The concept represented a turning point in Husserl's phenomenology from the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Up until then, Husserl had been focused on finding, elucidating, and explaining an absolute foundation of philosophy in consciousness, without any presuppositions except what can be found through the reflective analysis of consciousness and what is immediately present to it. Originally, all judgments of the real were to be "bracketed" or suspended, and then analyzed to bring to light the role of consciousness in constituting or constructing them. With the concept of the lifeworld, however, Husserl embarked on a different path, which recognizes that, even at its deepest level, consciousness is already embedded in and operating in a world of meanings and pre-judgements that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted — plaque flag

And yet, at the very end of his career, Husserl reaffirmed that the intersubjective life world is an constitutive accomplishment of the solitary ego. Zahavi claims that for Husserl “a radical implementation of the transcendental reduction leads with necessity to a disclosure of transcendental intersubjectivity”. Husserl insists, however, that a radical reduction reveals the philosophical solitude of the absolute ego, which is prior to the constitutive accomplishment of transcendental intersubjectivity.

“...one of the main tasks of pure intentional psychology is to make understandable, by way of the progressive reduction of world-validity, the subjective and pure function through which the world as the "world for us all" is a world for all from my—the ego's—vantage point, with whatever particular content it may have. ...”(Crisis, p.256)

“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)

“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185)

To me the true position of the final Husserl is indeed of interest, but it is neither easily determined nor (most importantly) authoritative.

I'm trying to find the simplest words for what I see as the issue.

The lifeworld is through or for a living individual's nervous system. We must do justice to this embodied, egocentric insight.

Yet this nervous system is only intelligible as embedded within an encompassing world. Sensation needs sense organs ! Also our language (the one you talk to me in, sure of a partial meeting therein) is 'primordially' social, world-directed, and self-transcending. It's a 'sediment' compressing centuries of timebinding R & D.

One can't eliminate either factor without absurdity. For then the sense organs end up as products of the sense organs. Or there's a self somehow without an other or a world, etc. Or (in the other direction) there's a Reality having nothing to do with color, smell, concept, shape, ... and even time or space -- as if such talk could have meaning for us.

it is neurologically important to communicate to a collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties with through the collaborator's eyes being the most effective only way of engaging the neural networks that instantiate the collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties. — wonderer1

:up:

I'm trying to find the simplest words for what I see as the issue — plaque flag

Your mathematics background shining through. :cool:

Your mathematics background shining through. :cool: — jgill

:up:
Thanks!

All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men.

I think I see what this aims at, basically at something nondual like pure being. But I see no reason to call it solitude, for that metaphor depends on 'I-the-man' in the background. Husserl can't have his cake and eat it too. Is it not like this?

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

Some more Husserl from the lifeworld link:

In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.

I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. The articulation of the egotranscending sociality of reason (of logic and language) [which Husserl helped to do in arguments against psychologism ] defeats methodological solipsism. It makes no sense to construct the world from 'dreams' alone.

But there was always a valuable insight at the core of MS. The living body (the blazing brain) is not a bit player but the tragic hero on our stage. The living flesh is as primordial as language and world and tribe.

I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. — plaque flag

The deepest aspect of this problem being that our language is Cartesian through and through, our thinking utterly suffused with dualism.

I think I see what this aims at, basically at something nondual like pure being. But I see no reason to call it solitude, for that metaphor depends on 'I-the-man' in the background. Husserl can't have his cake and eat it too. Is it not like this? — plaque flag

:up: Yes, non-dual being cannot be solitude, for the latter is a dualistic idea, in that you can only be alone in relation to others.

Yes, non-dual being cannot be solitude, for the latter is a dualistic idea, in that you can only be alone in relation to others. — Janus

:up:

The deepest aspect of this problem being that our language is Cartesian through and through, our thinking utterly suffused with dualism. — Janus

I agree, but I think it's a soft, flexible dualism. Following Ryle maybe, I think the problem only begins when a flexible inner/outer distinction hardens into an 'absolute' indirect realism -- where the sense organs become their own product.

I agree, but I think it's a soft, flexible dualism. Following Ryle maybe, I think the problem only begins when a flexible inner/outer distinction hardens into an 'absolute' indirect realism. — plaque flag

Right, you often refer to the importance of metaphor, and I think it is the "softness" and "flexibility of metaphor which enables the communication of ideas through evocation and allusion, allows them to escape the hard walled prison of rigorous logic and mechanistic (cause and effect) thinking.

It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. Some of the best poetry is and has been philosophical. A few of the more prominent examples that spring to mind being Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Eliot, Stevens, Merwin, Aamons and Ashberry. There are many others.

Right, you often refer to the importance of metaphor, and I think it is the "softness" and "flexibility of metaphor which enables the communication of ideas through evocation and allusion, allows them to escape the hard walled prison of rigorous logic and mechanistic (cause and effect) thinking. — Janus

:up:

It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. Some of the best poetry is and has been philosophical. A few of the more prominent examples that spring to mind being Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Eliot, Stevens, Merwin, Aamons and Ashberry. There are many others. — Janus

:up:

I agree, though maybe poetry already 'secretly' rules philosophy from the center. Forums like this suggest to me that there's a variety of fundamental 'images' of the (ideal) philosophy -- varieties of cognitive heroism.

You mentioned some great poets (and whatever we want to call towering Shakespeare.) I'd add some philosophical novelists too: Hesse, Kundera, Sartre.

We probably agree that philosophy is 'bigger' than a specialty topic, as potentially as big as life itself.

It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. — Janus

I don’t mean this in a boundary policing way but it seems obvious that poetry is from the oral level of human cultural organisation and philosophy is from the logical. Each might be the high art of its respective domain, but they speak in different codes and organise different levels of social metabolism - or ways of organising people in ways they can exist in their world systems.

Poetry was mythic tribal memory. A way to capture an identity narrative that made sense in the pre-literate age of foraging and early agriculture.

Then the step from verbal semiosis to technological semiosis took place - with literacy coming along with the ride. Philosophy was born out of numbers and logic, its version of words and rules. Although the Ancient Greeks still mostly used poetry as the form of expression. It was the familiar way to set out a case in memorable fashion.

But then philosophy left the oral tradition well and truely behind. And poetry as social practice had its own new turn with the Romantic reaction to the industrialising world organised by number and logic. It affirmed something in the face of something - even when now mass produced to be silently read from a book.

So how could poetry take philosophy somewhere new, somewhere further, than numbers and logic?

Does it point to feeling and value as that which the age of machinery has forgotten? And even if it is a call back to society’s more basic level of oral order, is mechanistic reason not capable of delivering a point of view on feelings and values that is itself suitable for a world as it is currently being made?

So sure. More poetry. Why not?

But as an extension, a corrective, a natural progression, a necessary reclaiming?

Poetry has high status. But I would hesitate to say it has any greater role in philosophy just because of that. Pragmatically what is to be gained (except by a suppression of the pragmatic?).

I think poetry (understood as metaphor, analogy) still organizes the use of numbers and logic. We could also include drama and epic inasmuch as the history and prestige of personalities plays a role in a rhetoric that may take itself for logic. Philosophers have feelings about Derrida and Wittgenstein, etc. Blue team, red team, purple team, black team.

I lean toward Brandom's inferentialist semantics, which is to say that meaning and logic are melted together. We perform logic and semantics at the same time in the inferences we do and do not allow, and our logicsemantics evolves as we use it, always unstable, increasingly self-referential and metacognitive.

I grant that there are formal games that can be played too : symbolic logic, math from a formalist perspective. But we are still stuck at the higher strategic, analogical level when it comes to creating, using, and evaluating them. One can institute quantitative metrics, but this is a political process, involving rhetoric.

But I would hesitate to say it has any greater role in philosophy just because of that. Pragmatically what is to be gained (except by a suppression of the pragmatic?). — apokrisis

The other issue is whether philosophy is understood in terms of a quasi-scientific serious-objective metaphysics or as something like a self-critical conceptual response to existence, the working out of an identity perhaps. Should I pursue serious metaphysics (live a logocentric life) in the first place ?
This is a bit like the problem of the criterion. At the highest level there's no 'algorithmic' necessity, but maybe something more like a comparison of hero types.

I agree, though maybe poetry already 'secretly' rules philosophy from the center. Forums like this suggest to me that there's a variety of fundamental 'images' of the (ideal) philosophy -- varieties of cognitive heroism. — plaque flag

Right, there is not one true image of philosophy. Personally, I favour the idea of it, not as a search for truth or correctness of locution, but as a generator of new concepts with which to look at things in more novel and creative ways, or alternatively, which may in some senses be the same thing, a philosophy as a set of ideas that fires the imagination in ways which could facilitate bringing about altered states of consciousness and personal transformation which enables living in better ways.

I don’t mean this in a boundary policing way but it seems obvious that poetry is from the oral level of human cultural organisation and philosophy is from the logical. — apokrisis

Yes, you might say that, very broadly speaking, poetry deals with the allegorical, the mythical, the metaphorical concerns and philosophy deals with the logical concerns. I don't see a strict boundary though, and judging from your posts I doubt you do either.

Philosophy was born out of numbers and logic, its version of words and rules. — apokrisis

I'm not sure I completely agree with this: I can see it being applicable in the case of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, but would you say it is true of the Presocratics?

So how could poetry take philosophy somewhere new, somewhere further, than numbers and logic? — apokrisis

In the transformative ways I outlined in my response to @plaque flag. I think it is as important to stimulate the imagination and the emotions as it is to satisfy the intellectual desire for rigorous understandings.

Does it point to feeling and value as that which the age of machinery has forgotten? And even if it is a call back to society’s more basic level of oral order, is mechanistic reason not capable of delivering a point of view on feelings and values that is itself suitable for a world as it is currently being made? — apokrisis

I don't see why mechanistic reason could not deliver a point of view on feelings and values that is suitable for modern life. I guess it depends on individual needs and interests though. As I have no doubt you know I have great respect for science and I believe that metaphysical speculation is "pouring from the empty into the void" if it does not take account of the latest science.

But I am also drawn by the arts, by the idea of creating one's own life (in the sense that Foucault advocates) and I think for that we may need to let go of some of the rigour and mechanistic thinking and allow ourselves to mythologize (while also being careful not to take myths too seriously or literally). This is only for the exercise of the imagination and when such myth-making is taken to be literal truth, then the whole benefit of allegory and metaphor is lost.

Poetry has high status. — apokrisis

I'm not sure it enjoys as high a status today as it did at other times, speaking generally of course.

I think poetry (understood as metaphor, analogy) still organizes the use of numbers and logic. — plaque flag

Aren't metaphors and analogies about communicating structure of relations? "This is like a version of that in terms of its essential form or organisation."

Poetry might make use of them for the same reason, but in the hope of communicating psychological parallels rather than philosophical or scientific.

Philosophers have feelings about Derrida and Wittgenstein, etc. Blue team, red team, purple team, black team. — plaque flag

Sure. Humans play human games in anything they do. But science has the claim of a method that transcends these games in the long run. I would also want my philosophy to aim at the same goal – and yet not take away the fun of also playing the social games in appropriately ironic fashion.

It's an attention economy out there. We have no choice but to dance to the beat if we want to be part of it.

I lean toward Brandom's inferentialist semantics — plaque flag

I was checking that out only the other week. But its completely gone out of my head again. That's the second time now. I'll have to have a third go I guess.

One can institute quantitative metrics, but this is a political process, involving rhetoric. — plaque flag

I would say I am riding Peircean semiotics to a much more general destination where politics becomes just another aspect of an organism and its metabolism.

Societies have political structures that are triadic once they become fully connected and self-stabilising – as in the particular case of British parliamentary democracy. You need the three elements of a state machinery (the mediating system of law), the transcendent ideal that symbolises the wholeness of the organism (the position given to a "divine" monarch as titular head of state), and the feedback from the ground floor in terms of a democratic say (the material degrees of freedom that are the mug public).

So politics becomes yet another thing that is made explicable in Peircean terms. That just is the way systems must organise to stabilise instability, to have a metabolism that digests its world.

I am a structuralist. Or in these times, a post-post structuralist. :grin:

Should I pursue serious metaphysics (live a logocentric life) in the first place ? — plaque flag

That is a big issue. But pragmatism gives its answer. If the problem is that your philosophy feels like it leads to passive representation, then that is a little Cartesian. It should lead to practical action.

The caveat – which is something I'm currently defining more carefully with this focus on metabolism as the deep structure of an organism – is that a lot of what we might get caught up in intellectually has less and less to do with the metabolism of our society. It is indeed off the point and uninvolved. A proper model of the metabolism (its political and economic structure) would tell you exactly when and when it wasn't the case.

Right, there is not one true image of philosophy. Personally, I favour the idea of it, not as a search for truth or correctness of locution, but as a generator of new concepts with which to look at things in more novel and creative ways, or alternatively, which may in some senses be the same thing, a philosophy as a set of ideas that fires the imagination in ways which could facilitate bringing about altered states of consciousness and personal transformation which enables living in better ways. — Janus

:up:

I relate to all of this. The metaphor is something like (creative) expansion, exploration, invention. It reminds me of Rorty, who'd call it philosophy's inheritance from the Romantics.

Personally I find myself fascinated by truth-telling inscription, but I know that this is just one possible path. I really don't know if other tempting paths are better or worse (or even that better/worse makes much sense here). My path is absorbing or rewarding or addictive or whateverish enough to keep me on it. I guess I'm even happy, despite/because my grim view of the world.

Agree with most of your feedback to BF.

Poetry has high status.
— apokrisis

I'm not sure it enjoys as high a status today as it did at other times, speaking generally of course. — Janus

Indeed. Poetry now inhabits a cultural backwater, like bocce or folk dancing - there's a cognoscenti for it, but it's only a shadow of what used to be.

I don't see why mechanistic reason could not deliver a point of view on feelings and values that is suitable for modern life. — Janus

Indeed and (this is only a minor point) I find it interesting how often pejorative language (like 'mechanistic') is employed to describe reason or science. It seems to me that a form of romanticism still has us (perhaps postmodernism is a type of romanticism too) and it seeks to elevate the personal, the emotional, the relationship, the experience, as contrasted with the mechanical, the impersonal, the rational, the transactional, the disenchanted. But I suspect we don't have to use these words to characterize any way of seeing. It depends upon the individual seer.

It reminds me of Rorty, who'd call it philosophy's inheritance from the Romantics. — plaque flag

Looks like we were heading in the same direction. :wink:

Aren't metaphors and analogies about communicating structure of relations? — apokrisis

I think so. 'Analogy is the core of cognition.' If one thinks of poetry as a mere literary genre, then I probably agree with you. But if it's the basic metaphorical creativity of the mind, I think it is indeed core. (Of course core is a metaphor.)

But science has the claim of a method that transcends these games in the long run. — apokrisis

I lean toward agreement, but I consider that technology wins and is valued, as if scientific norms shine by reflected light. We'd worship clouds if that's what made it rain. (Which would be scientific, I guess.) Hypothesis non fingo. Will this bomb win the war ? I don't mean to come off as sentimental here either. Maybe I'm channelling Judge Holden from Blood Meridean or Herclitus, but it's as if war, father of all things, is the true Logic. This war-is-logic is like a demonic version of pragmatism. 'Shut up and exterminate.'

It's an attention economy out there. We have no choice but to dance to the beat if we want to be part of it. — apokrisis

Right. I mentioned the Moloch concept to you not long ago. Game theory looks to be at the heart of reality. Adapt or vanish. Hence the logic of war/competition. Cooperation is of course and advantage for the group of humans or group of organs. But there's always an outside, right ? Life 'is' exploitation. I say this amorally, trying to think that basic boundary.

Societies have political structures that are triadic once they become fully connected and self-stabilising – as in the particular case of British parliamentary democracy. You need the three elements of a state machinery (the mediating system of law), the transcendent ideal that symbolises the wholeness of the organism (the position given to a "divine" monarch as titular head of state), and the feedback from the ground floor in terms of a democratic say (the material degrees of freedom that are the mug public). — apokrisis

Excellent analysis, thanks!

That is a big issue. But pragmatism gives its answer. If the problem is that your philosophy feels like it leads to passive representation, then that is a little Cartesian. It should lead to practical action. — apokrisis

Let me come at it another way. In our differentiated society, we expect people to develop in all sorts of ways. I'd say that our society is so complex that no single finite mind can hope to contain more than a tiny piece of the structure.

A certain kind of philosopher will aim at a view from the top of the mountain, integrating science into something more satisfyingly holistic and metaphysical (as I understand you to do.) But should Coltrane have spent his life on metaphysics ? Should Joyce have written a book more like Vico's than his own?

To me it's not obvious that the best view is the conceptual view from the mountain, which I say as someone attracted to some Shakespearean-existential version of that view.

Another approach: is it better to be Homer or Achilles ? Can one be sure without impossibly taking both paths ?

I guess I'm getting at the finitude of the individual.

Indeed and (this is only a minor point) I find it interesting how often pejorative language (like 'mechanistic') is employed to describe reason or science. — Tom Storm

I suspect it's because (for many) physics is still the prototype of the concept (in Lakoff's sense of something like a central semi-conscious association.) But biology for instance...

:up: Yes, what could be the point of a philosophy which could not change the way we feel about life, even change the way we live? Let a philosophy be as absolutely correct as you like: should we count it as valuable if it makes us feel not better, but worse, about life?

Indeed. Poetry now inhabits a cultural backwater, like bocce or folk dancing - there's a cognoscenti for it, but it's only a shadow of what used to be. — Tom Storm

Agree :100:

Indeed and (this is only a minor point) I find it interesting how often pejorative language (like 'mechanistic') is employed to describe reason or science. It seems to me that a form of romanticism still has us (perhaps postmodernism is a type of romanticism too) and it seeks to elevate the personal, the emotional, the relationship, the experience, as contrasted with the mechanical, the impersonal, the rational, the transactional, the disenchanted. But I suspect we don't have to use these words to characterize any way of seeing. It depends upon the individual seer. — Tom Storm

:up: I agree and I've often said to Wayfarer that I don't believe a materialist metaphysic has any necessary bearing on spiritual or ethical practice; it always depends on the individual as to how they are variously affected by such ideas.

I'm not sure I completely agree with this: I can see it being applicable in the case of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, but would you say it is true of the Presocratics? — Janus

Yes. Thales brought back geometry from Egypt, Anaximander was his pupil, then a teenage Pythagoras is said to have travelled to Miletus to learn from them.

Before the presocratics, ancient thought was mythic. It was comfortable with casual explanations that mixed up personal and impersonal ways of thought. The gods were both real people and animistic forces in a way that made a narrative sense, but not a logical sense.

Anaximander in particular changed this. He say the Comos as a natural evolutionary system, closed for causality and thus driven by its own self-organising dialectic. There was one universalised cause. And it was a symmetry breaking of the Apeiron, a state of Peircean logical vagueness. You could wind back from the world as it is today to discover how it had to evolve from the first symmetric breaking of the hot and the cold separating out and causing the Apeiron to start to be materially structured.

So Anaximander had already nailed the general cosmic story in terms of a Big Bang symmetry breaking. He had made the leap to thinking of nature as a single developing system with an internal organising logic. The Pythagorean move to mathematical proof of geometric necessities was in a way a reductionist step backwards to the holism and dynamism of Anaximander, as was the metaphysics of the atomists.

So the story zigs and zags. But assuming a logic of rational development - a Cosmic causality - was the big presocratic step.

Of course modern reductionism sees them as fumbling about for a story of the fundamental substance, not the fundamental dynamics. Was it air, water, earth or fire that got things going? Anaximander instead gave a reason why all four emerged as a set of mutually-defining contrasts. Each the logical quantification of its “other”.

I think it is as important to stimulate the imagination and the emotions as it is to satisfy the intellectual desire for rigorous understandings. — Janus

Is intellectual desire an emotion? Is rigour not partner to the imagination in being the constraint on its degrees of freedom?

Imagination is our Bayesian ability to forward model the real world. It has its evolved and naturally constrained purpose were it comes to thought as a process.

Generally i would argue you are using confused psychology here. It is the Romantic fiction of how brains should work rather than the pragmatic and validated model of how they actually work. And so this can’t be a recipe for how to do thinking better.

Can you teach imagination and creativity? Not very well if you try to apply Romanticism as the psychological theory.

So sure, who could argue with stimulating the emotions and imagination as opposed to constraining and stifling those things. But that framing isn’t itself true to the psychology of rational inquiry.

But I am also drawn by the arts, by the idea of creating one's own life (in the sense that Foucault advocates) and I think for that we may need to let go of some of the rigour and mechanistic thinking and allow ourselves to mythologize (while also being careful not to take myths too seriously or literally). — Janus

That is a much more moderate statement and much harder to disagree with.

It is indeed part of the modern political and economic dialectic that we are required to construct our own uniqueness to have value in the ruthless social marketplace.

What does art school teach but how to cultivate a personal mystique by learning how to distill down a viewpoint that resonates with some generic cultural concern. It is the manufacture of provocative artefacts marketed by social networking.

Another interesting thread in all this is how humans can only escape the dominance-submission game that keep social animals in their place by collectively becoming submissive to an abstract or transcendent principle.

Fukuyama massive three book review of political structure makes this clear. Societies depended on granting legitimacy to a god, a king, eventually just rational principle so as to accept being ruled for the collective good. The divine was a necessary belief just to close the human system as a collaborative rather than competitive space.

So there is a genuine pragmatism in art in that it serves this political function. We agree to a collective awe which makes us all equal under the force of some higher power. We need a god equivalent even if we might - as greenies - call it nature,

Human psychology is a fascinating but explicable thing.

I'm not sure it enjoys as high a status today as it did at other times, speaking generally of course. — Janus

Probably true. I was thinking also about its “other” of essay writing. I don’t hear much celebration of that these days. And you can tell I found that the highest art when it come to language use.

But if it's the basic metaphorical creativity of the mind, I think it is indeed core. — plaque flag

Well yep. And is that then pattern recognition, generalisation, abstraction? It is an interesting question to ask how really to pigeonhole this fluidity of thought that can spot the telling sameness behind the arbitrary differences.

Poetry may be training for that. But not for me at least.

I lean toward agreement, but I consider that technology wins and is valued, as if scientific norms shine by reflected light. — plaque flag

That is my argument. Technology wins and science or poetry is valued only to the degree it pragmatically contributes to that fossil fuel-based current project.

So I start by accepting this as the organismic reality. It is where society and its economic metabolism is at. From this harsh truth we could start asking “but what else instead?”.

There are rational answers rather than poetic ones. We could price environmental capital and social capital into the current economic equation. We could properly evolve towards being a technological organism by closing ourselves for materials - recycling - like a real organism, and living within the limits of the planet’s ability to transfer waste heat to deep space. Boring but pragmatic stuff like that.

Cooperation is of course and advantage for the group of humans or group of organs. But there's always an outside, right ? Life 'is' exploitation. I say this amorally, trying to think that basic boundary. — plaque flag

Biology gives more hope. Bacteria managed to close the planet in terms of its atmospheric gas balance. They evolved a circular economy where photosynthesis eats the CO2 and respiration eats the O2. Everyone can then settle down and live together in mutualism, riding the daily rising and setting of the Sun.

It bacteria can learn to stabilise the planet to their liking in Gaian feedback fashion, why not us?

All social structure is based on the mutualism of competition-cooperation. Humans are fighters but also traders. It is the combo that has produced civilisation. The problem is that the shift to global governance is a project moving too slow while the rate of global entropification is motoring too fast.

Let me come at it another way. In our differentiated society, we expect people to develop in all sorts of ways. — plaque flag

Yep, the division of labour principle of Adam Smith and his pin makers. It is indeed the core principle of systems thinking and hierarchy theory. Self-organisation involves the mutualism of integration and differentiation. Each grounds the other. So we absolutely know why this works and is essential to any structure that grows.

Another approach: is it better to be Homer or Achilles ? Can one be sure without impossibly taking both paths ? — plaque flag

I see it different in that my approach is that you can’t see the grand integrative sweep unless you make a matching effort to drill down into the concrete details. The process of inquiry is based on going to both these extremes.

Taking both paths is a necessity. Big ideas need to be checked out in every small way possible. The practical question is how to put yourself in that position as a paying proposition.

Some more Husserl from the lifeworld link:

In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have m the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.

I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. The articulation of the egotranscending sociality of reason (of logic and language) [which Husserl helped to do in arguments against psychologism ] defeats methodological solipsism. It makes no sense to construct the world from 'dreams' alone. — plaque flag

The above quote is from page 110 in my edition of The Crisis. I imagine the we-subjectivity of a world for all is closer to your thinking than Husserl’s talk of a solitary ego constituting this world-for-all as a world-for-all from one’s own vantage. But keep in mind that the primal ‘I’ of the epoche which he discusses is on page 182 of Crisis. He uses the space between page 110 and 182 to demonstrate why your quote represents an incomplete understanding of the basis of we-subjectivity. The point for Husserl isnt about which modes of givenness we construct the world from (dream, imagination, memory, sensation), but how we manage to constitute from the movement among all of these modes more and more complexly interwoven strata of correlations.

I appreciate the detailed response about Husserl, but the larger issue is whether the intersubjective life world is an constitutive accomplishment of the solitary ego.

You and @Wayfarer both seem to want to emphasize the primacy of the subject and make the world as mere spectacle for or ex nihilo creation of some kind of constituting transcendental subject.

But serious objections to this claim are (it seems to me) simply ignored. For instance:

I need a nervous system to see a tree, but I also need eyes and a tree in an encompassing world. Or are we to claim that the eyes create themselves ?

Yes. Thales brought back geometry from Egypt, Anaximander was his pupil, then a teenage Pythagoras is said to have travelled to Miletus to learn from them. — apokrisis

Fair enough, I was thinking more along the lines of mathematical understanding itself being a directly motivating influence

.

Is intellectual desire an emotion? Is rigour not partner to the imagination in being the constraint on its degrees of freedom? — apokrisis

Right, but there are different degrees of appropriate constraint in different contexts.

Generally i would argue you are using confused psychology here. It is the Romantic fiction of how brains should work rather than the pragmatic and validated model of how they actually work. And so this can’t be a recipe for how to do thinking better. — apokrisis

Again, it depends on what kind of thinking you want to do. Different tools for different jobs and all that.

So sure, who could argue with stimulating the emotions and imagination as opposed to constraining and stifling those things. But that framing isn’t itself true to the psychology of rational inquiry. — apokrisis

Right, rational enquiry is one thing, though, and poetry and the arts in general another, not to mention personal transformation. These things don't have to be "rationally correct" they just have to be something alive.

What does art school teach but how to cultivate a personal mystique by learning how to distill down a viewpoint that resonates with some generic cultural concern. It is the manufacture of provocative artefacts marketed by social networking. — apokrisis

To me this view seems too simplistic. Artists may also create novel cultural concerns. Everything human is culturally mediated, to be sure, but it is not culture exhaustively and all the way down as I see it.

So there is a genuine pragmatism in art in that it serves this political function. We agree to a collective awe which makes us all equal under the force of some higher power. We need a god equivalent even if we might - as greenies - call it nature,

Human psychology is a fascinating but explicable thing. — apokrisis

I think I can agree with this, I am all for seeing nature as sacred, rather than some unknowable transcendence. I think it is healthy for humans to maintain a sense of the sacredness of life, of being itself, even if only to dispel the tedium of the commonplace for a while.

I see it different in that my approach is that you can’t see the grand integrative sweep unless you make a matching effort to drill down into the concrete details. The process of inquiry is based on going to both these extremes. — apokrisis

I agree with you in the abstract, but in practice there is just too much detail for the finite individual to master. The world has too much richness, too much depth.

Even though I see a construction of a grand metaphysics as still possible and worthwhile, such a construction has to be a severe lossy compression of the world. It's not obvious whether it's better to be a Hegel, a Coltrane, a Chappelle, a Napoleon, or just a person who puts their parental role before all else, etc.

What I'm looking at is how the metaphysics might model its own creator and how it accounts for its own role. For instance, does the correct metaphysics accelerate the heat death ? I like to see how theories account for their own engendering.