Husserl is someone whose works has only recently been unearthed. He wrote an exceptional amount much of which never saw the light of day until recently.

What he says in his earlier works he moves away from in later works. His views are progressed and refined so taking something like Ideas as a comprehensive representation of his thoughts can be extremely misleading (and in some cases flat out wrong).

Crisis was the last thing he wrote but he died because its completion.

He is one of the few cases where I would say you need to read overviews of others who have done the scholarly work because it is a lifetime's work to study everything he did with any rigor. I myself have read overviews of Ideas, have read Crisis with rigor, and got halfway through Logical Investigations sometime ago (so need to restart that when I get a chance).

I do believe Heidegger did a good job of explicating some of what Husserl was pointing at, but in general feel quite strongly that he went off in the wrong direction (likely due to the differences they had in background - one logical and science based, the other more historic and religious). That is just my opinion though. I am also suspicious that Heidegger partly lifted the vast majority of his ideas from Husserl (there is apparently evidence of this from Husserl's unpublished work predating Being & Time) and doubled down on this given the good chance that Husserl's work would be effectively wiped from history due to the political climate. It may appear that Husserl adopts some terminology from Heidegger in Crisis but (as I mentioned) there is some evidence that the opposite may well be the case for some of the terminological jargon used by Heidegger.

In short, Heidegger leaned hard into the linguistic turn and Husserl warned about this language focus as potentially misguiding the phenomenological cause (as a science of consciousness). Husserl was very much against psychologism as was Heidegger ... somewhere though there was a quite severe disconnect between their views and Heidegger (as obtuse as he was) did a far better job of expressing his in a more tangible manner most of the time.

Understood. Interesting and helpful. I've tried others of the basics without the assistance of a scholarly explanation and know exactly what you mean. I have to re-read pages, and then go back, and still only get an idea at best. I'm slowly making my way through Cartesian Meditations, sparked by the discussion here. Where does that work place? Would you say I'm especially ill advised to read that without a scholarly hand? I can see why you would say so.

How about first on my own, allow myself to explore parallels that might be buried by both the author and his disciples/critics, deliberately or neglegently, then see what the experts say, and, read again?

Don't misread me. I recognize the futility of embarking down the wrong path. That's probably what you're warning against. And of claiming to speak for Husserl without having a clue. I don't say this enough because it will sound inauthentic, but under my breath almost every utterance is prefaced with, "I stand to be corrected, but...". It's just easier and faster to text as if you know. Doesn't that apply to everyone in varying degrees?

In fairness to conventional logic, for me, that Gettier problem doesn't necessarily sway me. If a misreading of Husserl, nonetheless advances me to a reasonably justified belief, a temporary settlement in what is going to be a perpetual pursuit anyway, it's not the end of the world.

Thank you. I appreciate the information and do recognize that you are correct and I am being reckless.

How about first on my own, allow myself to explore parallels that might be buried by both the author and his disciples/critics, deliberately or neglegently, then see what the experts say, and, read again? — ENOAH

That is ALWAYS my approach. It does take considerably more effort though. Meaning at least read something firsthand they have done before approaching them through secondary sources.

Nietzsche is a good example of exactly how much you can get out of self-study. I was reading Beyond Good and Evil then quickly realised I needed to read The Genealogy of Morals and then Birth of Tragedy ... then I realised I needed to read Aristotle's poetics. Only then could I fully grasp Beyond Good and Evil because I had a better understanding of where his ideas developed from and followed the direct line of thinking back to its origins.

I very much doubt I would have gained a better understand by reading secondary sources on Beyond Good and Evil.

If the whole affair were not entirely set against radical indeterminacy, then I would agree. Caring in a truly finite setting only has a finitude of redress, a foundation that could be spoken and laid out clearly as one would talk about the nature of a bank teller or fence post: just look in the dictionary and there it is. — Constance

A fence post has identifiable qualities that define it as a fence post. Some qualities are essential for something to function as a fence post. A post must be rigid enough to support a fence, for example. Other qualities are not essential.

For a religion to function it must provide meaning, which it supplies with grand narratives, shared values, moral codes, etc etc. The ‘binding’ is desirable and meaningful. Transcendence, on the other hand, is not essential, and transcendence does not require religion.

Meaning at least read something firsthand they have done before approaching them through secondary sources. — I like sushi

Not only do you and I agree. But I remembered that Husserl prescribes same. Duh. What is a phenomenological (Husserlian) approach to Husserl, if not one which starts from scratch?

"I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge." ---Husserl's intro to Cartesian Mediatations

For a religion to function it must provide meaning, which it supplies with grand narratives, shared values, moral codes, etc etc. The ‘binding’ is desirable and meaningful. Transcendence, on the other hand, is not essential, and transcendence does not require religion. — praxis

Yes, religion is an institution like anything else, and it has it's utility. But one can say this of ANY institution. GM makes automobiles and UPS delivers packages. These bind, have narratives, rules, as well. The question is, what is this institution religion all about?

H's TransEgo is not a return to organic aware-ing or conscious living (I think, though expressed in different terms, that's what he thinks he's providing a method to reach), but rather, TransEgo is an experience mediated by mind. Why? Because ego--no matter how polished up-- is still assumed the experiencer. Organic aware-ing has no agent. It is aware-ing. Not I am aware-ing; and not I am aware-ing in the third person. Rather, real organic consciousness or being is the activity of present aware-ing. Not, some imagined agent doing the aware-ing. — ENOAH

Husserl would ask you not to use the term "organic aware-ing" simply because something being organic refers us to the naturalism that one has to suspend in the reduction. The hardest part of phenomenology is making the "qualitative movement" of Kierkegaard's away from naturalistic thinking. The transcendental ego goes back to Kant and his transcendental unity of apperception. Heidegger is only partly aligned with this: The ontology of dasein is structurally "me" and mine": See Hubert Dreyfus' Being in the World, where he writes (and I will give you the long paragraph since you have real interest) under the heading Consciousness is not a Conscious Subject:

Since, as Heidegger holds, getting the right approach is crucial, we
must stop here to get the right approach to Dasein. "Dasein" in
colloquial German can mean "everyday human existence," and so
Heidegger uses the term to refer to human being. But we are not
to think of Dasein as a conscious subject. Many interpreters make
just this mistake. They see Heidegger as an "existential
phenomenologist," which means to them an edifying elaboration
of Husserl. The most famous version of this mistake is Sartre's
brilliant but misguided reformulation of Being and Time into a
theory of consciousness in Being and Nothingness. Other
interpreters have followed the same line. Dagfinn F0llesdal,
one of the best interpreters of Husserl,
justifies his Husserlian reading ofBeingand
Time by pointing out that while Heidegger was working on the
book, he wrote Husserl: "The constituting subject is not nothing,
hence it is something and has being .... The inquiry into the mode
of being of the constituting subject is not to be evaded. "4Heidegger,
however, warns explicitly against thinking ofDasein as a Husserlian
meaning-giving transcendental subject: "One of our first tasks will
be to prove that ifwe posit an 'I' or subject as that which is primarily
given, we shall completely miss the phenomenal content ofDasein"
(72) [46].

Sartre makes a similar complaint in his famous Transcendence of the Ego, though he was defending something very different and Cartesian. Heidegger did not think a singular "primordial" ontology was possible, and this is a big part of his thinking: ontology is "equiprimoridal" meaning at the basic level of analysis, consciousness as Being qua being never shows up. Onology is about the being of beings, and this simply takes us to an examination the most basic framework of discussion, not a soul, something which would lie outside of where the reduction is able to go. Consciousness is not a phenomenon, I think puts it simply. But me and mine, these do show up as a structural; features of experience: this lamp I witness belongs to MY dasein, not yours or the postman's. There is a paper on this that Dreyfus goes after, by John Huageland, "Heidegger on Being a Person" which I have and Haugeland tries to make dasein into an institutional entity, a public gathering of collective thinking, giving no heed to the "egoic center" of experience. Haugeland draws on Heidegger's notion of das man, the world of general affairs we ARE when we speak and interact in the usual ways. His ontology asks us to rise above this "tranquilized" state of acceptance without question, but he is adamant about the original integrity of this "the they". We ARE this institutional interface in the world, and General Motors and ham and eggs for breakfast is part of the conditions of our "being there" and thus IN a constitutive analysis of our existence. I think of Hirsch's concept of cultural literacy, which conservatives love so much as it curtails cultural acceptance down to a finite body of identity features that belong to us-as-a-culture or a race, is what Heidegger had in mind when he described human dasein, and Haugeland was right about this. (One can see here why Heidegger actually had high hopes, initially, for the Nazis and the "volkism" that was circulating at that time throughout Germany. Does Being and Time promote national socialism? Yes, in a way, I think.)

But take Husserl's reduction more seriously, I say, down to the wire where language ceases to be in control at all in the job of encompassing what lies before one as a perceiving agency. Heidegger drops the transcendent ego, and replaces it with hermeneutics (the equiprimordiality of ontology), but has he not bypassed the critical move that "affirms" thereness of what is there? This is Michel Henry's point: While Heidegger is right acknowledge that we are "always already" IN a world prior to analytic thinking, a world of "environments" of equipment or utility, that is, of just dealing---this is Heidegger's pragmatism, that ontology lies in this "irreducible" world of non analytic working things out; he is wrong in that he fails to attend to precisely where the reduction takes us: to this "Being" that is not being at all, that is, not belonging to the interpretative language event. To see this critical moment of interface, if you will, talked about at length in Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, when one steps away from language's "taking as" structure, and, like Walt Wittman, feels the leaves of grass intimately and palpably, one sees the "other" of the world. This other that is radically and impossibly "there". Why impossible? Because it is OUT of Heidegger's being entirely. The scent of a flower is not a problem solved (a pragmatically conceived context of dealing with things) nor a cultural institution nor hermeneutically derived. Terribly difficult to argue this because it is not observable, this being-beyond-being. (I can see Wittgenstein wagging a finger of disapproval: Beyond?)

This is why I say analytic philosophers are good at understanding arguments, but just bad at understanding the world. They refuse to plunge into the life of the world, if you will. The world is a living affair, saturated with meaning that has to be encountered as it is, and this is really what the OP is about: taking the reduction down to where the world itself "speaks" the very nature of ethicality. What IS the normativity of all ethics grounded in in the final most basic "primordiality"? Principles? Feelings? Attitudes? All of these beg the value question.

Yes, religion is an institution like anything else, and it has it's utility. But one can say this of ANY institution. GM makes automobiles and UPS delivers packages. These bind, have narratives, rules, as well. The question is, what is this institution religion all about? — Constance

GM and UPS can brand themselves in various ways, whatever it takes to capture a segment of the market. Religion is all about branding too, just at a grand scale and backed with ultimate authority. It promises salvation but it only needs to deliver meaning.

We don't seem to be going anywhere.

Husserl would ask you not to use the term "organic aware-ing" simply because something being organic refers us to the naturalism that one has to suspend in the reduction. — Constance

Understood. My observation is that, while thinking that the phenomenological reduction ought, also, to bracket Nature, H did not take the phenomenological reduction far enough. It is all "modes" of Mind, including the ego, and all "modes" of the ego, including a so called transcendental ego, which ought to be bracketed so that the practitioner arrives finally at the aware-ing body, not as yet another "mode" of human being for the ego to contemplate or experience, but at being: just being.

Whether or not that aforementioned interpretation of H is even possible to execute is an open question. But I do think, notwithstanding H's language, that such being is what he was truly after. Like everyone from Plato to Descaryes, to Heidegger, he stopped just short of transcending Mind, because of attachment to ego.

the "qualitative movement" of Kierkegaard's away from naturalistic thinking. — Constance

Isn't SK's infinite resignation, ultimately acceptance that ego and its attachments are not the ulrimate; that ego has no means of grasping the ultimate; and, his leap and teleological suspensions, like N, H, H and S to follow, prescribed methods to "transcend" that ultimately incapable ego, for [a more authentic way of] being [one with God (for SK) or Truth (TE for H1, Dasein for H2, Good faith for S)? Yes, I am over generalizing their processes and methods. But even if unwittingly, they are all recognizing human perception is mediated, desire constructed; we need a means to return to unmediated sensation and organic drives?

But we are not
to think of Dasein as a conscious subject — Constance

. Right. Because a conscious subject is still Mind and its mistaken being, the ego. But real being is not. Yet, H2 goes on to describe some complex construction more burdened by ego and its constructions than what preceded him. This I submi

4Heidegger,
however, warns explicitly against thinking ofDasein as a Husserlian
meaning-giving transcendental subjec — Constance

And so H2 recognized the "problem" H1 encounters when he imbues the ego with a residual reality after shaving off most of its Fiction by way of the brilliant Transcendental Phenomenology. H2 acts as if he hasn't done the same. But as long as Dasein has "qualities" we can "know" it is "away from" Truth and Reality.

We ARE this institutional interface in the world, and General Motors and ham and eggs for breakfast is part of the conditions of our "being there" and thus IN a constitutive analysis of our existence. I think of Hirsch's concept of cultural literacy, which conservatives love so much as it curtails cultural acceptance down to a finite body of identity features that belong to us-as-a-culture or a race, is what Heidegger had in mind when he described human dasein, and Haugeland was right about this — Constance

I should be reiterating this incessantly, but especially now. I did read Being and Time, once, slowly. A wealth of tools it added to my mind's locus in History. But I am so far from being able to understand him, that I should just re-read and reserve comment.

However, Heidegger's seems an excellent "ology" of how [the constructions and projections of] Mind and its autonomous processes function. And that both on the local level of individual minds (psychology) and universal mind, history or culture (sociology). Yes, he is more ontological in approach but he's right, a primordial ontology cannot be made, because, being pri.ordial, it pre-exists both maker and making. So his is a restructuring for the purposes of projection into the world, of the deepest structures of Signifiers and their dynamics and there function. But they are still signifiers about signifiers. Good as it is.

take Husserl's reduction more seriously, I say, down to the wire where language ceases to be in control at all in the job of encompassing what lies before one as a perceiving agency. — Constance

Where language ceases, and yet he clings to a very feature of language, the Subject, then purports it to be outside of language. I say he really means the aware-ing our body has of its sensations, drives, bonding, and movements, and tge feelings associated with each unbound by language. That being is necessarily no ego, no lingering objects, no relationship thereto qua objects; transcendental or otherwise.

I am grateful that you already forgive my misuse of terms which is beyond the understandably (pedantic?) orthodox approach, and even places you at potential ridicule for being open. So I apologize for persistently responding not with total agreement but rather agreement with modifications. Believe me, I am being highly moved by your input. I hope that provides some gratification for your honorable efforts.

Please feel free to move on, although I welcome your further input.

GM and UPS can brand themselves in various ways, whatever it takes to capture a segment of the market. Religion is all about branding too, just at a grand scale and backed with ultimate authority. It promises salvation but it only needs to deliver meaning.

We don't seem to be going anywhere. — praxis

I think it is going splendidly. An argument is a conversation. So religion promises salvation. But I am curious, salvation from what? Do people think they need to be "saved" from something?

Do people think they need to be "saved" from something? — Constance

We want to be saved from our suffering, don't we?

In the 30s (of CM) H recognizes that precondition for perceiving objects is data input. I had to learn what an apple is. Now I see a "apple" unified as perception in one ego. Good.
But what he didnt carry far enough is that therefore any intellectual exercise whose aim it is to grasp the bare truth, cannot, because it involves the mind, which is already preconditioning the process.

I think without Mind in the human form, the necessary relationship that the human animal has with say, an apple, to unify it and or separate it for that animal as food, is the pre-existent condition which allows us to visually sense, in the real world, as a real "thing" that fruit, and to eat it (rather than experience it as a blob of atoms say, or an undifferentiated oneness with the observer).

Both the body and the apple are real, sensor and sensed, but that I even need to explain and understand it that way, and all of the endless concommitant Narratives that flow out of that, from biology, to gravity, to botany, nutrition, Adam, Shakespeare, and Johnny Appleseed, are all layers of constructed representations of that real, unspeakable sensation.

It is similar for the body as an object sensed (what we call ourselves). What it really is is its drives sensations bonds feelings movements, but that I even need to explain and understand it that way, and all of the endless concommitant Narratives that flow out of that, like, desire, emotions, neuroses, and now, an ego to unify and structure those as belonging to the body, yet they are all just layers of constructed representations of that real, unspeakable body being.

Not necessarily.

See Nozick's thought experiment involving The Experience Machine.

It was created as an argument against hedonism but does reveal enough to show the importance of experiencing reality (with its suffering) over pleasurable experiences that are disconnected from reality.

We want to be saved from our suffering, don't we? — praxis

Sure. But then the whole matter turns on suffering and the ethical/aesthetic dimension of our existence. This is in the OP. GM solves fairly straight forward problems, hires a legion of engineers and product designers, and so on. But religion reaches into metaphysics because the relief sought here is not IN our existence; it IS our existence. You are right, of course, about the narratives and rituals that bind people together, but, as with GM, there is this underlying condition, a need, that is being addressed that itself is NOT part of the pragmatic apparatus that responds to this, but is PRIOR to this. For GM it is a practical matter entirely. For religion it is existential, and this requires inquiry to move into an existential analysis, not merely a practical one.

So then, what is the existential analysis of suffering? Suffering, pleasure, misery and happiness and all of the entangled nuances of our ethical and aesthetic affairs fall under the general category of value. Religion's essence then is determined by what we can say about value-in-being, or the "pure reduced phenomenon" of value, which simply means we are not looking at the many contingencies that complicate instantiations of value that occur all the time. Value is going to be an apriori analysis into the universality and apodicticity of value-in-the world.

Thus far, does this make sense to you?