Ideas is mind-blowing. Husserl comes off as a self-conscious, almost constipated writer, and so has the bizarre distinction of conveying almost mystically powerful truths in tortured academic prose.

Reading a bit of the Derrida beforehand, he comes off as highly elliptical and more allusive, even a bit playful (and may we not even call him rhetorical?) than analytical. I hope the lacunae in the (what I guess are supposed to be?) arguments is filled in as the work proceeds.

It what way does Cyrenaism transform how one acts? And the only action mentioned thus far is playing the courtier for money. And courtiers knew how to be ironic and trip up other courtiers long before philosophy appeared on the scene. — csalisbury

Aristippus, Arete, Theo the Atheist, Hegesias, and so on, all provide evocative portraits of ancient sages, who each had their reported virtues and bizarre quirks. They are all recognizably from the same school in their way, but no one would mistake one for the other. If the track record of a philosophical school is the people it produces, then it has a pretty solid lineup (as do many Hellenistic schools, in contrast to analytic and continental philosophy, which do not produce character of any identifiable sort).

There were undoubtedly many more such characters, whose lives have been lost to time.

Also regarding the temporal paradoxes, I guess I should say that time in this sense only matters insofar as it's lived time, and I seriously doubt lived time is actually linear in the way that seems to be required for these planning paradoxes to make sense. I'm sympathetic to the Husserlian idea that the temporal in the crude linear sense is derivative of a deeper atemporal lived moment, which 'changes' not in the sense of passing, but in the sense of a deeper undergoing. But this all appeals to notions outside the scope of the Cyrenaic philosophy.

I guess I'm still a bit confused as to how the doctrine of unknowability escapes itself. We could call philosophy (or any inquiry for that matter) a game based on baseless assumptions, but this itself is a philosophical claim based on baseless assumptions. — darthbarracuda

If we see philosophy as ironic in the Socratic sense, then we only adopt the assumptions we need to on the terms the debate requires. Philosophy is a kind of game, but one that has real and deep urges and pains underlying it (well, some of the time). But we do not need to claim this about philosophy so much as come to embody it by playing the game better than anyone, on its own terms, and in so doing unwind the desire to take it seriously, because the passions that motivate it will have been dissipated by a kind of 'enlightenment' manifested in the Hellenistic approach of sagehood.

That's what I personally see metaphysics as: an attempt (not a discipline per se) to make sense of thing in the most general sense of the term. — darthbarracuda

What the metaphysician typically is not, though, is a meta-philosopher. He doesn't understand why he inquires or what it means to inquire, or to get an answer. Usually, I think it has to do with anxiety and control. Once the desire for these things diminishes, and the practical incoherence of seeking them is seen to be contradictory on its own terms, the desire to be a metaphysician goes with it. Unless, like Peter Unger, you only do it as a kind of game or profession while thinking it's nonsense in your heart of hearts, which is possible (and I suspect many professional philosophers are like this).

Ethics is fundamentally concerned with what choices we should make — darthbarracuda

I disagree, in that I think finding out what choices you should make does nothing to tell you about what choices you will make, which is all that matters.

and this depends on others around us (what Cabrera calls the FEA - the non-manipulation and non-trangression of other people's interests). — darthbarracuda

It may, come the day that we have technology to mind-meld or mind-control. But until then, the closest you've got is coercion, and responding to coercion is after all not different from responding to threats from the natural world. And in that sense, when it comes time to make a choice, it really doesn't depend on anyone else, you're all alone. Sure you might have to make a choice based on another person's wants or needs, but you've still got to do that (and nothing guarantees you won't, insofar as this really is a choice).

But this epistemological solipsism is not pathe-based, or is it? The description of our epistemological and existential condition is necessarily outside of our immediate perceptions. — darthbarracuda

No, I don't think so. If there is any existential condition at all, its got to be in your experiences. Or else, it literally wouldn't matter (to you). But then it is hard to see how it is an existential condition.

Quite clearly, in order to be consistent, they would have to devote no time, rather than a fuzzily defined less time. — csalisbury

Not at all. I think actually that any amount of planning is technically consistent with the position, because any action is consistent with any position, since belief is utterly impotent in that no belief implies any action whatsoever. What matters is whether the sorts of transformations that one goes through in philosophizing cause one to behave differently. A good Hellenistic philosophy amounts to a kind of lifestyle, and in the act of going through the motions of Socratic debate, the foibles of long-term planning might manifest themselves not as theoretical truths but as dispositions not to take part in them.

Certainly insofar as that planning is motivated by a notion of the good that is contradictory on its own terms, the sort of crash and burn that comes with the disappointment of inquiring into it can effect change. Certainly that's not guaranteed, but then nothing in life is guaranteed, and we don't expect a style of philosophizing to result in unanimous action by its practitioners. Nonetheless, there is a historical trend to the way the Cyrenaics behave, which is recognizable in style as traceable to the philosophy.

Although in my own life I have to say that in recent years the past and future have started mattering less to me – people can ask what I did last summer or what I will do on the weekend and I can't remember or don't care (so during small talk I just make things up). Maybe some people can't live like that, I don't know. But I don't think philosophy one takes up should be for anyone but oneself.

have you ever heard an addict philosophize/justify himself while high on his drug of choice? He may hit up Dionysus tommorow, in the sober light of day, but thats beside the point, which is right now, which is *this* — csalisbury

Is there anything wrong with that reasoning? Certainly you now look back at it and think there must be something outrageous about it, or wrong with it. But how is it different from eating when you're hungry and not wen you're full? Is that outrageous too? It seems like denying this sort of reasoning in effect nullifies the possibility of change or action, if taken seriously.

Addiction is unpleasant, and can't be escaped through reasoning. Better to refer yourself (while sober) to taste and habituation, by taking easy concrete steps that don't involve confronting the addiction itself: throw away the powder, or if you can't manage even that ask someone else to do it for you, etc.

& finally I think it would be easy to show that being a Cyrenaic is practically equivalent to not being a Cyrenaic — csalisbury

I think that it doesn't manifest in anything the Cyrenaic knows that other people don't, but that this just demonstrates the impotence of quests for knowledge (and belief). Philosophizing in a certain style does, if the philosophy matters in any way, effect changes on how one acts, including how one decides to philosophize. I'm coming broadly to a meta-philosophical view of philosophy as ultimately ironic: a Cyrenaic responds only insofar as he is questioned, and defends himself on the terms of the debate that get set up, which doesn't involve (unironic) belief in those terms. This is in fact generally how the Cyrenaics literally behave in the stories: someone asks them something, and then they tie their opponent in knots on the opponents' own terms, or say something witty.

As Arristippus said in chastising Plato for indulging in metaphysics: "Well, our friend, anyway, never spoke like that." And when asked what good philosophy was, he never responded that it was to learn things, but so that "when in the theater, at the very least, you will not be one stone sitting on another." Education and philosophy are humanizing, and inquiry is a quest for skill and therapy, not a culmination in doctrines (except insofar as one is in the irony, whether knowingly or unknowingly).

I thought we could just pick an arbitrary day to start each week, and then spend the week discussing the chapter. So yeah, we could just say that each week starts on Sunday, and next Sunday is when the discussion proper will begin. I'll make a thread several days beforehand. Optimally everyone will have read before the start of the discussion but that's not totally realistic, so we should expect the week also to act as a continuation of the reading and a shoring up of it where things weren't clear.

I'm curious, if the Cyrenaics thought that the only thing we know of are our pathe, how did they come to know of this general metaphysical principle? — darthbarracuda

If the whole of knowledge is self-knowledge, what about their philosophy? — Mongrel

I've thought a lot about this, and I think these meta-philosophical questions are important. While this is not contained anywhere in the ancient evidence (though the ancients themselves might have considered it, since we've lost almost everything from them), I think the correct thing to say is that philosophy does not grant one any new knowledge at all, and so a certain set of doctrines is espoused as the result of a systematic Socratic inquiry, but at the same time one shouldn't, and doesn't need to, claim that one knows these. There is nothing that philosophy, or theoretical science for that matter (the Cyrenaics were skeptics of physics) can teach you – but it can change the way that you live by performing a kind of Socratic boiling down of contradictions.

Party of the Socratic ethos is to refuse to live by mere belief and opinion, and to let life be governed by what one actually knows. One knows that particular things are good by virtue of experiencing them, and that sees to be all that is required. How then to state knowledge of the general thesis about the good? Surprisingly, it seems that one way of looking at the Cyrenaic tenets is to disavow that there is any such general thesis (that one would want to claim to know): in the Lives and Opinions, one formulation of their ethical position is that the good is 'this particular pleasure:' a rare formulation of an ethical doctrine in terms of an indexical, specific claim.

The practice of philosophy, then, is ultimately done ironically, in a sort of apotheosis of Socratic irony. The Cyrenaic responds to questions that are raised on their own terms, and accepting a premise for the sake of argument is not accepting it. In this sense they are close to the Skeptics, except that their different conception of knowledge causes them to conclude that the skeptical position is not possible.

Additionally, if all we can know are our own pathe, how can we know what others pathe are like in principle, i.e. pleasurable, painful, neutral? — darthbarracuda

The simple answer is, you can't. But I don't think there needs to be any common ground of faculties in order for there to be communication, and the sort of pluralism and skepticism we end up with is one with positive ethical content and not a disappointment that we need to try to circumvent.

How does the Cyrenaic epistemology avoid solipsism, and why does it posit the existence of an external world (one that cannot be arrived at by pathe alone) instead of adopting idealism a la Berkeley? — darthbarracuda

Solipsism makes a positive claim about what exists, and Cyrenaic epistemology seems not to countenance any existential statements or denial of them at all. There may be a kind of epistemological solipsism to it, but this is not the kind of solipsism that people generally worry about.

It's also worth noting that in general Hellenistic ethics was not as concerned with societal behavior as modern ethics. It taught about the good life of the individual, and thought about society only in relation to this.

Maybe the only thing we can know for certain (pace Descartes) are our immediate experiences (I am experiencing a salty taste, I am experiencing heat, I am experiencing the color red, etc), but it would seem to be the case (unless we are idealists) that any epistemology that limits itself to these incorrigible experiences and yet postulates the existence of a structure to the world outside of our experiences is contradictory, or at least an unacceptable speculation. — darthbarracuda

The Cyrenaics so far as I can tell postulate no such structure, and claim to be uninterested in it even if it could be posited, since by definition it would be external and therefore ethically irrelevant.

Having read both through the introduction and the first chapter, I think it would be prudent to start with the first chapter instead. The intro is very dense and confusing, and makes extensive reference to issues in Husserl's project, like the difference between transcendental phenomenology and pure psychology, that seem more illustrative of general theses espoused in the text and may be distracting until we understand what those theses are. It seems that chapter one can be understood without an independent reading of Husserl or Frege, and where supplements are wanted there are just a couple relevant references that could be consulted (e.g. the beginning of the first Logical Investigation).

We could just have the Intro as the eighth part of the reading, functioning basically as a sort of conclusion.

I wonder if it would help for someone to provide a 'skeleton key' for each chapter.

Okay, it looks like the introduction deserves a separate discussion. With that said, are people okay with a ~2 month span, about a week per section?

If so, we should decide whether we want to have dedicated summaries, or do it more freestyle. Once we have a general format in mind, we can decide on a starting date and make a new thread. Do people need more time to get a copy of the work, and if so does anyone want leads or assistance?

One more.

I think the connection is that the logical empiricism advocated by Russell and Ayer saw all ordinary things as logical constructions (out of sense data).

"Mystery" is an attempt at universal explanation. When people appeal to it, they are trying to bring all the separate pieces of knowledge under one though, such that if we say "mystery" we finally have enough to understand everything in one thought. It is to run from incomplete knowledge or understanding. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Not at all. Part of what makes something mysterious is that the mechanism behind it is not know, and so there are infinite ways, not one, for something to be mysterious. Mystery is a negative term insofar as it only disavows its amenability to me. To insist that everything must be completely explicable to or by me, on the other hand, is to always demand further explanation.

It takes a certain kind of pathology to insist that one knows or can know everything there is to know about someone else's sadness.

No it's not the 'oh it's all mysterious' that gets me, its more like in the face of: 'look what we can say if we take this into account, and this, and this, and that'; only to have someone say 'naaaah, mysterious.' — StreetlightX

But I haven't said anything of the sort. I've given my reasons for believing what I believe in detail. I don't see your characterization of the way the conversation has gone as accurate.

Indeed, one of the more interesting ramifications of the kind of thing I'm promoting is that we don't even have complete understandings of ourselves. — StreetlightX

I don't see how that's a ramification of your position. It seems like it could be amenable to many sorts of positions. The OP was about a much more specific topic.

If I were to say that some position or another is 'radical', this would be it, because it affirms not just some sort of epistemological limit to our understanding, but an ontological one: the so-called 'mystery' is 'built in', naturalized from the very beginning, as it were. To use a quip of Zizek's: "the reality I see is never “whole” — not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it." — StreetlightX

The metaphor of a stain is telling here though isn't it? As if there were an epistemic ideal with a wrinkle in it. I think what I am saying is different: there there is nothing there to stain. I don't really have much sympathy with ontology, and epistemological limits are not limits of talent or transcendental limits, but limits of power and relevance. All around are things that you won't ever understand, that don't care about you and that you don't care about. And moreover that what is important is not my inclusion, but what is other than me. The self as a hole as opposed to a whole is very old (and it weirdly, even in your formulation, gives a super-important placement to oneself – and notice also the upset coming from subjectivity again). The kind of incompleteness I have in mind isn't so banal as to be reduced to or driven by me.

I think that a consequence of Cyrenaic epistemology is that we don't even strictly speaking see anything in the classical Aristotelian sense. That to me is the interesting thesis.

In the sense you are talking about, yes. For something to unknowable means it doesn't have a meaning in experience. It is that which is beyond experience. Something which cannot possibly mean in experiential terms. Not even as something "unknown" or "beyond description." It's equivalent to the "world outside experience" which the immaterialist derides others for (supposedly) supposing.

The unknown and mystery only function when there is something which might be known. In either case, their significance is defined the the experientially thing to meaning which someone is missing out on, whether that be how some part of the world works, what another person is feeling, what happened in the past, what's going to happen in the future or even what's occurring in the present.

If there to be something which cannot be known, which is outside all possible experience, then there cannot be anything of significance. There is really nothing anyone is missing out on. You are caught proposing this thing which is not of experience and has no impact on anyone's life. Such "mystery" is nothing more than an appeal that we are explained by something outside our experience, as if we were defined by something beyond what's experientially significant. — TheWillowOfDarkness

What is this other than the insistence that, to the extent I can allow anything to mean anything, it must mean something to me and so on my terms? If you have no sympathy for that all-seeing impulse, then the appeal of this falls away.

I think the ethic of explanation is interesting. There is a tendency for a certain kind of mind to become upset, even enraged, at the idea that there is something that cannot be explained, and more than this, explained to them. The need to see others as within one's grasp just as surely as oneself is has ties to the deep need to dominate others. I'm not saying this is what drives your dissatisfaction personally: only that you are participating at least in some respect in a tradition fueled by this drive. Whatever criticisms are made up after the fact to support this libidinal dissatisfaction (all who don't allow my eyes to be everywhere are just crypto-magicians, and retrogrades to boot, and so on), it does not answer the fundamental question: 'why do I seek to explain everything? Why am I so disturbed, and upset, at the notion that this cannot be? And why do I take it as an a priori working assumption that everything is, in principle, already amenable to the inquiry of my mind?

Because I think it's utterly ridiculous - and I'm not just being polemic, I really find it completely incredulous - that when we can show the grounds for something like self-feeling, when we not only can provide accounts for, but actually test the ways in which the sense of self is a variable, differential production (which doesn't, by the way, make it artifice - all of reality is a production), that one can just throw one's hands up in the air, ignore the plethora of arguments for and evidence of, and just hearken back to some romantic ideal of the self as a free-floating affective ephemera (and really, what exactly is wrong with this characterization? How is it 'just' rhetorical bluster? Tell why you don't think this). — StreetlightX

But I've never claimed it wasn't a 'production,' whatever that might mean. My claim was simply that people are separated in such a way as not to brook, ultimately, complete understanding of one another, and a kind of soft, empirical solipsism prevails, because there is no universal place in which everything comes together and no one world that can be explained by a single field of interacting mechanisms. There are, in other words, gaps that can't be filled. Whether consciousness is a 'production' or not is a separate issue from this: one might think it is, or is not. I tend to think it is, but in such a way that eludes understanding – not for mystical or brute reasons, but for quite principled ones I've tried to outline here. If you think about the notion that we know ourselves in the same way as we know others, really think about it, I'm not sure how you'll be able to maintain it with intellectual honesty. For one thing, if it were true, it'd sure be hard to tell which one of these external things we were!

I also think you're overvaluing the epistemic import of science, but maybe that would take us too far afield.

As far as I take it, the charge that 'oh you just don't like mystery' is literally no different to what proponents of UFOs, ghosts and shamanism would say. It's the perpetual fallback of every mystic and peddler of crystal healing from time immemorial and sides with an ideology of ignorance that both ethically and politically compromised. I mean OK, this sounds harsh - it is harsh - but that's just honestly the level at which I see these sorts of claims about subjectivity and self-consciousness operating. Perhaps we're just ships in the night, perhaps you think this is incredulous, but I guess at some point the spade's just turned. — StreetlightX

So, am I right in characterizing your position as something like the following:

-Your position evokes some notion of mystery

-People who believe in UFOs and shamanism invoke some notion of mystery

-Therefore, your position is like positions (such as believing in UFOs and shamanism) to a significant enough extent that it is worth dismissing out of hand on pre-rational grounds, these grounds presumably being something like, 'do not brook what does not allow of explanation (possibly on some circumscribed ground within my philosophical school)?'

If this is not a fair characterization, what is wrong with it? If it is, in what way is 'oh you just don't like mystery' not a completely fair assessment of it?

I'm not sure that, even if I were to fall on your rhetorical sword, I'd be that offended – there are worse epithets than 'shaman,' and I've never been much of a 'true believer' in the sort of implicit positivism that seems to be the underlying appeal here. And I don't feel the sting of the moral/political charges that come with it either – the names don't hurt me, because I don't in my heart of hearts actually believe I'm guilty of anything untoward or unenlightened. If you do, then okay: I don't begrudge the believers their own beliefs, but only ask that they leave me alone in unbelief.

Okay, let's go ahead with the Derrida, 'Voice' translation preferred. Let's give a little time for everyone interested to get their hands on a copy. I think I will be able to secure a copy on Saturday or Sunday, at which point I'll skim through and get a feel for the structure, to see how we might divide up the reading.

So, any position that denies we do or can know everything is woo?

An apologia for woo if there ever was one. — StreetlightX

How so?

Solipsism in this empirical form (as opposed to the Ayer/Wittgenstein transcendental form), if you like, just the admission that not all things are amenable to or discoverable by oneself: to complain that the gaps then can't be closed once you understand this is only to complain that there are other people. Nothing guarantees that everything is on level ground, and everything is discoverable to everything else on a single immanent playing field. The materialist might want to believe this, but their want is just that.

The appeal to magical souls and zero-dimensional beings is of course just rhetorical bluster. I think the real underlying impetus is the refusal to accept any idea of permanent closure or mystery, which must be equivalent to some deity or dualism so long as you're a materialist. But if you're not, this need not bother you, and you can indeed see the world as more complex than the materialist can ever allow, by recognizing that not even its notion as a common 'world' holds together in the first place. The insistence that we must know others in the same way as we know ourselves then just amounts to an insistence that there are not more things than are contained in our philosophy.

As for the question of why it should be that experiences amount to self-consciousness: again all feeling is a feeling of oneself. So long as the feeling is localized somewhere, it must be so phenomenologically: and thus all feeling is feeling as within that locality (and not in an abstract 'somewhere'). To insist that one has to retrospectively use these experiences to see oneself as a distant object is just to insist that the only experience is experience of something transcendent, which is belied by the fact that, as we've already established, all such experiences take place in a pre-intentional sensory medium.

So of course young children have experiences, but that those experiences are 'of themselves' is precisely what's in question: It is precisely the self 'in' those experiences which are differentially engendered though development. — StreetlightX

Again, only if you assume the only way to be self-conscious is through introspection, of oneself as transcendent object.

Moreover, one you 'start' with solipsism, there's no getting 'out': you can't work from the 'inside-out' in the outside's already 'in'. — StreetlightX

I think the lack of escape form solipsism is a lived reality, though, and is mandated if you are serious about there being other people. Some sympathy for solipsism is inseparable from the belief in other minds: those who have most scorned solipsism traditionally have also been those who have taken other people least seriously.

there is no room for a categorical wedge between the conscious awareness of hunger and our reasons for eating. — Baden

This is a good way of putting it, and I'll add to the criticism above about a feeling-based account being incapable of thought: it's only passions that can possibly provide reasons, and thus allow for thinking (reasoning). Passions compel, which doesn't move the organism in the way gravity moves a stone, since the stone can't be compelled to do anything (it just does what it does), and thus has no reasons to do anything. Reasons are first and foremost so because in deliberation they are compelling: they are persuasive, the more viscerally the more they directly threaten us hedonically.

So a fully passionless being (a classical angel, say) has no reason to do anything, and so doesn't act except as an instrument of another's will.

It looks like Quine & Derrida are the most popular choices. Of the folks who could go either way, is there a preference?

Do you equate there coming to be a self-other distinction with someone realizing there is such a distinction? Because the argument doesn't make sense without this equation: after all, these 'vitality affects' you talk about are initially differentiated between self and other, just not within the confines of one individual's experience. That is, they don't all meld together in one big pot: if you hit one person, the other doesn't feel it.

Children may not have a notion of self versus other, or be conscious of the distinction between themselves and others, but this doesn't mean they aren't self-conscious before they're other-conscious. Young children are roughly solipsists, in the strong sense that they have experiences of themselves, and don't distinguish between this and experience of another precisely because their own experience encompasses everything for them: there is no notion that there could be any such thing outside of them until a theory of mind begins to develop as the result of socialization.

In other words, self-feeling only requires sentience; other-feeling requires socialization, which is predicated on sentience. The latter is derivative, and awareness of others always arises out of solipsism, not vice-versa (and I would argue, this process is extremely incomplete and shaky, such that large traces of solipsism remain even in the adult human – people are literally incapable of experiencing others as they do themselves).

And so this:

Importantly, these vitality effects do not find their locus in a 'self' but are simply experienced 'as such':

Taken one way is right (the infant doesn't make the distinction themselves, thinking that an experience is happening to them as opposed to someone else), but this doesn't serve your purpose, because this realization is not what's at issue. But taken another way, it's clearly wrong, since these experiences obviously aren't just 'experienced as such,' but are localized to particular bodies and do not bleed into each other. And it's this stronger false sense you would need to establish any interesting thesis.

Again, this cannot make sense unless you assume the self is a social construction and that having a self = coming to the realization of the self-other distinction as the result of being socialized. But this is exactly what is at issue.

OH BABY

To clarify, the slide from introspection to self-consciousness in the OP, while fallacious, is not accidental in that it is the only model of self-consciousness possible once you've accepted that the only kind of consciousness is of something exterior. What the OP sees as a kind of discovery is therefore only a working out of prejudices. One of the primary critiques of intentionality is precisely that it can only model self-consciousness as reflexivity or introspection, and that it must see our own experiences as little things that we must view from a distance, like any external object.

It's not 'subjectivity' that's the issue - it's the matter of it's being accounted for. And yeah, any philosophy that posits subjectivity as brute immediacy or whathaveyou is immediate grounds for its dismissal. — StreetlightX

I realize this, but thank you for admitting it. Generally speaking there are a number of pairs of checkboxes that you have to check one side of to be a real continental philosopher, and none of these so far as I can tell are supported by anything other than vague Zeitgeist. I think that this thread, insofar as it serves only as a signal of your position on that divide (having the correct opinion – I mean come on, what could be more of a dogwhistle cliché than quoting 'outside' like that) isn't conducive to discussion, and was not really created to have any discussion. So there it stays.

The 'myth of the given', to use Sellars's term, still haunts all our discourse on consciousness. — StreetlightX

It haunts our discussions mainly as something to accuse one's opponent of, in order to seem less like someone who would disagree with the sort of line you'r backing. Saying someone 'falls prey' to the myth of the given is like calling someone a racist – debate over. I've even seen it applied retrospectively to ancient philosophers. It's like the notion that a philosophy is in any way subjectivistic is immediate grounds for its dismissal.

Who would disagree with anything said in the OP of this topic in even a vaguely continental camp? Maybe some fringe analytics who no one take seriously and are crypto-dualists might. Even the vague nothing appeal to mirror neurons has become standard by this point, and the notion that this is supposed to be a discussion about biology isn't much of a cover.

groan

To you, it appears to be insane, because you haven't taken the time to consider the reality of these issues. — Metaphysician Undercover

Actually, it appears to me to be insane because it is.

I know with certainty that it is not hunger which compels me to eat. — Metaphysician Undercover

Since, as I pointed out to John, hunger only kicks in when the mechanism which compels us to eat when we should eat, fails to do so — Metaphysician Undercover

This is insane.

What do you think is particularly convincing in Henry's work that makes you think it has no directed intentionality? — Marty

This is not something that you need any philosopher's work to see. It's just pointing out that any purportedly intentional experiences are themselves composed of a non-intentional substrate (this much even Husserl admits), and that a good deal of them, not only every day in waking life but pretty much all of them at the start of life, do not have any intentional object whatsoever at which they're directed. The non-intentional is prior to the intentional and survives without it – and, if I am right, the 'intentional' is only the purportedly intentional in the end.

I'm not sure how you can have no understanding of hunger if it's affecting you — Marty

The feeling itself tells you nothing about how it arises, how it will go away, what controls it, what effects it has on anything, or even whether there is anything. What it does do is enforce a kind of compulsion on the one suffering it, and enough compulsions in enough directions can develop into a sort of 'world' that pieces together the various pathways that these compulsions can move along. If I am right, this never amounts to anything like intentionality, despite what philosophers have traditionally believes.

You need not understand at all what the source of or cure of your suffering is, just because the suffering affects you.

Do you, when you feel hunger, not feel the contractions of your muscles near your stomach? — Marty

No, you feel hunger. Nothing about suffering a muscle contraction will let you know that you have muscles. Feelings are not information about the objects felt, nor the objects feeling.

How does an adult understand that hunger requires an outside source to satiate it, without feeling hungry? He can't in advance search for something that he has no understanding of. The understanding would have to come first, and then once he understands his hunger, he begins to go outside to search for what can stop it. — Marty

It is exactly the opposite. A hungry child has no understanding whatsoever of its hunger or how to satiate it. All it has are instinctual compulsions that act in response to the hunger. It's only once these satiations take on regular patterns that 'objects' begin to come to the fore as capable of satiating that hunger. Food is itself an objectification of hunger, just as physical objects generally are a kind of objectification of felt spatial possibilities.

It's only recently that we're coming round to the understanding that such conceptions are entirely inadequate to the complexity of the world. And even then we have a long way to go. That such a prodigious philosopher as Henry could simply transpose such an ancient mythologeme into phenomenology and declare it 'radical' attests to that, I think. — StreetlightX

Well, all I can say is I feel the same way. There is absolutely nothing radical or new in what you are talking about. It is old hat in the oldest sense of hat. It was in Aristotle, it was in Ryle. Ask yourself this: if what you think is so radical, why does everyone agree with you? Why is everyone tripping over themselves to say things like the title of your OP, and why is any mention of Henry in a serious context made in order to dismiss him as vociferously as possible? Think about the current intellectual landscape and where you stand in it, honestly. Then trace it backward.

I think much of the confusion hinges on the fact that while I am talking about monism and the primacy of exteriority and transcendence, you are talking about theology, which you are so scared of being accused of that you are unwilling to engage with the subject being spoken of.

any reductionist program where something is meant to be sovereign over itself without remainder — StreetlightX

I'm not sure who you're supposed to be criticizing here, me personally or the general Henrian program that uses the term auto-affection, but in either case this is a profound, profound misunderstanding. Whatever the conclusion ultimately is, you need to understand that this is not a real or cogent criticism, and that you don't have the intellectual privilege of this cursory dismissal. Understand that while you have a prerogative to disagree, you are not doing so in an informed way.

Also, I don't share Henry's Christianity, but it's not exactly a traditional onto-theological take on divinity, and he's gotten in trouble with the Christian community because of it. It's also worth noting that Henry's own Christianity, though I don't agree with it, is so opposed to the idea presented in your quote that only a total ignorance of the position could have caused you to say that. A huge portion of the Henrian theological project is the notion of passivity and having to freely receive oneself from an outside, which Henry associates with the Holy Spirit. And this is a Christian idea that your trite version of the history of phil. will not countenance.

Hunger still affects the body, and is produced via the body which is outwardly connected with the world. — Marty

If we're looking 'from the inside,' then no: the point that hunger doesn't tell us anything about any objects at all, not even our own bodies, prevents it from showing us the body as in any way outwardly connected with the world. It might ultimately be so connected in fact, but the hunger itself does not help us understand this.

All suffering seems to be bodily, which means it's an experience of being-in-the-world, an intentional consciousness. — Marty

The point is that hunger is not intentional. It has a sort of internal telos to it, but that telos doesn't reach out toward anything else. An adult might understand that hunger requires an outside source to satiate it and so go looking for it: but hunger on its own does not help with this, it only compels the organism to act in certain ways, and those ways get more complicated as the organism becomes more intelligent.

If ultimately there is no difference in kind from the barest capability of sensation and the fully developed human, then even in the latter case one will not actually be looking for any sort of object to feed the hunger: the hunger will still be pushing within itself for certain actions to be taken for no reason, but some of that movement will have been projected into a sort of simulacrum-world, where part of the pathos gets parsed as 'hamburger,' leading to the false picture of intentionality.

You are correct in that we seem to eat primarily to get rid of an uncomfortable notification — darthbarracuda

Just to clarify on this point – an important thing to note here is that hunger is not a notification in the sense of providing the organism with information. The organism learns nothing about the objective state of their body from being hungry per se (that is, not unless they are prior aware of some theory of objective hunger and take this sensation merely as an indicator of some separate state), nor what needs to be done to recognize this. Hunger is not a signaling of any state of the body whatsoever to the organism, who need know nothing objective about its own body at all in order to be hungry. Possibly it learns something that, for a human with speech powers, might be expressible with 'I'm hungry' while the sensation persists. But this could only be construed as a report of a feeling, not an objective state (thus it would be true even if one were 'objectively full,' but one's body were thrown out of whack to be hungry even when the stomach was full and no energy was needed).

Hunger simply compels us to act in a certain way like a whip does – we don't, by being hungry or following this compulsion, learn anything about the mechanisms affecting us, or their manner of resolution, or the objective effect we have on food or our own body by eating.

To interject here, sometimes people eat because they enjoy eating, or because they're bored. You are correct in that we seem to eat primarily to get rid of an uncomfortable notification; indeed without this uncomfortable notification the only thing that would compel us to eat would be an understanding of biological functions paired with a general desire to continue to exist.

In such cases, the eating is still compelled by an appetite of some sort: the feeling of hunger is only an example, and not of intrinsic interest.

I'n not going to reply to this, because I don't think it matters. The point was just that if you stop something from feeling hunger, it can die as a result, vitiating the (IMO absurd) claim that hunger doesn't compel eating. I have no desire to engage with your elaborate whatever-it-is.

OK, but isn't the light, colour, and contour something external? So isn't this "feeling of light", an awareness of something external? — Metaphysician Undercover

No.

As I explained, I don't think it is hunger which compels one to eat. — Metaphysician Undercover

How am I even supposed to respond to this?

You can starve or overfeed-to-death an organism by messing with the biochemical processes that make it feel appropriate hunger and satiation.

Eh, I'm of course exactly of the opposite mind, both historically and philosophically: the notion of auto-affection has been the theological thread that philosophy has had to untangle for thousands of years, and it's only recently we've managed to really think past it in a way most welcome. I think you'd very much enjoy something like Voice and Phenomena, by the way (re: the reading group), if only because it makes this point exactly with respect to Husserl - even if you would perhaps vehemently disagree with it. — StreetlightX

Auto-affection has not had any real mainstream proponents aside from, basically, Descartes, and maybe you can find echoes of it in Husserl's self-conscious revival of the Cartesian spirit (and as he notes, Descartes' treatment of it is not quite right, it's more of an inkling – I think his thoughts were more or less a pale reflection of several ancient philosophers' who have not received any mainstream attention). The idea that we are only now coming to think past it makes no sense to me: rather, what you're saying here, about the outside being prior to the inside, has always been the direction of Western philosophy, so I don't see in it anything new at all, only a culmination of previous, very old, prejudices. The self and experience generally has always appeared as a problem and outrage for philosophy, and its tendency toward it has always been flight, combined with a longing sense that some mystery has been overlooked or misunderstood.

To that end, seeing the self as just another outside object, and affirming that looking outward happens prior to feeling inward, is congenial to the project. Of course in this direction we end up with neither a self nor others, but just more rocks, albeit some that, as Lingins pretends, we can animate analogically with sensory powers, as if our eyeballs floated out in the middle of nowhere, then saw two bodies and noticed a regularity between them.

The problem is of course that we don't just see external things at all to begin with: they are formed only as a coagulation of feelings, and we only come to individuate them insofar as we understand how that affect us, and so other people arise from a common pathetic source, and not as things that we must first see as rocks and then imbue with life force as we notice that they move like another kind of rock (our body, which we look at from the outside out, rather than the inside out).

In any case, my interest was how the account offered nicely links up to a testable, scientific thesis. — StreetlightX

There is not any account of other minds I'm aware of that's amenable to science in any way, and I'm not sure how this one is different. Any test I could imagine just piggybacks on preexisting metaphysical positions that beg the question. How do we know which observed behaviors are conscious?