fooloso4:
My theoretical mill is idle (pun on the original meaning or theoria not intended but apt). A pile of names does not obviate differences. You believe in a form of universalism, but I have no knowledge or experience of a universal reality that underlies our thoughts and beliefs. I think it may be that the universal is not a transcendence of thought and belief but rather is itself a matter of thought and belief. Rather than being what is revealed in epoche, it is, rather, something that fails to be bracketed and is thus, so to speak, ushered in the back door, introduced and discovered as if it were there all along.
That is what I have found to be a position held by most who take up these matters. Failed to be bracketed is what I believe to be the pragmatic underpinning that settles in childhood and regularly encouraged in society. I am a conceptual being, but my concepts are dynamic residua of a lived life of assimilating language and culture, and these comprise material episodes of problem solving. This is the unbracketed of the real: pragmatic dynamics reified by familiarity and habit, what Dewey calls consummatory experiences aggregated as, as what...as doxastic foundations implicit in conscious events (how does belief get fixed? Peirce wrote well on this in his Fixity of Belief).
But given this admission, the question of being as such endures as one inspired by something Other entirely. This is not going to set well with you or others, I know: It is through value that this Other is intimated. The affirmation that there is a transcendental ego is not confirmed in an analysis of consciousness and its structures. It is affirmed in value; in the, e.g., tortured occasion of a single person is taken up in a single agency of experiencing the world (and of what is the world "made" if not the collective material experiences like this? Dewey is right on this. See his Experience and Nature and Art as Experience). This is another argument that takes time to bring forth. Suffice it here to say, the presence of experience in value is strongly supportive in affirming the transcendence of the ego, and it is of a nature that is prohibitive of a morally stand alone world. If you like I can produce this argument.
I do not know what you mean by the transcendence that sits before you on the other side. There is a great deal of disagreement as to the status of objects independent of consciousness for Husserl. If an object “sits on the other side” it is out of bounds. We can bracket the question of its existence, but once it is taken up or considered, it becomes an object of consciousness.
And whatever manner theory makes of the object, it remains there, something that, while cannot be conceived apart from the language and logic that that behold it, and are part and parcel of it, remains ineffably as presence. This is the same argument as your first I believe, that says that epoche cannot bracket what is ushered int eh back door, which is the bedrock of concepts that one cannot escape and remain a perceiving agent. I simply say, notwithstanding; for even if it is conceded that the object before me is constructed of my own perceptual presence, the question then goes to the
presence of perception. My take on this is that all that sits before the my perceiving eyes, is, neti neti, rendered transcendental. One can explain this away with the points you make above, but as points, they are ready to hand. Heidegger knew not what to do with presence at hand. It is, as Rorty once put it, purely ineffable. And I, with emphasis, add: value is presence at hand. That spear in my kidney is not ready to hand; it is a given.
I am glad to have provided you with the opportunity to use that quote, but if you introduce “Christian sin” how are you going to ignore Paul?
By not asking about Christian sin in the context of what Paul says. I am asking a question about what Paul
really is talking about, and assuming the analysis does not stop with Paul, but goes deeper. Paul begs the question, in other words: Paul says sin is estrangement from God (I think that 's what Augustine says. Oh well), I ask, what do you mean by estrangement? And God? and please, unpack 'sin' for me in material terms. What are good examples? Tell me how a sin is committed vis a vis a free soul; can you defend freedom in non contradictory way? And so on.
It is about what is most valued by his followers, but that is not what is most valued by others.
But the "what" of it of which I speak is value as such, as it reveals itself as a given in experience. Not how others, through their interpretative orientation take it as.
I would say that anyone who has been in a loving relationship that endures knows that this is not true. We are not always happy with the relationship, with the other person, or even with ourselves. Perhaps those who think of love as happiness are more prone to ending relationships when things get bad. To love is to commit and this does not always bring happiness. Traditional marriage vows are a recognition of this. There are, of course, different objects and modes of love and happiness. The happiness of a child can turn in an instant to despair.
Of course, I agree. But i don't take love or happiness as they are presented in complex interpretative environments. Environments where commitment, fidelity, selflessness and so on are mixed together. I take them in their non contingent presence: this elation, this valuative good, this quality there, like the saltiness of a cracker or air hunger while drowning; these can all be contextualized, considered in a body of contingent extensions. But AS a powerful feature of the Being there of a situation, indeed, a feature that does not allow for, if you will, paradigmatic containment and is unambiguosly the most salient part of any experience, love, happiness, pain, misery, and so on, these are,like consciousness, like Being, to be examined for what they are among the things themselves. They are not part of the interpretative context; they are a givens.
think you overstate the case. While there is no way in which we can definitively determine an author’s intent and whatever is intended may be opaque even to the author, the question of what an author means by X stands side by side with the question of what X means. An author may be a useful guide for helping us determine what it means to be in the world. Heidegger’s text is not merely a “material condition before you”; whatever it is you think he is saying influences both what you understand the question to be and how you answer it. If one holds, as I do, that the philosophers are our teachers, then we have something to learn from their questions and answers, and so, if we are to learn from them we must attend to what it is we think they mean.
I also agree here, and the extent that the author can clarify and explain in ways that are useful, s/he is relevant. But Foucault, thinking in Heidegger's shadow, said we are ventriloquized by history, he meant that the streams of words and meanings run through us and there is no genuine "author" apart from this. So where is Heidegger beyond this? (Of course, I think there is something oin the agency behind Heidegger, but this is not Heidegger, I imagine.)
Of course, but if we ignore the question of what they are saying, of what they mean, of what they are pointing to, there can be little or no heuristic value.
I would never ignore what what said. I just ignore--when I am studying this issue, that problem, interpreting some thorny mess---who said it.
