to address "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." I've never been able to get much of a grasp on what he's even talking about. How would you explain it? (And please, if you can, give a relatively short answer that just explains what the heck he even has in mind with respect to any issue/confusion about "being.")

Faustus5 wrote
When those assumptions enable human beings to solve real problems and answer real question, tearing down those assumptions seems to me a pointless academic exercise that produces nothing of value. Exactly the kind of thing that rightfully gives philosophy a bad reputation.

Then by all means, get involved, start a union, work for Microsoft. But if it wasn't for tearing down assumptions, you and I would arguing about how to best please Yahweh.

Real questions, solving problems?: depends on the problems. Philosophy is about pursuing the truth, putting aside that this concept is an inherent problem, at the level of basic assumptions. This frees us from illusions, putting questions to assumptions to see what holds up and what does not. The world, it turns out, is a very alien place at this level and in a given cultural climate, such a thing is dangerous, threatening. Talk like Quine or Wittgenstein to a Old Testament sheep herder and you will probably be shunned or worse. Who cares: there is no Yahweh, nor walking on water, nor any of that nonsense.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 11:26 am Real questions, solving problems?: depends on the problems. Philosophy is about pursuing the truth, putting aside that this concept is an inherent problem, at the level of basic assumptions.

But if you are aiming at something that doesn't tell people to behave differently, doesn't make a difference in their lives, doesn't recommend some sort of tangible change in practice other than what words we use, then you aren't aspiring to anything that deserves to be called "truth". It just becomes meaningless babble that only philosophers care about, which means it has no value and is a waste of time and energy.

Faustus5 wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 12:32 pm

Hereandnow wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 11:26 am Real questions, solving problems?: depends on the problems. Philosophy is about pursuing the truth, putting aside that this concept is an inherent problem, at the level of basic assumptions.

But if you are aiming at something that doesn't tell people to behave differently, doesn't make a difference in their lives, doesn't recommend some sort of tangible change in practice other than what words we use, then you aren't aspiring to anything that deserves to be called "truth". It just becomes meaningless babble that only philosophers care about, which means it has no value and is a waste of time and energy.

Of course "truth" sometimes turns out to have no value and makes no difference in people's lives. Sometimes it's even detrimental.

Some people like to collect stamps, some like to play football, some people like to try to solve the big questions of existence. Why are you surprised?

Atla wrote: ↑August 31st, 2020, 1:22 pm Some people like to collect stamps, some like to play football, some people like to try to solve the big questions of existence. Why are you surprised?

Actually, it is as if you read my mind, Atla!

I was thinking metaphorically that this approach to philosophy ends up making it a kind of game like D&D. Players might have a very involved language and a set of conventions about how to use that language, and some players are superbly excellent at mastering the language and commit an enormous volume of data about it to memory. But that language has zero importance and meaning outside of playing the game.

Philosophy, or at least any approach to philosophy that I'll take seriously, is supposed to aim for something higher than that. And especially if you are going to start a thread crying about the "hegemony" of one of humanity's most important intellectual achievements, your philosophical approach had damn well better be more substantial than the act of collecting stamps.