What is the source of intelligibility of the empirical world? These 'transcendental' idealist/phenomenologist approaches, as I understand them, say that it is the faculties of the rational or sentient beings. Fair enough. However, it seems to me that the question that follows up is: considering that the existence of these beings seems to be contingent (and, indeed, the analysis of the empirical world suggests that), how did they come into be? — boundless

In Kantian Idealism, subjectivity is treated as a kind of substance or object with faculties, just as you described it. When we start with objects a cause is implied. So we are led to ask what is the cause of this transcendental cause? To be fair to Kant, his transcendental subjectivity is not the cause of , but the condition of possibility of making the world intelligible in terms of empirical causality. So it makes no sense to look for an empirical cause of Kant’s categories. Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity is very different from Kant’s idealism. It is not a ‘being’ in the sense of a substance or an object, and it has no faculties. It is a site of interaction. Still, you would say we still need to ask how this site came into being, even if that genesis is not an empirical cause. That is a question concerning history and time. Some would argue that time has a cause or origin outside of itself, that it ‘came into being’. Others, like Kant, say that time is the a priori condition of any being or existent, that it does not itself come into being from somewhere or something else. But Kant considers transcendental subjectivity to be an atemporal condition of possibility of time.

In Husserl, transcendental subjectivty is nothing but the structure of time itself. It is not contingent; it is contingency itself. Transcendental subjectivity is not a set of atemporal conceptual conditions that are then “applied” to time. Rather, subjectivity is itself internally temporal through and through. The fundamental structures of consciousness, retention, primal impression, and protention, are not conditions of time from the outside, but are the very way time is constituted as time. There is no pre-given temporal form that consciousness then inhabits; temporality is inseparable from the flow of conscious life itself. Transcendental subjectivity is therefore not “before” time, nor “outside” time, nor a condition of possibility in the Kantian sense of a formal constraint. It is a self-temporalizing process.

I don't understand visual phenomena like the duck/ rabbit as rational at all. I see them as just ambiguous patterns which can resemble more than one thing. Does it look like a beak or ears? Which resemblance do I notice — Janus

What I mean by rational is that when we recognize a
series of lines and curves as a duck, each line and curve has a particular role that it plays in forming the pattern that appears as the duck. In other words, the pattern is constituted as a structure of relations according to a particular logic. When we see the image as a rabbit, the role of the lines and curves in constituting this pattern is different. What appears as a line when the image looks like a duck may no longer be seen as a line. So the pattern constituting the rabbit expresses a different logic or relations. I call the logic of pattern a system of rationality.

Physicalism does not rule out qualities, though. All physical things have their attributes or characteristics, which is the same as to say qualities. A particle may have the quality of mass or not. An orange has the quality of roundness, and of appearing to us as orange. In fact I can't see how anything non-physical could have a quality. If by 'quality' you just mean 'human feeling' then sure physical objects as such do not have human or animal feelings, and they may not even evoke the same feelings in different percipients. — Janus

Do these qualities inhere in the things themselves independent of our encounter with them, or only in our response to these things, in how they affect us? By quality, I mean human feelings in the sense that the quality of an object is something that is felt, sensed by us. According to this definition, if a physical object, defined by qualities such as mass or roundness, may not evoke the same feelings in different percipients, then we cannot call these qualities of the object, but qualities of the interaction between the object and ourselves. Are qualities like mass and roundness universally felt as the same by all of us, or do we simply hypothesize that the differences among us in qualitative sense of the same object amounts to subjective variation in the experience of an objectively invariant quality inhering in the object itself? Can we ever prove this hypothesis, or must we take it as a given if we are to act as physicalists?

I would add that my example of the duck/rabbit image is meant to show that individual qualities don’t just appear to us as what they are in isolation. They appear within systems or patterns of inter-related qualities. Mass and roundness mean what they mean within a larger system of qualitative relations constituting a theory or model which you can think of as a meta-quality (what I’ve been calling a system of rationality). Think of mass or roundness like the lines and curves within the duck or rabbit image. It’s not just that what constitutes a line or curve differs depending on the larger gestalt configuration it belongs to. It’s that the very concept of something like mass or roundness depends on a larger system of qualities that we perceive in things.

Everything you say there is equally a narrative told from a particular perspective which is just one among many. I don't say the world is "based on energy" I say it is most primordially energetic, ever-changing. Your saying that physicalism is just a narrative which we have become attached to, is itself a psychologising narrative designed with the intention of refuting physicalism as a mere attachment. — Janus

I’m not trying to refute physicalism. It isnt wrong and it isn’t merely an attachment . It is a model and models are intrinsic and necessary to our experience. Are all models relative? Phenomenology says that is it is what all models have in common (the subject-object structure of temporality) which is non-relative, rather than it being the case that we can get beyond perspectivalism to how the world really is in itself absent our participation.

I recently had a plumber lecture me about how science is the cause of most problems and that we need more people like America’s visionary RFK. I think the culture war we often talk about also unfolds as a battle between the seen and the longed for. Or something like that — Tom Storm

It gets a bit tricky to sort out where anti-vacc-ers and other rejecters of scientific consensus are coming from. Much of the rejection of covid recommendations coming from the CDC and Fauci in the U.S. emanated from the same groups who reject climate change models. I wouldn’t characterize this group as anti-science. On the contrary, they are science idealists. They would tell you that they very much believe in science as a method. But they have a traditional, romanticized view of how science method works, and the actual ambiguities and complexities of scientific practice don’t fit their idealized view of it. Their worshipful, dogmatic view of science is about as non-relativized as can be.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum are new age and postmodernist types who are suspicious or dismissive of the limits of Western medicine. Unlike the traditionalists, they directly question the authority of scientific methodology. By contrast, traditionalists accuse the scientific establishment of choosing political ideology over ‘scientific truth’ as the traditionalists idealize it. Traditionalists believe in a pure separation between scientific truth and politics, whereas postmodern types believe all science is inherently political.

I think the postmodernists have a point about needing to question the authoritative approach to doing science. And I don’t find that postmodernists deny the benefits of scientific medicine. They are not arguing that western medical advances and climate change research are untrue or not useful. Their issues are more subtle than this.

To sum up, traditionalists embrace an older, idealized conception of science which causes them to treat climate change and covid recommendations as simply bad or corrupt science. New age hippie types embrace non-Western alternatives to scientific medicine which integrate body , mind and cosmos holistically. At times this leads them to dangerously reject the Western component rather than finding a way to accommodate it to their alternative practices. Postmodern types dont advocate for an alternative to science. They accept it for what it is , useful in a sense. They simply want to point out that it is intrinsically political. I think hippie-types have a point about the need to integrate body and mind perspectives, but without simply rejecting Western approaches. And I think postmodernists have a point about needing prominent body and mind with the socio-cultural dynamics within which science functions.

it seems to me that the view expressed by Wayfarer in the OP doesn't give us an explanation of their (and our) existence — boundless

It depends on what you mean by explanation. The OP is laying bare the self-recursivity of empirical explanations, how the most ancient is interpreted via the assumptions of the most recent and contemporary thinking. Your notion of explanation seems to require that this self-reflexivity come to an end by anchoring itself to some way the world really is in itself. But what if the way the world really is is best described by a phenomenological analysis of the structure of self-reflexivity itself? And this analysis is conducted not from an objective distance but from within this reflexivity?

Excellent OP! I will have more to say on this later. For now I wanted to quote from a lecture by Heidegger concerning the existence of things before the arrival of humans .

The Earth, the cosmos, are older than the human. They were already existing before the human came to be an entity. One can hardly refer, in a more decided and persuasive way, to entities that are what and how they are independently from the human. Yet, in order to exhibit such entities, is it necessary to make the cumbersome appeal to the results of modern natural science regarding the various ages of the Earth and the human? To these researches, one could right away pose the awkward question as to where they take the time periods from for their calculation of the age of the Earth. Is this sort of time simply found in the ice of the “ice age”, whose phases geology calculates for us?

To exhibit entities that are independent from the human, it is enough simply to point to the Alps, for example, which tower up into the sky and in no way require the human and his machinations to do that. The Alps are entities-in-themselves—they show themselves as such without any reference to the various ages of the Earth’s formations and of human races.When one unhesitatingly invokes entities such as these, which manifestly exist in themselves, and presents them as the clearest thing in the world, one must also however accept the question, with respect to these entities-in-themselves, as to what is thereby meant by being-in-itself. Is the latter as crystal clear as these entities-in-themselves? Can one grant the claim of being-in-itself in the same hindrance-free way as the invocation of entities-in-themselves, with which one deals day in and day out?

The Alps – one says – are present at hand, indeed before humans are on hand to examine them or act with respect to them, whether it be through research, through climbing them, or through the removal of rock masses. The Alps are before the hand – that is, lying there before all handling by the human. Yet does not this determination of entities-in-themselves as present at hand characterize the said entities precisely through the relation to the handling by the human, admittedly in such a way that this relation to the human portrays itself as independent from the human?

… the invocation of Kant is too hasty; for, although Kant experiences scientific representation as empirical realism, he interprets the latter in terms of his transcendental idealism. In short: Kant posits in advance that being means objectivity. Objectivity however contains the turnedness of entities toward subjectivity. Objectivity is not synonymous with the being-in-itself of entities-in-themselves.

This is what I think I understand: the mind is not a detached observer, and the body is not merely a machine. They exist together, intertwined within a single field of lived experience. From this perspective, the traditional problem of interaction or dualism might be said to dissolve. Phenomenology does not assume that mind and body are two independent entities that must somehow be connected. Instead, it understands them as co-emerging, inseparable aspects of the way we inhabit and experience the world — Tom Storm

I think we need to dissolve or bracket all fixed distinctions between mind and body, and see change, inter-affection, intertwinement and interaction as primary. The body is already minded in itself and the mind embodied. What does this mean? It means that before we solidify processes into entities with pre-assigned laws and properties ( what a body is and does, and what a mind is and does) , we have fields of interacting bits. These bits aren’t defined by any substantial , pre-assigned content , but by what they do, how they affect and are affected by their neighboring bits.

The whole system is in constant change with respect to its prior states, and local patterns of distinctions and differentiations emerge dynamically from out of this total interactive activity. It is not the property of mind to observe but to act, just as the body continues to exist only by acting. To perceive and to know is to be changed. Changed by what? It is changed by a world which is not simply outside of it, as though there were mind here and world
out there. Interaction is prior to the notion of an inside being affected by an outside. To say we experience the world is to say we experience ourselves, make changes in ourselves.

How do thoughts relate to brain in this model? What would it mean to say a thought is not reducible to a neural process? If phenomenology isn't monist what exactly does co-emergence mean? — Tom Storm

Husserlian phenomenology is monist. There is reduction, but not from thought to physical entity. Rather, from physical entity to underlying process generating qualitative systems of rationality. Is this process physical? Spiritual? It is not physical since the physical is one of an infinity of possible narratives that we can construct to navigate and organize events, and saying something is physical doesn’t address the underlying system of rationality which organizes the theory of the physical or the genesis of systems. Where does this underlying system of rationality come from, if not the physical? We can say that the bits comprising mind, body and world are not physical, since the physical presupposes but doesnt explain them. But what does explain them? Or better yet, can we come up with an understanding which avoids ‘explanation’ of a physicalist or causal sort, avoids spiritualist mumbo jumbo, and also grounds physicalism?

It would seem that current neuropsychological models give us much of what we need to ground mental phenomena, since they assume a brain and body in continual change with respect to itself, fields of interacting elements and systems of model making which link mind and world. This is a good start, but from a phenomenologist’s vantage, it still stumbles on remnants of physicalistic reification when it treats mind as mirroring, modeling or representing an outside world. This treats neurons as inner objects shaping themselves to conform to outer objects.

To get rid of the remnants of physicalism, we need to stop talking about the mind, body and world in terms of objects which interact , even objects that exist only very briefly. The bits I have been describing here aren’t tiny objects, they are actions, differences, events, creations, values, vectors. To make this our starting point rather than the concept of neutral , affectless ‘object’ allows us to avoid the hard problem’s dilemma of explaining the relation between value, quantity, affect, feeling, creation, meaning on the one hand and object, fact, identity, thing on the other. It also means that we have to start treating the concept of time seriously, radically, primordially.

I don't see why one could not be a (non-eliminative) physicalist without devolving into some form of dualism. One could maintain that subjective feelings are perfectly real events and are also completely physical, and that they only seem non-physical to us on account of the bewitchments of dualistic language — Janus

Yea, but I’m defining what you’re calling ‘subjective feelings’ as a qualitative system of rationality within which a physical account is intelligible. Imagine we are looking at a picture which can appear as either a duck or a rabbit. The system of rationality (the particular way the lines and curves are defined and organized into a whole gestalt frame of meaning) differs between the duck and the rabbit, and it differs qualitatively, valuatively, as a ‘felt’ sense of meaning . A physicalist will say , yes but we can locate the underlying facts which explain this difference.

The phenomenologist will say that those underlying facts themselves will always require a quantitative , valuative, felt system of rationality to make them intelligible and there is no physical account which can ground it. We can as phenomenologists study the process of constructing qualitative systems of rationality, but this will not lead us to a physicalist explanation, since the physicalist explanation presupposes the developed framework of a qualitative system of rationality. Think of physicalism as dealing with events described on the basis of a logic derived from an axiomatic system, and phenomenology as revealing subject-world interactions as the ground of axiomatization.

There are is no end to the variety of qualitative systems of meaning we can constitute, and physicalism is just one historically produced narrative. It is not the world which is physical, or based on energy, it is a narrative which emerged a few centuries ago and which we have been quite attached to. We are so blinded by the usefulness of that narrative we can’t see through it or beyond it, as though we were all living in The Truman Show.

The problem for phenomenology is that all of what is said above is also a "theoretical artefact". Property dualism is discursively inescapable. I think that is why the later Heidegger reverted to poetic language. Dualism is not inherent in lived experience and the primal synthetic apprehension of things, but it is inherent in any and every saying that is the product of analysis. — Janus

That’s right. The ‘theoretical artefact’ can also be called a qualitative stance or value orientation. It is such stances and orientations that are inescapable when we use an objectively causal physical description of an aspect of the world. The world is always objective on the basis of a particular qualitative system of understanding and intelligiblity Is the distinction between a qualitative system of valuation and the causal account which is organized on its basis a dualism? If so, it is only the dualism of implict vs explicit, surface versus depth, abstractive vs primary. It seems to me these aren’t properties so much as dimensions.

If one is a physicalist, one will not notice the way the underlying value framework is indispensable to the direct intelligibility of all physicist accounts. One then will say that values are properties of subjective feeling ‘sprinkled over’ the properties of the physicalist account. That’s dualism, and it doesn’t require the postulation of a supernatural or non-natural realm.

Consciousness does not arise from the physical. It's there with the physical all along. — Patterner

If a physical description of the behavior of billiard balls involves objectively causal mechanisms of interaction, how should we talk about what it is that is ‘there with the physical all along’? If it is consciousness which is there, what is it doing there? What is it contributing to the physical description? Is it simply contributing some mysterious quality of inner feeling?

I think my reading is more interesting. I don’t want to start quoting chapter and verse, but a major concern of Heidegger’s is the dehumification of human beings, and I think it’s that piece that’s most relevant today. Presence and its privileged position within Western philosophy has played a large role in that. — Mikie

I just think that, if you want to define the metaphysics of presence as a thinking which doesn't take into account what is completely outside of awareness you should leave Heidegger and Derrida out of the discussion and focus on those accounts which illustrate, rather than challenge, your argument, such as psychoanalysis and cognitive science.

I claim that the phrase ‘physical world’ is not describing a world that is real in the sense of being real independent of our conscious interaction with it. I believe our consciousness and the physical world cannot be separated. That's what property dualism means. We can't remove the experiential property from particles any more than we can remove mass or charge from them. The bifurcation doesn't exist. But we ignore some properties at times. We don't concern ourselves with charge or consciousness when we calculate the path of a baseball after it leaves the bat — Patterner

On the surface your account sounds as if you are rejecting the inner/outer split, but property dualism usually preserves and stabilizes the hard problem rather than dissolving it. The key issue is where the split is located. Phenomenology dissolves the hard problem by denying that the split between neutral physical reality and affectively laden experience is ontologically basic in the first place. Property dualism, by contrast, typically relocates that split inside the world itself. Instead of two substances, it posits two irreducible kinds of properties, physical and experiential, cohabiting the same entities. That leaves intact the explanatory gap

For instance, you claim that consciousness is a property of particles in the same sense as mass or charge. But once consciousness is treated as a property alongside physical properties, it immediately raises the question: why do certain physical configurations instantiate this additional property at all, and how does it relate to the others? We still have a world described completely in third-person terms, to which experiential properties are added as something extra.

For Husserl and Heidegger, the mistake lies in taking “the physical world” as something already fully constituted as neutral, objective, and affectless, and then asking how consciousness gets added to it. That picture is a theoretical abstraction derived from scientific practice, not a description of the world as it is originally given. The world is first encountered as meaningful, relevant, and affectively structured. Neutral objectivity is a derivative achievement, produced by bracketing relevance, concern, and involvement, not the metaphysical ground floor.

You say that when calculating the trajectory of a baseball, we ignore charge or consciousness. Yes, but phenomenology insists that scientific abstraction does not reveal a consciousness-free world; it selectively suspends certain dimensions of sense in order to achieve specific explanatory aims. Property dualism treats consciousness as a property that is “there anyway,” even when we are not attending to it. But what is the property? Phenomenology tell us that any set of facts about the world, any act of empirical measurement which deals with what is the case, gets its meaning sense and intelligibility fro the qualitative ‘how’ it makes sense as a system of understanding. This underlying ‘how’ is always present as that which guides and organizes the sense of what it means to calculate the trajectory of a baseball. It is there implicitly but not explicitly. This is only a property dualism if we consider the explicit ‘what’ of physical facts and the implicit ‘how’ of their anew and intelligibility to be properties.

Property dualism remains wedded to the hard problem of it accepts a conception of the physical as fully intelligible without reference to the qualitative intelligibility dimension of experience. Once that concession is made, consciousness can only appear as something mysterious, whether localized in brains, spread across particles, or treated as fundamental. The question “Why is there something it is like?” remains unavoidable.

By contrast, the phenomenological move is not to say that consciousness is another property of reality, but that the very distinction between “neutral physical” and “felt subjective” is a theoretical artifact. Worldhood, for Heidegger, is already affectively attuned; intentionality, for Husserl, is already value-laden and sense-bestowing. Affect and mattering are not added to a neutral base; they are conditions under which anything shows up as a base at all.

I fail to see the relevance. Plenty of behavior involves no conscious awareness, yet it happens. We may have no memory of turning the doorknob to event a room, but we know it must have occurred. We’re all in agreement about that, I think.

All of these are examples of absence, which is exactly what isn’t privileged— and that was your initial question. — Mikie

Yes, but this distinction between what we are paying attention to and what is outside of this awareness is not what Heidegger or Derrida are getting at with their deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. They are directing their focus on what is taking place within that very beam of direct attention, that it is not simply a staring at something but being thrown into engagement with it. Attention is a kind of displacement.

we can't even make a memory out of something that's outside of our consciousness. — L'éléphant

That’s a good point. The here and now of conscious awareness is the absolute starting point for Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger and Derrida as well accept the absolute primacy of the experienced now. Their deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence aims to show that within the now itself there is a bifurcation or hinge even more intimate than pure presence. So they dont look outside of the now to what is beyond our immediate awareness, but within this assumed immediacy.

the intention behind the arguments is precisely to stake a claim for the reality of consciousness - to put a block in the way of reduction. The arguments have succeeded, I think, in doing that. — Ludwig V

Reduction by itself isnt necessarily a bad thing, but we want to aim for the right kind of reduction. Reducing phenomena to physical processes relying on objective causal mechanisms is concealing kind of reduction since it slaps abstractive idealizations over what we experience, hiding the richness of that experience. Husserlian reduction and Wittgensteinian seeing bracket the flattening generalizations of empiricism so we can notice what is implicated in them but not made explicit.

Part of the problem is encapsulated by the confusion inherent in the idea of the "real world", "reality". The idea that physics captures the reality of an aspect of the world is meant to insist that there is only one world, which is thought of in many ways. These conceptual systems are related to each other in something of the way that different interpretations of a picture are related. They are independent, complete in themselves, yet, in a sense competing with each other, and, in that competition, co-existing. The picture of the duck-rabbit is really a picture of a duck and a picture of a rabbit and it is not possible for it to be both simultaneously; yet there is only one picture. It seems impossible and yet, there it is. — Ludwig V

For both Husserl and Heidegger, but in different ways, ‘reality’ refers back to a canned method which developed between Galileo and Descartes, defining empirical phenomena in geometric terms as bodies at rest or in motion. Husserl reserves the word ‘reality’ for a certain realm of abstractive idealizations that we construct. For instance, the ‘reality’ of the real spatial object is constituted by us when we move from the perception of a flowing, changing nexus of sense data to the constitution of patterns of correlation linking our movements and their kinesthetic feedback with phenomena such that an overall self-similarity obtains. The leap to the concept of ‘real’ is the abstraction we make in which we see such patterned phenomena in terms of ‘this unitary, self-identical object’.

Similarly for Wittgenstein, we get caught up in grammatical confusions when we reify our abstractive generalizations. We can see something as a duck, as a rabbit, or as a picture which functions as a categorical container for both (“there is only one picture”). This leap towards the ‘real’ as a general fact comprising particulars obfuscates the change in grammar we undergo when we move from seeing something as a duck, to seeing something as a rabbit, to seeing something as ‘this categorical ground of a duck and a rabbit’. Each shift in grammar is, in a subtle way, a change of subject. Generalization , inclusion, identification all involve such shifts in grammatical sense, but we tend to conceal from ourselves these qualitative changes in meaning.

And there is a glue which ties together these changes in sense. It is the glue of relevance. The hard problem consists in assuming that relevance , mattering and significance refer to processes associated with an aspect of the world called consciousness or subjectivity. The aspect called physical reality comprises events and objects which in themselves are devoid of affect, relevance and mattering. They simply ‘are’ as neutral facts of the real. Relevance is a gloss we as subjects add to them.

If you mean presence and absence are aspects of change, then yes. But presence and absence go eat beyond that, so we don't have to confine ourselves to time. — frank

No, they don’t go beyond time, since they are inextricable. from it. They are incoherent without it.

— Britannica

This blurb suggests that it's not primarily about time. It's about presence versus absence. Do you have a quote that contradicts this?

Derrida characterizes as the “metaphysics of presence.” This is the tendency to conceive fundamental philosophical concepts such as truth, reality, and being in terms of ideas such as presence, essence, identity, and origin—and in the process to ignore the crucial role of absence and difference.
— Britannica — frank

The way that absence and difference are internal to presence what time is. Difference isnt a static fact, it’s an event , an activity. It is temporalization.

Why is the only thing we can be certain of in the “here and now”?

But in any case, for everything that is here and now, how many things are NOT here and now? Far more. From the workings of our bodies to all activity outside our scope of vision, what’s absent and unknown is simply much bigger than what is present and “known.” — Mikie

I don’t think this is what Derrida is getting at in his deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. What he means is that the present isn’t something that can turn back to look at itself. To be present is to be a change, a hinge, a transit. The present doesn’t ‘occupy’ a moment of time, as if it subsists itself briefly as itself before it changes into a new present. When we talk about or imagine things outside consciousness, beneath consciousness , simultaneous with consciousness, like a body performing processes we are unaware of, we are still treating these things and this time as present at hand.

physics is designed to exclude anything that doesn't fit its methodology. Nothing wrong with that, until you start claiming that the physical world is the only real world.
— Ludwig V

What the 'explanatory gap' and 'hard problem' arguments are aimed at, is precisely that claim. That everything is reducible to or explainable in terms of the physical. That is the point at issue! — Wayfarer

But this makes it sound as though there is more than one real world; that physics effectively captures the reality of an aspect of it (the physical) and we need another explanation alongside of it for something like consciousness. This is dualism, a reification of the hard problem. If instead we claim that the phrase ‘physical world’ is not describing a world that is real in the sense of being real independent of our conscious interaction with it, then we are doing phenomenology. This dissolves the dualism of the hard problem by showing there to be a single underlying process of experiencing accounting for the historical decision to bifurcate the world into concepts like ‘physically real’ and ‘real in other ways’.

My dictionary defines "specious" as superficially plausible, but actually wrong, or misleading. — Metaphysician Undercover

This where I’m getting it from:

“William James's "specious present" describes our experience of the present as a short, flowing duration, not an instantaneous point, acting like a "saddle-back" of time with a bit of the immediate past and future held together, allowing us to perceive motion and succession rather than just isolated moments, a key idea in his Principles of Psychology (1890). He contrasted this "thick" experience with the "knife-edge" mathematical present (a single point) and the "stream of consciousness," arguing that our awareness always carries a sense of "now" that's extended and contains felt duration.”

But I think that describing the present as pure actuality is far from indicating that the present is "specious". "Pure actuality" indicates that "now" is more like the opposite of specious.

I think what he is indicating in your quoted passage, is that the present never appears to us as "a moment" So it is "the moment" which is specious, not the now. In other words, "the moment" is not a correct representation of "the present". — Metaphysician Undercover

If the present never appears as the ‘moment’ , what is a moment, and how does the present appear? To me specious means inclusive or thick, that the ‘now’ has room for past and future , not just the present. So what would the opposite of this be? Some kind of preferencing of the present over the past and future, in which only the present, but not the past and future, is pure actuality? Or a preferencing of the past and future over the present?

I had to look into this. Contamination, but this would still be a system of deference and difference out of which the "trace" produces the sense of presence, notwithstanding what "infects a mark". — Constance

As long as we don’t confuse this system of deferral and difference with a Saussurrian structuralism in which the elements of the system are simultaneously present to each other as aspects of a totality mutually defining the meaning of each element.

m

↪Ciceronianus
I remember it as God pooping out of the sky. I don't remember a cathedral. — frank

Holy Sh*t

I just did a brief review of the part where he talked about "now" and I see that he described it as "pure actuality". So I don't agree that "now" is specious for Derrida. — Metaphysician Undercover

What do you think Derrida means by ‘pure actuality’? You dont think it includes what has just passed and what is just about to occur? Derrida wrote on Heidegger's formulation of anxiety as being-towards-death:

“…the point is not to resign oneself to one's mortality…but to constitute the present as the past of a future: that is, to live the present not as the origin and absolute form of lived experience (of ek-sistence), but as the product, as what is constituted, derived, constituted in return on the basis of the horizon of the future and the ek- stasis of the future, this latter being able to be authentically anticipated as such only as finite to- come, that is, on the basis of the insuperability of possible death, death not being simply at the end like a contingent event befalling at the far end of a line of life, but determining at every — let's say moment — the opening of the future in which is constituted as past what we call the present and which never appears as such

doesn't language, when analytically brought to bear on its own nature and limitations in the world, have to yield to something that is simply NOT language at all, and if this is allowed, then the delimitations you refer to above, which I take to be essentially a denial of what I will call "linguistic absolutes" entering into explanations, "absolutes" that can be tossed about freely in doubt and suspicion simply because they ARE language, and language possesses nothing stand alone, nothing that stands as its own as its own presupposition, as Kierkegaard put it, these delimitations face a ground for acceptance and denial that is not contingent, for it is not realized IN conditions in which it can be gainsaid — Constance

I see a number of issues wording their way through here. There is the issue of the pre-propositional and pre-reflective, which Henry formulates as immanent self-affecting. And the. there is the question of ether language has to be understood in terms of a space of reasons based on the logic of predicational grammar. In responding to Esse Quam Videri, I offered a non-foundational grounding of intelligibility that I thought he might related to better than introducing phenomenological language. My own preference is to move in the direction of Wittgenstein and Husserl in bracketing and reducing propositional truth.

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?