The concept represented a turning point in Husserl's phenomenology from the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Up until then, Husserl had been focused on finding, elucidating, and explaining an absolute foundation of philosophy in consciousness, without any presuppositions except what can be found through the reflective analysis of consciousness and what is immediately present to it. Originally, all judgments of the real were to be "bracketed" or suspended, and then analyzed to bring to light the role of consciousness in constituting or constructing them. With the concept of the lifeworld, however, Husserl embarked on a different path, which recognizes that, even at its deepest level, consciousness is already embedded in and operating in a world of meanings and pre-judgements that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted — plaque flag
“...one of the main tasks of pure intentional psychology is to make understandable, by way of the progressive reduction of world-validity, the subjective and pure function through which the world as the "world for us all" is a world for all from my—the ego's—vantage point, with whatever particular content it may have. ...”(Crisis, p.256)
“ 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)
it is neurologically important to communicate to a collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties with through the collaborator's eyes being the most effective only way of engaging the neural networks that instantiate the collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties. — wonderer1
I'm trying to find the simplest words for what I see as the issue — plaque flag
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.
I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. — plaque flag
I think I see what this aims at, basically at something nondual like pure being. But I see no reason to call it solitude, for that metaphor depends on 'I-the-man' in the background. Husserl can't have his cake and eat it too. Is it not like this? — plaque flag
Yes, non-dual being cannot be solitude, for the latter is a dualistic idea, in that you can only be alone in relation to others. — Janus
The deepest aspect of this problem being that our language is Cartesian through and through, our thinking utterly suffused with dualism. — Janus
I agree, but I think it's a soft, flexible dualism. Following Ryle maybe, I think the problem only begins when a flexible inner/outer distinction hardens into an 'absolute' indirect realism. — plaque flag
Right, you often refer to the importance of metaphor, and I think it is the "softness" and "flexibility of metaphor which enables the communication of ideas through evocation and allusion, allows them to escape the hard walled prison of rigorous logic and mechanistic (cause and effect) thinking. — Janus
It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. Some of the best poetry is and has been philosophical. A few of the more prominent examples that spring to mind being Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Eliot, Stevens, Merwin, Aamons and Ashberry. There are many others. — Janus
It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. — Janus
But I would hesitate to say it has any greater role in philosophy just because of that. Pragmatically what is to be gained (except by a suppression of the pragmatic?). — apokrisis
I agree, though maybe poetry already 'secretly' rules philosophy from the center. Forums like this suggest to me that there's a variety of fundamental 'images' of the (ideal) philosophy -- varieties of cognitive heroism. — plaque flag
I don’t mean this in a boundary policing way but it seems obvious that poetry is from the oral level of human cultural organisation and philosophy is from the logical. — apokrisis
Philosophy was born out of numbers and logic, its version of words and rules. — apokrisis
So how could poetry take philosophy somewhere new, somewhere further, than numbers and logic? — apokrisis
Does it point to feeling and value as that which the age of machinery has forgotten? And even if it is a call back to society’s more basic level of oral order, is mechanistic reason not capable of delivering a point of view on feelings and values that is itself suitable for a world as it is currently being made? — apokrisis
Poetry has high status. — apokrisis
I think poetry (understood as metaphor, analogy) still organizes the use of numbers and logic. — plaque flag
Philosophers have feelings about Derrida and Wittgenstein, etc. Blue team, red team, purple team, black team. — plaque flag
I lean toward Brandom's inferentialist semantics — plaque flag
One can institute quantitative metrics, but this is a political process, involving rhetoric. — plaque flag
Should I pursue serious metaphysics (live a logocentric life) in the first place ? — plaque flag
Right, there is not one true image of philosophy. Personally, I favour the idea of it, not as a search for truth or correctness of locution, but as a generator of new concepts with which to look at things in more novel and creative ways, or alternatively, which may in some senses be the same thing, a philosophy as a set of ideas that fires the imagination in ways which could facilitate bringing about altered states of consciousness and personal transformation which enables living in better ways. — Janus
Poetry has high status.
— apokrisis
I'm not sure it enjoys as high a status today as it did at other times, speaking generally of course. — Janus
I don't see why mechanistic reason could not deliver a point of view on feelings and values that is suitable for modern life. — Janus
It reminds me of Rorty, who'd call it philosophy's inheritance from the Romantics. — plaque flag
Aren't metaphors and analogies about communicating structure of relations? — apokrisis
But science has the claim of a method that transcends these games in the long run. — apokrisis
It's an attention economy out there. We have no choice but to dance to the beat if we want to be part of it. — apokrisis
Societies have political structures that are triadic once they become fully connected and self-stabilising – as in the particular case of British parliamentary democracy. You need the three elements of a state machinery (the mediating system of law), the transcendent ideal that symbolises the wholeness of the organism (the position given to a "divine" monarch as titular head of state), and the feedback from the ground floor in terms of a democratic say (the material degrees of freedom that are the mug public). — apokrisis
That is a big issue. But pragmatism gives its answer. If the problem is that your philosophy feels like it leads to passive representation, then that is a little Cartesian. It should lead to practical action. — apokrisis
Indeed and (this is only a minor point) I find it interesting how often pejorative language (like 'mechanistic') is employed to describe reason or science. — Tom Storm
Indeed. Poetry now inhabits a cultural backwater, like bocce or folk dancing - there's a cognoscenti for it, but it's only a shadow of what used to be. — Tom Storm
Indeed and (this is only a minor point) I find it interesting how often pejorative language (like 'mechanistic') is employed to describe reason or science. It seems to me that a form of romanticism still has us (perhaps postmodernism is a type of romanticism too) and it seeks to elevate the personal, the emotional, the relationship, the experience, as contrasted with the mechanical, the impersonal, the rational, the transactional, the disenchanted. But I suspect we don't have to use these words to characterize any way of seeing. It depends upon the individual seer. — Tom Storm
I'm not sure I completely agree with this: I can see it being applicable in the case of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, but would you say it is true of the Presocratics? — Janus
I think it is as important to stimulate the imagination and the emotions as it is to satisfy the intellectual desire for rigorous understandings. — Janus
But I am also drawn by the arts, by the idea of creating one's own life (in the sense that Foucault advocates) and I think for that we may need to let go of some of the rigour and mechanistic thinking and allow ourselves to mythologize (while also being careful not to take myths too seriously or literally). — Janus
I'm not sure it enjoys as high a status today as it did at other times, speaking generally of course. — Janus
But if it's the basic metaphorical creativity of the mind, I think it is indeed core. — plaque flag
I lean toward agreement, but I consider that technology wins and is valued, as if scientific norms shine by reflected light. — plaque flag
Cooperation is of course and advantage for the group of humans or group of organs. But there's always an outside, right ? Life 'is' exploitation. I say this amorally, trying to think that basic boundary. — plaque flag
Let me come at it another way. In our differentiated society, we expect people to develop in all sorts of ways. — plaque flag
Another approach: is it better to be Homer or Achilles ? Can one be sure without impossibly taking both paths ? — plaque flag
Some more Husserl from the lifeworld link:
In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have m the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.
I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. The articulation of the egotranscending sociality of reason (of logic and language) [which Husserl helped to do in arguments against psychologism ] defeats methodological solipsism. It makes no sense to construct the world from 'dreams' alone. — plaque flag
Yes. Thales brought back geometry from Egypt, Anaximander was his pupil, then a teenage Pythagoras is said to have travelled to Miletus to learn from them. — apokrisis
Is intellectual desire an emotion? Is rigour not partner to the imagination in being the constraint on its degrees of freedom? — apokrisis
Generally i would argue you are using confused psychology here. It is the Romantic fiction of how brains should work rather than the pragmatic and validated model of how they actually work. And so this can’t be a recipe for how to do thinking better. — apokrisis
So sure, who could argue with stimulating the emotions and imagination as opposed to constraining and stifling those things. But that framing isn’t itself true to the psychology of rational inquiry. — apokrisis
What does art school teach but how to cultivate a personal mystique by learning how to distill down a viewpoint that resonates with some generic cultural concern. It is the manufacture of provocative artefacts marketed by social networking. — apokrisis
So there is a genuine pragmatism in art in that it serves this political function. We agree to a collective awe which makes us all equal under the force of some higher power. We need a god equivalent even if we might - as greenies - call it nature,
Human psychology is a fascinating but explicable thing. — apokrisis
I see it different in that my approach is that you can’t see the grand integrative sweep unless you make a matching effort to drill down into the concrete details. The process of inquiry is based on going to both these extremes. — apokrisis
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