• Possibility
    2.8k
    Contrary to many misinterpretations, Husserlian phenomenology is not an idealism but a radical subject-object interactionism.Joshs

    Thank you for this, and for the quotes - the more I look into Husserl, the more I find this to be a more accurate description. Idealism is far too confining a term for what he had in mind.
  • Constance
    1.1k
    Actually Kierk argued the opposite here in this short read: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/18/kierkegaard-concept-of-anxiety-time/3017amen
    Excellent link. This is from The Concept of Anxiety, a seminal work. As you read through this text you find Sartre, here, Heidegger there.
    I wasn't being very careful. In a sense, K argues that past and future do not exist, because the only way they do exist is in the present. We live in time, I would argue, such that past and future are subsumed under the present, or, rather, such that our experience of the past moving into the future is a reality in the giveness of the presence. The past is a dimension of our worldly giveness, and once spirit is posited and we leave the aesthetic moment to moment existence behind, we come to see that even when the past and the future stand before us, there is really only a true ontology of the eternal present.

    He is devilishly difficult to get right, for me, at any rate, because he is so playful. Playful geniuses are hard to read because their thinking is so idiosyncratic.
  • Constance
    1.1k
    The reason concepts of time were at issue around 1859 is that Darwin published Origin of Species that year, in turn based on a geological concept of time - that proposed a hugely ancient origin of the earth and lifeforms fossilized in rock layers.counterpunch

    No. K was responding to Hegel. At any rate, K died in 1855. Aristotle is behind this. See 3017amen's:
    https://youtu.be/vh-IW9Y1htA
  • Present awareness
    128
    the trick is to become a knight of faith, which is to live in the present and embrace the past and the future in this lived present.Constance

    I’m reminded of one of John Lennon’s songs “life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans”. Also, there is a Buddhist saying “do each thing, as if you do nothing else”.

    Presents of mind, is to be where you are. Wherever you are, your five senses will be feeding the brain with information about sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. However, the thinking mind, as John Lennon points out, may be busy making other plans. One may not stop thinking, by thinking about it, as that would be like trying to wipe up blood, with blood. The trick is to watch the thinking and allow it to be there, simply because it “IS” there. To allow things to be, just as they are, is to be in the present moment, or in the NOW. Anyone whom is reading this, is reading it NOW, because there is no “other”time.
  • Possibility
    2.8k
    Okay. I would genuinely like to know. Some of Husserl is very accessible, like Cartesian Meditations and others. Ideas get rather technical, but it is here I think you can see how phenomenology works. I haven't read Logical Investigations. On my list.Constance

    In the meantime...

    Whereas retentions and protentions in the early lectures were defined as retaining the primal impression, or projecting a new primal impression, respectively, in Husserl’s later research manuscripts, the primal impression is considered the line of intersection between retentional and protentional tendencies that make up every present phase of consciousness. Even in his earlier account Husserl had claimed that primal presentation is not self-sufficient, rather it operates only in connection with retentions and protentions. In the Bernau Manuscripts, however, Husserl seems to suggest that the complicated interlacing of retentions and protentions is constitutive of primal impression. Not only is primal impression not self-sufficient, it is a constituted product rather than something that makes a constitutive contribution of its own.“The Past, Present and Future of Time-Consciousness: From Husserl to Varela and Beyond”, Shaun Gallagher (in Constructivist Foundations, November 2017)

    Barrett describes instead three event structures: an ongoing interoception of affect constructed by internal and external sensory data as the state of the organism; an ongoing prediction of affect generated by conceptual structures; and a 4D instructional map of attention and effort (energy) distribution across the organism, constituting the ‘complicated interlacing’ of interoception and conception, similar to Husserl’s primal impression.

    This relates to my suggestion that the present is a construction, what we make of it, and doesn’t seem too far from Husserl’s internal time-consciousness. The ‘present’, or primal impression, is not understood as an ‘object’, but as a constituting event operating only in connection with ongoing interoception and prediction.

    I also see a similar relational structure, at a three-dimensional level, reflected in the bio-chemical function of DNA and mRNA, but that’s another discussion... anyway, I’ve just picked up ‘The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness’, so bear with me...
  • 3017amen
    3.1k
    We live in time, I would argue, such that past and future are subsumed under the present, or, rather, such that our experience of the past moving into the future is a reality in the giveness of the presence.Constance

    Sure, no worries Constance. K makes the point of both phenomena occurring from within the human condition, hence is emphasis on dread. (Logically, it breaks the rules of excluded middle.) Our existence is such that without past and present, cognition could not exist the way it does. However, it seems when discussing that which is present, the question becomes how big is that sliver of present(?).

    Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al . as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable. However, in theory, Einstein said it was possible, out there... .

    Too, in the aforementioned Platonian sense, we get to play with eternity from time to time. Whether it's through the phenomenal humanistic experiences that we engage in, or from experimenting with mathematical entities...
  • Constance
    1.1k
    Sure, no worries Constance. K makes the point of both phenomena occurring from within the human condition, hence is emphasis on dread. (Logically, it breaks the rules of excluded middle.) Our existence is such that without However, it seems when discussing that which is present, the question becomes how big is that sliver of present(?).3017amen

    Note that the ideas I set forth here is not exclusively an attempt at weaving textual agreement, which is what academics hold so dear. I explore, appropriate freely.

    The impossible present. Heidegger accused Husserl of trying to walk on water in his impossible affirmations of "things themselves" but that really is the way this idea works: The way to make this plausible is first to remove the standard concept of time from our imagination, for this is a quantitative abstraction. And the law of the excluded middle only has application here where the past and the present are mutually exclusive. This logical attempt to bring the world to heel is exactly what K opposed, but on the other hand, I think he does not violate it at all since a quantitative temporal order is not existential, but pragmatic, I would call it reified pragmatics, the measurements we impose on the world, then take them AS the world.
    This being "without past and present, cognition could not exist the way it does" is, K is telling us, the wrong way to look at this. There is only ONE actuality, and this is the eternal present (which IS eternity; See Wittgenstein, a big fan of K. He draws on K in his Tractatus), and we live in this and only this, but we do it AS we live in a temporal world, making the temporal world and all of our ordered thinking and engagement mere constituents of the eternal now. This is, I claim, exactly what the Buddhists are talking about when they say one does not achieve Buddhahood, but only realizes that one, to borrow from Heidegger, always, already IS this. For K, to "posit spirit" is to posit sin, for in this positing one realizes that what we call time is possessed by the eternal present, which is God, the soul.

    Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al . as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable. However, in theory, Einstein said it was possible, out there... .3017amen

    Tricky. Realizing the eternal present subsumes time is to become aware of sin. Early on in K's Concept of Anxiety, he refers to the child and her wonderment and free adventurous spirit as being indicative of this radical movement, prior to which there is no sin. I am moving toward the realization that the idea that "no time is impossible," is wrong minded. Of course, we can talk like this vis a vis past, present and future, but "positing the spirit" is to pull away from normal discourse, not just in thought, but existentially, and indeed from all that creates separation from God: culture. Hereditary sin is to live in devotion to culture, to live, as Tillich put it, as if the institutions we created were our ultimate concern.

    Einstein theorized an a world prior to positing spirit, what Husserl called the naturalistic attitude. Certainly nothing wrong with this, but it is pre-sin. (Btw, the term 'sin' here is not, as K tells us, the Lutheran concept of the foulest deed imaginable, but a kind of Augustinian absence of God. This is my take on K).

    Too, in the aforementioned Platonian sense, we get to play with eternity from time to time. Whether it's through the phenomenal humanistic experiences that we engage in, or from experimenting with mathematical entities...3017amen

    The sense you refer to, I can't say I remember. But K is critical of the Greeks, here and especially in Repetition. The idea of Platonic recollection in Meno makes the past rule the present, to put it one way. Repetition is to live in the eternal present such that the past is the fullness of time,† but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past.
  • Constance
    1.1k
    Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al . as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable.3017amen

    It occurred to me that I really didn't address this: Heraclitus 's world of flux, one has to ask, why is this exclusive of affirming the present? WE are the ones who look at the stream on time as a logical succession, but the term "stream" belies this, for it possesses no boundaries at all. The law of the excluded middle is a positivist's way of misapprehending the world entirely.
  • 3017amen
    3.1k
    Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al . as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable. — 3017amen
    It occurred to me that I really didn't address this: Heraclitus 's world of flux, one has to ask, why is this exclusive of affirming the present? WE are the ones who look at the stream on time as a logical succession, but the term "stream" belies this, for it possesses no boundaries at all. The law of the excluded middle is a positivist's way of misapprehending the world entirely
    Constance

    Of course, the existential ethos of life not being so neat and tidy, and frankly illogical, rears its ugly head here, once again. As mentioned, in normal everydayness we are unable to, as you say, affirm the present. I agree that the LP would struggle with making sense out of consciousness/the process of cognition itself/cognitive behavior, as not only does it violate the logic associated with the a priori law of excluded middle axiom, it also (consciousness) has obvious metaphysical features to its existence and functionality.

    But back to the matter at hand, what sliver of time does the present represent? The answer to that question, I think, will speak to your concern about affirming the present, because perhaps, the present is made up of past and future, in an illogical mix of same. And so which of the three elements of time enjoy the special status of primacy, I wonder (?)… .

    Maybe as a thought experiment, think about how the intellect and the Will function together. Throw in sentience, and see what you come up with....
  • Joshs
    5.2k


    "positing the spirit" is to pull away from normal discourse, not just in thought, but existentially, and indeed from all that creates separation from God:Constance

    For K, to "posit spirit" is to posit sin, for in this positing one realizes that what we call time is possessed by the eternal present, which is God, the soul.Constance

    Why is the eternal present God, rather than God-sin as the inseparable poles of every present?

    Something I wrote on Caputo;
    “to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.”
  • Deleted User
    0
    I meant flow as in 'the trend'
  • Constance
    1.1k
    Why is the eternal present God, rather than God-sin as the inseparable poles of every present?Joshs

    Why is this not God-sin? But this begs the question, what is God?

    As for sin, speaking for K, I would say, first, there is no "every moment" as this quantifies the present. (He does speak of "the instant" but this is what makes K so frustrating, because he does reconcile apparent contradictions, but one has to read the full context of what he says to see this). All there IS, is the present, and for us, the temporal world contained therein. Sin is knowing, positing, spirit, which as I understand it is an existential qualitative movement out of daily affairs (culture, our "inherited sin") and into a kind of "pure" present, and I think of this purity as not unlike what Kant did with reason: In our entangled affairs, as we live through them, we recognize nothing of the structures of reason in judgment and thought, but turn toward these, in analysis, one comes to see at a higher order. Only here, the higher order is existential, non discursive; the "movement" is nondiscursive, though getting there is--obviously, one has to think.
    As to how God and why it is privileged over God-sin, K would say things like, through God lies redemption, making for the fullness of time, but the fullness of time being the instant as the eternal, as the Bible says. But I leave K (who has been accused of endorsing silliness) here. For such fullness, I turn to the Buddhists and the actuality of intimated "ultimate reality" as the Abhidhamma puts it. Ultimate reality is only meaningful in the intuited way it is apprehended, and here, one has to put aside or "suspend" critical judgment that pounces on such a thing. This is why philosophers like Levinas speak so cryptically about "the ideatum that exceeds the idea" and others are intent on whittling down time to the present to some primordial intimation, but end up talking around it, not about it, for this is the best that can be done.
    After all, what is falling in love, phenomenologically, looking at the "thing itself"'; and what is pain, in the same manner? This is not a matter for thought's adumbrations; it is transformational, cannot be spoken, yet they are the principle features of Being Here, that is, all these terms subsume. Talk about God is talk about value, and this ushers in a discussion about metaethcs, metavalue.
    Something I wrote on Caputo;
    “to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.”
    Joshs

    I'll have to look through Caputo for this. Off hand, this "for an instant, semantic unity, nameable as God, love...." is an instant outside of the apophatic annihilation of all such instants. Such terms, in the reductive attempt, are the last to go. But then, it may very well be that, if K is right, the closer one gets to "eternity" the more philosophy falls away, and one can be a butcher, an accountant, but live AS these in the eternal present. Like Abraham.
    It does not in the end come down to time, or any analysis of anything. Philosophy is really a search for value, which is what God is about: a consummation of this search.
  • Constance
    1.1k
    I meant flow as in 'the trend'TaySan

    That doesn't help. If you don't side with the atheists, the believers, or anyone else you mentioned, the "trend" certainly isn't going to be a step up. What trend? What is it that everybody is thinking in this trend that you find so important?
  • Valentinus
    1.6k

    One element that has not been mentioned as yet in this discussion of The Concept of Anxiety is how the "single individual" is the one who has to face the prospect of the "eternal." The limit to psychology often mentioned in the book is directly related to the "inward reserve" needed to be the one who can make a choice.

    The "generational" inheritance of sin described at the beginning is related to a model of the good parent who helps their child deal with this element. The book is a manual of religious education along with whatever else it may be.
  • Antony Nickles
    988


    Well done with this reading. I agree with the dynamic (though my K is limited), I only find it hard to bear up under the weight of this as a constant state. Every movement is not an action, nor is every expression intended--are we to be skewered at every passing moment on our angst for the state of our self? Cavell talks of a philosophical or moral moment, which is not ever-present; but, say, when we don't know what to do and are at a loss. K seems to capture this with what you quoted:

    Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? — Kierkegaard, Repetition, 1843

    I can't help hear the echo of Emerson's Experience, which was written a year before Either/Or.

    Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. — Emerson, Experience, 1844

    We don't know our customs, our world, our self; whether to go backward or upward. We enter a world already made, with the past in place, our language already imbued with the interests and desires and judgments of our culture. We have not signed the contract; most of the time we act and speak without standing for ourselves; we quote others Emerson says. The past simply continuing into the future, the abstraction of our self from this moment "annihilates the concept" as K says. The word is dead, and we are quiet (our life is, desperately). But there is an instant which makes all things new; when time is full (of possibilities Wittgenstein might say). We may need to be adverse to expectation (Emerson), convert our interest in our concepts, atone for the unspoken, redeem our judgments--to give them new life and power over our present deliberation. It is we, at this moment, that are responsible, now, before we define our life with our culture, our expression, our action. When duty calls us, we must answer for our current state, beyond our (past) knowledge, or suffer the sin of that lost chance. If we are to say our original sin was the creation of the past--our desire for certain knowledge of it--then our Eden is the sight of the sun at the top of Nietzsche's ladder, at noonday as Emerson says.

    And so is the "eternal present" ever-present? or, if it is, is it that we are only at times aware of it, or have the opportunity to rise to the occasion of it? Not that we may not be brought up at any time by society for our action or inaction, but are we to be held to the grindstone by ourselves at all times (as if every second was subject to sin, our grief endless)?

    This leads me to also comment on your question: "Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL?" We could say the past is outside of our self: knowledge, language, culture. And the future is the implications and consequences and judgments from that past. Our default aspect to the present is unrecognized consent, complicity, blindness, inattention, alienation. We fail to shake off our lethargy (or apathy) when our moment arrives. That is to say, the past and the future are ALL that exist; before we are thrust (drawn) into the present to face our eternal, if yet unconnected, unlived, self (Emerson speaks of a "next" self).
  • Constance
    1.1k
    “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday.”Antony Nickles

    That stair can be a very strange place, depending on the individual. Some experience a powerful alienation from all things and familiarity itself is lost. One has a sense of being two selves, the daily rote self, and then, this uncanny presence which cannot identify any longer with this. This is played out in phenomenology as a central theme, and it is considered a structural feature of our existence.
    Obviously, there is philosophical opposition to this. I can only conclude that we are all put together differently for reasons impossible to fathom.

    "Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls?"Antony Nickles

    He really nailed it. But the confidant (in Repetition) who was so confused by his affections and what to do, this hardly makes the case, does it? It is the "impossible" cases that drive one to top of a mountain raising a fist to oblivion in hopeless outrage, cases like pneumonic bubonic plague and the like. Language nullifies such things, everything, really, which is part of its job, to reduce the world to a manageable totality. We are not aware that this is happening, of course, but common speech reduces that world to its level. But then, to follow Emerson, walking along a bare common, "glad to the brink of fear" we see there are two sides of this. The Manichean way was to give horror and delight equal place, and there is some truth in this, but this is a quantitative equality. Qualitatively, the differences are stark and clear.
    The point being that K doesn't quite penetrate to the heart the "metaethical" discussion of this outrage.

    The past simply continuing into the future, the abstraction of our self from this moment "annihilates the concept" as K says. The word is dead, and we are quiet (our life is, desperately). But there is an instant which makes all things new; when time is full (of possibilities Wittgenstein might say). We may need to be adverse to expectation (Emerson), convert our interest in our concepts, atone for the unspoken, redeem our judgments--to give them new life and power over our present deliberation. It is we, at this moment, that are responsible, now, before we define our life with our culture, our expression, our action. When duty calls us, we must answer for our current state, beyond our (past) knowledge, or suffer the sin of that lost chance. If we are to say our original sin was the creation of the past--our desire for certain knowledge of it--then our Eden is the sight of the sun at the top of Nietzsche's ladder, at noonday as Emerson says.Antony Nickles

    That is nicely put. Keeping in mind that people don't live an abstraction, and there is a "fullness" in getting married, raising a family, even going shopping, and K's thought is that these things are not to be abandoned, but "sin" is doing all this, taking the world AS all of this, with no foundation in the" eternal", and what is this? This has to be played out in its cash value, for we are not dealing with a "sliver of time" between past and future, but an encompassing presence of God (not to put too fine a point on it), and then the question goes to what is "given": what is there about being glad to the brink of fear, or being tortured horribly? These are the kinds of questions that loom large, for we are no longer on familiar ground as our world is cast in high relief upon eternity, that is, what language has so tamed is now unleashed and its true nature becomes clear: These are not localized affairs, as empirical science would have it, for we have made a "qualitative" movement beyond the "naturalistic attitude" (Husserl's term) and the boundaries that would otherwise localize them are undone.
    But then, this also de-localizes the qualitative natures of (ethical) good and evil, and "ontic" presence is now ontological (these kind of language I lift from Heidegger. Ontic refers to our lived lives in everydayness while ontological refers to the structure of Being. But we are not in Heidegger's world here; we are in Kierkegaard's, or, at least hovering around this). So the conclusion seems irresistible: The Good really is the Good in an absolute moral way. Moral realism is the much derided term in modern philosophy. But now the question progresses further, how is this to be understood? In utility? In a rational good will (Kant's deontology)? Both of these beg the question, what is all the fuss about? Reason is an empty vessel and utility is measuring magnitudes and qualities of the Good, but what is the Good?
    My point in all this is to get to this one point, around which I claim all philosophy tends, implicitly The good and the bad, in the ethical/aesthetic sense, are intuitive actualities: taste that chicken cordon bleu, falling in love and be enraptured by all things (for to be in love is to love all things in one's gaze indiscriminately; Walt Whitman's poetry is founded on this idea, his "tallying the world"), the pneumonic plague, i.e., palpable meaning is an actuality not confined to the boundaries of finitude.

    And so is the "eternal present" ever-present? or, if it is, is it that we are only at times aware of it, or have the opportunity to rise to the occasion of it? Not that we may not be brought up at any time by society for our action or inaction, but are we to be held to the grindstone by ourselves at all times (as if every second was subject to sin, our grief endless)?

    This leads me to also comment on your question: "Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL?" We could say the past is outside of our self: knowledge, language, culture. And the future is the implications and consequences and judgments from that past. Our default aspect to the present is unrecognized consent, complicity, blindness, inattention, alienation. We fail to shake off our lethargy (or apathy) when our moment arrives. That is to say, the past and the future are ALL that exist; before we are thrust (drawn) into the present to face our eternal, if yet unconnected, unlived, self (Emerson speaks of a "next" self).
    Antony Nickles

    Emerson, the three I's: I, eye, aye! Reading his famous Nature is always inspiring, and philosophers don't take him seriously because he is kind of a crank romantic idealist. But then, so am I, though I think in different terms. Nietzsche really liked him because he was an iconoclast, rejecting dogmatism and orthodoxy, inviting us to be a "transparent eyeball" which I take as the dramatic reductive move to Kierkegaard's eternal present. I think if you walk with Emerson in the woods and leave behind the interpreted world, the past and the future disappear. Now, this gets us to the big issue in phenomenology, which is, even though you are not explicitly thinking of anything at all, there is still "the world" there before you, and you know it, and what allows this comfort of knowing is the past, or rather, it is the past to future event, and it is argued that there is no "in between" for this is just impossible: to grasp what the present could BE would require a medium outside the past to future, but this would be to posit something beyond the conditions of positing itself, beyond language, and language is the understanding's structure. This eternal present is after all, only as good as sense can be made out of it. Eternal??
    Of course, this is the kind of argument that stands in way of positing anything that is not discursive in the positing, and K is doing just this. But is he? As I see it, the present is not constrained by the past into future at all, and K's framing of the idea holds the key that at once allows the present to sustain positioning the past and the future within this. We cannot, as he says, forget that we exist. Existence IS the present, he is arguing; to Be is to be now, and this makes the past a now actuality. And history is a now actuality, to recall is to recall now. To anticipate is to anticipate now. All roads' analyses lead to the present, and, as K says, not positing this, not realizing this, is our distance for God, God being the actual, inevitable existential embodiment of the Good; after all, we have admitted above that the Good we realize in the everyday affairs we have is no longer localized. The question about the Good that remains is the hierarchy of the Good, which is the basis from K going after concupiscence.
  • Constance
    1.1k
    One element that has not been mentioned as yet in this discussion of The Concept of Anxiety is how the "single individual" is the one who has to face the prospect of the "eternal." The limit to psychology often mentioned in the book is directly related to the "inward reserve" needed to be the one who can make a choice.

    The "generational" inheritance of sin described at the beginning is related to a model of the good parent who helps their child deal with this element. The book is a manual of religious education along with whatever else it may be.
    Valentinus

    The single individual? Pls elaborate, if you would. How is it related to model of the good parent? And, inward reserve?
  • Deleted User
    0
    I don't know. Honestly, perhaps it cannot be defined. But does it help you to know that the Vedic Mystics already knew that the Earth's diameter on the equator is 8000 miles. Long before it could be measured.
  • Constance
    1.1k
    Honestly, perhaps it cannot be defined. But does it help you to know that the Vedic Mystics already knew that the Earth's diameter on the equator is 8000 miles. Long before it could be measured.TaySan

    Well, it's an interesting fact, but no it doesn't help. "I don't know" does fall short of the mark for discussion. Tell me more.
  • Deleted User
    0
    This is how my dad and I used to get caught up in endless discussions.

    Fine, I'll contemplate on it once more. Chances are the discussion ends here.
  • Deleted User
    0
    Everyone in Europe used to believe in God. It was the public opinion or popular belief.
  • Valentinus
    1.6k

    I believe the discussion of time you are referring to in The Concept of Anxiety begins in the third chapter (section IV 355). It begins with:

    Man, then, is synthesis of psyche and body, but is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. That has often been stated. I do not object to it at all, for it is my joy and dearest occupation to ponder over that which is quite simple.
    As for the latter synthesis, it is immediately striking that it is formed differently from the former. In the former, the two factors are psyche and body, and spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when spirit is posited. The latter synthesis has only two factors, the temporal and the eternal. Where is the third factor? And if there is no third factor, there really is no synthesis, for a synthesis that is a contradiction cannot be completed without a third factor, because the fact that the synthesis is a contradiction asserts that it is not. What, then, is the temporal?
    — Translated by Reidar Thomte

    The remainder of chapter 3 builds from his explanation of the temporal in order to separate expectations of fate from freedom and the consciousness of sin. I would summarize that portion if I could. But, even if I was more able, the summary could only be understood by some one who traveled the distance by themselves. So, with the caveat of how the sentence could be wildly misunderstood out of context, I will pluck the following out of section (IV 374):

    However, to explain how my religious existence comes into relation with and expresses itself in my outward existence, that is the task."
    (Same translator as cited above)

    The next chapter, Number Four, is titled: "Anxiety of Sin or Anxiety as the Consequence of Sin in the Single Individual." The chapter includes the distinction between good and evil and it how that relates to the possibility for freedom. Kierkegaard also introduces his view of the demonic as a result of that relationship. The problem of "inclosing reserve" is that it is a necessary condition of any single individual acting as themselves but is also a source of suffering and personal existential peril. To answer your question about a "model of the good parent", I will rip another bit of text out of context. It comes with that bitter quality of understatement Kierkegaard uses when very pissed off about something:

    However, the tormentor of inclosing reserve may also relate himself selfishly to his own inclosing reserve. About this I could write a whole book, although I have not been, according to the custom and the established convention among the observers of our day, in Paris and London, as if by such visits one could learn something great, more than chatter and the wisdom of traveling salesmen. If an observer will only pay attention to himself, he will have enough with five men, five women, and ten children for the discovery of all possible states of the human soul. What I have to say could indeed have significance, especially for everyone who deals with children or has any relation to them. It is of infinite importance that the child be elevated by the conception of lofty inclosing reserve and saved from the misunderstood types. In an outward respect, it is easy to determine when the moment arrives that one dares let a the child walk alone; in a spiritual respect, it is not so easy. In a spiritual respect, the task is very difficult, and one cannot exempt oneself by employing a nursemaid or by buying a walker. The art is that of constantly being present, and yet not being present, so that the child may be allowed to develop himself, and at the same time one has a clear view of the development. The art is to leave the child to himself in the very highest degree and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent relinquishing in such a way that, unnoticed, one is aware of everything. If only one is willing, time for this can very well be found, even though one is a royal officeholder. If one is willing, one can do all things.
    And the father or the educator who has done everything else for the child entrusted to him, but has failed to prevent him from becoming closed up in his reserve, has at all time incurred a great liability.
    — Same translation as above, starts within section (IV 393)
  • ernest meyer
    100

    The art is that of constantly being present, and yet not being present, so that the child may be allowed to develop himself, and at the same time one has a clear view of the development. The art is to leave the child to himself in the very highest degree and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent relinquishing in such a way that, unnoticed, one is aware of everything. If only one is willing, time for this can very well be found, even though one is a royal officeholder. If one is willing, one can do all things. — Same translation as above, starts within section (IV 393)

    Well, K makes alot of assumptions about others having experience as horrible as his own, as he was required from an early age to work 364 days a year, just getting Christmas off, for almost no pay.

    As N said, every philosophy is a kind of specious autobiography. That might also not apply in all cases, but from one existentialist to another, it appears particularly suitable.

    I can't agree with K's assessment. My parents left me entirely alone until I did something stupid, then blamed the other for raising me wrong as part of their 15-year-long-divorce, while punishing me for it with relish. So we all serve different purposes to our parents, dont we, lol
  • Constance
    1.1k
    “to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.”Joshs

    The key term here would be that of semantic unity, which, too, is under erasure. I think Caputo thinks that since Derrida thinks the apophatic nature of the trace cancels even itself and conceptualization is out the window, any and all thinking is under erasure, when the erasure is complete, there is an existential residuum which is the basis for positing God: the noncontingent Good, the Bad. I say what the erasure cannot touch is metavalue, which of course, is a concept, but the signified in this case "speaks" aconceptually: a lighted match on one's finger is very different from a "being appeared to redly". What remains after analysis has exhausted the event of the former is, again, an existential residuum
    The present, according to Kierkegaard is certainly not some radical sliver of time that escapes erasure, but an infinitely overarching actuality that subsumes time; and this is logically unassailable, for it is founded on faith. This is the absurd in Kierkegaard. It does not endorse silliness, as has been claimed by some, because it is based (somehow, loosely) on the reasoning above.
    Still thinking......
  • Constance
    1.1k
    As N said, every philosophy is a kind of specious autobiography. That might also not apply in all cases, but from one existentialist to another, it appears particularly suitable.ernest meyer

    But then, it may be that one biography exceeds another here as it does in all regards. I may not be able to do math like Quine could, but I don't think Quine had an inkling as to what K was talking about, nor an inkling as to what Meister Eckhart was talking about. Some are tone deaf while others receive the aesthetic of music naturally; but then, when one does acknowledge this aesthetic, is it merely a localized "perspective"?
    Is mathematics speciously biographical? Of course not.
  • ernest meyer
    100
    I think N's remark might definitely apply to K's opinions on parenting, but I agree in general, N was prone to vast generalizations.
  • Valentinus
    1.6k

    I think it is a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard's intention to read being 'present but not present' before a child's inward reserve to mean the same thing as a "hands off" style of parenting that only notices the child's experience when bad things happen.

    The key element is found in what cannot be delegated:
    " the task is very difficult, and one cannot exempt oneself by employing a nursemaid or by buying a walker."
    One has to engage with their own struggle in this regard to have any relationship to what is happening in another by themselves. We can help each other but we can't do certain things for each other.

    As N said, every philosophy is a kind of specious autobiography.ernest meyer

    Specious? I have read a number of places where N said the philosophical is autobiographical. I don't recall where that element was said to be all it meant. N judged philosophical views by their fruits according to what he valued.
  • ernest meyer
    100
    It was aphorism gathered by his, um sister, for his last book Ecce Homo, by which time he had become increasingly incoherent. Both source and translations vary.
  • ernest meyer
    100
    I think it is a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard's intention to read being 'present but not present' before a child's inward reserve to mean the same thing as a "hands off" style of parenting that only notices the child's experience when bad things happen.Valentinus

    Well I dont know, lol, being forced to work 364 days a year by his parents, with only Christmas off did, apparently cause his obsessive reiteration of one tragic religious narrative about one of Christ's ancestors, Abram, and his intended sacrifice by his father, in an entire book on the subject titled 'Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death.' One needs to bear in mind that Christ also was to be sacrificed by his Father, even at his birth.

    So I'd have to say, with regrets, the extent his views were colored by his childhood experience can only be a matter of opinion. I mean, how many people ever want to talk about trying to forgiving their father that much? lol.

    Personally, if I learned anything important from K, it was how much suffering God must have felt Himself to sacrifice his Son for the sake of our sins in the conventional account of Christ's life, something normally ignored during the glittering Christmas celebrations of Western Protestantism.
  • Valentinus
    1.6k

    I do not dismiss the notion that Kierkegaard's experience provides a background for better understanding of what he writes about but it doesn't explain the concept of the Single Individual, presented here and elsewhere, by itself.
    To relegate this view of parenting as only the product of abuse is to dismiss any reason to engage with Kierkegaard as a thinker.
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