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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6
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The Todes blogger provides the table of contents of Todes's Body and World under the heading "What to Read before you read Todes" (linked below). I'm going to straight to chapter 6, the contents of which are the following:
6 Development of the Thesis That the Human Body Is the Material Subject of the World, as a Critique of Kant's View That the Human Subject Makes the World of His [/Her] Experience
6.0 The Critique of Pure Reason in the Light of a Phenomenology of Impure Experience
6.1 Kant's False Dilemma of A Priori Knowledge: How It Arises from Imaginizing the World
6.2 The Ego, According to Kant: Its Three Stages of Self-Evidence
6.3 Phenomenological Criticism: Kant Imaginizes the Ego
6.4 Kant's View of Spatial Objects: Spatialization as Conceptualization
6.5 The Missing Perceptual Stage: How Is a Local Object Determinable?
6.6 The "Common, but to us Unknown, Root"
6.7 Kantian Categories as Imaginative Idealizations of Perceptual Categories
6.7.1 Deduction of perceptual categories from the felt unity of the active body, as Kant deduces
imaginative categories from the transcendental unity of apperception
6.7.2 The concept of nothing (= 0) versus the perceptual sense of nothing (= -x)
6.8 Kant's Dialectic: Perception Takes Revenge
6.8.1 The antinomies of the Paralogisms: the suppressed perceptual thesis vs. the imaginative
antithesis
6.8.2 The perceptual thesis vs. the imaginative antithesis of Kant's Antinomies; or, the fruitless
question: Which form of objectivity is the right one?
6.8.3 The antinomies of the Ideal of pure reason: the suppressed perceptual thesis versus the
imaginative antithesis
6.9 Summary, and Concluding Remarks
Samuel Todes Blog: Table of Contents
6 Development of the Thesis That the Human Body Is the Material Subject of the World, as a Critique of Kant's View That the Human Subject Makes the World of His [/Her] Experience
6.0 The Critique of Pure Reason in the Light of a Phenomenology of Impure Experience
6.1 Kant's False Dilemma of A Priori Knowledge: How It Arises from Imaginizing the World
6.2 The Ego, According to Kant: Its Three Stages of Self-Evidence
6.3 Phenomenological Criticism: Kant Imaginizes the Ego
6.4 Kant's View of Spatial Objects: Spatialization as Conceptualization
6.5 The Missing Perceptual Stage: How Is a Local Object Determinable?
6.6 The "Common, but to us Unknown, Root"
6.7 Kantian Categories as Imaginative Idealizations of Perceptual Categories
6.7.1 Deduction of perceptual categories from the felt unity of the active body, as Kant deduces
imaginative categories from the transcendental unity of apperception
6.7.2 The concept of nothing (= 0) versus the perceptual sense of nothing (= -x)
6.8 Kant's Dialectic: Perception Takes Revenge
6.8.1 The antinomies of the Paralogisms: the suppressed perceptual thesis vs. the imaginative
antithesis
6.8.2 The perceptual thesis vs. the imaginative antithesis of Kant's Antinomies; or, the fruitless
question: Which form of objectivity is the right one?
6.8.3 The antinomies of the Ideal of pure reason: the suppressed perceptual thesis versus the
imaginative antithesis
6.9 Summary, and Concluding Remarks
Samuel Todes Blog: Table of Contents
MP wrote in the Phenomenology of Perception that "Imagination is present in the first human perception." We will also find, applying consciousness research to animals, that an incipient form of imagination is also present in the protoconsciousness of many species, drawing the individual animal into exploration of its environment for a fuller grasp of, a better 'grip' on, what is there.
This article by Zahavi would be good to read after reading Dreyfus's introduction to the Todes book:
Dan Zahavi, "Mindedness, Mindlessness, and First-Person Authority, forthcoming in J. Schear (ed.): Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The Mcdowell-Dreyfus Debate. London: Routledge. 2012.
"Whereas the recent exchange between Dreyfus and McDowell has largely highlighted differences in their respective accounts, my focus in the following will be on what I take to be some of their shared assumptions. More specifically, I wish to argue that Dreyfus’s frequent reference to mindless coping is partly motivated by his endorsement of a conception of mindedness that is considerably closer to McDowell’s view than one might initially have assumed. In a second step, I will discuss to what extent the notions of mindlessness and conceptual mindedness can do justice to the first-personal character of our experiential life. In pursuing this issue, I will at the same time challenge Dreyfus’ claim that his position is one with a venerable phenomenological ancestry."
http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/zahavi-publications/Mindedness__mindlessness_and_first-person_authority.pdf
Dan Zahavi, "Mindedness, Mindlessness, and First-Person Authority, forthcoming in J. Schear (ed.): Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The Mcdowell-Dreyfus Debate. London: Routledge. 2012.
"Whereas the recent exchange between Dreyfus and McDowell has largely highlighted differences in their respective accounts, my focus in the following will be on what I take to be some of their shared assumptions. More specifically, I wish to argue that Dreyfus’s frequent reference to mindless coping is partly motivated by his endorsement of a conception of mindedness that is considerably closer to McDowell’s view than one might initially have assumed. In a second step, I will discuss to what extent the notions of mindlessness and conceptual mindedness can do justice to the first-personal character of our experiential life. In pursuing this issue, I will at the same time challenge Dreyfus’ claim that his position is one with a venerable phenomenological ancestry."
http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/zahavi-publications/Mindedness__mindlessness_and_first-person_authority.pdf
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Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
No I have't. I am way behind on my reading. Been doing my own stuff. But tode is in my todo list.
I was eager to respond quickly before HWFTI got in there lol
S
smcder
Guest
RWFebruary 5, 2013 at 1:01 AM Interesting blog. What made you put the effort in? I wonder how much you're interested in Dreyfus's more recent normative philosophy -
- his fusing of Kierkegaard and Homer and Melville; proposing a rejection of the desiccated mode of being dominant today (nihilism, or scientism, or what you will).
smcder Dreyfus lectures are available free from Berkley and they are wonderful - he is a co-learner with his students and very, very keen - I think like Melville, Nietzsche and many others - his response to nihilism is constitutional physical, it's in his body I mean - there is a vitality there and his mind is to quick, too open to get caught in a sink hole. (see below*)
Daniel AriasFebruary 11, 2013 at 12:15 AM
Thanks. Honestly, I read Todes' s Body and World and thought it was incredible. I haven't written anything in a while, but I'll go through my notes and put stuff up again soon.
And yes, I'm a fan of all things Dreyfus. As far as All Things Shining goes, Kelly deserves a ton of credit for framing the issue of nihilism so well (for example, his use of David Foster Wallace) and for his description of the meaningful differences that show up as a result of skilled abilities (this time through his use of George Sturt).
Regarding Dreyfus's urgency to combat nihilism, I'm not sure the degree to which he finds the danger pressing, but he himself has said in interviews *that he has never seriously felt the threat of nihilism and Kelly explains a bit of this in his essay, "The Purpose of General Education":
smcder and you can hear that in his lectures, you can hear it too in Melville who was a man of adventures - and I think, like Ishmael, a man of moods (stimmung)
From the very opening of Moby Dick, we have an effusion - the same force that through the green fuse drives the flower:
Power Moby-Dick, the Online Annotation — Chapter 1
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
smcder And here Ishmael is frutrated and irritable and makes reference to Cato and his sword - but he gets himself off to sea ... as Melville did. He acts and does - "A Squeeze of the Hand" too is a wonderful reading on this idea - of life and vitality and profusion. You can see this in Nieztsche but I think Nietzsche, as a first encounterer of modern nihilism, was ravaged by it - his eternal recurrence was an outrageous response - essentially saying "bring it!" and bring it eternally, for me it will eternally be a yes saying.
"A former advisor of mine, who is not so much younger than my wife’s grandmother, grew up in the American Midwest memorizing the plays and poetry of Shakespeare. How I envy the way that he – completely without effort – experiences the events in his life in terms of these extraordinary lines of poetry."
"[T]here is no substitute for putting these works into one’s entire being. We face a particular threat to this practice in the technological age. For now that we have an almost infinite amount of information at our fingertips, there is little incentive to learn anything by heart.
- But if we satisfy ourselves with the practice of looking things up on the internet, then we will never have the happy experience of being surprised by the meaning in a situation. A situation becomes meaningful not because one searches to find the meaning in it, but because one is struck by its meaning, and struck in a way that one can at least partly articulate. This can happen only if you have embodied the wisdom of a culture in such a way that it can speak through you, it can appear unbidden to enliven your understanding of the situation. When one embodies the wisdom of a culture in this way, the threat of nihilism will easily be kept at bay."
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdkelly/General Education.pdf (see page 4, paragraphs 2 and 3)
RWFebruary 13, 2013 at 11:58 PM
Re Dreyfus and the threat of nihilism, I recall a comment he made regarding Camus and his status as an "existentialist", saying in effect that he couldn’t be one because he was a pagan, ie happy sitting on the beach in Algiers watching the girls go by.
- This is the sense I get from Dreyfus, that he’s a pagan and never experienced a complete world collapse -- a phenomenon if not unique to existentialism, at least unique to a feeling of nihilism; though the nature of his paganism has more to do with cultural moods than the sensual stuff of Camus, I think, The Plague notwithstanding.
smcder - I think this is exactly right! and is explicit in his lectures on polytheism in Moby Dick.
This paganism, I think, also explains pretty well his distaste for Division II of B&T and his obvious preference for the more concrete phenomenology of perception, Merleau-Ponty, Todes, et al. Kelly seems drawn to this first pole of phenomenology too (if I can use the distinction of Divs I & II), so I find his diagnosis of nihilism rather suspect, and I felt pretty underwhelmed by his treatment of it in All Things Shining. His chapter on Wallace was especially bad, though I was delighted to see the author brought into the discussion at all as I perceive DFW to be an existentialist of sorts (in the sense one could call Wittgenstein one).
Nevertheless I find his reading of Moby-Dick very appealing.
- Indeed this Homeric Mood he’s pointing to seems to stand singularly at the terminus of the two great traditions of the West, namely the Judaic and the Hellenic, and that they would find a single voice in Moby-Dick is, in retrospect, quite fitting given the heritage of the American spirit, of which Melville is the greatest poet (Whitman being close second).
S
smcder
Guest
What do you make of this comment ... ?
It also lends the story of the West considerable romance seeing now our original heritage of Homer coming to the rescue – and with great plausibility
- now that the Enlightenment and Existentialist movements have in effect annihilated each other,
??
I need to go back to the comments in the Todes blog between the author and his respondent and read them in full again to try to respond to this post and your just-previous one. Both posts seem to quote and respond to key statements by RW and his respondent. I like the idea in the quote regarding the heritage of Homer coming back to the rescue, since the Enlightenment disregarded all but reason in its prescriptions for humanity and phenomenological existentialism is only understood by philosophers who read it and poets, artists, and others who live it without reading it.
The heritage of Homer is, of course, the idea of the heroic impulse/drive in humans who risk all to explore the extent and nature of reality (putting Odysseus in the best possible light). Poets do that as well, and Dylan Thomas, whom you referred to in your second-last post, is exemplary in that regard, especially in "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower." So strange (a synchronity) that you refer to that poem today because last night, reading the Zahavi paper I linked, that poem came up for me after reading Z's commentary on a lecture by Heidegger, paraphrasing H's primary point as follows:
“We are confronted with a process of lived self-acquaintance whose distinctive feature is its nonreflective character, and which must be understood as an immediate expression of life itself.”
Here is that stunning poem:
‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ (1934)
Dylan Thomas
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
For me, and I think for most readers, that passionate and insightful poem could only be written by someone who had thought long and deeply about the human condition, indeed the condition of all living beings and even of the being of nature as a whole in its evolution of this universe [and likely others] which are also caught and lived within time understood as temporality.
S
smcder
Guest
on a distant planet, the remains of a POET and his POEM are found. A team of scientists appropriates the discovery and goes to work to find its core essence.
"What force drives the flower through the green fuse?"
They run the POEM through their machines and they run it through their heads but they can't pull it apart.
"What turns the POET's blood to wax?" they ponder and they ask if it is an anti-oxidant.
They run the wax through their chemical rinses and aver that it is not unlike Descartes piece of wax - perhaps they are unravelling the mystery!
To be continued ...
S
smcder
Guest
What makes the synchronicity even more interesting is that I thought I was quoting Whitman! Because i have a connection in mind from Song of Myself to Moby Dick.
I can see why that Thomas line would have crossed over into your reading of Whitman. They both have that vibrant presence to nature, feel it as part of them and themselves as intrinsic with it. The natural world is not just up against their skin but penetrates it. Phenomenologists in their own time and experience.
I was just searching here for poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins whose sense of the vitality of nature -- throughout nature -- was intermingled with his idea that this world that we and other beings experience was produced by an incomprehensibly powerful God. We don't have to be theists or believers in Intelligent Design to appreciate Hopkin's expressions of the depths of the universe's 'lived reality' as Hopkins sensed and expressed it.
I remember several occasions during this six-part thread's development when we discussed Hopkin's sense of the nature of 'what-is' in this world we inhabit and came across this post at the end of the first part of the C&P discussion, following a point there in which Tyger and I and probably you, Steve, discussed Hopkins. I think this post near the end of Part 1 of the thread and the sequence in Part 1 might be useful at this point in Part 6:
Consciousness and the Paranormal
I want to tag this post and the sequence for @Soupie and @Tyger .
I remember several occasions during this six-part thread's development when we discussed Hopkin's sense of the nature of 'what-is' in this world we inhabit and came across this post at the end of the first part of the C&P discussion, following a point there in which Tyger and I and probably you, Steve, discussed Hopkins. I think this post near the end of Part 1 of the thread and the sequence in Part 1 might be useful at this point in Part 6:
Consciousness and the Paranormal
I want to tag this post and the sequence for @Soupie and @Tyger .
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
@Constance in what sense does "what-is" differ from "what is"?
S
smcder
Guest
The dangerous idea that life is a story – Galen Strawson – Aeon
Biography <> philosophy
" smcder I came across this when searching: "Hegel and Strawson"
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.
Perhaps. But many of us aren’t Narrative in this sense. We’re naturally – deeply – non-Narrative. We’re anti-Narrative by fundamental constitution.
It’s not just that the deliverances of memory are, for us,
But I do, like the American novelist John Updike and many others, ‘have the persistent sensation, in my life…, that I am just beginning’. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s ‘heteronym’ Alberto Caeiro (one of 75 alter egos under which he wrote) is a strange man, but he captures an experience common to many when he says that:
....
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
- Virginia Woolf
Biography <> philosophy
" smcder I came across this when searching: "Hegel and Strawson"
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.
Perhaps. But many of us aren’t Narrative in this sense. We’re naturally – deeply – non-Narrative. We’re anti-Narrative by fundamental constitution.
It’s not just that the deliverances of memory are, for us,
- hopelessly piecemeal and disordered*, even when we’re trying to remember a temporally extended sequence of events.
But I do, like the American novelist John Updike and many others, ‘have the persistent sensation, in my life…, that I am just beginning’. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s ‘heteronym’ Alberto Caeiro (one of 75 alter egos under which he wrote) is a strange man, but he captures an experience common to many when he says that:
- ‘Each moment I feel as if I’ve just been born/Into an endlessly new world.’
....
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
- Virginia Woolf
'What-is' is a usage developed in phenomenology toward distinguishing between what Dasein is capable of understanding of 'what-is' based on experience in a local world and that which is in the structure of the universe, Cosmos, multiverse as a whole.
I just read the other night an essay entitled "Philosophy and Sociology" published in MP's volume Signs, in which many of his foundational insights are refined and extended. After I get the volume in hand again I'll copy and post to you the last paragraph or two as an illustration of the distinction I summarized above..
But we don't actually live in that penumbra, even though we feel that we are at times in touch with it in occasional 'experiences', and also in touch with it more abstractly in 'thinking', by which I mean philosophy.
To add: we surely cannot reduce the fullness and incompossible details of our lived experience in the world over a lifetime to a 'narrative' such as a written biography or a novel. But the value of literature, and especially the novel in its historical development, is in its representation of situated humans, situated consciousnesses, in the local, and thus limited, world of our experience in one place and time or another.
Stapledon is interesting because he attempts to comprehend developments in the evolution of consciousness in cosmic terms far into an extrapolated future, only rarely (in two novels, one of which is Sirius) presenting the grappling of consciousness with situated beings living in specific times and places in the world we're familiar with on earth in time.
Stapledon is interesting because he attempts to comprehend developments in the evolution of consciousness in cosmic terms far into an extrapolated future, only rarely (in two novels, one of which is Sirius) presenting the grappling of consciousness with situated beings living in specific times and places in the world we're familiar with on earth in time.
S
smcder
Guest
Penumbra makes me think of the boxing ring ... has anyone written a phenomenology of boxing?
From Merleau-Ponty, "The Philosopher and Sociology," Signs, Librairie Gallimard, 1960; trans. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
". . . Philosophy is indeed and always a break with objectivism and a return from constructs to lived experience, from the world to ourselves. It is just that this indispensable and characteristic step no longer transports it into the rarified atmosphere of introspection or into a realm numerically distinct from that of science. It no longer makes philosophy the rival of scientific knowledge now that we have recognized that the 'interior' it brings us back to is not a 'private life' but an intersubjectivity that gradually connects us ever closer to the whole of history.
When I discover that the social is not simply an object but to begin with my situation, and when I awaken within myself the consciousness of this-social-which-is-mine, then my whole synchrony becomes present to me, through that synchrony I become capable of really thinking about the whole past as the synchrony it has been in its time, and all the convergent and discordant action of the historical community is effectively given to me in my living present.
Giving up systematic philosophy as an explanatory device does not reduce philosophy to the rank of an auxiliary and propagandist in service to an objective knowledge; for philosophy has a dimension of its own, the dimension of coexistence -- not as a fait accompli of contemplation, but as the mileau and perpetual event of the universal praxis. Philosophy is irreplaceable because it reveals to us both the movement by which lives become truths and the circularity of that singular being who in a certain sense already is everything he happens to think."
{Note, I have added paragraph breaks because MP almost never does.}
". . . Philosophy is indeed and always a break with objectivism and a return from constructs to lived experience, from the world to ourselves. It is just that this indispensable and characteristic step no longer transports it into the rarified atmosphere of introspection or into a realm numerically distinct from that of science. It no longer makes philosophy the rival of scientific knowledge now that we have recognized that the 'interior' it brings us back to is not a 'private life' but an intersubjectivity that gradually connects us ever closer to the whole of history.
When I discover that the social is not simply an object but to begin with my situation, and when I awaken within myself the consciousness of this-social-which-is-mine, then my whole synchrony becomes present to me, through that synchrony I become capable of really thinking about the whole past as the synchrony it has been in its time, and all the convergent and discordant action of the historical community is effectively given to me in my living present.
Giving up systematic philosophy as an explanatory device does not reduce philosophy to the rank of an auxiliary and propagandist in service to an objective knowledge; for philosophy has a dimension of its own, the dimension of coexistence -- not as a fait accompli of contemplation, but as the mileau and perpetual event of the universal praxis. Philosophy is irreplaceable because it reveals to us both the movement by which lives become truths and the circularity of that singular being who in a certain sense already is everything he happens to think."
{Note, I have added paragraph breaks because MP almost never does.}
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
@Constance I don't get the what-is.
Is it the subjective what-is not the objective what is?
Who and where is this articulated?
Is it the subjective what-is not the objective what is?
Who and where is this articulated?
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