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.
