• Banno
    25k
    Another article from Philosophy Now.

    The existential mode of expression strikes me as clumsy. Being-in-itself, Being-for-itself, Being-for-others, and here, Being-with-others. Clumsy ways of expressing the obvious. Here being-with-others is used to "explain" why Zoom meetings fell so detached; but really it's just renaming that detachment.

    But further down in the article is a reminder of the best argument against philosophical zombies: Sartre's "look of the other".

    And then it explains how self-awareness is embodied, the world undeniable. This condemnation of solipsism:
    The world pushes back at us, and so cannot be merely our own mental construction.

    It moves on to shared intentionality, to that rare feeling of working together. And then to why here...
    the exchanges usually amount to no more than statement-judgement-statement,

    Have a read.
  • Shawn
    13.2k
    Sartre never made sense to me when confronted with the discrepancy between the look of the other or what is called modernly in cognitive science as an 'appraisal' and the resulting behavior from it.

    That could just be a bad reading of why someone would peek on a woman while she is dressing, a French thing I suppose.
  • Wheatley
    2.3k
    self-awareness is embodiedBanno
    This is just another version of embodied cognition theory.

    Here's a more interesting version:
    https://brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/2015/123-phenomenology
  • javi2541997
    5.8k
    We’re All Existentialists Now

    Hopefully I am not the unique boy!

    This may also explain why social media exhibits its more toxic aspects. Social media is disembodied minds articulating mere words under the detached, judgemental, and baleful Look of an amorphous Other. It results in living either in pride or in shame through the detached and objectifying Look of the Other, with none of the solace, nuance, understanding, transcendence, or possibilities of connection that full-blooded, embodied being-with can provide.

    This was so excellent :up: I am completely agree with him. The lack of understanding and transcendence probably were the main aspects of why I deleted my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. These monsters only created an amorphous platform where the youngest are only interested in empty "likes"

    Anyway, thanks @Banno for sharing with us this interesting article. :ok:
  • Antony Nickles
    1.1k

    I'm not versed in Ponty, and all I really remember about Sartre was his character put a fork in his hand because he was worried it wasn't his (a different take than Moore). The worry of the other is worse than ours for ourselves. We cannot know them, so we project our uncertainty onto them, making them unknowable, something we can't see. These philosophers are attempting to solve this problem by putting us into a relation with the other, seen/judged, or pushed away from/connected to a body. But there is nothing ensuring the vision of, or connection with, the other. Wittgenstein say that we are separate from the other. Me in my body, you, yours. "The human body is the best picture of the human sole." This is not only to say we have no way in, but that our knowledge can only go so far in relation to the other; that we don't know the others pain, we accept or reject it--we treat them as if they have a soul.

    Zoom and social media and useless forums may all "distance us" from each other, but they are nothing to the human power to blind ourselves to the other's humanity, perhaps to even blind their view of me.
  • Banno
    25k
    ...thanks...javi2541997

    Cheers. I was thinking more in terms of this forum, but yes.
  • Banno
    25k
    ...a different take than Moore...Antony Nickles

    Ha! hadn't thought of that comparison. I like that. Sartre's is more... convincing.
  • Ciceronianus
    3k
    Secretly, I've always wanted to be hugged by Heidegger. I think this is best expressed as Being-Hugged-by-Heidegger. For me, there can be no Other but Heidegger.
  • NOS4A2
    9.2k
    The problem with the solipsistic types is they put little effort into reminding themselves that much of their existence lies outside their immediate periphery, the perils of an animal who cannot see its own ears. I think that’s why it is odd to see oneself on video.

    It was a good read.
  • baker
    5.6k
    I was thinking more in terms of this forum, but yes.Banno
    Oh, the irony!

    Philosophy is overrated anyway. At the end of the day, philosophers, too, are "just people". And forum moderators at a philosophy forum don't even wait for the end of the day!
  • Joshs
    5.7k
    These philosophers are attempting to solve this problem by putting us into a relation with the other, seen/judged, or pushed away from/connected to a body. But there is nothing ensuring the vision of, or connection with, the otherAntony Nickles

    There may some truth to that with regard to Sartre, but Merleau-ponty’s ‘body’ is not only my body , but the social body.

    According to Merleau-Ponty, the individualistic assumption is that

    “the psyche, or the psychic, is what is given to only one person…I alone am able to grasp my psyche—for example, my sensations of green or of red. You will never know them as I know them; you will never experience them in my place. A consequence of this idea is that the psyche of another appears to me
    as radically inaccessible…I cannot reach other lives, other thought processes, since by hypothesis they are open only to introspection by a single individual: the one who owns them.”

    In contrast to this assumption, Merleau-Ponty proposes
    that the rudiments of self-consciousness emerge from a more basic ‘‘state of pre­communication (Max Scheler,) wherein the other’s intentions somehow play across my body while my intentions play across his.’’ At this stage of the infant’s development, ‘‘there is not one individual over against another, but rather an anonymous collectivity, an undifferentiated group life.’’ Only later, ‘‘on the basis of this initial community, both by the objectification of one’s own body and the constitution of the other in his difference, there occurs a segregation, a distinction of individuals’’ whereby self-consciousness, understood as awareness of oneself as a distinct phenomenal subject, can be said to emerge. Merleau-Ponty thus concludes that ‘‘[c]onsciousness of oneself as a unique individual, whose place can be taken by
    no one else, comes later and is not primitive,’’ developmentally speaking.”

    In general ,

    “…as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other's are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.”(P. Of Perception, p.412)

    Sense always co-implies body, and subjectivity belongs to intersubjectivity. Being in the world for Merleau-Ponty is occupying a position within a shared gestalt (the same world for everyone). I am primordially situated in an intersubjective world.

    As for Heidegger, the issue of putting us into a relation with the other doesn’t arise , since he doesn’t begin from the subject-object dichotomy in the first place.
  • Banno
    25k
    It was a good read.NOS4A2

    Cheers.

    I wonder what you make of @Joshs comments; they do not square with your avowed individualism.
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