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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8

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Wow. What a bibliography, and as Radin says there this not include include the thousands of published articles in psychical and parapsychological research available.

Do you remember the name of the author, a female psychologist whose book I linked in the last year or so and which you found impressive, who whose research concerned comparative research into NDEs and past-life regression? I have it around here somewhere but probably still in one of the boxes yet unpacked from my move last August.

Thanks for the Radin bibliography of links. I've saved it in Word.

Jenny Wade?
 
To complete the summary quote earlier presented:

"Whereas the neo-Kantian idealism then dominant in France (e.g., Léon Brunschvicg, Jules Lachelier) treated nature as an objective unity dependent on the synthetic activity of consciousness, the realism of the natural sciences and empirical psychology assumed nature to be composed of external things and events interacting causally. Merleau-Ponty argues that neither approach is tenable: organic life and human consciousness are emergent from a natural world that is not reducible to its meaning "

Where did you post the earlier part of the 'summary quote' you (or someone else?) presented here? I tracked back and couldn't find it in the thread.

I had difficulty understanding the development of the rest of your post and intended to ask you to clarify it. I also thought I'd at least try to provide a succinct characterization for you of the meaning of MP's concept of the chiasmic relation of consciousness and nature as intertwined 'flesh', which you request at the end, so I went to SEP's page on MP and found that there's a new entry there now, this one by Ted Toadvine, a superb MP scholar and exponent. And rather quickly I found myself reading the quote you begin with here, in a very informative discussion of MP's early work with Gestalt psychology. I want to finish reading Toadvine's article before I try again to understand and respond to your post.
 
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Earlier posts concerning the Chiasm and chiasmic relation from the forum's search page:



  1. Post
    Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
    ...includes embodied contact with the body of the physical world and understanding of the nature of that contact, that interrelationship, that chiasm.
    Post by: Constance, Jan 16, 2017 in forum: General Freewheeling Chit-Chat

  2. Post
    Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
    The Visible and the Invisible: The Intertwining—The Chiasm Maurice Merleau-Ponty [Originally from The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 130-55 in...
    Post by: Constance, Jan 15, 2017 in forum: General Freewheeling Chit-Chat

  3. Post
    Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
    ...speaking of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, particularly of his use of chiasm or the crossing into one another of experiences or ontological...
    Post by: Constance, Dec 8, 2016 in forum: General Freewheeling Chit-Chat

  4. Post
    Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
    ...roots can help us enter into the crossing between/ the chiasm of the nature of our being and physically evolved nature as we experience it in...
    Post by: Constance, Dec 6, 2016 in forum: General Freewheeling Chit-Chat

  5. Post
    Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6
    ...The following extract from MP's "The Intertwining -- the Chiasm" expresses the unfolding of the grounded passageway from prereflective...
    Post by: Constance, May 8, 2016 in forum: General Freewheeling Chit-Chat

  6. Post
    Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6
    ...and mind are borne out of nature and yield a bifurcation, a chiasm, in nature -- an emergence of further complexity in the evolution of nature...
    Post by: Constance, Apr 27, 2016 in forum: General Freewheeling Chit-Chat

  7. Post
    Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6
    This extract from MP's "The Intertwining -- the Chiasm" should also be clarifying: "What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of...
    Post by: Constance, Apr 3, 2016 in forum: General Freewheeling Chit-Chat
 
Toadvine's new entry on MP at SEP:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

See especially this section:

6. The Visible and the Invisible
The manuscript and working notes published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible (1964 V&I), extracted from a larger work underway at the time of Merleau-Ponty’s death, is considered by many to be the best presentation of his later ontology. The main text, drafted in 1959 and 1960, is contemporaneous with “Eye and Mind” and the Preface to Signs, Merleau-Ponty’s final collection of essays. The first three chapters progressively develop an account of “philosophical interrogation” in critical dialogue with scientism, the philosophies of reflection (Descartes and Kant), Sartrean negation, and the intuitionisms of Bergson and Husserl. These are followed by a stand-alone chapter, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”, presenting Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh. The published volume also includes a brief abandoned section of the text as an appendix and more than a hundred pages of selected working notes composed between 1959 and 1961.[7]

Merleau-Ponty frames the investigation with a description of “perceptual faith”, our shared pre-reflective conviction that perception presents us with the world as it actually is, even though this perception is mediated, for each of us, by our bodily senses. This apparent paradox creates no difficulties in our everyday lives, but it becomes incomprehensible when thematized by reflection:

The “natural” man holds on to both ends of the chain, thinks at the same time that his perception enters into the things and that it is formed this side of his body. Yet coexist as the two convictions do without difficulty in the exercise of life, once reduced to theses and to propositions they destroy one another and leave us in confusion. (V&I: 23–24/8)

For Merleau-Ponty, this “unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world” is the starting point for developing an alternative account of perception, the world, intersubjective relations, and ultimately being as such. Neither the natural sciences nor psychology provide an adequate clarification of this perceptual faith, since they rely on it without acknowledgment even as their theoretical constructions rule out its possibility. Philosophies of reflection, exemplified by Descartes and Kant, also fail in their account of perception, since they reduce the perceived world to an idea, equate the subject with thought, and undermine any understanding of intersubjectivity or a world shared in common (V&I: 62/39, 67/43).

Sartre’s dialectic of being (in-itself) and nothingness (for-itself) makes progress over philosophies of reflection insofar as it recognizes the ecceity of the world, with which the subject engages not as one being alongside others but rather as a nothingness, that is, as a determinate negation of a concrete situation that can co-exist alongside other determinate negations. Even so, for Sartre, pure nothingness and pure being remain mutually exclusive, ambivalently identical in their perfect opposition, which brings any movement of their dialectic to a halt. The “philosophy of negation” is therefore shown to be a totalizing or “high-altitude” thought that remains abstract, missing the true opening onto the world made possible by the fact that nothingness is “sunken into being” (V&I: 121–122/88–89). This “bad” dialectic must therefore give way to a “hyperdialectic” that remains self-critical about its own tendency to reify into fixed and opposed theses (V&I: 129/94). . . . .
 
Neither the natural sciences nor psychology provide an adequate clarification of this perceptual faith, since they rely on it without acknowledgment even as their theoretical constructions rule out its possibility. Philosophies of reflection, exemplified by Descartes and Kant, also fail in their account of perception, since they reduce the perceived world to an idea
The first part of this quote is very well put. The second part regarding Kant I question. Doesn't Kant suggest that noumena is mind-independent? In other words, Kant's position is not one of solipsism denying the existence of an objective world. An objective, external, noumenal world does exist, Kant just says that our phenomenal access to it is necessarily limited.

In any case, I'm interested to read the rest of the entry.
 
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Responding to @Soupie's post today to the following paragraph by Toadvine concerning MP's later philosophy in The Visible and the Invisible at SEP:

"For Merleau-Ponty, this “unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world” is the starting point for developing an alternative account of perception, the world, intersubjective relations, and ultimately being as such. Neither the natural sciences nor psychology provide an adequate clarification of this perceptual faith, since they rely on it without acknowledgment even as their theoretical constructions rule out its possibility. Philosophies of reflection, exemplified by Descartes and Kant, also fail in their account of perception, since they reduce the perceived world to an idea, equate the subject with thought, and undermine any understanding of intersubjectivity or a world shared in common (V&I: 62/39, 67/43).

The first part of this quote is very well put. The second part regarding Kant I question.
Doesn't Kant suggest that noumena is mind-independent? In other words, Kant's position is not one of solipsism denying the existence of an objective world. An objective, external, noumenal world does exist, Kant just says that our phenomenal access to it is necessarily limited..


I'll try to respond to that question, though I have read less than 10 percent of Kant's philosophical works. As I understand Kant, the noumenal is the
ding an sich, the thing in itself that we cannot know. {Question arises for me: did Kant think that because we cannot perceive the noumenal we also cannot experience it and, from the basis of experience, understand that the noumenal is/exists? It seems to me that Kant must have 'thought' that the phenomenal adumbrates the noumenal -- that the whole notion of the noumenal arises in and out of our phenomenal experience in the world. If not, where? and how? does the concept of the noumenal become possible as a category of human thought and being? That we can think the 'noumenal' means that the noumenal is not "mind-independent." Evidently, Kant is not a solipsist; he does not deny "the existence of an objective world." But can we conclude that Kant identifies the noumenal with a wholly 'objective world'? Is Kant, then, an emergentist? Question posed to you and Steve and Michael, and anyone else who wants to respond.

T
oday I've been reading ramifying posts in our thread from mid-January, especially guided by Steve's reading, thinking, quoting, and linking of sources including Jane V. Rubenstein and Galen Strawson. I recommend that we go back to these posts spanning at least the two posts linked here, for further food for thought:

https://www.theparacast.com/forum/threads/consciousness-and-the-paranormal-part-8.17985/page-42#post-253366

https://www.theparacast.com/forum/threads/consciousness-and-the-paranormal-part-8.17985/page-43#post-253421
 
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Responding to @Soupie's post today to the following paragraph by Toadvine concerning MP's later philosophy in The Visible and the Invisible at SEP:

"For Merleau-Ponty, this “unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world” is the starting point for developing an alternative account of perception, the world, intersubjective relations, and ultimately being as such. Neither the natural sciences nor psychology provide an adequate clarification of this perceptual faith, since they rely on it without acknowledgment even as their theoretical constructions rule out its possibility. Philosophies of reflection, exemplified by Descartes and Kant, also fail in their account of perception, since they reduce the perceived world to an idea, equate the subject with thought, and undermine any understanding of intersubjectivity or a world shared in common (V&I: 62/39, 67/43).

https://www.theparacast.com/forum/t...e-paranormal-part-8.17985/page-42#post-253366

I'll try to respond to that question, though I have read less than 10 percent of Kant's philosophical works. As I understand Kant, the noumenal is the
ding an sich, the thing in itself that we cannot know. {Question arises for me: did Kant think that because we cannot perceive the noumenal we also cannot experience it and, from the basis of experience, understand that the noumenal is/exists? It seems to me that Kant must have 'thought' that the phenomenal adumbrates the noumenal -- that the whole notion of the noumenal arises in and out of our phenomenal experience in the world. If not, where? and how? does the concept of the noumenal become possible as a category of human thought and being? That we can think the 'noumenal' means that the noumenal is not "mind-independent." Evidently, Kant is not a solipsist; he does not deny "the existence of an objective world." But can we conclude that Kant identifies the noumenal with a wholly 'objective world'? Is Kant, then, an emergentist? Question posed to you and Steve and Michael, and anyone else who wants to respond.

T
oday I've been reading ramifying posts in our thread from mid-January, especially guided by Steve's reading, thinking, quoting, and linking of sources including Mary Jane Rubenstein and Galen Strawson. I recommend that we go back to these posts spanning at least the two posts linked here, for further food for thought:

https://www.theparacast.com/forum/threads/consciousness-and-the-paranormal-part-8.17985/page-42#post-253366

https://www.theparacast.com/forum/threads/consciousness-and-the-paranormal-part-8.17985/page-43#post-253421
Hegel's razor demolishes Kant...

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk
 
I want to post here again the quotation from MP's The Visible and the Invisible that I posted in Part 6 of the thread (post #992 there).

"This extract from MP's "The Intertwining -- the Chiasm" should also be clarifying:

"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."

I think a reading of The Invisible and the Invisible and MP's late lectures and notes collected under the title Nature are necessary for an understanding of MP's late ontological thought centered in the Chiasm. We might contemplate, as MP does, the implication of the Invisible in the Visible -- as arising out of the depth of the tangible world as we experience and understand it in phenomenal perception (both prereflectively and reflectively), which understanding generates our ability to conceive of the noumenal as distinguished from the phenomenal. But it remains a question whether the noumenal can be understood as equating to a purely 'objective world'. The noumenal might also be characterized by the interdependence and interaction of consciousness/mind and things.
 
Partial quotation from Strawson (from the second mid-January post linked above):

. . . [iii] Among physical phenomena, experiential physical phenomena do not depend on non-experiential physical phenomena …, or do not depend on them in any way in which non-experiential phenomena do not also depend on experiential phenomena.9

My reason for mentioning this straight away is that I take it that real (realistic) physicalists must be equal-status monists, given the argument in RMP that the experiential cannot possibly emerge from the wholly and utterly non-experiential. If one is a realist about the experiential, a real realist about the experiential (see p. 3), one faces the fact that any asymmetry or one-way dependence or reducibility must be to the detriment of the non-experiential. I am going to continue to assume for purposes of argument that monism is true, in spite of the difficulties in the notion:10 both insofar as I continue to assume for ad hominem purposes that physicalism is true (for whatever physicalism is it is a monist position), and on my own account — at least until the term ‘physical’ falls apart (see p. 234 below). No monism can be ‘neutral’, however, given that there is no sense in which experience considered just as such can be mere appearance, in the sense of not being really real at all,11 and given that this is so — given that neutral monism is out — , it looks as though the only monism that really makes sense, given the certain existence of experience, is experiential or panpsychist monism. If so, continued use of the word ‘physicalist’ will sound ever more oddly, with an increasingly reductio ad absurdum ring, and equal-status monism will turn out to be a pipe-dream — unless, that is, Spinoza can save it. . . . ."
 
Re Hegel and Kant, i thought the following was helpful from quora:

https://www.quora.com/profile/Matt-Perryman

"Kant described his solution to the problems of dogmatism, on the one hand, and Hume's skepticism about causality, on the other, as a Copernican turn in philosophy. It is not our minds that conform to the world, in the manner that Descartes, Locke, and Hume would have it, but the other way around: it is the conceptual activity of our minds on what is given to us in sensation that creates the world as it appears to us.

Kant pays a price for this move: since the world as it appears to us is necessarily a product of what is intuited in sensation as structured by the activity of the transcendental subject, he must give up the possibility of perceiving or conceiving anything about the world as it is in itself, independently of our mental activities. Kant has given up on metaphysics in order to explain the possibility of knowledge. In that move we arrive at the famous distinction between phenomena, that which appears to us as it must appear to us, and noumena, or the things in themselves.

Hegel's critique of Kant centers on this distinction. Following on the ground laid by Fichte and Schelling in the post-Kantian elaboration of the critical philosophy, Hegel holds that we do in fact have the noumena in thought -- for Kant has the thing itself in mind when he conceives of it as that about which we can know nothing!

What Hegel is saying, then, is that by positing the limit to thought, Kant has inadvertently brought what is beyond thought back into thought. What is by definition unthinkable is nevertheless being thought in the very process of making the point. This has two central consequences for Hegel's project:

1. The identity of subject and object. Since the noumenal is revealed as another manifestation of phenomena, what is unthinkable is also thinkable. Since what is thinkable depends on the necessary conceptual activity of rational beings, the consequence is that the noumenal world beyond thought is also dependent upon thought. The Kantian subject is identical with its own object.

2. The priority of flux or change over what is fixed and given. There is a contradiction in point (1): what is posited as unthinkable is, at the same time, thinkable. Ordinarily, we could not say that "p" and "not-p" are simultaneously true. One of Hegel's innovations (or mistakes, depending on who you ask) is the acceptance of true contradictions in the form of the determinate negation. Hegel's project in the Phenomenology of Mind is a working-through of the unfolding of consciousness and Reason as it begins with immediate sense-certainties. What Hegel argues is that what seems to us as given in immediate sensation is anything but; to focus on a "bit" of sensation, say a patch of color or a flavor, is not to grasp an object-like thing, but to actually experience an underlying process. Colors and tastes change in intensity; so do all of our sensory perceptions and concepts in thought. What seems to us as a fixed and orderly Being is unmasked as a deeper process of historically-unfolding becoming.

The upshot of these two points is that the Kantian subject, understood as the transcendental and universal synthetic a priori knowledge that necessarily structures our perceptions and conceptions, loses its "given" status. For Hegel, even that subject is a historically-contingent outcome of a process of nature struggling with itself in light of the dialectical contradiction. Thus what Kant posits as the timeless and universal structure of thought is, in actuality, conditioned by its own process of development. What Kant saw in us was not given, but itself a part of history's unfolding towards the Absolute."
 
"The rational mind, dealing with the known, expects to find it glistening in a familiar ether. What it really finds is the unknown always behind and beyond the known, giving it the appearance, at best, of chiaroscuro."[101]

-- Wallace Stevens in a lecture entitled "The Irrational Element in Poetry."
 
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