Thanks. Just wanted to add this from conservative Peter Wehner, who Ben calls ‘despicable’:

Many of the same people who once fiercely supported Reagan and opposed moral relativism and nihilism have come to embody the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who insists that justice has no intrinsic meaning. All that matters is the interests of the strongest party. “Injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice,” he argued.

The United States under Trump is dark, aggressive, and lawless. It has become, in the words of Representative Ogles, a predator nation. This period of our history will eventually be judged, and the verdict will be unforgiving—because Thrasymachus was wrong. Justice matters more than injustice. And I have a strong intuition and a settled hope that the moral arc of the universe will eventually bend that way.

↪Joshs Fair enough. My instinct is that separation of powers only work by agreement. They are not magic spells and in the end where the military go will probably be the decisive factor. — Tom Storm

You’re right. Thus far, we have been successful in keeping them out of Chicago.

↪Joshs Do you think America has become an autocracy (with more to come) and that Trump and/or his cronies are here to stay? Either ignoring future elections or suspending them? Or do you think much of the US has a desire for autocracy and will happily vote for it? Or something else — Tom Storm

Tbh, I’ve been almost completely ignoring the political news the past 6 months to preserve my sanity. My guess, though, is that the separation between federal, state and local judicial and governmental institutions, not to mention robust civic institutions and a very diverse media landscape, will be enough to restrain Trump from seizing complete control. I think only a minority of the population truly supports autocracy. I don’t think our friend Ben does, but like many, he isn’t able to recognize those instincts in Trump. He thinks he’s just “a rich New York real estate mogul and reality TV star.”

I’m not sure Trump has a direction — Mikie

It’s the autocrat’s direction. Everything points back to the king. Total one-man control of power.

Trump — for however different he is in many ways — hasn’t really strayed from the very policies that have been championed for decades: tax cuts, deregulation, small government, privatization. Same old, same old. — Mikie

Careful what you wish for. Be thankful we have a federalist system with many local checks and balances. Without those deep constraints, the direction Trump would take the country would be unrecognizable relative to the standards of a constitutional democracy.

But the American Left is very, very far from center on social issues -- and that's what I care about. It gets its leftism not direct from Marx, but from the Frankfurt School & critical theory. Which is, despite not being economic, still very far from anything any reasonable human on Earth could consider centrist. — BenMcLean

Yes, Frankfurt school Critical Theory has been trickling down from academia over the past few decades to shape the political views of politicians on the left. Is it centrist? Not if we take a poll of country as a whole. But if we poll residents of the 20 most populous American cities, as happened when the mayors of Chicago and New York were elected, it may be argued that some of its broadest concepts are being integrated into centrist perspectives in urban America. My advice to you is to stay away from the cities, especially the northern and west coast ones. You won’t like it there. Their centrism is not your centrism. I recommend suburban Dallas. Oklahoma City is good, too.

The act of cognition constitutes its content as objective. Once we recognize the distinctive givenness of essences in our experience, we can extend Kant's realism about empirical objects grounded in sensible intuition to a broader realism that encompasses objects grounded in categorial intuition, including mathematical objects. — Richard Tieszen, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics (Review)

I wouldnt say that for Husserl the objectivating constituting acts of intentionality amount to a realism about empirical objects. Rather, when Husserl says that the objects which are constituted are ‘real’, he means to treat the real as a subjective, relative idealization which must be bracketed and reduced in order to locate the non-relative grounds of objectivation. For Kant, empirical reality is not a merely relative idealization that can be reduced away in favor of a more primordial level of constitution. Rather, empirical objects are objectively real within the bounds of possible experience because they are constituted according to a priori forms and categories that are universally and necessarily binding for any finite discursive subject. The reality of the empirical object is secured not by ongoing intentional syntheses that could, in principle, be otherwise, but by the fixed transcendental framework of sensibility (space and time) and understanding (the categories).

This leads to a different sense of “non-relative.” For Kant, what is non-relative is not located in a deeper phenomenological stratum beneath empirical objectivity, but in the transcendental conditions that legislate objectivity as such. Once an appearance is subsumed under the categories and situated in space and time, its empirical reality is not something to be bracketed or reduced; it is fully legitimate and irreducible as appearance. Husserl radicalizes transcendental idealism by showing that even the sense of empirical reality is a constituted achievement that can be methodologically suspended.

On the object side of his analysis Husserl can still claim to be a kind of realist about mathematical objects, for mathematical objects are not our own ideas — Wayfarer

They are neither our own ideas nor simply in the world. They are products of the idealizations we construct out of our actions in relation to the world. The origin of number for Husserl is the again and again of ‘same thing different time’. Do we ever experience anything in our imagination or in the world which accords with this ideal of identical self-repetition? The answer for him is that no contentful event in imagination or world repeats itself identically. This is something we add to experience in order to have matematizable objects.

“The consideration of the conditions in principle of the possibility of something identical that gives itself (harmoniously) in flowing and subjectively changing manners of appearance leads to the mathematization of the appearances as a necessity which is immanent in them.

A true object in the sense of logic is an object which is absolutely identical "with itself," that is, which is, absolutely identically, what it is; or, to express it in another way: an object is through its determinations, its quiddities [Weisheiten], its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging. Purely mathematical thinking is related to possible objects which are thought determinately through ideal-"exact" mathematical (limit-) concepts, e.g., spatial shapes of natural objects which, as experienced, stand in a vague way under shape-concepts and [thus] have their shape-determinations; but it is of the nature of these experiential data that one can and by rights must posit, beneath the identical object which exhibits itself in harmonious experience as existing, an ideally identical object which is ideal in all its determinations; all [its] determinations are exact —that is, whatever [instances] fall under their generality are equal—and this equality excludes inequality; or, what is the same thing, an exact determination, in belonging to an object, excludes the possibility that this determination not belong to the same object.”

Understand that the conditions of mathematizing objects Husserl is describing above don’t come to us from the world, or ready made from our imagination, but from the idealizing abstractions we perform on actual events in order to make countable things appear. From Husserl’s point of view, Platonism is not attractive because of its advantages but because it answers the wrong question. The problem is not how we gain epistemic access to a realm of already constituted ideal beings, but how ideal objectivity, validity for anyone whatsoever, is possible at all. Husserl’s answer replaces the metaphysics of a Platonic realm with an analysis of the lawful structures of intentionality that make ideal unity, necessity, and exactness intelligible. Once that shift is made, it is no longer clear what work “mind-independence” is supposed to do.

Kant would have his own objections to what Tieszen is trying to do. Kant’s first objection would target the claim that mathematical objects are “given” in something like intuition in a way analogous to empirical objects. For Kant, mathematical cognition is intuitive only because it is grounded in pure sensible intuition:space and time. Geometry concerns the a priori form of outer intuition; arithmetic concerns the a priori form of inner intuition. Mathematical objects are not encountered as invariants in experience, nor are they disclosed through a special kind of categorial or eidetic intuition. They are constructed in pure intuition according to rules. This is why Kant insists that mathematics is synthetic a priori: its objects and truths arise from the active construction of concepts in intuition, not from the recognition of independently existing ideal entities.

Second, Kant would reject outright the idea that mathematical objects could be mind-independent, self-subsistent, and “in every sense real,” even with a transcendental qualification appended afterward. For Kant, this language collapses the critical distinction between appearances and things in themselves. Mathematical objects are objectively valid, necessary, and universally binding, but their objectivity is exhausted by their validity for any possible experience structured by our forms of intuition. To say that numbers or geometrical figures exist independently of those forms is, for Kant, to relapse into dogmatic metaphysics. We do not have access to objects as they are in themselves, and mathematical objects are no exception.

Third, Kant would object to the extension of “empirical realism” to mathematics. Empirical realism is Kant’s way of affirming the full objectivity of appearances while denying their transcendence beyond experience. It is not a general recipe for realism wherever cognition is successful. Mathematical objects are not empirically real at all; they are transcendentally ideal constructions whose application to experience is secured by the fact that space and time are forms of sensibility. Kant would therefore see Tieszen’s move as a category mistake: it treats mathematical objectivity as if it were just another species of objecthood, when for Kant it is a distinct mode of cognition grounded in construction rather than givenness.

Kant would see the phrase “transcendentally constituted but mind-independent” as incoherent. In Kant’s framework, transcendental constitution already exhausts what it means for an object to be. Once an object’s being is located in the conditions of possible experience, there is no further metaphysical question about whether it exists independently of those conditions. To insist on independence “in every sense real” is to overstep the limits of reason that the Critique is designed to enforce.

The Left finds them useful now not just because they hate Trump but because the Left has internalized the same libertarianism on economics — BenMcLean

Who is a good exemplar of non-libertarianism on the right? Do Trump’s tariffs count?

What they're really doing, in my view, is kind of despicable, because National Review today would rather flat out side with the rabid lunacy of the woke Left than work with a flawed but politically viable Right-leaning leadership. — BenMcLean

They’re despicable to you not because they aren’t taking an honest, principled stance but because they aren’t as conservative as you are. It shows how fringe Trump is that even you don’t like him.

When FDR massively expanded the powers of the executive branch and when Obama said, "I have a pen and a phone" you clapped like a circus seal and never gave the implications of that expansion a second thought. This is just pure partisanship, not rooted in a genuine suspicion of executive power. The same thing is good when your guys do it but bad when the other guys do it. — BenMcLean

I gave you a chance to get beyond the ‘you guys vs us guys’ rhetoric when I gave you a long list of the kind of people you said in your OP that you endorsed as thoughtful role models of Buckley-National Review political thought. I explained that none of them had any problem making a distinction between executive overreach and straight-out autocracy. They all placed Trump in the latter category. Most of the figures on that list have explicitly singled Trump out as exceptional among U.S. presidents in the degree, explicitness, and persistence of his autocratic instincts, not merely as “another flawed president” or an intensification of familiar abuses of power. What distinguishes their criticism is precisely that they do not treat Trump as continuous with Nixon, Bush, Obama, or even earlier illiberal moments in American history, but as representing a qualitative break in norms.

For writers like George Will, David Frum, Peter Wehner, Michael Gerson, Jonah Goldberg, William Kristol, and Charles Krauthammer, the claim is not simply that Trump governed aggressively or expansively, but that he rejected the legitimacy of constitutional restraint itself. They repeatedly emphasize features they regard as unprecedented in the modern presidency: the open denial of electoral legitimacy, the personalization of state institutions, the systematic attack on independent courts and the press as enemies of the people, the use of office for personal loyalty rather than institutional fidelity, and the willingness to praise or emulate foreign strongmen as political models. Will, in particular, has framed Trump as the first president to govern as though the Constitution were an inconvenience rather than a binding structure.

So you and I belong to two different communities. I side with that thoughtful community of National Review pundits in their assessment of Trump. You side with the community which dismisses these views as ridiculous and overblown. I suspect you and I have different criteria for what constitutes autocracy, which is why on such an issue having a deep impact on the quality of our lives we should separate and focus on building up our respective communities in the direction we need it to go. I want to hang out with the people on that list , even though they are to the right of me politically. You go hang out with whoever considers them ridiculous.

I had the idea that his ‘eidetic vision’ was concerned with essences ‘the pure perception of the essential, invariant structures (eidos) of phenomena, moving beyond mere empirical facts to grasp universal essences, achieved through the method of eidetic reduction, where one uses eidetic variation (imaginatively altering features of an object to find what must remain constant) to discover necessary laws of consciousness’. However it’s centered on conscious structures not on some supposed ‘third realm’. He referred to it as a kind of qualified Platonism — Wayfarer

I was taking liberties in referring to a world apart from consciousness. One finds this in Deleuze and Foucault, not in Husserl. They want to deconstruct subjectivity so as to make it an effect of processes which are pre-subjective and pre-personal. But this isn’t as big a departure from Husserl as one might think. For instance, what exactly is left for Husserl once we perform the most radical and complete phenomenological epoche? What invariant structures remain as essential? Only the present itself (as retention-impression-protention) as an empty form. What’s important here is that for Husserl, as for Deleuze and Foucault, no substantive content is left once we have reduced the naively seen world to its irreducible basis. No objects, substances, material forms. Only a synthetic repetition of change of sense. For Husserl the site of this repetition is time consciousness (transcendental subjectivity). For Deleuze it is a multiplicity of differences producing not a single flow of time constituted by a single source or zero point ( the subject) but multiple times arising out of multiple differences ( the pre-subjective collectivity).

I wanted to show that we can end up with a similar deconstruction of empirical objectivity even if we don’t use Husserl’s starting point in subjective consciousness (which sets people off because of its strong connection in their minds with older metaphysical notions of consciousness) and instead talk about the relational structure of the world ‘in itself’.

. But even still, the real cause of these people's alarm isn't that Trump really is so extreme (that's ridiculously overblown) but that the massive success of Trump does stand as a public indictment of the older ideology of National Review (and what remnants of it are still represented by its current editors) as dying, on a civilizational level — BenMcLean

I have no problem in accepting that a broad swath of the American public always harbored autocratic instincts, but that until the past 50 years this segment was hidden within a mixed electorate characterizing both parties. As intellectual republicans of the George Will-David Brooks mold left their party, and that broad traditionalist swath inclined toward autocracy left the Democratic party, it exposed a long-hidden truth, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Traditionalists gravitate to leaders like Orban, Putin, Erdogan and Trump, and when they all concentrate within one party, their numbers allow them to dominate at the national level. That’s not an indictment of anything, it just says that your way of life was never as popular as you thought it was and now that the electorate has split along geographic lines coalition may no longer be possible.

It is becoming less and less likely that some political middle ground can be reconstructed any time soon, because the left has been moving farther and farther away from the traditionalists, which is why the latter fled liberal parties. Just as important, the two factions have segregated themselves geographically. If you live in a large city, it is likely your view of the world socially, scientifically, politically and ethically is so far removed from that of a rural resident that for all intents and purposes you live in a different country from them. Is Trump extreme? No more than MAGA. Is MAGA extreme? Yes, of course they are. They are extremely far removed from any political, ethical, social or scientific values that I and the majority of those
living alongside me in my urban community relate to and thrive within. I am not judging their values and positions as right or wrong in a moral sense. I am simply saying that when implemented by a community as a whole they are incompatible with the kind of life I need to live. Under such circumstances, the best strategy for a federalist country like the U.S. is separation and soft secession.

I am not worried that the Right is at risk of imploding.
On the contrary, it is quite possible that the MAGA numbers will increase over the next decade as more socially conservative minorities flee the democratic party. It’s only your vision of the right which has imploded because you are outnumbered. This may go on for a long time, and that isn’t a tolerable scenario for urbanites since it means their needs will go unrepresented. It will require aggressive , creative thinking about how to re-align the relationship between municipalities, states and the national government in the direction of forming local and state alliances and coalitions which fill in for what will be lacking from the national level.

Buckley's fusionism explicitly embraced and promoted the Civil Rights movement not only by voting for the Civil Rights act in the 1960s but also by making Dr. Martin Luther King's philosophy in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" theirs -- permanently — BenMcLean

As has been pointed out, Buckley himself was not exactly an enthusiastic supporter of the Civil Rights movement when it counted. According to Wiki:

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Buckley opposed federal civil rights legislation and expressed support for continued racial segregation in the South. In Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, author Nancy MacLean states that National Review made James J. Kilpatrick—a prominent supporter of segregation in the South—"its voice on the civil rights movement and the Constitution, as Buckley and Kilpatrick united North and South in a shared vision for the nation that included upholding white supremacy".[118] In the August 24, 1957, issue of National Review, Buckley's editorial "Why the South Must Prevail" spoke out explicitly in favor of temporary segregation in the South until "long term equality could be achieved". Buckley opined that temporary segregation in the South was necessary at the time because the black population lacked the education, economic, and cultural development to make racial equality possible.[119][120][121] Buckley claimed that the white South had "the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races".

Buckley said white Southerners were "entitled" to disenfranchise black voters "because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."[125] Buckley characterized blacks as distinctly ignorant: "The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could."[125] Two weeks after that editorial was published, another prominent conservative writer, L. Brent Bozell Jr. (Buckley's brother-in-law), wrote in the National Review: "This magazine has expressed views on the racial question that I consider dead wrong, and capable of doing great hurt to the promotion of conservative causes. There is a law involved, and a Constitution, and the editorial gives White Southerners leave to violate them both in order to keep the Negro politically impotent.

This meant that the "far Right" radicals of various stripes too far outside America's Overton Window had to go. No more John Birch Society, no more Ayn Rand and most crucially, no more white nationalism — BenMcLean

Buckley rejected Rand’s insistence on absolute rationalism and her rejection of tradition and religion as arbiters of morality. Rand, in turn, thought Buckley’s reliance on faith and hierarchy undermined human reason and freedom. While I am no fan of Randianism, I think she has a point here.

I hope Trump will do some good things and I hope we can survive the bad things he does and I don't see him as either the savior of America or as the absolute devil that the American Left always says every Republican President always is and always has for my entire life and probably always will. He's no angel, but there's also no sense in crying wolf about him. Trump is, for the most part, a pretty normal politician — BenMcLean

Many of the most direct and scathing attacks on Trump I have read have come from old line National Review conservatives like David Brooks, Peter Wehner, David Frum, George Will, William Kristol, Charles Krauhammer, Michael Gerson, Ross Douthat , and many others. These conservatives were the first to raise the alarm that Trump is ANYTHING but a normal politician, and that his playbook is explicitly autocratic and a direct threat to the survival of American democracy.

Sure, there is a sense in which it can be said that the quality of roundness or mass is a mere potential unless it interacts with something, is felt. But that doesn't change the fact that objects that have mass and are round may exist without ever having been perceived by any human or even animal. A round rock might be dislodged by water or wind and roll down a hill in a remote place that has never been visited by humans, or even animals. — Janus

If our customary starting point for grounding reality is objects-in-themselves, self-identical substances which exist first before they interact, then there must first be something before it can be perceived by something else. For Husserl and the other thinkers I mentioned there are no thing-in-themselves. Not just because humans or animals must be present for them to be perceived, but because a world seen in itself, apart from humans or animals, is a temporal flux of qualitative change with respect to itself.

The real places that “have never been visited by humans, or even animals” is this self-reflexively qualitatively changing flux. When humans (as part of the flux itself) interact with this flux such as to produce certain relatively stable patterns, we create abstractive idealizations, a garb of ideas we place over the patterns. We then interpret the patterns in terms of ‘physical objects’ and say such things as that a round rock has been dislodged by water or wind and rolls down a hill in a remote place. For sure something in the world has taken place, but our contribution to its apparent solidity and ‘objectness’ is much greater than just passively observing it.

Levin is merely speculating at this stage, and his thinking is more in line with Spinoza, Hegel and Whitehead than with Leibniz. — Janus

Spinoza, yes. Hegel and Whitehead, no. For the latter two the idea of mathematical truths that are utterly independent of history, world, relation, or realization is not just false, it is philosophically incoherent. Hegel explicitly criticizes mathematics for mistaking abstraction for truth. Mathematical truth does not explain reality, it abstracts from it. Mathematical entities achieve certainty only by stripping away determinacy, relation, and mediation; they are true as abstractions, not as accounts of reality.

Whitehead would never say that mathematical forms “emerge from mathematics” independently of the world. Mathematics, like logic, is an abstraction from the patterns of actuality, not a transcendent realm dictating those patterns from outside. He would say Levin’s platonism reifies potentiality and ignores the relational, processual conditions under which anything, including mathematics, can be intelligible at all. Hegel and Whitehead’s process theories are early progenitors of Bitbol’s phenomenology, and far removed from Levin’s platonism.

phenomenology neither asserts nor rules out a “beyond”; it simply declines to turn what exceeds experience into a theoretical object. There’s something quite Buddhist about this also: a refusal to indulge metaphysical speculation, paired with an insistence on attending carefully to the nature of existence/experience moment-by-moment. — Wayfarer

It may be a different situation with Husserl than Edith Stein or Max Scheler. For him a beyond of experience is not impossible but meaningless. There is no coherent sense to be attached to a reality that is not even in principle accessible to intentionality, because “accessibility in principle” is built into what it means for something to be something. The world always exceeds what is currently given, but it never exceeds the structure of givenness as such. Husserl isnt just declining to speculate; he is showing that certain speculative questions rest on a confused picture of meaning and existence.

I'd say that some qualities are relational and others are intrinsic to physical objects. Opacity of most things other than glass, the heaviness (mass) of stones and wood, the liquid flowingness of water and so on. I think roundness is a real non-relational quality, as I do form and pattern in general. Due to scale some characteristics may not be perceptible to some creatures; insects for example. — Janus

Interesting. Here is where phenomenology (and hermeneutics, enactivism, poststructuralism and the later Wittgenstein) differs. The claim there is no such thing as a non-relational quality. Furthermore, a quality is an event, a change of relation. A quality doesn’t first come into existence and then sit there self-identically over time. Quality is the flow of the Heraclitean stream, always returning to itself differently. Phenomenology shows us how we are able to construct relatively stable patterns of sense from this qualitative flux

t. I believe that if you showed any number of people a sphere and a cube and asked them to identify which is which, that there would be no disagreement. This shows that the characteristics of objects are not human-dependent. Even my dog can tell the difference between a ball and a heavy stone―he won't try to pick up anything too large for his jaws. — Janus

No, it shows that there is enough similarity between the ways that each of us construct pattens of sense-making out of the flux that we can create abstractive idealizations that we call empirical objectivity. When we do this we convince ourselves that the multitude of similar perceptions among a community of observers amount to different vantages on the absolute ‘same’ object. In believing in the identity of objects independent of our idealizing abstractive
interaction with them, we ignore the gradually but continually shifting experience of them for each of us over tome, as well as the differences between persons. Note
that we do t invent our experience of the world
out of whole cloth. Whether do when we theorize empirical objects is begin with real but shifting patterns of interaction and harden them into formal logico-mathematical unities (this self-identical object).

If I put on my physicalist hat, I would say that the physical, that is energetic configurations, are inherently mind-like in some way that is very hard, maybe impossible, to articulate clearly. I don't know if you are familiar with the experiments being carried out by Michael Levin. If not, if you are interested search his name and you will find plenty of material. I won't go into detail, but he hypothesizes a "platonic morpho-space" which he thinks is his currently best hypothesis to explain what he observes with clumps of human and other cells spontaneously organizing themselves such as to be able to problem solve in various ways — Janus

Levin buys into a mathematical platonism that goes back to Leibnitz and ignores all the thinking since Kant that this OP is drawing from. He assumes arbitrary mathematical truths in themselves which are utterly non-relational and then wants to integrate these pure ‘non-physical’ truths with evolutionary processes.

Like pi, e, and many other remarkable constants, forms emerge from mathematics in ways that cannot be explained by any kind of history or properties of the physical world – they would be this way even if the physical world was entirely different.

What is the source of intelligibility of the empirical world? These 'transcendental' idealist/phenomenologist approaches, as I understand them, say that it is the faculties of the rational or sentient beings. Fair enough. However, it seems to me that the question that follows up is: considering that the existence of these beings seems to be contingent (and, indeed, the analysis of the empirical world suggests that), how did they come into be? — boundless

In Kantian Idealism, subjectivity is treated as a kind of substance or object with faculties, just as you described it. When we start with objects a cause is implied. So we are led to ask what is the cause of this transcendental cause? To be fair to Kant, his transcendental subjectivity is not the cause of , but the condition of possibility of making the world intelligible in terms of empirical causality. So it makes no sense to look for an empirical cause of Kant’s categories. Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity is very different from Kant’s idealism. It is not a ‘being’ in the sense of a substance or an object, and it has no faculties. It is a site of interaction. Still, you would say we still need to ask how this site came into being, even if that genesis is not an empirical cause. That is a question concerning history and time. Some would argue that time has a cause or origin outside of itself, that it ‘came into being’. Others, like Kant, say that time is the a priori condition of any being or existent, that it does not itself come into being from somewhere or something else. But Kant considers transcendental subjectivity to be an atemporal condition of possibility of time.

In Husserl, transcendental subjectivty is nothing but the structure of time itself. It is not contingent; it is contingency itself. Transcendental subjectivity is not a set of atemporal conceptual conditions that are then “applied” to time. Rather, subjectivity is itself internally temporal through and through. The fundamental structures of consciousness, retention, primal impression, and protention, are not conditions of time from the outside, but are the very way time is constituted as time. There is no pre-given temporal form that consciousness then inhabits; temporality is inseparable from the flow of conscious life itself. Transcendental subjectivity is therefore not “before” time, nor “outside” time, nor a condition of possibility in the Kantian sense of a formal constraint. It is a self-temporalizing process.

I don't understand visual phenomena like the duck/ rabbit as rational at all. I see them as just ambiguous patterns which can resemble more than one thing. Does it look like a beak or ears? Which resemblance do I notice — Janus

What I mean by rational is that when we recognize a
series of lines and curves as a duck, each line and curve has a particular role that it plays in forming the pattern that appears as the duck. In other words, the pattern is constituted as a structure of relations according to a particular logic. When we see the image as a rabbit, the role of the lines and curves in constituting this pattern is different. What appears as a line when the image looks like a duck may no longer be seen as a line. So the pattern constituting the rabbit expresses a different logic or relations. I call the logic of pattern a system of rationality.

Physicalism does not rule out qualities, though. All physical things have their attributes or characteristics, which is the same as to say qualities. A particle may have the quality of mass or not. An orange has the quality of roundness, and of appearing to us as orange. In fact I can't see how anything non-physical could have a quality. If by 'quality' you just mean 'human feeling' then sure physical objects as such do not have human or animal feelings, and they may not even evoke the same feelings in different percipients. — Janus

Do these qualities inhere in the things themselves independent of our encounter with them, or only in our response to these things, in how they affect us? By quality, I mean human feelings in the sense that the quality of an object is something that is felt, sensed by us. According to this definition, if a physical object, defined by qualities such as mass or roundness, may not evoke the same feelings in different percipients, then we cannot call these qualities of the object, but qualities of the interaction between the object and ourselves. Are qualities like mass and roundness universally felt as the same by all of us, or do we simply hypothesize that the differences among us in qualitative sense of the same object amounts to subjective variation in the experience of an objectively invariant quality inhering in the object itself? Can we ever prove this hypothesis, or must we take it as a given if we are to act as physicalists?

I would add that my example of the duck/rabbit image is meant to show that individual qualities don’t just appear to us as what they are in isolation. They appear within systems or patterns of inter-related qualities. Mass and roundness mean what they mean within a larger system of qualitative relations constituting a theory or model which you can think of as a meta-quality (what I’ve been calling a system of rationality). Think of mass or roundness like the lines and curves within the duck or rabbit image. It’s not just that what constitutes a line or curve differs depending on the larger gestalt configuration it belongs to. It’s that the very concept of something like mass or roundness depends on a larger system of qualities that we perceive in things.

Everything you say there is equally a narrative told from a particular perspective which is just one among many. I don't say the world is "based on energy" I say it is most primordially energetic, ever-changing. Your saying that physicalism is just a narrative which we have become attached to, is itself a psychologising narrative designed with the intention of refuting physicalism as a mere attachment. — Janus

I’m not trying to refute physicalism. It isnt wrong and it isn’t merely an attachment . It is a model and models are intrinsic and necessary to our experience. Are all models relative? Phenomenology says that is it is what all models have in common (the subject-object structure of temporality) which is non-relative, rather than it being the case that we can get beyond perspectivalism to how the world really is in itself absent our participation.

I recently had a plumber lecture me about how science is the cause of most problems and that we need more people like America’s visionary RFK. I think the culture war we often talk about also unfolds as a battle between the seen and the longed for. Or something like that — Tom Storm

It gets a bit tricky to sort out where anti-vacc-ers and other rejecters of scientific consensus are coming from. Much of the rejection of covid recommendations coming from the CDC and Fauci in the U.S. emanated from the same groups who reject climate change models. I wouldn’t characterize this group as anti-science. On the contrary, they are science idealists. They would tell you that they very much believe in science as a method. But they have a traditional, romanticized view of how science method works, and the actual ambiguities and complexities of scientific practice don’t fit their idealized view of it. Their worshipful, dogmatic view of science is about as non-relativized as can be.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum are new age and postmodernist types who are suspicious or dismissive of the limits of Western medicine. Unlike the traditionalists, they directly question the authority of scientific methodology. By contrast, traditionalists accuse the scientific establishment of choosing political ideology over ‘scientific truth’ as the traditionalists idealize it. Traditionalists believe in a pure separation between scientific truth and politics, whereas postmodern types believe all science is inherently political.

I think the postmodernists have a point about needing to question the authoritative approach to doing science. And I don’t find that postmodernists deny the benefits of scientific medicine. They are not arguing that western medical advances and climate change research are untrue or not useful. Their issues are more subtle than this.

To sum up, traditionalists embrace an older, idealized conception of science which causes them to treat climate change and covid recommendations as simply bad or corrupt science. New age hippie types embrace non-Western alternatives to scientific medicine which integrate body , mind and cosmos holistically. At times this leads them to dangerously reject the Western component rather than finding a way to accommodate it to their alternative practices. Postmodern types dont advocate for an alternative to science. They accept it for what it is , useful in a sense. They simply want to point out that it is intrinsically political. I think hippie-types have a point about the need to integrate body and mind perspectives, but without simply rejecting Western approaches. And I think postmodernists have a point about needing prominent body and mind with the socio-cultural dynamics within which science functions.

it seems to me that the view expressed by Wayfarer in the OP doesn't give us an explanation of their (and our) existence — boundless

It depends on what you mean by explanation. The OP is laying bare the self-recursivity of empirical explanations, how the most ancient is interpreted via the assumptions of the most recent and contemporary thinking. Your notion of explanation seems to require that this self-reflexivity come to an end by anchoring itself to some way the world really is in itself. But what if the way the world really is is best described by a phenomenological analysis of the structure of self-reflexivity itself? And this analysis is conducted not from an objective distance but from within this reflexivity?

Excellent OP! I will have more to say on this later. For now I wanted to quote from a lecture by Heidegger concerning the existence of things before the arrival of humans .

The Earth, the cosmos, are older than the human. They were already existing before the human came to be an entity. One can hardly refer, in a more decided and persuasive way, to entities that are what and how they are independently from the human. Yet, in order to exhibit such entities, is it necessary to make the cumbersome appeal to the results of modern natural science regarding the various ages of the Earth and the human? To these researches, one could right away pose the awkward question as to where they take the time periods from for their calculation of the age of the Earth. Is this sort of time simply found in the ice of the “ice age”, whose phases geology calculates for us?

To exhibit entities that are independent from the human, it is enough simply to point to the Alps, for example, which tower up into the sky and in no way require the human and his machinations to do that. The Alps are entities-in-themselves—they show themselves as such without any reference to the various ages of the Earth’s formations and of human races.When one unhesitatingly invokes entities such as these, which manifestly exist in themselves, and presents them as the clearest thing in the world, one must also however accept the question, with respect to these entities-in-themselves, as to what is thereby meant by being-in-itself. Is the latter as crystal clear as these entities-in-themselves? Can one grant the claim of being-in-itself in the same hindrance-free way as the invocation of entities-in-themselves, with which one deals day in and day out?

The Alps – one says – are present at hand, indeed before humans are on hand to examine them or act with respect to them, whether it be through research, through climbing them, or through the removal of rock masses. The Alps are before the hand – that is, lying there before all handling by the human. Yet does not this determination of entities-in-themselves as present at hand characterize the said entities precisely through the relation to the handling by the human, admittedly in such a way that this relation to the human portrays itself as independent from the human?

… the invocation of Kant is too hasty; for, although Kant experiences scientific representation as empirical realism, he interprets the latter in terms of his transcendental idealism. In short: Kant posits in advance that being means objectivity. Objectivity however contains the turnedness of entities toward subjectivity. Objectivity is not synonymous with the being-in-itself of entities-in-themselves.

This is what I think I understand: the mind is not a detached observer, and the body is not merely a machine. They exist together, intertwined within a single field of lived experience. From this perspective, the traditional problem of interaction or dualism might be said to dissolve. Phenomenology does not assume that mind and body are two independent entities that must somehow be connected. Instead, it understands them as co-emerging, inseparable aspects of the way we inhabit and experience the world — Tom Storm

I think we need to dissolve or bracket all fixed distinctions between mind and body, and see change, inter-affection, intertwinement and interaction as primary. The body is already minded in itself and the mind embodied. What does this mean? It means that before we solidify processes into entities with pre-assigned laws and properties ( what a body is and does, and what a mind is and does) , we have fields of interacting bits. These bits aren’t defined by any substantial , pre-assigned content , but by what they do, how they affect and are affected by their neighboring bits.

The whole system is in constant change with respect to its prior states, and local patterns of distinctions and differentiations emerge dynamically from out of this total interactive activity. It is not the property of mind to observe but to act, just as the body continues to exist only by acting. To perceive and to know is to be changed. Changed by what? It is changed by a world which is not simply outside of it, as though there were mind here and world
out there. Interaction is prior to the notion of an inside being affected by an outside. To say we experience the world is to say we experience ourselves, make changes in ourselves.

How do thoughts relate to brain in this model? What would it mean to say a thought is not reducible to a neural process? If phenomenology isn't monist what exactly does co-emergence mean? — Tom Storm

Husserlian phenomenology is monist. There is reduction, but not from thought to physical entity. Rather, from physical entity to underlying process generating qualitative systems of rationality. Is this process physical? Spiritual? It is not physical since the physical is one of an infinity of possible narratives that we can construct to navigate and organize events, and saying something is physical doesn’t address the underlying system of rationality which organizes the theory of the physical or the genesis of systems. Where does this underlying system of rationality come from, if not the physical? We can say that the bits comprising mind, body and world are not physical, since the physical presupposes but doesnt explain them. But what does explain them? Or better yet, can we come up with an understanding which avoids ‘explanation’ of a physicalist or causal sort, avoids spiritualist mumbo jumbo, and also grounds physicalism?

It would seem that current neuropsychological models give us much of what we need to ground mental phenomena, since they assume a brain and body in continual change with respect to itself, fields of interacting elements and systems of model making which link mind and world. This is a good start, but from a phenomenologist’s vantage, it still stumbles on remnants of physicalistic reification when it treats mind as mirroring, modeling or representing an outside world. This treats neurons as inner objects shaping themselves to conform to outer objects.

To get rid of the remnants of physicalism, we need to stop talking about the mind, body and world in terms of objects which interact , even objects that exist only very briefly. The bits I have been describing here aren’t tiny objects, they are actions, differences, events, creations, values, vectors. To make this our starting point rather than the concept of neutral , affectless ‘object’ allows us to avoid the hard problem’s dilemma of explaining the relation between value, quantity, affect, feeling, creation, meaning on the one hand and object, fact, identity, thing on the other. It also means that we have to start treating the concept of time seriously, radically, primordially.

I don't see why one could not be a (non-eliminative) physicalist without devolving into some form of dualism. One could maintain that subjective feelings are perfectly real events and are also completely physical, and that they only seem non-physical to us on account of the bewitchments of dualistic language — Janus

Yea, but I’m defining what you’re calling ‘subjective feelings’ as a qualitative system of rationality within which a physical account is intelligible. Imagine we are looking at a picture which can appear as either a duck or a rabbit. The system of rationality (the particular way the lines and curves are defined and organized into a whole gestalt frame of meaning) differs between the duck and the rabbit, and it differs qualitatively, valuatively, as a ‘felt’ sense of meaning . A physicalist will say , yes but we can locate the underlying facts which explain this difference.

The phenomenologist will say that those underlying facts themselves will always require a quantitative , valuative, felt system of rationality to make them intelligible and there is no physical account which can ground it. We can as phenomenologists study the process of constructing qualitative systems of rationality, but this will not lead us to a physicalist explanation, since the physicalist explanation presupposes the developed framework of a qualitative system of rationality. Think of physicalism as dealing with events described on the basis of a logic derived from an axiomatic system, and phenomenology as revealing subject-world interactions as the ground of axiomatization.

There are is no end to the variety of qualitative systems of meaning we can constitute, and physicalism is just one historically produced narrative. It is not the world which is physical, or based on energy, it is a narrative which emerged a few centuries ago and which we have been quite attached to. We are so blinded by the usefulness of that narrative we can’t see through it or beyond it, as though we were all living in The Truman Show.

The problem for phenomenology is that all of what is said above is also a "theoretical artefact". Property dualism is discursively inescapable. I think that is why the later Heidegger reverted to poetic language. Dualism is not inherent in lived experience and the primal synthetic apprehension of things, but it is inherent in any and every saying that is the product of analysis. — Janus

That’s right. The ‘theoretical artefact’ can also be called a qualitative stance or value orientation. It is such stances and orientations that are inescapable when we use an objectively causal physical description of an aspect of the world. The world is always objective on the basis of a particular qualitative system of understanding and intelligiblity Is the distinction between a qualitative system of valuation and the causal account which is organized on its basis a dualism? If so, it is only the dualism of implict vs explicit, surface versus depth, abstractive vs primary. It seems to me these aren’t properties so much as dimensions.

If one is a physicalist, one will not notice the way the underlying value framework is indispensable to the direct intelligibility of all physicist accounts. One then will say that values are properties of subjective feeling ‘sprinkled over’ the properties of the physicalist account. That’s dualism, and it doesn’t require the postulation of a supernatural or non-natural realm.

Consciousness does not arise from the physical. It's there with the physical all along. — Patterner

If a physical description of the behavior of billiard balls involves objectively causal mechanisms of interaction, how should we talk about what it is that is ‘there with the physical all along’? If it is consciousness which is there, what is it doing there? What is it contributing to the physical description? Is it simply contributing some mysterious quality of inner feeling?

I think my reading is more interesting. I don’t want to start quoting chapter and verse, but a major concern of Heidegger’s is the dehumification of human beings, and I think it’s that piece that’s most relevant today. Presence and its privileged position within Western philosophy has played a large role in that. — Mikie

I just think that, if you want to define the metaphysics of presence as a thinking which doesn't take into account what is completely outside of awareness you should leave Heidegger and Derrida out of the discussion and focus on those accounts which illustrate, rather than challenge, your argument, such as psychoanalysis and cognitive science.

I claim that the phrase ‘physical world’ is not describing a world that is real in the sense of being real independent of our conscious interaction with it. I believe our consciousness and the physical world cannot be separated. That's what property dualism means. We can't remove the experiential property from particles any more than we can remove mass or charge from them. The bifurcation doesn't exist. But we ignore some properties at times. We don't concern ourselves with charge or consciousness when we calculate the path of a baseball after it leaves the bat — Patterner

On the surface your account sounds as if you are rejecting the inner/outer split, but property dualism usually preserves and stabilizes the hard problem rather than dissolving it. The key issue is where the split is located. Phenomenology dissolves the hard problem by denying that the split between neutral physical reality and affectively laden experience is ontologically basic in the first place. Property dualism, by contrast, typically relocates that split inside the world itself. Instead of two substances, it posits two irreducible kinds of properties, physical and experiential, cohabiting the same entities. That leaves intact the explanatory gap

For instance, you claim that consciousness is a property of particles in the same sense as mass or charge. But once consciousness is treated as a property alongside physical properties, it immediately raises the question: why do certain physical configurations instantiate this additional property at all, and how does it relate to the others? We still have a world described completely in third-person terms, to which experiential properties are added as something extra.

For Husserl and Heidegger, the mistake lies in taking “the physical world” as something already fully constituted as neutral, objective, and affectless, and then asking how consciousness gets added to it. That picture is a theoretical abstraction derived from scientific practice, not a description of the world as it is originally given. The world is first encountered as meaningful, relevant, and affectively structured. Neutral objectivity is a derivative achievement, produced by bracketing relevance, concern, and involvement, not the metaphysical ground floor.

You say that when calculating the trajectory of a baseball, we ignore charge or consciousness. Yes, but phenomenology insists that scientific abstraction does not reveal a consciousness-free world; it selectively suspends certain dimensions of sense in order to achieve specific explanatory aims. Property dualism treats consciousness as a property that is “there anyway,” even when we are not attending to it. But what is the property? Phenomenology tell us that any set of facts about the world, any act of empirical measurement which deals with what is the case, gets its meaning sense and intelligibility fro the qualitative ‘how’ it makes sense as a system of understanding. This underlying ‘how’ is always present as that which guides and organizes the sense of what it means to calculate the trajectory of a baseball. It is there implicitly but not explicitly. This is only a property dualism if we consider the explicit ‘what’ of physical facts and the implicit ‘how’ of their anew and intelligibility to be properties.

Property dualism remains wedded to the hard problem of it accepts a conception of the physical as fully intelligible without reference to the qualitative intelligibility dimension of experience. Once that concession is made, consciousness can only appear as something mysterious, whether localized in brains, spread across particles, or treated as fundamental. The question “Why is there something it is like?” remains unavoidable.

By contrast, the phenomenological move is not to say that consciousness is another property of reality, but that the very distinction between “neutral physical” and “felt subjective” is a theoretical artifact. Worldhood, for Heidegger, is already affectively attuned; intentionality, for Husserl, is already value-laden and sense-bestowing. Affect and mattering are not added to a neutral base; they are conditions under which anything shows up as a base at all.

I fail to see the relevance. Plenty of behavior involves no conscious awareness, yet it happens. We may have no memory of turning the doorknob to event a room, but we know it must have occurred. We’re all in agreement about that, I think.

All of these are examples of absence, which is exactly what isn’t privileged— and that was your initial question. — Mikie

Yes, but this distinction between what we are paying attention to and what is outside of this awareness is not what Heidegger or Derrida are getting at with their deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. They are directing their focus on what is taking place within that very beam of direct attention, that it is not simply a staring at something but being thrown into engagement with it. Attention is a kind of displacement.

we can't even make a memory out of something that's outside of our consciousness. — L'éléphant

That’s a good point. The here and now of conscious awareness is the absolute starting point for Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger and Derrida as well accept the absolute primacy of the experienced now. Their deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence aims to show that within the now itself there is a bifurcation or hinge even more intimate than pure presence. So they dont look outside of the now to what is beyond our immediate awareness, but within this assumed immediacy.

the intention behind the arguments is precisely to stake a claim for the reality of consciousness - to put a block in the way of reduction. The arguments have succeeded, I think, in doing that. — Ludwig V

Reduction by itself isnt necessarily a bad thing, but we want to aim for the right kind of reduction. Reducing phenomena to physical processes relying on objective causal mechanisms is concealing kind of reduction since it slaps abstractive idealizations over what we experience, hiding the richness of that experience. Husserlian reduction and Wittgensteinian seeing bracket the flattening generalizations of empiricism so we can notice what is implicated in them but not made explicit.

Part of the problem is encapsulated by the confusion inherent in the idea of the "real world", "reality". The idea that physics captures the reality of an aspect of the world is meant to insist that there is only one world, which is thought of in many ways. These conceptual systems are related to each other in something of the way that different interpretations of a picture are related. They are independent, complete in themselves, yet, in a sense competing with each other, and, in that competition, co-existing. The picture of the duck-rabbit is really a picture of a duck and a picture of a rabbit and it is not possible for it to be both simultaneously; yet there is only one picture. It seems impossible and yet, there it is. — Ludwig V

For both Husserl and Heidegger, but in different ways, ‘reality’ refers back to a canned method which developed between Galileo and Descartes, defining empirical phenomena in geometric terms as bodies at rest or in motion. Husserl reserves the word ‘reality’ for a certain realm of abstractive idealizations that we construct. For instance, the ‘reality’ of the real spatial object is constituted by us when we move from the perception of a flowing, changing nexus of sense data to the constitution of patterns of correlation linking our movements and their kinesthetic feedback with phenomena such that an overall self-similarity obtains. The leap to the concept of ‘real’ is the abstraction we make in which we see such patterned phenomena in terms of ‘this unitary, self-identical object’.

Similarly for Wittgenstein, we get caught up in grammatical confusions when we reify our abstractive generalizations. We can see something as a duck, as a rabbit, or as a picture which functions as a categorical container for both (“there is only one picture”). This leap towards the ‘real’ as a general fact comprising particulars obfuscates the change in grammar we undergo when we move from seeing something as a duck, to seeing something as a rabbit, to seeing something as ‘this categorical ground of a duck and a rabbit’. Each shift in grammar is, in a subtle way, a change of subject. Generalization , inclusion, identification all involve such shifts in grammatical sense, but we tend to conceal from ourselves these qualitative changes in meaning.

And there is a glue which ties together these changes in sense. It is the glue of relevance. The hard problem consists in assuming that relevance , mattering and significance refer to processes associated with an aspect of the world called consciousness or subjectivity. The aspect called physical reality comprises events and objects which in themselves are devoid of affect, relevance and mattering. They simply ‘are’ as neutral facts of the real. Relevance is a gloss we as subjects add to them.

If you mean presence and absence are aspects of change, then yes. But presence and absence go eat beyond that, so we don't have to confine ourselves to time. — frank

No, they don’t go beyond time, since they are inextricable. from it. They are incoherent without it.

— Britannica

This blurb suggests that it's not primarily about time. It's about presence versus absence. Do you have a quote that contradicts this?

Derrida characterizes as the “metaphysics of presence.” This is the tendency to conceive fundamental philosophical concepts such as truth, reality, and being in terms of ideas such as presence, essence, identity, and origin—and in the process to ignore the crucial role of absence and difference.
— Britannica — frank

The way that absence and difference are internal to presence what time is. Difference isnt a static fact, it’s an event , an activity. It is temporalization.

Why is the only thing we can be certain of in the “here and now”?

But in any case, for everything that is here and now, how many things are NOT here and now? Far more. From the workings of our bodies to all activity outside our scope of vision, what’s absent and unknown is simply much bigger than what is present and “known.” — Mikie

I don’t think this is what Derrida is getting at in his deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. What he means is that the present isn’t something that can turn back to look at itself. To be present is to be a change, a hinge, a transit. The present doesn’t ‘occupy’ a moment of time, as if it subsists itself briefly as itself before it changes into a new present. When we talk about or imagine things outside consciousness, beneath consciousness , simultaneous with consciousness, like a body performing processes we are unaware of, we are still treating these things and this time as present at hand.

physics is designed to exclude anything that doesn't fit its methodology. Nothing wrong with that, until you start claiming that the physical world is the only real world.
— Ludwig V

What the 'explanatory gap' and 'hard problem' arguments are aimed at, is precisely that claim. That everything is reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. That is the point at issue! — Wayfarer

But this makes it sound as though there is more than one real world; that physics effectively captures the reality of an aspect of it (the physical) and we need another explanation alongside of it for something like consciousness. This is dualism, a reification of the hard problem. If instead we claim that the phrase ‘physical world’ is not describing a world that is real in the sense of being real independent of our conscious interaction with it, then we are doing phenomenology. This dissolves the dualism of the hard problem by showing there to be a single underlying process of experiencing accounting for the historical decision to bifurcate the world into concepts like ‘physically real’ and ‘real in other ways’.

My dictionary defines "specious" as superficially plausible, but actually wrong, or misleading. — Metaphysician Undercover

This where I’m getting it from:

“William James's "specious present" describes our experience of the present as a short, flowing duration, not an instantaneous point, acting like a "saddle-back" of time with a bit of the immediate past and future held together, allowing us to perceive motion and succession rather than just isolated moments, a key idea in his Principles of Psychology (1890). He contrasted this "thick" experience with the "knife-edge" mathematical present (a single point) and the "stream of consciousness," arguing that our awareness always carries a sense of "now" that's extended and contains felt duration.”

But I think that describing the present as pure actuality is far from indicating that the present is "specious". "Pure actuality" indicates that "now" is more like the opposite of specious.

I think what he is indicating in your quoted passage, is that the present never appears to us as "a moment" So it is "the moment" which is specious, not the now. In other words, "the moment" is not a correct representation of "the present". — Metaphysician Undercover

If the present never appears as the ‘moment’ , what is a moment, and how does the present appear? To me specious means inclusive or thick, that the ‘now’ has room for past and future , not just the present. So what would the opposite of this be? Some kind of preferencing of the present over the past and future, in which only the present, but not the past and future, is pure actuality? Or a preferencing of the past and future over the present?

I had to look into this. Contamination, but this would still be a system of deference and difference out of which the "trace" produces the sense of presence, notwithstanding what "infects a mark". — Constance

As long as we don’t confuse this system of deferral and difference with a Saussurrian structuralism in which the elements of the system are simultaneously present to each other as aspects of a totality mutually defining the meaning of each element.

m

↪Ciceronianus
I remember it as God pooping out of the sky. I don't remember a cathedral. — frank

Holy Sh*t

I just did a brief review of the part where he talked about "now" and I see that he described it as "pure actuality". So I don't agree that "now" is specious for Derrida. — Metaphysician Undercover

What do you think Derrida means by ‘pure actuality’? You dont think it includes what has just passed and what is just about to occur? Derrida wrote on Heidegger's formulation of anxiety as being-towards-death:

“…the point is not to resign oneself to one's mortality…but to constitute the present as the past of a future: that is, to live the present not as the origin and absolute form of lived experience (of ek-sistence), but as the product, as what is constituted, derived, constituted in return on the basis of the horizon of the future and the ek- stasis of the future, this latter being able to be authentically anticipated as such only as finite to- come, that is, on the basis of the insuperability of possible death, death not being simply at the end like a contingent event befalling at the far end of a line of life, but determining at every — let's say moment — the opening of the future in which is constituted as past what we call the present and which never appears as such

doesn't language, when analytically brought to bear on its own nature and limitations in the world, have to yield to something that is simply NOT language at all, and if this is allowed, then the delimitations you refer to above, which I take to be essentially a denial of what I will call "linguistic absolutes" entering into explanations, "absolutes" that can be tossed about freely in doubt and suspicion simply because they ARE language, and language possesses nothing stand alone, nothing that stands as its own as its own presupposition, as Kierkegaard put it, these delimitations face a ground for acceptance and denial that is not contingent, for it is not realized IN conditions in which it can be gainsaid — Constance

I see a number of issues wording their way through here. There is the issue of the pre-propositional and pre-reflective, which Henry formulates as immanent self-affecting. And the. there is the question of ether language has to be understood in terms of a space of reasons based on the logic of predicational grammar. In responding to Esse Quam Videri, I offered a non-foundational grounding of intelligibility that I thought he might related to better than introducing phenomenological language. My own preference is to move in the direction of Wittgenstein and Husserl in bracketing and reducing propositional truth.