Derrida did not agree. He did not think that only speech was pure presence. He redefines writing as foundational, alongside speech. Both have access to meaning.
As a writer of short stories, this quote really resonates with me. I am very much present in my writing. I imbue my writing with meaning, which is taken up by the reader, and often they put their own spin on it, find meaning in it I did not even intend. But above all, it brings writer and reader together. — Questioner

You put your finger on it here. It is not just when someone else reads my writing that they find meaning you didnt intend. The very structure of intention guarantees that you will end up meaning something other than what you intended in the very act of intending to mean something.
The act of meaning is never purely present to itself. It is always contaminated by something other than itself.

"Through the possibility of repeating every mark as the same, [iterability] makes way for an idealization that seems to deliver the full presence of ideal objects..., but this repeatability itself ensures that the full presence of a singularity thus repeated comports in itself the reference to something else, thus rending the full presence that it nevertheless announces"(LI29)). ...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)." "The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition(p.53)( Limited, Inc)

Derrida would say that the language deployed to give this very analysis cannot reach into affairs beyond its own structure. Language does not talk about the world in traditional way. Rather, when it talks about the world, "the world' itself belong to language. This leaves the actuality that sits before you, the park benches and clouds and other people, and everything, really, a delimited intra-referential system in which meanings defer to other meanings. Derrida is like Heidegger on steroids, a radical hermeneutics.

So the, well, "real" metaphysical issue has to do with a kind of non linguistic insight of a world that clearly is NOT language. Meister Eckhart comes to mind, where mysticism begins?? — Constance

Derrida understands concepts like language and writing in his own peculiar way. Language is simply the repeatability of a mark, and the fact that i. repeating it we are altering its sense. This alteration that inhabits iteration is what Derrida means by writing. Language for him is not an enclosed structure. it is the contamination by an outside which infects a mark of meaning from inside of it.

(2) We’re in a period of technological nihilism, where we view human beings as essentially machines. The world itself is thought of as a machine, one reduced to substances — Mikie

Not sure what this has to do with the metaphysics of presence. I mean, I find what you say fairly right, but how does, but are you suggesting that our culture's "present" state of affairs is reductive towards something less than human, a mere consumer of high tech "things"? Perhaps, but the metaphysics of presence is a more radical idea. Imagine beholding a world which is not wholly determined by the finitude of what Heidegger (since you brought him up) called, "the they"/ — Constance

Heidegger’s analysis of technological thinking in terms of enframing reveals the ultimate consequence of treating time and beings as present at hand. The present at hand becomes thought as orderability. Everything, including ourselves, becomes instrumentalized as a mere means to a pre-figured end.

“The subject-object relation thus reaches, for the first time, its pure "relational," ie., ordering, character in which both the subject and the object are sucked up as standing-reserves. That does not mean that the subject- object relation vanishes, but rather the opposite: it now attains to its most extreme dominance, which is predetermined from out of Enframing. It becomes a standing-reserve to be commanded and set in order.”

So, metaphysics of presence as opposed to what? By providing this piece of information, it would be clearer to understand. And just to add to this understanding, the metaphysics of presence is a critique against the privilege that we put on the 'now'-- the world as we experience it in real time.

So what are they arguing about? — L'éléphant

They’re arguing about the tendency to treat presence as self-affecting presence to self, A=A. What is colloquially called ‘real time’ is treated as a metric placed over events.

I believe that determinism obscures the importance of the present by establishing continuity between past and future. This makes understanding our experience of being present impossible. That is because the need to choose is fundamental to our experience — Metaphysician Undercover

Determinism makes not only the present but the past and future incomprehensible. By treating time as the linear succession of punctual nows, only the present is actual, but the present is meaningless isolated from a historical context. For Derrida, the present is ‘specious’. It includes within itself past and future, not as sequentially separate but as simultaneous.

inquiry is historically conditioned in its unfolding, but it is driven by an unrestricted demand for understanding that implicitly appeals to a standard of sufficiency no merely conditioned or purely self-reflexive process can finally supply from within itself. Intelligibility, on this view, is neither an externally imposed framework nor a closed dialectical system, but something that unfolds in response to reality while always pointing beyond any given set of conditions. — Esse Quam Videri

Certain authors come to mind here who may share your view. I’m thinking of Schelling, Peirce, Charles Taylor and John Mcdowell. I don’t know if you’ve read any of them, but a post -Hegelian critique of their work would look something like this:

A residual metaphysics of grounding in your position can be put into question. Despite your rejection of Kantian a priori form and Hegelian closure, you continue to assume that normativity must be underwritten by something more fundamental than the practices in which it is exercised. You suggest that intelligibility’s norms must be explained in order to be binding, that unless non-contradiction, coherence, and explanatory sufficiency are grounded in something non-contingent, their authority becomes inexplicable. But from a Wittgensteinian point of view, norms are not the kind of thing that gain authority by being grounded in something else. Their authority consists in their role within practices of giving and asking for reasons. To ask for a further ground is not to deepen the explanation but to change the subject.

Normative authority isn’t a causal force that needs metaphysical backing; it is a status conferred within a space of reasons. To demand a further metaphysical explanation is to assimilate normativity to the wrong explanatory model, one appropriate to causes, not commitments. Chess rules are binding even when nothing practical is at stake; their bindingness does not require an ontological ground beyond the practice of chess. Anything that purports to ground the norms of intelligibility would already have to be articulated and assessed under those very norms. The grounding project therefore generates an infinite regress or a pseudo-foundation.

Unrestricted intelligibility isn’t a coherent ideal. The demand that intelligibility be grounded “without remainder” is not simply reason being faithful to itself; it is reason overreaching its own conditions. Finitude isn’t a defect to be compensated for by grounding, but a constitutive feature of understanding. For instance, Robert Brandom argues that the force of norms like non-contradiction arises from their role in inferential articulation. To contradict oneself is not to violate a metaphysical law but to undermine one’s own standing as a reason-giver. That is a genuine error, not a mere inconvenience, but its seriousness is pragmatic in the space of reasons, not metaphysical in the space of being. The normativity is real, but it doesn’t point beyond itself to a necessary existent; it points sideways, to the social and inferential structure of discursive commitment. What drops out isn’t truth, but the idea that truth needs a metaphysical guarantor.

Transcendental reflection can clarify what we are committed to when we reason; it cannot deliver an account of what must exist in order for those commitments to be valid. From this vantage, your appeal to necessary existence is unnecessary.

The phrase “metaphysics of presence” was popularized by Derrida, but comes out of Heidegger — Metaphysik der Anwesenheit. Despite much derision directed at both men, I think it’s not only an interesting and challenging idea, but also still relevant. So I feel like it needs a thread of its own. There’s much more detail involved which I can get into depending on how the thread develops, but I wanted to keep this relatively brief. Also, I’m not interested in Twitter-level responses here.

Two questions should stand out:

(1) What does the phrase mean? — Mikie

We encounter the metaphysics of presence in Heidegger primarily in the guise of the present-to-hand (Vorhandenheit), which he contrasts with the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). We encounter things as present-to-hand when we treat them as simply persisting in time self-identically. He argues that this ‘theoretical’ stance is a derivative mode of encountering things. Our primary mode of engagement with things is in terms of what we are using them for, how they matter to us in relation to our larger goals and projects.

The disadvantage of treating the world in terms of the metaphysics of presence is that it conceals from us the relevant connection between ourselves and our world.

My reading of the works of that dreadful man has been limited to short works, like What is Metaphyics? and The Question Concerning Technology — Ciceronianus

I have a friend who can probably outdo you in the insult department when it comes to Heidegger. The difference between him and you when it comes to that philosopher he refers to as that ‘little worm of a man’ is that, to his horror, my friend found that Heidegger’s ideas were indeed indispensable to him. Such is the dilemna many of us find ourselves in; one of most more despicable 20th century philosophers happens to be one of most profound thinkers in the history of philosophy, in the opinion of many who hate him as much as you do.

Frankly, I find it difficult to believe anyone would think it's the goal of philosophy to address such questions as "Why is there something rather than nothing?" If the question relates to the origin of the universe, it strikes me as unlikely that philosophers will answer it by thinking really hard. It's possible, though, that physics, cosmology and astronomy may provide insight — Ciceronianus

For the record, Heidegger doesn’t ask why there is something rather than nothing. He asks why philosophy has focused so much on ‘something’ and not on that which is not a thing.

Philosophy has all too often been an assault upon everydayness — Ciceronianus

I agree with Constance. Philosophy should be about challenging everyday common sense, not reifying it. As Deleuze says:

“Common sense is the ideology of the natural, and good sense is the ideology of the normative. Together they form the two aspects of the image of thought according to which thought is assumed to be in principle in accord with truth, and according to which the thinker is assumed to possess a natural capacity for thought.

“Common sense always interprets by reference to the identity of things; it thinks in terms of what is similar, what is continuous, what is known. It fears the singular, the event, and the unrecognizable. Thought is thus forced into the pre-existing framework of the recognizable, and loses its power to create new connections.”

Finally, acknowledging the reality of play and excess doesn’t settle the metaphysical question of whether intelligibility itself is conditioned or unconditioned; it only describes how intelligibility is encountered, not what ultimately makes it possible. This is where I think we may ultimately diverge — Esse Quam Videri

Hegel believes that intelligibility is not given as an unconditioned starting point, and contra Kant, he doesn’t believe that intelligibility is merely conditioned by subjective forms, categories, intuitions, or epistemic limits that stand over against an unknowable thing-in-itself. Intelligibility is unconditioned only insofar as it is self-conditioning. Intelligibility is therefore not externally conditioned, as in Kant, nor immediately unconditioned, as in some rationalist metaphysics, but dialectically unconditioned through the immanent development of concepts. My own position follows phenomenology and hermeneutics in deconstructing Hegelian dialectics, but it follows Hegel in basing intelligibility in a self-reflexive
movement that is both subjective and objective rather than to Kant’s ahistorical grounding of intelligiblity. Where do you stand with respect to Kant and Hegel?

This is the kind of thing that Habermas wouldn't have been able to accept because he and others perceived that the Holocaust was a manifestation of the indulgence of irrationality. In fact, the Nazis in general were thought of as such a manifestation. For Habermas, it was imperative to bolster rationality in every way possible to return to psycho-social stability — frank

Habermas was a long way from Heidegger philosophically. His longing for a metaphysical and moral foundation causes him not only reject Heidegger and poststructuralism, but Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Gadamer, Freud and the many philosophical movements they were connected to which questioned foundationalism and recognized the need to reconcile
the rational and the irrational.

↪Joshs
Yes. That would be part of the intelligent resolution of real problems, not philosophical ones. Dewey called the tendency to neglect context "the philosophers fallacy." — Ciceronianus

Heidegger initially called his approach philosophy but then called it ‘thinking’ in order to distance it from the association between philosophy and abstraction.

Steiner wasn't saying that Being and Time doesn't make sense. He was explaining that it's incomplete and that people who heard him speak said his lectures went beyond what he wrote. I guess the same was said of Plato. Apparently there is a recording of him somewhere, and Steiner says it reveals a magnetic personality. — frank

70% of Heidegger’s published work is lectures or seminars.

↪Constance
Oh, the horrors of everyday thinking! Ineluctable to those of us in the common herd, mired in life and living, and its seemingly real problems, neglecting its essential structure. — Ciceronianus

Just make sure your everyday common realities are sensitively geared to the unique particularities of the actual, changing circumstances of the people you care about. Otherwise you run the risk of turning the common , the everyday and the real into abstractions which conceal more than they reveal. Sometimes we need to bracket the abstractions to get to what’s genuine.

"The essential structure of everydayness" seems ineluctable blindness to its presupposed "essential structure" ... like, to use a naturalistic example, an eye that must exclude itself from its visual field in order to see. Afaik, phenomenological reduction (i.e. transcendental deduction) is just an overly prolix way for the puppet (e.g. dasein) to show itself its strings (e.g. being-with-others-in-the-world-towards-death) that is only shocking or profound to Cartesians, subjectivists, and other mysterians. — 180 Proof

I’ve found it to be shocking ( and also incomprehensible) to realists and naturalists too.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.
— Freddy Zarathustra, TGS
(Emphasis is mine.) — 180 Proof

I’m with @Constance here. Neither of us find Being and Time obscure. Do you find it obscure?

Eventually it was discovered that this was all based on deplorable pseudo science, but lurking in the background was the real a-humanism of the naturalist perspective. — frank

The irony is that reductive naturalism is the product of Enlightenment philosophy, and is often aligned with rationalist theology and deism, where humanism is more closely aligned with atheistic existentialists like Sartre.

Hitler was no philosopher - he seemed to be a variety of romantic (all blood, providence, destiny) I wonder how he and his impatient cronies made sense of Heidegger. Can we find any contemporary assessments about how they might have made it fit? It always struck me that populists don’t really do ideas, they do slogans — Tom Storm

Hitler and his cronies couldn’t make sense of Heidegger. That’s why they fired him from his brief position as rector of the German university. He wasn t useful to their cause as they had hoped because his ideas were so abstract.

It's phenomenology peppered with dialectics. It ends up being a zoo of strange creatures which are supposed to be hiding behind the veil of language. — frank

Dialectics? You mean Hegelian dialectics?

↪Paine Is it correct to say that, for Heidegger, an authentic life carries no inherent moral content? Does his philosophy largely avoid the concept of the good life? Are right and wrong understood as indirect indicators of taking Being seriously? — Tom Storm

Not a moral content but an ethical process. Authenticity guards against reifying experience into totalizing moral categories, and that is an ethical achievement.

Steiner's work is the first one I've come across that suggests that Being and Time isn't actually supposed to make sense. It's just supposed to be pointing toward some new comprehension (which I think is alluded to in the speech you linked, thanks for that.) — frank

It sounds like Being and Time didn’t make sense for Steiner. Based on my knowledge of Steiner s philosophical background and perspective, the poststructuralist ideas of Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida probably didnt make any sense to him either.

So the real question may be this: are the norms implicit in inquiry (coherence, adequacy, explanatory sufficiency) themselves intelligible and binding, or are they contingent products of practice with no further warrant? I don’t expect that to settle things, but I think it names the divergence more precisely. — Esse Quam Videri

The pragmatic contingency of history and time imply a tripartite structure of temporality ( past-present- future) which repeats itself ‘identically’ every moment. One can consider this structure to be an absolute and binding ground, but it maintains its identity, absoluteness and bindingness only by changing itself. According to this ground, no experience is ever absolutely coherent nor absolutely incoherent, but involves a play between presence and absence, recognition and novelty, intelligibility and excess.

Sorry, perhaps I am missing something, but all I see here is an explanation of how intelligible models work but I don't see an explanation about why they do.
On the other hand, if we say that we do know (albeit imperfectly, in a distorted way etc) the 'things in themselves', the reason why they work is clearer. — boundless

They work because the world (including us) changes with respect to itself in a manner that is recursive, self-reflexive and self-referential. This gives its continual self-transformation an intimate and intricate character. From the vantage of human experience this translates into the perception of the order of pattern. The world never doubles back on itself, but its differentiation implies self-similarity. It continues to be the same differently for us. A world which changes in this intimate way can allow for the anticipation of new events on the basis of both similarity and difference with respect to previous events. Instead of talking about this ongoing intelligibility in terms of a mirroring , copying or representing of an external world of ‘things in themselves’ by a subject-in-itself, we can think of intelligibility in terms of the ordered, assimilative way the knower makes changes in themselves.

Mathematically, an atom is a point. It has a location, a mass, a velocity, a charge, a spin. those are all numbers, no qualitative identity.
It’s not red, beautiful, or hairy
— T Clark

Red is a qualitative category , and so is color. I can perform a quantitative measurement of whether a color is red, by working within the qualitative category of color. I can quantitatively determine the hue, brightness or saturation of the red color by utilizing the qualitative categories of redness, hue, brightness and saturation.
Location, mass, velocity, change and spin are all qualities. Differences of degree within these qualitative wholes are quantitative. If I am trying to teach someone what one of these qualities means, I don’t simply present a set of numeric values. I offer a qualitative definition. What’s the difference between the meaning of 50 yards, 50 lbs, 50 mph and 50 Coulombs? That’s a qualitative distinction. If I want to teach someone how to measure quantitive increments pertaining to one of these qualities, then I introduce a technique of quantitative measurement adapted to the qualitative nature of the category I am measuring.

Numeric iteration (differences in degree) implies sameness in kind.
— Joshs

Sorry, I don’t know what this means — T Clark

When we count increments, we are counting increments of something. The something must remain identical over the course of the count, otherwise we would have to start the count over again every time this something morphs into something else. For instance, we can measure spatial displacement of a moving thing. If the thing which is moving suddenly disappears, dissolves or evaporates, then the something we were counting increments of has lost its qualitative identity as this spatially self-identical point. If we are measuring temperature, then the quality whose behavior we are calculating must remain identical as ‘temperature’ over the course of the iteration and not suddenly morph into color or sound.

Numbers are ideas, and ideas are not physical. Yet without math science couldn’t even get started — Wayfarer

Right, numbers pertain to quantity, and the physical pertains to both quality and quantity, difference in degree and difference in kind. If difference in degree is an idea, then so is difference in kind.

So, the world is made up of physical phenomena, but the characteristics of those phenomena are mathematical. Whatever the ding dong that means. — aT Clark

For something to have mathematical characteristics, it must have a qualitative identity which persists over time. Numeric iteration (differences in degree) implies sameness in kind.

To say “becoming” is prior to being still presupposes that becoming exists. — Esse Quam Videri

Only if we understand exist to mean ‘subsist in itself’. If instead we empathize the EX in exist, then existence means transit and esctasis rather than self-presencing.

To say “difference” is prior to identity still presupposes something that differs. — Esse Quam Videri

Only if we assume that there must be identities first (a‘something’ that either changes or stays the same) and differences secondarily.

To say “performativity” grounds intelligibility still presupposes that performativity is intelligible enough to ground anything. — Esse Quam Videri

Do meaning and intelligibility require a pre-existing ground , or does the exact repetition of a meaning destroy its intelligibility?

↪Joshs
We have no chance of getting to it if we continue to understand naturalism in terms of objectively causal processes which treat subjectivity as something added onto an objective world.
— Joshs

I mean, in truth, it was. There was once a time when consciousness didn't exist. Time passed. At some point, reality started experiencing itself. If "added" is not the right term (after all, who or what added it?), consciousness at least arose from an unconscious world. — hypericin

Let’s say we go with the idea that there was a time when consciousness didn’t exist. Is the only conceptual vocabulary available to us to describe the world prior to the appearance of conscious beings one which treats the natural in terms of objective causality? Let me start by suggesting that consciousness is not a matter of reality experiencing itself, as though to perceive is simply to stare at. Consciousness constructs, creates, becomes. To be aware of something is to produce it. Not in the sense of fabricating a world out of whole cloth, but in the sense that perceiving is acting upon, making a change in the world we are already a part of. So with consciousness, reality doesn’t experience itself, reality alters itself. Phenomenologists hold this view of the nature of consciousness, which is radically different from the conventional dualistic view of it implied by panpsychisms (that for a material thing to have consciousness is to be aware of itself).

Poststructuralists reject the idea that consciousness was always present in the world, but they agree with the phenomenologists that reality exists by altering itself, that no entity pre-exists its interactions within a configuration of elements. In other words, they reject a view of naturalism or materialism as objectively causal processes.

If consciousness arose from unconscious processes, we can in principle describe how this happened. The trouble is, unconscious reality only has a third person perspective, while consciousness only has a first person perspective. We simply lack the cognitive tools to cross this perspectival gap, as we have never crossed it before — hypericin

Both the phenomenologists and the poststructuralists argue that a third person perspective is a derived abstraction generated via intersubjective processes (and which was developed contingently at a certain point in cultural history), Reality prior to the advent of human consciousness has neither a third personal nor a first personal perspective. It has the multiple, continually changing perspectives of all of its interacting aspects. When conscious entities like ourselves study any of these aspects, we contribute to the alteration of the shifting patterns we interact with through our observations. As scientists, philosophers and poets we are a part of the cosmic dance, not passive onlookers.

If the order of the world is infinite and our models finite then there would be infinitely many ways to model its order truthfully, but also infinitely many ways to model it erroneously — Janus

Exactly. But not all at the same time. For long stretches of time, during normatively stable periods within a science or a culture, there is but one or a handful of related accepted ways to model truth and error. Since we always inhabit one of or another of these normative epochs, the world always makes sense to us in some way, according to some accepted scheme of rationality.

Ok. But, again, if there is no a priori intelligible order, why our conceptual maps work? — boundless

Think of an intelligible order as a scheme or system of rationality. Within that order or map, things work a certain way, according to certain criteria. We can determine correctness or incorrectness on the basis of the criteria that are dictated by the qualitative organization of the scheme of rationality. Think of a theoretical approach within physics, for instance. Not only does its scheme generate predictions which can be verified , but these predictions can be articulated mathematically to a remarkable precision.

This precision of prediction is what a rational
scheme buys us. But is there not also a downside to this precision? The quantitative accuracy of the map applies to the relations among its founding concepts, but those concepts themselves are qualities, not quantities, and cannot be derived quantitatively. As a result, the mathematical precision of the predicted relations sits along side aspects of the model which are arbitrary, such as the features of the world which are considered random in their behavior. Thus, the scheme works, but it works in a particular way, combining the precisely predictable with the arbitrary and random in a certain way. According to philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn, as theories change, the way in which the random or arbitrary relates to the precisely predictable is reconceptualized.

, in my opinion, even this kind of perspective can't given an account to explain why the empirical world - which I agree 'arises' from the interaction between the subject and the 'world' - appears to be intelligible. Are we merely going to say that it is a 'happy coincidence' that we can make conceptual models that work? Or is there a deeper reason that explain why they work — boundless

The challenge for these thinkers isnt just to explain why the world is intelligible, but why the meaning of its intelligibility (the qualitative organization of our schemes of rationality) changes continuously over long periods of time. The world is always intelligible to us i. some way or other, because we interact directly with it according to pattens of activity which have a certain stability to them. That is the definition of a living system. The world is intelligible ina certain sense to an amoeba in that the amoeba constitutes an organism-world ecosystem that maintains consistency through change.

Our human models of our world express constructed ecosystems of interactions. Each modification in our scientific knowledge constitutes a change in that built ecosystem. The point is there is no one correct map, model or scheme of rationality that mirrors the way the world is. Our knowledge is not a mirror of the world. It is an activity that continually modifies the nature of the world in ways that
are meaningful and recognizable to us. There is no intelligibility without a pragmatic refreshing of the sense of meaning of what is intelligible.

But what is that rock, really? Objectively, it does not appear as you see it. In reality, it, and all of reality, outside of human perception, it is a conglomeration of colourless particles and waves, a haze and maze of uncertainty that turns into certainty only when you observe it. (I have heard it described as wavelength collapse, but I don't know enough about it to comment.)

The grass is not really green. That's only the light that particular conglomeration of chemistry reflects to your eyes. Outside of perception, objective reality might be "there," but it has no definition or meaning. — Questioner

You’re taking the derived abstraction ( the empirical third-person account) and making it the basis for the actual phenomenological experience which constructed the abstraction in the first place.

We use the fruits of our experience-our perceptions and observations-to create models of the world, but then turn around and treat our experience as somehow less real than the models. Forgetting where our science comes from, we find ourselves wondering how anything like experience can exist at all.( The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson)

Science’s "blind spot" is ignoring lived human experience as the foundation of all knowledge, creating a disconnect that harms both our understanding and our relationship with the world.

Universal contingency therefore parasitically depends on an unacknowledged necessity; the unconditioned ground of intelligibility. In other words, contingency only makes sense against the background of intelligibility and, therefore, cannot be absolutized — Esse Quam Videri

What if the ground of intelligibility is itself groundless, as Wittgenstein and Heidegger maintain? And what is a groundless ground? It is performativity itself, becoming before being, difference prior to identity, intra-action before self-presence.

This is the tip of a very large iceberg for your ‘mind=brain’ materialism: how something like a composition, a sentence, a formula can retain its identity across different versions and even different media. ‘The same and yet different’. — Wayfarer

I alluded to this above in deriving the idea of the identical third-personal empirical spatial object from the constructed first personal object.

What does an objective state of affairs look like?
— Joshs

We have no access to it. Everything constructed in the mind of the subject is by definition subjective. We have no choice but to believe our senses. — Questioner

Don’t we have access to it intersubjectively? Isnt objectivity intersubjective agreement? I interact with a rock, and in this way I don’t simply believe my senses , I construct my senses in line with my goal-oriented intentional activity. It’s not simply ‘seeing is believing’, it’s ‘believing is seeing’: as I interact with the rock my expectations co-determine what I see and how I see it. My subjective knowledge of the rock as object is the result of patterns of correlation that emerge from the responses of the rock to my movements in relation to it. I can reliably predict how the rock will respond to my engagement with it, such that I can think about it as a unified thing which persists as itself over time ( object permanence) , even when I pick it up and move it from place to place or hide it from view.

This first-personal process of objectivation already involves idealization and abstraction, but this object for me is not yet an empirically objective thing. I have to compare my perspective on the rock with that of other subjects, and through this intersubjective correlating, we come to a consensus on the idea of the rock, seen differently for each of us as individual subjects, as an empirically objective entity which is ‘identical’ for all. The third-personal empirically factual object is an abstraction derived from shared first personal accounts, but a scientifically useful one. This is Husserl’s phenomenological concept of the origin of objectivity. For him all third-person empirically objective accounts are subjective and relative, since they are abstracted from, without eliminating, first personal experience.

.... describes or does not describe an objective state of affairs — 180 Proof

What does an objective state of affairs look like?

... which is or is not how things are objectively (re: noumena)? — 180 Proof

One wouldn’t begin with pre-existing objects and then move from there to relations. One begins with configurations, which have subjective and objective aspects but are neither strictly subjective nor objective. Their objective aspect is what is relatively predictable and stable over time, their subjective aspect is the qualitatively transformative basis of their ongoing existence.

An order which makes intelligibility possible is not the same thing as an intelligible order, if intelligible order implies a fixed a priori form dictating a particular logic of intelligibility.
— Joshs

While I agree with the wording, my problem here is that I don't see how these kinds of accounts are plausible. They appear to give to the subject the entire 'responsibility' of the 'ordering' of the empirical world. In other words, for all practical purposes, an epistemic solipsism — boundless

For Husserl, the nature of the order on the basis of which events cohere is not fixed but, as you say, pragmatic. It is an order of associative similarity (not associative in Hume’s causal sense, but association by relevance to an intending subject). If you dont like the idea of a pragmatic ordering of the world depending on the notion of an a priori subject, you can find accounts which follow the phenomenologists in their deconstruction of the natural empirical attitude without relying on subjectivity as necessary ground. Such accounts can be found with Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Karen Barad, Joseph Rouse and others. For these writers, we can remove human beings and livings things from the picture and show how materiality is agential or ‘subjective’ in itself, in that no object pre-exists its interaction with other elements within an already organized configuration of elements.

Consciousness does emerge from structural relations of non conscious entities, and consciousness is the precondition for identifying those relationships in the first place. This circularity results in the hard problem, but the hard problem, like all problems, is epistemic. We, as conscious beings, may face an insurmountable barrier in explaining consciousness itself. But from this apparent epistemic barrier it cannot be concluded that consciousness has no naturalistic explanation. Just that we might never get to it. — hypericin

We have no chance of getting to it if we continue to understand naturalism in terms of objectively causal processes which treat subjectivity as something added onto an objective world.

While I think Bitbol is right to reject reductive materialism, right to expose the limits of objectification, and right to insist on the primacy of lived experience, I don’t think Bitbol is successful in dissolving the ontological question and, therefore, simply ends up leaving it unanswered. In my opinion, this results from a refusal to move from phenomenological critique to a positive, critically grounded account of being and truth. It mistakes the dissolution of bad metaphysics for the end of metaphysics itself. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree with your assessment of Bitbol, and I believe you can find a “positive, critically grounded account of being and truth” in phenomenologists like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger “.

My problem, however, is this. If we are so 'constrained' by our own perspective and we can't make statements about the 'things in themselves' - i.e. metaphysical statements - the problem I notice is that the apparent intelligibility of the world as we experience it remains unexplained. Yes, following the 'broadly' Kantian tradition that Bitbol supports, it seems to me that we are compelled to say that intelligibility should be explained in terms of the capacity of our mind to 'order' experience, to 'give it a form'.

However, the problem is that even the most radical follower of this tradition must acknowledge that the possibility of such an 'ordering' - unless one is also prepared to say that the whole 'form'/'order' of the empirical world is a contrived self-deception or a totally furtuitous event - it is rooted on some property of 'what is outside of experience' that makes it possible. But to me this implies that the 'things in themselves' have, indeed, an intelligible order at least in principle. — boundless

An order which makes intelligibility possible is not the same thing as an intelligible order, if intelligible order implies a fixed a priori form dictating a particular logic of intelligibility.
One doesn’t have to assume such an epistemological a priori, as Bitbol does. Within the phenomenological tradition, there are more radical approaches than Bitbol’s, including those of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Husserl. For them, the intelligibility of the empirical world is contingent and relative. For Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the embodied subject is a center of activity. The subject dictates no specific a priori content to the experience of the world. Its formal role is to organize events on the basis of the relational structure of time.

One could say then that without the subject there is no time to produce the glue which makes the objectively real possible. The formal structure of time is not to be understood as ‘inside‘ the subject, however. It requires the exposure of the subject to a world, and therefore there is no subject prior to a world. There are no things in themselves, whether those things are objects outside the subject or an inner realm inside the subject. The subject has no interior since it is not an in-itself but the exposure to a world. It is also not a fixed perspective but the empty capability of generating perspectives.

My main point was that there is no incoherence or inconsistency in thinking that the physical world existed prior to the advent of consciousness. Science informs us that it did. The fact that such judgement is only possible where there is consciousness (and language for that matter) I see as a mere truism. What do you think? — Janus

Both Husserl and Heidegger make a radical claim that is hard for most to swallow: Husserl argues that transcendental consciousness does not emerge at some point in the empirical history of the world along with living things. It doesnt precede the world either. Rather, it is co-determinative of history. Heidegger makes a similar argument about Being. One doesn’t have to accept their claims about consciousness or Being in order to embrace their rethinking of the basis of empirical science, causality and objectivity away from physicalism.

Are you more partial to Husserl's approach? — Tom Storm

Yes, for Husserl every fact we know about ourselves and the world is the product of social construction, and therefore contingent and relative, except for the tripartite structure of time consciousness itself (retention-impression-protention).

↪Banno
Chemical treatments for mental illness seem to show that consciousness is not primary. Though I think the issue really comes down to the way we talk rather than what we know about the world. — frank

The fact that chemical treatments are far from guaranteed to work, and work differently in different persons, indicates that objective materiality abstracted away from the interaction of the world with subjectivity is also not primary. What is primary is the indissociable interaction between the subjective and objective poles of experience, and this is the lesson phenomenology is trying to teach.