my knowledge of Derrida is not even being able to get through his attempt to read Austin (in Signature Event Context); — Antony Nickles

I re-read Signiature-Event-Context today, and my take on it is this. Derrida zeros in on the concept(s) of context, which is central to the argument of olp. He claims that Austin believes one can exhaustively determine a context of word uses such that no remainder is left over.

“Austin’s analyses at all times require a value of context, and even of a context exhaustively determined, in theory or teleologically; the long list of "infelicities" which in their variety may affect the performative event always comes back to an element in what Austin calls the total context.6 One of those essential elements-and not one among others-remains, classically , consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his speech act. As a result, performative communication becomes once more the communication of an in­ meaning, even if that meaning has no referent in the form of a thing or of a prior or exterior state of things. The conscious presence of speakers or re­ceivers participating in the accomplishment of a performative, their conscious and intentional presence in the totality of the operation, implies teleologically that no residue [reste] escapes the present totalization. No residue, either in the definition of the requisite conventions, or in the internal and linguistic context, or in the grammatical form, or in the semantic determination of the words em­ployed; no irreducible polysemy, that is, no "dissemination" escaping the horizon of the unity of meaning. “

What does he mean by this? I can tell you that the treatment of context , not just by Austin but also Wittgenstein, leaves me with questions similar to Derrida’s. What is the minimal requirement for a context of use?At least two people, no? There is a speech act involving an utterance and a response. Is the the context a unity between these two aspects, between my intent and the other’s response, between what I send out and what comes back? Do these together constitute a single intent and single context? Or are there two contexts here, the context which forms the circumstances of my utterance , and the changed context which marks the other’s response, which can surprise my expectations?

I must join Banno and express my surprise that you claim Frantic Freddie Nietzsche exemplifies OLP. — Ciceronianus the White

In case you missed my response to Banno,

Derrida wrote:
“ Austin was obliged to free the analysis of the performative from the author­ity of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form, and to substitute for it at times the value of force, of difference of force (illocutio­nary or perlocutionary force). In this line of thought, which is nothing less than Nietzschean, this in particular strikes me as moving in the direction of Nietzsche himself, who often acknowledged a certain affinity for a vein of English thought.”
Limited, Inc.

But I'm puzzled by your inclusion of the Great Moustache, since I find him relatively obscure. — Banno

Derrida wrote:
“ Austin was obliged to free the analysis of the performative from the author­ity of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form, and to substitute for it at times the value of force, of difference of force (illocutio­nary or perlocutionary force). In this line of thought, which is nothing less than Nietzschean, this in particular strikes me as moving in the direction of Nietzsche himself, who often acknowledged a certain affinity for a vein of English thought.”
Limited, Inc.

Words/ideas are extremely important tools, but they have serious limitations. — synthesis

I don’t distinguish between words and experience. Words are not ‘tools’ that represent thought. Language IS thought, and thought IS experiencing. So the ‘serious limitations’ of language are a reflection of the serious limitations of experiencing. Yes, certainly one can make a distinction between verbal and non-verbal language. Not all implicit meanings we experience are clear enough to articulate verbally. But they are still a form of language.

When truly with your lover, do you look deeply into their eyes so they can realize the magnitude of your caring or would you present them with a dissertation on the theory of language and meaning as it applies to love? — synthesis

I would attempt to ‘communicate’ my feelings through non-verbal and perhaps verbal language. But my non-verbal expressions are not more ‘direct’ or ‘ pure’ or ‘immediate’ than language. This is an old Western philosophical prejudice privileging the ‘immediacy’ of speech over writing , gesture over speech. All communicating is mediate and interpretive. I think assuming that eye contact and expressions of bodily intimacy directly and unambiguously conveys one’s feelings to another is a recipe for disaster.

What concept of "enlightenment" are you talking about? — baker

I was referring strictly to @Janus’ formulation of the feeling expansion of self.

skepticism/moral relativism (Descartes, Derrida); — Antony Nickles

The only thing I would quibble with here is your characterization of Derrida as a relativist and/or a skeptic. He denied being associated with either of these( you may have meant only Deacartes as the skeptic).

So it could produce feelings of love and compassion or equally murderous rage according to that claim; I think this is obviously false. The feelings and ideas of interconnectedness lead to an expansion of the feeling and idea of self, and the affections naturally associated with this expansion are love and compassion. — Janus

The feelings and ideas of interconnectedness INITIALLY lead to an expansion of the idea of self, because they represent a transition, a contrast to, and departure from what went on before them in one’s consciousness, the experience of everyday normalcy and sameness. They are an expansion beyond that specific prior state.

In order to continue to feel that sense of expansion and love, one has to up the ante, to go beyond that prior realization. Once the particular ( and it is always particular) concept or feeling of interconnectedness ceases to be the novelty that it initially represented, once it is no long the improvement but instead the new normal, then the mood of achievement shifts, and with it the affects of love and bliss, to the predictability of boredom or restlessness or complacency. After all, there are a lot of ways of experiencing interconnectedness, It isnt an end in itself but merely a beginning.

You may have noticed that the first experience with a hallucinogen may have been the most profound and intense. One may then spend years trying and failing to recapture the intensity of that initial experience of mind expansion. The problem isn’t with the drug , it’s that once one’s mind has learned from the initial sense of discovery and enlightenment, it will never be as impressed with the same ‘trip’ again. Enlightenment always has to be a NEW enlightenment. It has to build on what came before, not just duplicate it.

I imagine the first time Varela made the discovery of the groundlessness of the self and the interconnectedness of all reality it was like a first drug trip. Eventually he was forced to ask ‘now what’? Where do I go from
here? How do I build on this insight? From that point onward , as he lived his life built upon the insight of the interconnectedness of all things , he would have noticed that it is possible to interact with ones world with that implicit insight always in the background of one’s consciousness , and yet still feel all the everyday feelings of tension with respect to that world one is interconnected with. What he apparently didn’t realize from this was that it is not the mere realization of interconnectedness that leads to bliss or love. It is the IMPROVEMENT in one’s experiencing of that interconnectedness.


That is, those kinds of feelings of pleasure that result from enlightenment take continual effort. Pleasure isn’t passive but instead innovative, which is tough to sustain. Most of the effort, and reward, on the part of the meditator takes place when they initially put themselves in the meditative state. From that point on , they have to continually discover something new in the experience in order to keep it from slipping into meaninglessness.

The mindfulness tradition can go further than phenomenology only because it has smuggled along things from Buddhism — baker

Can it go further than phenomenology? How?

The present moment is very deep - the plank length of time is 10^−44 seconds, so it is not something many, if anybody, can reach. But in the attempt to do so one dives into the moment. — Pop

Phenomenological philosophy after Husserl introduced a notion of time that may appear strange. They begin by pointing out that time measurement involves measuring change of some variable against a background that is constant. Foe instance, measuring the movement tod an object in space. The space-time grid is understood as the fixed background against which we measure the change in some factor that exists within that fixed frame. On that basis , we can measure change in consciousness or awareness if we take these to be some sort of object changing ( or not changing) relative to a background, such as the cognitive system inside of the body inside the physical space-time frame.
Phenomenology , however, believe that there is no fixed referent for the measuring of time. We have constructed an abstract system of space-time based on a geometric model of objectively as bodies within a spatial frame.
But our construction , upon which physics is based, is an idealization. There is in fact no fixed referent anywhere.

The origin or zero point of time is not objective space-time within which a body and mind exist , but the conscious experiencer. It makes no sense from a phenomenological perspective to say that awareness ‘takes time’ like an object changing within a fixed frame.

This may make it sound like for the phenomenologists there is nothing but chaotic flux, but as you know, they have managed to put forth perspectives that involve intricate ordering to experience. But it is an order based on a notion of irreducible change that cannot be measured against a background reference frame. This idea cannot be assimilated to notions of time
in relativistic or quantum physics. Physics is still a science based on objective realism, and its relativities only make sense against a space-time reference frame.

Phenomenology doesn’t believe that one can disengage from consciousness since that which is doing the disengaging pre-supposes consciousness.

For phenomenology , consciousness IS change, it a mechanism or process sitting IN time that can be unplugged. That’s the objective empiricist view of consciousness.

Heidegger does a much better job than I do of explaining this view of time as temporality. I highly recommend you read his section on time in Being and Time. You can get the pdf of the entire book online free.

Hang on - I’m not talking about a normative perspective, but the possibility of a normative understanding (a developing rationality) that seeks to orient differentiated perspectives in a rational, overarching (and irreducible) structure — Possibility

Would I be correct in assuming that you are a realist( I understand there are many varieties of it)? In other words, that you believe with Kant that , while we can never attain the thing in itself, progress in human knowledge possible as an asymptotic goal via successive approximations? More specifically, do you believe that our models attempt to mirror or correspond to an independently existing reality?

If so, then I assume you reject various relativisms( postmodernism, etc) that argue reason and logic rest
on arbitrary , ungroundable assumptions , and that you prefer Popper’s Kantian notion of scientific process through falsification over Kuhn and Feyerabend’s post-Hegelian claims that science does not ‘progress’ but changes in arbitrary ways through paradigm shifts?

The Nazis were a highly collectivist bunch,and I cannot for my life see why an author og S und Z would want to have any kind of philosophical contact with Hitlers. One can see other reasons to join the party... — Ansiktsburk

It is true that Heidegger spoke of authenticity in terms of one’s ‘own most possibilities’ as against at the inauthenticity of das man and idle talk. But he also saw the capability of this type of ‘authentic’ thinking as linked to groups. For instance, the early Greeks understood Being but the West went off the track afterwords. He connected German language to Greek language and thought that Germans have a special ability because of this to get back on the track of authenticity. He thought American and Soviet culture both represented the worst examples of inauthenticity, and may have seen the Jews in terms of the extremes of capitalism and socialism. . Given that Heidegger had undergone a revolution in his own thinking, he was inclined to see this sweeping self-conscious nationalism in Germany as somehow an expression on the part of the volk of a reclaiming of authenticity. I don’t think he gave a damn about Hitler , but misread their utopianism
for his utopianoism. There were many who thought they could ‘steer’ the movement.

Is our "extant construct system" itself not just another construct according to you? To know that all we experience is a construct, you would need to know reality itself and be able to compare it with our constructs to see the difference. By your own argument you cannot do that, which makes your claim seem groundless. — Janus

Yes, you’re right , there is no grounding to our construct system other than the system itself. Reality to any experiencer is what is consistent with thechannels of organizing events that their construct system applies. If an event lies partly outside the range of that system, the system will have to be reorganized so as to find a way to make sense of it. If an event lies entirely outside the range of the system, it will not even be seen.

So the real, and truth, are ideal limits, and we can make progress toward them through successive approximations. But what we are making approximations toward is not an independent reality. our approximations don’t UNCOVER what was presumed to be already there in an independently existing world. Rather, our approximations help to UNFOLD that reality.
The universe is not a static entity but a development. The asymptotic convergence of ‘outer reality’ and human formulations, then, is not a progressively more exact inner mirroring of an outer causal machine , but our participation in its unfolding. We can make up any old notions we want, but some will work better than others, and the criterion of ‘working’ is a pragmatic goal-oriented criterion, as the pragmatists argue.
The self-organizing systems and ‘enactivist’ crowd also say this with their notion of structural coupling between organism and environment, where what constitutes environment canopy be understood outside of the aims of the organism that interacts with and helps to create it.

This would be an example of radical or postmodern constructivism. A less radical version of constructivism can be found in Piaget.

He writes:

We now only need to situate reality with respect to these mechanisms-that is, the object as such, existing prior to knowledge, compared with what it becomes once it gets encompassed within the framework of necessities and possibilities constructed by the subject (without being modified, however, in its intrinsic characteristics, which remain independent of the subject). At first glance, reality may appear completely absorbed or "consumed" at its two ends by these constructions of the subject: at the start, it is reduced to nothing more than a particular case among other possible ones, and at the end, it finds itself subordinated to necessary ties. But, in either case, it becomes much richer by being better understood and promoted from the lower rank of an observable to the higher rank of reality interpreted.

An ambiguity might result from the distinction we make between the object as it is and the object as interpreted by the subject. It would be to equate it with Kant's distinction between the thing in itself (noumenon) and the thing as revealed (phenomenon). But this would be false, since the subject in her cognitive activities comes to know and to reconstruct the object in increasingly adequate ways. However, every progress also opens up new problems so that the object becomes more and more complex and, in this sense, retreats as the subject approaches it.

This means that the absolute difference between subject and object diminishes as a function of successive approximations. But there always remains a relative distance, with the object staying in a state of "limit," which is quite different from an unknowable and immutable noumenon.”

So Piaget begins from the idea that something independent of the organism is the starting point for its constructive activity. But the evolution of knowledge is a continual decentering of previously incorporated meanings within ever more differentiated schemes of
reciprocity. So understanding is not the mirroring of an outer reality so much as it is the contructing of ever more integrated and differentiated schemes
of relation. The ideal limit of objectivity has to do with the increasing variety of ways that we can interact with the world , not what it supposedly is ‘ in itself’ .

I should add that Piaget’ s model of affectivity shares
much in common with mine.

“In our view, it is dangerous to start off by dissociating behavior into two aspects, affective and cognitive, and then to make one the cause of the other. Understanding is no more the cause of affectivity than affectivity is the cause of understanding.” They are two aspects of the same process.

I understand that my comment piqued your curiosity concerning just how Derrida or Levinas were able to ‘justify’ Heidegger’s political choices. And make no mistake, what they offered has to be considered a type of justification. Why? Because they begin with the claim that Heidegger’s philosophy, although they critique it , stands as perhaps the most enlightened worldview( ethically as well as conceptually) of this era. Since they connect Heidegger’s
politics with his philosophy, one has to conclude that , from their vantage, if Heidegger could be drawn into such entanglements, then all of us in the West are as vulnerable to similar thinking, not specifically with regard to Jews , but to others that we feel
alienated from.

Many current theories and in fact lots of cosmology and physics ignores time since its irrelevant. Time is also not a property, or a requirement for many known processes in the universe such as quasi-particles. In the quantum world the primary mover is probability, not time. — Mick Wright

I’m surprised you didn’t mention current dissenting views in physics, like Lee Smolen, who argues that the presuppositions that have dominated the field concerning the understanding of time are holding it back.

He says the currently accepted physical description of reality is hampered by its reliance on a static model that sees time as a superfluous construct.
Making time central to physics and reenvisioming it as a science of evolutionary process unites it with living processes and points the way to an eventual conciliation with the new mind models. Such models also dissolve the divide between the strictly physical and the mental by seeing self-organizing informational processes as fundamental.
Ilya Prigogine is another who would argue that a revolution of philosophical worldview within physics is necessary to keep pace with where philosophy has already gone after Darwin . with respect to temporality. This shift in thinking would not necessitate the invalidation of any of the prior empirical results , but rather a re-envisioning of the significance of those results within a metatheoretical framework that would open up new horizons of discovery.

I didn’t mean to be rude. Am not sure how to answer your question without summarizing the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy.

(Although

Sorry, I have a daytime job and a family — Ansiktsburk

did strike me as a little abrupt.)

mean why didn’t Kant’s philosophy permeate all of his thinking? — Brett

I believe it did permeate all his thinking.

why would they not deduce that racism is destructive to others, or that anti-Semitism is a dangerous point of view. — Brett

We live in a much more interconnected world than past philosophers did. They had limited exposure to groups unlike themselves. Had Kant ever met a black person? I heard he never travelled outside of Prussia.

You seem to be saying, for sample, that Aristotle’s thoughts regarding women was the result of his intellect. But it does seem to me that anyone applying their intellect to the world around them would reach the conclusion that women are not less than men. — Brett

I’m saying that all us carry around our own personal
worldview through which we interpret the world and through which our values and opinions are determined.
If it seems to you that anyone should act in a way different than the way they do in fact act, I’d suggest the reason is that you’re applying your own worldview to them rather than effectively grasping their vantage on things.

you seem to be downplaying the role of the things we experience in constraining our sensory "constructs", — Janus

A sensory construct is the way that the things we experience meet with our extant construct system. That meeting is the new construct. There are no ‘things’ outside of that meeting between subjective and objective poles of the construct , and the extant system is itself changed by that meeting, that dimensional axis of similarity and difference. The world always changes our construction system as a whole, but that world is itself
co-defined by the expectations the system brings to experience.

Explanations are constructed by relating the analyzed elements of experience; so they are truly constructs; things deliberately constructed. — Janus

A construct is not deliberately constructed, it is as much passive as it is active. Perception is always interpretive, but that doesn’t make it ‘deliberate’. We don’t will ourselves to see a visual shape as that shape, but it is still a construction.

On the other hand, it can be used as a form of mystification. I am not suggesting that you are using it in the way that I am about to speak of but I am speaking of a danger. That is when people use jargon to sound really clever and taken to its extreme is when people think that if their writing is so not comprehensible to others it is sign that they are so clever that others cannot understand them — Jack Cummins

I don’t know if it’s used that way deliberately, but it is a sign of badly thought-out ideas, and there is a lot of that in philosophy. There will always be a few who know how to use language to express important original ideas, and then unfortunately there are the followers of the masters who in some cases try to ape their style in ridiculous fashion.

Do you have any cats?

Thats an interesting one. Where do you find Hitler in Sein und Zeit? I’m not ironical, I am seriously interested. — Ansiktsburk

You may want to read Levinas’ Totality and Infinity. The whole book is essentially an attempt to show how Heidegger’s way of understanding Being lent itself to his political entanglements. Or Derrida’s “Heidegger and the Question”

Which makes me wonder if it’s possible that philosophy has nothing to do with life or how ones mind operates. — Brett

They don’t appear to have applied their thinking and discrimination to themselves. — Brett

I disagree. The personal actions of philosophers don’t occur in spite of their expressed worldiview but because of it; they manifest the possibilities and limitarions of that worldview. That’s precisely how Derrida, Levinas , Karl Jaspers and other philosophers who were close to Heidegger or his work treated his ideas in relation to his politics.

Splitting their philosophy off from their actions gives readers an excuse to avoid having to interpret their actions in a more complex way than just :’ Heidegger wrote Being and Time but he was a Nazi.’

Personally, I could use and improve my reading of certain terminology,but for what purpose and benefits? Even in my own academic studies, I was encouraged to go beyond that. — Jack Cummins

Did you go beyond that? Do you think you have assimilated the ideas of the American pragmatists, the phenomenologists?

In the past, many philosophers and other thinkers were accustomed to writing in jargon, in closed circles of their own fields,but I think that the future of philosophy will not be able to go in that direction if it is going to survive as a discipline of creditablility, rather than be thrown into the recycling bin as a lost relic. Of course, the past texts are important but, surely, we need to go beyond them, rather than replicate them, in order to face the perils and the challenges of the Twentieth First century. — Jack Cummins

We can’t go beyond the past texts until we understand them. 120 years ago, Dewey and James pointed to an exciting new way to understand psychological phenomena. They were ignored by mainstream psychology for 80 years, as Freudianiam and behaviorism ruled. Husserl began publishing in 1892. He was ignored by mainstream psychology for the past 100 years, as first behaviorism and then Cartesian approaches in cognitive science dominated. Only since the 1990’s has his work, and the writings of phenomenological writers like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, been re-discovers by a small but growing group of researchers in perception (Alva Noe) , theories of schizophrenia, autism , depression, ptsd, empathy, consciousness( Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe, Jan Slaby, Thomas Fuchs, Dan Zahavi).

Was Husserl ignored because he wrote in ‘jargon’, or because people weren’t ready to absorb the content of his ideas? What the hell does that really mean,anyway’ they were accustomed
to writing in jargon’? Why do you think that is? Just for
the hell of it? Because they were being cultish? Because it made them feel special? To annoy you? Perhaps they chose the only kind of language they could come up with to express an entirely original view of the world. You could say that Darwin did the same without the jargon, but he stood on the shoulders of Hegel , who got there before him.

Did Einstein or Newton write in ‘jargon’, or did they choose a vocabulary precisely suited to express what they were trying to convey? I suggest that jargon is a accusation often thrown around to blame the author’s style for one’s failure to grasp their ideas.

So, for you, there is no per-linguistic affectivity? If so, this would seem to contradict some of your arguments in your 'Private Language' thread. — Janus

For me , the irreducible basis or ‘unit’ of all experience is the construct. A construct is a dimensional axis by which we experience an event in terms of a way in which it is similar to and a way in which it differs from a preceding event. Affectivity simply pertains to what one might call the hedonic aspect of the the structure of a construal. Constructs can be verbal or pre-verbal. a pre-verbal construct already contains most of the essential features ( it is a means of pragmatic expression, it is subject to correction, it is not ostentive, it formed in reality to an outside environment) of a verbal construct , except that we aren’t able to put it into words. It is a meaningful sense of a situation, both in affective and intentional terms.

You're conflating discursive explication and explanation with the kinds of evocation to be found in poetry. You're making my argument for me. — Janus

My argument would be that the kinds of evocation to be found in poetry and discursive explication are different ways of going about the same general task, which is to express a construal about some aspect of the world. There are more or less impressionistic or evocative forms of articulation, tighter or looser constructions of meaning, empirical, poetical, literary styles of expression, but they are different ways of going about the same general
aim.

Affectivity isn’t some ineffable quality before or outside of language. It IS language.

Their claim makes perfect sense if it is recognized that partiality, conflict and malevolence are made possible by the divisiveness that comes from the notion of separation that is inherent in discursive thought. — Janus

Their claim is based on a model of attention as separate from intention. If one shows this separation to be untenable, as the phenomenologists have, then Varela amd Thompson’s notions of attention as neutral and thus ‘peaceful, breaks down along with it.

Contrary to Varela and Thomson's assertions concerning the primacy of neutral attention, Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's discussions of the philosophical history of the concept of attention would appear to place Varela and Thompson's theory of attention within the context of empiricist and idealist orientations put into question by phenomenology.

In their depiction of an independence between the objects of awareness and the mind's attending to it via a neutral re-objectifying observational stance, Varela and Thompson share features with empiricist(sensualist) and idealist(intellectualist) philosophical approaches to the concept of attention.

Merleau-Ponty states:

“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)

Merleau-Ponty explains that to attend to any experience is not merely to shine a neutral light on it, but to articulate a new sense, the ‘active constitution of a new object'. It is to identify a new figure and in doing so, to transform the sense of the previous figure along with its background.

“Attention, therefore, as a general and formal activity, does not exist.” Rather than there being a general capacity for neutral observation, a universal kind of attention necessary for any moment of consciousness, “it is literally a question of creation. “ “Attention is “a change of the structure of consciousness, the establishment of a new dimension of experience, the setting forth of an a priori... To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures. “

“The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. Thus attention is neither an association of images, nor the return to itself of thought already in control of its objects, but the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon.”

Husserl, like Merleau-Ponty , sees attention as an intentive act of creation rather than “a light which does not change its character with the various objects which it shines upon.”

“Attention is one of the chief themes of modern psychology. Nowhere does the predominantly sensualistic [empiricist] character of modern psychology show itself more strikingly than in the treatment of this theme, for not even the essential connection between attention and intentionality-- this fundamental fact: that attention of every sort is nothing else than a fundamental species of intentive modifications-- has ever, to my knowledge, been emphasized before.” “Dazed by the confusion between object and mental content, one forgets that the objects of which we are ‘conscious', are not simply in consciousness as in a box, so that they can merely be found in it and snatched at in it; but that they are first constituted as being what they are for us, and as what they count as for us, in varying forms of objective intention...One forgets that.... an intending, or reference is present, that aims at an object, a consciousness is present that is the consciousness of this object. The mere existence of a content in the psychic interplay is, however, not at all this being-meant or being-referred-to. This first arises when this content is ‘noticed', such notice being a look directed towards it, a presentation of it. To define the presentation of a content as the mere fact of its being experienced, and in consequence to give the name ‘presentations' to all experienced contents, is one of the worst conceptual distortions known to philosophy.”(Ideas I).

don't think Nietzsche was talking about rejecting nihilism, but about facing it. I don't believe he thought many people are capable of it. — frank

From Heidegger: “Nietzsche's thinking sees itself as be­longing under the heading "nihilism." That is the name for a historical movement, recognized by Nietzsche, already ruling throughout preceding centuries, and now determining this cen­tury. Nietzsche sums up his interpretation of it in the brief statement: "God is dead."

In a note from the year 1887 Nietzsche poses the question, "What does nihilism mean?" (Will to Power, Aph. 2). He an­swers: "That the highest values are devaluing themselves."

This answer is underlined and is furnished with the explana­tory amplification: "The aim is lacking; 'Why?' finds no answer."
According to this note Nietzsche understands nihilism as an ongoing historical event. He interprets that event as the devaluing of the highest values up to now.

Nietzsche understands by nihilism the devaluing of the highest values up to now. But at the same time he takes an affirmative stand toward nihilism in the sense of a "revaluing of all previous values." Hence the name "nihilism" remains ambiguous, and seen in terms of its two extremes, always has first of all a double meaning, inasmuch as, on the one hand, it designates the mere devaluing of the highest values up to now, but on the other hand it also means at the same time the un­conditional countermovement to devaluing.

the empty place demands to be occupied anew and to have the god now vanished from it replaced by some­thing else. New ideals are set up. That happens, according to Nietzsche's conception (Will to Power, Aph. 1021, 1887), through doctrines regarding world happiness, through socialism, and equally through Wagnerian music, i.e., everywhere where "dog­
matic Christendom" has "become bankrupt." Thus does "incom­plete nihilism" come to prevail. Nietzsche says about the latter :
"Incomplete nihilism : its forms: we live in the midst of it. Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluing our values so far : they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute" (Will to Power, Aph. 28, 18)

“Nietzsche understands the metaphysics of the will to
power specifically as the overcoming of nihilism. And in fact, so long as nihilism is understood only as the devaluing of the highest values, and the will to power, as the principle of the revaluing of all values, is thought from out of a re-positing of the highest values, the metaphysics of the will to power is indeed an over­coming of nihilism.”

Nihilism is the belief that
cultural values are meaningless. The rejection of metaphysical Christian values in the West led to nihilistic movements. Nietzsche tries to show that the will to power is the ground of the necessity of value-positing and of the origin of the possibility of value judgment. The principle of value-positing comes out of the ground of Being as Will to Power. Will to power is a kind of life
force, whose aim is to always overcome itself. Life is a postive force of self-overcoming, not meaningless but always formative of new values. This is only nihilistic of your notion of meaningfulness depends on a universal metaphysical grounding of value.

But Nietzsche believed there were all manner of valuations and he saw his task as the overcoming of nihilism,precisely through that realization.( transvaluation of values)

The nature of meditative states cannot be definitively understood intellectually, They are affective, and exemplary of "that whereof we cannot speak". — Janus

Since when are affective experiences those of which we cannot speak? We speak them in our attitudes, expressions, gestures. Since when is an affective experience non-intellectual? Affective sense IS the basis of all intellectual meaning. We could
speak and understand nothing if speech were not affectively attuned. It is Varela and Thompsonwho do not understand affectivity to the extent that they split it off from intention.

Keep in mind, Varela and Thompson are making a
very specific intellectual claim, that one valuative stance ( neutrality, peace, benevolence) can be fundamentally
associated in a privileged way with mindful attention, in opposition to other affective valuative stances.

[reply="frank;487349"
Not sure I understand. We may have to turn this into a real conversation. It seems more like a cross between a tweet and a haiku. I’m going to call it a twaiku.

You're pushing the things you hate behind you and reaching to grasp the things you love. You're in motion on your way to defeating nihilism, right? — frank

You’re saying that by claiming mindfulness is non-neutral I’m doing the above? No, I’m not giving preference to love over hate. I’m saying that all manner of valuations are implied in a mindful attitude . And I don’t think that amounts to nihilism.

I think you could probably blend theory and reflections more in your writing. — Jack Cummins

And you could probably deepen your knowledge
of philosophical jargon. Not trying to be snarky, just reminding you that it works both ways. I agree that on this forum it would be a good idea for me to avoid allowing the language to become too theoretical, at least for most readers . But in the right academic venues the writing that appeared to you to lack convincing merit would be perfectly understandable. I just want to make sure you’re not saying that ALL densely theoretical arguments are faulty or lacking in some way. Becuase that would apply to most of the philosophical authors that are most valuable to me.

I have to switch off the thoughts gradually and, only then, can I reach a — Jack Cummins

I guess what I’m trying to say is that when you mediate
you don’t ‘switch off’ thinking, you shift your focus to a particular kind of abstractive thinking that doesn’t let itself
dwell on particular objects. And I’m saying the bliss and peacefulness comes from the contrast with the state you just left behind you. Getting drunk can achieve
that. also.But once you have made the transition from everyday concerns to meditative focus, the meditative
state becomes its own source of comparison , and you will notice textures and shifts in mood within the experience.

That’s right , it can’t be both. I say it is non-neutral, despite its claims to be.

You need to back up what you are saying with reference to the experiences of life in order for the argument to have any convincing merit. — Jack Cummins

Do me a favor and simply correct your
your sentence to read “You need to back up what you are saying with reference to the experiences of life so that I can understand it “

Your wording smacks of anti-intellectualism.


I sit here and non-judgementally detach my awareness
from being invested in intentional attachment to objects. I maintain my awareness in pure self-reflexivity. It brings a sense of peace and bliss, But what happens as I continue to maintain this state of mind? I suggest that my felt awareness will shift constantly and with it my valuations. So mindfulness is a form of concentrated intentionality , not an overview that is neutral.

I’m defining it as Contemplative attending , which is a neutral observational gaze occurring prior to and separate from intendings of specific objects, but which provides the primordial condition of possibility for all intentional acts, habits, objectivities.

“...meditation is thought to support a “bare attention”, or “passive observational stance”, unobtrusive enough to avoid disturbing target experiences or coloring their description with theoretical preconceptions” (Thompson, Lutz and Cosmelli, 2005, pp. 69-75). Mindful meditations is “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn 1994, p. 4). ” Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it was occurring for the first time. It is not analysis which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process (Gunaratana, 2002, p. 168). (Davis and Thompson)

“...with the full achievement of Samatha, one disengages the attention from the previous meditative object, and the entire continuum of one's attention is focused single-pointedly, non-conceptually, and internally in the very nature of consciousness.... Only the aspects of sheer awareness, clarity, and joy of the mind appear, without the intrusion of any sensory objects (Wallace, 1999, p. 182). (Thompson, Empathy and Consciousness, 2001)

Mindfulness is a technique for helping people to cope in life and I don't see how a phenomenological theory could help here. — Jack Cummins

Could you give me a sense of your understanding of phenomenological theory?

The main point of the OP is that Varela and Thompson claim that ‘unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'blissfulness', ' are values that ensue from mindful disengagement from intentional activity in the world. In other words, that these values precede all other values , and guide us fundamentally when we recognize the groundlessness of the concept of self and the interconnected of all things.
I agree with Nietzsche that no value can institute itself as some pure, original ground of all other value, whether that value be unconditionally intrinsic goodness or benevolence or spontaneous compassion.

Varela and Thompson claim phenomenology needs mindfulness because Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s accounts produce ‘after the fact’ theoretical reflections that miss the richness of immediate concrete pre-reflective experience as present in the here-and-now.

“Husserl's turn toward experience and "the things themselves" was entirely theoretical, or, to make the point the other way around, it completely lacked any pragmatic dimension.” “Indeed, this criticism would hold even for Heidegger's existential phenomenology, as well as for Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of lived experience. Both stressed the pragmatic, embodied context of human experience, but in a purely theoretical way.” (Embodied Mind)

Varela and Thompson's claim that Buddhist-originating practices of mindful awareness reorientate experiencing from a phenomenological ‘after the fact' theoretical stance to the immediate here and now centers on its techniques of attentive meditation.

I’ m arguing that they misunderstand phenomenology.


Varela and Thompson's dissatisfaction with the phenomenologies of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger stems from their belief that phenomenology begins from intentional and reflective acts as derived and secondary constructions built on top of the immediate neutral pre-objectifying awareness performed by the act of mindful attention. Phenomenological approaches can only indirectly point to this immediacy ‘from the outside' via theoretical reflective and intentive modes. Intentionality is the formation of conditioned habit, and attention is the mind's immediate access to the field of experience prior to the construction of causal relations. Varela and Thompson's belief that the neutral observational awareness of groundlessness afforded by mindfulness techniques gives immediate access to the here and now makes mindfulness an observation rather than a creation mechanism. That is to say, meditative attention gives neutral access to the immediate richness of changeable experience without itself comprising a constitutive, sense-making activity. It is instead a sense-observing process.


I’m not trying to discredit mindfulness , only to refute
Varela and Thompson’ s claim that the mindfulness tradition has the resources to go further
than phenomenology in accessing the immediacy of the here and now. I agree with phenomenology that there is no such thing as an immediate present.

My disagreement centers on the assumption that there is such a thing as neutral attention. Phenomenology sees attention as creation and transformational, so mindfulness doesn’t traffic in pure non-intentional awareness , but is already invested, motivated and desiring.

Your post is keeping me up at night

How do you think Copernicus was able to structure the solar system without leaving Earth’s atmosphere? — Possibility

According to Piaget, he decentered his thinking, by the same process that a child eventually learns that the moon doesn’t actually follow him when he walks. But the developing process of differentiation and decentration in one’s thinking doesn’t necessarily lead one to a normative perspective shared by others. For instance, new scientific paradigms, philosophical positions, artistic movements often begin with one or a handful of individuals. They break away from normative conventions of thought in order to arrive at their newly decentered theoretical or aesthetic perspective.
So while periods of work of relatively shared values within normative communities , such as the normal
science that Kuhn talks about, is an important contributor to innovation, equally important is the deviation from those norms.