reading Husserl, Fink....

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tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by tapaticmadness »

odysseus wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 2:48 am What about Husserl of Fink? I have these pdf if you would like them. Husserl, especially if you are patient will detail, wrote his Ideas I which clears up a lot about phenomenology.
By all means send me Fink's writing on Husserl. I have already read overmuch of Husserl and Heidegger and those other guys of their ilk, though it has been a number of years since I did. i think I would rather read your words about phenomenology and the Transcendental Ego. I'm sure that we have a different view about just what phenomenology is, but that's ok. After all I am a philosophical realist and you are an idealist. There are a lot of Hindu scholars here in Nepal who would agree with you about the Transcendental Ego (I think), but I'm not really of that crowd. I'm too much of a theist. Whatever, I'll be glad to have a go at Fink.
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

Sure, I can send it along.But this posting arrangement here will not allow. I'd have to email it to you. I don't know how you do things, but for me, I have set up an email that i use exclusively for this kind of thing, apart from my personal affairs. It's free and, well, why not?
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

Btw, you've "read overmuch" Husserl? Well, then you must have a grasp of things phenomenological. Fink should be accessible. It not exactly ON Husserl, his 6th Meditation. It is an approved extension of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, which I'm guessing you've read.
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

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odysseus wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 5:33 am Sure, I can send it along.But this posting arrangement here will not allow. I'd have to email it to you. I don't know how you do things, but for me, I have set up an email that i use exclusively for this kind of thing, apart from my personal affairs. It's free and, well, why not?
I can get anything and everything here - lifeisjustwon@hotmail.com . I also have Dropbox from which I send out a link.
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

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odysseus wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 5:36 am Btw, you've "read overmuch" Husserl? Well, then you must have a grasp of things phenomenological. Fink should be accessible. It not exactly ON Husserl, his 6th Meditation. It is an approved extension of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, which I'm guessing you've read.
I'm sure I will be able to read it easily enough, though I may have an interpretation of it that is not yours. I'm more of a poet than an academic philosopher. Kant came up with his first Critique because he misunderstood Aristotle and then his second because he misunderstood his own first Critique. All creativity is a mistake. I look forward to giving it a go.

Why did you say it was an "approved" extension? Who does the approving? It sounds a bit too authoritarian for me. I want my writing to be unapproved.
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

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odysseus wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 5:33 am Sure, I can send it along.But this posting arrangement here will not allow. I'd have to email it to you. I don't know how you do things, but for me, I have set up an email that i use exclusively for this kind of thing, apart from my personal affairs. It's free and, well, why not?
Hello Odysseus, I haven't received anything yet. Have you sent it and somehow I didn't get it?
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

Just got back. Sending it now
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

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odysseus wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 9:49 pm Just got back. Sending it now
Got it. Thanks. I like it when on page 8 he says that what he's doing is a phenomenology of phenomenology.
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

The introduction is very lengthy, and worth while reading. I will begin on page one after the intro, however. It's in the middle of the text book. there are lots of highlights and notes. Sorry. I do this when I read. Makes going back easier, and it gives me the chance assimilate better. all my books are like this.

P 2, Here is the Prefatory note. Fink jumps into the fray. He moves directly to the problem. which is "transferring the mode of cognition that relates to something existent [ Seiendes] into the phenomenological cognition of the forming (constitution) of the existent."
Now, you'll recall that Husserl's intention is to present the phenomenological reduction, or, epoche, which is a reduction of things as they appear in the natural attitude, as with normal talk, scientists' theorizing, a nd so on. The reduction is fundamental to Fink's dissertation. for in the reduction, the usual way we think about the world is dismissed, suspended.

Just got your email. The phenomenology of phenomenology? Sounds odd, of course. But you have understand first what Husserl's epoche is about. If this is not familiar, then perhaps we should do Husserl's Ideas I instead. Or both. It depends on you. Its just that phenomenology is the child of Kant's idealism, and one has to take this seriously in order for the epoche to have a place in the understanding. On the other hand, Fink does press the reduction pretty constantly, and is often describing how is works.
At any rate, to move on. In phenomenology, there is this suspension pesuppositions about the way the world is, and he tries very hard to make a case that empirical science is derivative, that is, it rests on assumptions regarding elementary perceptual data, and never questions these because they are not empirical. This has, in the tradition of Kant, to do with the structure of thought, but here, unlike Kant, Husserl is not interested in logical form, rather, ideational, or eidetic, form, and how the structure of actualities (intuitions?) and ideas come together to make the world. The epoche is simply front and center in all this, because is yields a method for doing philosophy, which takes inquiry matters all the way to the, well, quasi magical place where the production of thought and experience issue froth from transcendence. So: phenomenology is uncovered in the epoche as all scientific ideas/ assumptions are suspended and the "thing itself" is revealed, and this is the presence qua presence, a package of idea and actuality as-it-is absolutely. Husserl affirms this to be the world qua world, and not relative, not contingent; the "thereness" of things. In the thereness, we witness in a way that is sui generis, competely new, like a vision . The phenomenology of phenomenology is to take the perceptual object (not apperceptual!) divested of all that not what it is, as well as the transcendental egoic center that produces the whole affair of experience, and give analysis to its structure, with a focus of the construction/constructor.

You'll see. Lots of fun.
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

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odysseus wrote: Tue Feb 18, 2020 6:54 am

Just got your email. The phenomenology of phenomenology? Sounds odd, of course. But you have understand first what Husserl's epoche is about.
Yes, I am quite familiar with the notion of the epoche or phenomenological reduction. In my writings I call it something else, but the notion of breaking away, violently, from the ordinary way of seeing the world is a major theme of my writing.
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

That is good news.Then we can explore this text freely. Like I said, I am foregoing the lengthy intro. very worthy and helpful, but Fink cab speak for himself. Youknow that Husserl thinks his method is the be all of rigorous philosophy. H ewants to develop a "science" out of phenomenological examination.

In the following I just read a think. If you find any of it interesting you can so say. I'll do the same.

Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, leave off at a juncture where pure consciousness meets the presentation of its own genesis, the "constitutive becoming of the world." (4)

Perhaps I can express the paradoxical nature of fink's undertaking here, and why he and Husserl have been abandoned in their strong claim to pure analysis. It goes like this, we can do the epoche, though I believe, and Husserl does, too, it takes time to get it. Its a matter of beholding the world free of assumptions that insert themselves invisibly, but serve to create the illusion that the world is already understood. Science does this, as well as everyday affairs and language where the Being of the world is altogether passed by. This beholding of the world occurs in Time, and all thought and experience production occur in time, and hence, one can never get "behind" time, because time is required to think at all, to perceive at all. Husserl's analysis andthe grip of time is expressed in "delineation" and preapprehension of things, tha t is, prior to encounters in the world, we are always, already in possession. so to speak, of the world,and the occasion before us simply is an instantiation of adumbrated (his language. Memories are retained as adumbrated forms of originals)recollection of a prior encounter) experiences.

But if this is so, how is it possible to describe something tha t is "pure" at all? If the world is that of Heraclitus, and not Parmenedes; if to understand is to be intrinsically conditioned adumbrated past events, how can purity of perception ever arise? The problem is essentially one of circular thinking.

That is the issue Fink is going to bring up. It is that fine line between being a constituted perceiver in one's perceptual agency, on the one hand, and taking up the the theme of what it is to be constituted. Seems impossible. A bit like trying to think what thought is. But then: THIS is the way to go, the only way, for one cannot deny that the understanding is not software; it is open absolutely and can acknowledge the "presence" of metaphysics in the world.
this is why Fink says, "the method and system of these cognitive actions cannot be anticipated." All apprehensions of things are predelineated, anticipated, in thought, memory. Not the transcendental mysterious X that produce thought, though.

Note on 5 how condescending Fink is to the "world naivete" of empirical science, the "natrualistic attitude" of Husserl. F and H really think they have come to the grand foundational realization, and philosophy is finally home. Anthony Steinbach's Phenomenology and Mysticism comes to mind. Here what is acknowledged is a "verticaliy" of the reduction, that is, an elevation ofthe understanding to a greater height at which a kind of epiphany is achieved. I actually think there is something to thi, and I say this because this is the way the epoche is for me. It may be that Husserl's epoche is a deeply spiritual experience. It is a release from time, from predelineation, preapprehension; from the assumption that we "know". See Pseudo Dionysus' Cloud of Knowing, if you will, a medeival Christian mystic's collection of writings that often discuss the impediments of the presumptions of knowledge.

But fink is no mystic. He is analytical through and through.

flowing present actuality (6)

this is Kierkegaard. His "eternal present" is the locus of God and the soul. Note also Fink's static phenomenology and genetic phenomenology. The former is a constitutive analytic, the latter a constitutive inquiry. I guess he means the latter to be our everyday lives, "sedimented" in our history and coming to life in our everydayness;it is inquiry "back" into this history's "habitualities".These cause (genetic) our current dispositions to live. The former deals with the structure of this. Need further clarification....
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

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odysseus wrote: Tue Feb 18, 2020 6:55 pm
But fink is no mystic. He is analytical through and through.
As I see it the problem that Husserl and Fink saw was to explain how knowledge of the world came to be constituted in consciousness. Using the ever-present essences that eidetic intuition discovers and acting upon sensations in Time, the Self builds or synthesizes a worldview. That Self is actually a system or community of monads.

Ok, that’s good and fine, but my experience is different. In my life I encounter the world and I come undone. In the shock of recognition I am analyzed, i.e. I am broken into thousands of pieces. All synthesis or constituting is gone. I tremble and my vision is broken. The world I see after that is one of brokenness. Disjunction is everywhere. The Spirit quakes. I am mad. That is my phenomenological reduction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq_hztHJCM4&t=173s
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

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I'll grant you, William Burroughs had scrambled visions of reality. But the way to go about this is not with the things that are descriptive of you. My philosophical obsession with the world, with our Being here, is ethical, and it encompasses all wretchedness. The pinnacle of philosophical awareness certainly is NOT in the mechanical analyses of the structure of world-making or "enworlding," as Fink calls it, for who cares? If I were to understand with vividly posited justification the relation between language and the world, it would not matter any more than a child's toy. It all begs the question, the entire human enterprise, which is that of the value of it. Levinas was right: ethics is first philosophy, but intersubjectivity of ethics begs a deeper question still, which is the nature of value itself. knowing as such, a conceptual, propositional matter, without the value invested in it by a living soul, if you will, is not worth a candle. But this on ethics can wait.

Your comment about becoming undone as a result of the shock of recognition, is, if a take your meaning, regarding one of the most important philosophical ideas of the previous century, which is alienation. It goes two ways. On the one hand, here we are very familiar with the world, in all we do and say. This is the naturalistic attitude, and its history can be traced to Kierkegaard as quantitative sin, and it is later famously called das man, the they, in Heidegger. As you know, I believe, this is the normal mode of relating to the world, and for most it hangs together quite well....as long as you don't ask philosophical questions! The question, the piety of thought, say Heidegger, undoes this world; but it reconstructs itself (see Kuhn's Structures of Scientific revolutions, e.g.). Philosophical questions lead to ontology, though, and this is open ended, a hermeneutically delimited place. So here,one an become alienated from this world if one asks too many questions at the level of assumptions that underlie knowledge. This is emphatically true, and I can attest to it. Take a walk with Sartre's Roquentin in his novel Nausea: here is a character alienated from things, the body, and so on. I actually know what Sartre is talking about, and it is a thin line between existential epiphany and going crazy, and if you do the epoche enough (it IS a method, not just a thesis; and it has to be practiced) you cans become alienated like this.

On the other hand, there is the abiding alienation from the truth while IN natural attitude. Being comfortable comes at a cost, which is the trivialization of the our humaity, that is, reducing it all to daily affairs, paying you taxes, doing your dry cleaning, and so on. Kierkegaard thinks we are alienated form God because we literally think more about our dry cleaning than about God. There is a point here. Heidegger calls it authenticity that is won with philosophical questioning. When we "suspend" presuppositions, we are left with the eidetic structures of a "predicatively formed eidetic affairs" as he calls it (or predicatively formed actualities). Husserl gives the impressionism, no, says outright, that these are there, in the world unconditionally, these idea packaged "things themselves".
so the one is an alienation from the other. Alas, you study existential philosophy it will remove you from the world of "just going along" for everything starts to look like a performance and people seem to be sleep walking through life (Kierkegaard's take). What happens when you "wake up"? the Buddhists say you realize your Buddha nature (which was there all along).

I think the Buddhists are right, and so is Kierkegaard. Life breaking up as you describe it, being broken into a thousand pieces, the spirit quaking (actually Kierkegaard thinks this should be like this. He says the spirit is a synthesis of soul and body, of eternity and finitude, and when one "posits" spirit, s/he recognizes this inner dialectic (or, if you like, neurosis, as Freud will call it later on) and the normal anxiety is compounded, for one feels the alienation with intensity. The only solution is faith. See his Fear and trembling for an account of his knight of faith, Kierkegaard, it shoudl be quickly added is NOT talking about mundane faith. Rather, faith is coming to realize the eternal present at the center of the spirit. This is God, and faith is a unity, of sorts, with God. The knight of faith is effortless, just like the Buddhist sitting quietly, doing nothing (but on the inside, ever so much more than this).
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

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odysseus wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2020 2:31 am I'll grant you, William Burroughs had scrambled visions of reality. But the way to go about this is not with the things that are descriptive of you. My philosophical obsession with the world, with our Being here, is ethical, and it encompasses all wretchedness. The pinnacle of philosophical awareness certainly is NOT in the mechanical analyses of the structure of world-making or "enworlding," as Fink calls it, for who cares? If I were to understand with vividly posited justification the relation between language and the world, it would not matter any more than a child's toy. It all begs the question, the entire human enterprise, which is that of the value of it. Levinas was right: ethics is first philosophy, but intersubjectivity of ethics begs a deeper question still, which is the nature of value itself. knowing as such, a conceptual, propositional matter, without the value invested in it by a living soul, if you will, is not worth a candle. But this on ethics can wait.

Your comment about becoming undone as a result of the shock of recognition, is, if a take your meaning, regarding one of the most important philosophical ideas of the previous century, which is alienation.
No, my "condition" is not alienation. Nor am I interested in ethics. I don't see philosophy as ethics. Actually my coming undone is jouissance in French. It is orgasmic. Remember, i am more of a poet, an artist, than a rational philosopher. Both Husserl and Fink write in complete sentences and with unity of thought. I write with broken-up sentences and my writing is not an academic unity of presentation. Fink is an intellectual and his writings are an intellectualizing. In my opinion they are not radical enough for a proper reduction. Please don't think I feel alienated. I don't. Not in the least. I see the spirit world as a place of violence and I am a spiritual man. For me religion is charismatic, spirit possession and speaking in tongues. It is not rationalistic like Husserl and Fink. Still, I do read such rationalists and see what it is they have to say and, who knows, maybe I can steal an idea from them and write is up in my own cut-up fashion. Have you looked at my blog? https://tapaticmadness.wordpress.com/
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

I have no issues with, well, such abundance as your website presents. And pushing matters to extremes in art and other indulgences neither offend nor compel. I only try to be clear about the most extraordinary thing there is about being human, which is metaethics, metavalue, which is the philosophical study of the art you celebrate; and metaphysics, the way to describe the threshold between plain thought and actuality. I am driven to this because I experience the world like this.
But it does require one to take an interest in Fink's phenomenology in order to find it engaging. Philosophy is not poetry, though some things poetical are philosophical, like Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman. I find the control of thought to be essential to competently move where thought does not go, and the revelations are not aesthetic, but existential (though, one can never avoid aesthetic presence in experience. See Dewey's Art As Experience).
Your website demonstrates an extravagance with serious ideas that perhaps make for exotic and novel syntheses, but in doing so, compromises the chance to look deeply into the secret, even mystical possibilities that inhabit our world. To me, it is one thing to create art that reveals extraordinary things, but here, one remains IN art, which is like being IN a narrative. I can't live a story. I have to have reality.
At any rate, you have seen the kind of thing I do. I take Fink and the like to be a vehicle to insight, even revelation, but it takes a philosophical mentality. If you wish to move forward in an analysis of this text, then good. If not, that is ok as well.
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