reading Husserl, Fink....

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odysseus
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reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

Anyone interested in reading Husserl with me? All it takes is a desire to take up a difficult text and move through it, paragraph by paragraph. The result is extremely rewarding IF you have a genuine interest in understanding the world at the level of basic questions. I am reading his Cartesian Meditations and Eugene Fink's 6th Meditation.
Thoreau went to Walden Pond because he didn't want at the end of his life to discover he not really lived. Living philosophically is a process of discovery, but it really never goes anywhere unless you read the most resistant to comprehension. This is because the normal, hum drum perspective of apprehension dominate. This needs to be overthrown! Phenomenology can be profoundly helpful in doing this. So if you have time for reading, why not read read Husserl?
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by tapaticmadness »

odysseus wrote: Fri Jan 24, 2020 6:26 pm Anyone interested in reading Husserl with me? All it takes is a desire to take up a difficult text and move through it, paragraph by paragraph. The result is extremely rewarding IF you have a genuine interest in understanding the world at the level of basic questions. I am reading his Cartesian Meditations and Eugene Fink's 6th Meditation.
Thoreau went to Walden Pond because he didn't want at the end of his life to discover he not really lived. Living philosophically is a process of discovery, but it really never goes anywhere unless you read the most resistant to comprehension. This is because the normal, hum drum perspective of apprehension dominate. This needs to be overthrown! Phenomenology can be profoundly helpful in doing this. So if you have time for reading, why not read read Husserl?
I would love to discuss Husserl with you but not paragraph by paragraph. I have great respect for him, especially his early work where he was a realist, not the idealist he later became. What are your thoughts so far? I know philosophy/phenomenology enough to understand what you say.
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

tapaticmadness

I would love to discuss Husserl with you but not paragraph by paragraph. I have great respect for him, especially his early work where he was a realist, not the idealist he later became. What are your thoughts so far? I know philosophy/phenomenology enough to understand what you say.
I am open to anything you find interesting. If by his early works you refer to his logical investigations, I haven't read these. I have read his his Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, Fink's 6th Meditation, European Crisis, and ... perhaps something else.

Alas, to be frank, it is the idealist in Husserl that attracts me, and it was Fink's Meditation which attempts clarify the threshold of the transcendental egoic construction of phenomena that gave me my current renewed interest. The problem Fink addresses is one I have been struggling ever since Kant's Critique demonstrated that the metaphysical other ( and this is not Kan't's language; it's that of Emanuel Levinas, a pupil of Husserl's, and his predecessor Franz Rozenweig, whom I am reading now as well), which is how it is that Kant, bound to empirical realism (Kant, it is said, is the father of both positivism as well as phenomenology, this latter distinction, of course, generally going to Husserl), thought it impossible to ignore what he insisted one could not discuss at all: noumena, the radical other. Kant only grudgingly took this to task, but there had to be (and this was Hegel's complaint, as I recall) something possessed in a clear and comprehensive account of the world that made this compulsory. One cannot meaningfully talk about this transcendental unknown if there is nothing in the analysis of experience that intimates this. This is where Fink (and Husserl, who approved nearly every word) takes his cue. The phenomenological reduction, whereby presuppositions are suspended and consciousness is divested of the cumbersome ages of constructed thinking (which, incidentally, I am convinced is pragmatic in nature. Another philosophical curiosity is whether Heidegger held that language is "instrumental" and ready to hand. I haven't taken this up seriouly, but there is good cause to believe, as pragmatists like Rorty do, that concepts are part of a matrix of problem solving and what it is to know and believe is no more, and here, of course, is where fink and Husserl are squarely opposed to Heidegger, Rorty, et al, no more than a living through of pragmatic success, which Dewey calls "consummatory")

His early work includes Ideas? Not his earliest, but published in 1913. I would not mind at all discussing this, or any of the above mentioned ideas and their associated themes.
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by tapaticmadness »

odysseus wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2020 4:11 pm
tapaticmadness

I would love to discuss Husserl with you but not paragraph by paragraph. I have great respect for him, especially his early work where he was a realist, not the idealist he later became. What are your thoughts so far? I know philosophy/phenomenology enough to understand what you say.
I am open to anything you find interesting. If by his early works you refer to his logical investigations, I haven't read these. I have read his his Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, Fink's 6th Meditation, European Crisis, and ... perhaps something else.

Alas, to be frank, it is the idealist in Husserl that attracts me, and it was Fink's Meditation which attempts clarify the threshold of the transcendental egoic construction of phenomena that gave me my current renewed interest. The problem Fink addresses is one I have been struggling ever since Kant's Critique demonstrated that the metaphysical other ( and this is not Kan't's language; it's that of Emanuel Levinas, a pupil of Husserl's, and his predecessor Franz Rozenweig, whom I am reading now as well), which is how it is that Kant, bound to empirical realism (Kant, it is said, is the father of both positivism as well as phenomenology, this latter distinction, of course, generally going to Husserl), thought it impossible to ignore what he insisted one could not discuss at all: noumena, the radical other. Kant only grudgingly took this to task, but there had to be (and this was Hegel's complaint, as I recall) something possessed in a clear and comprehensive account of the world that made this compulsory. One cannot meaningfully talk about this transcendental unknown if there is nothing in the analysis of experience that intimates this. This is where Fink (and Husserl, who approved nearly every word) takes his cue. The phenomenological reduction, whereby presuppositions are suspended and consciousness is divested of the cumbersome ages of constructed thinking (which, incidentally, I am convinced is pragmatic in nature. Another philosophical curiosity is whether Heidegger held that language is "instrumental" and ready to hand. I haven't taken this up seriouly, but there is good cause to believe, as pragmatists like Rorty do, that concepts are part of a matrix of problem solving and what it is to know and believe is no more, and here, of course, is where fink and Husserl are squarely opposed to Heidegger, Rorty, et al, no more than a living through of pragmatic success, which Dewey calls "consummatory")

His early work includes Ideas? Not his earliest, but published in 1913. I would not mind at all discussing this, or any of the above mentioned ideas and their associated themes.
Hello Odysseus, I just now saw your reply to what I wrote. This Forum didn't notify my earlier. That seems to happen quite a lot. Thanks for the reply. I will try to engage with you on Husserl and the mental Act the best I can. I am a philosopher, not a scholar. I think a lot about ontology and what appears to my mind. I call myself a phenomenological realist. That is to say that the phenomena that appear to my mind's eye are real. By real I mean that they exist separate from and independent of my mind. I obviously do believe minds exist and they are not brains. There is no connection between mind and brain that I find worth talking about. I am a direct realist. I believe we know the world and ontological things directly without going through the nervous system.

Here's why I am not an idealist. Idealism usually ends up in the category of the Social. Everything comes back to the human community. I have zero interest in the social. I am here in Nepal where I study Hinduism, but the Hindu community is of no interest to me. I am interested in the gods. I grew up on the American Prairie. I was a loner in a little town. By myself I studied mathematics and science. I walked out in the countryside alone. I climbed cliffs and trees and train cars, anything that had a way up. I was always alone and I could feel the world against my body. I was oversexed. I jacked off a lot. And the spirits of the place swirled around me. What other people thought or thought of me was of no interest to me. I read books and day dreamed. The category of the social never entered into my thinking. Only the very real world i was up against and which was up against me.

I just bought Fink's ebook on Play. Do you know that book?
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

Fink's book> Which one? Is it his 6th Cartesian Meditation?
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by tapaticmadness »

odysseus wrote: Sat Feb 15, 2020 6:21 am Fink's book> Which one? Is it his 6th Cartesian Meditation?
On Amazon, the only ebook I could find and that I could afford is the one entitled Play. In Nepal I cannot order paperbacks. I will soon have some more to say about Husserl.
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

tapaticmadness
On Amazon, the only ebook I could find and that I could afford is the one entitled Play. In Nepal I cannot order paperbacks. I will soon have some more to say about Husserl.
I looked and that IS expensive. I don't have his "play" but I'll get it on line as PDF. I do have LOTS of PDF files, and Fink's 6th Meditation is among them. I can email these to anyone for free. Free because they cost me nothing (I rather cheated the system in getting them). If would like Fin'k's Meditation, an extraordinary study, let me know. Others as well. You've already bought Play, so I will try to get it, but I'm not going to spend 50 dollars on it, which is absurd. I'll see what I can do. There are ways.....
Let me know about sending you the PDF.

Nepal? Interesting. I lived and worked in Tamil Nadu, India for three years. Neighbors of sorts.
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

tapaticmadness

Hello Odysseus, I just now saw your reply to what I wrote. This Forum didn't notify my earlier. That seems to happen quite a lot. Thanks for the reply. I will try to engage with you on Husserl and the mental Act the best I can. I am a philosopher, not a scholar. I think a lot about ontology and what appears to my mind. I call myself a phenomenological realist. That is to say that the phenomena that appear to my mind's eye are real. By real I mean that they exist separate from and independent of my mind. I obviously do believe minds exist and they are not brains. There is no connection between mind and brain that I find worth talking about. I am a direct realist. I believe we know the world and ontological things directly without going through the nervous system.
There is, by my thinking, a bit of short circuiting in this, for phenomenologists don't really talk about brains and nervous systems, and they don't take issue with science, unless, that is, science has pretensions to philosophy. What Husserl calls the naturalistic attitude, he lets be. This allows science to be science and when the neurologists say thought and brain systems correlate, they take no issue. It is obviously true IN THAT BODY OF INTERPRETATIVE THINKING. Scientists are not worng at all; they just don't think in terms of basic assumptions, and this is philosophy's job.

Phenomenology sees that empirical science is derivative of perceptual and apperceptual phenomena. E.g., ask a scientist how the brain can provide an objective account of what a brain is, and you will get silence, for there is no empirical way to self validate, and the only way to get to the bottom of things is accept that empirical observation based method lacks foundational authority. What has this authority? Phenomena. It is the phenomenon that we first encounter, that is logically presupposed by empirical science, and that is direct, immediate, as you say.

If you really have an interest that is beyond the wonkish problem solving, then you are going to have to get, well, a little wonkish, for there is no doubt that Fink, Husserl, Heidegger are HARD to read. It really depends on you: do you want to understand things in a responsible way? If so, you have to be prepared to spend the time. The Hindus call it jnana yoga, the way of liberation through thought and theory, and this is my way, and it works IF your intuitions lean in that direction. Most philosophers, the analytic ones esp., do not lean in that direction at all. They are cerebral and emphatically dedicated to logical clarity. This rules their thinking, and I think they miss the boat; they never really boarded, for they can't see the really purpose to philosophy, which is liberation; it is a personal endeavor for self discovery. This is Kierkegaard and others and their difficult dissertations actually do work.


Here's why I am not an idealist. Idealism usually ends up in the category of the Social. Everything comes back to the human community. I have zero interest in the social. I am here in Nepal where I study Hinduism, but the Hindu community is of no interest to me. I am interested in the gods. I grew up on the American Prairie. I was a loner in a little town. By myself I studied mathematics and science. I walked out in the countryside alone. I climbed cliffs and trees and train cars, anything that had a way up. I was always alone and I could feel the world against my body. I was oversexed. I jacked off a lot. And the spirits of the place swirled around me. What other people thought or thought of me was of no interest to me. I read books and day dreamed. The category of the social never entered into my thinking. Only the very real world i was up against and which was up against me.
Now THAT is interesting. Kierkegaard spent his long night of inwardness putting his genius to work especially for people like you. For one has to withdraw from the social currents of constructed realities, of, you might say, reified familiarity, in order to see Kierkegaard was right: there is only one actuality, and that is the self. (I should add that Kierkegaard is a Christian, but in seminaries they will not teach him, for he is so away from orthodoxy in his critical works. See his Concept of Anxiety.. if you dare!) Fink is following Husserl, and this latter is THE phenomenologist. His Cartesian Meditations are a good beginning. Fink's 6th Meditation is an extraordinary trip into analysis of the transcendental ego.

Idealism suggests skepticism, and that is not where this is at. Phenomenology is the term. Have you read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason? He opens doors, as Heidegger would put it, of disclosure that are essential for complete understanding.

Again, let me know if you want any PDF philosophy books. I have hundreds, even the Kant, above. I would not mind at all reading Kant again with you, but he would take time.

You know, if you studied math and science by yourself, you should be able to access what these philosophers are saying. You sound like, on the other hand, a real Razor's Edge type (ref. the Somerset Maugham novel). I think one HAS to be this way, I mean disillusioned. For me it is the "presence" of human suffering joy. It is the one basic question that makes the metaphysical dimension of our existence come alive,for there are two kinds of, well, gratification, if you will. There is the one that is self contained, like good food or sex; then there is the other, the desire that cannot be consummated, but grows with the distance it presents. It is the transcendental Other that pervades all things and it beckons with a depth and a profundity that is alien to the commonplace world. There is something utterly and unspeakably profound about our being here, and this is simply a given for me.
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by tapaticmadness »

odysseus wrote: Sat Feb 15, 2020 5:06 pm For one has to withdraw from the social currents of constructed realities, of, you might say, reified familiarity,
Thanks for the very pleasant to read reply. Yes, I would like the PDF of the 6th meditation by Fink. I would really appreciate it. I am just now learning about that guy.

Yesterday evening I went over what I remember of Husserl and I read some of what Gustav Bergmann had to say about him. And I downloaded Husserl's Cartesian Meditations from Scribd.com. Here are some thoughts.

So much of their concern is about that they call Sensations, Empfindungen. Consider an apple. There are so many sensations connected with that: color, taste, feel, smell, weight, hardness, and on and on. They have been called secondary qualities and the question is whether they are in the apple or in the mind experiencing it. Husserl following Brentano made a distinction between act and object. The act of sensing the properties is other than the properties. Or is it? There is something about sense that are both in the mind and in the apple. Where is the redness of the apple? Even the word “sensation” seems to collapse the distinction between sensing and the sensed. I call myself a phenomenological realist. I think the redness of the apple is tied to the apple and it is not in my mind. I purposively did not say “in” the apple. I’m trying to avoid Aristotle’s substance theory. I want more of a Platonism.

My understanding of the latter Husserl is that he eventually put sensations in the mind. They became a property of the Self. The Self ordered those sensations into a world which it posited or shoved out away from itself. That is Idealism creating the world. In my philosophy all those sensual properties of things are “out there” in the world. The problem for me then as a realist is how I make contact with those properties. I think there is an intentional Nexus that unites thought with its object. That nexus is intimate indeed. I become poetic in my description of how the sensa penetrate me, pierce into my mind, possess me. I am passively taken by their intense presence. That is the job of the Nexus. I and the sensa are two, not one, but the Nexus unites me with that. Thus I walk out into the world and it overcomes me. Overwhelms me. I become a whirling dervish. I don’t create the world. I am undone by the world.

Here is something about T. P. Nunn –

John Passmore, in his book A Hundred Years of Philosophy, wrote:
"The first, in England, to formulate the characteristic doctrines of the New Realism was T.P. Nunn. Best known as an educationalist, Nunn wrote little on philosophy, but that little had an influence out of all proportion to its modest dimensions. In particular, his contribution to a symposium on ‘Are Secondary Qualities Independent of Perception?” was widely studied both in England where, as we have already noted, it struck Bertrand Russell’s roving fancy, and in the United States. Nunn there sustained two theses: (1) that both primary and the secondary qualities of bodies are really in them, whether they are perceived or not: (2) that qualities exist as they are perceived.
Much of his argument is polemical in form, with Stout’s earlier articles as its chief target. Stout had thought he could begin by presuming that there are at least some elements in our experience which exist only in being perceived – he instanced pain. But Nunn objects that pain, precisely in the manner of a material object, presents difficulties to us, raises obstacles in our path, is, in short, something we must reckon with. ‘Pain,’ he therefore concludes, ‘is something outside my mind, with which my mind may come into various relations.’ A refusal to admit that anything we experience depends for its existence upon the fact that it is experienced was to be the most characteristic feature of the New Realism.

The secondary qualities, Stout had also said, exist only as objects of experience. If we look at a buttercup in a variety of lights we see different shades of colour, without having any reason to believe that the buttercup itself has altered; if a number of observers plunge their hands into a bowl of water, they will report very different degrees of warmth, even although nothing has happened which could affect the water’s temperature. Such facts demonstrate, Stout thought, that secondary qualities exist only as 'sensa' – objects of our perception; they are not actual properties of physical objects.


Nunn’s reply is uncompromising. The contrast between ‘sensa’ and ‘actual properties’ is, he argues, an untenable one. All the shades of colour which the buttercup presents to an observer are actual properties of the buttercup; and all the hotnesses of the water are properties of the water. The plain man and the scientist ascribe a standard temperature and a standard colour to a thing and limit it to a certain region of space, because its complexity would otherwise defeat them. The fact remains, Nunn argues, that a thing has not one hotness, for example, but many, and that these hotnesses are not in a limited region of space but in various places around about the standard object. A thing is hotter an inch away than a foot away and hotter on a cold hand than on a warm one, just as it is a paler yellow in one light than it is in another light. To imagine otherwise is to confuse between the arbitrary ‘thing’ of everyday life and the ‘thing’ as experience shows it of be.


In Nunn’s theory of perception, then, the ordinary conception of a material thing is revolutionized; that is the price he has to pay for his Realism. A ‘thing’, now, is a collection of appearances, even if every appearance is independent of the mind before which it appears."
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

tapaticmadness
So much of their concern is about that they call Sensations, Empfindungen. Consider an apple. There are so many sensations connected with that: color, taste, feel, smell, weight, hardness, and on and on. They have been called secondary qualities and the question is whether they are in the apple or in the mind experiencing it. Husserl following Brentano made a distinction between act and object. The act of sensing the properties is other than the properties. Or is it? There is something about sense that are both in the mind and in the apple. Where is the redness of the apple? Even the word “sensation” seems to collapse the distinction between sensing and the sensed. I call myself a phenomenological realist. I think the redness of the apple is tied to the apple and it is not in my mind. I purposively did not say “in” the apple. I’m trying to avoid Aristotle’s substance theory. I want more of a Platonism.

My understanding of the latter Husserl is that he eventually put sensations in the mind. They became a property of the Self. The Self ordered those sensations into a world which it posited or shoved out away from itself. That is Idealism creating the world. In my philosophy all those sensual properties of things are “out there” in the world. The problem for me then as a realist is how I make contact with those properties. I think there is an intentional Nexus that unites thought with its object. That nexus is intimate indeed. I become poetic in my description of how the sensa penetrate me, pierce into my mind, possess me. I am passively taken by their intense presence. That is the job of the Nexus. I and the sensa are two, not one, but the Nexus unites me with that. Thus I walk out into the world and it overcomes me. Overwhelms me. I become a whirling dervish. I don’t create the world. I am undone by the world.

Here is something about T. P. Nunn –

John Passmore, in his book A Hundred Years of Philosophy, wrote:
"The first, in England, to formulate the characteristic doctrines of the New Realism was T.P. Nunn. Best known as an educationalist, Nunn wrote little on philosophy, but that little had an influence out of all proportion to its modest dimensions. In particular, his contribution to a symposium on ‘Are Secondary Qualities Independent of Perception?” was widely studied both in England where, as we have already noted, it struck Bertrand Russell’s roving fancy, and in the United States. Nunn there sustained two theses: (1) that both primary and the secondary qualities of bodies are really in them, whether they are perceived or not: (2) that qualities exist as they are perceived.
Much of his argument is polemical in form, with Stout’s earlier articles as its chief target. Stout had thought he could begin by presuming that there are at least some elements in our experience which exist only in being perceived – he instanced pain. But Nunn objects that pain, precisely in the manner of a material object, presents difficulties to us, raises obstacles in our path, is, in short, something we must reckon with. ‘Pain,’ he therefore concludes, ‘is something outside my mind, with which my mind may come into various relations.’ A refusal to admit that anything we experience depends for its existence upon the fact that it is experienced was to be the most characteristic feature of the New Realism.

The secondary qualities, Stout had also said, exist only as objects of experience. If we look at a buttercup in a variety of lights we see different shades of colour, without having any reason to believe that the buttercup itself has altered; if a number of observers plunge their hands into a bowl of water, they will report very different degrees of warmth, even although nothing has happened which could affect the water’s temperature. Such facts demonstrate, Stout thought, that secondary qualities exist only as 'sensa' – objects of our perception; they are not actual properties of physical objects.


Nunn’s reply is uncompromising. The contrast between ‘sensa’ and ‘actual properties’ is, he argues, an untenable one. All the shades of colour which the buttercup presents to an observer are actual properties of the buttercup; and all the hotnesses of the water are properties of the water. The plain man and the scientist ascribe a standard temperature and a standard colour to a thing and limit it to a certain region of space, because its complexity would otherwise defeat them. The fact remains, Nunn argues, that a thing has not one hotness, for example, but many, and that these hotnesses are not in a limited region of space but in various places around about the standard object. A thing is hotter an inch away than a foot away and hotter on a cold hand than on a warm one, just as it is a paler yellow in one light than it is in another light. To imagine otherwise is to confuse between the arbitrary ‘thing’ of everyday life and the ‘thing’ as experience shows it of be.


In Nunn’s theory of perception, then, the ordinary conception of a material thing is revolutionized; that is the price he has to pay for his Realism. A ‘thing’, now, is a collection of appearances, even if every appearance is independent of the mind before which it appears."
I can see here that you are looking for a technical answer. Have you read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason? It is not really for reading, but studying, for the idealism you align yourself with surely has to be brought into a study of Kant for the reason that he articulated the things your discuss above in the most rigorous fashion imaginable. He drops the earlier jargon of secondary and primary qualities altogether. In their place he puts sensory intuitions and apriori aesthetic intuitions, respectively. The out there of things is dismissed as noumenal unthinkables. Kant is an empirical realist, and he does not cross this line to talk much about objects that are still there when perceptual/cognitive systems leave the room: We take the room with us, so to speak..no, quite literally. He only grudgingly talks about those mysterious X's

Kant lays the foundation for phenomenology (AND positivism, for Kant was a no nonsense philosopher with no patience for empty dialectics, regardiing God, immortality, the soul), and phenomenology is, in my estimation, Real philosophy. Anyway, since your interests go to such details, this kind thing might be a welcome clarification. Kant may be a rationalist, and I certainly don't agree with everything he says at all, but he opens the doors to existential thinking, if accidentally)

Frankly, Nunn, Passmore, I haven't read, but your account of them seems to invite a deeper analysis, as with Kant, Husserl, fink, and others.

And also, given your appreciation for detail, you would find Husserl's Ideas I absolutely fascinating. It can be dry and dogmatic, but here he lays down a theory of phenomenological philosophy. I can't, and shouldn't, give a summary account. Like Kant, it has to be studied. Another, whom I haven't read, is Levi Strauss. He is on my list.

Here is a taste of what I like to do with philosophical texts (it is from an exchange I am currently having on Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. It is not really a religious discussion at all, btw):

Freedom (65). Interesting what he says about the history of the race and how we "later" individuals, unlike Adam, receive the distinction between good and evil only through an intimation, in a "more or less" way. I think he is talking about the way "habits' of behavior and thinking possess the way the spirit self-posits. If present, this distinction is imparted through habit, that is, I think, the habits of culture and language which are amassed through generations, which have become "second nature" and anxiety enters "into the world in another sense". "Sin entered into anxiety" but presented its own anxiety. This is fairly confusing; a bit, at any rate. We have to rephrase K's language to understand him, and it is here we can get it wrong.
I see that anxiety is there, prior to sin, and when the explicit positing of spirit, which really is seeing that a self is divided, occurs, the anxiety already in play (recall his talk about childhood and the experience of adventure and melancholy, and so forth) is augmented by this invisible actuality "with no substance" (65) So we go about our lives prior to positing the spirit and there is this quantitative anxiety that is "not an anxiety about sin" (65) This is living the mundane life, through which daily anxieties rise up, worries about family, work, and so on. It is the "history of te race" that has produced this, that is, these institutions that define our culture. Worry about marriage, for example, is bound to conventions of marriage that took centuries to construct. All around us are these kinds of conventions, norms, laws, inhibitions and taboos, liberties, and so on; and these produce anxiety in the familiar way. THEN, as you are in it all, you step back and have a philosophical/religious realization, an epiphany about what we are, and your spirit is thereby posited and sin and a qualitatively new anxiety enters into your world.

Now, what does he mean by salvation? Look at the bottom of the page: It's not a "sweet longing" for this is to misunderstand; it would be taking the quantitative sin, the familiar habits of expectation that actuality have an object, something like one's job, to be worried about, and here one is "still in the hands of sin". I guess he means by this that it is sin to put forth what is of the world to answer to only to what God can bring. Only a God can save, says Heidegger many years later (though he disparaged Kierkegaard as a "religious writer"). Not your boss, nor your family and friends, for these are finite, perishable.

I like to go slowly through things when it gets thick,and Kierkegaard gets very thick. These texts need interpretation,clarification, simplification (if possible) for these guys do NOT write to be immediately understood. They do not want this. They write from their own world of extraordinary thinking and it's our job to penetrate into this. Analsis is required, and this is, well, fun for me.

So, what would you like to read? I can't do Fink's Play (I won't pay that kind of money, but I may be able to get it free as PDF) but most anything else. Husserl's Ideas I strikes me as something you would find worthy. But I'm easy on this matter.
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

Incidentally, I want to emphasize that Kierkegaard's Anxiety is not a religious work, even though the above conversation suggests this. K takes the Biblical story of Adam and original sin uses it as a basis for an analysis of the structure of the self. A fascinating read, really.
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by tapaticmadness »

odysseus wrote: Sun Feb 16, 2020 4:53 pm Incidentally, I want to emphasize that Kierkegaard's Anxiety is not a religious work, even though the above conversation suggests this. K takes the Biblical story of Adam and original sin uses it as a basis for an analysis of the structure of the self. A fascinating read, really.
I see Kierkegaard as thoroughly a religious writer. He is also one of my favorite philosophers. I especially like Diary of a Seducer. As I see things Hegel's Absolute is the Spirit of Middle-Class, Teutonic, Bourgeois, Family Life. After Hegel came all those anti-Hegelians trying to negate that Spirit. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Sartre, Foucault etc. Even I as one who follows those who came out of Vienna and Cambridge work against those Kantians and the Berliners.

The Anxiety of Kierkegaard is the toppling of Hegel's Absolute, of the Bourgeois. Of abandoning married life with Regina. Kierkegaard was God-obsessed. I love Kierkegaard and I fear him. In the past every time I got into reading him my love life became a disaster.
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

tapaticmadness
I see Kierkegaard as thoroughly a religious writer. He is also one of my favorite philosophers. I especially like Diary of a Seducer. As I see things Hegel's Absolute is the Spirit of Middle-Class, Teutonic, Bourgeois, Family Life. After Hegel came all those anti-Hegelians trying to negate that Spirit. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Sartre, Foucault etc. Even I as one who follows those who came out of Vienna and Cambridge work against those Kantians and the Berliners.

The Anxiety of Kierkegaard is the toppling of Hegel's Absolute, of the Bourgeois. Of abandoning married life with Regina. Kierkegaard was God-obsessed. I love Kierkegaard and I fear him. In the past every time I got into reading him my love life became a disaster.
Iguess it depends on what you mean by religious. His Anxiety has so much of the analysis of the structure of the self in time, in recollection, contra reason's attempt to encompass actuality, and so forth, that in the thick of it, it loses its religious themes altogether, and is purely philosophical analysis. Interesting to read K then go to Sartre whose infamous pour soi, "nothingness," of subjectivity is a direct derivation of K's "nothing' of spirit and soul; or to Heidegger Being and Time in which his analysis of dasein as a kind of Heraclitean time structure is obviously based on K's Anxiety. That whole idea of human despair and alienation that runs through much of existential thought is Kierkegaard' s doing.

Hegel's spirit, the final metaphysical consummation of reason: Certainly K had a serious ax to grind with Hegel and rationalism, and this is evident many places, most conspicuously in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. His Bourgeois is supposed to be a social ideal of sorts. I haven't read much Hegel and likely never will. I have the Phenomenology of Spirit, but ...maybe one day. Sartre, Foucault (Oscar Wilde?) and others protest against the pretenses of reason in philosophy. Sartre's famous novel Nausea is a disturbing account of the intractable nature of existence; and so on. Kant is very important. He opens the door to German idealism, and presents the foundation for phenomenology. this latter is what philosophy should be about.

As to the love life, if you're significant other is also into existential philosophy, then all would be well. It really is the same for all deep interests: this other has to realize that in a big way, you're already married.

What K did with his girlfriend, Regina was pure mercy. He is scary, for he lived what I would call a profound life, which is very different from others. You have to look at this with a question: is it even possible to live like this without it being a delusion? Philosophers generally say pretensions to profundity are not grounded or supported by responsible thinking. They draw a sharp line between religion and sensible argument. Kierkegaard does not, and he is right. The two are one, though the question that hangs in the balance is, why is it that professional philosophers do not see this? The answer is not clear. I would say that there is a negative correlation between cerebral talent and intuitive depth, but then, Kierkegaard was a genius; but one committed to "inwardness" (which he spared Regina from having to endure). Not sure what you mean by K's anxiety being the topping of Hegel's Absolute, but K's was a reaching soul, out of the depths of convention.

On the other hand, he does not appear to be so much a mystic, and this much abused term is an intrinsic part of the dark, mystery of the journey to understand things more that just intellectually. Sartre's Roquentin sits beneath chestnut tree, Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree, and these were not arguments; they were encounters, though Sartre was a confirmed atheist (I have always thought atheism was a shallow thesis).
tapaticmadness
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by tapaticmadness »

odysseus wrote: Sun Feb 16, 2020 11:08 pm
tapaticmadness
I see Kierkegaard as thoroughly a religious writer. He is also one of my favorite philosophers. I especially like Diary of a Seducer. As I see things Hegel's Absolute is the Spirit of Middle-Class, Teutonic, Bourgeois, Family Life. After Hegel came all those anti-Hegelians trying to negate that Spirit. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Sartre, Foucault etc. Even I as one who follows those who came out of Vienna and Cambridge work against those Kantians and the Berliners.

The Anxiety of Kierkegaard is the toppling of Hegel's Absolute, of the Bourgeois. Of abandoning married life with Regina. Kierkegaard was God-obsessed. I love Kierkegaard and I fear him. In the past every time I got into reading him my love life became a disaster.
Iguess it depends on what you mean by religious. His Anxiety has so much of the analysis of the structure of the self in time, in recollection, contra reason's attempt to encompass actuality, and so forth, that in the thick of it, it loses its religious themes altogether, and is purely philosophical analysis. Interesting to read K then go to Sartre whose infamous pour soi, "nothingness," of subjectivity is a direct derivation of K's "nothing' of spirit and soul; or to Heidegger Being and Time in which his analysis of dasein as a kind of Heraclitean time structure is obviously based on K's Anxiety. That whole idea of human despair and alienation that runs through much of existential thought is Kierkegaard' s doing.

Hegel's spirit, the final metaphysical consummation of reason: Certainly K had a serious ax to grind with Hegel and rationalism, and this is evident many places, most conspicuously in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. His Bourgeois is supposed to be a social ideal of sorts. I haven't read much Hegel and likely never will. I have the Phenomenology of Spirit, but ...maybe one day. Sartre, Foucault (Oscar Wilde?) and others protest against the pretenses of reason in philosophy. Sartre's famous novel Nausea is a disturbing account of the intractable nature of existence; and so on. Kant is very important. He opens the door to German idealism, and presents the foundation for phenomenology. this latter is what philosophy should be about.

As to the love life, if you're significant other is also into existential philosophy, then all would be well. It really is the same for all deep interests: this other has to realize that in a big way, you're already married.

What K did with his girlfriend, Regina was pure mercy. He is scary, for he lived what I would call a profound life, which is very different from others. You have to look at this with a question: is it even possible to live like this without it being a delusion? Philosophers generally say pretensions to profundity are not grounded or supported by responsible thinking. They draw a sharp line between religion and sensible argument. Kierkegaard does not, and he is right. The two are one, though the question that hangs in the balance is, why is it that professional philosophers do not see this? The answer is not clear. I would say that there is a negative correlation between cerebral talent and intuitive depth, but then, Kierkegaard was a genius; but one committed to "inwardness" (which he spared Regina from having to endure). Not sure what you mean by K's anxiety being the topping of Hegel's Absolute, but K's was a reaching soul, out of the depths of convention.

On the other hand, he does not appear to be so much a mystic, and this much abused term is an intrinsic part of the dark, mystery of the journey to understand things more that just intellectually. Sartre's Roquentin sits beneath chestnut tree, Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree, and these were not arguments; they were encounters, though Sartre was a confirmed atheist (I have always thought atheism was a shallow thesis).
I agree with much of what you have to say but, for sure, I am not a Kierkegaard or Hegel scholar. I'm not a scholar at all. You probably know the saying - When I sup with a scholar I use a long spoon. What I like about K. is his irony and his humor. I like how he said that, since the Bible speaks against marriage, that if a person feels he should get married then he should have the village blacksmith perform the ceremony and then God might not notice.

If you want to jointly discuss something I suggest these

1. https://oyc.yale.edu/NODE/246

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tddCNY6U77Y

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9cw2ljlouz5ym ... G.pdf?dl=0

or Nausea by Sartre. I also like his Genet - https://www.dropbox.com/s/hx02tc2qeizss ... r.pdf?dl=0

or the first chapter of this - https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4z8ypp8t0f0m ... e.pdf?dl=0
odysseus
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Re: reading Husserl, Fink....

Post by odysseus »

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.
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