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Count Lucanor wrote

If the issue was what it is like to be a cat, or your cat, in terms of their first person experience, there wouldn’t be much for science to say, but neither philosophy. Now, if the issue is what there is in the cat and in their relationship with other objects, what makes it an object within human experience, once the exteriority of objects, their ontic independence from the subject, as well as the exteriority of the bodily experience itself, has been acknowledged. For that, science and philosophy have many things to say.

But science has plenty to say about first person experience. It is not an accident that we can agree about the world. The question: is there a private language? generally looks to a person's observable language behavior as a social phenomenon, and even in the most private or idiosyncratic matters, it is the public language that is made, privately, available to the individual in her unshareable subjectivity. Another may not experience what I experience, but the language tht talks about it is not only public, but it constitutes the meanings that are spoken about.

And as far as ontic judgments, you have to be more clear. You know, Heidegger makes a rather important distinction between ontic and ontological matters, and this former term is what science and everydayness acknowledge. So if this ontic independence is meant to simply identify the preanalytic, preontological state of things, as is in the assumptions of everything from apples to astronomy, then phenomenology says you have reached the starting place of philosophy, the basic assumptions of a world that await critical work. BUT, for phenomenology, it will not be the same analytic themes, and this has been discussed often here. Science cares nothing for the presuppositional grounding of scientific axioms.

That demarcation line is highly disputable. What exactly we don’t need science for? Philosophy cannot say why after drinking alcohol I start tumbling. I saw a video of a cat doing that the other day. I certainly want to know why, what and how the cat is and I cannot longer do that without science. OK, you might want to speculate on what a cat means to a human, and you can say that’s a task reserved for the philosopher, but right off the bat he will have to take into account not only the manifest image of the cat and the world it lives, but the scientific image too, which inevitably has permeated society. I’m not saying either one or the other, but both, the synoptic view. What should I do with a cat? Why? Is it a guardian sent by the gods or just a simple mammal that showed up contingently? You have to know something about what the cat is and why it’s there. How do you do that, stepping out of the narratives of everyday living, without using the facts provided by science?

That last part I understood. Not stepping on anyone's narratives. Phenomenology leaves everything in place, and does not for a moment violate one's sense of understanding the world through science. Phenomenology asks OTHER questions. The ones science ignores. For example, what is the structure of the conscious event that makes being drunk a conscious event? Consciousness is presupposed in drinking alcohol and tumbling around. You can't make a reference to brain states and their chemical analysis because such things as this presuppose a consciousness in the discussion of a chemical or the thought of a deviation from a norm. It is certainly NOT the case that talk about neurological imbalances is wrong. Phenomenology just doesn't talk about these things. I thought this clear. Look, just take this as an assumption: in any given area of science where a reasonable account is given, it is this accounts presuppositions that are phenomenology's interest. NOT the science claims at all.

I’m aware such phenomenologists are not mere Kant scholars, but do problematize on the legacy of the unsurpassable Kantian philosophy, to paraphrase Sartre, and have a tendency towards antirealism. Phenomenology needs not to be married to idealism, as the work of Merleau-Ponty demonstrates, so I don’t have a quarrel with phenomenology per se, but I do find problematic the doctrines of the “phenomenalist phenomenologists”. Add to that Kierkegaard’s theology and we have the recipe for disaster, the decadence of philosophy.

Sartre is not going say that phenomenology CAN be married to realism in the sense that I think you are taking the word. Remember that Being and Nothingness BEGINS with a thesis of a phenomenological ontology. You can't say something like " Add to that Kierkegaard's theology and we have a recipe for disaster" and so forth as some disembodied generality that is clear for all to see. Only someone who has read Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, The Concept of Anxiety, Repetition, and so on can talk like this. You're way over your head to even mention the name. UNLESS, of course, you can actually argue the point. So do say, what disaster did you have in mind?

Phenomenology per se??? I guess you must be including Being and Time of the Cartesian Meditations, or Infinity and Totality.

Frankly, I don't care if you haven't read any of this. I never pursued the matter as if you had. I rather wanted to assume a physicalist or materialist body of assumptions and ask very innocently, how does epistemology work in the logic of this? This is what I led with, and it was simply an attempt to show that such attempt led very quickly to a reductio ad absurdum and the evidence for this was crystal clear: such a position simply has no epistemic function.

It is a premise that is massively simple. I think you resist for the entertainment of resisting. What other reason? Everyone knows this. Analytic philosophers know this. They got tired of talking about Kant because there was nothing left to talk about after a century of this. They didn't refute problem of "the legacy of the unsurpassable Kantian philosophy." But the French and the Germans didn't see things that way. They put Kant in bed with Hegel's historicity, Kierkegaards qualitative leap, Nietzsche's perspectivalism, and Husserl's epoche, and Heidegger's dasein, and on and on. And the philosophy hs only really come together in this very complicated legacy; but the irony of the legacy is this: the Husserlian reduction leads to only one thing, and that outstrips language itself!

It is not an easy thesis to defend as it already spells out its own reductio, and this is right up the alley of Wittgenstein's Tractatus which is famously disclaimed by Wittgenstein himself in the same work. Why does he do this? Because in this book he actually talks about matters that are both IN the fabric of meaning, yet outside of the logicality of language, and this is because, as I have said here and there, the metaphysics of old and the tiresome Christian apologetics, is reducible to the simplicity of givenness. One cannot speak of value, Witt insists, and therefore about ethics, because ethical/value good and bad are IN not reducible to other words that can be used to speak what these are.

I bring this up here because the massively simple question of epistemology undoes the metaphysics of science, scientific metaphysics, as I am calling it. The kind of claims that attempt make a move from premises derived from the naturalistic pov, to philosophy, as if, as Rorty put it, the brain were a mirror of nature. The idea is so patently absurd there is hardly room for it in a reasonable thought. Once metaphysics is freed from this kind of thing, one can start thinking as a phenomenologist (like Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Jen luc Nancy, Jean luc Marion, Derrida--a post modern phenomenologist. Not so much Merleau-Ponty, whom I have read little of, but what little I have...Even Rorty who straddles the fence): the ontological priorities are turned around, and value/ethics/aesthetics (you know Wittgenstein says ethics and aesthetics were essentially the same thing. I see why this is so: it is because value is the essence of both) are now, I argue, the very foundation of ontology.

This can be argued, but you first have to at least get to the admission that materialism flat out perishes in the epistemic reductio ad absurdum. It is the first step fo understanding the essence of religion, which is a metaethical problem, and Husserl's reduction take's one just there.

Alas, the reduction is less an argument than an orientation, a rerouting of what is privileged in meaning.

I’m not sure what you mean there. I’m not making a detailed analysis, that would take endless paragraphs, but I’m pointing to where the analysis has taken me. Surely we can make lots of sense of science claims about things apart from the perceiver’s contribution, such as things that existed before there was even any perceiver (the issue of ancestrality) and the fact of contingency.

to look at this matter here, in the OP, one has to follow a certain path of reasoning. The point is this: It is IMPOSSIBLE to even begin to understand the "sense of science claims about things apart from the perceiver’s contribution." By your standards this sounds like a strong claim, and it is. But as I see it, you are conflating what is familiar and pragmatic with what survives an ontological critique. Science is a set of propositions and propositions are not over there among the bushes. What that over there is, sans the propositional knowledge, is an attempt to make a nonsense statement. I think Rorty and Wittgesntein are right (Rorty says this in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, in a footnote on p 122). There are no quantifications over there IN something in the world. Easy enough to believe this about, say, color, for no onw actually believes the color green is literally "on" the leaf. Nor does the first year physiology student believe sounds exist without eardrums. This is too obvious to bother with.

Yet when I tell you that the thoughts in your head are not IN the world they are about, the prima facie objection should just as easily be dismissed. The reason you and I are so aligned with the world is not because we know the world as it IS in itself, but because we are equipped with strategies to deal with it. Knowledge is pragmatic, nothing more, says Rorty. But does this exhaust ontology? This is the question I wish to raise. I see the lamp on the table and ask what is the knowledge relation I have to this lamp? And this takes me to look at my own epistemic constitution, for I am the knower and am most intimate with this side of the relationship. So what does it mean to know?

The study of subjective structures goes way back, as you likely know, but the first real attempt that survives even today (see what I call a difficult book, Time and Narrative by Paul Ricoeur) is Augustine's in his Confessions. The knowledge "event" is temporal. To know about the lamp is to have already had lamp experiences, and so I always already know the lamp prior to the occasion. And AS I continue to observe the lamp, it continues to affirm all that I know in the recollection-anticipation of what it is. The present is a synthesis of past and future, and these are really never separate, because, in Heidegger's amazing examination, the past is only the past as I conceive of the past in an occurrent event that ITSELF is inherently anticipatory! I mean, ask me to think about yesterday pulling into the service station, and the recollection itself is actualized in the present moment of remembering, making the remembering an present, future looking event in real time.

This kind of thinking goes on and on in Heidegger. Husserl wrote a book on it, following Brentano, and I just bring it up to at least present how it is that a knowledge event is not beyond the conditions in which it occurs. This temporal structure of knowledge is categorically not over there up a tree or on my desk. tp speak in the straight physicalist terms of someone like Rorty. BUT: I do have an intimacy with trees and the rest that exceeds the mere pragmatic, the "taking care of issues" that arrive in my encounters with them. This is rather fascinating a question, for it cuts to the marrow of the question of being: the tree IS and I know this in a way that is not pragmatics. Heidegger called this presence at hand. Descartes referred to res extensa. Husserl called this, and I think he was right, a transcendental object made immanent by intentionality, which brings me to my point: how is it that anything out there gets in here? When I see my aunt, I am NOT looking at brain functions and I am NOT confined to the delimitations of idealism; she is NOT an idea.

But there is no way out of the phenomenon. We accept that my aunt is my aunt, but we have to accept the analytic of experience (or dasein or consciousness) as well. She is there, but conditioned by experience. But how do we avoid Wittgenstein's insistence that there is no "outside" of the logical grid that structures judgment? It must be that this "nexus of intentionality" that brings her into the contexts of meaning in me has a metaphysical dimension. My aunt, if you can stand this kind of talk, or even if you can't, stands at the threshold of my finitude as a transcendental entity that is received as a phenomenon, and Wittgenstein was simply wrong that we cannot talk about transcendence like this outside of they way language games sets up meaning possibilities because transcendence is not some impossible nonsense but rather "appears" IN the immanence of my aunt's being there.

Science is not philosophy, right, but science has philosophical foundations, which means every time science produces verifiable results, they have philosophical implications that cannot be simply dismissed by pure introspection. If science is not denied, its implicit realism and materialism cannot be denied either.

Saying science has philosphical foundations is vague. And what is done here is not introspection. Introspection in the general sense is a reflection on one's own thoughts and feelings about something that occurs in the shared culture of living. Phenomenology is an apriori discovery of the structures of consciousness.
Philosophical foundations that are not revealed in science. This is the point. Husserl called his phenomenology a science, for his method was rigorous and objective. But his subject matter was not the world of empirical facts. It was about the presuppositional nature of those facts! Facts presuppose analysis, a meta-analysis, an analysis about the facts that are analyzed by science.

There’s no such inability, and ironically, it takes some presuppositions of philosophy to make such claim.

Right, and that takes insight! This is Heidegger's view. No matter what is said, that being said is going to be hermeneutically grounded, The entirety of our finitude is based, not on the idea that there are objects in an independent world of physical dynamics, which cannot be made sense of at this level of inquiry, but on a pervasive indeterminacy. Quine admitted as much with his paper on translation (you know, the gavagi paper) and Derrida pissed everyone off by taking this hermeneutics to its only logical conclusion, which is a radical discontinuity between what can be said and what the world "is", this latter being necessarily a token of the former (because, heh, heh, I just said it). This is the first step into the extraordinary mystery of our existence. To see that our knowledge assumptions are about something that exists, and existence is only known in the encounters with existents or beingS (not being at all careful with these otherwise technical terms) and so the quest for the meaning at the basic level is to be found IN the analysis of the being of beings. This takes the analysis to the presuppositions of beings, the going to work, waiting for a bus, having dinner, paying taxes of being here, and well as the dogs and cats and fence posts, as well as set theory or cosmology. ALL of these are knowledge claims, and hence ontology claims (you can't know something if it isn't there), and so ontology has its object, but this, too, will be hermeneutically indeterminate. BUT: philosophy has now found its foundational grounding: our radical indeterminacy as discoverable in the apriori investigations of our everydayness.

This has a telos: is there anything that can be disclosed that, as Kierkegaard put it, stands as its own presupposition? This simply means, is there anything that is not contingent on the hermeneutical indeterminacy of language? Something that is stand alone what it is without the indeterminacy of the openness interpretation? Something that would be like God is God actually existed. I argue that there is such a thing, and this lies in metaethics, the essence of religion.

Science is portrayed here as if it was just a little more refined version of the naive inductive attitude of sense-making after first-hand impressions, which is sort of an inversion of what really happens: when it comes to thinking about how the world is, philosophical reflection has been for ages in a dark room making guesses. Science is not about ordinary life, it makes no use of ordinary language, and it is definitely not playing in the default setting, what one might call the manifest image. That’s why science has been able to revolutionize the common worldview that for ages depended on the kind of reflection inherent to religion and contemplative philosophy.

When a phenomenologist refers to the naturalistic attitude, she is not referring to primitive notions of ancient paradigms. To understand what phenomenologists mean by this "default setting" requires one to actually participate. One has to "do" the phenomenological reduction, or what Kierkegaard called making a qualitative leap. I can't really help you here, for the reduction is a method that takes one into a novel perspective in which all the knoweldge claims that actively participate in perceiving the world are suspended, save those which are pure, to think like Husserl, or ontological, to think like Heidegger. The real issues of phenomenology really don't come alive until one does this, and to do this you have to practice it. How do you practice this method? Observe the world around you without the "always already there" assumptions that things are such and such and so and so and allow yourself to witness the world that has always been there but ignored.

So science is not denied its modern techniques nor the complex equational models. The point is that none of these achieves the reduction. One is not invited to "see" the models of perceptual possibility in science. Where does the reduction take one? This is what attracts inquiry into the nature of religion because to see what religion is, one has to penetrate through this ontic world you mentioned: the body of distractions, very helpful and useful distractions, granted, that cover phenomenological underpinnings and close understanding dogmatically. Ask, what is dogmatism? It is the authoritative pronouncement over something that is fixed and doesn't yield to objections. Science does not yield to the objections of phenomenology in the matter of ontology, and in this, it is the same as everydayness.

The phenomenon IS the witnessing of the event, the correlation between thinking and being, not what actually is, that is, the witnessed. Then there’s the question of whether both terms of the correlation are real, if they exist independently on their own, that is, if the event exists in a realm exterior to the phenomenal, witnessing world or not. Any phenomenologist denying that such exteriority can be affirmed, is denying science.

But the actuality IS the event. Your are not in Parmenides' world, but in Heraclitus'. See the above painfully brief sketch of being-in-time.Such an object that is an actuality beyond thought and being, or becoming, has never been witnessed, and to think of it requires an act of inference from the temporal dynamic to something that is OUT of this dynamic and this requires one to step outside of experience itself. Thought itself IS an event. There is actually something quite profound in this, for the "event" is called as such IN the event of calling, naming, which attempts to still the event to immutability, as if in this event of observing this lamp, there is an element that stands apart from the event of understanding it, as if the "lampness" were somehow intimated. Sounds Platonic? Yes, very. And not an defensible position.

Both terms of the correlation? You refer to thinking and being? But these are one, for one cannot conceive of being without the thought of being. The moment being comes to mind, it is a particle of language.

Grrr. Phenomenology is not denying science. It is telling us that we have to have another set thesis in place, one thematically zoned in on ontology, when the discussion turns to things like knowledge relationships and existence and being.

Nope. Solipsism is strange to physicalism, it is a stance exclusive to idealism. When you deny the exteriority of objects, even the surface of your skull, you’re in for a ride on the slide to solipsism.

But taking physicalism as the final say of the way we can describe the world makes the world itself impossible, because such a reduction would make all experience a physical object's internal affair. This is not, I am aware, what you intend, but the logic is clear: My consciousness is a brain event. This means every imaginable thing is just this; that is, unless you can show me a way out of the brain using the assumption of physicalism. That would be most welcome. But keep in mind that you would have to define the terms of physicalism that allow just this, and in doing so you would have to ad hoc include something that is extraneous to the concept. This is allowed, of course, but not under the name of physicalism.

“Conceiving” of exterior objects goes only to knowledge, how they appear in my experience, which we can all agree, without embracing the main currents of phenomenology, implies that our first-hand apprehension of reality is filtered by our senses, we can’t get all of it right away. But that does not say anything about the objects themselves and whether they actually exist on a realm (the physical world) that is contingent and not created by the conceiving mind. Once the exteriority of objects is acknowledged, including other subjects and other experiences which are not mine, realism takes in and there’s no escape back to denying their existence as objects and their relationships in themselves.

There is a lot taken on in this, and I don't think it is easy because of the entangled nature of this weird area of inquiry.

Filtered? Can't really talk like this, can you? To say the object is filtered by the senses implies a knowledge of the unfiltered condition and this doesn't bear out of the analysis. It is certainly NOT that we don't have this IN our experience, but the understanding does not reach beyond the conditions of its own interpretative possibilities. This would be bad metaphysics. Not at all that it is unreasonable to affirm its independent existence, but to do so one once again encounters Wittgenstein: outside of the logical grid there is nothing to say, for all that can be said must be done logically, that is, conform to the basic categories similar to what Aristotle laid out. But then, how is it that to affirm what is not logical in nature becomes an issue. I know the lamp, but before me is a great deal that is not language, and I know this, too.

This is the threshold of thought. One encounters an indeterminacy. For religion and my purpose here, it is not the indeterminacy of affirming things like lamps and cats; it is the indeterminacy of our ethics that is where the argument begins.

As to the rest, it all rests on the assumption that one can have a meaningful conversation about things beyond the reach of language. Pure nonsense. This is not a denial of science, yet again, but a denial of this kind of scientific metaphysics.

Now, talk about breeding nonsense. That’s simply impossible, and such contradiction goes to show the absurdity of the phenomenologist views that you defend.

Here is what you said:

1) to assume that this "reality" is entirely structured by his own mind. There's no point in investigating anything of it, because there's no knowable, intelligible world to start with, only the structure of the subject's own mind, the only mind that could exist. Since this reality appears as if talking back to him, as if it were independent, as if there were things outside of his experience, the structure of that mind can only make sense as hallucination, a dream at best. Or 2) To assume that this "reality" has a structure of its own, an intrinsic nature that is not only decodable, interpretable, intelligible, but that also requires the participation of other subjects to figure out how it works, by contributing with the telling of their own knowledge and experiences. This second attitude is the only one that allows for the establishment of philosophy and science, it's the only one that allows the world to be intelligible.

You're missing the point. The idea is to take all that one knows and allow it. Nothing is missing from science in a phenomenologist's take on things, for since it is essentially bound to descriptive inclusiveness, then the entire appearance is preserved, and space is still what NASA says it is, and time is still about when class begins. Only phenomenology insists that what holds for the ontic world of affairs is not complete in the most basic analysis because things are very different in the presuppositional analysis. This should be a familiar method as science does this all the time. We participate in the world unreflectively in many ways, but ask a physicist, say, to give a more detailed examination of my car's molecular composition, and it will be forth coming. Both are true, it being a car that I drive to work AND the molecular description. The latter does not cancel the former. So how can two (or many more, really) descriptive accounts of the same thing be true yet radically divergent? Where is the real "thing"? 'Clearly the interpretation of the that object is variable; it depends on the perspective.

Phenomenology is saying just this: Look at the world phenomenologically, and the descriptive terms are very different, though science sustains as well. Phenomenology is a foundational ontology, however, and so analysis can go no further. Husserl holds the intuitive givenness to be an absolute, and while this is hard defend his basic justification lies in the simplicity of the insistence that SOMETHING there is not hermeneutical, but just bare presence. Heidegger's is more appreciated: the car, the molecular composition, the phenomenlogical analysis are all mutually sustainable.

Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 8th, 2023, 1:35 pm

Lagayscienza wrote

So, my question is, in circumstances like this, if we want our knowledge of gravitational waves to rest on a solid metaphysical foundation, where can phenomenology take us?

I think it takes time for this single insght to set it: Philosophy is not about what we see and think every day AS it is seen and thought. If that were the case, then what would be the point? Science is an extension, an intensive quantification and classification of every day life. I see a stone and want to know more about it so I get closer, use a microscope, and a whole new world opens up about the structures of crystals and the differences of these structures and the content of what is not crystalline, and go further in and molecular differences are discovered, and all of these are named and given quantitative designations of varying kinds. And molecular differences have organizational features that are different, and there a thousand ways a scientist quantifies and distinguishes and talks about dynamic features that I can't begin to talk about, but science is, as you know, massively complex because it SEES MORE, whether it is a microscope or a telescope or a computer enhancing the seeing (and I would not consider that matter of the "unseen" gravitational object at issue here. No one has seen an atom, or a distant start either. One "sees" in the latter the light, not the star! The star is not the light, science wants to say, but it will never wrap its head around the fact that all one ever sees is light, no matter how distant. The star itself is inferred from t he consistency of the light's presences and the predictability of what it will do and where it will do it and how much and in what, and this is not materially different, vis a vis the "reality" status of the inferred object, from the "super-finely engineered apparatus" that is used to detect gravity...right? And this applies to my cat sitting here on the chair. And note, just to remind, how outrageously removed a good faith materialist's cat is from perceptual possibility: light goes through the lens of the eye, is taken up by rods and cones for modification and is sent via the optic nerve to the brain...but wait, the brain? We know this because we observe brains via the light that goes through the lens, is taken up by rods and cones and is delivered the optic nerve to the brain. BUT: I do in fact encounter that cat, and certainly not light waves and their neurochemical "counterparts" and I do encounter brains and their neuro physiology, and all the rest. The trouble does NOT lie in the the overt encounter, and this is something phenomenology wants to insist: We DO encounter these things, they are not reducible to anything else like talk about more basic substrata of perceiving. Materialistic accounts weave a web of physical contingency that has NOTHING in it of the original givenness because it ignores the fact that inquiry begins with givenness.

Anyway, now that little sketch about science is an introduction to a very meaningful conversation, but what it is not is philosophy. Philosophy is about the presuppositions of what it is to observe at all. Not unlike the presuppositions of a magnified or otherwise modified image have to do with the premodified state of the object, as all this talk about molecular structures in stones presupposes that there is a stone there in the first place. So what if we ask about the presuppositions of something being a stone, this scientifically unproblematic thing that is simply axiomatic for science? You could start as a scientist would and discuss its manifest classificatory features, the weathering that rounded its surface or the mass determined by gravity and pressure; but what about the language that makes calling something what it "is" possible? What about the time structure of the dynamic of perceiving at all? What about the rules that make classification possible? The understanding that takes up the world? And so on. These are not nothing, but are simply not to be talked about as if one is talking about a stone because enhanced seeing is not possible and there are no more details to be revealed (which is why everyone is disillusioned with philosophy and why analytic philosophy clings to science--there is nothing left to say! I say I follow Michel Henry, Levinas, and the rest, but in truth, the only reason I fond them so fascinating is that they are revealing philosphy's true end, it telos, and it is not more theory. You might say phenomnelogy's attention to consciousness is philosophy's last stand: its "instrument" of enhanced analysis is the world's apriority, this intense self examination that does not look outward, but inward revealing, if you will, the world that takes up the world perceptually, affectively, cognitively. This world IS the world at the basic level. What is outside is a there that is prohibitively transcendental. Nothing. NOt, certainly that science is nothing, which is insane. But that science is really about the phenomenological play8ing field IN WHICH we discover an imposition of events that are not us. These events are the way the world is given to us, not the world in an impossible out theresness.

What are those microbiological things you mentioned? All I can talk about is how they appear in a world of appearances. Outside this one would have to step out of phenomena. This cannot be made sense of. Talk about transcendence, consider "out there" to be beyond the margins of experience, and "in here" to be our finitude: Is it that what is prohibitively out there and what is in here in thoughts, feelings and the rest, makes any sense? This "out thereness" as a concept conceived in here, and so out there, when conceived, is never free of the the in-here's conditions of apprehension, so when we speak of out there, we are really speaking of in here. This is not solipsism at all, remember, because there are no brain interiors we are hopelessly inside. The in earnest positing of an out there is not upended. It is simply that it is not as if one can reach beyond the margins of experience and thought into something else and declare it out there. Here is nothing beyond phenomena, no "out there" of science in this philosophical analysis, and this makes out there not simply transcendent but NONSENSE! NOT that microbiology is nonsense! But the givenness of microbiology in our world IS a givenness. This is a critical point, and what Wittgenstein was on about. He was not saying there is this grid of logic (Tractatus) which we live in against transcendence. He was saying every metaphysical idea we have of the world is self-world-referencing, contained within finitude, and this is exactly what Heidegger said! So again, transcendence and metaphysics don't vanish in a puff of logic; they are now frontiers of finitude and our finitude and no longer finitude at all.


But always back the the OP: the matter here is about religion, and religion is about ethics, and ethics, in light of the above, is metaethics, the infinity, if you will, that is part and parcel of, or in the essence of, our finitude. This is not about spatial or temporal infinity, but the openness of all concepts, and the concept of ethics has an existential dimension: suffering and happiness and everything possess therein. IN the examination if microbes on a dish, what is this event's analysis? We speak here of the full analytical breadth of the event which is always an event, never "things out there" removed from the event. And the analysis includes the observer, the interest, the historicity, the temporal setting of anticipating prior to sitting before a microscope what microscopes are and what they do, and the background of "regionalized" thinking that makes interpretation rich and complex, and so on; as well as the physicality of affairs and the explcit theories applied.

Something like this would be a fair response to your question., perhaps.

I agree that doing philosophy is one step removed from what science does.

But, ok, let’s be good phenomenologists and take all that as included in an EVENT that is a scientific investigation; let's "include in the analysis the observer, the interest, the historicity, the temporal setting of anticipating prior to sitting before a microscope, what microscopes are and what they do, and the background of "regionalized" thinking that makes interpretation rich and complex, and so on; as well as the physicality of affairs and the explicit theories. Let’s include all that in a phenomenological/scientific investigation." But are we then not just doing science, albeit science based in a different, or perhaps better, metaphysical understanding? And won’t the usefulness of all this extra baggage be limited, not to say a distraction, if we are studying a very particular phenomenon such as gravitational waves?

As you know, I’m interested is science AND in phenomenology. I want to understand how phenomenology might be made relevant, useful even, to scientists. From what I’ve learned so far, the hard sciences seem to reach a dead end with phenomenology - perhaps with metaphysics generally. And this seems to be so even if we take in the “full analytical breadth of the EVENT” which is a scientific investigation.
What is the practical use of what is given in pure consciousness (however much is included in that) to the physicist, for example? How can it help her understand how the universe works when all she has to work with are numerical data and her and other scientists’ interpretations thereof? I guess the chemist and the biologist might ask the same question.

If I am correct to take it that the task of the phenomenologist-philosopher is to describe the structures of experience, in particular consciousness, the imagination, relations with other persons, and the situatedness of the human subject in society and history, then would it be fair to say that phenomenology is likely to be of practical use principally in areas like sociology cultural studies, the arts... that is, in areas where we want to know about people’s lived experience and where research is necessarily qualitative rather than quantitative?

This is not to say lived experience is unimportant or that the subjective first person POV is not useful, or that phenomenology might not be useful to scientists in ways that I don't yet understand. If nothing else, it can certainly change one's POV. A phenomenological perspective has been transformative for me. It has entailed a radical realignment of how I see the world. I’m just unsure about it’s practical implications in the hard sciences.

Lagayscienza wrote

But, ok, let’s be good phenomenologists and take all that as included in an EVENT that is a scientific investigation; let's "include in the analysis the observer, the interest, the historicity, the temporal setting of anticipating prior to sitting before a microscope, what microscopes are and what they do, and the background of "regionalized" thinking that makes interpretation rich and complex, and so on; as well as the physicality of affairs and the explicit theories. Let’s include all that in a phenomenological/scientific investigation." But are we then not just doing science, albeit science based in a different, or perhaps better, metaphysical understanding? And won’t the usefulness of all this extra baggage be limited, not to say a distraction, if we are studying a very particular phenomenon such as gravitational waves?

Husserl, wanted phenomenology to be the science of phenomena. But the difference lies in several places: one is that philosophy is essentially apriori in that it looks at the presuppositions of what is observable. Take an ordinary experience of an object and there are multiple ways science can talk about it, and this is not what philosophy is about. I was just reading about Karl Popper, who certainly is not a phenomenologist, and he holds what I have come to understand to be the hypothetical deductive method of scientific discovery. Induction is about the logical move from particulars to generalities of universals, but Poppers says this is really not the way science works, because there really never is this original observation that is free of assumptions. To use Heidegger's phrasing, the object always already appears before us conditioned by assumptions, rote and ready to hand. I don't know if Popper ever read Heidegger, but likely not, but Heidegger's hermeneutics says the same thing, and this goes back to Husserl and the analysis of time and the way an object/event (objects ARE events; my cat is an event), and Kant and so on. Not as if Popper had discovered something original, but the hypothetical deductive method I think is really what happens when we affirm a scientific proposition, and such a thing is structurally no different from tying my shoe laces: I come into the situation already anticipating results about intereacting with shoes and laces and the point is, I already anticipate everything prior to tying them. Kuhn says something like this when he talks about paradigms in science, "normal" science that precedes anything new, and what is new is grounded in the the possibilities (the "risk" says Popper) of anomalies, but these anomalies are IN the fabric, so to speak, of the norms that are violated. See how this puts all eyes on the thesis and way thought "creates" openings for discovery.

So phenomenology is the "science" that looks at things science doesn't look at but merely assumes, or presupposes. I observe the planet Jupiter, but do I observe the perceptual act itself? It is not observable, for to observe at all presupposes it making it logically out of bounds. But you can't ignore this, any more than you can ignore the question, what was there "before" the Big Bang? Only here we are not left at the mercy of the singlar and pretty boring equations about what particles of matter do when compressed absolutely, but are presented with the wealth of apriori question presented in the living reality of being a living self. Science cannot touch this, but Popper's hypothetical deductive method certainly can, and this is found in phenomenology (thought very differently construed).

This foundation of the subjective end of a perceptual encounter encompasses all things, for all things to be there at all are first regarded, and you cannot remove this from the conditions of "being regarded". I mean, there are so many ways to put this, for every analysis comes back home to the "things themselves" as Husserl put it, and his can't be overstated: phenomenology is not at odds with science. It is merely stating that unusual things happen when you start asking more and more basic questions. It was easier for the ancient mind to make this weird dramatic move toward the presuppositional foundation because there was no science and culture to speak of to fill the space where foundational encounters could occur, but the "always already there" of Heidegger and Popper's was mostly exclusively about religion and its faith and dogmatism and bad metaphysics.

If you are looking for the "usefulness" of phenomenology, it lies here: Where religion founders with all of its extravagant dogmatic BS when it comes to defining what it means to be human at the most basic level, phenomenology gives responsible, if still conflicted, thinking. Phenomenology is literally the responsible thinker's religion. Religion is all about our metaethical world, and metaethics is the indeterminacy of our value experiences (like being burned alive and being in love or Hagan dazs or having an interest; see Michel Henry on this, but also see Schopenhauer who gives us this stark look at our reality. One has to see this, I say, to know the call for what I earlier called the need from redemption!) and value IS reality: nothing is more real that joy, pleasure, suffering and heartache, and the rest...

That physicist reading the latest data on the movements of a star cluster--what is the most salient feature of this? It is the interest she takes! Yes, of course, her research will benefit science and science is the remedy for our woes, but the basic justificatory currency, it you will, is the value in play. Imagine science if no one cared, if caring didn't exist. The whole point of anything that has ever passed through a conscious mind is bound to this one thing: value, and value, like all things, is foundationally indeterminate and the girl we talked about insists on redemption. I know I said this before, but the OP refers back to this as its original intention: This metaphysics of ethics and value played out so dramatically in our finitude is not an apriori idea but an existential apriority, meaning value's redemptive and consummatory meanings belong to the "world" and therefor have a kind of old Testament gravitas.

Only phenomenology can discover this.

As you know, I’m interested is science AND in phenomenology. I want to understand how phenomenology might be made relevant, useful even, to scientists. From what I’ve learned so far, the hard sciences seem to reach a dead end with phenomenology - perhaps with metaphysics generally. And this seems to be so even if we take in the “full analytical breadth of the EVENT” which is a scientific investigation.
What is the practical use of what is given in pure consciousness (however much is included in that) to the physicist, for example? How can it help her understand how the universe works when all she has to work with are numerical data and her and other scientists’ interpretations thereof? I guess the chemist and the biologist might ask the same question.

If I am correct to take it that the task of the phenomenologist-philosopher is to describe the structures of experience, in particular consciousness, the imagination, relations with other persons, and the situatedness of the human subject in society and history, then would it be fair to say that phenomenology is likely to be of practical use principally in areas like sociology cultural studies, the arts... that is, in areas where we want to know about people’s lived experience and where research is necessarily qualitative rather than quantitative?

This is not to say lived experience is unimportant or that the subjective first person POV is not useful, or that phenomenology might not be useful to scientists in ways that I don't yet understand. If nothing else, it can certainly change one's POV. A phenomenological perspective has been transformative for me. It has entailed a radical realignment of how I see the world. I’m just unsure about it’s practical implications in the hard sciences.

I think what I said above works here. If you are interested in science AND phenomenology, then you re interested in the what lies in the basic assumptions of what science says, and not in terms of its current work, but in terms of the conditions that make belief and justification for science's propositions valid. If one is not looking here, then one is simply looking at science.

I think the hypothetical deductive method is right, and scientific findings are events, and they are about, at this level of analysis, other events that constitute the paradigmatic assumptions that precede the work. What is my cat prior to anything a biologist or a veterinarian or anyone could say? Go to basics: I perceive the cat and this perceiving is really apperceiving and this means that the actual apprehension of the cat, the literal occurrent "thing" of perceiving is an event that is temporal in that it "part" of the event is a recollection about cats and a recollection itself cannot be understood apart from the anticipatory nature of the remembering that at once remembers and is forward-looking to a verification in each moment. Time is really a unity that is divided by analysis, for past, present and future are all IN the singular apprehension of the cat, knowing what it is and its possiblities, knowing it is here and now and knowing that each moment is going to confirm the past assumptions about cats IN the living present and nothing escapes the living present. Note that this down and dirty analysis is all apriori.

Useful? See religion and the whole human enterprise and its meaning. I think phenomenology goes directly there.

Thanks for your response, Hereandnow. As always, I have been reading and rereading it and trying to figure out if there is something I have not understood. And again, as always, there are questions - there remain some things that still puzzle me about phenomenology and, I suppose, about metaphysics generally.

You say that “philosophy is essentially a priori and that phenomenology is the "science" that looks at things that regular science doesn't look at but [which regular science] merely assumes or presupposes.” For one thing, “science cannot observe the act of perception itself”. Perceiving the act of perception is taken to be “logically out of bounds” to science. I won’t offer an argument against that here, but I am wondering if this is a limitation of science alone.

I agree that if one’s pure consciousness is intending the phenomena of a cat, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to imagine at the same time doing a meta-observation of oneself perceiving the pure phenomena of the cat. Such meta-perception would seem to be impossible for science and phenomenology. I take it that here, the phenomenologist would say that, with phenomena given in pure consciousness, we hit bedrock - one cannot get beneath or beyond the phenomenon. Maybe that is so for phenomenology as currently formulated. But why could there not be something beneath this apparent bedrock that we are not perceiving; something real that is not presented to consciousness? Why could there not be something that is, as yet, imperceptible, unknowable but conceivably perceptible and knowable? I cannot see why phenomenology insists that there can be nothing behind the phenomena perceived in pure consciousness. Why is phenomenology the ultimate truth? Can it pull itself up by its own bootstraps any more than science can? It seems too easy to say that phenomenology is the end of the line, that everything ends in phenomenology. I get the feeling that this, at least in part, accounts for accusations of solipsism that are sometimes levelled at phenomenology.

But let’s go back to you observing the cat. There, in pure immediate consciousness is what the phenomenologist calls an inerrant phenomenon. As I understand it, this is as far as phenomenology can take us in such a straightforward observation. If we want to know something other than what is presented in immediate consciousness (what’s inside the cat, for example) we will then need to use science with all its underlying and unacknowledged presuppositions. But, of course, by resorting to science we leave behind the pure phenomena that presented immediately to consciousness. But, if there is more to know about the cat than what is available as pure phenomenon given in immediate consciousness, how then can it be true that what phenomenology provides us a priori, is the complete and utter foundation of everything? How can it be taken to be complete if there is more that can be known via non-phenomenological observations? You say that the “foundation of the subjective end of a perceptual encounter encompasses all things” but I can’t see why, logically, this must be so.

At this point, the phenomenologist may want to talk about the “foundationally indeterminate” which is said to be the basis of religion and value. Surely, it is here that we reach a boundary beyond which science cannot proceed. But why could it not, and why could phenomenology not, with better techniques, eventually proceed further? Why should anything be said to be forever foundationally indeterminate? The phenomenologist might then want to point to some other supposedly indefeasible indeterminacies that we must just accept – for example the indeterminacy which is said to be inherent in QM – wave-particle duality and the (as yet?) inability of science to tell us about both the positions and momenta of particles. But are these, the indeterminacy of QM and the supposed indeterminacy of phenomenological value, really commensurate? I have an astrophysicist acquaintance who tells me that it is conceivable that science will one day resolve the apparent enigmas of QM, just as it is conceivable that science will eventually resolve the enigmas of dark matter and dark energy. Our values are real, and if determination is conceivably possible in these other cases, then why is it inconceivable in the case of value?

In respect of moral value, evolutionary ethicists might argue that moral value is determinate by reference to the scientific truths of evolution. Moral value is a determinate product of evolution like our livers, our toenails and our language. If this is true, then what would the breaching of the supposed foundational indeterminacy in respect of moral value mean for the foundational assumptions of phenomenology?

And in respect of religion, might it not be the case that underlying it, there is no ultimate indeterminacy but simply a yearning, a huddling together in the dark for comfort in the face of the unknown, in the face of the as yet indetermined? Religion may yearn for the ground of being but does not find it with its communal rituals and dogma. And so the religious affirm to each other that it surely feels like they on the right track, and that they must just have faith to get to the final goal. That may be comforting, but it does not get to the actual ground of “being” or the meaning of “being”, whatever that may be. And it is not proof that what they are searching for must be radically indeterminate.

There is certainly something that cries out for an explanation, but I think it is something that phenomenology or Dasein or metaphysics or science or religion do not (or have not yet) explained and that is because we, as limited phenomenologists and scientists, are in no position (yet?) to understand or explain it. All the tortured word-weaving of Continental philosophy, all the drab, dry conceptual analysis and logic of Anglo-American philosophy, all the myths, dogma and rituals of religion... these may purport to get us there but, as far as I can see, they don't. They all hit a brick wall when it comes to explaining the ground of being, they are not yet explaining what "being" is or what "being means". Maybe to comprehend this we would need to "be" the entire universe and "be" all knowing. But we, as puny limited beings, whether phenomenologists or scientists, are currently in no such position. However, this does not logically entail perpetual, indefeasible, radical indeterminacy. It is conceivable that what is behind it all could be determinable? But perhaps just not by us in our current state.

Hereandnow, I've thought about what I wrote above and I think I can be more concise regarding my concerns. I guess it's about the foundations of phenomenology.

You say that

value IS reality: nothing is more real that joy, pleasure, suffering and heartache, and the rest...

Yes, they are very real; indubitably real. But aren't things other than value just as real? Matter and energy and events (other than joy, suffering, etcetera) that occur in space-time are, at least arguably, all just as real as joy and suffering, even though we may not be in a position to know exactly what these other things are "in themselves". But don't we know enough about them to know that they are real? And didn't space-time, matter and energy exist before humans, and couldn't they continue to exist after humans and their "Value-[ing]" cease to exist? Could it not be argued that value is just a natural phenomenon that emerges from more fundamental physical realities?

You also say that

The whole point of anything that has ever passed through a conscious mind is bound to this one thing: value, and value, like all things, is foundationally indeterminate.

Why do you say that all things are "foundationally indeterminate"? Is this necessarily so? Aren't some things determinate, at least to some extent? If this were not so, then how could we even move around without bumping into things? If we are not hallucinating or dreaming, is it not the case that intentions are about an externally extant reality, however dimly perceived? The phenomena cannot be just about aboutness? And if there is more to them than this, then why should the phenomena in consciousness be the end of the road in terms of determinacy? If some determination is possible with physical objects and events in space-time, then why should value be said to be necessarily foundationally indeterminate? Again, value my be just a natural phenomenon that emerges when matter is organised into highly complex objects like brains. And in that sense, determinate.

So in the end, I find it hard to grasp the idea that all we really know are phenomena as presented to consciousness and that all is foundationally indeterminate. I find it hard to believe that there is not more to the universe than intention and indeterminacy?

It seems to me that unless we grant at least a measure of ultimate reality to things beyond how they appear in consciousness, and unless some determination is possible, then the physical universe beyond beyond our heads, AND VALUE, both seem to evaporate for, without the reality of the rest of the universe, there would be nothing to care about, nothing to value, and nowhere for valuing to happen. So why grant primacy to value?

And doesn't phenomenology presuppose mind? Without mind, can there be intention? I suspect the phenomenologist would turn that around and say that without intention there can no mind. A chicken and egg game, no? I might be wrong about that, but what seems certain to me is that without brains, their could be no intention. If that is so, then is not phenomenology presupposing brains? And if so, then wouldn't physical brains be primary and the phenomena in consciousness secondary? And then we'd be back to a materialist view of the would, with consciousness and value as emergent phenomena.

As you can see, I'm on something on a mental merry-go-round here. I wanted this to be more concise that my previous post so I'd better leave it there for now.

Lagayscienza wrote

You say that “philosophy is essentially a priori and that phenomenology is the "science" that looks at things that regular science doesn't look at but [which regular science] merely assumes or presupposes.” For one thing, “science cannot observe the act of perception itself”. Perceiving the act of perception is taken to be “logically out of bounds” to science. I won’t offer an argument against that here, but I am wondering if this is a limitation of science alone.

It does point to a kind of bottom line where inquiry of any kind becomes unclear. But one is forced to attend to the here and now, as cliche as this sounds, just for an observational grounding and this in itself is a big step, nigh impossible for most, for one has to look at consciousness and its perceptual events, so to speak, "from the inside out" (though I am instantly reminded by Witt that such talk is nonsense) while science is always from the "outside in" which we generally refer to as objectivity, a public affair that has clear shared demarcations of intelligibility. And certainly we can agree on what is regarded as "inside" as with having a headache or feeling comfortable, and the like, but such things are themselves clear, if often ambiguous, in making a categorical placement (as in not being sure if one is in love or ready for an exam). But reporting about what is in perception and and analyzing perception itself?--these are very different, like having a thought and and analyzing the nature of thought itself, a dense, Kantian thing. For one thing there is nothing to compare it to, which is why Wittgenstein would not talk about it: logically prohibited because logic insists that for a thing to make sense, its contradiction has to make sense, and one cannot make sense of terms like the "the world" (or Being) because one can't imagine what is not world. It is like making sense out of a line without the concept of two sides of the line each being meaningful. Perception is like this at this level of inquiry given that it is impossible to imagine what is not perceptual.

I agree that if one’s pure consciousness is intending the phenomena of a cat, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to imagine at the same time doing a meta-observation of oneself perceiving the pure phenomena of the cat. Such meta-perception would seem to be impossible for science and phenomenology. I take it that here, the phenomenologist would say that, with phenomena given in pure consciousness, we hit bedrock - one cannot get beneath or beyond the phenomenon. Maybe that is so for phenomenology as currently formulated. But why could there not be something beneath this apparent bedrock that we are not perceiving; something real that is not presented to consciousness? Why could there not be something that is, as yet, imperceptible, unknowable but conceivably perceptible and knowable? I cannot see why phenomenology insists that there can be nothing behind the phenomena perceived in pure consciousness. Why is phenomenology the ultimate truth? Can it pull itself up by its own bootstraps any more than science can? It seems too easy to say that phenomenology is the end of the line, that everything ends in phenomenology. I get the feeling that this, at least in part, accounts for accusations of solipsism that are sometimes levelled at phenomenology.

Keep in mind that Husserl would say something like this. Heidegger holds that this "bedrock" is hermeneutics which is the kind of thing that makes this field so interesting because one is now caught BETWEEN Husserl and Heidegger! Husserl may be "walking on water" with his claim that there is an intuitive bedrock of pure presence, but he cannot be dismissed: It is clear as a bell that while my thinking is interpretative and malleable, the plain givenness of being here "in the midst of" thinking and feeling is indubitable, it is something that it is impossible to think away, or, one cannot imagine it being nothing at all. Being IS and this is a kind of mystical affirmation because there is no way to explain it. But on the other hand, and in a BIG way, this is refuted on its face for it IS spoken to conceive at all that there is something about my existence that is not spoken! Fair to say, this is the impasse phenomenology leads us to, which itself, I believe the essential telos of philosophy itself-- the phenomenology of phenomenology takes one beyond the "essence", that is, the saying what something IS, of the world. This is no man's land, metaphysics, which makes no sense because existence makes no sense because existence isn't language (though in this very odd existential situation, language isn't language). If you've ever come across Sartre, his Nausea and Roquentin's experience under the infamous chestnut tree, you have seen how this has been dealt with, and I will give Sartre credit for "leaning" Kierkegaardian: the realization that existence, and especially OUR existence, it not simple logical conclusion. It is, if you can stand it, an existential crisis to see that existence qua existence cannot be totalized, reduced to a potentiality of possiblities. Existence is radically "Other" than what the understanding can think or imagine. So you have Roquentin having these very troubling experiences with "the puddle beneath his tongue" that keeps returning, and other very weird things. The thesis Sartre gives us is called radical contingency, meaning the world of things is not bound to the world of logic, and could do anything. It sounds like something out of a horror movie, and I think this is part of the point. One should be truly astounded to be in this place.

But this about "ultimate truth" actually has these two sides, the Husserlian and the Heideggerian. Encountering the world like Roquentin does is not really a confession of ultimacy, but, given Sartre's atheism, more like a pathological "truth" that occurs when one becomes unhinged from basic assumptions, something that phenomenology and its epoche really does encourage. There is in a letter from Husserl to.. I can't remember who...where Husserl remarks that his students are turning to religion as the epoche revealed a mysterious underpinning to what it is to be human they had never understood before. In a qualified way, I agree. Taking after Heidegger and others, like Derrida, who follow through on phenomenology, I use the term indeterminacy as what it is that is discovered. Another world is transcendence (transascendence? This is a term used by Jean Wahl in his Human Existence and Transcendence which I have but haven't read but mean to).

Ultimate truth? Rorty follows Sartre, it seems: truth is not over there in the trees and bushes; it is here, in the proposition I make. Truth is a property of propositions. As I see it, the term 'ultimate' in this impossible context refers to something that is not discoverable in the totality of discourse possibilities. So its meaning lies outside language, and this puts "words" like affectivity, aesthetics, ethics, value, pathos, and the like front and center, for these have as their "essence" an "existential essence" which is the weirdest thing one can imagine, which is why I liken it to having the authority of stone tablets made by God, but just without God (some anthropomorphic agency). Essences are logical meanings, predicative units of "X is Y", definitions that say what a thing is, and these belong to propositions that are supposed to be about "the world" and someone like Heidegger says that essences and existence are joined at the hip, so to speak (contra Kierkegaard who talked about the "collision" between thought and existence) which means one cannot encounter a thing apart from context (per the above) and again, I agree with this, except for those things in existence I mentioned, the aesthetics, ethics, value and so on: these bear the meaning of good and bad, right and wrong, IN their existence!

See how extraordinary this is: take the color yellow, which just sits there and says nothing. Now, you can say the essence of the color yellow IS its yellowness, but here, one struggles to be rid of the language context in which "yellow' occurs for its meaning, for the "just sitting there" does not speak at all, and seems to be, as Derirda said, entirely dependent (contingent) where and how the term is predicatively attached. By itself, yellow cannot be understood as yellowness due to the meanings having to issue from language contextualizations---bananas are yellow, and yellow is foundin traffic lights and connotes cowardice and is the color of mustard, and so on (there is considerable reading on this that begins with the linguist Saussure and structuralism and Derrida's response to this. I haven't read enough on this) Further, yellowness is a universal concept that designates all yellow things (this is Kantian: we identify particulars through universal concepts). Analytic philosophers call this the problem of qualia and Dennett and others argue correctly that this term is without meaning as such. Ah, but value does not sit there quietly. It is the ouches and yums and OMG's of a living world. People fight over the value of things, obsess and lose their minds over things-of-value.

Religion's essence is value-in-the-world and its indeterminacy in our affairs. Value is very different from factual qualia, like being appeared to redly. Value is a term that refers to this impossible existential essence of the good (divinity is this, says Wittgenstein. Russell called him a mystic).

But let’s go back to you observing the cat. There, in pure immediate consciousness is what the phenomenologist calls an inerrant phenomenon. As I understand it, this is as far as phenomenology can take us in such a straightforward observation. If we want to know something other than what is presented in immediate consciousness (what’s inside the cat, for example) we will then need to use science with all its underlying and unacknowledged presuppositions. But, of course, by resorting to science we leave behind the pure phenomena that presented immediately to consciousness. But, if there is more to know about the cat than what is available as pure phenomenon given in immediate consciousness, how then can it be true that what phenomenology provides us a priori, is the complete and utter foundation of everything? How can it be taken to be complete if there is more that can be known via non-phenomenological observations? You say that the “foundation of the subjective end of a perceptual encounter encompasses all things” but I can’t see why, logically, this must be so.

This about "complete and utter foundation" has to be clarified. Consider: even of God were to appear to us, standing tall atop to Himalayas or in Time Square, there before the naked eye, and all scientific instruments brought in to analyze, the philosophical questions would be left untouched, given that God would still be an appearance processed in a brain and the brain and all of its neurochemistry is the least mirror-like thing, of complete opacity, to anything "outside" it that one can imagine. And all of the language issues brought forth by post moderns sustain as well. Of course, you could assume that God being God, that all of these issues would vanish, but this breaks with the hypothetical under consideration, and in order to conceive that God appearing before us like this and thereby annihilating all issues of epistmemology and ontology, onw would have to first do an analysis of exactly these philosophical matters to make sense of God being able to do this. And this analysis would have to be phenomenological.

So "complete and utter" here isn't about what can be discovered by science. It is about what discovery AS SUCH is. And this kind of question is logically prior to empirical questions. The discovery of the cat's anatomy is the most complicated thing there is, for all sciences are implicit, if indirectly. So we find cancer, say, cell growth out of control, in the liver. What is it that is "really" there? Cell? What is this? Obviously, we all know this because observations and studies have given us familiarity with these, but is this knowing a matter of "reified familiarity"? I like Wittgenstein's example: A man's head in a public place suddenly turns into a lion's head, and everybody is shocked and bewildered, that is, of course, until science steps in and explains how it happened. But what about this explaining? Can the explaining be explained? Now where are we? Hasn't the world just become a place that is just like the lion's head appearing prior to the knowledge assumptions of science? For these assumptions themselves are just as indeterminate on analysis. No? The scie3ntist's claim will no doubt include the "how" this happened, and this must assume the principle of causality. So what is causality? An apodictic intuition that itself defies reduction. Unspeakable, this insistence that a thing cannot move by itself. We are shown this, but cannot explain this, just as the lion's head is initially a complete bewilderment!

The phenomenological reduction is a reduction of all things to this basic understanding, and this understanding itself is indeterminate. This is where hermeneutics takes us. Do a Kantian reduction (reductions are a lot like deconstructions): I called causality an apodictic intuition, but then, what is apodicticity? See, here is where post modern thought takes wing (see Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics): ALL terms' meanings are "traces" of the language matrix (the clearest I've ever heard this presented is Geoffrey Bennington on Derrida and Deconstruction. I have Saussure's Semiotics, which Derrida takes up in his thesis and Bennington refers to, if you want it. Of course, one really has to actually read Derrida to get him. Good luck with that, for he is just awfully playful with ideas, which is kind of his whole point as one has to see just how "open" knowledge claims really are) out of which particulars are identified, and thus language is denied its ability to directly address an issue or be about a particular at all, in this analysis. Of course, by and large, we address these things all the time.

You see where this goes? It certainly is NOT that the cat no longer has cancer. What it IS saying requires one to make a stand in philosophy. A liver is what we call the thing, but what does the naming mean; I mean, historically, we can reach back to a time in indo-European languages, and before, when animal guts were observed and named in unidentified social evolvement, but, and this is a critical question, does the naming (how ever messy it really was) impart knowledge? Certainly not as such, for naming istn't this simple. It occurred in a matrix of problem solving that expanded into all things. Naming is USEFUL! for it established a ground for sharing and communicating, in fact, someone like Rorty and the pragmatists (Heidegger, too, was a qualified pragmatist) will say, language is essentially pragmatic and therefore essentially social, and sending a rocket to the moon is an intersubjective and inherently social enterprise at its very core for language is really a communicative tool that works (Herbert Meade defended this, I recall). But does this mean that the "aboutness" of language is exhausted in this reductive move to intersubjectivity and pragmatics? When I see a cat's liver, the "???" before me taken as a cat's liver, but where does the aboutness have its grounding? In order to determine this, we have separate what is IN the "???" and what is in the calling it a cat's liver, and even if you get into the chemistry and all the systematic ways one can categorize and systematize, this basic question doesn't have its answer, I mean, just because I can organize thinking around throughout everything about cats and their livers doesn't mean the language ideas are about the "???". More likely is that they are about the system itself: callinf it a liver places this "???" in a body of contextual possibilities whenever we deal with such biological systems. The givenness constrains and directs and delimits what can be said, but the saying is never what the "???" is. (Derrida cancels ALL references at this level of inquiry. Here everything is "under erasure" because language simply does not have this foundational particularity in its analysis. Heidegger: I see this cat liver and the familiarity of it Being is generated by the rich contextual understanding that always already precedes and attends one's general understanding of cat anatomy, and NOT the "???"; Derrida says, heh, heh, what cat? Not that he doesn't think there is a cat there! But because foundational thinking does not demonstrate the "???" to BE a cat liver (contra Heidegger). It is difference and deference IN the systemic relations.)

At this point, the phenomenologist may want to talk about the “foundationally indeterminate” which is said to be the basis of religion and value. Surely, it is here that we reach a boundary beyond which science cannot proceed. But why could it not, and why could phenomenology not, with better techniques, eventually proceed further? Why should anything be said to be forever foundationally indeterminate? The phenomenologist might then want to point to some other supposedly indefeasible indeterminacies that we must just accept – for example the indeterminacy which is said to be inherent in QM – wave-particle duality and the (as yet?) inability of science to tell us about both the positions and momenta of particles. But are these, the indeterminacy of QM and the supposed indeterminacy of phenomenological value, really commensurate? I have an astrophysicist acquaintance who tells me that it is conceivable that science will one day resolve the apparent enigmas of QM, just as it is conceivable that science will eventually resolve the enigmas of dark matter and dark energy. Our values are real, and if determination is conceivably possible in these other cases, then why is it inconceivable in the case of value?

In respect of moral value, evolutionary ethicists might argue that moral value is determinate by reference to the scientific truths of evolution. Moral value is a determinate product of evolution like our livers, our toenails and our language. If this is true, then what would the breaching of the supposed foundational indeterminacy in respect of moral value mean for the foundational assumptions of phenomenology?

QM discoveries can move forward and make progress. The question is, where do science and phenomenology meet? They are both about the same thing, no? But one is calling it a cat's liver, the other says that beneath being called this, there is a more basic analysis. To me, it is simply the same kind of difference that lies between what a veterinarian would say and what a physicist would say. Both are right, but simply look at different things. Any advance in science is going to still sit on a nest of phenomenological presuppositions, just as any advance in biology is going to sit on a nest of, say, presuppositions in the field of particle physics.

And in respect of religion, might it not be the case that underlying it, there is no ultimate indeterminacy but simply a yearning, a huddling together in the dark for comfort in the face of the unknown, in the face of the as yet indetermined? Religion may yearn for the ground of being but does not find it with its communal rituals and dogma. And so the religious affirm to each other that it surely feels like they on the right track, and that they must just have faith to get to the final goal. That may be comforting, but it does not get to the actual ground of “being” or the meaning of “being”, whatever that may be. And it is not proof that what they are searching for must be radically indeterminate.

I haven't been clear. I said earlier that our ethics IS ethics, so what do I mean by this? It goes directly to a phenomenological description of ethics. Just as Kant looked at the structure of rational thought, I want to look at the structure of ethics. Kant finds forms of our everyday judgments to be pure, and Husserl find purity in the phenomenological givenness of the world and I am asking, in this essential givenness of ethical matters, what is it that makes something ethical, the essence of ethics? I really am playing the kind of game Kant plays: we do a reduction of the common example, suspending what is incidental, so there I am ethically bound not to harm others, to keep it simple. So this presents itself in many different ways and conditions, and to get at the essence of ethics, we remove from consideration all that is not ethical in nature, the facts of my complicated relation with someone or some situation, because while the facts do contextualize my decision making and are important, here, I am trying determine what it is that makes a case ethical at all, so all merely factual in nature is off the table. I want to analyze it down to its basic anatomy, and find the thing that makes something ethical, the thing presupposed by an ethical situation, that, were this to be removed, the ethicality itself would be removed as well. This I am calling value, after Wittgenstein in his Tractatus and his Lecture on Ethics (available online). Remember that Witt would talk about ethics and insisted that such a word was nonsense in a discussion about the nature of ethics (certainly not talking about whether this or that was ethical, because such cases are prior to the ethical reduction).

Value is hard to discuss, but this is so in the same sense that talk about pure reason is hard to discuss. It is not as if there is anything such and pure reason or pure value. Rather, this purity is an analytical concept that shows us a dimension of our existence. Anyway: it is "pure" and therefore evidenced in normal matters, but not as something one can quantify or point to. It is the non contingent good and bad. Take a sharp knife. We call this good because it has certain properties, like a sharp edge or a balanced weight or a good grip, or whatever. But the sharpness: if this is to be used in a production of Macbeth, it is no longer good, is it? It is in fact bad for the knife to be sharp, for someone could get hurt. This kind of contextualization the creates a meaningful possibility is something I have brought up several times. See Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play in which it is argued that there is no center "outside" of context (there is nothing beyond text) and so nothing to stand as an Archimedean point to make meaning and reference possible. If I ask the professor, is there a text in this class? how is she to take this? Do I mean text in terms of a physical textbook I left behind? Or am I asking whether there is a book whose content we will be reading? Of perhaps I am referring to some set of assumptions about the way things are understood. Or: I have a paper weight, and I use it to hold the door open. Then a thief picks it up and bludgeons me with it. Is it a paper weight, a door stop or a weapon? Realize later on that Picasso sculpted the thing and the Chicago Museum of Art gives me ten million dollars for it. Now it is a work of art. The point is that these meanings are generated by new contexts, but if you remove all contextual possiblities, all meanings vanish as well. And ALL meanings are like this, says Derrida. Is Venus a planet or is it the morning star and the evening star? All of these. Talk about astronomy, and it is a planet. But poetically, it may well be the latter. What would a particle physicist say Venus is?

I think this idea is clear. Things are not in some natural correspondence with our language, but are contextually determined. Ask what something IS, and it is either assumed or it has to be explained regarding what context the thing is intended to be in. No context, no meaning. No thing is "stand alone" what it is, but has its meaning generated out of contextual associations. And Derrida is the master of this thesis. But back to ethics: The sharp knife's sharpness is a contingent virtue, and MOST analytic philosophers want ethics to be just this! Like Mackie: right and wrong moral actions depend this and that, and how one praises or valorizes or approves or commends, and so on; and nothing according this this pov is ever stand alone because people and opinions vary. This is where the argument takes its major turn: I agree with Mackie and the rest that good and bad are contingent matters in the entanglements we find them in. But the engine that drives ethics is value, and value "reduced" to its essence is not discovered to be merely context contingent, but possesses an essence that lies outside of the contingencies of language, and this is In existence. Ethics' value is an existential essence! For this I have offered the simple yet powerful justification: put your hand in boiling water and keep it there until the value is duly registered. Now: this is most emphatically NOT a language event. The prohibition not to do this does not issue from the way my culture views such things or the way it can be contextualized "out" of its nature. The world is the source of the meaning that screaming pain in your hand.

I did argue this before, but perhaps this here is clearer. The idea is that the engine that drives ethics is IN the fabric of things, and the contingencies that are created in the entanglements of our affairs are not. We make up, if you will, the latter. Not the former, making the former absolute. You said, "but it does not get to the actual ground of “being” or the meaning of “being”, whatever that may be. And it is not proof that what they are searching for must be radically indeterminate." well, what is being? I argue that it doesn't get more real than value-being or being-in-value.

There is certainly something that cries out for an explanation, but I think it is something that phenomenology or Dasein or metaphysics or science or religion do not (or have not yet) explained and that is because we, as limited phenomenologists and scientists, are in no position (yet?) to understand or explain it. All the tortured word-weaving of Continental philosophy, all the drab, dry conceptual analysis and logic of Anglo-American philosophy, all the myths, dogma and rituals of religion... these may purport to get us there but, as far as I can see, they don't. They all hit a brick wall when it comes to explaining the ground of being, they are not yet explaining what "being" is or what "being means". Maybe to comprehend this we would need to "be" the entire universe and "be" all knowing. But we, as puny limited beings, whether phenomenologists or scientists, are currently in no such position. However, this does not logically entail perpetual, indefeasible, radical indeterminacy. It is conceivable that what is behind it all could be determinable? But perhaps just not by us in our current state.

To be honest, it does take work to begin to take someone like Heidegger seriously. But the same can be said for any hard science.

To really understand what Heidegger was talking about, one has to take a radical turn in one's default assumptions about the world: A person is most emphatically NOT an object. This may sound simple enough, but consider how strongly culture pulls one toward the thinking that one IS an object. And just as with any hard science, the truth is not written on the sleeve of the world. It is discovered by analysis. The brick wall you speak of is mostly constructed of the assumptions you implicitly bring to the wall to penetrate it. These assumptions will be largely dismissed, and it is not as if once one really gets into the literature one is delivered from ambiguity; rather, one sees that one really never understood what the most basic questions really are. This has been my experience, at any rate. I am reading Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative right now, and while some parts are tedious, there is an idea I have only recently begun to realize given analysis I never thought of. I have n3ever understood what time is so well as now, but then, this only deepens the rift between what can and cannot be said, for when one thinks on this threshold of the impossible (indetermincy) it is the threshold one finally sees, and one is there, IN this, not merely thinking about it.

Thanks, Hereandnow.

I have trouble with Heidegger. I don't trust him. His Continental wordsmithing may be beguiling (if one can understand it), but I suspect that it is as opportunistic and as questionable as his politics. Husserl is much purer. Sartre I know from my uni days, 50 years ago. I read Huis Clos and Le Nausea in French (I did a sub-major in French language) and was greatly affected by these works. They still sit, heavily notated, on my book shelves. You have renewed my interest and I will open them again.

I need to read your latest post closely. I'm sure to have more questions. I hope you won't mind.

Oh, and BTW, I've asked you this before, but you didn't address my question, so I'll try again. Why is the Continental style of philosophizing so prolix? I mean, I don't expect anything as crude as a syllogism, but can they not at least aim for clarity? Why does it have to be so nebulous?

Lagayscienza wrote

Yes, they are very real; indubitably real. But aren't things other than value just as real? Matter and energy and events (other than joy, suffering, etcetera) that occur in space-time are, at least arguably, all just as real as joy and suffering, even though we may not be in a position to know exactly what these other things are "in themselves". But don't we know enough about them to know that they are real? And didn't space-time, matter and energy exist before humans, and couldn't they continue to exist after humans and their "Value-[ing]" cease to exist? Could it not be argued that value is just a natural phenomenon that emerges from more fundamental physical realities?

Consider: Is General Motors real? And then, is a library real? And finally, how about my cat? One place phenomenology goes in the search for the real and the question of language is the reality status of naming. If a child decides to form a philosophy club and is elected president and now IS the president, is this an occasion of bringing into the world a new reality? In a way, yes, because as president, she will BE an agency of consequence and so the concept of presidency is not vacuous, but it is not as if she were, say, a volcano, something that was already real prior to the naming process of cultures long past, but this raises the question, what does the naming actually do? In itself it is no more real than the reality of the noise made when uttering the word, or better, than the matrix of meaning out of which it was conceived that is implicit IN the utterance (or thought, or written word) that belongs, as Heidegger put it, to the potentiality of possibilities of human dasein; but then, anything you can imagine qualifies in this because no utterance is meaningless but is understood against a backdrop of meaning. In a way, no: a president isn't there, in the empirical evidence, and is no "thing". But how do names become like things? I am president of GM! uttered by whoever it really is, is not a reality vacuous statement, while the newly elected philosophy club child is, or is much LESS real.

Does this kind of thinking introduce an element of variance into the determination of what is real? Can something be more real than another thing? We commonly admit that some things are more intense or significant that others, but more real? Reality is supposed to be quality and quantity neutral. A speck of dust is no less real than a galaxy, and no more real than a neutrino. The ambiguity rises out of how a reality is ushered in in the naming process, for to name something is no mere tag of nomenclature. It is a principle, a function. The point I want to make is that the day to day talk about someone or something being this or that is analytically reducible to a function, that is, it DOES something, just as a volcano does something. Just as real, BUT: it is NOT that the name is real, or, that the naming that places a name on a thing or person is itself real: there is no such thing as a president of GM, but what these DO when introduced into an existing system of operation is undeniably real. A person may, in a desperate psychological move to avoid stress, believe in Jesus and angels and their redeeming abilities, and while we certainly do challenge the idea that these things exist and can do these things, we cannot deny the deliverance from stress, so the question of the reality of naming then goes to the pragmatics of the affair. Pragmatists argue that everything is like this. Language itself, the naming of things that gives birth to institutions like GM and (there is a great paper on this by John Haugeland, Heidegger on Being a Person, that goes into this, indirectly. I have this) even cats and dogs and bridges and dams, is a pragmatic function, and this is a modality of Being, or reality, or existence (take your pick, since this is not a technical discussion).

This is a reduction to pragmatics, and I think it is right. The reality of our existence, the going shopping and paying taxes and getting married is all about an institutional life, phenomenologically reducible to pragmatics. What is pragmatics? It is a reduction to the temporality of problem solving, that is, the conditional structure of IF....THEN....Things are now events! What IS a cat and its name? It IS: If one approaches catlike appearances, THEN one can expect certain kind of possibilities that are associated with cats. So the reality of my cat is the forward looking event of encountering my cat, and this brings things to an analysis of time, and value is now in a different dynamic: it is in the constitution of the problem solving event. What do I think now of reality? Reality in the simple nondescript sense is useless, trivially true or tautologically true: Nothing is really said at all when the term is used in this most basic sense. It is only in context that it makes sense: When I say the elephant in my dreams is not real, I mean it is not real as actual elephants are real, but certainly real as dream elephants are real. But if this standard is dismissed, then the principle that says all tings are equally real is gone as well, and so all eyes are the reality of the problem solving event. I argue that the quality in play is value, which is I say an existential absolute: one cannot even imagine a diminished value-as-such. The sharp knife's sharpness can be a virtue or a deficit, depending; but value as value is not relative to context.

To add: pragmatic reals are variable. Existential reals are not. But what is an existential real? Value.

Why do you say that all things are "foundationally indeterminate"? Is this necessarily so? Aren't some things determinate, at least to some extent? If this were not so, then how could we even move around without bumping into things? If we are not hallucinating or dreaming, is it not the case that intentions are about an externally extant reality, however dimly perceived? The phenomena cannot be just about aboutness? And if there is more to them than this, then why should the phenomena in consciousness be the end of the road in terms of determinacy? If some determination is possible with physical objects and events in space-time, then why should value be said to be necessarily foundationally indeterminate? Again, value my be just a natural phenomenon that emerges when matter is organised into highly complex objects like brains. And in that sense, determinate.

So in the end, I find it hard to grasp the idea that all we really know are phenomena as presented to consciousness and that all is foundationally indeterminate. I find it hard to believe that there is not more to the universe than intention and indeterminacy?

But one has to ask about how determinacies are made. It is determinate that this is a lamp. Okay, but dig deeper: What is meant by "is"? Hence, a book named Being and Time. The verb 'to be' is the most philosophically charged word there is. What is meant by "is"? This is a question, and a question is an openness, only here we are not asking about things that are contingently or determinately secured, as when you are hammering and the hammer head flies off: after a moment's surprise and "question", belief and determinacy set in once again. Questions within the totality of, again with Heidegger, the potentiality of possiblitiies are determinate, even if one is in one of Kuhn's normal science paradigms and Einstein comes along with a surprising theory, his thoughts still belong to this totality. So what happens when this totality asks such a question? An openness, the nature of a quesiton, only here, one stands in a very different place where language meets its

So the original move regarding determinacy is Cartesian: I know many things, but I can doubt them and so what is the source of this doubt? Not that I do doubt them, but that doubt is a structural feature of their existence. There certainly IS the possibility to doubt this is an actual lamp, for one can insert conditions of dubitability, and hence we have the epistemic distance between observer and observed. Husserl said this distance is cancelled by attending to the phenomenon and not the talk in common circulation (the naturalistic attitude). I can doubt the lamp is really a lamp, but can I doubt that I am experiencing something at all? No. we have now found the true ground for declaring what is real: that which cannot be doubted. Whether you agree with Husserl or not is not as important as what Husserl opened up: there really is a difference between just going along with accepting the world as everyone says it is, and questioning the world, for this structural doubt possibility that is in my cat's existence is an openness with no possible determinacy, and this is because anything that can be be proposed still faces the same openness of a question. It is not like the hammer's head flying off, for here, we know what to do, and why it happened, and all this is discoverable. The question of being (existence, reality) does not have this. The question of being is the door to metaphysics.

And this wouldn't matter at all, and would be just a blank openness in our knowledge of things, this openness in the basic assumptions about this being a cat or that being stellar event given that their existence cannot be explained; it would be like an anomaly the stands against normal science if it wasn't for two things: one is, the question of being denies foundational authority to all knowledge claims, and even this hardly matters; but the other lies with ethics, the metaphysics of ethics, or metaethics: the question of the Good as well as the Bad, and their practical counterparts, the Right and the Wrong, for these, taken in the non contingent ethical sense (and not in the good knife, bad couch sense) are about existential crises, not just definitional finitude: The horrors of the world in this indeterminacy are left "open" in the question of ethical meaning, and so one faces ethical nihilism, the kind of thing Critchley talked about. BUT: consider that religion's job is just this, to give our ethics and the horrors and injustices and the joys and the desire for consummation a grounding in the absolute!

See, I am saying that good and bad in the contingent sense, which is very common, you know, good catch! Bad tomatoes! does not work when the question is about the Good itself, for here we have arrived at the ultimate reduction: the down to the pain qua pain, the joy qua joy. These cannot be recontextualized to change their badness or goodness; not like a couch or a knife and their qualities.

It seems to me that unless we grant at least a measure of ultimate reality to things beyond how they appear in consciousness, and unless some determination is possible, then the physical universe beyond beyond our heads, AND VALUE, both seem to evaporate for, without the reality of the rest of the universe, there would be nothing to care about, nothing to value, and nowhere for valuing to happen. So why grant primacy to value?

Ah, here is a point, and without argument, extremely important: You are thinking not as a phenomenologist thinks, but as an empirical scientist who chops up the world into pieces, here a quartz crystal, there a fossil, here a mental disturbance, there an appreciation for cigars, and so on. But talk about Being does not work this way. A case of occurrent value, as with the annoying way these glasses slip forward, IS existence. It is not separated, not a localized affair. So when human value experiences are analytically determined to have a dimension of absoluteness, this IS the world, inside and outside. Any talk about the discreet differences between me and things out there are possessed within the the only reality that can be talked about: phenomena. This is intuitively challenging. I want to say that it really doen't matter if something out there beyond the trees and stars is value relevant, for my existence, and everyone's, IS existence, you could call it meta-existence, for, to use those Kantian terms, there is no way to divide the world into noumena and phenomena. The world IS phenomena, and nothing more. Calling it appearance and representation is misleading, for the appearance of what? question suggest a beyond the appearance itself. No. There is no "appearance of" anything. The phenomenon itself is stand alone Being.

And doesn't phenomenology presuppose mind? Without mind, can there be intention? I suspect the phenomenologist would turn that around and say that without intention there can no mind. A chicken and egg game, no? I might be wrong about that, but what seems certain to me is that without brains, their could be no intention. If that is so, then is not phenomenology presupposing brains? And if so, then wouldn't physical brains be primary and the phenomena in consciousness secondary? And then we'd be back to a materialist view of the would, with consciousness and value as emergent phenomena.

Phenomenology is first descriptive. Mind is a fine term, but ask what this IS, and one directed to its contents, and this is Husserl all over. Consciousness itself is overarching, all encompassing, cannot be outstripped (Heidegger's term). Keep in mind that consciousness observes the brain in order for the brain to be posited, and therefore consciousness is presupposed by the posting of a brain. Not that there is no relation between brain and consciousness, but that this kind of relation is indeterminate.

If you are finding all of this difficult, join the club. I struggle with it every day. Did I mention Ricoeur's Time and Narrative? Reading this now. Trying to deal with this, but insight lies in the immediate horizon.

Lagayscienza wrote

I have trouble with Heidegger. I don't trust him. His Continental wordsmithing may be beguiling (if one can understand it), but I suspect that it is as opportunistic and as questionable as his politics. Husserl is much purer. Sartre I know from my uni days, 50 years ago. I read Huis Clos and Le Nausea in French (I did a sub-major in French language) and was greatly affected by these works. They still sit, heavily notated, on my book shelves. You have renewed my interest and I will open them again.

I need to read your latest post closely. I'm sure to have more questions. I hope you won't mind.

Oh, and BTW, I've asked you this before, but you didn't address my question, so I'll try again. Why is the Continental style of philosophizing so prolix? I mean, I don't expect anything as crude as a syllogism, but can they not at least aim for clarity? Why does it have to be so nebulous?

You could do what I have always done, which is to "real through" where it is unintelligible and just move along through the text. You go through at first betwlldered, then things start to make sense. I know someone who has his phd in philosophy and he told me that when he first read Husserl he just didn't understand anything, and he said this flat out. Here and there things made some sense, but he didn't really know what he was talking about. Then is studied Brentano, and Kant, and he read papers, and so on. Now he teaches it.

It really is just this way. Common sense has to be seriously challenged and this is never welcomed by an established pov.

Thanks Hereandnow. It's funny how I have to agree with what you say about phenomenology and consciousness and value, and yet, I don't want it to be so. My mind rebels against upsetting the way I have always thought - matter, energy, and the fundamental laws of nature that govern the universe such that we go from physics, to chemistry to biology to consciousness, value - we start with the simplest and build up to the most complex. Phenomenology sort of turns that on its head and starts with consciousness. Instead as seeing value as a natural phenomenon that emerges as a result of consciousness the Continentals see value as fundamental. It's hard to get used to. It's like looking at a Necker cube - the mind keeps flipping back and forth between different interpretations of what is being observed. But, the alternative view, the phenomenological view, does make a lot of sense. It's because I find it difficult to adjust to that I play devil's advocate and try to find ways that phenomenology may be wrong. The other difficulty I have already mentioned - the Continental style of discourse is often impenetrable or, at best, takes a lot of work to parse. But. I'll get there. Still reading the meditations. And lots about idealism/realism.

“Hereandnow” wrote: But science has plenty to say about first person experience…

Not the cat’s or human introspection, surely. The experience of exterior objects and the other subjects that constitute the world, that’s another issue. We would not need language if there weren’t other subjects and if we didn’t have the practical necessity to communicate each other’s experiences of the world, that is, our shareable objectivity, to cooperate in its transformation.

“Hereandnow” wrote: Science cares nothing for the presuppositional grounding of scientific axioms.

There are theoretical aspects dealt with when any specialized discipline goes to work, such as scope of the inquiries, objects of study and systematic approach to the subject matter. Of course many of those themes become paradigmatic and presumed as part of the discipline when the actual work in the field is done, until some other scientists challenge them. These may not be foundational for science in general, but they are for the particular fields. There are also major discussions about broader, yet foundational themes in the field of science in general, which is what we call the philosophy of science. No need to stress the fact that it can do pretty well without phenomenology.

“Hereandnow” wrote: Phenomenology leaves everything in place, and does not for a moment violate one's sense of understanding the world through science. Phenomenology asks OTHER questions. The ones science ignores.

Phenomenology leaving everything in place is a disputable assertion. I see that you took care of saying “sense of understanding”. But phenomenology does not leave in place the 4.3 billion old Earth, for example, unless it implies the correlationist view that it only exists insofar human exists, because there’s only time when there’s a human. Heidegger wrote about it. That is not compatible with the intrinsic realism of science. And then you argue that those assumptions are the ones challenged by phenomenology, which is exactly what the attempt to delegitimize science is. Correlationism is idealism, antirealism, it simply cannot go together with science. That’s what Heidegger does, his philosophy is against science and for irrationalism. It’s not disputed.

I’m sure not all subjects are within the scope of scientific inquiries, not because they can’t be, but because any such insight would be irrelevant. Want to learn Karate or Jiu-Jitsu? Being a good father? There are many ways to deal with these things, and yet I’m not convinced phenomenology is of any help there. Nowhere. Just look at the subject of this forum, religion. Phenomenology is indeed looking at other things, so much that it’s going astray.

“Hereandnow” wrote: You can't say something like " Add to that Kierkegaard's theology and we have a recipe for disaster" and so forth as some disembodied generality that is clear for all to see. Only someone who has read Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, The Concept of Anxiety, Repetition, and so on can talk like this. You're way over your head to even mention the name. UNLESS, of course, you can actually argue the point. So do say, what disaster did you have in mind?

Excuse me if I don’t hold Kierkegaard in high regard, as apparently you do. I will not go on to make a long and detailed post as you probably would, but I can tell you that he is a theologian. Any philosophy that stems from the mystical is bankrupt from the start in every possible way (metaphysical, ethical, etc.). Christian Existentialism is no exception, besides it seems to take the alienated individualism of modern man to its extremes.

“Hereandnow” wrote:
It is a premise that is massively simple. I think you resist for the entertainment of resisting. What other reason? Everyone knows this. Analytic philosophers know this. They got tired of talking about Kant because there was nothing left to talk about after a century of this. They didn't refute problem of "the legacy of the unsurpassable Kantian philosophy." But the French and the Germans didn't see things that way. They put Kant in bed with Hegel's historicity, Kierkegaards qualitative leap, Nietzsche's perspectivalism, and Husserl's epoche, and Heidegger's dasein, and on and on. And the philosophy hs only really come together in this very complicated legacy; but the irony of the legacy is this: the Husserlian reduction leads to only one thing, and that outstrips language itself!
[…] I bring this up here because the massively simple question of epistemology undoes the metaphysics of science, scientific metaphysics, as I am calling it. The kind of claims that attempt make a move from premises derived from the naturalistic pov, to philosophy, as if, as Rorty put it, the brain were a mirror of nature. The idea is so patently absurd there is hardly room for it in a reasonable thought. Once metaphysics is freed from this kind of thing, one can start thinking as a phenomenologist (like Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Jen luc Nancy, Jean luc Marion, Derrida--a post modern phenomenologist.

Your sympathy for idealism in philosophy is well noted. You think it has found in phenomenology the last frontier of philosophical reflection, having refuted and left behind materialism (or physicalism, as you wish to call it). I can understand the feeling because I am convinced, just the same as you are about your philosophical affiliations, that idealism is completely obsolete and materialism is all we are left with. Such statements, from me or from you, don’t make for an argument though. That’s why saying that “you resist for the entertainment of resisting” sounds absolutely ridiculous and shows that you are in a bubble. Heidegger has not been passed down to us unharmed by criticism. Neither Husserl or Wittgenstein. Bunge said Heidegger was a schizophrenic and Popper detested him (mostly because he was a Nazi, of course, but also very much for philosophical reasons). Antirealism has received devastating critiques from Bhaskar and Meillassoux. Sellars found a middle ground between scientific naturalism and Kantian epistemology. Against Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism there is Sartre’s atheistic existentialism. Against idealist phenomenology there’s a down to earth critique from Searle in The Phenomenological Illusion. There’s evidently a heavy influence of Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida and so on in Postmodernist thought and most of the criticism to its jargon and the concepts behind cultural relativism and constructivism apply to phenomenologists. So, whatever you think I need to be up to date, it’s not phenomenology.

“Hereandnow” wrote: This can be argued, but you first have to at least get to the admission that materialism flat out perishes in the epistemic reductio ad absurdum. It is the first step fo understanding the essence of religion, which is a metaethical problem, and Husserl's reduction take's one just there.

Alas, the reduction is less an argument than an orientation, a rerouting of what is privileged in meaning.

You cannot argue against materialism, which is an ontology, with a purely epistemic approach. You cannot argue against materialism without rejecting the facts of science; such stance is simply incompatible. Saying that phenomenology looks at other things…well, they will have to be other non-factual things, nothing related to their material existence. But then again, to which type of existence? You said phenomenology did not deny the exteriority of objects, so they must be constituted somehow. What is it that they are constituted of? Tell me about that table, about that lamp…

Religion can be seen in many aspects, such as the ethical or metaethical, but it cannot be reduced to one of such aspects, even if it was an essential one. There can be many properties essential to the things we are studying. The right orientation is to recompose how it emerges from more basic elements until it forms a comprehensible whole, not to reduce. That’s just palm-reading.

“Hereandnow” wrote: Knowledge is pragmatic, nothing more, says Rorty. But does this exhaust ontology? This is the question I wish to raise. I see the lamp on the table and ask what is the knowledge relation I have to this lamp? And this takes me to look at my own epistemic constitution, for I am the knower and am most intimate with this side of the relationship. So what does it mean to know?

That’s introspection, you can try to deny it, but that goes nowhere. Even if one discovered something that way, such as res cogitans, and denied access to anything else, that is, if it cannot say anything about the constitution of exterior objects, to remain coherent you must stay committed to the interiority of your being. The naturalistic approach is not refuted. To do that you must reject nature itself and embrace mysticism, which phenomenology does not hesitate to do. Even the constitution of other human beings, which are exterior subjects, just as the rest of objects in experience, remains inaccessible, and talking about human beings in general becomes as unjustified as any other claim from phenomenology. It cannot give a fair account of the most basic facts, including the facts of our biology. It’s plainly absurd. The whole project fails from the beginning by refusing to see that the lamp is there as an ontic reality in a world structured independently of its subjective apprehension, and that it takes subjective apprehension, that is, the relationship between the structure of my subjectivity and the structure of the world in itself, to realize it and constitute it as a fact. Also, and most importantly (since phenomenology claims to have some privileged authority over the subject of human existence), that my own self, my being as human, is defined by that same relationship with exterior entities, unconscious and conscious, to whom I appear as an exterior body too.

“Hereandnow” wrote: But there is no way out of the phenomenon. We accept that my aunt is my aunt, but we have to accept the analytic of experience (or dasein or consciousness) as well. She is there, but conditioned by experience.

But if I give any value to that conditioned experience, I can assert that your old aunt was there before you were born and had any experiences. We can also assert that if you’re gone (hopefully not), your aunt will still be there, when you are not experiencing anymore. When you do experience her presence, you might want to say that she’s there FOR YOU at the same time that you are here FOR HER. That’s the limit, the conditions that restrict your experience, but that obviously does not exhaust the possibilities of existence of your aunt, which do not depend on your experience of her. She did things in her childhood, which can be attested as really happening through evidence like photos and films, all of which, even as going through your experience, says something about what your aunt was without your experience. So, there’s a way out of the phenomenon of your aunt, beyond what she means for you as your aunt. So we can say about what happens in the world and what and how it is. Phenomenology is not better equipped than science to get insights on this.

“Hereandnow” wrote: Saying science has philosphical foundations is vague. And what is done here is not introspection. Introspection in the general sense is a reflection on one's own thoughts and feelings about something that occurs in the shared culture of living. Phenomenology is an apriori discovery of the structures of consciousness.

The statement about the foundations or science might be succinct, but not vague. It goes right to the point I wanted to make.

By definition introspection is an interior inspection, it’s about what goes on in your inner experience. Your inner experience of the world, what else could it be? Surely, you can aim to “discover the structures of consciousness” that way, but that’s just an euphemism for a type of introspection.

Very interesting discussion. Thank you both. Count Lucanor, I've managed to get hold of the Searle paper, The Phenomenological Illusion.

In trying to get to grips with phenomenology I've had to read up on idealism/realism. I feel like I'm starting Philosophy 101. I find myself hovering between realism and idealism. It's hard to see a tenable, middle position.

Idealism seems to make a mystery out of why our perceptions conform to the notion that we live in a world of beings, things, and events that exist independently of our perceptions. It seems to eliminate the problem of things in themselves, but it also seems to make more acute the problem of other minds. If they are just my own perceptions, how do I avoid solipsism? It seems that idealism does not leave us a world as something fundamentally distinct from mentation.

I've spent today re-reading this entire thread. I came across a paragraph that I missed before. It is so succinct, concise and clear and precisely what I needed to understand the Idealism/Realism divide. I wish that you had posted this at the very beginning of this thread, Hereandnow, it would have made my work easier. (I started from a very low base, obviously):

Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 18th, 2023, 3:49 pmTo the question: "does anything exist independently of our consciousness?" the antirealist answers: "no, nothing else exists" or "we can never know anything else exists". Another version is: "they do exist, but we can never know exactly how they are, because how they appear to us is caused by ourselves and not by the things in themselves".

In trying to understand where Continental philosophers are coming from, I think, at a minimum, it is essential to take on board one of the above versions. I’m probably wrong and, although I am not in total agreement with it, I’d like to think that the last version would best serve as a basis for a beginner starting to read Continental philosophy. It at least acknowledges the existence of things exterior to our mentation whilst at the same time capturing the fundamental idea that what is perceived will depend on a whole lot of stuff that is already in our heads. If I’d read an introduction to Continental philosophy I might, if I’d been lucky, have come across a similar paragraph. Before I stated reading this thread, I was completely clueless about idealism. But it's clear to me now that one must grasp Idealism to understand Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism.

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑December 19th, 2023, 6:44 pm Very interesting discussion. Thank you both. Count Lucanor, I've managed to get hold of the Searle paper, The Phenomenological Illusion.

In trying to get to grips with phenomenology I've had to read up on idealism/realism. I feel like I'm starting Philosophy 101. I find myself hovering between realism and idealism. It's hard to see a tenable, middle position.

Idealism seems to make a mystery out of why our perceptions conform to the notion that we live in a world of beings, things, and events that exist independently of our perceptions. It seems to eliminate the problem of things in themselves, but it also seems to make more acute the problem of other minds. If they are just my own perceptions, how do I avoid solipsism? It seems that idealism does not leave us a world as something fundamentally distinct from mentation.

Idealism always ends in solipsism or in some form of supernaturalism. It’s the vengeance of old theology that became obsolete. You will never get to grips with idealist phenomenology, because it’s absurd, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not an argument, I’m just stating the conclusion I have reached after years of weighing its arguments against materialism and realism.

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑December 20th, 2023, 5:35 am I've spent today re-reading this entire thread. I came across a paragraph that I missed before. It is so succinct, concise and clear and precisely what I needed to understand the Idealism/Realism divide. I wish that you had posted this at the very beginning of this thread, Hereandnow, it would have made my work easier. (I started from a very low base, obviously):

Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 18th, 2023, 3:49 pmTo the question: "does anything exist independently of our consciousness?" the antirealist answers: "no, nothing else exists" or "we can never know anything else exists". Another version is: "they do exist, but we can never know exactly how they are, because how they appear to us is caused by ourselves and not by the things in themselves".

In trying to understand where Continental philosophers are coming from, I think, at a minimum, it is essential to take on board one of the above versions. I’m probably wrong and, although I am not in total agreement with it, I’d like to think that the last version would best serve as a basis for a beginner starting to read Continental philosophy. It at least acknowledges the existence of things exterior to our mentation whilst at the same time capturing the fundamental idea that what is perceived will depend on a whole lot of stuff that is already in our heads. If I’d read an introduction to Continental philosophy I might, if I’d been lucky, have come across a similar paragraph. Before I stated reading this thread, I was completely clueless about idealism. But it's clear to me now that one must grasp Idealism to understand Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism.

Actually that paragraph is mine (or my mind is creating
the reality that I wrote it ). In any case, I’m glad that it’s helping you to untangle the philosophical knots of the realism/antirealism debate.