A Question of Truth?

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Burning ghost
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Re: A Question of Truth?

Post by Burning ghost »

Sounds like convenient ambiguity for radicalism ... that is how it is used.
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Judaka
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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I think one thing which is continually misunderstood in philosophy is that the truth is so often irrelevant. Often times, truth doesn't even really exist. The reason being that we don't just have a truth, we also have interpretation, application, implementation, underlying values and such things that go into account. The extent to which a truth or "generalised truth" can be distorted using these tools is rather extraordinary and it does beg the question, what is it that influences all of these things and can you not describe that thing as power? Causality in social circumstances is made nearly redundant, the importance of a truth and where we look for truth ranges based on these things, the practical implications of the truth are defined by it.

Even simple things like generally accepted facts rely on language which are subject to the same requirements, words must be interpreted, applied, used in certain ways and are founded upon ideals such as many terms today like "terrorism", a label often used to denounce groups despite the fact that many less influential countries detest those labels, such as what happened with Gaddafi. Even words like "birds" and fly" and "truth" and every word, so words also have power but their use is not explicitly based on something we can rely upon - there's elements of subjectivity too and can we not describe the things which determine important terms and words as power?

I don't agree with post-modernism which takes it one step too far for me but you do need to recognise the role of subjectivity in society. It's not nearly as limited as many people here seem to think.
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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Hereandnow -

Have you read Levi-Strauss? It looks like Foucault took his ideas applied them to a select topic of interested and watered it down to fill more pages. Foucault's "style" is no style at all. He doesn't write anything with any substance. It is waffle. Neither a historical, anthropological, psychological, linguistic or philosophical piece. It is some pieces of information thrown together surrounded in opinions and a fictional narrative - I say fictional because it is mostly invention interspersed with conveniently selected historical snippets with no attention paid to counter positions.

I'll tell you how he justifies all this. In his "Conclusion" he attempts to make out that his "fiction" is a "truth", and it is in part, but he makes no attempt to say this outright because he probably doesn't want to refer the reader to people who presented these areas before him.

I should add I read everything with brute force. I wish to ridicule it and tear it apart, I am merciless. I respect what is written once I've torn into as best I can and then come back at it with optimistic hope. Foucault leaves me wanting, and maybe when I read another of his books he'll reveal something to me, or you will by way of your defense of him? Either way, to present I am not impressed because I have found nothing original in his work other than some bizarre attempt, and failure, to replicate something like what Nietzsche wrote - his biggest failure is likely because rather than write true to himself he's clearly attempted to take on the mantel of Nietzsche for the modern age. He was not up to the task, and I would say the whole 20th century of philosophy has been about trying to reconcile the stark and vicious attack of Nietzsche on human thought and philosophy in general.

Of course this is just my opinion of him. It is just as valuable as his words because I've provided as much information as he has to back up my opinion. I lambast because there is a lot of tell and no showing. Where he does he succeeds as a fictional writer, but fails as a scholar/historian.
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Re: A Question of Truth?

Post by Hereandnow »

Burning Ghost:
I should add I read everything with brute force. I wish to ridicule it and tear it apart, I am merciless.
Really? Reading everything with brute force is not so good, Burning Ghost. You should read with the willingness to understand. It takes patience. What good is tearing something down if you have't given it its due?

I can take the matter to the writing itself. I will not make Foucault easy or amenable to calls for simple clarity. But who wants this? No fun at all! A patient mind waits for understanding, and this is the only way to penetrate texts like Foucault's.

I'll look at Archaeology of Knowledge, which I have here in PDF. It's rather typical of his style, and you can tell me where he goes wrong.
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Burning ghost
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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What good is it? It stops you from falling prey to ideologies.

On my book shelf his book is placed between history and mythology.
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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Burning Ghost:
What good is it? It stops you from falling prey to ideologies.

On my book shelf his book is placed between history and mythology.
Right. But have you actually and seriously gone into a text? That is the question. Consider this passage from The Archaeology of Knowledge, one of my favorites. Apologies for the reading (but, you know, that is what philosophy is about):

There are statements, for example, that are quite obviously concerned — and have been from a date that is easy
enough to determine — with political economy, or biology, or psychopathology; there are others that equally obviously
belong to those age-old continuities known as grammar or medicine. But what are these unities? How can we say that
the analysis of headaches carried out by Willis or Charcot belong to the same order of discourse? That Petty's inventions
are in continuity with Neumann's econometry? That the analysis of judge-ment by the Port-Royal grammarians belongs
to the same domain as

the discovery of vowel gradations in the Indo-European languages? What, in fact, are medicine, grammar, or political
economy? Are they merely a retrospective regrouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to
their own past? Are they forms that have become established once and for all and have gone on developing through
time? Do they conceal other unities? And what sort of links can validly be recognized between all these statements that
form, in such a familiar and insistent way, such an enigmatic mass?
First hypothesis — and the one that, at first sight, struck me as being the most likely and the most easily proved:
statements different in form, and dispersed in time, form a group if they refer to one and the same object. Thus,
statements belonging to psychopathology all seem to refer to an object that emerges in various ways in individual or
social experience and which may be called madness. But I soon realized that the unity of the object 'madness' does not
enable one to individualize a group of statements, and to establish between them a relation that is both constant and
describable. There are two reasons for this. It would certainly be a mistake to try to discover what could have been said
of madness at a particular time by interrogating the being of madness itself, its secret content, its silent, self-enclosed
truth; mental illness was constituted by all that was said in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it,
explained it, traced its developments, indicated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by
articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own. Moreover, this group of statements is far from
referring to a single object, formed once and for all, and to preserving it indefinitely as its horizon of inexhaustible
ideality; the object presented as their correlative by medical statements of the seventeenth or eighteenth century is not
identical with the object that emerges in legal sentences or police action;


Here is how I handle this passage:

One has to think here that our systems of understanding our world may be presented as whole and unified. This is how we "know" things. I take this to be something of a profound truth when it comes to the matter of basic questions, that is philosophical questions. This is one post modern message: our words never touch their realities. It is a kind of Kantian legacy to look at thinking in the world and see that our knowing the thing is a composite of intuition and concepts. Foucault is, along with everyone in Continental thinking, working in the shadow of this single idea: our knowledge is made, not discovered, but made. What Foucault does is show us how knowledge comes apart upon close inspection. We receive knowledge as wholes written in texts and lectured about under these grand encompassing rubrics, but take these apart, look at how our concepts fail to present the same coherence at a deeper level, this is what Foucault is about. This naming and dividing that systematizes knowledge in various fields: We do this, and we have a long history of doing this, and this history presents knowledge as duly systematized. But are there really systems of thought in have unity at all? Or are we just saying they do? See how he denies mental illness it "secret self" as if there were such a thing in reality! No,mental illness was made, and not just at the "hand" of conceptualizers in their professions. He further shows how madness as a unifying concept appears in a variety of contexts,which further ambiguates what is supposed to be the core of understanding madness. mental pathologies have different dividing and enclosing discourses, in legal language for example.

The whole book is like this, and it is tedious if you don't sit with it with an effort to enjoy his thinking. He is absolutely brilliant. And after you are done, you see why he is difficult to classify. One the one hand, he does what philosophers are supposed to do: analyze our understanding of the world. On the other, it is postmodern, that is, it takes language and thought and shows how it falters in coherence and representation. This is important because we need to see how poorly we understand in order to change.
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Burning ghost
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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I'll read later.

It would've made more sense to pick a section from the text I've actually read I'd have thought?
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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Before I read how you read that I'll give my take (one given out of context with the larger part of the text, which is to the point of what many post-modernist's chose to obsess over in regard to Husserlian phenomenology - the instigator being Heidegger.)

So, he says ... Words as words are different to concepts. Over time through communication and usage words changes in how they are applied and the concepts shift around too; be this through political use, technical use, or colloquial usage. Those concepts and ideas that don't hold fast in the wider picture of human activity are either discarded or reconstructed so as to be useful for communicative purposes.

It is hardly something that cuts to the core of things for me. Anyway, I'll read your reply and contrast ...

note: I am also capable of rereading something and approaching it as if it means something more than my first perusal. I attack it and then defend it. I don't approach things with open arms; I've been duped by texted too many times in the past.
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Burning ghost
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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Just read what you wrote ... well I got bored to be honest and stopped. I think this is a case of first coming across age old ideas by reading Foucault first. My point is he says very little that is fresh, and what you've read into his work above has been said, perhaps several times before and in a more articulate and precise manner.

He is a scholar playing at philosophy. Someone too lazy to study language and instead simply pluck out convenient nuances of language to fit his purposes of looking intellectual. There is no depth to his work, other than some interesting historical references here and there (and that is the only reason I could bear reading his work. If he'd left out his conjecture he'd have likely gone on to be an extremely good historical scholar - I guess no one can completely "leave out" their conjectures, but I don't see the need to waffle about the machinations of "conjecture" itself and drown the reader it etymological flights of fancy in order to unorder all meaning.)

I swear to you he is merely regurgitating the truly profound work of those that came before him. His work is an example of how to dilute and fabricate knowledge so as to not have to bother saying anything truly original. It is easier to break things up than it is to build things. And please, no trite comeback with pleas to historicism veiled as Foucault's profundity.
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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If he has a special place in your heart for opening you up to "new" ideas then good for you. I guess you are entitled to your journey and it is not my intent to ridicule it, only to ask you to do what you rile against. Attack his work, rip it to shreds with those that came before him and came after.

Everything written is as worthless as it is worthy. The works that do either to any extreme are the "best."
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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Burning Ghost:
Just read what you wrote ... well I got bored to be honest and stopped.
Therein lies the problem. I got bored with Kant when I first read him. One has to get over this.
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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Hereandnow -

Haha!

Seriously, I am glad to have met someone who has a love for Foucault. I hope you can shine the light on what I may be missing. Obviously I am not convinced, but I am more than willing to admit that it may be my fault rather than there being little value to it.

It is not like I didn't enjoy Madness and Civilization, I just didn't find anything refreshing - other than the idea of the "city state" as a madhouse; this relates to something I am currently reading (The Sacred and The Profane - Eliade.)

If I am honest my qualm is with how Heidegger deflected Husserl's ideas into a direction which led to the work of Derrida and post-modernist philosophy. I am still muddling through all of that and it may take longer than I'd wish to sieve through all of that. At the moment it is baby steps for me, I had to admit to myself that Nietzsche is extraordinarily brilliant and that I need to give him serious credit - I tried my normal approach of derision and tried to tear him to pieces ... I cannot.

I'm approaching the whole post modernist thing from the literary side - or rather will be this year. At the moment reading up on anthropology and some other bits first.

This thread was simply me dipping my toe in regarding the form of "knowledge" cast, as it is, in written words. Hence my whole question of what could be meant by "general truth."

Something I have written on my white board thingy ... "Something is 'full' of meaning the less accurate it is."

Just under that I wrote ... "People are 'smarter' than me in innumerable ways."
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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Burning Ghost:
If I am honest my qualm is with how Heidegger deflected Husserl's ideas into a direction which led to the work of Derrida and post-modernist philosophy. I am still muddling through all of that and it may take longer than I'd wish to sieve through all of that. At the moment it is baby steps for me, I had to admit to myself that Nietzsche is extraordinarily brilliant and that I need to give him serious credit - I tried my normal approach of derision and tried to tear him to pieces ... I cannot.
This is from Husserl's Crisis of European Science's:

. A true beginning,
achieved by means of a radical liberation from all scientific and prescientific traditions,
was not attained by Kant. He does not penetrate to the absolute subjectivity which
constitutes everything that is, in its meaning and validity, nor to the method of attaining
it in its apodicticity, of interrogating it and of explicating it apodictically


This is from Heidegger's Being and Time:

As something selfsame in the manifold otherness, it has the character of self. Even if one rejects "soul substance" and the thinghood of consciousness, or denies that a person is an object , ontologically one is still positing something whose Being retains the meaning of present at hand....... Yet, presence at hand is the kind of Being which belongs to entities whose character is not that of Dasein>


Husserl thought that the self that is, if you will, present at hand, you know, there as a presence in the field of perception amidst other presences, aka, phenomena, IS the real self. We are souls, and the proof is there, undeniable in our Being here as such. Heidegger does not doubt that the self seems to, as he says, "posit" something of this strange ontology. BUT: that is not us! WE are dasein, not presence at hand. This means that we are, to put B&T in a nut shell, these entities of interpretation that take up presence at hand AS something else, as language and its regions of concern that rise to awarness and become "proximate". We ARE this taking things AS; this is the instrumental nature of language. Language never "touches" present at hand. i may talk about this stone, but my talk about this other "thing" takes it AS language,culture, regional clusters of meaning, like geology.

Kant talks about space and time as intuitions, Heidegger complains that we never can understand an intuition. Impossible. Understanding lies with words/symbols that are instrumental.

SO the difference between Heidegger and Husserl here is huge. But it is Heidegger's move toward language that makes him a kind of father of postmodern thought, for the postmoderns like Derrida are coherentists when it comes to meaning and truth. If Heidegger is right, and we, human dasein, are not present at hand, like a rock is, but are these language institutions (see John Haugeland Heidegger on Being a Person), then that puts us in with Derrida, Foucault and others:enclosed by the interpretative possibilities inherent in language and logic. Truth is sentential, and "beyond this; well, there is no beyond this, because the use of the term 'beyond' is simply borrowed from contexts where meanings are contingent (see Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity). Absolutes like Husserl's or Kant's or Descartes are nonsense.
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Burning ghost
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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I think you're wrong, and a lot of people are wrong about Heidegger and Husserl.

If you can show me a clear definition, with citation, that Heidegger gave of what "dasein" means you'll be the first. I don't think he says anything much different to Husserl. He merely alters the terminology to suit his needs and plays a merry dance with words - he is purposefully obtuse.

Please cite pages for quotes (for the benefit of others and ease of references.) I am guessing that is taken from Part II of Crisis. Heidegger pays attention to language and Husserl to consciousness. That is a the main difference.
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Re: A Question of Truth?

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I would REALLY like to see a clear definition of Dasein. I don't want your "impression", but Heidegger's actual words. No one has managed to do this yet (Note: I have a copy and I believe he makes tow or three attempts to define early on in B&T then simply resorts to using the term without any more explanation.

As for the whole Husserl thing I don't have the time to discuss that in depth right now, but I will in the future. I am doing my best to streamline my studying and stick to one main task at a time (for the most part.) Right now I dealing with anthropology and religion, then I'll be going into the topic of art and aesthetics. Then I'll likely jump back into Nietzsche or get back into Husserl and logic in general (just bought Logical Investigations and going to be studying Logic full on in the second half of the year I hope.)

In the meantime some discussion on "dasein" would be appreciated.
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