smcder
Paranormal Adept
Yay! I'm on a climb too. ;-)
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Yay! I'm on a climb too. ;-)
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I don't think you should take my comment as a personal insult. All we are trying to do here is to make progress in comprehending the possibilities of integrating the contributions of phenomenology and 'naturalism' as explored in recent consciousness studies. To do so, we need to rely on the texts written by the philosophers engaging with this project/attempt, and to do that we need to establish an understanding of what they have to contribute to this project (which requires reading their texts together with mutually developing comprehension).[/QUOTE]
Very well said, @Constance
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I'm working today and only had a bit of a look at the Moran paper ....
I'll try to find the Morris paper too, tonight or tomorrow.
I like this: focus on 1 topic, the naturalization of phenomenology, for the moment and I think Zahavi and Moran are very clear.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Michel Bitbol
On the primary nature of consciousness (a short statement)
... just a couple of page download...
"Data from general anaesthesia feed this doubt. When the doses of certain classes of anaesthetic drugs are increased and coherent EEG frequency is decreased, mental abilities are lost step by step, one after another. At first, subjects lose some of their appreciation of pain, but can still have dialogue with doctors and remember every event. Then, they lose their ability of recalling long-term explicit memories of what is going on, but they are still able to react and answer demands on a momentary basis. With higher doses of drugs, patients lose ability to respond to requests, in addition to losing their explicit memory ; but they still have “implicit memories” of the situation. To recapitulate, faculties that are usually taken together as necessary to consciousness are in fact dissociable from one another. And pure, instantaneous, unmemorized, non-reflective experience might well be the last item left. This looks like a scientific hint as to the ubiquity and primariness of phenomenal consciousness. Of course, a scientific hint does not mean a scientific proof (at any rate, claiming that there exists a scientific proof of the primariness of elementary consciousness would badly contradict our initial aknowledgment that objective science can have no real grip on pure experience). The former scientific hint is only an indirect indication coming from the very blindspot of science: the pure passing experience it presupposes, and of which it retains only a stabilized and intersubjectively shared structural residue."
On the primary nature of consciousness (a short statement)
... just a couple of page download...
"Data from general anaesthesia feed this doubt. When the doses of certain classes of anaesthetic drugs are increased and coherent EEG frequency is decreased, mental abilities are lost step by step, one after another. At first, subjects lose some of their appreciation of pain, but can still have dialogue with doctors and remember every event. Then, they lose their ability of recalling long-term explicit memories of what is going on, but they are still able to react and answer demands on a momentary basis. With higher doses of drugs, patients lose ability to respond to requests, in addition to losing their explicit memory ; but they still have “implicit memories” of the situation. To recapitulate, faculties that are usually taken together as necessary to consciousness are in fact dissociable from one another. And pure, instantaneous, unmemorized, non-reflective experience might well be the last item left. This looks like a scientific hint as to the ubiquity and primariness of phenomenal consciousness. Of course, a scientific hint does not mean a scientific proof (at any rate, claiming that there exists a scientific proof of the primariness of elementary consciousness would badly contradict our initial aknowledgment that objective science can have no real grip on pure experience). The former scientific hint is only an indirect indication coming from the very blindspot of science: the pure passing experience it presupposes, and of which it retains only a stabilized and intersubjectively shared structural residue."
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Yes. That is one of the Morris papers I linked in the last or second-last 'part' of this thread. It's available at this link from the Concordia University bibliography of Morris's publications that you linked above.
From the Nature of Meaning to a Phenomenological Refiguring of Nature - Spectrum: Concordia University Research Repository
Very important. This research seems to support Evan Thompson's thesis in Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy.
that a minimal state of consciousness is maintained even in non-dreaming sleep. Thompson cites Bitbol in that book but I don't know where my copy of the book is at present so I can't report what in Bitbol's research Thompson refers to.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Ok ... Are we missing anything else? A paper by Moran?
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Can you say more about what a "predictive model" is or would do? Predictive of ... ?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
What are your thoughts?
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The one I posted is recent and I think likely contains the same arguments that he presented in a videotaped lecture following Zahavi's. I haven't listened to that Moran lecture but you'd be best able to tell if he changed his viewpoint at that point. I think I'll listen to his lecture now just to see what he said in response to Zahavi.
ETA: I've been reading some additional papers concerning the project of naturalizing phenomenology and will post links and extracts tonight.
I like this too. Following this project is I think the best way to become clear about the core insight of phenomenological philosophy as a whole -- why it constitutes a 'turn' in philosophy that presents a critique of objectivist science that scientists [ETA: and philosophers] must come to terms with. It also leads us to an understanding of how phenomenology itself underwrites a new ontology as expressed in Merleau-Ponty's last works. I'm reading Mauro Carbone's The Thinking of The Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy, and hoping to find it reproduced somewhere online so that we can discuss it together. It's a short but dense book and critically important since it does present a full confluence and integration of phenomenology and naturalism.
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Yes, I'm interested in your elaboration of the post to which both Steve and I have responded. No, I don't think that you "should do everything [my] way," nor can I see such a coercive intent in Steve's engagements with and responses to your posts. The issue isn't actually what you have or haven't read, but what you understand about the philosophical and scientific theories we discuss in this thread concerning the nature of consciousness. Discussing these theories requires reading the texts in which they are expressed and delineated. This you do not wish to do, and that's of course your choice. You seem in general to disparage philosophical contributions to the investigation of consciousness and to operate on the assumption that you can participate fully in discussions in this thread without reading the texts we refer to. That leads to posts such as the one in question in which you reduce the difference between Kantian idealism and phenomenological description to a matter of "attitude," which unfortunately can't do the work needed to distinguish between Kantian philosophy and phenomenological philosophy in the development of modern philosophy.
But I encourage you, as Steve first encouraged you, to elaborate on what you meant by reducing these differences in philosophies to matters of 'attitude'.
Excellent, especially Bitbol's identification of "the very blindspot of science" that precludes its investigation of the grounds of all experience, including its own experience in pursuing solely objective descriptions of nature in the modern period. I want to post the whole of what Bitbol writes in that statement you linked:
On the primary nature of consciousness (a short statement)
Michel Bitbol
CNRS / Ecole Normale SupŽrieure (Archives Husserl), Paris
Published as an insert in F. Capra & P.-L. Luisi,
The Systems View of Life,
Cambridge UniversityPress, 2014, p. 266-268
Nobody can deny that complex features of consciousness, such as reflexivity (the awareness that there is awareness of something), or self-consciousness (the awareness of one's own identity) are late outcomes of a process of biological adaptation. But what about pure non-reflexive experience ? What about the mere 'feel' of sensing and being, irrespective of any second-order awareness of this feel ? There are good reasons to think that pure experience, or elementary consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, is no secondary feature of an objective item but plainly here, primary in the strongest sense of the word.
We start with this plain fact : the world as we found it (to borrow Wittgenstein's expression) is no collection of objects ; it is indissolubly a perceptive-experience-of-objects, or an imaginative experience of these objects qua being out of reach of perceptive experience. In other terms, conscious experience is self-evidently pervasive and existentially primary. Moreover, any scientific undertaking presupposes one's own experience and the others' experiences as well. In history and on a day-to-day basis, the objective descriptions which are characteristic of science arise as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience. In this sense, scientific findings, including results of neurophysiology and evolution theory, are methodologically secondary to experience. Experience, o elementary consciousness, can then be said to be methodologically primary for science. Consequently, the claim of primariness of elementary consciousness is no scientific statement: it just expresses a most basic prerequisite of science.
But conversely, this means that the objective science of nature has no real bearing on the pure experience that tacitly underpins it. The latter allegation sounds hard to swallow in view of so many momentous successes of neurosciences. Yet, if one thinks a little harder, any sense of paradox vanishes. Actually, it is in virtue of the very efficience of neurosciences that they can have no grip on phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, as soon as this efficience is fully put to use, nothing prevents one from offering a purely neurophysiological account of the chain of causes operating from a sensory input received by an organism to the elaborate behaviour of this organism. At no point does one need to invoke the circumstance
that this organism is perceiving and acting consciously (in the most elementary sense of 'having a feel'. In a mature cognitive neuroscience, the fact of phenomenal
consciousness is bound to appear as irrelevant or incidental.
As a result, any attempt at providing a scientific account of phenomenal consciousness, by way of neurological or evolutionary theories, is doomed to failure (not because of any deficiency of these sciences, but precisely as a side effect of their most fruitful methodological option). Modern neurological theories, such as global workspace theory or integrated information theory, have been remarkably successful in accounting for major features of higher levels of consciousness, such as the capacity of unifying the field of awareness and of elaborating self-mapping. They have also turned out to be excellent predictors of subject's behavioral wakefulness and ability/inability of [to] provide
reports in clinical situations such as coma and epileptic seizure. But they have provided absolutely no clue about the origin of phenomenal consciousness. They have explained the
functions of consciousness, but not the circumstance that there is something it is like
to be an organism performing these functions. The same is true of evolutionist arguments. Evolution can select some useful functions ascribed to consciousness (such as behavioral emotivity of the organism, integrated action planning, or self-monitoring), but not the mere fact that there is something it is like to implement these functions. Indeed, only the functions have adaptative value, not their being experienced.
Even the ability of neurophysiological inquiry to identify correlates of phenomenal consciousness can be challenged on that basis. After all, identifying such correlates rely [relies] heavily on the subject's ability to discriminate, to memorize, and to report , which is used as the ultimate experimental criterion of consciousness. Can we preclude the possibility that the large-scale synchronization of complex neural activity of the brain cortex often deemed indispensible for consciousness, is in fact only required for interconnecting a number of cognitive functions including those needed for memorizing, self-reflecting and reporting? Conversely, extrapolating Semir Zeki's suggestion, can we preclude that any (large or small) area of the brain or even of the body is associated to some sort of fleeting pure experience, although no report can be obtained from it?
Data from general anaesthesia feed this doubt. When the doses of certain classes of anaesthetic drugs are increased and coherent EEG frequency is decreased, mental abilities are lost step by step, one after another. At first, subjects lose some of their appreciation of pain, but can still have dialogue with doctors and remember every event. Then, they lose
their ability of recalling long-term explicit memories of what is going on, but they are still able to react and answer demands on a momentary basis. With higher doses of drugs, patients lose ability to respond to requests, in addition to losing their explicit memory; but they still have 'implicit memories' of the situation. To recapitulate, faculties that are usually taken together as necessary to consciousness are in fact dissociable from one another. And pure, instantaneous, unmemorized, non-reflective experience might well be the last item left. This looks like a scientific hint as to the ubiquity and primariness of phenomenal consciousness. Of course, a scientific hint does not mean a scientific proof (at any rate, claiming that there exists a scientific proof of the primariness of elementary consciousness would badly contradict our initial acknowledgment that objective science can have no real grip on pure experience). The former scientific hint is only an indirect indication coming from the very blindspot of science: the pure passing experience it presupposes, and of which it retains only a stabilized and intersubjectively shared structural residue.
Should we content ourselves with these negative remarks ?As Francisco Varela has shown, one can overcome them by proposing a broadened definition of science. Instead of remaining stuck within the third-person attitude, the new science should include a 'dance' of mutual definition taking place between first-person and third-person accounts, mediated by the second person level of social exchange. As soon as this momentous turn is taken,
elementary consciousness is no longer a mystery for a truncated science, but an aknowledged datum from which a fuller kind of science can unfold.
Bibliography
Bitbol M., 'Science as if situation mattered',
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, 1, 181-224, 2002
Bitbol, M., 'Is Consciousness Primary?',
NeuroQuantology, 6, 53-71, 2008
Bitbol, M. & Luisi, P.-L., 'Science and the self-referentiality of consciousness',
Journal of Cosmology, 14, 4728-4743, 2011
Varela, F.V., 'Neurophenomenology : a methodological remedy for the hard problem', in: Shear J (ed.) Explaining consciousness, the hard problem, MIT Press, 1998
Wittgenstein, L., 'Notes for lectures on private experience and sense data', Philosophical Review, 77, 275-320,1968
Zeki, S., 'The disunity of consciousness', in R. Banerjee & B.K. Chakrabarti (Eds.),
Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 168, Elsevier, 2008
On the primary nature of consciousness (a short statement)
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Yes, and I think I can see why that would be. In meditation one seeks a way to encounter being at another level of consciousness, deeper or more fundamental than consciousness engaged in confronting things and human behaviors in locally lived worlds, which pose daunting ambiguity and difficulty of interpretation -- and especially of shared interpretation -- resulting in lived worlds in which interpretation is a struggle, even a battle, and the innate desire for social harmony requiring social justice cannot yet be satisfied. The wonder of meditation is that in seeking to quiet the anguished mind it enables consciousness to discover a deeper zone of stillness and peace in an extended sense/experience of being/Being.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
All that should matter is that the content posted by participants addresses some aspect of the discussion in an honest and cognizant way. How one chooses to do that should be up to them. This gives each participant the freedom to engage the content in the way that is best for them, and adds to the potential for additional insight coming from their particular perspective. If some discrepancy between participants should arise over the material, then specific points can be identified and hashed out, and such hashing out should address the content and quality of analysis rather than concerning itself with irrelevancies like the author's personal characteristics, credentials, or history with the subject.
That isn't to say that the use of material from existing philosophical works isn't valuable ( it is ). It might even be considered requisite to establishing baselines, but the concepts in the material transcend the material itself. Therefore once the concepts are understood, all the baggage that goes along with the texts or videos or whatever the case may be, can be discarded, freeing the philosopher to reflect on the essence of the issue. IMO this is what real philosophy is all about, not simply parroting a bunch of papers, books, videos, or whatever.
That being said, you have your own way of approaching the subject. It is your path, and I have mine. Our paths have crossed here and even though I don't approach things the way you do, I have gleaned some important insights by being open to what you've presented. Perhaps it might also do you some good to be a bit more flexible with respect to my style as well. I tend to assume, perhaps incorrectly ( I'm not entirely certain ) that you think I overestimate my comprehension more often than is warranted. But the fact is, it doesn't take me long to figure out when I'm in over my head, and it's very rare when I think I understand something, but don't.
Discussing these theories only requires that one grasp an understanding of the concepts at issue. How one does that should be up to them, and if there's some discrepancy between participants on interpretation of the subject matter, then those specific points should be addressed rather than making irrelevant comments about the participant.
You keep making that proclamation, but the fact is that I engage the material and also tend to cross reference it with other sources to see how they compare. I put time and thought into reflecting on it and I make an honest effort to contribute to the discussion. So before assuming that the content I post isn't worthy of your consideration, perhaps try engaging it with respect to the points made rather than commenting about me personally. I've requested that a number of times now, and you rarely do it, instead, reverting to personal criticisms or walls of text by somebody else. I would prefer to know what you think.
I believe I've already responded to that sufficiently.
The philosophical attitudes that I have alluded to are mentioned in the video, and in other reference sources, including, if I recall correctly, one or more of the PDFs posted here, as well as online sources such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is not, from what I can tell, a trivial point, as you seem to suggest.
I'd prefer to engage you on the subject in open discussion rather than composing an essay. I assume that you recall the word "attitude" being used in the video and in the papers and elsewhere when discussing how people approach issues from various philosophical perspectives? So perhaps you can begin by briefly giving me your impression of what that means to you in your own words along with a reference or two that you relate well to. Then I'll respond to those specific points, and maybe we'll get someplace in the New Year! Hope you have a fine and wonderful New Year's Eve
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Further illuminating papers concerning the project of 'naturalizing phenomenology' or, forthrightly in Morris, 'phenomenalizing naturalism'.
1. Dermot Moran on naturalizing phenomenology: https://philpapers.org/archive/MORLLA.pdf
2.David Morris on same. Following are citations to and extracts from (where accessible) three related papers by Morris. I’ve requested that Morris place the following paper online at academia.edu:
Measurement as Transcendental-Empirical Écart: Merleau-Ponty on Deep
Abstract:
Merleau-Ponty’s radical reflection conceptualizes the transcendental and the empirical as intertwined, emerging only via an écart. I advance this concept of transcendental-empirical écart by studying the problem of measurement in science, in both general and quantum mechanical contexts. Section one analyses scientific problems of measurement, focusing on issues of temporality, to show how measurement entails a transcendental that intertwines/diverges with the empirical. Section two briefly interprets this result via Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth, to indicate how measurement reveals a temporality that is not an already given ground that would guarantee the transcendental in advance: temporality is instead ‘deep’, it is itself engendered via an écart of transcendental and empirical operations. Section three briefly indicates how these results challenge Meillasoux’s claims about correlationism and ancestrality.
More Info: for special issue on “Merleau-Ponty's Gordian Knot: Transcendental Philosophy, Empirical Science and Naturalism,” eds. Jack Reynolds & Andrew Inkpin (forthcoming in 2017)
Journal Name: Continental Philosophy Review
3. The following paper by Morris is available online at academia.edu, and can be extremely helpful in grasping the significance of natural affordances that enable phenomenological perception via all the senses. Morris’s particular gift, it seems to me, is his ability to clarify the deeper dimensions of what is revealed about the nature of human perception in phenomenological philosophy as ‘built-in’ aspects of the given, in both the time and space/place of existence.
DAVID MORRIS, Casey’s Subliminal Phenomenology: On Edging Things Back into Place
© David Morris, Department of Philosophy, Concordia University
Published in Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey: Giving Voice to Place, Memory, and Imagination, ed. Donald A. Landes & Azucena Cruz-Pierre (Bloomsbury, 2013), 53-61.
Epigraphs:
“External perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that, by its very nature, it is not in a position to accomplish.” Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses HUA XI 3.5
“The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.” Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences”, 13.
Morris begins:
“In this chapter I suggest how Casey opens some radical implications for phenomenology. Casey does this by showing that place is what first of all grants room for the appearance of things—but only in virtue of a non-givenness. That is, place undergirds determinate things only in being something “less” than fully delimited or determinate, something less than space would be as an already given dimension. Place is thus kin to Bergson’s durée as openly generative becoming, in contrast to time as already fixed dimension. In showing us how determinate phenomena are conditioned by place as less than given, and in complementary work on “periphenomena” (see, e.g., WG 438-448), such as glances and edges, Casey reveals what I call a subliminal dimension of phenomena: a way in which periphenomena and thence phenomena appear as delimited only by edging into what is less than delimitable. This subliminal dimension is phenomenologically paradoxical. It cannot appear as such, precisely because it is less than delimitable, vagrant with respect to classical conditions of appearance. Yet this vagrant “less than” precisely appears as subliminal within and to delimited appearances, versus being something ideal or behind appearances.
Casey thus makes a twofold contribution to phenomenology: bringing phenomena down to earth, as having a determinacy ‘grounded’ in this-here earth-place; and showing how this determinate delimitation involves something subliminal, something non-delimitable and non-given that is nonetheless given within places. Casey’s contribution is obviously complementary to themes of non-givenness in other phenomenologists, and to Heidegger’s turn from temporality to place and Abgrund (abyss, lack of ground).
But Casey is innovative in his approach and way of displacing non-givenness from temporality into place. To wit, if Bergson shows that we have to wait for the sugar to dissolve, Casey shows that we have to unendingly get back with things into place for them to show themselves. If it is the narrator’s inner effort in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu that exemplifies a Bergsonian waiting for things, then it is FinnegansWake, with its endless outer circulation through the Dublin landscape/dreamscape that exemplifies Casey’s effort of getting things back into place—and also a kind of vagabond spirit in Casey that runs pell-mell in their wake, to glimpse them edgewise in their “plurabilities.” (Finnegans Wake is a touchstone of WG.) By putting himself in the wake of things and of place as less than already delimited, Casey suggests what I call a subliminal phenomenology, that, as discussed below, permutes phenomenology’s method and topic. What I offer here is my own synthesis of things learnt from Casey, through sketches that gradually lay out the phenomenological and methodological stakes, and then work into the nexus of things, places and periphenomena to build my case. My synthesis stems in particular from study of Casey’s place work; chapters 3 and 4 in WG, as distinguishing the glance and the gaze and correlative differences in the determinacy of their object (see esp. 139-147); and the discussion of the “logic of the lesser” in WG’s concluding thoughts but also in draft chapters of the forthcoming WE.
Before I begin, two quick clarifications. First, when I talk about the non-givenness of place, I do not mean that place is not given at all. Far from it, place is most evidently given—but it is given as place precisely by not being fully given as to its determinacy. Place thus contrasts with space, which is precisely and in principle constituted as a fully determinate network of locations already capable of locating things in advance. To give an analogy, we readily grasp the mistake in speaking of time as if it is, in the sense of being a thing that could already be fully given. Time, or better, durée, is precisely in the making, time is never fully now. Similarly, Casey shows that place is never fully here. Place is what grants there being a determinate here or there, but place grants does so in being given on the go, in inherently leading itself out in what I call Procession . Place thus manifests a determinate here precisely in being “less than” fully here—something that Casey teaches us, particularly in his “logic of the lesser.”
Second, because points about non-givenness are inherently difficult, yet a bit more familiar to us as they erupt in durée, I often work with the above analogy between duree and place. But this is not meant to give durée either parity with or priority over place. Casey is displacing temporality from its privileged position in traditional philosophy by showing us the priority of place. (Indeed, without place we could not notice movement or time.) Nonetheless, the analogy helps.
Getting Back With the Things Themselves—In Place.
Phenomenology famously calls on philosophy to go back to the things themselves. Yet Husserl’s own effort to do so eventually reveals things as at once exceeding us yet being less than we took them to be. Consider perceiving something quite mundane, this lemon sitting on the counter. It looks to be given right over there. But, as Merleau-Ponty would put it, to perceive a lemon is to attend upon a thing present only in inexhaustibly turning up new aspects. A lemon shows up as truly being a lemon only insofar as its showings could possibly reveal, say, a fake, foam lemon; it is there only in the temporal incompleteness of ongoingly showing up as not otherwise than a lemon. Or consider Hollis Frampton’s film Lemon, in which a lemon shows up in slowly rotating in and out of an eclipsing shadow that its surface casts over itself when lit.
Lemon helps us notice a place-based (vs. temporal) incompletion of things, namely how the very skin through which things show up inherently obscures or edges out their showing up all at once in place. A thing’s givenness as determinately this or that thus rests on: what is otherwise (its turning up as not fake, etc., in temporality); and otherwhere (its turning up through other aspects now eclipsed, in place). Thus Husserl’s point that by its very nature “[e]xternal perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that … it is not in a position to accomplish.”
Perception claims to get things in the flesh, to grasp their pith and marrow. Yet in perception the delimited, determinate givenness of objects arises only out of what, as otherwise and otherwhere, is not fully delimited or determinate. This is one of phenomenology’s great discoveries. Even greater is phenomenology’s insight that this is not a defect in things but a transcendental, that is, inherently unsurpassable, condition of their appearance. This upends Descartes’s argument that since appearance is inherently and unendingly incomplete, the real identity of something such as a candle could only be given in an idea, which alone can fully comprehend a thing’s determinacy once and for all. It also marks a turning point in a certain history of philosophy, from a claim that what is truly real must rest in something more than what is now given (e.g., in Platonist or Cartesian ideas that exceed appearances), to the discovery that what gives our sense of reality is something less than and in what now appears given. Indeed, phenomenology radically reconfigures classic philosophical problems of appearance and reality. For the Cartesian, the real conditions of something cannot appear, since appearance cannot bear the full blown determinacy and certainty that Cartesian truth demands. The phenomenologist, on the contrary, has the radically empirical project of finding the real conditions of things in appearance, and finds that these conditions do appear. But these conditions appear only by being something peculiarly less than the full determinacy or certainty that philosophy had previously sought. The paradoxical and difficult point here is that the condition of appearance is not a given thing, substance, essence, idea, etc, but a kind of non-givenness given right within the given.
In phenomenology, this non-givenness classically turns out to be temporality. But Casey shows us how the determinate appearance of things turns on place as a generative non-givenness. If Bergson’s first move is to rise above the turn of experience, to get out of the lock-step of clocktime and into the durée of things, Casey’s first move is to get back into the place in which we first encounter things. And for Casey this means getting out of our lock on things as being determinately all over there, a point we’ll come back to and that comes to the fore for Casey in periphenomena. Altogether, Casey’s way of getting back with the things in place has ontological and methodological consequences, since it subverts the givenness of things, by leading into what I called the subliminal dimension. This connection between place, things, philosophical method, and something bigger than us is more or less explicit in Casey’s article “Sym-Phenomenologizing: Talking Shop.” The article is avowedly about the need to do phenomenology together with other people in workshops, in sym-pathy. But there he writes (drawing on Heidegger on region and place) that “where a workshop, including a workshop in phenomenology, takes place is not indifferent to what is accomplished in that workshop. The place or region is not the mere setting – which could in principle be found anywhere – but part of the process and the product of being in a workshop.”
Now Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others would already acknowledge that phenomenology’s method of getting back to things takes guidance from and is thence passive to things. This is what opens room for a temporal non-givenness in their phenomenology: getting back to things under the guidance of things takes time. Casey is adding that getting back to things under their guidance takes place. Phenomenology is not just a working together with things or with people, but with place, in a sort of sympathetic wandering that is placial kin to a Bergsonian intuition of duree.
On this front, Casey’s contribution is radical precisely because it shows how non-givenness comes from outside: while we could think that the non-givenness of temporality springs from a sort of insufficiency or passivity internal to the subject, we cannot think this with place. The non-givenness of place indicates a kind of passivity or sympathy that we have, even as reflecting philosophers, with something much bigger than us. Hence my image above of Casey’s phenomenology as methodologically vagabond or subliminal in its edgewise, peripheral approach to things, from their periphery and in their wake (vs. a more traditional head-long approach to abstract things in their essence). . . . .”
Casey’s Subliminal Phenomenology: On Edging Things Back into Place
4. A third paper by Morris that I recommend because Morris here shows a potential naturalization of phenomenology, or phenomenalisation of nature, as implicit in deep structures of Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenology. MP’s concepts of a) ‘chirality’ [which seems to parallel, and might have inspired, Kafatos’s ontological theory of nature and consciousness], and b) the resulting ‘chiasmic’ character of the intertwining of consciousness and nature/world seem to me to completely overcome Cartesian duality and the resulting ‘mind/body’ problem.
The Chirality of Being: Exploring a Merleau-Ponteian Ontology of Sense
David Morris, Department of Philosophy, Concordia University, [email protected]/DavidMorris
Published in
Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought
12 (2011): 165-182.
Abstract
The problem of ontology includes the problem of how being is determinate and has sense, i.e., orientations, meanings, differences that make a difference. This paper explores the thought that being’s sense stems from an ‘ontological chirality,’ a kind of ontological difference with characteristics kin to differences between left and right hands. The paper first shows how Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of reversibility leads to issues of chirality. Results in chemistry, biology and geometry are then discussed to illuminate the importance of chiral differences and to develop a definition of ontological chirality that connects with an ontology of sense.
Morris begins this paper as follows:
"Being is. But being is also something, it is determinate. The problem of ontology is not only or so much saying how it is that being is, but how it is that being is determinate: how being has orientations, senses, meanings, differences that make a difference, rather than being an indifferent blank void of all sensible determinations. This paper explores the thought that being’s sense stems from an ‘ontological chirality,’ a kind of ontological difference with characteristics kin to differences between left and right hands. The concept of reversibility in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology led me to this thought, so I begin by briefly showing how chirality lurks within reversibility—especially in a relation between activity and passivity that is crucial to reversibility. I then discuss results in chemistry, biology and geometry to illuminate the importance of chiral differences and to develop a definition of ontological chirality that connects with an ontology of sense. Reversibility, a concept central to Merleau-Ponty’s later works “Eye and Mind” (OE) and The Visible and the Invisible (VI), indicates both a relational structure and its ontology. For Merleau-Ponty the perceiver and the perceived in general are reversible. He often illustrates this with touch. . . . .”
The Chirality of Being: Exploring a Merleau-Ponteian Ontology of Sense
5. This excellent paper by another phenomenologist is also significant for the naturalisation/phenomenalisation project:
DAVID STOREY, Spirit and/or Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Encounter with Hegel
http://phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/article/viewFile/604/745
ETA: All of the above papers are essential reading for understanding the meaning of/the significance of 'transcendence' in modern philosophy as it develops from Kant through the development of phenomenological philosophy.
Further note: the two papers referenced below are also likely to be helpful as we pursue this 'naturalisation/phenomenalisation project:
“Beyond the Gap,” Petitot, Varela et al:
J. Petitot (1999). Beyond the Gap: An Introduction to Naturalizing Phenomenology in Petitot J., Varela JF, Pachoud B., Roy JM. In Jean Petitot, Franscisco J. Varela, Barnard Pacoud & Jean-Michel Roy (eds.), Naturalizing Phenomenology. Stanford University Press. (This is the collection of essays to which the videotaped lectures by Zahavi, Moran, and Morris responded at the symposium in Denmark.)
FSU Libraries | Find it @ FSU
and
Toward a Pragmatically Naturalist Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement
Sami Pihlström
Journal of Philosophical Research 35:323-352 (2010) {available in whole at the link below}
Abstract
This paper examines the metaphysical status of the fact-value entanglement. According to Hilary Putnam, among others, this is a major theme in both classical and recent pragmatism, but its relevance obviously extends beyond pragmatism scholarship. The pragmatic naturalist must make sense of the entanglement thesis within a broadly non-reductively naturalist account of reality. Two rival options for such metaphysics are discussed: values may be claimed to emerge from facts (or normativity from factuality), or fact and value may be considered continuous. Thus, pragmatic naturalism about fact and value may be based on either emergentism or Peircean synechism. This is a crucial tension not only in pragmatist philosophy of value but in pragmatically naturalist metaphysics generally.
http://www.nordprag.org/papers/Pihlstrom - Pragmatic Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement.pdf
1. Dermot Moran on naturalizing phenomenology: https://philpapers.org/archive/MORLLA.pdf
2.David Morris on same. Following are citations to and extracts from (where accessible) three related papers by Morris. I’ve requested that Morris place the following paper online at academia.edu:
Measurement as Transcendental-Empirical Écart: Merleau-Ponty on Deep
Abstract:
Merleau-Ponty’s radical reflection conceptualizes the transcendental and the empirical as intertwined, emerging only via an écart. I advance this concept of transcendental-empirical écart by studying the problem of measurement in science, in both general and quantum mechanical contexts. Section one analyses scientific problems of measurement, focusing on issues of temporality, to show how measurement entails a transcendental that intertwines/diverges with the empirical. Section two briefly interprets this result via Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth, to indicate how measurement reveals a temporality that is not an already given ground that would guarantee the transcendental in advance: temporality is instead ‘deep’, it is itself engendered via an écart of transcendental and empirical operations. Section three briefly indicates how these results challenge Meillasoux’s claims about correlationism and ancestrality.
More Info: for special issue on “Merleau-Ponty's Gordian Knot: Transcendental Philosophy, Empirical Science and Naturalism,” eds. Jack Reynolds & Andrew Inkpin (forthcoming in 2017)
Journal Name: Continental Philosophy Review
3. The following paper by Morris is available online at academia.edu, and can be extremely helpful in grasping the significance of natural affordances that enable phenomenological perception via all the senses. Morris’s particular gift, it seems to me, is his ability to clarify the deeper dimensions of what is revealed about the nature of human perception in phenomenological philosophy as ‘built-in’ aspects of the given, in both the time and space/place of existence.
DAVID MORRIS, Casey’s Subliminal Phenomenology: On Edging Things Back into Place
© David Morris, Department of Philosophy, Concordia University
Published in Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey: Giving Voice to Place, Memory, and Imagination, ed. Donald A. Landes & Azucena Cruz-Pierre (Bloomsbury, 2013), 53-61.
Epigraphs:
“External perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that, by its very nature, it is not in a position to accomplish.” Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses HUA XI 3.5
“The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.” Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences”, 13.
Morris begins:
“In this chapter I suggest how Casey opens some radical implications for phenomenology. Casey does this by showing that place is what first of all grants room for the appearance of things—but only in virtue of a non-givenness. That is, place undergirds determinate things only in being something “less” than fully delimited or determinate, something less than space would be as an already given dimension. Place is thus kin to Bergson’s durée as openly generative becoming, in contrast to time as already fixed dimension. In showing us how determinate phenomena are conditioned by place as less than given, and in complementary work on “periphenomena” (see, e.g., WG 438-448), such as glances and edges, Casey reveals what I call a subliminal dimension of phenomena: a way in which periphenomena and thence phenomena appear as delimited only by edging into what is less than delimitable. This subliminal dimension is phenomenologically paradoxical. It cannot appear as such, precisely because it is less than delimitable, vagrant with respect to classical conditions of appearance. Yet this vagrant “less than” precisely appears as subliminal within and to delimited appearances, versus being something ideal or behind appearances.
Casey thus makes a twofold contribution to phenomenology: bringing phenomena down to earth, as having a determinacy ‘grounded’ in this-here earth-place; and showing how this determinate delimitation involves something subliminal, something non-delimitable and non-given that is nonetheless given within places. Casey’s contribution is obviously complementary to themes of non-givenness in other phenomenologists, and to Heidegger’s turn from temporality to place and Abgrund (abyss, lack of ground).
But Casey is innovative in his approach and way of displacing non-givenness from temporality into place. To wit, if Bergson shows that we have to wait for the sugar to dissolve, Casey shows that we have to unendingly get back with things into place for them to show themselves. If it is the narrator’s inner effort in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu that exemplifies a Bergsonian waiting for things, then it is FinnegansWake, with its endless outer circulation through the Dublin landscape/dreamscape that exemplifies Casey’s effort of getting things back into place—and also a kind of vagabond spirit in Casey that runs pell-mell in their wake, to glimpse them edgewise in their “plurabilities.” (Finnegans Wake is a touchstone of WG.) By putting himself in the wake of things and of place as less than already delimited, Casey suggests what I call a subliminal phenomenology, that, as discussed below, permutes phenomenology’s method and topic. What I offer here is my own synthesis of things learnt from Casey, through sketches that gradually lay out the phenomenological and methodological stakes, and then work into the nexus of things, places and periphenomena to build my case. My synthesis stems in particular from study of Casey’s place work; chapters 3 and 4 in WG, as distinguishing the glance and the gaze and correlative differences in the determinacy of their object (see esp. 139-147); and the discussion of the “logic of the lesser” in WG’s concluding thoughts but also in draft chapters of the forthcoming WE.
Before I begin, two quick clarifications. First, when I talk about the non-givenness of place, I do not mean that place is not given at all. Far from it, place is most evidently given—but it is given as place precisely by not being fully given as to its determinacy. Place thus contrasts with space, which is precisely and in principle constituted as a fully determinate network of locations already capable of locating things in advance. To give an analogy, we readily grasp the mistake in speaking of time as if it is, in the sense of being a thing that could already be fully given. Time, or better, durée, is precisely in the making, time is never fully now. Similarly, Casey shows that place is never fully here. Place is what grants there being a determinate here or there, but place grants does so in being given on the go, in inherently leading itself out in what I call Procession . Place thus manifests a determinate here precisely in being “less than” fully here—something that Casey teaches us, particularly in his “logic of the lesser.”
Second, because points about non-givenness are inherently difficult, yet a bit more familiar to us as they erupt in durée, I often work with the above analogy between duree and place. But this is not meant to give durée either parity with or priority over place. Casey is displacing temporality from its privileged position in traditional philosophy by showing us the priority of place. (Indeed, without place we could not notice movement or time.) Nonetheless, the analogy helps.
Getting Back With the Things Themselves—In Place.
Phenomenology famously calls on philosophy to go back to the things themselves. Yet Husserl’s own effort to do so eventually reveals things as at once exceeding us yet being less than we took them to be. Consider perceiving something quite mundane, this lemon sitting on the counter. It looks to be given right over there. But, as Merleau-Ponty would put it, to perceive a lemon is to attend upon a thing present only in inexhaustibly turning up new aspects. A lemon shows up as truly being a lemon only insofar as its showings could possibly reveal, say, a fake, foam lemon; it is there only in the temporal incompleteness of ongoingly showing up as not otherwise than a lemon. Or consider Hollis Frampton’s film Lemon, in which a lemon shows up in slowly rotating in and out of an eclipsing shadow that its surface casts over itself when lit.
Lemon helps us notice a place-based (vs. temporal) incompletion of things, namely how the very skin through which things show up inherently obscures or edges out their showing up all at once in place. A thing’s givenness as determinately this or that thus rests on: what is otherwise (its turning up as not fake, etc., in temporality); and otherwhere (its turning up through other aspects now eclipsed, in place). Thus Husserl’s point that by its very nature “[e]xternal perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that … it is not in a position to accomplish.”
Perception claims to get things in the flesh, to grasp their pith and marrow. Yet in perception the delimited, determinate givenness of objects arises only out of what, as otherwise and otherwhere, is not fully delimited or determinate. This is one of phenomenology’s great discoveries. Even greater is phenomenology’s insight that this is not a defect in things but a transcendental, that is, inherently unsurpassable, condition of their appearance. This upends Descartes’s argument that since appearance is inherently and unendingly incomplete, the real identity of something such as a candle could only be given in an idea, which alone can fully comprehend a thing’s determinacy once and for all. It also marks a turning point in a certain history of philosophy, from a claim that what is truly real must rest in something more than what is now given (e.g., in Platonist or Cartesian ideas that exceed appearances), to the discovery that what gives our sense of reality is something less than and in what now appears given. Indeed, phenomenology radically reconfigures classic philosophical problems of appearance and reality. For the Cartesian, the real conditions of something cannot appear, since appearance cannot bear the full blown determinacy and certainty that Cartesian truth demands. The phenomenologist, on the contrary, has the radically empirical project of finding the real conditions of things in appearance, and finds that these conditions do appear. But these conditions appear only by being something peculiarly less than the full determinacy or certainty that philosophy had previously sought. The paradoxical and difficult point here is that the condition of appearance is not a given thing, substance, essence, idea, etc, but a kind of non-givenness given right within the given.
In phenomenology, this non-givenness classically turns out to be temporality. But Casey shows us how the determinate appearance of things turns on place as a generative non-givenness. If Bergson’s first move is to rise above the turn of experience, to get out of the lock-step of clocktime and into the durée of things, Casey’s first move is to get back into the place in which we first encounter things. And for Casey this means getting out of our lock on things as being determinately all over there, a point we’ll come back to and that comes to the fore for Casey in periphenomena. Altogether, Casey’s way of getting back with the things in place has ontological and methodological consequences, since it subverts the givenness of things, by leading into what I called the subliminal dimension. This connection between place, things, philosophical method, and something bigger than us is more or less explicit in Casey’s article “Sym-Phenomenologizing: Talking Shop.” The article is avowedly about the need to do phenomenology together with other people in workshops, in sym-pathy. But there he writes (drawing on Heidegger on region and place) that “where a workshop, including a workshop in phenomenology, takes place is not indifferent to what is accomplished in that workshop. The place or region is not the mere setting – which could in principle be found anywhere – but part of the process and the product of being in a workshop.”
Now Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others would already acknowledge that phenomenology’s method of getting back to things takes guidance from and is thence passive to things. This is what opens room for a temporal non-givenness in their phenomenology: getting back to things under the guidance of things takes time. Casey is adding that getting back to things under their guidance takes place. Phenomenology is not just a working together with things or with people, but with place, in a sort of sympathetic wandering that is placial kin to a Bergsonian intuition of duree.
On this front, Casey’s contribution is radical precisely because it shows how non-givenness comes from outside: while we could think that the non-givenness of temporality springs from a sort of insufficiency or passivity internal to the subject, we cannot think this with place. The non-givenness of place indicates a kind of passivity or sympathy that we have, even as reflecting philosophers, with something much bigger than us. Hence my image above of Casey’s phenomenology as methodologically vagabond or subliminal in its edgewise, peripheral approach to things, from their periphery and in their wake (vs. a more traditional head-long approach to abstract things in their essence). . . . .”
Casey’s Subliminal Phenomenology: On Edging Things Back into Place
4. A third paper by Morris that I recommend because Morris here shows a potential naturalization of phenomenology, or phenomenalisation of nature, as implicit in deep structures of Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenology. MP’s concepts of a) ‘chirality’ [which seems to parallel, and might have inspired, Kafatos’s ontological theory of nature and consciousness], and b) the resulting ‘chiasmic’ character of the intertwining of consciousness and nature/world seem to me to completely overcome Cartesian duality and the resulting ‘mind/body’ problem.
The Chirality of Being: Exploring a Merleau-Ponteian Ontology of Sense
David Morris, Department of Philosophy, Concordia University, [email protected]/DavidMorris
Published in
Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought
12 (2011): 165-182.
Abstract
The problem of ontology includes the problem of how being is determinate and has sense, i.e., orientations, meanings, differences that make a difference. This paper explores the thought that being’s sense stems from an ‘ontological chirality,’ a kind of ontological difference with characteristics kin to differences between left and right hands. The paper first shows how Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of reversibility leads to issues of chirality. Results in chemistry, biology and geometry are then discussed to illuminate the importance of chiral differences and to develop a definition of ontological chirality that connects with an ontology of sense.
Morris begins this paper as follows:
"Being is. But being is also something, it is determinate. The problem of ontology is not only or so much saying how it is that being is, but how it is that being is determinate: how being has orientations, senses, meanings, differences that make a difference, rather than being an indifferent blank void of all sensible determinations. This paper explores the thought that being’s sense stems from an ‘ontological chirality,’ a kind of ontological difference with characteristics kin to differences between left and right hands. The concept of reversibility in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology led me to this thought, so I begin by briefly showing how chirality lurks within reversibility—especially in a relation between activity and passivity that is crucial to reversibility. I then discuss results in chemistry, biology and geometry to illuminate the importance of chiral differences and to develop a definition of ontological chirality that connects with an ontology of sense. Reversibility, a concept central to Merleau-Ponty’s later works “Eye and Mind” (OE) and The Visible and the Invisible (VI), indicates both a relational structure and its ontology. For Merleau-Ponty the perceiver and the perceived in general are reversible. He often illustrates this with touch. . . . .”
The Chirality of Being: Exploring a Merleau-Ponteian Ontology of Sense
5. This excellent paper by another phenomenologist is also significant for the naturalisation/phenomenalisation project:
DAVID STOREY, Spirit and/or Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Encounter with Hegel
http://phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/article/viewFile/604/745
ETA: All of the above papers are essential reading for understanding the meaning of/the significance of 'transcendence' in modern philosophy as it develops from Kant through the development of phenomenological philosophy.
Further note: the two papers referenced below are also likely to be helpful as we pursue this 'naturalisation/phenomenalisation project:
“Beyond the Gap,” Petitot, Varela et al:
J. Petitot (1999). Beyond the Gap: An Introduction to Naturalizing Phenomenology in Petitot J., Varela JF, Pachoud B., Roy JM. In Jean Petitot, Franscisco J. Varela, Barnard Pacoud & Jean-Michel Roy (eds.), Naturalizing Phenomenology. Stanford University Press. (This is the collection of essays to which the videotaped lectures by Zahavi, Moran, and Morris responded at the symposium in Denmark.)
FSU Libraries | Find it @ FSU
and
Toward a Pragmatically Naturalist Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement
Sami Pihlström
Journal of Philosophical Research 35:323-352 (2010) {available in whole at the link below}
Abstract
This paper examines the metaphysical status of the fact-value entanglement. According to Hilary Putnam, among others, this is a major theme in both classical and recent pragmatism, but its relevance obviously extends beyond pragmatism scholarship. The pragmatic naturalist must make sense of the entanglement thesis within a broadly non-reductively naturalist account of reality. Two rival options for such metaphysics are discussed: values may be claimed to emerge from facts (or normativity from factuality), or fact and value may be considered continuous. Thus, pragmatic naturalism about fact and value may be based on either emergentism or Peircean synechism. This is a crucial tension not only in pragmatist philosophy of value but in pragmatically naturalist metaphysics generally.
http://www.nordprag.org/papers/Pihlstrom - Pragmatic Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement.pdf
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All that should matter is that the content posted by participants addresses some aspect of the discussion in an honest and cognizant way. How one chooses to do that should be up to them. This gives each participant the freedom to engage the content in the way that is best for them, and adds to the potential for additional insight coming from their particular perspective. If some discrepancy between participants should arise over the material, then specific points can be identified and hashed out, and such hashing out should address the content and quality of analysis rather than concerning itself with irrelevancies like the author's personal characteristics, credentials, or history with the subject.
That isn't to say that the use of material from existing philosophical works isn't valuable ( it is ). It might even be considered requisite to establishing baselines, but the concepts in the material transcend the material itself. Therefore once the concepts are understood, all the baggage that goes along with the texts or videos or whatever the case may be, can be discarded, freeing the philosopher to reflect on the essence of the issue. IMO this is what real philosophy is all about, not simply parroting a bunch of papers, books, videos, or whatever.
That being said, you have your own way of approaching the subject. It is your path, and I have mine. Our paths have crossed here and even though I don't approach things the way you do, I have gleaned some important insights by being open to what you've presented. Perhaps it might also do you some good to be a bit more flexible with respect to my style as well. I tend to assume, perhaps incorrectly ( I'm not entirely certain ) that you think I overestimate my comprehension more often than is warranted. But the fact is, it doesn't take me long to figure out when I'm in over my head, and it's very rare when I think I understand something, but don't.
Discussing these theories only requires that one grasp an understanding of the concepts at issue. How one does that should be up to them, and if there's some discrepancy between participants on interpretation of the subject matter, then those specific points should be addressed rather than making irrelevant comments about the participant. You keep making that proclamation, but the fact is that I engage the material and also tend to cross reference it with other sources to see how they compare. I put time and thought into reflecting on it and I make an honest effort to contribute to the discussion. So before assuming that the content I post isn't worthy of your consideration, perhaps try engaging it with respect to the points made rather than commenting about me personally. I've requested that a number of times now, and you rarely do it, instead, reverting to personal criticisms or walls of text by somebody else. I would prefer to know what you think. I believe I've already responded to that sufficiently. The philosophical attitudes that I have alluded to are mentioned in the video, and in other reference sources, including, if I recall correctly, one or more of the PDFs posted here, as well as online sources such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is not, from what I can tell, a trivial point, as you seem to suggest. I'd prefer to engage you on the subject in open discussion rather than composing an essay. I assume that you recall the word "attitude" being used in the video and in the papers and elsewhere when discussing how people approach issues from various philosophical perspectives? So perhaps you can begin by briefly giving me your impression of what that means to you in your own words along with a reference or two that you relate well to. Then I'll respond to those specific points, and maybe we'll get someplace in the New Year! Hope you have a fine and wonderful New Year's Eve
You're still not doing what Steve first asked you to do, and which I've also asked you to do -- i.e., to elaborate on what you meant by reducing the differences between Kantian and phenomenological philosophy to matters of 'attitude'. In other words, to put some flesh on the bone of your simple, reductive, statement. It's time to fish or cut bait rather than repeatedly verbalizing what you consider to be excuses for not doing so.
Happy New Year to you too and to all who might be reading this thread.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Happy New Year to you Constance and to all!
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