that doesn’t mean they can’t inform or be informed by phenomenological idealism. — Possibility

Contrary to many misinterpretations, Husserlian phenomenology is not an idealism but a radical subject-object interactionism.

Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:

“ But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance
of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out
of mthe proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)

So what’s happening in your brain when you categorise? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. — Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘How Emotions Are Made’

What this quote from Barrett illustrates is the fact that idealism and realism are two sides of the same coin. Barrett’s cognitive system is a relation. between a ‘real’ independent external world and ideal internal
representations.

Merleau -Ponty echoes Husserl on idealism and empiricism:

“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)

Where Rovelli falls short, Lisa Feldman Barrett fills in more of the puzzle for me - with a theoretical approach to emotion, awareness and energy distribution, based on empirical research in neuroscience and psychology, which (probably quite unintentionally) draws intriguing parallels with Rovelli’s restructuring of reality as consisting of energy-based events rather than objects, and explores in depth the question of what is a concept?

I’m just saying don’t write science off just yet. I have a feeling they’ll come around eventually, and the more that philosophers are informed by - and strive to inform - the frontiers of theoretical science, the faster this may happen. — Possibility

I agree that science has made progress in catching up with where philosophy has arrived( and why not? I don’t think there are any hard and fast distinctions between what constitutes the boundaries of a science and a philosophy).

I have read carefully a number of writings by Clark , Friston and Barrett, and I can say with confidence that their thinking is squarely within the realist tradition( not naive realism, as Barrett points out, but a more sophisticated neo-Kantian version which distinguishes between real sense data and constructed human realities).

Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here: “ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”

There are more philosophically progressively psychological models to be found in enactivist embodied approaches influenced by phenomenology , which reject representationalist computationalist realism in general.

the ethical/aesthetic dimension of it, the searing pain that issues forth, registers unmediated. Experience is permeated by value, but what intrigues me is the metavalue of value, that elusive "Good" or "Bad" that attends value, making the presence of pain exceed the factual. — Constance

This is a longstanding presupposition in philosophy, the idea that feeling is somehow immediate and non-intentional.

There is no "redness" as such; this is just an abstraction from the fullness of experience, which is always in or of value. Anticipations are inherently "caring" anticipations. And this points directly to value, and puts the fate of the discussion of presence and existence in the hands of a metaethical, metaaesthetic analysis. I.e., what is value? What is the ethical/aesthetic good and bad? — Constance

Value is a differential, as is intention. It is not the subjective side of intentionality but both sides. There is in fact no subject and no object in the way you are conceiving them as somehow split off from each other. Value is how we find ourselves in the world and this ‘now’ is a becoming, not an immediate presence to self but transformation. The ethical/ aesthetic good and bad is a function of the ongoing organizational integrity of the process of experiential change, not a self-inhering content that hoves above or beyond or underneath ‘facts’.

Here’s a snippet from a recent paper of mine. I think Zahavi’s and Henry’s positions are similar to yours.


“Dan Zahavi posits that my awareness of myself cannot fundamentally be comparable to my experience of an object. For one thing, if it were mediated in this same way it would lead to an infinite regress. The I that views my subjectivity implies another I that experiences this I, and so on. Even more damaging to the claim that self-awareness is the intending of an object is that it presupposes what it is designed to explain. ”..a mental state cannot be imbued with for-me-ness simply as a result of being the object of a further mental state. Rather, if awareness of awareness is to give rise to for-me-ness, “the first order state” must already be “imbued with some phenomenally apparent quality of mine-ness” (Howell and Thompson 2017)

To avoid the specter of an infinite regress, the subjective pole of intentional awareness must be of a qualitatively different nature than the object pole, goes Zahavi's argument. He explains that the pre-reflective self-awareness that opposes, but is at the same time inseparably connected with intended objects, is a peculiar sort of experience, something of the order of a feeling rather than an objective sense.

Zahavi(1999)approvingly cites the phenomenonologist Michel Henry's view:

“When we are in pain, anxious, embarrassed, stubborn or happy, we do not feel it through the intervention of a (inner) sense organ or an intentional act, but are immediately aware of it. There is no distance or separation between the feeling of pain or happiness and our awareness of it, since it is given in and through itself. According to Henry, something similar holds for all of our conscious experiences. To make use of a terminology taken from analytical philosophy of mind, Henry would claim that all conscious experiences are essentially characterized by having a subjective ‘feel' to them, that is, a certain quality of ‘what it is like'”.

I want to take note of the fact that Zahavi treats both the subjective and the objective sides of intentionality as self-inhering interiorities, states, identities, before they are poles of a relation. Because he makes self-inhering content do most of the work of establishing the awareness of the affectively felt and objectively perceived sides of the bond between the subject and the world, the relation between subject and object becomes a mostly empty middle term, a neutral copula added onto the two opposing sides of the binary. In settling on feeling as a special sort of entity that does the work of generating immediate self-awareness , Zahavi is harking back to a long-standing Western tradition connecting affect, feeling and emotion with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

For George Kelly, these dichotomous features: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as belonging to interacting states of being; they are instead the inseparable features of a unitary differential structure of transition, otherwise known as a construct. In personal construct theory, there are no self-inhering entities, neither in the guise of affects nor intended objects. In the place of Zahavi's three-part structure of subjective feeling, relational bond and intentional object, Kelly proposes a two-part structure manifested by the bi-polar construct. For Kelly subjective affect and objective intention are equi-primordial features of a construct's referential differential hinge. Put differently, every construed event is already both feeling and object of sense. This being the case, there is no synthetic relational connector needed to tie subject and object together.

Heidegger's approach complements Kelly's. He critiques Western notions of propositional relation as external bond, tracing it back to Aristotle. As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating.” Instead, taking something as something means transforming what one apprehends in the very act of apprehension. This integral structure of self-temporalization implies equi-primordially and inseparably affective (Befindlichkeit) and intentional-cognitive aspects.

From Kelly's and Heidegger's perspectives, Zahavi's concerns about an infinite regress is a byproduct of the way the issue of subjectivity is being formulated, and Zahavi s solution only reaffirms the problem, which is that the affective and cognate aspects of events are artificially split into separated entities, and then have to be pieced together again in an interaction . To ground experience in radical temporality is to abandon the concept of subject and world in states of interaction, in favor of a self-world referential-differential in continuous self-transforming movement.The functioning of a construct within a hierarchical system allows Kelly to maintain along with Zahavi that one is intrinsically self-aware in every construal, whether that construction is specifically directed toward the self or an event in the world. But unlike for Zahavi, the self component of awareness is not a self-inhering feeling state. Rather, the ‘for-meness' aspect of a construed event is the contribution my construct system as a unified whole makes to the discernment of a new event in terms of likeness and difference with respect to my previous experience. In other words, the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense. As discussed earlier in this paper, Kelly's organization corollary indicates that the system is functionally integral, which I interpret to mean that one's superordinate outlook is implicit in all construals. “

In Husserl’s early work his analysis of the primal impression , the experience of the ‘now’ , appeared to position it as a dull presence to self , apart from the retentional and protentional phase of time consciousness.

But Gallagher writes :“Some of Husserl’s later texts on time-consciousness, especially the Bernau Manuscripts, which were written around 1917–1918, introduce a reframing of the original tripartite account. In this later account, primal impression, rather than being portrayed as an experiential origin, “the primal source of all further consciousness and being” (Husserl 1966a: 67), is considered the result of an interplay between retention and protention. Thus, in the Bernau
Manuscripts, Husserl defines primal impression as “the boundary between […] the retentions and protentions” (Husserl 2001). Whereas retentions and protentions in the early lectures were defined as retaining the primal impression, or projecting a new primal impression, respectively, in Husserl’s later research manuscripts, the primal impression is considered the line of intersection between retentional and protentional tendencies that make up every present phase of consciousness. Even in his earlier account Husserl had claimed that primal presentation is not self-sufficient, rather it operates only in connection with retentions and protentions.

In the Bernau Manuscripts, however, Husserl seems to suggest that the complicated interlacing of retentions and protentions is constitutive of primal impression. Not only is primal impression not self-sufficient, it is a constituted product rather than something that makes a constitutive contribution of its own. This more radical claim is expressed in Husserl’s idea that the initial
event of experience is the empty anticipation.

“ First there is an empty expectation, and then there is the point of the primary perception, itself an intentional experience. But the primary presentation [or impression] comes to be in the flow only by occurring as the fulfillment of contents relative to the preceding empty intentions, thereby changing itself into primal presenting perception.” (Husserl 2001: 4; translated in
Gallagher & Zahavi 2014) . The primal impression comes on the scene as the fulfilment of an empty protention; the now, as the present phase of consciousness, is constituted by way of a protentional fulfilment (Husserl 2001: 4, 14).

“ Each constituting full phase is the retention of a fulfilled protention, which is the horizonal boundary of an unfulfilled and for its part continuously mediated protention.” (Husserl 2001: 8)

Rudolf Bernet writes:

“In his genetic time-analysis Husserl no longer takes it for granted that the intentionality at work in time-consciousness is an egoic act- intentionality with an objective correlate, like a typical static examination of the correlation would have it. Though such act-intentionality plays an important role in time-consciousness and in its constitutive function, Husserl is now more interested in its arising from pre-intentional tendencies, inclinations, and inhibitions, which characterize the intentionality of a passively flowing originary process. Furthermore, this process, as a life-process, is not simply an automatic process; it has a goal and the tendency to draw near to this goal. This determination of the originary process of life as striving toward intuitive givenness forces Husserl, as already mentioned, to a new, dynamic reformulation of the process of temporal fulfillment.

The passively experienced, hyletic originary process stands therefore at the source of the egoic acts of turning-towards, perceiving and grasping. However, it is not only the subject of the egoic performance that is born from this originary stream, but also each present givenness. In fact, the consciousness of the being-present of a givenness arises, as was indicated above, from the interplay between the retentional and protentional intentionality of the passively experienced
originary stream. With this new insight, the privilege of the present as the most originary dimension of time-consciousness could not remain unquestioned by a genetic phenomenology. If each present has a genesis of its emergence, and thus is a present having-come-to-be, then one understands even better why Husserl engages in such a detailed way with the question of whether
there can be something like a first primary presentation. “

Rudolf Bernet

By thinking about the past, but the thinking is done in the present. How does apprehend the future? By thinking about the future, which is done in the present. Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL? No. — Constance

For Husserl and Heidegger the present is a fulfillment of a past which comes out of the future, so it is the present that is inessential rather than past and future, and eternity becomes incoherent.

Is there a theory of how even the losers and the underdogs can have some peace of mind and some sense that their life is worth living?
Is there a philosopher or other author who has written about this? — baker

Since everybody is bringing Christianity into this discussion as the salvation for the powerless, I can’t resist mentioning Nietzsche, who turned this notion on its head by performing a psychoanalysis of the drive to religion. Nietzsche claimed that all of humanity is motivated by one primary drive, the will to power. This doesn’t mean possessing power that we wield over others, but a constant becoming as self-overcoming and self-transformation. Christian piety arose as will to power becoming sickly and turning against itself, as a strategy of those who were oppressed to gain revenge against those who dominated them by elevating self-denial ( the ascetic ideal) to a primary principle.

I don’t agree with everything Nietzsche said, but I do think Will to Power is a wonderful antidote to the repressive impulses of religious piety, which ultimately is used as a weapon to bludgeon non-conformists into submission.

I suggest the terms of the OP’s query, in construing power as an opposition between those who are powerful and those who are powerless, already pre-suppose the ascetic ideal.

you might want to read some of what Thomas Sheehan wrote about Heidi and his devotion to National Socialism sometime. — Ciceronianus the White

I’ve read it. I know Tom Sheehan pretty well. He’s kind of a wild man of activist philosophy, a real character. But as I said before , the route to an adequate understanding of Heidegger and the Nazis is through his philosophy , and I never thought Sheehan grasped his ideas very well . Kind of like Jaspers , who wanted to get rid of Being and Time because he thought it was nothing but dangerous mysticism.

What would you contend he meant by referring to "the Jews"? — Ciceronianus the White

Maybe not this:

From Wittgenstein’s biographer:

“...it is clear that for most of the time when he talks of , Jews' he is thinking of a particular racial group. Indeed, what is most shocking about Wittgenstein's
remarks on Jewishness is his use of the language - indeed, the slogans - of racial anti-Semitism. T-he echo that really disturbs is not that of Sex and Character, but that of Mein Kampf Many of Hitler's
most outrageous suggestions - his characterization of the Jew as a parasite 'who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favourable medium invites him', his claim that theJews' contribution
to culture has been entirely derivative, that 'the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed', and, furthermore, that this contribution has been
restricted to an intellectual refinement of another's culture ('since the Jew ... was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others') - this
whole litany ofIamentable nonsense finds a parallel in Wittgenstein's remarks of1931.

Were they not written by Wittgenstein, many of his pronouncements on the nature of Jews would be understood as nothing more
than the rantings of a fascist anti-Semite. 'It has sometimes been said',
begins one such remark, 'that the Jews' secretive and cunning nature is a result of their long persecution':
Wittgenstein wrote:

‘That is certainly untrue; on the other hand it is certain that they continue to exist despite this persecution only because they have an inclination towards such secretiveness. As we may say that this or that animal has escaped extinction only because of its capacity or ability to conceal itself. Of course I do not mean this as a reason for commending such a capacity, not by any_means. ‘

'They' escape extinction only because they avoid detection? And therefore they are, of necessity, secretive and cunning? This is anti-
Semitic paranoia in its most undiluted form - the fear of, and distaste for, the devious 'Jew in our midst'. So is Wittgenstein's adoption of the metaphor of illness. 'Look on this tumour as a perfectly normal
part of your body!' he imagines somebody suggesting, and counters with the question: 'Can one do that, to order? Do I have the power to
decide at will to have, or not to have, an ideal conception of my body?'
He goes on to relate this Hitlerian metaphor to the position of EuropeanJews:

Wittgenstein said:

‘Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated as their intervention in European affairs would actually
merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life [and no one wants to speak of a disease as ifit had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones).

We may say: people can only regard this tumour as a natural part of their body if their whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up with it. You can expect an individual man to display this sort of tolerance, or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things that
makes it a nation. I. e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone both to retain his former aesthetic feeling for the body and also to make the tumour welcome.

Those who seek to drive out the 'noxious bacillus' in their midst, he comes close to suggesting, are right to do so. Or, at least, one cannot expect them - as a nation - to do otherwise. ‘

It goes without saying that this metaphor makes no sense without a racial notion of Jewishness. The Jew, however 'assimilated', will never be a German or an Austrian, because he is not of the same 'body': he is experienced by that body as a growth, a disease. The metaphor is particularly apt to describe the fears of Austrian anti-Semites, because it implies that the more assimilated the Jews become, the more dangerous becomes the disease they represent to the otherwise healthy Aryan nation.”

From Heidegger’s biographer:

“ In the cultural field, competition anti-Semitism genera]]y includes the as-sumption of a specific "Jewish spirit." But this Jewish spirit that one should beware of does not exist for Heidegger. Indeed he always objected to this kind of "spiritual" anti-Semitism. In a lecture in the mid-1930s he defended Spi-noza, declaring that if his philosophy was "Jewish," then all philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel was Jewish too. This rejection of "spiritual" anti-Semitism is all the more surprising as Heidegger is usually fond of emphasizing the German element in philosophy, contrasting it with the rationalism of the French, the utilitarianism of the English, and the obsession with technology of the Americans. But unlike his comrades-in-arms and rivals Krieck and Baeumler, Heidegger never used this "German element" in philosophy for differentiation from the "Jewish" one. Karl Jaspers, asked in 1945 for an opinion on Heidegger's anti-Semitism, came to the conclusion that in the 1920S Heidegger had not been anti-Semitic. "With respect to this question he did not always exercise discretion. This doesn't rule out the possibility that, as I must assume, in other cases anti-Semitism went against his conscience and his taste."27 Certainly his kind of anti-Semitism had not been a reason for him to join the Nazi movement. Nor, on the other hand, did the (soon to be revealed) brutality of Nazi anti-Semitism deter him from the movement. He did not support its actions, but he accepted them. When Nazi students in the summer of 1933 stormed the building of a Jewish student fraternity and proceeded with such violence that the public prosecutor's office could not avoid initiat-ing an investigation, and in this context requested information from Rector Heidegger, he brusquely refused to pursue any further inquiries on the grounds that those involved in the raid had not all been students.”

his contempt for the Jews, are all well known. — Ciceronianus the White

No, his contempt for the Jews is NOT well known, it is up for constant debate. He never bought into the virulent Nazi anti-semitism that presented Jews as amoral vermin. His comments about jews in the black notebooks had to do with a very different sort of cultural analysis, the same sort he applied to the Russians and the Americans. I asked you about Wittgenstein because Wittgenstein himself harbored many anti-semitic views
that were fashionable at the time: that jews are secretive
and mere copiers of European creativity. He even said he understood why a European country would want to keep Jews out.

Thre reaearch you’ve done is one or two-line snippets from the black notebooks with absolutely no background context from his philosophy to put it into any perspective. He approved the release of these notebooks because they are philosophical notes, and cannot be comprehended properly without knowing the philosophical background.

From his biographer:

“Was Heidegger anti-Semitic? Certainly not in the sense of the ideological lunacy of Nazism. It is significant that neither in his lectures and philosophical writings, nor in his political speeches and pamphlets are there any anti-Semitic or racist remarks. Thus, when Heidegger in his circular before the May Day celebrations described "the building of a new spiritual world for the German people" as the "command of the hour," he did not wish to exclude from this task anyone willing to cooperate. Heidegger's Nazism was decisionist. What mattered to him was not origin but decision. In his terminology, man should be judged not by his "thrown-ness" but by his "design." To that extent he was even able to help hard-pressed Jewish colleagues. When Eduard Fraenkel, professor of classical philology, and Georg von Hevesy, professor of physical chemistry, were to be dismissed be-cause they were Jews, Heidegger in a letter to the Ministry of Education tried to prevent this. He used the tactical argument that a dismissal of these two Jewish professors, "whose extraordinary scientific standing was beyond doubt," 17 would be especially harmful to a "borderland university,"l8 on which foreign critical eyes were particularly focused. Besides, both men were "Jews of the better sort, men of exemplary character." He could vouch for the irre-proachable conduct of both men, "insofar as it is humanly possible to predict these things."19 Fraenkel was dismissed despite Heidegger's submission, while Hevesy was allowed to stay on for the time being. ”

His student that he seduced, yes. — Ciceronianus the White

She never complained, so who the hell are you to pass judgement?

I suspect you’re probably as morally suspect as Heidegger. perhaps more so, since I never knew him to engage in lazy, cheap shots at historical figures without bothering to do any of the research, as you do.

Cite the worst text from Heidegger on the subject and I think under scrutiny it can be shown he's position was no so unusual. — Gregory

I agree completely. If one is going to attack a historical figure, it’s usually a good idea to at least do one’s research.

Herr Recktorführer was never, in the slightest, anti-nazi (i.e. anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-antisemitic ...) — 180 Proof

Sure he was, according to his biographer, Hannah Arendt and many others , Jee and non-Jew, who knew him.
He never bought into Nazism as a political ideology. He was trying to promote his own philosophical revolution , and when he discovered it had nothing to do with what the Nazis had in mind, he broke away from them.
He was never particularly anti-semitic, certainly no more so than Wittgenstein.

I feel the same way about the craven, miserable, pretentious, obscure, mystical, romantic, jackboot-licking, Hitler-loving, Jew-hating Nazi bastard. — Ciceronianus the White

How do you feel about Wittgenstein?

This is what Husserl is proposing:

“ 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)

What Husserl is doing here is showing that for each person, their participation in interpersonal activities
and consensually objective meanings is not simply an paring of you and me to make a we, but a ‘we’ from
each person’s own interpretative vantage.

“Show me the way to the next whiskey bar”

From posts which I have read by you, it seems that your interests lie in the border between philosophy and psychology. — Jack Cummins

My degree was in cognitive science. To me psychological discourse is simply a less self-aware ( or ‘naturalized) form of philosophical thinking.

The question is why Stein goes one way, Heidegger another? What makes for the timeless indecision of philosophy is not the issues being so vague, but the vagaries of people's experiences. Some people are simply intuitively wired for existential affirmation of religion. — Constance

Or perhaps Heidegger understood phenomenology better, and took the epoch to a more primordial beginning , than did Stein.

“The lightest of the slight is beyng.
The most entity-like of entities is God.
In beyng, the distinction between beings and being (in the sense of beingness) comes into its own.
Being means: presence.
Seyn never lets itself be identified with God. It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity.
As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”(Heidegger)

“ Can we be satisfied simply with the notion that human beings are subjects for the world (the world which for consciousness is their world) and at the same time are objects in this world? As scientists, can we content ourselves with the view that God created the world and human beings within it, that he endowed the latter with consciousness and reason, that is, with the capacity for knowledge, the highest instance of which is scientific knowledge? For the naivete that belongs to the essence of positive religion this may be undoubted truth and remain a truth forever, even though the philosophers cannot be content with such naivete. The enigma of the creation and God himself are essential component parts of posi-tive religion. For the philosopher, however, this, and also the juxtaposition "subjectivity in the world as object" and at the same time "conscious subject for the world," contain a necessary theoretical question, that of understanding how this is possible. The epoche, in giving us the attitude above the subject-object correlation which belongs to the world and thus the attitude of focus upon the transcendental subject-object correlation, leads us to recognize, in self-reflection, that the world that exists for us, that is, our world in its being and being-such, takes its ontic meaning entirely from our intentional life through a priori types of accomplishments that can be exhibited rather than argu-mentatively constructed or conceived through mythical thinking.”(Husserl, Crisis)

. I claim that if you follow Husserl's reduction to its logical end, you end up with what is essentially important about Buddhism: Liberation and enlightenment. — Constance

If you follow Husserl’s reduction to its beginning you end up with the structure of time consciousness , which is both liberating and conforming

While expertise probably counts for something, I am sure that there are complex power dynamics and an elite hierarchy within establishing philosophy circles. — Jack Cummins

That may be so , but that hasn’t stopped me. I don’t have a PhD and never took a single
course in philosophy, and yet I have been able to publish my philosophical work in academic journals such as the British Society of Phenomenology.

I do agree with your point about whether or not one makes a living out of being a philosopher being an important marker. — Jack Cummins

Neither Nietzsche nor Spinoza or Kierkegaard made their living in philosophy or were part of academia during most or all of their writing careers.

BTW, since you live in the London area, have you tried these philosophy groups?

https://www.meetup.com/topics/philosophy/gb/17/london/

Are you making a case against the general consensus amongst analytic philosophers who differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive statements based on the reasons I have thus far offered? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I notice there is no mention in your treatment of analytic philosophy’s view of the fact/ value distinction of writers like Quine, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Putnam, McDowell
or Rorty. Do you find any of them useful to your understanding of the fact-value distinction?

what does it mean to say that one is a philosopher, and who are the 'real' philosophers? — Jack Cummins

Only the real philosophers know the secret handshake.

I don’t have any work to show, Just wanted your quick take on the subject, which doesn’t have to be done on this thread.

I understand that, but I’m asking because I was impressed with Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche and am curious as to whether you think Deleuze might have departed from Nietzsche’s view of science.

Wouldn’t Deleuze side with Nietzsche on science? I thought you agreed with his philosophy.

quote="StreetlightX;515183"]If it cannot, in principle, be proven wrong by further observation, that's not science, that's religion.[/quote]

Nietzsche would beg to differ. Even Popper’s neo-Kantian inspired ‘falsifiability’ , to the extent that it maintains a role for truth , would be considered by him to be an expression of the religiosity of the ascetic ideal.

“Some science will just never be correct.”

Ah, the ascetic ideal rears its ugly head.

If that is what you mean, then there is no meaning in calling a perspective “one's own perspective” rather than “someone else's perspective”, since it couldn't be any other way. — Amalac

Of course, I can still make a distinction between my perspective and someone else’s , but only as filtered though my vantage on their outlook.

Why do moral relativists bother trying to suggest that others should act differently then, if everyone, without exception, acts according to their own perspective? There is no point for the moral relativist to say anything about moral relativism then, since so interpreted it's just trivial. — Amalac

I’m not a moral relativist. I side with those philosophers who don’t find concepts like morality and ethics to be coherent or useful. As I see it, the moral is supposed to pertain to matters of will and deliberate intent , of values, goals and subjective inclinations.

I reject the idea that there is such as thing as bad or immoral intent or evil will, only problems having to with ineffective interpersonal understanding.

As I understand it, moral relativists , and there are many on this site, do believe that intent can be distorted , subverted or corrupted, but they don’t believe that any universal rule or principle of the mora can ever be located, not Kant’s imperative or the golden rule. Kierkegaard and liberal theologians like him are compatible with certain forms of moral relativism, offering that though faith and action one can affirm that some transcendent idea of the good is at work, but not one that can ever be reduced to a rule or concept.

Does the moral relativist claim that we should not trust someone else (A moralist, for example) who says that the moral relativist is wrong?

If so, how do they know that that is a better way of acting than its opposite? — Amalac

I can’t answer this for moral relativists , but for myself and like-minded philosophers I will say that I don’t view theories, worldviews , values and other forms of knowledge as either right or wrong in any absolute way.
For me , all value systems are right in that they are useful to a community or individual in making of sense of and guiding their relationship with others. But as I mentioned , I believe that value systems like science , evolves. I believe that newer approaches mostly subsume older ones rather than simply proving them ‘wrong’. So if I ‘reject’ moral realism it s not that I think it is ‘wrong, but that I believe my ‘immoral’ approach enriches and transforms moral thinking. So am I ‘right’, and what would that mean? I think there are three possibilities with respect to any claim I make to having come upon a ‘better’ way. 1) My approach subsumes previous systems and so may be invisible and subject to misinterpretation by those who are not ready to assimilate its concepts.
2)My approach is just a re-invention of the wheel. It is just a variation on perspectives that are already out there.
3) My ideas are internally inconsistent and so don’t make sense to others.

If my approach indeed subsumes other approaches and goes beyond them in some way, I should be able to demonstrate this to myself , if not to others, by demonstrating to them that I fully understand their position and can see the world in a way that closely approximates their thinking. This is up to them , not me, to confirm. So what I’ve done is shown myself that I have options of acting that they don’t. I can see the world in the way they do, as a place that is amenable to moral determinations, but also via my enriched perspective, which sees what they see but also a lot more. [

quote="Amalac;514580"]How do you know that you are not implicitly claiming that you know that what you say is morally preferable?[/quote]

How do you know that you are not claiming implicitly that I should believe you?

How do you know that you are not implicitly claiming that you know that what you say is morally preferable? — Amalac

It’s a matter of my lifting up a rock and asking you what you see. You describe a few insects and other things. I can see what you see but also much more. I know you can’t see what I can see although I try to point those items out. Why can’t you see them? Is it simply an empirical or sensory question? It gets complicated here because we have to get into issues of philosophy of science, materialism vs idealism vs phenomenology.

I don’t find concepts of truth and falsity with respect to issues of empirical fact to be any more useful than with respect to values, Since I follow those who recognize the value-laden ness of facts.

What we strive for in ‘moral’ and empirical truth is not corresponding our ideas and values to an independently existing world , but co-constructing a world that is in a continual state of becoming, so facts
and values are creations that don’t mirror , but transformingly develop a world. We can invent any old world we want , but some of those construals will speak back to us more usefully than others.

How does the moral relativist know that it is better (morally) to trust his own ethical perspective rather than someone else's? If he is consistent, It would seem that he'll have to say that he also doesn't know that.

But in that case, his decision to prefer his own perspective rather than other people's perspective is arbitrary, and therefore the moralist may retort that he has no right to say that that is “needed”. — Amalac

You and I have no choice but to trust our own perspective because that is the only perspective that we have. Even when we trust someone else’s , we still have to interpret the other’s view though our own perspective , so there’s no getting around a personalistic vantage.

Even when an entire culture assumes they are all following the same normative values , each is viewing it from their own vantage and interpretation, which is often invisible to them. Inevitably, and to their astonishment , they or someone else in their community is accused of straying from those values, and it never occurs to anyone that the issue is one of interpretation rather than deliberate deviation from the supposed true path.

The problem is the assumption of the idea of a true or universal or objective path. That is the source immorality, the positing of a true path in the fist place , rather than the straying from it.

What I am suggesting is not a strict enforcement of moral codes, as I see fit. Because how do I know that I am right? What i am suggesting is that it is possible for me to be wrong — Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Whehther you are right or wrong is entirely relative to your own interpretation of the world for your purposes and whether your moral hypotheses continue to validate
themselves ( appear useful and predictive ) over time
relative to your outlook , regardless of what others in your culture may think is true or false. I don’t think your mora philosophy should be a matter or social consensus , even if , practically speaking, the political realization must involve consensus. Of course, it is important that you use others in your cultural as sources of evidence and validation for your view as much as possible. it this is different than assuming there is a ‘true’ or ‘false’ of moral valuation in some universal objective sense.

My question for Nietzsche would be: Why should we embrace his view? If moral judgments are mere imaginings then by what criteria does he judge that we should abandon them. Surely if this were the case it would make no difference whether we embraced or abandoned them. — Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Make sure you understand what you are embracing in embracing Nietzsche’s ‘view’ , because it is less a ‘view’ that it is a description of change and becoming itself.
His ‘view’ is the principle of will to power. What that means is that humans are value posting creatures. He doesn’t mean we churn out value systems until we find the right one. There is no right or wrong value system. What matters is the movement from one system to the next, not the content of any particular system. His ‘view’, then, is split within itself as both the embrace of each value system as we fall into it or posit it , and the unraveling of that system and its replacement by another.
We are all both creators and destroyers, but not ‘deliberately’ so. Regardless of what moral values we will, we find ourselves constantly overcoming ourselves , and our previous values. So its not a question of choosing his values over moral realism, but of recognizing that all value systems pre-suppose what Nietzsche is telling us. He doesn’t condemn us if we don’t get it , he is just saying that he thinks we would be healthier humans if we did recognize this. You can think of his approach as a kind of genealogical analysis of the history of morality. He’s offering us what he thinks is a clarifying way of looking at the very idea of morality. It is ‘true’ for everyone, but in a different way for each , and in the way that endless self-transformation is ‘true’

how can an anthropologist defending these views say that they are better than their opposites, without resorting to the same universal guidelines that they claim to deny?

Simple, one can argue that from one’s own perspective one set of beliefs is preferable to another , without assuming that this perspective must be shoved down the throat of those who don’t see things in the same way. Put differently , one can assume that each of us is a sense-making being aiming to anticipate events, that what is in our best interest is understanding and assimilating the world. We only reject others to the extent that we are unable to understand their ways of thinking and acting. The issue of ‘evil’, then, is not one of ‘bad’ intent but of a failure of comprehension.

The mistake of moralists is to assume that those on the opposite sides of moral or political debates can be grasping the ‘facts’ identically and yet reach different ethical conclusions based on ‘selfishness’ or some other unctuous accusation that we make of those whose thinking is inscrutable to us.

What is needed is to attempt to help other to see, from their own perspective , what we find to be more insightful in dealing with people, rather than resorting to condemnation and moralistic blame. This rejects the concept of ‘universal guidelines’ because it assumes
there are an infinity of ways of construing reality, and the usefulness of an particular way of dealing with others must be validated relative to each individual’s perspective. I think we can talk of a cultural
progress in empathy , but as a personalistic pragmatic evolution and not a ‘universal principle’.

“ My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely-an-interpretation of certain phenomena:more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking; thus "truth," at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call "imaginings." Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity.

Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity-an idiosyncrasy of degenerates which has caused immeasurable harm. We others, we immoralists, have, conversely, made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending, and approving. We do not easily negate; We make it a point of honor to be affirmers.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

In reading your current op as well as previous threads, I notice that, while you reference writers like Jackson, Block and Chalmers , there seems to be no engagement with phenomenological philosophy and those researchers of consciousness who have been strongly influenced by it( Zahavi, Varela and Thompson), or writers coming from the radical constructivist tradition ( Von Glasersfeld, Maturana, Piaget) or embodied enactivist perspectives( Gallagher, Fuchs).

Instead I see formulations reminiscent of 1st generation cognitivism and representationalism , with the accompanying metaphor of mind as computer ( the mind inputs i interpreted sense dat and processes into output) with a bit of ‘subjective 1st person coloration sprinkled over it. For instance , you write “ Sensations are the raw, uninterpreted experiences, like the seeing of a color, or the hearing of a pitch.” That a classic dualistic move.

It seems to me this way of modeling conscious activity misses the fundamentally normative( an organism’s ‘is’ is anticipative in that it’s world matters to it in particular ways in relation to it’s functioning , and it evinces an inherently prescriptive , purposive and holistic character of experiencing at all levels.

Philosophy isn't religion, nor is it art, or so I think. We shouldn't look to philosophy or philosophers for any deep insights into life or the world or ourselves — Ciceronianus the White

If we shouldnt look to philosophy for deep insights then we shouldnt look to religion or art either. First of all, it’s impossible to tease out where the philosophical or the religious or the artistic or the scientific begins and ends , because all these fields of cultural are helplessly entangled in each other. Secondly, shifts in religious thinking owe a great debt to the philosophical innovations of their time , as well as of previous eras. It’s hard to imagine reading Aquinas or Maimonides without noting the direct influence of Aristotle in their work, or the effect of Kant on Buber, Tillich and Niebuhr, or the influence of Levinas, Heidegger and Kierkegaard on a current generation of theologians.

I'm afraid I do believe there is something transcendental about our being here. Wittgenstein insisted such things are nonsense, but then, he wrote, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics." This, in 1929, the same year of his Lecture on Ethics, in which put ethics in the nonsense bin. What was he talking about? It was the "presence" of ethics as an absolute. He knew it all rested with ethics and aesthetics, and he was right, AND wrong: one could not speak what ethics is, what value is, but one can speak in its vicinity. this is what Marion does. And Eugen Fink and Michel Henry. — Constance

I take transcendence the way that Heidegger and Husserl do, not as a divine beyond this world but as an otherness immanent in being in the world.
But I think you’re on the right track putting Wittgenstein in the company of Henry, Levinas and Marion. He was a devoutly religious person even though he did not identify with organized forms of religious practice. That is why he admired Kierkegaard and St Augustine so much.

His biographer Ray Monk wrote:

“ “To Waismann and Schlick he repeated the general lines of his lecture on ethics: ethics is an attempt to say something that cannot be said, a running up against the limits of language. 'I think it' is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics - whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable.' On the hand, it is equally important to see that something was indicated by the inclination to talk nonsense. He could imagine, he said, what Heidegger, for example, means by anxiety and being (in such statements as: 'That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such'), and he sympathized too with Kierkegaard's talk of 'this unknown something with which the Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion'.
St Augustine, Heidegger, Kierkegaard - these are not names one expects to hear mentioned in conversations with the Vienna Circle - except as targets of abuse.”

What sense of “dualism” do you mean, and what are the blind spots you speak of? — Pfhorrest

This is my suggested route to transcending dualistic tendencies:

Rather than distinguishing between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’, recognize with Putnam, Rorty and others the inseparability of fact and value, description and prescription

Recognize that affectivity( the hedonic) is not separable from rationality but forms the core of intentional meaning.

Understand that both subjectivity and objectivity are constructed through intersubjective processes. Instead of the computer-based metaphor of the subjective agent receiving inputs from objective sense data and transforming this into behavioral output, see the organism-environment relation as a single system of of mutual transformation. Another way of saying this is that our propositions do not meet up with an independent nature but only with other propositions( ‘nature’ filtered though our purpose -driven interpretations of it).

But it is not pragmatic engagement all the way down. Sure, when you turn the key and the car doesn't start, you don't have an existential crisis, but turn quickly to alternatives that hover near by. But the problem of one's whole Being has no ready to hand. When there is distance between the intending agent and the world qua world, one stands apart from all possibilities, and they are suspended. — Constance

But there is no “problem of one’s whole being” as something outside of heedful circumspective relationality with one’s world for Heidegger , or a ‘whole being’ outside of noetic-noematic activity for Husserl. This only becomes a problem when you create an artificial “distance between the intending agent and the world qua world”. Only then does it appear that you “stand apart from all possibilities”, rather than always BEING IN particular possibilities.

This is a well articulated description of a dualist-based model of moral reasoning, replete with a separation of the affective-hedonic, the cognitive-rational and the conative aspects of human functioning, along with a split between the subjective and objective, and the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’.
The usual blind spots in making sense of human behavior are to be expected from such a traditional model.

The hammer is ready to hand, but when the head flies off the hammer, the nail is missed, something goes awry, the ready to hand yields to an openness as to what to do. — Constance

But even during the breakdown of the hammering, the being drawn to the broken hammer still belongs to and gets its sense from the totality of relevance of the pragmatic activity of hammering. So this openness is constrained by the larger purposes of which it is a part. And the successful and uncomplicated hammering activity itself is not devoid of freedom of decision. It is a more primordial engagement with things in the form of taking care of them. This engagement with the work rather than staring at the broken hammer represents a greater openness to the world via our pragmatic engagement with it.