Ethics is transcendental. — Constance

Where ethics is statements that transcend all times and places, to speak these statements would require a vantage point that's unavailable. People still go on and on as if they do have this vantage point, though.

I don't think Wittgenstein's point is that we know ethical principles, but we just can't put them into words (ineffable). It's that we can't know these transcendent facts to begin with. That's the problem with ethical discourse.

A difficult sentence. For Wittgenstein, ethics is not transcendent, but done. — Banno

I think that's your own personal Wittgenstein.

I think that's your own personal Wittgenstein. — frank

Like much of Wittgenstein, it's ineffable, understandable only through midrash.

try to bring to mind the image of the (unknown) word as it was written. (….) You don't actually 'recall to mind' the image you just saw of it written down, but you'll think that's exactly what you're doing — Isaac

…..agreed, I don’t recall to mind the exact image I just saw written, because I’m not familiar with it, so no I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. I have immediately understood the image from perception will not correspond to any image whatsoever I already have, insofar as otherwise, it wouldn’t have been unfamiliar in the first place. I don’t understand the word I’ve seen written, therefore, in the first instance of conscious reproduction of that writing, I can do nothing with it.
(Sidebar: buried in her mini-treatise, has make explicit why this is metaphysically so)

….you'll 'see' the page, the book colour, perhaps the desk it was on… — Isaac

No, I wouldn’t admit doing any of that. Those are not the things with which I am unfamiliar. I know them so I need not think about them. Peripherals make no impression on me when I’m presented with something I don’t know. While it is the case that things I know help me with things I don’t, there remains a categorical separation between empirical knowledge of things supplementing pure a priori knowledge in the construction of cognitions. Which is actually what I’m doing….trying to cognize something for which I have no experience.

But I understand what you mean here. There are times when recalling the where’s and what’s of the forgotten can jog the memory, but the forgotten presupposes that which is not contained in the altogether unfamiliar.

….but the word will remain stubbornly un-spelt, because you're actually constructing the 'image' as you go, not recalling it as a complete image. — Isaac

…actually, I am recalling the complete image as a perception. This represents as just this thing, one of the same matter as many other things but of a completely different form. The perception of the word, even being unfamiliar, is a complete image, which is rather known as a sensation. That which I recall in mind is itself complete, so I don’t construct it as I go, except I must necessarily fail to relate the complete image recalled, to any of the recallable images of that which I know.

The recollected image will remain unspelt, yes. Or, which is the same thing, the initially perceived image in sensation and the recalled image in mind will not correspond to each other. But again, not because I’m constructing it as I go, but because I cannot construct it at all. I may try to construct, but on that I’d most likely give up. So I open the stupid book, rest on that stupid word until I become familiar with it. Or not.

Then….I’ll have to work on what the now familiar word actually means, in conjunction with another mind that already knows.
————-

Don't try too hard to recall the spelling deliberately — Isaac

Right, I initially wouldn’t do that. First, I’m trying to recall a duplicate whole image, not the particulars of it. Second, subsequently having granted I can’t properly recall to mind the word, its spelling is therefore quite irrelevant. I mean….if I knew the spelling I’d be familiar with the word, but I’m not, so….
————-

Blurry letters? Probably so, in the strictest sense of the experiment. In attempting the recall of a whole, there’s little focus on the components.

Thing is, in the strictest sense of the attainment of the experiment…..as you say, the confounding factors…. I wouldn’t cease recalling the word at that point, although I might if I have no further interest, but rather, assuming there is an interest, I would continue by then focusing on its components. If the object of the operation is attaining the word, I have no choice but to recall the letters which comprise it, and furthermore, to recall the proper arrangement of them. The fewer components comprising the word, then, by their consequently becoming the focus, wouldn’t be blurry, but still does not address their relative arrangement with each other.

Generally speaking, I’d agree with your position, in that it is very difficult to exactly recall anything for which there is minimal familiarity. But I hear there are minds capable of it. Metaphysically, there just isn’t anything significant enough in the perception to relate it to a cognition that properly represents it. Perception gives me the word itself without equivocation, but does not give a relation belonging to it.

Thanks for the interesting experiment.

Like much of Wittgenstein, it's ineffable, understandable only through midrash. — Hanover

I hadn't heard of midrash. Can you midrash anything? Or does it have to be scripture?

I hadn't heard of midrash. Can you midrash anything? Or does it have to be scripture? — frank

It relates to scripture, but you can use the term sarcastically when someone is going to great lengths to make sense of something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially when they've begun with the assumption that what they're interpreting must be really important and impregnated with all sorts of hidden meaning when really maybe it's just fragmented slop.

That's at least how I just used it.

I'm going to midrash traffic signs. For real.

I'm going to midrash traffic signs. For real. — frank

Hopefully oncoming traffic will interpret the same way you do.

This is consistent with how Plato originally explained "the good" in "The Republic". It is in a strange way, always outside of knowledge, therefore not truly knowable, making virtue something other than knowledge. But the good has a profound effect on knowledge, as what makes the intelligible objects intelligible, in a way analogous to the way that the sun makes visible objects visible. — Metaphysician Undercover

I do like this way of putting it, for it opens up the issue. Those in the cave facing the shadows on the wall turn around to see that actual figures producing these. This is an act of philosophical reflection, whereby one pulls away from mundane interpretations of the world. I would like to call this an engagement in the method of Husserl's phenomenological reduction, a dismissing of everydayness, or, the "naturalistic attitude". The light that illuminates all things is the Good.

You say it is outside of knowledge, and in a qualified way, I agree. Heideggerians and many others want to make the affective dimension of our existence of a piece with the language that makes it "unhidden" (alethea), but on the other, the language is "open" interpretatively, so the nature of what is there is an open concept to the understanding, thus we live in existential openness, our freedom. The move outside the cave is a metaphysical move. The question of ineffability begins here, I think.

I like to take ponderous metaphors like this, and bring them home: here I am, cat on sofa, clouds and trees and houses outside. Now, what IS the Good? It is here, in the actuality of the lived event that this question has its authenticity, I hold. To your point: If the good makes the intelligible, intelligible, then the good is logic and language, something Kantian? Plato is called a rational realist, and so I always thought along these lines. But the affectivity, this is happiness, joy, love, bliss, ecstasy, rapture, and other words that mean essentially the same thing. How does this "Good" effect knowledge, I want to ask. Not that it doesn't, but to characterize somehow is a worthy question.

This is the difference between the general principles which we apply, and the particular things or particular circumstances which we find ourselves engaged with, and requiring the application of general principles. This difference often creates a conundrum for decision making because the general principles often do not readily fit the particular circumstances.

The problem with "states of affairs" is that this terminology creates the appearance that a particular situation can be represented by general principles, and expressed as a state of affairs. The issue, with what cannot be said, is that there is a fundamental inconsistency between how we represent general principles, and how we represent particular situations. There are features of the particular circumstances, which by our definition of "particular" and the uniqueness assigned to "particular", which makes it so that the particular cannot be represented by descriptive terms, which we employ as general principles. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with this, but there one has to get by the difficulties. One is this: Consider states of affairs as a temporal dynamic, and not as a spatial one. Thus, what it means to have an encounter in the world at all has a temporal model to work out, for when we talk about general principles' failure to grasp the palpable realities before us, the "before us" is a "presence" in time, in which the past and the future are a unity where recollection (history) offers the basic existence conditions out of which a future is constructed, and this occurs as a spontaneous production of our Being There. In this, the present vanishes. All that lies before me is bound to this past-future dynamic. I don't see a tree in the mundane sense, for trees are forged out of education, habits and familiarities over years of experience, and this is what rushes in as I walk down the street "understanding" things? Being caught in this cycle of temporal production.

This kind of thinking places everything that crosses our path in a finitude, out of which there is no exist, for how can one even conceive of such a thing when conception itself is an historical event? Never spontaneously "there".

I say, true, yet put a spear in my kidney and the is not an historical event. Or listen to music, fall in love,, and all of the affective spontaneities that are always already there as well, and THIS declares the present., the Real with a capital 'R'. I defend a kind of value-ontology: the determination as to what is Real lies in the felt sense, and this sense of not epistemic; rather, the "raw feels" of the world are aesthetic. The "features of the particular circumstances" you speak of have their ineffability in the desire, the interest, the satisfaction, the gratification, and so on, that saturate experience.

Where ethics is statements that transcend all times and places, to speak these statements would require a vantage point that's unavailable. People still go on and on as if they do have this vantage point, though.

I don't think Wittgenstein's point is that we know ethical principles, but we just can't put them into words (ineffable). It's that we can't know these transcendent facts to begin with. That's the problem with ethical discourse. — frank

Most emphatically. He cares little for moral principles in the way they replace the earnestness of real experience. Perhaps he is even close to Nietzsche on this, who said, I don't refrain from lying because a moral principle tells me not to do this. I refrain from lying because I am just not a liar. You see how this closes in on something genuinely engaging the world. Of course, N would have none of this talk about ineffability; nor would Witt., but he does point to it, mention it, bring it to light in order to disclaim it in meaningful talk. But again, N would never talk about the Good as does Witt. Interesting comparison.

And you are right about the vantage point: it is like talking about reality or the world, as these have no counterpart in a possible denial. A thing can make sense only if its denial makes sense. You can't question the validity of logic, say.

My view is that no animal, humans included, forms connections between word-sounds and certain neural networks. — javra


This seems to be directly contradicted by the evidence. Am I misunderstanding your claim, or are you just saying that evidence from cognitive science is all wrong? — Isaac

You’ve misunderstood. I’m saying that first-person awareness - such as of word-sounds - can be said to supervene upon neural networks but that this does not imply that neural networks are equivalent to first-person awareness. This just as a table is not equivalent to the molecules upon which it supervenes. And this irrespective of whether the supervenience that occurs in mental processes is strong or weak.

A word-sound only occurs relative to awareness. Otherwise, the issue would be about a certain type of vibration in air waves affecting some sensory receptors tied into certain neural networks. I'm saying that aspects of awareness do not form connections to neural networks, that this conceptualization holds a maybe subtle but very drastic category error, for all aspects of awareness supervene on neural networks.

Instead, I find it correct to conceptualize the issue in the following manner: certain neural networks form connections to other neural networks - while, concurrently, certain aspects of awareness which supervene on the first grouping of neural networks will form connections to other aspects of awareness that supervene on the second grouping of neural networks.

All this in the context of first-person awareness associating words to concepts.

But it seems clear we hold very different models in relation to minds. Since its not something that will be easily resolved, I'll try to step out of the overall conversation.

In what way Deleuze was close to Derrida's approach? Could you relate Derrida's perspective on power to your quote from 'Desire and Pleasure'? By the way, Deleuze entirely changed his position and reformulated the disagreement with Foucault in 'Foucault'. — Number2018

Deleuze’s concept of desire avoids the problem of resistance that Foucault had to deal with. Rather than starting from symbolic structures of power that must be resisted, Deleuze begins from change, becoming and resistance.

As Dan Smith writes:

“If resistance becomes a question in Foucault, it is because he begins with the question of knowledge (what is articu­lable and what is visible), finds the conditions of knowledge in power, but then has to ask about the ways one can resist power, even if resistance is primary in relation to power. It is Foucault’s starting point in constituted knowledges that leads him to pose the problem of resistance.

Deleuze’s ontology, by contrast, operates in an almost exactly inverse manner. Put crudely, if one begins with a status quo – knowledge or the symbolic – one must look for a break or rupture in the status quo to account for change. Deleuze instead begins with change, with becoming, with events. For Deleuze, what is primary in any social formation are its lines of flight, its movements of deterritorialization, which are already movements of resistance. “Far from lying outside the social field or emerging from it,” Deleuze writes, “lines of flight constitute its rhizome or cartog­raphy.” Resistance, in a sense, is built into Deleuze’s ontology, and for this reason, the conceptual problem he faces wound up being quite different from Foucault’s.”

This irreducible gesture of difference has proximities to Derridean differance, as Derrida noted:

“Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of all Nietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have been for me not only, of course, provocations to think, but, each time, the unsettling, very unsettling experience – so unsettling – of a proximity or a near total affinity in the “theses” – if one may say this – through too evident distances in what I would call, for want of anything better, “gesture,” “strategy,” “manner”: of writing, of speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the “theses” (but the word doesn’t fit) and particularly the thesis concerning a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference “more profound” than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation (“yes, yes”), the taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this “generation.” I never felt the slightest “objection” arise in me, not even a virtual one, against any of his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or that proposition in Anti-Oedipus…”

Like much of Wittgenstein, it's ineffable, understandable only through midrash. — Hanover

To be fair, this goes for most of the canonical philosophers too. I've joked that Marx scholarship is basically materialist Talmudic scholarship.

I'm going to midrash traffic signs. For real. — frank

Heidegger beat you to it ;).

This is not the same "gap" between knowledge and experience that you and Banno spoke about earlier in the discussion. (I set out that gap/contradiction here. Banno has not yet addressed it, despite saying that he would.)

It is not merely that you can't talk about something before you experience it - you can. It is that, at least in some cases, you cannot put part of an experience into a set of instructions so that another can know how to do something from those instructions alone.

This is just a variation of Mary's Room. Does Mary learn all there is to know about colour perception from reading all the facts on the subject prior to her seeing colour? According to the Ability Hypothesis, what Mary learns when she sees red is not a new fact (knowledge-that), but an ability (knowledge-how) - she learns how to pick out red from other colours by sight. This is the same as what you and Banno are claiming: that the knowledge (how) that one learns from an experience cannot be entirely stated and recorded in every possible book on the subject (written by those who have had the experience); it cannot be included in "all the facts". Therefore, that part of knowledge is ineffable.

You and Banno did not specify that it is necessarily knowledge-how that cannot be included in "all the facts", or in the most detailed possible list of instructions of how to do something, but you have both previously implied, if not stated, that there is some ineffability in the knowledge that one gains from undergoing an experience. — Luke

Something ineffable in the sense that we can't talk it into our head, sure. Mary learns something, and we learn how to ride by riding while being guided by words and a tutor (or, if we are stubborn enough, brute trial and error) No matter how many facts -- as in true statements -- one believes, one doesn't know-how or learn until one does something. (Setting curious cases to the side, for now). I just don't think that makes for a metaphysical distinction. At least with Chalmers we get a clear definition of physicalism such that I understand what he means when he distinguishes consciousness from physicalism, and so I can understand the metaphysical distinction he's making (though I disagree, because of how I think about materialism). But here it seems a bit over the top to posit a whole metaphysical distinction between language and doing such that language isn't in contact with doing. Distinctions play into activity play into distinctions in a back-and-forth interplay far too much for me to believe that. Language sits in causal relations with our phenomenal world of experience, the so-called "manifest image". It's not reducible to language, but rather, language inter-penetrates (just as action and experience also influence language).

So for the ineffable I have in mind something like the very possibilities of any and all experience. Hence the invocation of God -- and not really a religious God, as much as the conceptual God of the philosophers (with its rather disappointing version of immortality as a conceptual being thinking forever). It may sound off to modern, secular ears -- but all this talk of the subject begins with Descartes, evil demons, and proofs of God. So the conceptual history for this line of thinking still references these old, post-scholastic ideas. (funnily enough, these days the scientist is seen as more plausible than God, with brains in vats and all that... ) -- the ineffable, for Kant, was invented precisely to preserve sacred ideas and separate them from human knowledge. For Descartes, given that God is good, we can be certain of our senses and nothing is ineffable, including the two substances that all of reality is made of.

That sort of talk I think Kant did a good number on -- the sort of metaphysics of Descartes. And it's that line that I have in mind when thinking on the ineffable: rather than asking "is everything language?", I'm asking, "What are the limits of language?" -- because so far, if the philosophers have said anything true, it seems like the mind can be grasped by language: and if it can be grasped by language, it can be made an object of knowledge, operated on, manipulated, engineered. Just like anything else in the world. What else would experience/activity be than this such that it's ineffable?

...analytic philosophy wants to say that that which must be passed over in silence is about nothing. But this is directly contradicted by Witt. He says just the opposite in the above — Constance

Here's the rub; Wittgenstein is an analytic philosopher. Hence there is a contradiction in your account.

One simply has to shut up and listen, watch, feel, receive. — Constance

...and do.

...ethics/aesthetics remains deeply indeterminate... — Constance

Why indeterminate? Unstated, experienced, enacted, perhaps, but not indeterminate.

Husserl's epoche gives these their existential clarity... — Constance

In so far as the phenomenological epoché is in the first person, it is private, dropping like a beetle. It could not therefore be part of the public narrative. In so far as it is part of the public narrative, it cannot perform the intended task of setting out the experience exactly as experienced. We are embedded in a world that is social and real, and hence not only can one not bracket all one's experiences at once, one cannot bracket one's experiences at all. See @Isaac's comments above regarding the conceptualisation of colour involving those parts of the brain that use language...

Phenomenology sets itself an impossible task.

Oh, doubtless, but was it also Wittgenstein's' Wittgenstein? I didn't just make this up, and although my thesis remains incomplete and unpublished, it is based on a reasonable quantity of reading and discussion. That is, just saying it is not presenting an argument, and does nothing for the discussion. So can you present something of Wittgenstein that contradicts what I've said? Or point to an analysis that differs or shows the opposite? Can you make a substantive objection?

it's ineffable, understandable only through midrash. — Hanover

Nothing so esoteric. Wittgenstein extolled use in the place of meaning; it would be absurd to think he dropped this in the case of ethics.

I don't think Wittgenstein's point is that we know ethical principles, but we just can't put them into words (ineffable). — frank

Putting them into words is irrelevant. What counts in "ethical principles" is enacting them.

The most exhaustive list of instructions on how to ride a bike will not give one knowledge of how to ride a bike.
The experience of riding a bike is/adds to one's knowledge of how to ride a bike.
[Therefore] The experience of riding a bike is/contains knowledge that cannot be stated or included in the list of instructions on how to ride a bike.
Something which is known but which cannot be stated is ineffable.
However, (according to you) nothing is ineffable. — Luke

"The experience of riding a bike is/adds to one's knowledge of how to ride a bike."

No, it doesn't. The experience neither adds to, nor is, one's knowledge of riding a bike.

As if dreaming of riding a bike or riding a bike in a simulation added to or is riding a bike.

(I'd written this reply, but it got lost when I wrote something more interesting. I didn't notice that I hadn't posted it. It doesn't help that your posts do not show in mentions. )

Do you think Wittgenstein is hard to follow for a lay reader? I have been unable to get through PI but I am fairly hopeless at philosophy. Early or later?

In so far as the phenomenological epoché is in the first person, it is private, dropping like a beetle. It could not therefore be part of the public narrative. In so far as it is part of the public narrative, it cannot perform the intended task of setting out the experience exactly as experienced. We are embedded in a world that is social and real, and hence not only can one not bracket all one's experiences at once, one cannot bracket one's experiences at all. See Isaac's comments above regarding the conceptualisation of colour involving those parts of the brain that use language...

Phenomenology sets itself an impossible task. — Banno

Very interesting. Has there ever been a robust and critical thread on phenomenology here? I couldn't find anything useful. Seems to me there are so many intense personal takes on phenomenology that no two devotees seem to agree as to what it is and how it works. But if you're an 'analytic' guy, then this stuff is your traditional bête noire, right?

Wittgenstein is an analytic philosopher. H — Banno

I would agree with Putnam, Cavell and Rorty, among others, that the later Wittgenstein is no longer an analytic philosopher.

In so far as the phenomenological epoché is in the first person, it is private, dropping like a beetle. It could not therefore be part of the public narrative. In so far as it is part of the public narrative, it cannot perform the intended task of setting out the experience exactly as experienced. We are embedded in a world that is social and real, and hence not only can one not bracket all one's experiences at once, one cannot bracket one's experiences at all. See Isaac's comments above regarding the conceptualisation of colour involving those parts of the brain that use language... — Banno

Unless of course the public narrative is a derivative of the first personal vantage, the intersubjectively objective a constitutive accomplishment of subjectivities. I agree that setting out an experience exactly as experienced cannot be the goal of the epoche , if one expects to determine and preserve a specific content of meaning. If , however , one uses the epoche to uncover an irreducible structural invariant of experiencing, then this method is invaluable.
Isaac’s argument concerns the relation between conscious narratives of experience and the subpersonal processes which empirical research discovers. The epoche isnt in conflict with the results of neuroscience, since it doesn’t make any claims concerning specific contents of conscious experience or subpersonal mental events. Rather, its claims pertain to the formal condition of possibility underlying both conscious narratives of experience and empirical accounts of subpersonal neurological events.

... so here: .

Unless of course the public narrative is a derivative of the first personal vantage... — Joshs

A misguided presumption. Why not think instead that the supposed first person vantage is a construct of the public narrative...? A hang over from Descartes' misguided attempt to find an epistemic foundation. The supposed first person vantage depends on there being a public discourse.

The epoche isnt in conflict with the results of neuroscience — Joshs

The epoché is not a falsifiable notion, so it could not be in conflict with any empirical evidence. The epoché is more like a prayer.

@Isaac - just alerting you to your being mentioned.

Why not think instead that the supposed first person vantage is a construct of the public narrative...? A hang over from Descartes' misguided attempt to find an epistemic foundation. The supposed first person vantage depends on there being a public discourse. — Banno

You’re confusing Descartes’ self-enclosed subjectivity with a phenomenological self-world interaction. There is no Cartesian subject for Husserl. His ‘ego’ is merely a zero point of activity without any pre-assigned content. First personal vantage is not the vantage from a metaphysical soul, but the site of continual synthetic activity reinventing the nature , meaning and sense of the self in every intentional act. If we assume that the fist personal vantage is a construct of the public narrative, we completely miss the fact that this public narrative is a narrative construed and interpreted slightly differently from your vantage than from mine. That there is a public discourse from which each of us acquire our own vantages only means that each of us are constantly exposed to an outside, an alterity or otherness. But this publicness is not the identical public for each of us. That we can participate in the ‘same’ language games and the ‘same’ cultural conventions means that my public and your public, while not identical, must be recognizable and interpretable to each other.

The epoché is not a falsifiable notion, so it could not be in conflict with any empirical evidence. The epoché is more like a prayer. — Banno

Or one could say the epoche is more like Quine’s fact/value complicity or Kuhn’s incommensurability idea, a non-falsifiable notion not in conflict with any empirical evidence.

Seems to me there are so many intense personal takes on phenomenology that no two devotees seem to agree as to what it is and how it works. — Tom Storm

This should not be a surprise. They ask us to retreat into our inner private sanctum with the hope of emerging with all sorts of revelations to be shared. But the language they use is borrowed from the public realm, so if you to try to clarify, your are left with a feeling of wonder, puzzlement or suspension depending on your natural inclinations.

You’re confusing Descartes’ self-enclosed subjectivity with a phenomenological self-world interaction. There is no Cartesian subject for Husserl. His ‘ego’ is merely a zero point of activity without any pre-assigned content. First personal vantage is not the vantage from a metaphysical soul, but the site of continual synthetic activity reinventing the nature , meaning and sense of the self in every intentional act. If we assume that the fist personal vantage is a construct of the public narrative, we completely miss the fact that this public narrative is a narrative construed and interpreted slightly differently from your vantage than from mine. That there is a public discourse from which each of us acquire our own vantages only means that each of us are constantly exposed to an outside, an alterity or otherness. But this publicness is not the identical public for each of us. — Joshs

...I've no clear idea what to do with this. While superficially addressing my criticism, it instead goes off in a new direction. Again, why not suppose that the first person vantage is a construct of the public narrative?

...not in conflict with any empirical evidence... — Joshs

My objection is conceptual, not empirical. If you think you can think about you experiences without thinking about them, I'll leave you to it.

There may be a further objection based on neuroscience, if it shows that "experience" and language are inseparable at a neurological level. I'll leave that for @Isaac, if he cares to comment.

All this to simply say that I do not see any philosophical advantages in phenomenology.

This should not be a surprise. They ask us to retreat into our inner private sanctum with the hope of emerging with all sorts of revelations to be shared. But the language they use is borrowed from the public realm, so if you to try to clarify, your are left with a feeling of wonder, puzzlement or suspension depending on your natural inclinations. — Richard B

On the other hand, concepts like “inner private sanctum” and “public realm” leave me with more of a feeling of puzzlement than do phenomenological concepts , which question the coherence of the former distinctions.

...I've no clear idea what to do with this. While superficially addressing my criticism, it instead goes off in a new direction. Again, why not suppose that the first person vantage is a construct of the public narrative? — Banno

Give me an example of a public narrative and I’ll
try to show how it’s not public in quite the way you may suppose.

But the language they use is borrowed from the public realm, so if you to try to clarify, your are left with a feeling of wonder, puzzlement or suspension depending on your natural inclinations. — Richard B

Not a fan?

I know a smattering about it but have read some essays and seen some lectures on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and 2 or 3 by Dan Zavhi. It seems very interesting and some of it is quite seductive. I'd be interested to gain a better understanding, but life is short. @Joshs is a good advocate for the approach.

...it’s not public in quite the way you may suppose. — Joshs

Are you so sure you know how I privately suppose it to be public? How could you?

Ok,

Give me an example of a public narrative and I’ll
try to show how it’s not public in quite the way you may suppose. — Joshs

If we assume that the fist personal vantage is a construct of the public narrative, we completely miss the fact that this public narrative is a narrative construed and interpreted slightly differently from your vantage than from mine. That there is a public discourse from which each of us acquire our own vantages only means that each of us are constantly exposed to an outside, an alterity or otherness. But this publicness is not the identical public for each of us. T — Joshs

I can see how this might work. But it's not much different than saying that we all have a unique take and perspective on life despite some overlaps (depending upon what community you hail from).

That we can participate in the ‘same’ language games and the ‘same’ cultural conventions means that my public and your public, while not identical, must be recognizable and interpretable to each other. — Joshs

Reasonable. How does this play out for us in terms of building 'community' or a shared moral framework? Surely there is some sense in which this must be almost impossible.

...some of it is quite seductive... — Tom Storm

Indeed, but whenever I've tried to make sense of it, it seems to fall in pieces. I remain unsure if it's what is being said or how it is being said that is the source of the obscurity. But being a lapsed Catholic I have an allergy to esoteric writings...

...left with a feeling of wonder, puzzlement or suspension... — Richard B

...and mostly suspicion. I will read with interest your chat with @Joshs, you are less likely to offend him than I.

and mostly suspicion. — Banno

Correction from the “public realm”…thats how it should be

Phenomenology sets itself an impossible task. — Banno

And so goes the history of philosophy.... :D

EDIT: I suppose I mean, reading that again, that many philosophers set themself impossible tasks and try to do it anyway.