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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

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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.}

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.

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."

yes and yes ... two big aha points here for me ...
 
great rejection-slips in the history of philosophy

My So-Called Big Fat Greek Philosophy - Aristotle

I, Kant ... Get No Satisfaction

Phenomenonomonomenology - Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Monotones (this was later a minor hit for Frank Sinatra)

What's Your Russerl, Husserl? - Martin Heidegger

The Apollinian and the Not-So-Niceian - how to be a "bad boy" and draw attention from the opposite sex in three easy lessons Friederich Nietzsche

Semiotic Connotations of a Neo-Hegelian Dialectic - (a critical success and ahead of its time) but lack of financial success led AA Milne to write a series of popular children's books featuring a stuffed bear
 
What-is is the crossover and blendings, the interactions and integration, of the so-called subjective and objective poles of reality.

What I mean will be clearer to you if you read the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, available at this Google Books link:

Phenomenology of Perception


These pages from MP's "The Intertwining -- the Chiasm" should also be clarifying:

Extract: "What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant. How does it happen that I give to my hands, in particular, that degree, that rate, and that direction of movement that are capable of making me feel the textures of the sleek and the rough? Between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are not only, like the pseudopods of the amoeba, vague and ephemeral deformations of the corporeal space, but the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part."

http://timothyquigley.net/cont/mp-chiasm.pdf
 
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What I mean will be clearer to you if you read the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, available at this Google Books link:

Phenomenology of Perception


These pages from MP's "The Intertwining -- the Chiasm" should also be clarifying:

Extract: "What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant. How does it happen that I give to my hands, in particular, that degree, that rate, and that direction of movement that are capable of making me feel the textures of the sleek and the rough? Between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are not only, like the pseudopods of the amoeba, vague and ephemeral deformations of the corporeal space, but the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part."

http://timothyquigley.net/cont/mp-chiasm.pdf
I do enjoy reading MP... it's like floating down a river in a dinghy. Not always sure what I am floating on though.
The passage above does not help me re "what-is". Something to do with my brain... I am blind to so much.
But I do relate to the text that you @Constance have encouraged me to read.

What I am puzzling about is how HCT relates to this (MP's) mode of thinking.
You said something like,
"one might view HCT as a move beyond a quasi-determined circular concept of ‘what-is’ to an existential concept of what becomes—of what comes into being"
As I understand this and MP, HCT has a phenomenological relevance. But I don't get the "move" from 'what-is' to the existential concept. I like the idea that it is an existential concept of what comes into being because it does have this. But the 'what-is' is what?

MP says,
1. “here a transcendental idealism which treats the world as an indivisible unity of value” (xi lower half)
HCT has a 'unity of value' concept to it.

2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"
Is this something to do with what is?
 
@smcder , have you posted a link to this paper before?

"'Place of Nothingness'and the Dimension of Visibility:
Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Huineng"
David Brubaker

" ' Place of Nothingness' and the dimesion of visibility: Nishida, Merleau-Ponty and Huineng" | David Brubaker - Academia.edu

I was drawn to the title because I am still perplexed by the idea of 'nothingness' and 'emptiness' in phenomenology and hope to understand it vis a vis papers such as this that compare Western phenomenology with Eastern thought (esp Buddhism).
 
I do enjoy reading MP... it's like floating down a river in a dinghy. Not always sure what I am floating on though.

The passage above does not help me re "what-is". Something to do with my brain... I am blind to so much.

We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.

But I do relate to the text that you @Constance have encouraged me to read.

Good. There are other texts I've cited (and linked to in paper-length expositions) that help the newcomer to phenomenological philosophy to enter into the different world that exists in the presence of beings that are first aware of themselves {as situated in and yet at a distance from their environments} and increasingly aware of the meanings that arise for them in their existences, their lived realities, in protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind. One text I think is clarifying is Hofstadter's collection of late lectures and essays of Heidegger, titled Poetry, Language, Thought, available in used copies from amazon for a song. But as I've mentioned before, I had to read it three times before I finally reached the shift needed in my thinking. That was a long time ago, when I was first studying phenomenology.

Diving headlong into Phenomenology of Perception or Being and Time is bound to be discouraging. Neither of these primary texts is easy reading, especially given the subtle changes in meaning in translations. But even without that complication the works of Heidegger and MP are dense and difficult. The effort to understand phenomenology is repaid with a way of thinking about nature and mind that does dissolve the effects of radical dualism that have hindered our species' thinking since Descartes. On behalf of Descartes it's important to realize, as the phenomenological philosophers do, that he at least foregrounded consciousness/mind in philosophy, though he failed to move beyond thinking of C/M as a category of being separate from the being of the material world.

What I am puzzling about is how HCT relates to this (MP's) mode of thinking.

You said something like,

"one might view HCT as a move beyond a quasi-determined circular concept of ‘what-is’ to an existential concept of what becomes—of what comes into being"

As I understand this and MP, HCT has a phenomenological relevance. But I don't get the "move" from 'what-is' to the existential concept. I like the idea that it is an existential concept of what comes into being because it does have this. But the 'what-is' is what?

The 'what-is' is no longer a physical world describable in terms of 'brute being', or in another usage of MP or perhaps Sartre, 'the trackless depths of brute being' before C/M are present to contemplate the difference between the world as experienced and thought and the world without experiencers and thinkers. We are limited in understanding physical being at and beneath the quantum substrate; at most we propose various theories about how qm works -- epistemological rather than ontological approaches to that level of 'what-is', with the exception of theory that proceeds from David Bohm. Interestingly, a paper by Rovelli that I read about seven years ago moves toward an ontological description of interaction at the q level involved in interactions between forces and fields evolved in the physical universe; he was approaching the subject of consciousness, but he made it clear that the systemic interactions and integrations he was talking about were not to be understood as 'conscious'.

MP says,
1. “here a transcendental idealism which treats the world as an indivisible unity of value” (xi lower half)

HCT has a 'unity of value' concept to it.

2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"

Is this something to do with what is?

Much confusion arises in reading phenomenological philosophy because of the limitations of language, in the case you raise in 1. above, the meaning of the word 'transcendental'. Husserl at mid-point in his thinking sought a 'Transcendental Ego', by which he seems to have meant a form of C/M that could reach an understanding of 'what-is' more complete and encompassing than that in which existentially situated, limited, C/M arises and develops. He recognized that error and thenceforward concentrated instead on what he termed 'lived reality' -- experience -- a concept close to James's 'radical empiricism' and taken up by MP. The term 'transcendence/transcend' has a different meaning from that point forward throughout phenomenology as a whole [but also on the way to expression in other 19th-century German tbought], where it is recognized that the 'subject' transcends the 'object', but that the 'object' also transcends the 'subject'. In phenomenology there is recognized overlapping and merging of 'subject' and 'object' in experience and in the development of consciousness that experience bodies forth. Thus phenomenology overcomes radical dualism to the extent that it recognizes subjective and objective 'poles' combined in experience, in consciousness, and eventually in mind. Thus Kant's a priori 'categories' fall short of recognizing what existential phenomenology recognizes -- that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).

Before phenomenology was developed to the point of a philosophical method and critique of positivism by Husserl, it was foreshadowed in literary works by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, adumbrated in subsequent early 'moderns' such as Melville, Proust, Dos Passos, and others. Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus expressed phenomenological insights in novels as well. The novel (and also poetry) are forms that enable the depiction of reality as experienced from both the 'outside' and the 'inside' by conscious existents. The site at which these poles of reality interact is inevitably in the experienced reality of individual humans, expressed in the interior monologues and interactive dialogues of individuals with others -- and with abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.

I've gotta take a break here. I hope what I've written is helpful in making sense of 'what-is' in existential phenomenological terms, but if not I'll be back soon for another round if you like.

Just reviewed the last few paragraphs and see that I did not take up the term 'thematization' in this part of your post:

'2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"

Is this something to do with what is?'


What MP is attempting to express in that sentence is that we cannot reduce 'what-is' in the world as a whole to an 'idea' that we can discuss as if it is 'real' and not an abstraction. Many of the 'ideas' about consciousness and mind discussed in POM and physicalist science -- i.e., those ideas and abstractions which are not informed by phenomenology -- do either reduce 'what-is' in the world to dualistic categories or else generate accounts of C/M as machine-like effects of the world understood as purely physical. These are examples of what MP means by 'thematization', the reduction of being to an idea, which ignores the experience in and of the world that generates consciousness and thought as a moving platform from which the world can be understood to limited extents through our interactions with objects and others alongside us in the world.
 
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@smcder , have you posted a link to this paper before?

"'Place of Nothingness'and the Dimension of Visibility:
Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Huineng"
David Brubaker

" ' Place of Nothingness' and the dimesion of visibility: Nishida, Merleau-Ponty and Huineng" | David Brubaker - Academia.edu

I was drawn to the title because I am still perplexed by the idea of 'nothingness' and 'emptiness' in phenomenology and hope to understand it vis a vis papers such as this that compare Western phenomenology with Eastern thought (esp Buddhism).

I don't think I've posted this before ... but I am off work tomorrow and will try to read this. I've posted about emptiness in Eastern thought ... that will be interesting to look at ...
 
We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.



Good. There are other texts I've cited (and linked to in paper-length expositions) that help the newcomer to phenomenological philosophy to enter into the different world that exists in the presence of beings that are first aware of themselves {as situated in and yet at a distance from their environments} and increasingly aware of the meanings that arise for them in their existences, their lived realities, in protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind. One text I think is clarifying is Hofstadter's collection of late lectures and essays of Heidegger, titled Poetry, Language, Thought, available in used copies from amazon for a song. But as I've mentioned before, I had to read it three times before I finally reached the shift needed in my thinking. That was a long time ago, when I was first studying phenomenology.

Diving headlong into Phenomenology of Perception or Being and Time is bound to be discouraging. Neither of these primary texts is easy reading, especially given the subtle changes in meaning in translations. But even without that complication the works of Heidegger and MP are dense and difficult. The effort to understand phenomenology is repaid with a way of thinking about nature and mind that does dissolve the effects of radical dualism that have hindered our species' thinking since Descartes. On behalf of Descartes it's important to realize, as the phenomenological philosophers do, that he at least foregrounded consciousness/mind in philosophy, though he failed to move beyond thinking of C/M as a category of being separate from the being of the material world.



The 'what-is' is no longer a physical world describable in terms of 'brute being', or in another usage of MP or perhaps Sartre, 'the trackless depths of brute being' before C/M are present to contemplate the difference between the world as experienced and thought and the world without experiencers and thinkers. We are limited in understanding physical being at and beneath the quantum substrate; at most we propose various theories about how qm works -- epistemological rather than ontological approaches to that level of 'what-is', with the exception of theory that proceeds from David Bohm. Interestingly, a paper by Rovelli that I read about seven years ago moves toward an ontological description of interaction at the q level involved in interactions between forces and fields evolved in the physical universe; he was approaching the subject of consciousness, but he made it clear that the systemic interactions and integrations he was talking about were not to be understood as 'conscious'.



Much confusion arises in reading phenomenological philosophy because of the limitations of language, in the case you raise in 1. above, the meaning of the word 'transcendental'. Husserl at mid-point in his thinking sought a 'Transcendental Ego', by which he seems to have meant a form of C/M that could reach an understanding of 'what-is' more complete and encompassing than that in which existentially situated, limited, C/M arises and develops. He recognized that error and concentrated instead on what he termed 'lived reality', experience, a concept close to James's 'radical empiricism' and taken up by MP. The term 'transcence/transcend' has a different meaning in phenomenology as a whole, where it is recognized that the 'subject' transcends the 'object', but that the 'object' also transcends the 'subject'. There is overlapping and merging of 'subject' and 'object' in experience and the development of consciousness it bodies forth. Thus phenomenology overcomes radical dualism to the extent that it recognizes subjective and objective poles in experience, in consciousness, and eventually mind. Thus Kant's a priori 'categories' fall short of recognizing what existential phenomenology recognizes -- that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).

Before phenomenology was developed to the point of a philosophical method and critique of positivism by Husserl, it was foreshadowed in literary works by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, adumbrated in subsequent early 'moderns' such as Melville, Proust, Dos Passos, and others. Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus expressed phenomenological insights in novels as well. The novel (and also poetry) are forms that enable the depiction of reality as experienced from both the 'outside' and the 'inside'. The site at which these poles of reality interact is inevitably in the experienced reality of individual humans, expressed in the interior monologues and interactive dialogues of individuals with others -- and with abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.

I've gotta take a break here. I hope what I've written is helpful in making sense of 'what-is' in existential phenomenological terms, but if not I'll be back soon for another round if you like.

Just reviewed the last few paragraphs and see that I did not take up the term 'thematization' in this part of your post:

'2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"

Is this something to do with what is?'


What MP is attempting to express in that sentence is that we cannot reduce 'what-is' in the world as a whole to an 'idea' that we can discuss as if it is 'real' and not an abstraction. Many of the 'ideas' about consciousness and mind discussed in POM and physicalist science -- i.e., those ideas and abstractions which are not informed by phenomenology -- do either reduce 'what-is' in the world to dualistic categories or else generate accounts of C/M as machine-like effects of the world understood as purely physical. These are examples of what MP means by 'thematization', the reduction of the being to an idea, which ignores the experience in and of the world that generates consciousness and thought as a moving platform from which the world can be understood to limited extents through our interactions with objects and others alongside us in the world.

much yay saying as I read this post (and will re-read it several times after work)

example:

... that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).

yes!

A couple of other things you've posted are tickling at me in terms of this consciousness, reflective and aware and when it comes in ... it comes in eventually, but once it has, then it goes back in to the stream and arises again for itself in preconsciousness, becomes visceral, literally, physical and embodied - I am using this now to deal with a number of simple, practical concerns - by becoming aware of habitual responses, then visualizing the next time it will come up and making a decision now for that future ... very simple but it's helped me get some idea, I think, of prereflective consciousness ... and of what it takes to be in place, a world first that coheres? or is thinkable ... no, "awareable" and then all of the preconscious activity, all the previous activity for us to be in a position to be aware ... and so maybe now that I am aware of wha sorts of things I can be aware of, I can go explore? you move ahead back into preconscious awareness that way ... (this is what you are saying about the limitations of language! a funny tickling as I try to put my thoughts, my awareness that's come partly out of words back into words ...)
 
@smcder , have you posted a link to this paper before?

"'Place of Nothingness'and the Dimension of Visibility:
Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Huineng"
David Brubaker

" ' Place of Nothingness' and the dimesion of visibility: Nishida, Merleau-Ponty and Huineng" | David Brubaker - Academia.edu

I was drawn to the title because I am still perplexed by the idea of 'nothingness' and 'emptiness' in phenomenology and hope to understand it vis a vis papers such as this that compare Western phenomenology with Eastern thought (esp Buddhism).

Reading this now.
 
We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.



Good. There are other texts I've cited (and linked to in paper-length expositions) that help the newcomer to phenomenological philosophy to enter into the different world that exists in the presence of beings that are first aware of themselves {as situated in and yet at a distance from their environments} and increasingly aware of the meanings that arise for them in their existences, their lived realities, in protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind. One text I think is clarifying is Hofstadter's collection of late lectures and essays of Heidegger, titled Poetry, Language, Thought, available in used copies from amazon for a song. But as I've mentioned before, I had to read it three times before I finally reached the shift needed in my thinking. That was a long time ago, when I was first studying phenomenology.

Diving headlong into Phenomenology of Perception or Being and Time is bound to be discouraging. Neither of these primary texts is easy reading, especially given the subtle changes in meaning in translations. But even without that complication the works of Heidegger and MP are dense and difficult. The effort to understand phenomenology is repaid with a way of thinking about nature and mind that does dissolve the effects of radical dualism that have hindered our species' thinking since Descartes. On behalf of Descartes it's important to realize, as the phenomenological philosophers do, that he at least foregrounded consciousness/mind in philosophy, though he failed to move beyond thinking of C/M as a category of being separate from the being of the material world.



The 'what-is' is no longer a physical world describable in terms of 'brute being', or in another usage of MP or perhaps Sartre, 'the trackless depths of brute being' before C/M are present to contemplate the difference between the world as experienced and thought and the world without experiencers and thinkers. We are limited in understanding physical being at and beneath the quantum substrate; at most we propose various theories about how qm works -- epistemological rather than ontological approaches to that level of 'what-is', with the exception of theory that proceeds from David Bohm. Interestingly, a paper by Rovelli that I read about seven years ago moves toward an ontological description of interaction at the q level involved in interactions between forces and fields evolved in the physical universe; he was approaching the subject of consciousness, but he made it clear that the systemic interactions and integrations he was talking about were not to be understood as 'conscious'.



Much confusion arises in reading phenomenological philosophy because of the limitations of language, in the case you raise in 1. above, the meaning of the word 'transcendental'. Husserl at mid-point in his thinking sought a 'Transcendental Ego', by which he seems to have meant a form of C/M that could reach an understanding of 'what-is' more complete and encompassing than that in which existentially situated, limited, C/M arises and develops. He recognized that error and thenceforward concentrated instead on what he termed 'lived reality' -- experience -- a concept close to James's 'radical empiricism' and taken up by MP. The term 'transcendence/transcend' has a different meaning from that point forward throughout phenomenology as a whole [but also on the way to expression in other 19th-century German tbought], where it is recognized that the 'subject' transcends the 'object', but that the 'object' also transcends the 'subject'. In phenomenology there is recognized overlapping and merging of 'subject' and 'object' in experience and in the development of consciousness that experience bodies forth. Thus phenomenology overcomes radical dualism to the extent that it recognizes subjective and objective 'poles' combined in experience, in consciousness, and eventually in mind. Thus Kant's a priori 'categories' fall short of recognizing what existential phenomenology recognizes -- that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).

Before phenomenology was developed to the point of a philosophical method and critique of positivism by Husserl, it was foreshadowed in literary works by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, adumbrated in subsequent early 'moderns' such as Melville, Proust, Dos Passos, and others. Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus expressed phenomenological insights in novels as well. The novel (and also poetry) are forms that enable the depiction of reality as experienced from both the 'outside' and the 'inside' by conscious existents. The site at which these poles of reality interact is inevitably in the experienced reality of individual humans, expressed in the interior monologues and interactive dialogues of individuals with others -- and with abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.

I've gotta take a break here. I hope what I've written is helpful in making sense of 'what-is' in existential phenomenological terms, but if not I'll be back soon for another round if you like.

Just reviewed the last few paragraphs and see that I did not take up the term 'thematization' in this part of your post:

'2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"

Is this something to do with what is?'


What MP is attempting to express in that sentence is that we cannot reduce 'what-is' in the world as a whole to an 'idea' that we can discuss as if it is 'real' and not an abstraction. Many of the 'ideas' about consciousness and mind discussed in POM and physicalist science -- i.e., those ideas and abstractions which are not informed by phenomenology -- do either reduce 'what-is' in the world to dualistic categories or else generate accounts of C/M as machine-like effects of the world understood as purely physical. These are examples of what MP means by 'thematization', the reduction of being to an idea, which ignores the experience in and of the world that generates consciousness and thought as a moving platform from which the world can be understood to limited extents through our interactions with objects and others alongside us in the world.

We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.

I've come back across Jean Gebser and his evolution of consciousness. I'm not sure how or if it relates to this idea about the evolution of consciousness with nature:

GEBSER's IDeA

consciousness is:

presence, being present, understood in the broadest sense as wakeful presence
  • human consciousness is in transition
this happens by "mutations", it's not continuous.
  • These involve structural changes to body and mind.
  • Previous consciousness structures continue to operate parallel to the emergent structure.
@Pharoah ... shades of HCT? (compatible with?)

Wikipedia

Each consciousness structure eventually becomes deficient, and is replaced by a following structure. The stress and chaos in Europe from 1914 to 1945 were the symptoms of a structure of consciousness that was at the end of its effectiveness, and which heralded the birth of a new form of consciousness.

  • The first evidence he witnessed was in the novel use of language and literature. He modified this position in 1943 so as to include the changes which were occurring in the arts and sciences at that time.
His thesis of the failure of one structure of consciousness alongside the emergence of a new one led him to inquire as to whether such had not occurred before.

  • Ursprung und Gegenwart is the result of that inquiry.

It was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953, and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin.

smcder
Ursprung literally origin
Gegenwart - presence

Working from the historical evidence of almost every major field, (e.g., poetry, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, religion, physics and the other natural sciences, etc.) Gebser saw traces of the emergence (which he called "efficiency") and collapse ("deficiency") of various structures of consciousness throughout history.
 
We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.



Good. There are other texts I've cited (and linked to in paper-length expositions) that help the newcomer to phenomenological philosophy to enter into the different world that exists in the presence of beings that are first aware of themselves {as situated in and yet at a distance from their environments} and increasingly aware of the meanings that arise for them in their existences, their lived realities, in protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind. One text I think is clarifying is Hofstadter's collection of late lectures and essays of Heidegger, titled Poetry, Language, Thought, available in used copies from amazon for a song. But as I've mentioned before, I had to read it three times before I finally reached the shift needed in my thinking. That was a long time ago, when I was first studying phenomenology.

Diving headlong into Phenomenology of Perception or Being and Time is bound to be discouraging. Neither of these primary texts is easy reading, especially given the subtle changes in meaning in translations. But even without that complication the works of Heidegger and MP are dense and difficult. The effort to understand phenomenology is repaid with a way of thinking about nature and mind that does dissolve the effects of radical dualism that have hindered our species' thinking since Descartes. On behalf of Descartes it's important to realize, as the phenomenological philosophers do, that he at least foregrounded consciousness/mind in philosophy, though he failed to move beyond thinking of C/M as a category of being separate from the being of the material world.



The 'what-is' is no longer a physical world describable in terms of 'brute being', or in another usage of MP or perhaps Sartre, 'the trackless depths of brute being' before C/M are present to contemplate the difference between the world as experienced and thought and the world without experiencers and thinkers. We are limited in understanding physical being at and beneath the quantum substrate; at most we propose various theories about how qm works -- epistemological rather than ontological approaches to that level of 'what-is', with the exception of theory that proceeds from David Bohm. Interestingly, a paper by Rovelli that I read about seven years ago moves toward an ontological description of interaction at the q level involved in interactions between forces and fields evolved in the physical universe; he was approaching the subject of consciousness, but he made it clear that the systemic interactions and integrations he was talking about were not to be understood as 'conscious'.



Much confusion arises in reading phenomenological philosophy because of the limitations of language, in the case you raise in 1. above, the meaning of the word 'transcendental'. Husserl at mid-point in his thinking sought a 'Transcendental Ego', by which he seems to have meant a form of C/M that could reach an understanding of 'what-is' more complete and encompassing than that in which existentially situated, limited, C/M arises and develops. He recognized that error and thenceforward concentrated instead on what he termed 'lived reality' -- experience -- a concept close to James's 'radical empiricism' and taken up by MP. The term 'transcendence/transcend' has a different meaning from that point forward throughout phenomenology as a whole [but also on the way to expression in other 19th-century German tbought], where it is recognized that the 'subject' transcends the 'object', but that the 'object' also transcends the 'subject'. In phenomenology there is recognized overlapping and merging of 'subject' and 'object' in experience and in the development of consciousness that experience bodies forth. Thus phenomenology overcomes radical dualism to the extent that it recognizes subjective and objective 'poles' combined in experience, in consciousness, and eventually in mind. Thus Kant's a priori 'categories' fall short of recognizing what existential phenomenology recognizes -- that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).

Before phenomenology was developed to the point of a philosophical method and critique of positivism by Husserl, it was foreshadowed in literary works by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, adumbrated in subsequent early 'moderns' such as Melville, Proust, Dos Passos, and others. Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus expressed phenomenological insights in novels as well. The novel (and also poetry) are forms that enable the depiction of reality as experienced from both the 'outside' and the 'inside' by conscious existents. The site at which these poles of reality interact is inevitably in the experienced reality of individual humans, expressed in the interior monologues and interactive dialogues of individuals with others -- and with abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.

I've gotta take a break here. I hope what I've written is helpful in making sense of 'what-is' in existential phenomenological terms, but if not I'll be back soon for another round if you like.

Just reviewed the last few paragraphs and see that I did not take up the term 'thematization' in this part of your post:

'2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"

Is this something to do with what is?'


What MP is attempting to express in that sentence is that we cannot reduce 'what-is' in the world as a whole to an 'idea' that we can discuss as if it is 'real' and not an abstraction. Many of the 'ideas' about consciousness and mind discussed in POM and physicalist science -- i.e., those ideas and abstractions which are not informed by phenomenology -- do either reduce 'what-is' in the world to dualistic categories or else generate accounts of C/M as machine-like effects of the world understood as purely physical. These are examples of what MP means by 'thematization', the reduction of being to an idea, which ignores the experience in and of the world that generates consciousness and thought as a moving platform from which the world can be understood to limited extents through our interactions with objects and others alongside us in the world.

Good. There are other texts I've cited (and linked to in paper-length expositions) that help the newcomer to phenomenological philosophy to enter into the different world that exists in the presence of beings that are first aware of themselves {as situated in and yet at a distance from their environments} and increasingly aware of the meanings that arise for them in their existences, their lived realities, in protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind. One text I think is clarifying is Hofstadter's collection of late lectures and essays of Heidegger, titled Poetry, Language, Thought, available in used copies from amazon for a song. But as I've mentioned before, I had to read it three times before I finally reached the shift needed in my thinking. That was a long time ago, when I was first studying phenomenology.

smcder
If I remember, you've talked about this transition or shift, there may have even be one or more epiphanies associated with it ... I seem to remember that ... I'm very interested in this shift if you can say more about it.

Diving headlong into Phenomenology of Perception or Being and Time is bound to be discouraging. Neither of these primary texts is easy reading, especially given the subtle changes in meaning in translations. But even without that complication the works of Heidegger and MP are dense and difficult. The effort to understand phenomenology is repaid with a way of thinking about nature and mind that does dissolve the effects of radical dualism that have hindered our species' thinking since Descartes. On behalf of Descartes it's important to realize, as the phenomenological philosophers do, that he at least foregrounded consciousness/mind in philosophy, though he failed to move beyond thinking of C/M as a category of being separate from the being of the material world.
Strawson said something about this, in the lecture on Niietzsche Metaphysics, I need to dig this up ... I've come across another interpreter of Descartes too that seems to think he had another side, that some of his writing was "occult" in the literal sense of hidden so as not to offend prevailing standards ... not sure, need to dig.
 
We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.



Good. There are other texts I've cited (and linked to in paper-length expositions) that help the newcomer to phenomenological philosophy to enter into the different world that exists in the presence of beings that are first aware of themselves {as situated in and yet at a distance from their environments} and increasingly aware of the meanings that arise for them in their existences, their lived realities, in protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind. One text I think is clarifying is Hofstadter's collection of late lectures and essays of Heidegger, titled Poetry, Language, Thought, available in used copies from amazon for a song. But as I've mentioned before, I had to read it three times before I finally reached the shift needed in my thinking. That was a long time ago, when I was first studying phenomenology.

Diving headlong into Phenomenology of Perception or Being and Time is bound to be discouraging. Neither of these primary texts is easy reading, especially given the subtle changes in meaning in translations. But even without that complication the works of Heidegger and MP are dense and difficult. The effort to understand phenomenology is repaid with a way of thinking about nature and mind that does dissolve the effects of radical dualism that have hindered our species' thinking since Descartes. On behalf of Descartes it's important to realize, as the phenomenological philosophers do, that he at least foregrounded consciousness/mind in philosophy, though he failed to move beyond thinking of C/M as a category of being separate from the being of the material world.



The 'what-is' is no longer a physical world describable in terms of 'brute being', or in another usage of MP or perhaps Sartre, 'the trackless depths of brute being' before C/M are present to contemplate the difference between the world as experienced and thought and the world without experiencers and thinkers. We are limited in understanding physical being at and beneath the quantum substrate; at most we propose various theories about how qm works -- epistemological rather than ontological approaches to that level of 'what-is', with the exception of theory that proceeds from David Bohm. Interestingly, a paper by Rovelli that I read about seven years ago moves toward an ontological description of interaction at the q level involved in interactions between forces and fields evolved in the physical universe; he was approaching the subject of consciousness, but he made it clear that the systemic interactions and integrations he was talking about were not to be understood as 'conscious'.



Much confusion arises in reading phenomenological philosophy because of the limitations of language, in the case you raise in 1. above, the meaning of the word 'transcendental'. Husserl at mid-point in his thinking sought a 'Transcendental Ego', by which he seems to have meant a form of C/M that could reach an understanding of 'what-is' more complete and encompassing than that in which existentially situated, limited, C/M arises and develops. He recognized that error and thenceforward concentrated instead on what he termed 'lived reality' -- experience -- a concept close to James's 'radical empiricism' and taken up by MP. The term 'transcendence/transcend' has a different meaning from that point forward throughout phenomenology as a whole [but also on the way to expression in other 19th-century German tbought], where it is recognized that the 'subject' transcends the 'object', but that the 'object' also transcends the 'subject'. In phenomenology there is recognized overlapping and merging of 'subject' and 'object' in experience and in the development of consciousness that experience bodies forth. Thus phenomenology overcomes radical dualism to the extent that it recognizes subjective and objective 'poles' combined in experience, in consciousness, and eventually in mind. Thus Kant's a priori 'categories' fall short of recognizing what existential phenomenology recognizes -- that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).

Before phenomenology was developed to the point of a philosophical method and critique of positivism by Husserl, it was foreshadowed in literary works by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, adumbrated in subsequent early 'moderns' such as Melville, Proust, Dos Passos, and others. Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus expressed phenomenological insights in novels as well. The novel (and also poetry) are forms that enable the depiction of reality as experienced from both the 'outside' and the 'inside' by conscious existents. The site at which these poles of reality interact is inevitably in the experienced reality of individual humans, expressed in the interior monologues and interactive dialogues of individuals with others -- and with abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.

I've gotta take a break here. I hope what I've written is helpful in making sense of 'what-is' in existential phenomenological terms, but if not I'll be back soon for another round if you like.

Just reviewed the last few paragraphs and see that I did not take up the term 'thematization' in this part of your post:

'2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"

Is this something to do with what is?'


What MP is attempting to express in that sentence is that we cannot reduce 'what-is' in the world as a whole to an 'idea' that we can discuss as if it is 'real' and not an abstraction. Many of the 'ideas' about consciousness and mind discussed in POM and physicalist science -- i.e., those ideas and abstractions which are not informed by phenomenology -- do either reduce 'what-is' in the world to dualistic categories or else generate accounts of C/M as machine-like effects of the world understood as purely physical. These are examples of what MP means by 'thematization', the reduction of being to an idea, which ignores the experience in and of the world that generates consciousness and thought as a moving platform from which the world can be understood to limited extents through our interactions with objects and others alongside us in the world.

The 'what-is' is no longer a physical world describable in terms of 'brute being', or in another usage of MP or perhaps Sartre, 'the trackless depths of brute being' before C/M are present to contemplate the difference between the world as experienced and thought and the world without experiencers and thinkers. We are limited in understanding physical being at and beneath the quantum substrate; at most we propose various theories about how qm works -- epistemological rather than ontological approaches to that level of 'what-is', with the exception of theory that proceeds from David Bohm. Interestingly, a paper by Rovelli that I read about seven years ago moves toward an ontological description of interaction at the q level involved in interactions between forces and fields evolved in the physical universe; he was approaching the subject of consciousness, but he made it clear that the systemic interactions and integrations he was talking about were not to be understood as 'conscious'.


Much confusion arises in reading phenomenological philosophy because of the limitations of language, in the case you raise in 1. above, the meaning of the word 'transcendental'. Husserl at mid-point in his thinking sought a 'Transcendental Ego', by which he seems to have meant a form of C/M that could reach an understanding of 'what-is' more complete and encompassing than that in which existentially situated, limited, C/M arises and develops. He recognized that error and thenceforward concentrated instead on what he termed 'lived reality' -- experience -- a concept close to James's 'radical empiricism' and taken up by MP. The term 'transcendence/transcend' has a different meaning from that point forward throughout phenomenology as a whole [but also on the way to expression in other 19th-century German tbought], where it is recognized that the 'subject' transcends the 'object', but that the 'object' also transcends the 'subject'. In phenomenology there is recognized overlapping and merging of 'subject' and 'object' in experience and in the development of consciousness that experience bodies forth. Thus phenomenology overcomes radical dualism to the extent that it recognizes subjective and objective 'poles' combined in experience, in consciousness, and eventually in mind. Thus Kant's a priori 'categories' fall short of recognizing what existential phenomenology recognizes -- that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).
Before phenomenology was developed to the point of a philosophical method and critique of positivism by Husserl, it was foreshadowed in literary works by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, adumbrated in subsequent early 'moderns' such as Melville, Proust, Dos Passos, and others. Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus expressed phenomenological insights in novels as well. The novel (and also poetry) are forms that enable the depiction of reality as experienced from both the 'outside' and the 'inside' by conscious existents. The site at which these poles of reality interact is inevitably in the experienced reality of individual humans, expressed in the interior monologues and interactive dialogues of individuals with others -- and with abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.
I've gotta take a break here. I hope what I've written is helpful in making sense of 'what-is' in existential phenomenological terms, but if not I'll be back soon for another round if you like.
Just reviewed the last few paragraphs and see that I did not take up the term 'thematization' in this part of your post:
'2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"

Is this something to do with what is?'

What MP is attempting to express in that sentence is that we cannot reduce 'what-is' in the world as a whole to an 'idea' that we can discuss as if it is 'real' and not an abstraction. Many of the 'ideas' about consciousness and mind discussed in POM and physicalist science -- i.e., those ideas and abstractions which are not informed by phenomenology -- do either reduce 'what-is' in the world to dualistic categories or else generate accounts of C/M as machine-like effects of the world understood as purely physical. These are examples of what MP means by 'thematization', the reduction of being to an idea, which ignores the experience in and of the world that generates consciousness and thought as a moving platform from which the world can be understood to limited extents through our interactions with objects and others alongside us in the world.[/QUOTE]

The 'what-is' is no longer a physical world describable in terms of 'brute being', or in another usage of MP or perhaps Sartre, 'the trackless depths of brute being' before C/M are present to contemplate the difference between the world as experienced and thought and the world without experiencers and thinkers. We are limited in understanding physical being at and beneath the quantum substrate; at most we propose various theories about how qm works -- epistemological rather than ontological approaches to that level of 'what-is', with the exception of theory that proceeds from David Bohm. Interestingly, a paper by Rovelli that I read about seven years ago moves toward an ontological description of interaction at the q level involved in interactions between forces and fields evolved in the physical universe; he was approaching the subject of consciousness, but he made it clear that the systemic interactions and integrations he was talking about were not to be understood as 'conscious'.
I've lost track of what C/M stands for? Consciousness/Mind?
Much confusion arises in reading phenomenological philosophy because of the limitations of language, in the case you raise in 1. above, the meaning of the word 'transcendental'. Husserl at mid-point in his thinking sought a 'Transcendental Ego', by which he seems to have meant a form of C/M that could reach an understanding of 'what-is' more complete and encompassing than that in which existentially situated, limited, C/M arises and develops. He recognized that error and thenceforward concentrated instead on what he termed 'lived reality' -- experience -- a concept close to James's 'radical empiricism' and taken up by MP. The term 'transcendence/transcend' has a different meaning from that point forward throughout phenomenology as a whole [but also on the way to expression in other 19th-century German tbought], where it is recognized that the 'subject' transcends the 'object', but that the 'object' also transcends the 'subject'. In phenomenology there is recognized overlapping and merging of 'subject' and 'object' in experience and in the development of consciousness that experience bodies forth. Thus phenomenology overcomes radical dualism to the extent that it recognizes subjective and objective 'poles' combined in experience, in consciousness, and eventually in mind. Thus Kant's a priori 'categories' fall short of recognizing what existential phenomenology recognizes -- that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).

OK ... I think I am grokking, I'm going back to look at Kant and Hegel, hopefully not to get lost there ... but reading Hegel's preface to Phenomenology of Spirit and trying to understand Kant before going forward into MP and Todes ...

Before phenomenology was developed to the point of a philosophical method and critique of positivism by Husserl, it was foreshadowed in literary works by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, adumbrated in subsequent early 'moderns' such as Melville, Proust, Dos Passos, and others. Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus expressed phenomenological insights in novels as well. The novel (and also poetry) are forms that enable the depiction of reality as experienced from both the 'outside' and the 'inside' by conscious existents. The site at which these poles of reality interact is inevitably in the experienced reality of individual humans, expressed in the interior monologues and interactive dialogues of individuals with others -- and with abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.

... yes ...

abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.

examples ... ?

I've gotta take a break here. I hope what I've written is helpful in making sense of 'what-is' in existential phenomenological terms, but if not I'll be back soon for another round if you like.

Yes, round 2 for me, please!

What MP is attempting to express in that sentence is that we cannot reduce 'what-is' in the world as a whole to an 'idea' that we can discuss as if it is 'real' and not an abstraction. Many of the 'ideas' about consciousness and mind discussed in POM and physicalist science -- i.e., those ideas and abstractions which are not informed by phenomenology -- do either reduce 'what-is' in the world to dualistic categories or else generate accounts of C/M as machine-like effects of the world understood as purely physical. These are examples of what MP means by 'thematization', the reduction of being to an idea, which ignores the experience in and of the world that generates consciousness and thought as a moving platform from which the world can be understood to limited extents through our interactions with objects and others alongside us in the world.

I always want to imaginitize this ... in this way:

One of his main theses is that Kant imaginizes perception - that is, Kant makes perception too mental.

"idea"-ize it ... but this is where you let metaphors drop, I think ... there is no metaphor for experience, no converting it, then it becomes conception ... what I want to do is pick it up mentally, oh it's just like this and then put in, Procrustean, something that doesn't fit ... it just is experience. There is a Buddhist teacher who says things like ...

"personality view is like this"
anger is like this

and he says "everything fits" this to me is maybe what-is?

So instead of abstracting your experience, you just let it be like this
 
We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.



Good. There are other texts I've cited (and linked to in paper-length expositions) that help the newcomer to phenomenological philosophy to enter into the different world that exists in the presence of beings that are first aware of themselves {as situated in and yet at a distance from their environments} and increasingly aware of the meanings that arise for them in their existences, their lived realities, in protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind. One text I think is clarifying is Hofstadter's collection of late lectures and essays of Heidegger, titled Poetry, Language, Thought, available in used copies from amazon for a song. But as I've mentioned before, I had to read it three times before I finally reached the shift needed in my thinking. That was a long time ago, when I was first studying phenomenology.

Diving headlong into Phenomenology of Perception or Being and Time is bound to be discouraging. Neither of these primary texts is easy reading, especially given the subtle changes in meaning in translations. But even without that complication the works of Heidegger and MP are dense and difficult. The effort to understand phenomenology is repaid with a way of thinking about nature and mind that does dissolve the effects of radical dualism that have hindered our species' thinking since Descartes. On behalf of Descartes it's important to realize, as the phenomenological philosophers do, that he at least foregrounded consciousness/mind in philosophy, though he failed to move beyond thinking of C/M as a category of being separate from the being of the material world.



The 'what-is' is no longer a physical world describable in terms of 'brute being', or in another usage of MP or perhaps Sartre, 'the trackless depths of brute being' before C/M are present to contemplate the difference between the world as experienced and thought and the world without experiencers and thinkers. We are limited in understanding physical being at and beneath the quantum substrate; at most we propose various theories about how qm works -- epistemological rather than ontological approaches to that level of 'what-is', with the exception of theory that proceeds from David Bohm. Interestingly, a paper by Rovelli that I read about seven years ago moves toward an ontological description of interaction at the q level involved in interactions between forces and fields evolved in the physical universe; he was approaching the subject of consciousness, but he made it clear that the systemic interactions and integrations he was talking about were not to be understood as 'conscious'.



Much confusion arises in reading phenomenological philosophy because of the limitations of language, in the case you raise in 1. above, the meaning of the word 'transcendental'. Husserl at mid-point in his thinking sought a 'Transcendental Ego', by which he seems to have meant a form of C/M that could reach an understanding of 'what-is' more complete and encompassing than that in which existentially situated, limited, C/M arises and develops. He recognized that error and thenceforward concentrated instead on what he termed 'lived reality' -- experience -- a concept close to James's 'radical empiricism' and taken up by MP. The term 'transcendence/transcend' has a different meaning from that point forward throughout phenomenology as a whole [but also on the way to expression in other 19th-century German tbought], where it is recognized that the 'subject' transcends the 'object', but that the 'object' also transcends the 'subject'. In phenomenology there is recognized overlapping and merging of 'subject' and 'object' in experience and in the development of consciousness that experience bodies forth. Thus phenomenology overcomes radical dualism to the extent that it recognizes subjective and objective 'poles' combined in experience, in consciousness, and eventually in mind. Thus Kant's a priori 'categories' fall short of recognizing what existential phenomenology recognizes -- that we traffic in meaning even in preconsciousness, prereflective consciousness, and eventually realize this in reflective consciousness and thinking (mind).

Before phenomenology was developed to the point of a philosophical method and critique of positivism by Husserl, it was foreshadowed in literary works by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, adumbrated in subsequent early 'moderns' such as Melville, Proust, Dos Passos, and others. Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus expressed phenomenological insights in novels as well. The novel (and also poetry) are forms that enable the depiction of reality as experienced from both the 'outside' and the 'inside' by conscious existents. The site at which these poles of reality interact is inevitably in the experienced reality of individual humans, expressed in the interior monologues and interactive dialogues of individuals with others -- and with abstract ideas that function as blocks to the individual's interpretation of his or her own experience in the world.

I've gotta take a break here. I hope what I've written is helpful in making sense of 'what-is' in existential phenomenological terms, but if not I'll be back soon for another round if you like.

Just reviewed the last few paragraphs and see that I did not take up the term 'thematization' in this part of your post:

'2. "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization"

Is this something to do with what is?'


What MP is attempting to express in that sentence is that we cannot reduce 'what-is' in the world as a whole to an 'idea' that we can discuss as if it is 'real' and not an abstraction. Many of the 'ideas' about consciousness and mind discussed in POM and physicalist science -- i.e., those ideas and abstractions which are not informed by phenomenology -- do either reduce 'what-is' in the world to dualistic categories or else generate accounts of C/M as machine-like effects of the world understood as purely physical. These are examples of what MP means by 'thematization', the reduction of being to an idea, which ignores the experience in and of the world that generates consciousness and thought as a moving platform from which the world can be understood to limited extents through our interactions with objects and others alongside us in the world.

We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.

I've come back across Jean Gebser and his evolution of consciousness. I'm not sure how or if it relates to this idea about the evolution of consciousness with nature:

GEBSER's IDEA

consciousness is:

presence, being present, understood in the broadest sense as wakeful presence
  • human consciousness is in transition
this happens by "mutations", it's not continuous.

  • These involve structural changes to body and mind.
  • Previous consciousness structures continue to operate parallel to the emergent structure.
@Pharoah ... shades of HCT? (compatible with?)

Consciousness is "presence", or "being present":[6]
As Gebser understands the term, "conscious is neither knowledge nor conscience but must be understood for the time being in the broadest sense as wakeful presence."
Each consciousness structure eventually becomes deficient, and is replaced by a following structure. The stress and chaos in Europe from 1914 to 1945 were the symptoms of a structure of consciousness that was at the end of its effectiveness, and which heralded the birth of a new form of consciousness. The first evidence he witnessed was in the novel use of language and literature. He modified this position in 1943 so as to include the changes which were occurring in the arts and sciences at that time.
His thesis of the failure of one structure of consciousness alongside the emergence of a new one led him to inquire as to whether such had not occurred before. His work, Ursprung und Gegenwart is the result of that inquiry. It was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953, and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin. Working from the historical evidence of almost every major field,

  • poetry
  • music
  • visual arts
  • architecture
  • philosophy
  • religion
  • physics

Gebser saw traces of the emergence (which he called "efficiency") and collapse ("deficiency") of various structures of consciousness throughout history:

The archaic structure
  1. The magic structure
  2. The mythical structure
  3. The mental structure
  4. The integral structure (see Ken Wilber at al)
smcder We are perhaps ready for a post-integral structure?
 
@smcder , have you posted a link to this paper before?

"'Place of Nothingness'and the Dimension of Visibility:
Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Huineng"
David Brubaker

" ' Place of Nothingness' and the dimesion of visibility: Nishida, Merleau-Ponty and Huineng" | David Brubaker - Academia.edu

I was drawn to the title because I am still perplexed by the idea of 'nothingness' and 'emptiness' in phenomenology and hope to understand it vis a vis papers such as this that compare Western phenomenology with Eastern thought (esp Buddhism).

Reading this article now ...

This passage implies that there is a prior awareness of a color or sound before these are experienced as belonging to some external material object or as the perceptions in an observer. Nishida’s stated aim is to

avoid

  • “the view that the whole world is simply our ideas” and the solipsism that arises for Descartes and Berkeley (IG 44). Later on in the book, Nishida returns to the example of sound,

159 David Brubaker

in order to argue against the materialist belief that the universe is given only as objects known to the scientist: “Nature conceived of as an objective reality totally independent of our subjectivity is an abstract concept, not true reality” (IG 68).

BUT I want to say we're neglecting the idea, McGilChrist's idea that we have half a mind, a whole hemisphere - that Nature is conceived of as an objective reality totally independent of our subjectivity ...

So I keep coming across the idea of dissolving the split or sometimes the terminology used in other areas is "healing" -

the differences lie not, as has been supposed, in the 'what' - which skills each hemisphere possesses - but in the 'how', the way in which each uses them, and to what end.

the relationship between the hemispheres is not symmetrical
The left hemisphere, though unaware of its dependence, could be thought of as an 'emissary' of the right hemisphere, valuable for taking on a role that the right hemisphere - the 'Master' - cannot itself afford to undertake.
However it turns out that the emissary has his own will, and secretly believes himself to be superior to the Master. And he has the means to betray him. What he doesn't realize is that in doing so he will also betray himself.
The book begins by looking at the structure and function of the brain, and at the differences between the hemispheres, not only in attention and flexibility, but in attitudes to the:

  • implicit,
  • the unique,
  • and the personal
as well as the

  • body
  • time
  • depth
  • music
  • metaphor
  • empathy
  • morality
  • certainty
  • and the self.
It suggests that the drive to language was not principally to do with communication or thought, but manipulation, the main aim of the left hemisphere, which manipulates the right hand.

It shows the hemispheres as no mere machines with functions, but underwriting whole, self-consistent, versions of the world. Through an examination of Western philosophy, art and literature, it reveals the uneasy relationship of the hemispheres being played out in the history of ideas, from ancient times until the present. It ends by suggesting that we may be about to witness the final triumph of the left hemisphere – at the expense of us all.
 
We're floating upon and attempting to think about the river of existence as it bears us along in our individual lives within a physical world that is also always changing in its evolution. You're not really 'blind' to this, just still oriented to thinking of consciousness and mind as totally separate from the physical world of nature that has produced consciousness and mind as an intrinsic part of itself. We're all still struggling with the burden of Descartes' radical dualism, which is what the phenomenological turn attempts to overcome. Centuries of dualistic thinking have prevented our coming to understand the nature of 'what-is' once it includes the innumerable experiences of it that begin and evolve with life. MP refers to 'brute being' to distinguish the condition of what-is before the lights on it turn on and are perpetuated in the long evolution of experienced being and the task that arises, with us, of attempting to think and to understand this stage of the universe's evolution.

I've come back across Jean Gebser and his evolution of consciousness. I'm not sure how or if it relates to this idea about the evolution of consciousness with nature:

GEBSER's IDeA

consciousness is:

presence, being present, understood in the broadest sense as wakeful presence
  • human consciousness is in transition
this happens by "mutations", it's not continuous.
  • These involve structural changes to body and mind.
  • Previous consciousness structures continue to operate parallel to the emergent structure.
@Pharoah ... shades of HCT? (compatible with?)

Wikipedia

Each consciousness structure eventually becomes deficient, and is replaced by a following structure. The stress and chaos in Europe from 1914 to 1945 were the symptoms of a structure of consciousness that was at the end of its effectiveness, and which heralded the birth of a new form of consciousness.

  • The first evidence he witnessed was in the novel use of language and literature. He modified this position in 1943 so as to include the changes which were occurring in the arts and sciences at that time.
His thesis of the failure of one structure of consciousness alongside the emergence of a new one led him to inquire as to whether such had not occurred before.

  • Ursprung und Gegenwart is the result of that inquiry.

It was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953, and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin.

smcder
Ursprung literally origin
Gegenwart - presence

Working from the historical evidence of almost every major field, (e.g., poetry, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, religion, physics and the other natural sciences, etc.) Gebser saw traces of the emergence (which he called "efficiency") and collapse ("deficiency") of various structures of consciousness throughout history.

Your post motivates me to read Gebser (no small project). Amazon has The Ever-Present Origin and some interesting discussions in the customer reviews and comments/discussions following some of them. Here's one of those comments that also motivates me:

"Viridian says:

I am inclined to agree with Ebert about Wilber in particular, although Tarnas cannot be compared with either Wilber or Gebser.
The really bottom line is that there is no substitute in the writings of culture and consciousness, the philosophy of consciousness or an exploration of the nuances of the psychology of consciousness than Jean Gebser. He stands alone. These other writers may nip at his ankles, but that is all they can do. Gebser very clearly also stands beyond Jung and yet he is not a post-Jungian either.

His clarity of vision was sculpted in pre-war Europe and honed during his constant movement during WWII to avoid the Nazis (he was Swiss); his acute senses that Western civilization was both breaking down in its deficient structures of consciousness, while at the same time there was an emerging aperspectival vision (seen in early Picassos for example) that heralded a new stage or structure of consciousness he termed the integral.

At the same time it has to be stated categorically that his integral consciousness is not equivalent with Wilber's "integral". To get to appreciate this you need to read and get a grip on Gebser's thought. Once you get into it, it is captivating: magical, mythical and absorbing of the mental mind as well. One may even arrive at the "diaphanous" state, something Gebser wove his perambulations on consciousness ever towards- the magnet and lure of the genuinely integral."

Amazon.com: John David Ebert's review of The Ever-Present Origin, Part One: Foundat...
 
Good. There are other texts I've cited (and linked to in paper-length expositions) that help the newcomer to phenomenological philosophy to enter into the different world that exists in the presence of beings that are first aware of themselves {as situated in and yet at a distance from their environments} and increasingly aware of the meanings that arise for them in their existences, their lived realities, in protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind. One text I think is clarifying is Hofstadter's collection of late lectures and essays of Heidegger, titled Poetry, Language, Thought, available in used copies from amazon for a song. But as I've mentioned before, I had to read it three times before I finally reached the shift needed in my thinking. That was a long time ago, when I was first studying phenomenology.


smcder

If I remember, you've talked about this transition or shift, there may have even be one or more epiphanies associated with it ... I seem to remember that ... I'm very interested in this shift if you can say more about it.


If I remember, you've talked about this transition or shift, there may have even be one or more epiphanies associated with it ... I seem to remember that ... I'm very interested in this shift if you can say more about it.


The earlier 'epiphany' you're remembering took place in Iowa City while I was walking down a high hill to the English-Philosophy Building. That was only a few years after my OBE, which might have produced a subconscious need to understand the relationship between body and mind. I must have been thinking about consciousness because I suddenly came face to face with the operation of my reflective consciousness as a continual presence in my mind. (I had at that point read no phenomenology; that came five or six years later at another university.) As I said when I posted about this experience, I was shaken by it (I even thought I might be losing my mind). It was like suddenly discovering another room in a house I'd lived in forever. In the years during which we develop in our awareness of the world and accrue what we think of as our 'self', we continuously move seamlessly from prereflective consciousness to reflective consciousness without noticing the difference, so that we become accustomed to it without realizing what it is -- i.e., a further layer of level of consciousness aware of and responding to our embedded prereflective awareness of and contact with the world.


The 'shift' in my thinking during my third reading of Heidegger's essays in Poetry, Language, Thought was an ontological shift into a completely new {to me} perspective on the world, in which I understood that one's consciousness is merely a small point of light in the opaqueness of a physical world which is without description, indescribable and undescribed, in the absence of consciousness, and moreover that consciousness itself [extending far beyond one's own] is an integral phenomenon shared -- realized -- among all humans and sentient animals in our individually lived realities. It was no longer possible to think of myself or my consciousness and mind as separate or alienated from this world in which we have our temporal being. We take our small places in the evolution of being -- and possibly of 'Being' -- whether we realize it or not. But only realizing this enables us to take what we do seriously as having meaning for ourselves and beyond ourselves for others, and this recognition is the ground of ethical thinking and behavior. The world inhabited and lived by conscious beings is not 'meaningless'. Everything we do has meaning, significance -- for better or worse depending on the extent to which we take upon ourselves the obligations laid on us by what we see and feel and know and learn. That nature itself has produced life and evolved us to become beings that see, feel, know, and learn -- a profound recognition of our situation in being -- adds to the weight of what Heidegger called the Appropriation of consciousness by Being. There is an inescapable sense that we are meant to be aware of what-is and to be, as Heidegger also said, "the shepherds of being."








 
It shows the hemispheres as no mere machines with functions, but underwriting whole, self-consistent, versions of the world. Through an examination of Western philosophy, art and literature, it reveals the uneasy relationship of the hemispheres being played out in the history of ideas, from ancient times until the present. It ends by suggesting that we may be about to witness the final triumph of the left hemisphere – at the expense of us all.

This is an important subject -- the nature and relationship of the two hemispheres, the right enabling openness and responsiveness to the natural world, the left enabling practical management skills for coping with and more often controlling sociocultural situations in the world. I've read somewhere the idea that these differences can be understood as necessary specializations to provide options for behavior in varying conditions and situations emerging in the evolution of species. The desire for increasing power and control by 'leadership' factions in human history has evidently led to the dominance of left-hemisphere skills, to the disadvantage of our species as whole. The danger is most exquisitely expressed in the blind rush to implement artificial intelligence to replace our own native intelligence.
 
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