...isn't taken seriously by those who have never read it. To those who have read it, it is taken very seriously. But Wikipedia is not reading. — Constance
at best being political at worst an indoctrinated evangelist for a movement. — ENOAH
In my opinion, rationality is a tool and spirituality is another one. If your only tool is a hammer, then the entire world will start looking like a nail.
We know very well that rationality cannot deal with the question about the meaning of life. It would be the same as asking a computer why he exists. Humans can answer that question. The computer cannot, at least not rationally. The computer would have to ask us, because only humans know the answer to that question.
Concerning the meaning of life, we would only be able to rationally answer the question, if we had created it. So, since we didn't, we can try to ask the one who did. That is not a rational endeavor but a spiritual one. — Tarskian
I think that I agree with Witggenstein on this matter. There is no confrontation. Spirituality is the solution for a problem that rationality cannot solve.
Anybody trying to determine rationally if God exists or not, is wasting his time. The correct question is: Does faith in God give you spiritual satisfaction? If yes, then you are one of the lucky ones, blessed with the ability to stave off the absurdity of meaninglessness. If not, then you are unlucky because you will almost surely fail to find a satisfying alternative. — Tarskian
My point is that cognitive architecture comes first, not some inescapable reality standing outside all narrative. — hypericin
I have read much. I don't take it seriously. Neither do the vast, vast majority of academics and students I've interacted with through Philosophy education.
Weirdly, this response is the kind of outlandish, comedic set of assumptions that has most trained philosophers rejecting continental philosophy as fart-sniffing. I tend to agree.
Pretending you understand Heidegger is not exactly a good thing. — AmadeusD
I would not confine language and all the mediatedness in which we are involved as a simple medium that divides two poles so easily: man and the world. My view is that the medium is more than what can be confined in a cogito, in a self, or in man. Language for example is not a mere medium for thought but a possibility of it which reveals to us -perhaps even better- the very nature of thought itself, or rather, something essential to thought which does not allow itself to be secluded in thought and which slips into language as a necessary possibility of thought. — JuanZu
For example, if we take an affirmation such as "I am" supposed for thought, it never presents itself in a pure singularity but in a repetition (Kant said that the I accompanies all our representations) in which its meaning implies the possibility of repetition. Thus the "I am", or the "I think", makes sense on condition of my own absence and disappearance. Hence man can speak of the I am as something that even makes sense in language, in writing, etc. According to this, if thought did not "begin" as repetition, it would not be possible to write "I am" in a book and for another person to understand it when reading it. — JuanZu
Perhaps this is what Husserl was referring to when he spoke of the original intersubjectivity at the level of the cogito. But do we see the passage from one to the other? So language is not an accident of thought, nor something that is simply recruited into a cogito, it becomes a necessary possibility of intersubjectivity. And why not beyond? All this indicates that there is an element of exteriority in our interiority. Derrida said that the outside is the inside. Ultimately I agree with him: the separation between subjectivity and the world cannot be maintained so clearly. Not if it is analyzed from the point of view of the whole framework of exteriorization that implants us in the world and does not allow for a radical gap as has been thought since Descartes. — JuanZu
Religion is at the heart of this matter. Our evaluations from the origin contemplate its repetition (something that is valid for other men). The divinity that man thinks is perhaps an act of recognition of the exteriority of our valuations. In the sense that my evaluations escape from me (just like the I am of which we spoke above). The error of religion in general is perhaps not to consider that repetition and exteriority escape subjectivity. Thus, we still make the presentation of our evaluations too subjective. The divinity, as will, thinking being, etc., is the cogito trying to reappropriate that which exceeds it. — JuanZu
I think the essence of religion is belief in something beyond yourself and what you can see. — John McMannis
Wittgenstein said this about logic. It would require a perspective removed from language, but this too would find its analysis question begging and would also require yet another pov, ad infinitum.
But on the other hand, language is inherently open. It confines or limits content in no way, even regarding its own nature, meaning when I ask what language is I get answers, as with symbolic logic and semiotics, but ask what these are and there are more answers, but these, too, are questions deferring to others, and so on (Hermeneutics).[....]
Jab a knife under my ribs and the pain is exclusively me and mine. It is not a cogito at all that experiences this — Constance
This is why the whole matter has to be reconceived, just as you say. The universal cannot grasp the singularity, but only itself, and this is undone by Derrida who argues it does not even do this, and one feels a kind of thud as one hits the bottom of the rabbit hole. The question ends there, for it has turned on itself as one's curiosity faces a world, perhaps for the first time, as an uncanny presence. Important to see, I am saying, that once in this "no man's land" it is thought that got you there. Thought is the way "in" as well as the way "out" (in and out, two particles of language. But why should language be set apart from the very uncanniness it brings one to? There is an epiphany in this: ALL is indeterminate, or transcendental, if you like. — Constance
"We use language to talk about language". In this sense, language becomes the space of essentiality. It is what Heidegger pointed out when naming language as "the house of being". That is why I point out this exteriorization of language, even of language on itself. We give ourselves in language, not so much by language but by the transcendentality of language that is even at the level of the cogito. And I would go further, to the level of perception and sensibility: memory. When you say that pain is something mine and mine alone, you are already carrying out a re-appropriation: there is no pain without duration. So the repetition already takes place even at the level of sensibility. That is why we can remember a pain, because its meaning as pain transcends it and makes it possible (as duration or repetition). It is almost like the movement of a language, full of signs and signs of signs. Pain is also a sign. — JuanZu
The thing is that it is not universalization in the strict sense. It is transcendence, and singularity begins with transcendence (as has been said above about pain qua singularity) and signification. Hence we can establish an ethics about pain because if it were so absolutely singular it would be impossible to remember, or even to be aware of it. Religion, according to my reasoning, is a case of reappropriation of the field of transcendentality. It is something that still establishes universal maxims that must be followed by humans. God according to tradition is a cogito, but his condition of possibility (transcendence) exceeds the cogito. — JuanZu
I believe you are right about the way language constitutes the Being of what can be said. But not the Being of what cannot be said. When language is deployed to speak the world it encounters the impossible, that is, what is "exterior to itself. A toothache's ache is not a thesis. I put most emphasis on the value dimension of our existence which is so emphatically underscored in the existential declaration of what it is. This I hold to be evident beyond question: screaming agony, say, as the most poignant example, is NOT an interpretative phenomenon in the purity of its presence[...] — Constance
Here, I do not care if I am caught in the middle of interpretative necessity (after all, saying something is outside language is itself an occasion pf language) which have no limit in subsuming phenomena, and the "purity" of the pain. The screaming pain of this sprained ankle IS absolutely authoritative, and this sense of absolute IS aligned with the traditional sense of ontology, which Heidegger wants to ignore.
As to universal maxims being followed by humans, we take no issue with this. But the analytic of ethics/aesthetics (Wittgenstein says they are the same thing, and I agree) reveals a transcendental Reality that has nothing to do with the Kantian/Heideggerian ontotheology.
And God is, I argue, certainly NOT a cogito. This is a rationalistic perversion invented by logicians. — Constance
I claim that there is indeed a process of interpretation. As I said, suffering does not occur in the absolute singularity that you claim. And this is demonstrated in the exercise of the recognition of pain. What is the link between pain and memory? If pain were not part of a process of signification, we could not even say that memory, insofar as it has as its object of memory, is somehow related to pain. In this sense, what is it that memory brings out of pain? Meaning. Pain cannot be thought of without its inscription in a process of signification being already given at the very moment of its existence. That would be to make pain something absolute, but so absolute (absence of relation) that neither thought (nor memory) could relate to it. — JuanZu
This even occurs at the level of presence that you point out: Husserl's understanding of temporality. It is not convenient here to recall Husserl's analyses of temporality. Husserl refers us to a differentiated structure of the moment in which something presents itself to the cogito, and this moment is related to the traces that are retained (retention, protention) in this moment (such as the moment of pain). Thus the aforementioned presence of the experience is inscribed in a chain of signification. That to which I have constantly referred. It is not an absolute, and its meaning is not given from itself. Language, therefore, is not a mere accident that survives the experience, but a possibility that is given by essence insofar as the experience is imbricated and inscribed in the signification. — JuanZu
I claim that this transcendent reality of which you speak when you speak of pain belongs to what Heidegger calls Western ontotheology. And this is so insofar as you have referred to the absolute, to purity, and to authority about something like pain. That reference to purity, to the absolute, and to the presence of pain is the classical element of the unconditioned and that whose meaning and being is given from itself. — JuanZu
But how do we make this compatible with ethics? Such an absolute makes impossible the recognition necessary for empathy and understanding of the pain of others. More ethical than "I suffer" is "the other suffers". And the suffering of the other is not my experience! Ethics at this point must challenge and transcend the value of presence and experience, just as memory and language do, and just as the process of signification in which pain is inscribed invites us to think. — JuanZu
This is confusing to me. Levinas said the opposite. One's own suffering translates into a knowledge of suffering that there is a metaethical grounding to one's compassion. The Other's suffering has always been understood empathetically, which places the nature of understanding always with the self. Transcending one's self begins with self knowledge: I see another suffering, and "it hurts; it hurts and I know it." This is the foundation of empathy. — Constance
This seems the foundation for Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion and thus the foundation of his ethics: — schopenhauer1
Husserl's reduction is an apophatic method of disclosure. Heidegger later (Discourse on Thinking) softens a bit, referring to gelassenheit, meditative thinking that is a kind of yielding to a world to discover it, but here one can still construe this to be no more than allowing the Totality of language and culture to play out without the imposition of presumed knowing. — Constance
But yes, I am saying that value-in-Being is just as you say, but value as such is utterly transcendental, and the word is contextually bound — Constance
“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time.”
Even if I were to grant that the experience of pain was memory contingent, this would not, nor can anything, undo or diminish the manifestation of the pain qua pain. — Constance
Husserl's is not a Cartesian cogito. It is a transcendental ego that stands in an intentional relationship with its object, and these relationships are not simply knowledge relationships, but include liking, disliking, anticipating, dreading, and so forth. But no matter. Note that that which is inscribed in a chain of signification is merely an "adumbration" of the experience. I recall that I sprained my ankle, but that recollection does not relive the pain of the sprain. The pain itself is transcendentally occurrent, meaning it issues from a "now" that is not discovered in the retention — Constance
This is confusing to me. Levinas said the opposite. One's own suffering translates into a knowledge of suffering that there is a metaethical grounding to one's compassion. The Other's suffering has always been understood empathetically, which places the nature of understanding always with the self. Transcending one's self begins with self knowledge: I see another suffering, and "it hurts; it hurts and I know it." This is the foundation of empathy. — Constance
Frustration is not what results in suffering, nor is want or deficiency. There, of course, are examples of suffering, but suffering itself "stands as its own presupposition," requiring no wordy accounting, and again, not that wordy accountings are wrong, they just miss the point: The bad experience (not a bad couch or a having a bad day) finds what makes it bad in the pureness of badness itself. — Constance
I am saying, if you want to know what the basis is for the injunction not to bludgeon your neighbor with a hammer, the basis for the laws against doing this, all one has to do is bludgeon oneself, and the authority of the injunction not to do it rests solely with what it feels like to be bludgeoned. It is not a deficit nor the frustration of being bludgeoned (whatever that is), but the "presence" of this value-in-the-world we call bad. Likely due to Schopenhauer's exposure to Buddhism which, as you likely know, puts the onus on the idea of attachments, but this too begs the same question: what is wrong with attachments? Such inquiry always comes down to the foundational pure phenomenon of value. — Constance
The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing. — Schopenhauer- Studies in Pessimism/ The Vanity of Existence
Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic structure of consciousness. It is not designed to disclose certainty in the specific content of what appears to consciousness. On the contrary, every particular content given in consciousness ( such as a sensation of pain) is contingent and relative. — Joshs
For Heidegger, the transcendence of Being refers to the fact that the subject is out beyond itself in being in the world. It understands itself by coming back to itself from its future. When we take something ‘as’ something, we are projectively understanding from out of this future. — Joshs
When Derrida says there is nothing outside the text, he means nothing outside context. Context for him is not a frame that encloses a meaning within it, but a displacing , transcending futurity that is imminent to the structure of understanding something as something, a break within the heart of what would otherwise be constituted as intrinsically ‘pure’ value , sense, meaning, ipseity. — Joshs
Yes, but all of these "most trained" philosophers are trained in analytic philosophy. — Constance
well stated vacuum of inquiry. — Constance
But I was referring specifically to the apophatic nature of the reduction. Michel Henry argues how this negative "method" takes philosophy to the purity of engagement and he means it takes one to an undeniable simplicity. — Constance
“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”
“Henry conceives of this self-affection as a purely interior and self-sufficient occurrence involving no difference, distance or mediation between that which affects and that which is affected. It is immediate, both in the sense that the self-affection takes place without being mediated by the world, but also in the sense that it is neither temporally delayed nor retentionally mediated. It is in short an event which is strictly non-horizontal and non- ecstatic.”
I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology. — Constance
I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology. — Constance
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