Some contemporary physicists do as well, although others treat the laws of nature as eternally unchanging and immutable. — Fooloso4

I agree that some physicists have moved beyond naive direct realism , but I can’t find any who have left realism of all stripes behind, Do you know of any? I can’t imagine any phycisst who would subscribe to Nietzsche’s claim below:

Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened –). We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life? – In the end, we are not only allowed to make such an attempt: the conscience of method demands it. Multiple varieties of causation should not be postulated until the attempt to make do with a single one has been taken as far as it will go (– ad absurdum, if you will). This is a moral of method that cannot be escaped these days; – it follows “from the definition,” as a mathematician would say. The question is ultimately whether we recognize the will as, in effect, efficacious, whether we believe in the causality of the will. If we do (and this belief is really just our belief in causality itself –), then we must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is. “Will” can naturally have effects only on “will” – and not on “matter” (not on “nerves” for instance –). Enough: we must venture the hypothesis that everywhere “effects” are recognized, will is effecting will – and that every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will. – Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else.”

Peterson and Zizek are both egomaniacs.

Give me 5 minutes of someone like Noam Chomsky over either of their oeuvres. — Xtrix

Peterson grossly misreads most of the postmodern authors he pontificates about. Zizek’s a windbag but at least he has a solid background in figures like Hegel, Marx, Freud and Kierkegaard. Chomsky is a brilliant psycho-linguist but as a political theorist is an egomaniac to rival the other two, and whose philosophical understanding seems to be arrested somewhere between Hume and Hegel.

The problem is not with the meaning of the term. I suspect you know that. — Fooloso4

What is there outside of the meaning of the term? Put differently , unless you maintain a dualist perspective, positing an objective ‘real world’ existing in itself outside of subject-object interaction, is the idea of a ‘meaningless in itself’ universe even coherent? ( I’m arguing this from a phenomenological philosophical perspective).

He does not deny science. What he denies is the:

metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests — Fooloso4

Yes, and this means he denies that the aim of science should be the attainment of truth, which amounts to a direct critique of modern physics and most sciences outside of perhaps a few branches of psychology.

The universe has always been meaningless. — Wayfarer

Then how are we able to understand the meaning of the word ‘universe’?

This isn't a disparagement. Not even close. — Xtrix

Heidegger had nothing but respect for Kierkegaard, just as he had for Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Descartes, and others -- despite the fact they he considers them still within the realm of Greek ontology. — Xtrix

Indeed, as well he should respect them, because they represent the foundation on which his own philosophy is built. Let me clarify what I mean by disparage in the context of Heidegger’s relationship to Kierkegaard.
Of the philosophical predecessors to one’s own thinking, there are those whose work is distant enough intellectually ( this isn’t necessary correlated with chronology, since Heidegger felt a philosophical proximity to the pre-Socratics) to be of only tangential or historical use to them. By contrast, there is usually a much smaller circle of thinkers whose ideas are considered close enough to one’s own to be considered kindred spirits. For Heidegger, Nietzsche and Holderlin became those figures whereas Kierkegaard was one step removed from this circle. This is what I meant by his being ‘disparaged’ by Heidegger.

I can't find a single time he "disparages" Kierkegaard. — Xtrix

From Gerhard Thonhauser
“Thinker without Category:

“The first volume of the Black Notebooks is exemplary for Heidegger’s hostility against an anthropological and/or existential reading of Being and Time, which Heidegger associates with the name “Kierkegaard” (GA 94, 32–33 and 74–76).

Heidegger’s view of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel is a major aspect of his understanding of Kierkegaard. Heidegger’s perspective remained the same throughout his intellectual development: From a philosophical point of view, Kierkegaard is a Hegelian. Kierkegaard himself, however, did not notice this de- pendency. For that reason, his criticism of Hegel is mistaken, as he failed to see or misunderstood the crucial metaphysical issue that manifests itself in Hegel’s philosophy. In short, Heidegger considered Kierkegaard a Hegelian that deeply misunderstood Hegel, which is why his criticism of Hegel, from a philosophical perspective, is hollow and pointless.

Heidegger:

The pertinacity of dialectic, which draws its motivation from a very definite source, is docu- mented most clearly in Kierkegaard. In the properly philosophical aspect of his thought, he did not break free from Hegel. His later turn to Trendelenburg is only added documentation for how little radical he was in philosophy. He did not realize that Trendelenburg saw Ar- istotle through the lens of Hegel. His reading the Paradox into the New Testament and things Christian was simply negative Hegelianism.

Regarding Heidegger’s relation to Kierkegaard, we can summarize with the observation that the first half of the 1930s is characterized by a tendency to embrace the Dane alongside Nietzsche. That changed around 1935 together with a transformation of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, whose “The Will to Power” is henceforth considered the completion of metaphysics. As a consequence, Hei- degger includes Nietzsche in his history of being as the final step in the oblivion of being (Seinsvergessenheit), whereas Kierkegaard continues to be excluded from Heidegger’s idiosyncratic history of Western thought. In Contributions to Philosophy he states: “What lies between Hegel and Nietzsche has many shapes but is nowhere within the metaphysical in any originary sense—not even Kierkegaard.”

The first time Heidegger clearly explains his new point of view is in summer term 1936:

Nietzsche’s attitude toward system is fundamentally different from that of Kierkegaard who is usually mentioned here together with Nietzsche...All of this is said, by the way, in order to show by implication that the combination of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which has now become customary, is justified in many ways, but is fundamentally untrue philosophically and is misleading.31
Through this shift, Nietzsche gains an importance for Heidegger that Kierkegaard never had.

As for Nietzsche, he didn't write two volumes, he taught several courses -- and later than Being and Time. — Xtrix

These were published as 2 two volume books of 200 pages each.

it is the structure the the past only existing as what it occurs into and is changed by.
— Joshs

This isn't very clear, I'm afraid. What does the second "it" refer to? Time or temporality? — Xtrix

Past , present and future are the same moment, what Heidegger calls the three ecstasies of the ‘ now’, The past isnt what is behind me, but that part of the past-present-future hinge which projects forward into the now. The present occurs into this projected past. So there is never a past other than this past which is always already changed by the present which it projects itself into.
This gives the relation between my past ,present and future an extra-ordinary intimacy, the intimacy of Care. It makes the now a becoming rather than a ‘state’.

time temporalizes itself," meaning it emerges and is constructed out of something else. That "something else" is human being, human experience, human needs and interests. — Xtrix

Keep in mind that Heidegger didn’t want to equate Dasein with anthropos , the ‘ human being ‘ as biological entity.
Yes, It emerges and is constructed out of Dasein, but more specifically , it is the structure the the past only existing as what it occurs into and is changed by.

Heidegger is highly influenced by Kierkegaard. It's worth the effort in reading it. — Xtrix

I think he was much more influenced by Nietzsche, who he wrote two volumes about , than kierkegaard, who he only mentioned disparagingly. Unfortunately a whole generation of West Coast Heideggerians ( Dreyfus, Haugeland, Rousse) were mostly influenced by Kierkegaard in their reading ( in my view misreading) of Heidegger. The writers I find most useful in understanding Heidegger are Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche and Derrida , but Kierkegaard very little.

I think science is our best bet at a future. — counterpunch

I didnt realize comparing the value of different cultural modalities came down to a processof elimination.

The advent of computers marks the threshold of epistemic and technological maturity - the bahmitzvah of binary, if not yet the quinceanera of qbits, a coming of age that isn't reflected philosophically, sociologically or politically. — counterpunch

In what way is it not reflected philosophically?You mean you can’t name a single philosopher whose ideas have the ‘maturity’ of the fields you mention?

Galileo had a stultifying effect on the subsequent development of philosophy — counterpunch

What specifically do you object to in post-Galilean developments in philosophy? How do you envision the lineage of Descartes-Spinoza-Leibnitz-Hume-Kant-Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche, etc might have differed without this ‘stultifying effect’?

Most people don't realize 'Starry Night' is Van Gogh trying to paint what he actually saw. — ernest meyer

If you look at the painting Starry Night you’ll notice that Van Gogh didnt just paint rings around lights, he painting a veritable network of streaming movement that includes not only points of light but integrated the lights with the blank sky and clouds. This complex river of movement was intended as a subjective spiritual and emotive statement, not simply a copy of external reality.

the processing is innate, but it is not completely hard-wired. — ernest meyer

Only the capacity to process perceptual relations is innate, the actual constructive process is entirely a process of perceptual learning , which is why sensory deprivation at a crucial juncture in development can cause permanent deficits in sight or other sense modality.

Suppose we are waiting in a dark room as a baby, and our mother comes in and turns the light on, then feeds us. Then when she leaves she turns the light off. This makes an association in our minds that bright light is good, and shadows are bad.

I believe such associations at a very early age explain much of what we personally 'feel' about color. As we grow older, we form more associations, which are more direct, such as red being 'danger' because of traffic lights and blood — ernest meyer

I think there are more interesting and more explanatory models of perception than those which make use of basic stimulus response reinforcement.

Newer approaches think of perception as a form of normative and goal oriented interaction with the world. not simply the processing of data but embodied sensory-motor interaction with environment. The model of blind arbitrary associative reinforcement has been replaced by the idea that perception is anticipative and oriented toward fulfillment of expectations. It doesn’t like surprise or loss of what was anticipated. Thus, what is reinforced isnt simply what is causally associated with a surge of pleasure , but fulfillment of anticipation , completion of pattern, consistency of appearance, a relative match between what we see and what we expect to see. In short , perception is patterned sense making , not causal association shaped by simple reinforcement It prefers coherence over incoherence and chaos.

In this regard, the change from light to darkness that ensues when we turn off a light represents a loss that is intrinsically negative. Of course, we can say we love the dark , but that involves secondary positive features that emerge for us after the immediate change from light to dark. Similarly , I think colors have intrinsic hedonic ‘feel’ to them prior to secondary meanings that are shaped though more complex social interactions, and this feel , like light vs dark , is linked to what I described as their ‘popping out toward us vs receding away from us’. Linking the expression ‘Having the blues’ with the color doesn’t require complex social associations of the color blue but can be directly related to the recessionary character of the basic perception. One can compare these recognized felt qualities of color to the way temporal arrangements of musical
notes provideds us with a feeling vocabulary of music independent of our varying reactions to particular musical pieces. We all recognize that when an octave scale is played it constitutes a subject and predicate. The first 4 notes constitute a completed ‘subject’ phrase and the second 4 are the predicate.Put together as a song , patterns of notes connote beginnings, endings, sadness adm joys, and all variants of moods. How does it manage to do this in such a way that we all recognize the basic feeling elements of music even when we disagree on how good or bad a particular song is ? Through consonances and dissonances that remind us of the rhythms of fulfillment’s and lack of fulfillment’s that perception and cognition in general present us with.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that this capacity to recognize feeling in music is either ‘innate’ or just a concatenation of reinforcement contingencies.

Look. My sense of what a color is changes in subtle ways in relation to my own previous perception of it all the time , in response to changing contexts of experience , both social-linguistic and private. If I am an artist, the meaning for me of red may be extraordinarily differentiated , and change in all kinds of ways as a result of different projects I engage in. I am constant evaluating and attempting to validate
my previous understanding and use of the sense of all of my perceptions, so my own use of words for color and sound and touch that I use for my own purposes shifts subtly all the time.

In similar fashion, the words we share with others for color undergo all kinds of changes in sense, both those that members of a group agree on and those they don’t. Straws on babbles on about evolutionary and genetic determinants of color perception, but what matters for
the social consensus concerning the meaning of a color word is what sense of color is being meant and how we go about validating whether others are meaning a similar sense not. So for instance ,the word red can be used to pick out an object against a background.
For this task it is irrelevant whether my perceived red is the same as yours. All that matters is that we both consistently pick out the same object. Then there can be an aesthetic use of the word red. If my red is fiery hot, aggressive, angry and yours is the opposite, then the word red in this context isn’t very useful in capturing a shared understanding.

Strawson’s reminder that we may be meaning different things with the use of the same color word is sort of beside the point. First of all, how would we even know this unless we established some situation
to validate it? If we normally don’t force our shared use of words like red to undergo validation its because our pragmatic involvement with it doesn’t present difficulties. The word is doing what we need it to do.

If it came to be that an important shared understanding of a word sense began to unravel, that is, if it became apparent that each user of the word could no longer depend on other users to behave in previously anticipated ways in response to the use of the word, the. it would likely cease to be practical in its present form.

Everything I said about the social validation of color concepts applies to the interpersonal establishment of objective science. This is the point of a phenomenological analysis. Strawson is doing a kind of rudimentary phenomenology when he shows how shared concepts are built from intercorrelations across individual perceptual systems that transcend subordinate differences

as if you and I did not overwhelmingly agree as to what is black and what is white.

Phenomenology starts in the wrong place and proceeds in the wrong direction. — Banno

Then so does Wittgenstein.

Look. My sense of what a color is changes in subtle ways in relation to my own previous perception of it all the time , in response to changing contexts of experience , both social-linguistic and private. If I am an artist, the meaning for me of red may be extraordinarily differentiated , and change in all kinds of ways as a result of different projects I engage in. I am constant evaluating and attempting to validate
my precious understanding of the sense of all of my perceptions, so my own use of words for color and sound and touch that I use for my own purposes shifts subtly all the time.

In similar fashion, the words we share with others for color undergo all kinds of changes in sense, both those that members of a group agree on and those they don’t. Straws on babbles on about evolutionary and genetic determinants of color perception, but what matters for
the social consensus concerning the meaning of a color word is what sense of color is being meant and how we go about validating whether others are meaning a similar sense not. So for instance ,the word red can be used to pick out an object against a background.
For this task it is irrelevant whether my perceived red is the same as yours. All that matters is that we both consistently pick out the same object. Then there can be an aesthetic use of the word red. If my red is fiery hot, aggressive, angry and yours is the opposite, then the word red in this context isn’t very useful in capturing a shared understanding.

Strawson’s reminder that we may be meaning different things with the use of the same color word is sort of beside the point. First of all, how would we even know this unless we established some situation
to validate it? If we normally don’t force our shared use of words like red to undergo validation its because our pragmatic involvement with it doesn’t present difficulties. The word is doing what we need it to do.

If it came to be that an important shared understanding of a word sense began to unravel, that is, if it became apparent that each user of the word could no longer depend on other users to behave in previously anticipated ways in response to the use of the word, the. it would likely cease to be practical in its present form.

Strawson believes in the usefulness of notions like veridicality and mind-independence of experience. Phenomenology sees them as derivative abstractions.

Treating these as if they were mutually exclusive will get you nowhere. — Banno

I did not mean to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. What I meant was, following Husserl and Merleau-Pontus, the ‘physical’ is a higher order derived product of constitution, and can’t be used to ‘explain’ the fundamental basis of color in perception. .

We are influenced by color, both by deep evolutionary forces, and by abstract cultural associations; yet the colors themselves possess no intrinsic properties to cause such influence. The colors themselves are no more than labels we apply to a physical phenomena (parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, in this case). — ernest meyer

Colors are not physical phenomena, they are perceptual phenomena, and as such are the achievement of a constructive process. They are intentional acts , and like all acts, they produce a change of sense. Colors may not present ‘intrinsic’ properties on the order of qualia, but they do present us with the experience of a transformative construction. For instance, the perceptual act of color constitution is created primoridally as a black shape either emerging out of or receding into a dark background. You can demonstrate this yourself. Cut out a white cardboard circle, paint one half black , and then draw a series of black lines following the curvature of the circle on either side of the disk emerging from the black half. Then attach it to a fan and watch the appearance of red and blue.

This explains why red is often a metaphor for anger and aggression, and blue can represent calm and coldness.
Red is literally the sense of a shape popping out at us and blue is an appearance receding from us( and the other colors of the rainbow fit between these two
poles), even as these are just features of a motionless surface.
So our language, through its metaphors , is in fact indicating organizational characteristics ( aggressive approach vs passive receding) of the supposedly ‘private’ feel of color.
Color, like all other perceptions, is never just immediate ‘sense data’ taken from the world , but correlations , figures emerging out of and co-created by their relationship to a background bodily field. And one can see how perceptual correlations are intertwined at a higher level with the social field of interpersonal relations.

I argue that philosophy is a certain strangeness that comes with experience — ghostlycutter

Even better, philosophy discloses the strangeness that is an intrinsic feature of experience but is covered up by everyday living and thinking.

one can't philosophize endlessly, before convening on a decision. — Aryamoy Mitra

That a decision or appraisal emerges, after some length of time, is what accords all meaning to the exercise (to commence with). — Aryamoy Mitra

you're likely embarking on an inexhaustible venture. — Aryamoy Mitra

is it at all worth rationalizing one's being? — Aryamoy Mitra

You make it sound like profound life meanings are some finite set of propositions that we either grasp or fail to grasp.

Let me offer two suppositions to counter your argument. First, if ‘rationalizing one’s existence’ is going to have any significance to one’s actually lived life, it will have to centrally involve insights concerning improving one’s understanding of and empathy with other people.

Second, such insights are not a matter of adequation with reality, but with production of reality , which is a developmental process, meaning every step, however small , along the way can benefit one enormously in getting along with others ( and oneself), and thereby enriching one’s capacity for joy. So you better get started. Think how much time you’ve wasted thinking you needed to hand in a completed report! If it makes you feel any better , all of us , whether philosopher or not, is in a sense ‘rationalizing our life’ every day we live.

Our day to day behavior is the posing of questions that our subsequent experience either validates or invalidates, causing us to re-evaluate our sense of the world as we progress through it. This rationalizing need not be in propositional form, but it may make you happier to articulate it this way if you have a predilection for analytic philosophy.

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

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

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

Something I wrote on Caputo;
“to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.”

that doesn’t mean they can’t inform or be informed by phenomenological idealism. — Possibility

Contrary to many misinterpretations, Husserlian phenomenology is not an idealism but a radical subject-object interactionism.

Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:

“ But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance
of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out
of mthe proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)

So what’s happening in your brain when you categorise? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. — Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘How Emotions Are Made’

What this quote from Barrett illustrates is the fact that idealism and realism are two sides of the same coin. Barrett’s cognitive system is a relation. between a ‘real’ independent external world and ideal internal
representations.

Merleau -Ponty echoes Husserl on idealism and empiricism:

“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it. This may be shown by studying the history of the concept of attention.”

“...in a consciousness which constitutes everything, or rather which eternally possesses the intelligible structure of all its objects, just as in empiricist consciousness which constitutes nothing at all, attention remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work to perform. Consciousness is no less intimately linked with objects of which it is unheeding than with those which interest it, and the additional clearness brought by the act of attention does not herald any new relationship. It therefore becomes once more a light which does not change its character with the various objects which it shines upon, and once more empty acts of attention are brought in, in place of ‘the modes and specific directions of intention'.(Cassirir)

Where Rovelli falls short, Lisa Feldman Barrett fills in more of the puzzle for me - with a theoretical approach to emotion, awareness and energy distribution, based on empirical research in neuroscience and psychology, which (probably quite unintentionally) draws intriguing parallels with Rovelli’s restructuring of reality as consisting of energy-based events rather than objects, and explores in depth the question of what is a concept?

I’m just saying don’t write science off just yet. I have a feeling they’ll come around eventually, and the more that philosophers are informed by - and strive to inform - the frontiers of theoretical science, the faster this may happen. — Possibility

I agree that science has made progress in catching up with where philosophy has arrived( and why not? I don’t think there are any hard and fast distinctions between what constitutes the boundaries of a science and a philosophy).

I have read carefully a number of writings by Clark , Friston and Barrett, and I can say with confidence that their thinking is squarely within the realist tradition( not naive realism, as Barrett points out, but a more sophisticated neo-Kantian version which distinguishes between real sense data and constructed human realities).

Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here: “ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”

There are more philosophically progressively psychological models to be found in enactivist embodied approaches influenced by phenomenology , which reject representationalist computationalist realism in general.

the ethical/aesthetic dimension of it, the searing pain that issues forth, registers unmediated. Experience is permeated by value, but what intrigues me is the metavalue of value, that elusive "Good" or "Bad" that attends value, making the presence of pain exceed the factual. — Constance

This is a longstanding presupposition in philosophy, the idea that feeling is somehow immediate and non-intentional.

There is no "redness" as such; this is just an abstraction from the fullness of experience, which is always in or of value. Anticipations are inherently "caring" anticipations. And this points directly to value, and puts the fate of the discussion of presence and existence in the hands of a metaethical, metaaesthetic analysis. I.e., what is value? What is the ethical/aesthetic good and bad? — Constance

Value is a differential, as is intention. It is not the subjective side of intentionality but both sides. There is in fact no subject and no object in the way you are conceiving them as somehow split off from each other. Value is how we find ourselves in the world and this ‘now’ is a becoming, not an immediate presence to self but transformation. The ethical/ aesthetic good and bad is a function of the ongoing organizational integrity of the process of experiential change, not a self-inhering content that hoves above or beyond or underneath ‘facts’.

Here’s a snippet from a recent paper of mine. I think Zahavi’s and Henry’s positions are similar to yours.


“Dan Zahavi posits that my awareness of myself cannot fundamentally be comparable to my experience of an object. For one thing, if it were mediated in this same way it would lead to an infinite regress. The I that views my subjectivity implies another I that experiences this I, and so on. Even more damaging to the claim that self-awareness is the intending of an object is that it presupposes what it is designed to explain. ”..a mental state cannot be imbued with for-me-ness simply as a result of being the object of a further mental state. Rather, if awareness of awareness is to give rise to for-me-ness, “the first order state” must already be “imbued with some phenomenally apparent quality of mine-ness” (Howell and Thompson 2017)

To avoid the specter of an infinite regress, the subjective pole of intentional awareness must be of a qualitatively different nature than the object pole, goes Zahavi's argument. He explains that the pre-reflective self-awareness that opposes, but is at the same time inseparably connected with intended objects, is a peculiar sort of experience, something of the order of a feeling rather than an objective sense.

Zahavi(1999)approvingly cites the phenomenonologist Michel Henry's view:

“When we are in pain, anxious, embarrassed, stubborn or happy, we do not feel it through the intervention of a (inner) sense organ or an intentional act, but are immediately aware of it. There is no distance or separation between the feeling of pain or happiness and our awareness of it, since it is given in and through itself. According to Henry, something similar holds for all of our conscious experiences. To make use of a terminology taken from analytical philosophy of mind, Henry would claim that all conscious experiences are essentially characterized by having a subjective ‘feel' to them, that is, a certain quality of ‘what it is like'”.

I want to take note of the fact that Zahavi treats both the subjective and the objective sides of intentionality as self-inhering interiorities, states, identities, before they are poles of a relation. Because he makes self-inhering content do most of the work of establishing the awareness of the affectively felt and objectively perceived sides of the bond between the subject and the world, the relation between subject and object becomes a mostly empty middle term, a neutral copula added onto the two opposing sides of the binary. In settling on feeling as a special sort of entity that does the work of generating immediate self-awareness , Zahavi is harking back to a long-standing Western tradition connecting affect, feeling and emotion with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

For George Kelly, these dichotomous features: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as belonging to interacting states of being; they are instead the inseparable features of a unitary differential structure of transition, otherwise known as a construct. In personal construct theory, there are no self-inhering entities, neither in the guise of affects nor intended objects. In the place of Zahavi's three-part structure of subjective feeling, relational bond and intentional object, Kelly proposes a two-part structure manifested by the bi-polar construct. For Kelly subjective affect and objective intention are equi-primordial features of a construct's referential differential hinge. Put differently, every construed event is already both feeling and object of sense. This being the case, there is no synthetic relational connector needed to tie subject and object together.

Heidegger's approach complements Kelly's. He critiques Western notions of propositional relation as external bond, tracing it back to Aristotle. As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating.” Instead, taking something as something means transforming what one apprehends in the very act of apprehension. This integral structure of self-temporalization implies equi-primordially and inseparably affective (Befindlichkeit) and intentional-cognitive aspects.

From Kelly's and Heidegger's perspectives, Zahavi's concerns about an infinite regress is a byproduct of the way the issue of subjectivity is being formulated, and Zahavi s solution only reaffirms the problem, which is that the affective and cognate aspects of events are artificially split into separated entities, and then have to be pieced together again in an interaction . To ground experience in radical temporality is to abandon the concept of subject and world in states of interaction, in favor of a self-world referential-differential in continuous self-transforming movement.The functioning of a construct within a hierarchical system allows Kelly to maintain along with Zahavi that one is intrinsically self-aware in every construal, whether that construction is specifically directed toward the self or an event in the world. But unlike for Zahavi, the self component of awareness is not a self-inhering feeling state. Rather, the ‘for-meness' aspect of a construed event is the contribution my construct system as a unified whole makes to the discernment of a new event in terms of likeness and difference with respect to my previous experience. In other words, the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense. As discussed earlier in this paper, Kelly's organization corollary indicates that the system is functionally integral, which I interpret to mean that one's superordinate outlook is implicit in all construals. “

In Husserl’s early work his analysis of the primal impression , the experience of the ‘now’ , appeared to position it as a dull presence to self , apart from the retentional and protentional phase of time consciousness.

But Gallagher writes :“Some of Husserl’s later texts on time-consciousness, especially the Bernau Manuscripts, which were written around 1917–1918, introduce a reframing of the original tripartite account. In this later account, primal impression, rather than being portrayed as an experiential origin, “the primal source of all further consciousness and being” (Husserl 1966a: 67), is considered the result of an interplay between retention and protention. Thus, in the Bernau
Manuscripts, Husserl defines primal impression as “the boundary between […] the retentions and protentions” (Husserl 2001). Whereas retentions and protentions in the early lectures were defined as retaining the primal impression, or projecting a new primal impression, respectively, in Husserl’s later research manuscripts, the primal impression is considered the line of intersection between retentional and protentional tendencies that make up every present phase of consciousness. Even in his earlier account Husserl had claimed that primal presentation is not self-sufficient, rather it operates only in connection with retentions and protentions.

In the Bernau Manuscripts, however, Husserl seems to suggest that the complicated interlacing of retentions and protentions is constitutive of primal impression. Not only is primal impression not self-sufficient, it is a constituted product rather than something that makes a constitutive contribution of its own. This more radical claim is expressed in Husserl’s idea that the initial
event of experience is the empty anticipation.

“ First there is an empty expectation, and then there is the point of the primary perception, itself an intentional experience. But the primary presentation [or impression] comes to be in the flow only by occurring as the fulfillment of contents relative to the preceding empty intentions, thereby changing itself into primal presenting perception.” (Husserl 2001: 4; translated in
Gallagher & Zahavi 2014) . The primal impression comes on the scene as the fulfilment of an empty protention; the now, as the present phase of consciousness, is constituted by way of a protentional fulfilment (Husserl 2001: 4, 14).

“ Each constituting full phase is the retention of a fulfilled protention, which is the horizonal boundary of an unfulfilled and for its part continuously mediated protention.” (Husserl 2001: 8)

Rudolf Bernet writes:

“In his genetic time-analysis Husserl no longer takes it for granted that the intentionality at work in time-consciousness is an egoic act- intentionality with an objective correlate, like a typical static examination of the correlation would have it. Though such act-intentionality plays an important role in time-consciousness and in its constitutive function, Husserl is now more interested in its arising from pre-intentional tendencies, inclinations, and inhibitions, which characterize the intentionality of a passively flowing originary process. Furthermore, this process, as a life-process, is not simply an automatic process; it has a goal and the tendency to draw near to this goal. This determination of the originary process of life as striving toward intuitive givenness forces Husserl, as already mentioned, to a new, dynamic reformulation of the process of temporal fulfillment.

The passively experienced, hyletic originary process stands therefore at the source of the egoic acts of turning-towards, perceiving and grasping. However, it is not only the subject of the egoic performance that is born from this originary stream, but also each present givenness. In fact, the consciousness of the being-present of a givenness arises, as was indicated above, from the interplay between the retentional and protentional intentionality of the passively experienced
originary stream. With this new insight, the privilege of the present as the most originary dimension of time-consciousness could not remain unquestioned by a genetic phenomenology. If each present has a genesis of its emergence, and thus is a present having-come-to-be, then one understands even better why Husserl engages in such a detailed way with the question of whether
there can be something like a first primary presentation. “

Rudolf Bernet

By thinking about the past, but the thinking is done in the present. How does apprehend the future? By thinking about the future, which is done in the present. Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL? No. — Constance

For Husserl and Heidegger the present is a fulfillment of a past which comes out of the future, so it is the present that is inessential rather than past and future, and eternity becomes incoherent.

Is there a theory of how even the losers and the underdogs can have some peace of mind and some sense that their life is worth living?
Is there a philosopher or other author who has written about this? — baker

Since everybody is bringing Christianity into this discussion as the salvation for the powerless, I can’t resist mentioning Nietzsche, who turned this notion on its head by performing a psychoanalysis of the drive to religion. Nietzsche claimed that all of humanity is motivated by one primary drive, the will to power. This doesn’t mean possessing power that we wield over others, but a constant becoming as self-overcoming and self-transformation. Christian piety arose as will to power becoming sickly and turning against itself, as a strategy of those who were oppressed to gain revenge against those who dominated them by elevating self-denial ( the ascetic ideal) to a primary principle.

I don’t agree with everything Nietzsche said, but I do think Will to Power is a wonderful antidote to the repressive impulses of religious piety, which ultimately is used as a weapon to bludgeon non-conformists into submission.

I suggest the terms of the OP’s query, in construing power as an opposition between those who are powerful and those who are powerless, already pre-suppose the ascetic ideal.

you might want to read some of what Thomas Sheehan wrote about Heidi and his devotion to National Socialism sometime. — Ciceronianus the White

I’ve read it. I know Tom Sheehan pretty well. He’s kind of a wild man of activist philosophy, a real character. But as I said before , the route to an adequate understanding of Heidegger and the Nazis is through his philosophy , and I never thought Sheehan grasped his ideas very well . Kind of like Jaspers , who wanted to get rid of Being and Time because he thought it was nothing but dangerous mysticism.

What would you contend he meant by referring to "the Jews"? — Ciceronianus the White

Maybe not this:

From Wittgenstein’s biographer:

“...it is clear that for most of the time when he talks of , Jews' he is thinking of a particular racial group. Indeed, what is most shocking about Wittgenstein's
remarks on Jewishness is his use of the language - indeed, the slogans - of racial anti-Semitism. T-he echo that really disturbs is not that of Sex and Character, but that of Mein Kampf Many of Hitler's
most outrageous suggestions - his characterization of the Jew as a parasite 'who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favourable medium invites him', his claim that theJews' contribution
to culture has been entirely derivative, that 'the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed', and, furthermore, that this contribution has been
restricted to an intellectual refinement of another's culture ('since the Jew ... was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others') - this
whole litany ofIamentable nonsense finds a parallel in Wittgenstein's remarks of1931.

Were they not written by Wittgenstein, many of his pronouncements on the nature of Jews would be understood as nothing more
than the rantings of a fascist anti-Semite. 'It has sometimes been said',
begins one such remark, 'that the Jews' secretive and cunning nature is a result of their long persecution':
Wittgenstein wrote:

‘That is certainly untrue; on the other hand it is certain that they continue to exist despite this persecution only because they have an inclination towards such secretiveness. As we may say that this or that animal has escaped extinction only because of its capacity or ability to conceal itself. Of course I do not mean this as a reason for commending such a capacity, not by any_means. ‘

'They' escape extinction only because they avoid detection? And therefore they are, of necessity, secretive and cunning? This is anti-
Semitic paranoia in its most undiluted form - the fear of, and distaste for, the devious 'Jew in our midst'. So is Wittgenstein's adoption of the metaphor of illness. 'Look on this tumour as a perfectly normal
part of your body!' he imagines somebody suggesting, and counters with the question: 'Can one do that, to order? Do I have the power to
decide at will to have, or not to have, an ideal conception of my body?'
He goes on to relate this Hitlerian metaphor to the position of EuropeanJews:

Wittgenstein said:

‘Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated as their intervention in European affairs would actually
merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life [and no one wants to speak of a disease as ifit had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones).

We may say: people can only regard this tumour as a natural part of their body if their whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up with it. You can expect an individual man to display this sort of tolerance, or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things that
makes it a nation. I. e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone both to retain his former aesthetic feeling for the body and also to make the tumour welcome.

Those who seek to drive out the 'noxious bacillus' in their midst, he comes close to suggesting, are right to do so. Or, at least, one cannot expect them - as a nation - to do otherwise. ‘

It goes without saying that this metaphor makes no sense without a racial notion of Jewishness. The Jew, however 'assimilated', will never be a German or an Austrian, because he is not of the same 'body': he is experienced by that body as a growth, a disease. The metaphor is particularly apt to describe the fears of Austrian anti-Semites, because it implies that the more assimilated the Jews become, the more dangerous becomes the disease they represent to the otherwise healthy Aryan nation.”

From Heidegger’s biographer:

“ In the cultural field, competition anti-Semitism genera]]y includes the as-sumption of a specific "Jewish spirit." But this Jewish spirit that one should beware of does not exist for Heidegger. Indeed he always objected to this kind of "spiritual" anti-Semitism. In a lecture in the mid-1930s he defended Spi-noza, declaring that if his philosophy was "Jewish," then all philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel was Jewish too. This rejection of "spiritual" anti-Semitism is all the more surprising as Heidegger is usually fond of emphasizing the German element in philosophy, contrasting it with the rationalism of the French, the utilitarianism of the English, and the obsession with technology of the Americans. But unlike his comrades-in-arms and rivals Krieck and Baeumler, Heidegger never used this "German element" in philosophy for differentiation from the "Jewish" one. Karl Jaspers, asked in 1945 for an opinion on Heidegger's anti-Semitism, came to the conclusion that in the 1920S Heidegger had not been anti-Semitic. "With respect to this question he did not always exercise discretion. This doesn't rule out the possibility that, as I must assume, in other cases anti-Semitism went against his conscience and his taste."27 Certainly his kind of anti-Semitism had not been a reason for him to join the Nazi movement. Nor, on the other hand, did the (soon to be revealed) brutality of Nazi anti-Semitism deter him from the movement. He did not support its actions, but he accepted them. When Nazi students in the summer of 1933 stormed the building of a Jewish student fraternity and proceeded with such violence that the public prosecutor's office could not avoid initiat-ing an investigation, and in this context requested information from Rector Heidegger, he brusquely refused to pursue any further inquiries on the grounds that those involved in the raid had not all been students.”

his contempt for the Jews, are all well known. — Ciceronianus the White

No, his contempt for the Jews is NOT well known, it is up for constant debate. He never bought into the virulent Nazi anti-semitism that presented Jews as amoral vermin. His comments about jews in the black notebooks had to do with a very different sort of cultural analysis, the same sort he applied to the Russians and the Americans. I asked you about Wittgenstein because Wittgenstein himself harbored many anti-semitic views
that were fashionable at the time: that jews are secretive
and mere copiers of European creativity. He even said he understood why a European country would want to keep Jews out.

Thre reaearch you’ve done is one or two-line snippets from the black notebooks with absolutely no background context from his philosophy to put it into any perspective. He approved the release of these notebooks because they are philosophical notes, and cannot be comprehended properly without knowing the philosophical background.

From his biographer:

“Was Heidegger anti-Semitic? Certainly not in the sense of the ideological lunacy of Nazism. It is significant that neither in his lectures and philosophical writings, nor in his political speeches and pamphlets are there any anti-Semitic or racist remarks. Thus, when Heidegger in his circular before the May Day celebrations described "the building of a new spiritual world for the German people" as the "command of the hour," he did not wish to exclude from this task anyone willing to cooperate. Heidegger's Nazism was decisionist. What mattered to him was not origin but decision. In his terminology, man should be judged not by his "thrown-ness" but by his "design." To that extent he was even able to help hard-pressed Jewish colleagues. When Eduard Fraenkel, professor of classical philology, and Georg von Hevesy, professor of physical chemistry, were to be dismissed be-cause they were Jews, Heidegger in a letter to the Ministry of Education tried to prevent this. He used the tactical argument that a dismissal of these two Jewish professors, "whose extraordinary scientific standing was beyond doubt," 17 would be especially harmful to a "borderland university,"l8 on which foreign critical eyes were particularly focused. Besides, both men were "Jews of the better sort, men of exemplary character." He could vouch for the irre-proachable conduct of both men, "insofar as it is humanly possible to predict these things."19 Fraenkel was dismissed despite Heidegger's submission, while Hevesy was allowed to stay on for the time being. ”

His student that he seduced, yes. — Ciceronianus the White

She never complained, so who the hell are you to pass judgement?

I suspect you’re probably as morally suspect as Heidegger. perhaps more so, since I never knew him to engage in lazy, cheap shots at historical figures without bothering to do any of the research, as you do.

Cite the worst text from Heidegger on the subject and I think under scrutiny it can be shown he's position was no so unusual. — Gregory

I agree completely. If one is going to attack a historical figure, it’s usually a good idea to at least do one’s research.

Herr Recktorführer was never, in the slightest, anti-nazi (i.e. anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-antisemitic ...) — 180 Proof

Sure he was, according to his biographer, Hannah Arendt and many others , Jee and non-Jew, who knew him.
He never bought into Nazism as a political ideology. He was trying to promote his own philosophical revolution , and when he discovered it had nothing to do with what the Nazis had in mind, he broke away from them.
He was never particularly anti-semitic, certainly no more so than Wittgenstein.

I feel the same way about the craven, miserable, pretentious, obscure, mystical, romantic, jackboot-licking, Hitler-loving, Jew-hating Nazi bastard. — Ciceronianus the White

How do you feel about Wittgenstein?

This is what Husserl is proposing:

“ 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)

What Husserl is doing here is showing that for each person, their participation in interpersonal activities
and consensually objective meanings is not simply an paring of you and me to make a we, but a ‘we’ from
each person’s own interpretative vantage.

“Show me the way to the next whiskey bar”

From posts which I have read by you, it seems that your interests lie in the border between philosophy and psychology. — Jack Cummins

My degree was in cognitive science. To me psychological discourse is simply a less self-aware ( or ‘naturalized) form of philosophical thinking.

The question is why Stein goes one way, Heidegger another? What makes for the timeless indecision of philosophy is not the issues being so vague, but the vagaries of people's experiences. Some people are simply intuitively wired for existential affirmation of religion. — Constance

Or perhaps Heidegger understood phenomenology better, and took the epoch to a more primordial beginning , than did Stein.

“The lightest of the slight is beyng.
The most entity-like of entities is God.
In beyng, the distinction between beings and being (in the sense of beingness) comes into its own.
Being means: presence.
Seyn never lets itself be identified with God. It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity.
As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”(Heidegger)

“ Can we be satisfied simply with the notion that human beings are subjects for the world (the world which for consciousness is their world) and at the same time are objects in this world? As scientists, can we content ourselves with the view that God created the world and human beings within it, that he endowed the latter with consciousness and reason, that is, with the capacity for knowledge, the highest instance of which is scientific knowledge? For the naivete that belongs to the essence of positive religion this may be undoubted truth and remain a truth forever, even though the philosophers cannot be content with such naivete. The enigma of the creation and God himself are essential component parts of posi-tive religion. For the philosopher, however, this, and also the juxtaposition "subjectivity in the world as object" and at the same time "conscious subject for the world," contain a necessary theoretical question, that of understanding how this is possible. The epoche, in giving us the attitude above the subject-object correlation which belongs to the world and thus the attitude of focus upon the transcendental subject-object correlation, leads us to recognize, in self-reflection, that the world that exists for us, that is, our world in its being and being-such, takes its ontic meaning entirely from our intentional life through a priori types of accomplishments that can be exhibited rather than argu-mentatively constructed or conceived through mythical thinking.”(Husserl, Crisis)

. I claim that if you follow Husserl's reduction to its logical end, you end up with what is essentially important about Buddhism: Liberation and enlightenment. — Constance

If you follow Husserl’s reduction to its beginning you end up with the structure of time consciousness , which is both liberating and conforming

While expertise probably counts for something, I am sure that there are complex power dynamics and an elite hierarchy within establishing philosophy circles. — Jack Cummins

That may be so , but that hasn’t stopped me. I don’t have a PhD and never took a single
course in philosophy, and yet I have been able to publish my philosophical work in academic journals such as the British Society of Phenomenology.