Common sense is constituted of gestalts. It is shared gestalts that transmit being across scales. If I experience some entity (of whatever kind), with my conceptual mind, participating body, and feeling viscera, as a unity, I become a unity in experiencing it fully. In experiencing the entity’s objective unity as real, I experience my own … Continue reading On the subject of gestalts
Since 2020, and expecially since October 7th, 2023, I have been feeling a level of betrayal and grief I’ve never experienced before. Something vast and horrible is happening, but those perpetrating it — as always — see themselves as saving the world. I just had what I think is a pretty eloquent outburst on Slack, … Continue reading Esoteric ranting at work
From Dan Zahavi’s Husserl’s Phenomenology, paydirt: The relation between the transcendental subject and the empirical subject is not a relation between two different subjects, but between two different self-apprehensions, a primary and a secondary. The transcendental subject is the subject in its primary constitutive function. The empirical subject is the same subject, but now apprehended … Continue reading Transcendental subject versus psychological subject
For the last couple of months I have been re-grounding myself in Husserl’s phenomenology. The work I am interested in doing is phenomenological, but it is not, itself, phenomenology. By returning to Husserl, I hope to arrive at the point of departure for my project. I am interested in approaching philosophy as a design discipline, … Continue reading Remedial phenomenology
(This is another unpublished post from September 2023, written while I was studying Husserl. I think I just lost steam and forgot to finish it. It is still unfinished, but I think it is good enough and complete enough to publish as a work in progress. It has only been a few months but the … Continue reading New working vocabulary
I am finally getting around to reading Husserl’s Ideas. I should have read this long, long ago. He already developed the language I’ve needed to say what I most need to say. One important capability of phenomenology — in my opinion, the most important capability — is this: a phenomenological attitude permits us to port … Continue reading First principles last
Reading postphenomenology, I’ve become enamoured with the notion of postexistentialism. Why not? If existentialism developed out of phenomenology, why shouldn’t postexistentialism develop from postphenomenology? Each phenomenology is the personal property of a single genius: It isn’t too hard to see Ihde as the Posthusserl. Reading What Things Do, Verbeek seems to be taking things (so … Continue reading Postexistentialism?
From Tim Morton’s Hyperobjects: The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory spearheaded by Bohr holds that though quantum theory is a powerfully accurate heuristic tool, peering underneath this tool to see what kind of reality might underlie it would be absurd because quantum phenomena are “irreducibly inaccessible to us.” “Powerfully accurate heuristic tool” jumps out of … Continue reading Eureka
Wow, this post really sprawled out. It hits a lot of my enduring interests. I’m not sure it is suitable for reading. It might just be a personal journal entry written to myself. Feel free to eavesdrop if you wish, but I cannot promise it will make sense or yield any value. * I listened … Continue reading Slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notions of interpersonal being
Two details from a passage in Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man have stayed with me over the years. My friendship with one now dead arose in an incident that may be described, if you will, as a broken-off conversation. The date is Easter 1914. Some men from different European peoples had met in an undefined presentiment of … Continue reading A Jew trapped in a Gentile’s biography
The density of crucial insights in the passage below is staggering… Consciousness of being affected by history is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation is, however, always a task of peculiar difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence … Continue reading Still stuck! (Gadamer)
Gadamer, from the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method: This fundamental methodical approach avoids implying any metaphysical conclusions. In subsequent publications, especially in my research reports “Hermeneutics and Historicism” and “The Phenomenological Movement” (in Philosophical Hermeneutics), I have recorded my acceptance of Kant’s conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason: I regard … Continue reading More scaffolding
Think about these statements: “Bear with me.” “Please hear me out.” “It will all make sense in the end.” Why are these requests necessary? When are they made? To what feeling in the listener is the speaker responding? What kind of appeal is being made? Do we owe it to another to give him a … Continue reading Christian cred
Bernstein: … the notion of dialogue has been present from the very beginning of Gadamer’s discussion of play as the “clue to ontological explanation.” When one enters into a dialogue with another person and then is carried further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back … Continue reading Primacy of dialogue
I’ve been reading John Dewey in the morning. Last weekend I finished Experience and Education and started Freedom and Culture. At night I’m reading Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis. It is one of the best-written popular philosophy/science books I’ve read. Haight knows how to make his ideas accessible without the long-windedness and stiff condescension that usually … Continue reading Reading
The essence of morality (in its relationship to phenomenological philosophy) from Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. But the presentation and the development of the notions employed [in Totality and Infinity] owe everything to the phenomenological method. Intentional analysis is the search for the concrete. Notions held under the direct gaze of the thought that defines them … Continue reading There it is
Your world stands on your immediate experience in the same way that a tree stands on its trunk. * From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 54: What, at bottom, is the whole of modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes – and indeed rather in spite of him than on the basis of his precedent – all … Continue reading Nietzsche on anatta
I finally finished Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology late last night. Thinkers like Kant, Guenon, Hursserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Bernstein and (to some extent) Voegelin tend to clarify and articulate things I’ve already tacitly practically grasped. Reading them helps me account for myself to others. (This is important especially for work. I … Continue reading Reading plans
Practice precedes theory. Practice is wordlessly active. Theory is the verbal ensurfacing of practice. Hermeneutics is the practice of performing the ensurfacing practice in reverse (most obvious when performed in the intellectual realm). It is the reconsititution of wordless intellectual practice guided by the theoretical content, treated as artifact, but not as the essential content … Continue reading Practice precedes theory
(A semi-poeticization of Husserl) It is too easy to confuse our biological anatomy with our spiritual anatomy, to confuse the physical site in the body where the spiritual intercepts kinesis (the body experienced from the inside). Our minds are accustomed to reflect on a world of particulars and objects, and spiritual entities defy comprehension in … Continue reading Spiritual anatomy lesson