I am arguing that when something is taken AS something, it can also taken as such. Value makes this clear and it indicates a dimension of one's dasein that is not easy to talk about. When the flame is on my finger, the experience is not being taken ready to hand, but it registers as its own nature, which is what the screaming is all about. My ready to hand language instrumentality may be regionally attending, but the moment belongs to presence as such. It announces itself with agonizing clarity.fooloso4:
What is present is never present to me as such but always as something. Orange is what we call what appears to us in a particular way. The paint color may appear orange in some light but not others. How it looks is not an interpretation of what it is.
Orange? There are certainly problems in universalizing what I see. But what I see is what I see. The problems of agreement aren't really at issue for me here.
'Human animal' is a term that makes excellent ontic sense, a "naturalistic" term, is what Husserl would call it, but it is not about the kind of strange ontology I am arguing for. I am arguing an objectivist's position that says value as such stands outside our interpretative world, but is nevetheless present in our world.If I had said this I suppose you might have said in response that what a human animal is can only be disclosed in the experience of being a human animal.
But if you were truly suffering, do you think your desperate appeals to the Being that threw you into the world would be wholly founded on bad philosophy and foolish thinking?Of course I would not like it! Why would you wonder about such a thing? My point is that there is not just the experience of suffering but the attempt to find the meaning in or behind it. The lament of Psalm 22 and of Jesus on the cross:
Why have you forsaken me?
One might call this metaphysical or existential suffering. I do not ask why we suffer. I take it as a given. As Job learns, it is not something that we can understand. Perhaps we are converging on the same point from different directions?
When you talk like converging on the same point, I ask, by your lights, what point is this?