Lecture Notes

PHIL 458

Week 1 Tuesday – Introduction to Phenomenology

• Heidegger and Husserl – an Oedipal story
• Heidegerrian apologism
• Midsommar, Hereditary
• Lonergan – Jesuit priest, very well educated, a polymath.
  • Militant Longerganians
  • Jesuit departure from Catholicism: intellectual response to the reformation, a counter-reformation
  • Theory of history which is more informative than Marx and Hegel
  • CHID prgoram developed as in the history of Lonergan
  • Lonergan does phenomenology too – puts Husserl in the shade?
• Hegel: position, negation, negation of negation
• Nature, sin, grace; progress, decline, redemption
• What is the problem if evil exists on its own? Well God will have created it; evil is therefore the absence of good, since God made good: evil is our failure to desire the good – evil is something which doesn’t happen but which should
• For Lonergan you need a transcendental dimension; for Hegel the synthesis emerges from the dialectic.
• Hegel doesn’t really have a principle of bad: what appears to be bad is setting up for something good
• Same with Marx
• Theodicy – to justify God – logical exercises in the goodness of God
• Intentionality – directedness to an “object”; the ontological status is in question
  • Object: noema, cogitata
  • Our consciousness is always directed towards objects, it is always a consciousness “of”
  • No such thing just as “I’m conscious” – my consciousness is always directed at some object
  • The term of an act of consciousness. I always have a term of consciousness. There is the noesis and the noema.
  • Noesis: from latin, gnosis (knowledge, mental activity); gnoetic – mental life and activity.
  • English: thinking and the thought – cogitationes and cogitata
  • There is always pair: never a noema without a noesis and never a noesis without a noema.
  • For any cogitata without a cogitationes, what does that mean? We are never just considering an object without it being observed.
  • Try to think about an object which you aren’t thinking about
• Ontology: levels of being. Some ontological questions include, what are the statuses of mathematical vs. physical objects.
• Phenomenology – phenomena and logos, logos from logein/lire/lesen – to read off the phenomena
  • Interpreting of the phenomena, whatever happens to be in your experience. Attending to it as it is given to you, irrespective of what it might be independently of you
  • Phenomena / noumena (thing in itself). We don’t worry about the noumenal.
  • Bracketing: don’t worry about the noumenal. The epoché. Since in some sense by definition the noumena does not appear
  • Tricks – there is a way in which the noumena is another phenomena. Constitution – we constitute the object through our noetic acts.
  • Husserlian term: I see a profile. Every object you see, you never see the backside of it, but you say you see the object. So how does an object exist for you? How does it be an object for you? You constitute it?
  • I constitute an object because a constitute another subject who views the object.
  • Compossibility – compossible intentions, the totality of possibilities have you intended, they are cointended. Overcoming the idea that the nouema is just given to me. The noema is the full object but it is never given to me unless/until I constitute it
  • Intentionality vs cointentionality.
  • There is one cogitata which appears, but there are other cogitata (the backside) which I cointend – to what extend does it appear to me? As a possibility.
  • Many problems in philosophy occur from us not really grasping what we have grasped.
• Do children see 3 dimensions? They have some sense of depth perception.
• Principle of conservation, object permanence: you’ve constituted them as the same.
• Genetic phenomenology – generating objects over time. vs. static phenomenology – already constituted for all of us, but we can trace a geneology of phenomenology.
• Husserl says that Heidegger slips back into the issue by marking epoché as ontological.
• What about two dimensional depictions? I can be intending the Mona Lisa, but it’s an empty intention: the noema is not filling the noesis, not fulfilling the intention. Some objects you can never fulfill the intention. But you can fill it in by anticipating how others will see it.
• Infinite regress of constitution?
• Epoché, from ancient skepticism: for any claim, you can forulate its opposite, and they are equally powerful (equipolence). We do not know in the face of equipolence, we just cannot judge; right now it appears to me to be sweet. I am not going to make ontological assertions now, though.
  • The act of bracketing the question; what are you? To me now, you look to me to be …
• What is being? What really is? Not what we thought it was.
• What we thought was the noema really is something else.

Week 1 Thursday – The Aristotelian and Scholastic Backdrop to Phenomenology

• Husserl - not deeply invested in the history of philosophy, came relatively late
• Often raised philosophical questions about mathematics
• Eichman in Jeruselem, Arendt. The banality of evil. Augustin – evil is a deprivation. Arendt: what is distinct about the 20th century was its banality: its passionlessness, bureaucrats signing papers.
  • Macnumera: fro putting out cars to napalm
  • Evil is no longer an affair of passion but one of abstract technocratic faceless banality
• Eichman on trial: asked “why?” Response: “Just being a good Kantian”.
• Talk vs obey. Just obeying orders
• Husserl was responding to Franz Brentano, who did know his HoP.
• Medeival period – Suma Theologia, Aquinas (summation of theology). Aristotle is ‘the philosopher’.
• Aristotle, then Aquinas, Brentano, then Husserl
• Decartes’ meditations on first philosophy. In modernity, first philosophy (foundational philosophy) transformed from metaphysics to epistemology.
  • For Aristotle: metaphysics is the first philosophy
  • Modernity: epistemology is the first philosophy
• Aristotle: De anima, peri psyche – on the soul. Deals with what we think are epistemological issues, but articulated here in terms which are established in a larger metaphysical context.
• When epistemology becomes first philosophy, there is an attempt not to presuppose a first metaphysics until we get clear on the epistemology.
  • Previously: build other things like ethics, politics, study of the soul, logic from metaphysical presuppositions
• Post-Christian baggage of ‘soul’ not carried with the psyche – perhaps ‘mind’.
• Quick and dirty of Aristotle: not context for seeing where phenomenology comes from. We can see the natrue of the problem we are responding too.
• Basic Aristotelian metaphysics
  • Potency, form, act
  • Potency – adult human
  • Form – shipbuilder
  • Act – ship building
  • Every adult human is potentially a shipbuilder
  • Potentiality becomes formed, and it is a metaphysical transformation.
  • Activity of building a ship – an activity.
  • Eye, Sight, Seeing
  • What is the relation between form and act?
  • Metaphysics as the basic constituents of reality
  • Aristotle: a new reality emerges because I am fundamentally in my being different from potency to form
  • Virtue is a form – only the person who has the form of virtue can act virtuously.
    • Act must originate from a virtuous form to be virtuous in and of itself: metaphysically virtuous.
  • Shipbuilding is a practical virtue – virtue as skill (e.g. virtuoso)
  • technicality:
    • Potency: first potency
    • Form: first act, second potency
    • Act: second act
  • Acts can become potencies for further acts
  • Another example: human mind, science, understanding/sciencing (a theorem)
    • Human mind as a plate of potentiality
    • Sciencia: knowledge. Science is the actualization of knowledge.
  • Also: potency, form, act – first nature, second nature, act
  • Phenomenology: the only thing which actually happens is act, because that is what is happening.
  • Form is that by which you act: a first act, but really a potency.
  • An act is a different metaphsycial reality than potency and form.
  • Aristotle knows about consciousness but it is couched in metaphysical terms which are also applied to things which are not conscious the way we are, such as the growth of a plant or abstract motion.
  • Three kinds of souls for Aristotle: vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual.
  • Aristotle – applies a method of analysis to all souls equally.
    • Vegetative: life forms
    • Sensitive: conscious forms
    • Intellectual: humans, angels, maybe God
  • Phenomenology: we cannot just have a generic method equally useful for plant life and for human life.
    • Universality and particularity: favoring particularity by phenomenology
  • Aristotle as a ‘less sophisticated’ even if less brilliant method
  • Undifferentiated – different realities understood with one method.
  • A metaphysical analysis of the soul, which is different from what phenomenology does.
  • Maslow gets ‘self-actualization’ from the Aristotelian “first act, second potency” of form
    • Act: doing the thing which you self-actualize to do
  • Claim: potency is metaphysically improverished, form too. Act is on its own; but potency is on its way to act.
  • Potentiality and actuality will collapse: everything is an actuality. – Sartre.
  • Potentiality not be: it is potentially something.
  • Abortion: what is the metaphysical status of the potency of a human fetus (not in act yet)
    • What if potency is real, just not the same reality as act?
  • A plurality of acts become potency for another form.
  • Actions augment the original potency
  • The soul: for Aristotle, psyche (de anima, from the Scholastics in latin): potens omnia facere et fieri – the human mind can become anything
    • For Plato, all knowledge is recollected – we have it in us, we just recollect it; Aristotle says we have all knowledge in us potentially
    • Materia prima, prime matter – the potency of potencies, just not anything yet, the fundamental potency, it is not anything but it could be something, as opposed to nothingness: potency is not yet anything, but it is not yet nothing. It is potentially something. Sartre says: nah, it’s nothing – potency is nothing.
    • We all can potentially become things: sounds like a God. God is pure act
    • To think through something is to have that reality exist in your cognitive processes. There is no limit, we can become anything, on the spiritual or mental level.
  • Poesis: making something, poetry as the fundamental making.
  • To know something is to become something – not on the level of matter, but on the level of intentionality.
  • Lonergan: potency is the principle of limitation, which is why God is pure act
  • But we are potentially infinite.
  • Metaphysical evil is the failure to be: we are called to come to be, and for some irreason we don’t (anxiety, dread – what do we dread most of all, being? procrastination – you are about to be something more and you irrationally evade it)
  • Form is what directs act: I know the form of a triangle before I draw it. (But where does the form exist? Not even in y mind, fully)
• Lonergan – historicized metaphysical categories.
• Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Brahe – acts. Newton – synthesize into form. Newtonians doing things — synthesize as Einstein.
  • Evolution: species is latin for form. Individuals doing things (potency) \(\to\) species (form) \(\to\) act
• Epistemological turn in modernism with Hegel – the historical consciousness turn: history is not just static (universal), but there are wide differences in ways of being and this has fundamental epistemological significance.
  • Archaic Greek did not have a word for acts like seeing or thinking – did they know that they were seeing or thinkig? Homer: instead of Achilles thought, he says: Achilles deliberated with his horse. Not seeing, but rather Achilles’ profile was present to him.
  • Historicization <3
• Two fundamentally different kinds of act: actus imperfecti and actus perfecti.
  • Imperfect act and perfect act
  • Greek: kinesis and energeia
    • Movement and energy
    • Now we think of energy as potency – but energeia was originally an act.
  • Movement is metaphysically imperfect act, ontologically incomplete: what it is now is not what it will be, there is a finitude of temporality.
  • Aristotle: the movement through an act towards a term, telos, goal, objective – the act and the term of the act are distinct. Once the act reaches its term, the act is over. But the movement at any moment is not at any instance what it will be.
    • Perfective and imperfective verbs in linguistics!!! Completion vs doing
  • Motion is the act of the potential insofar as it remains in potency
  • Motion is the essential becoming; all motion is becoming and all becoming is motion.
  • Categories of change: growth, local, …
  • Kinesis: all becoming; it is an imperfect reality. An act of the potential still in potency; definitionally on the way.
  • Aristotelian definition of time: the measure of motion. A day is the measure of motion (the Sun).
  • Mtion as motion is not intrinsically intelligible: just being in motion is not reality, but itself it is not understandable: it needs to reference an origin and an end.
  • Newtonian physics: motion as motion is not understandable, you instead study the acceleration, the difference which makes a difference, the derivative. motion as motion is really act.
  • We experience it as an intrinsically act on its way to what it will become.
  • Motion is an ontologically inferior reality – when it is completed it is over. It is also intrinsically temporal.
  • Perfective: the act and the term of the act are coincident. Hobbes – human life as the restless pursuit of power after power, ceasing only in death. Life is only motion which ends in death. We don’t know how to rest. Life is an imperfect act?
  • Shipbuildinng is a motion – it is an act, but an imperfective act. Studying is likewise an imperfective act.
  • Perfect acts: seeing, hearing, tasting, understanding, judging. These are ontologically complete. One is never on the way to seeing: you are either seeing or you are not. You are seeing: it is ontologically coplete in the instance it occurs. Motion is on the other hand always lacking what it will be
  • Perfect acts are intrinsically outside of time. But they are not temporal in the way that motion is temporal.
  • A motion as complete is over.
  • A tree is spatially different from me, but it is not different from my spatial act of seeing: it is the sense of being perfect, complete, not lacking. The tree is not outside my act of seeing it.
    • Can something be nonspatial but temporal?
  • You are potentially pure act
• The entrance of phenomenology: the act and the object are always coincident: the problem of the bridge, is something outside of me? wrong question: how can affirm something I see is different from me? It is one reality?

Russian verbs which only exist in the perfective
понять (ponyat') - to understand (perfective only)
узнать (uznat') - to find out (perfective only)
сделать (sdelat') - to make/do (perfective only)
найти (nayti) - to find (perfective only)
остановиться (ostanovit'sya) - to stop (perfective only)
начать (nachat') - to start (perfective only)
увидеть (uvidet') - to see (perfective only)
договориться (dogovorit'sya) - to agree (perfective only)

Week 2 Tuesday – Husserl’s Introduction to Phenomenology

• Get started on reflection papers
• Discussion leader next week
• Actus imperfecti (kinesis) and actus perfecti (energeia)
• Imperfect act – motion – motion is inherently spatial and temporal
• Motion is an intrinsically complete act – on its way to something else. The completion of the act and the act itself are distinct.
• The act of seeing: the tree you see isn’t spatially distinct from your act of seeing. As a perfect act, the act and the term of the act are coincident.
  • You’re never on your way to seeing – either you see or you don’t see.
  • The act of seeing persists through time
  • There are always light waves, sound waves, etc. as imperfective acts towards me. But when they reach my eyes I see, i.e. it is the perfective act.
• Once you understand the truth of a sentence, you don’t stop understanding it – it is a complete act
• Imperfective and perfective aspects in grammar
• Potency is not inert – it anticipates form.
  • Potency – dunamis, tendency, tending towards
  • Previous acts of understanding become potency for more – part of a larger dynamism
• Humans are potentially dynamically oriented towards becoming on the level of nous (intellect) all things
• Each act is a partial actualization of this dynamic dimension.
• In our seeing, we are making them more be – they are not fully what they be until they are comprehended; there is no beauty outside of the act of appreciating; there is no act of being beautiful. There is a sense there in that we only exist when we’re known by God.
• Prime potency – potentially all things on the level of material reality
• We are potentially all things on the level of intellectual reality
• Prime potency doesn’t ‘exist’ – something in potency doesn’t exist – things only exist insofar as they have been formed
• Final actualization occurs in the act of appreciating the art itself, which doesn’t happen metaphysically unless there is the act of appreication. There is a sense in which we only fully act when we’re known…
• When you are in the act, you are fully doing what the act has you do
• You have halfway understood but you have not understood halfway; whereas I can shipbuild halfway
• Unlimited potentiality, a horizon – which Husserl asserts science strives for.
• Questions are metaphysically bizarre. Meno’s parodox: learning is impossible. Either you know something, in which case you can’t learn it. Or you don’t know something, in which case you can’t look for it and don’t know where to find it, so you can’t learn it.
  • Socrates: we ‘unforget’ – we knew everything to begin with. But it’s a myth of recollection – as if we recall things
  • Aha! moment – that’s it, that’s sort of like when you forget your keys and you remember where they are.
  • Potency as desire to know is the bizarrest of desires – asking questions – you both know and do not know what you are looking for.
  • It’s the act of potency insofar as it remains in potency: questions are the act of knowing insofar as it is still in potency
  • Metaphysically, here we have an act which is not fully in act – a desire to know which is a dynamic orientation
  • When the potentiality is actualized the activity which results is a perfect act; the dynamism of knowing resolves into the perfect act of understanding, as opposed to the dynamism of mere motion (the act ceases).
  • Potency is always anticipatory
• Sense in act is sensed in act – there may be sound waves but there is no sounding – it is one act; sounding and hearing are metaphysically the same reality.

• “You are the music while the music lasts” – dancing is not just motion, something more: it is a motion which is formed, and in the full sense it also has to be appreciated. Dance is a unity of motion and act, metaphysically beyond mere motion. There are different ways to be present. You forget about yourself – in some sense you are the music, and in some sense you are the dance – there is a sense in which you can render your life as a perfect act in the sense that you are not in agony about the future.
• Intellect in act is intelligible in act – metaphysically, the act of understanding (intellecting) is not distinct from what is intelligible.
• In order to be, you have to be known. If you’re intelligible, to be fully in act, you have to be understood by something
• Hell as God doesn’t know you – you’re forgotten
• The dance as motion occurs over time, but as danceit exists throught ime
• Play – activity for its own sake
• You don’t become a tree when you see a tree, but in a sense you do. You take on the form without the matter.
  • Seeing: sensible form without matter
  • Understanding: intelligible form without matter
• Seeing is a fundamental part of your being – the thing is you, it’s making up part of what I am – it’s the form of the thing without the matter.
• The act of seeing isn’t really spatial – the tree is here in the same sense that you see there. We are distinct insofar as we have different matter.
• Aristotle says form without matter, but we never just experience matter – so how do we know if there really is anything there?
• This question just didn’t get raised – the critical turn with Decartes through Kant – how do we know what we experience isn’t an illusion?
• We only experience an act – never potency / matter. If matter is the way by which I am different from others, then I am just me
• Omnipotent – omni, potency
• On the level of the intelligible, in knowing something, we become that thing. Prime matter can become all things on the material level – and nous / ego / cogita on the conceptual level.
• We never experience things insofar as they are determinations of our consciousness.
  • Never “out there”, always “in here”
• In here / out there – are distinctions you draw in here – determinations you’ve made
• Treat consciousness as a field – but it’s you – you’re not just a body
• Insofar as we can become all things, our ultimate horizon is being.
• Apodicticity – known with absolute certainty
• Decartes – it’s impossible to doubt that you’re doubting – it’s undubidable insofar as I am doubitng that I be
• It is apodictically certain that I am thinking – if I try to doubt I am thinking, I am doing thinking
• Decartes was on the way but he gets sidetracked because he carries with him a lot of baggage from the Scholastic tradition which Husserl wants to axe
  • Decartes says “I am a thinking thing”
  • Substance is the thing which stands underneath or behind the phenomena
  • We are all substances for Aristotle
  • No one experiences substantance as substance – substance is still a kind of potency underlying it; never an actuality in experience
  • This is where Husserl says Decartes went too far – a metaphysical reality which is not a phenomena of himself as a thinking substance. I’ve seen phenomena but nver substance as substance; I have to infer that.
  • Decartes – if there is thinking, every thing has a substance behind it, so I must be a thikning thing
• We have to start only from the apodictic reality that the activity of thinking is happening. This is what is given in an experience.
• Intentional existence – presence of form without matter – it exists intentionally within us.
• Idea of a substance is not something which is really an object of experience as experienced.
• Bracketing – stop presupposing an underlying substance.

Week 2 Thursday – Husserl’s Introduction to Phenomenology II (Meditation 1)

• You can trace throughout archaic Greek the emergence of the mind – in pre-Homeric Greek you don’t have the language for ‘mental acts’ (seeing, tasting, … understanding, judging, deciding, deliberating)
• Schnel, Discovery of the Mind - in Archaic Greek there are no words for mental acts; but presumably people did see, judge, decide, … – why weren’t there words for them?
• You can’t draw mental acts because they’re not spatial realities
• All the action appears to be in the object, whatever is going on – whatever is being scene, whatever is being understood, being judged, etc. This is prior to the discovery of the mind
• Eventually in Greek these acts begin to show up, and eventually you get philosophers trying to understand these acts
• Plato and Aristotle begin to adopt philosophies by which they begin to reflect on the mind, but they don’t even really get at a phenomenology of these acts itself. They don’t develop a phenomenology of the acts themselves – eventually there are words for acts, then philosophyw hich tries to deal with it.
• In the way in which Greek philosophers studied mental acts, Plato and Aristotle applies acts universally – mental acts as on the same plane as vegitable acts – same method to different kinds of souls
• Aristotle sees a difference between actus imperfecti anda ctus perfecti – but he still uses the same set of metaphysical terms. But fundamentally you need a diffferent method with which to investigate mental acts to fully understand what they are (beyong just im/perfect) and in relationship to one another
• A metaphysical rather than a phenomenological account of mental operations provided by the Greeks
• Imperfect acts – Aristotle kind of sees it, but he was struggling to articulate the reality of metnal acts. But still couched in this kind of metaphysical language. Sees the different realities of seeing vs. motion, but not quite seeing the unique dimension of mental acts
• Scholastics – started to talk about the act by which one is able to have an object in conciousness as an intentional act. What I see is the sensible form of the thing without the matter, I become the thing I see on the level of intentionality – I have conceptual intentionality rather than material intentionality in me
• Phenomenology – I only ever see the tree in me – I don’t see it when I’m not seeing it
• Sartre – “I’m trying to see what the flowers look like when no one looks at them”
• On the basis of what do I affirm that the tree is not me?
• By limiting ourself to the fact that the thing I see is the sensible form without the matter; the mind is potentially makingna dbecoming all things – matter and potency are essentially the same things.
• How do we know that what we see isn’t you? How do we establish the externality of objects?
• Givenness – what is given in an experience? Husserl – one of the things that isn’t given is that that thing is independently of you.
• Metaphysical thing: object and mind, then mind receives the form separate from the form – as if you already knew that there was a separation – but you only ever have the form in you. So this fundamentally inverts the problem.
• Subject and object are intrinsically correlated. Zahavi – phenomenology is the discovery of the correlation between the two (no object without subject, etc.) whereas modern epistemology threatens to trap us in the pure cogito, the pure I think, in subjecthood itself; phenomenology shows us we are always already connected to obejcts.
  • A critical and naive way of reading this interpretation
  • Phenomenological naivete – you continue to posit or presuppose the being of the world as self-evident. And conscious does it behind its own back – it’s you which posited / presupposed it.
  • This idea that we are connected to the being of the world is a phenomenological naivete – in order to analyze acts between subject and object, you have to already presuppose the ontological beingness of the object.
  • So with epoche, now we need to bracket and stop presupposing the reality of being as something which is just there and set out before us.
• Old epistemological problem which shows up past the scholastics into Hume and Kant – present us witht he problem of the bridge. How can I be sure that what gets from the subject gets to the object and vice versa? This is the original Cartesian meditations – oh gosh, what if this is all the Matrix or an evil demon?
• Decartes says I am a thinking substance – but we don’t experience ourselves as substance, but as act – then Decartes goes off the rails – ‘proves’ undubidably God. Modern epistemological challenge of the bridge. Hume – we only have our subjective impressions, we don’t know what cuases them, don’t worry about it
• Phenomenology – it was you who already decided that there was a world outside you – this distinction is within you – not the problem of bridge but affirming the distinction to begin with. What are the grounds (evidence) for this sort of judgement?
• For phenomenology, subject vs object is already part of the naive attitude – as if to know something is to know something which is out there.
• Anxiety is a naive presupposition – ‘how do I get outside of my head’ – but why are you assuming there is an outside to begin with? Why do you assume the basic epistemological problem is the problem of the bridge? – ensuring what is in here is reliably a representation of, effect of, etc.
• How can I be sure what I see is the effect of an object? – Decartes’ question, which already presupposes the question of the bridge.
• Aristotle runs into this – the world of perfect acts which really are nothing at all like motion – sense in act is sensed in act, metaphysically. Since we only ever experience the sensed in act, how do I know if the sensed is the act? (Flowers, what do they look like when no one is watching them?)
• Objectivity – how can I be certain that my knowledge is objective?
  • Naive conception – how can I be sure my subject reception is derived from the object, that there is a relation to the object
  • For Husserl objectivity is constituted by the subject – we discover things which are apodictic and universal – it doesn’t get you to an ‘outside’ but beyond you as an individual subject. Your knowledge is not merely your product, because it’s not relative to you – it’s absolutely true; universally and necessarily true.
  • “I think therefore I am” – an apodictic conclusion
  • Husserl – you can then build up entire columsn of knowledge – push you beyond what you are as a limited finite subject, which is where you can go beyond Hume. For Hume it is a deeply subjective reality whereas Husserl thinks we can obtain a degree of objectivity, but not the naive conception of objectivity.
  • There is a Platonic dimension to this
  • This movement of building up is the transcnedental subjectiivty, or the transcendental-phenomenological reduction
• A more immediate context – hot problems Husserl responds with in the strict philosophical sense – Husserl is responding to
  • Philosophical disagreement – lack of unity in knowledge/science because lack of apodictic formulation
    • Persists throughout the whole history of philosophy
    • In some sense it is the problem
    • This is what inspires Decartes to write the meditations. How to resolve these differences? 30 years of war in Europe…
    • How do these philosophical ideas conflict? Everyone has different views – can we generate a universal account of virtue? Aristotle – try to find this
    • Epoche: Ancient skpetics did this first, because they were the first skeptics to say, let’s stop arguing and first reserve judgement – rather bracket out unproductive elements and work on clearing a new universal ground.
    • Medievals have to include the Bible and its conflicts, plus the church fathers, etc. — Decartes, start over
    • Hume: start over
    • Kant: start over
    • Husserl: start over
    • Both philosophical but also generally – why do people disagree? Why can’t we get unified? For Husserl we need to have a unity
    • WWI as a philosophical conflict
    • What we need is an apodictically certain foundation to all knowledge, otherwise we will continue to fall with reasonable doubts – unproductive.
    • An arguably apocalyptic horizon
    • Division from God
  • Supposed devaluation of ‘lived experience’ by modern science
    • e.g. a reduction of secondary qualities to primary qualtiies
    • Alienation from ourselves / the world / others produced by this scientism
    • Very preoccupied with Galileo; modern science provide this distinction between secondary and primary qualities which are then taken up by all the modern philosophers (Hume et al.): primary quality is mathematically measurable aspects of that object (matter in motion – weight, mass, density, velocity, etc.) as opposed to secondary qualities (color, sound, etc.) – movement towards a denial of the reality of secondary qualities or have anything to do with the object – are ‘merely subjective’
    • Epiphenomenal – layered upon the real thing (the mathematically measurable aspects of matter in motion)
    • Husserl saying – it’s backwards, we only know the primary by way of the secondary; we can’t be nearly as certain of the primary qualities as the things which we experience more directly
    • You’re not looking behind the secondary qualities for the object
    • What you experience is apodictically certain knowledge
    • You only infer a primary quality based on the idea that you see it move or you see the measurements – you never see velocity an sich, you see the representations, etc. – it’s less apodictic.
    • ‘Lived experience’ (erlehnisse)
    • Reductionism – Freud; believe in God, but you replaced the father you murdered. Freud is a materialist in some sense though.
    • You become alienated from your experience – can I believe in my experience when Freud tells me about my consciousness? I’ve never experienced my consciousness an sich… that of what I am conscious of is much more apodictically certain than the matter and motion which would come to me.
    • Phenomenology as a descriptive science.
• Ancient skeptics’ use of the epoche; Husserl adds more; also the first to point out how philosophers disagreeing are not addressing what should be the goal of settling things.
• Husserl – there has to be pre-predicative experience
• Attend to what is actually given and what our interpretation is
  • Is this even possible?
• Epoche – to withhold or suspend judgement / assent – not denial or affirmation, and it’s hard to do. Epoche as a deeply meditative practice (hence Carteisan meditations) – don’t just affirm things and get caught up in disagreements.
• Husserl – we can’t fully follow Decartes; Decartes proposed a scientific method which we must withhold judgement about, cannot assume it is the scientific method – we are founding science (sciencia, knowledge) itself – we can’t even presuppose you know what science is yet.
  • Science as geometry – from axioms to theorems.
  • Even geometry is dubidable
• I am looking for an axiom from which I can start out from. ‘
• Husserl: you didn’t successfully doubt it – you carried it along with you
• Opposite of apodicticity – presupposed (that which is doubtful but assumed, which is not grouunded)
• Decartes did not ground his presupposition that geometry was the right type of way to do philosophy – it’s not apodictic, we need to keep on going, to find a truly apodictic foundation to all knowledge.
• Core – searching for an apodictic foundation to all knowledge. Husserl says, is the being of the world apodictically certain? Is it indubidable that there is a world existing distinct from me? Is it absolutely certain? Indubidable? It could be an illusion.
• Does Husserl presuppose a notion of science with his notion of apodicticity? Objectivity as an ascent to the universal.
• Husserl – phenomenology is the true positivism (which claims to stick with only what is experienced – they’ve missed a lot of what is experienced ine xpeirence, not least being the acts themselves).
• Being in the world is dubidable. By reason of evidence of natural experience, must no longer for us be an obvious fact. It must henceforth only be a phenomenon – we bracket its existence. We treat it as what appears – we don’t judge is it real or not. We need to find what is indubidable.
• The Being of the world is not gien to us – it is not apodictic.
• Epoche: entails a reduction – removing presuppositions but also enriching, a discovery of a new ‘continent’
• The existence value of the world is something we give to it.
• Zahavi – this entails a religious conversion – you have to go through this experience of ‘I’m floating, and I don’t know what is real – I just have my experiences… am I now trapped?’ But this is already presupposing that I need to get out. Some people say no, Husserl is actually saying we don’t have to worry about the epistemological problem b/c we’re always connected to the world, consciousness of … but Husserl is saying, yes,, we are conscious of a world – this is apodictically true. But is it the world? Not so sure.
• The natural attitude – the naive perspectivce – is forbidden when we do phenomenology, we bracket these things.
• Zahavi tries to say that Husserl takes this back – the true ontic reality is now set truth, we don’t lose anything – this is false, we keep our world but we bracketed the existence/meaning value of it.
• Subject and object correlate is not religious conversion – epoche is saying first in order to understand what acts are doing we can’t presuppose that world because for all we know we could have constituted it – if you want to keep the world, you will have to give it up.

Week 3 Tuesday: Universality in Phenomenology I (Meditation 1, 2)

• Husserl – we’re not looking for transcendence (this is what is bracketed in the epoche) – the world as transcending consciousness; we only ever know and experience that which is in consciousness
• Transcendence as opposed to immanence – we have to limit our investigation to that which is immanent in consciousness
  • Immanence – within, restricted to
  • That which is within consciousness
  • What is immanent in consciousness – what is within consciousness
  • Conscious acts are not spatial; consciousness is not spatial; within implies there is an in and an out, that it is a spatial location
  • To what extent is a tree in my consciousness? vs. a water is in my bottle
  • Space is in consciousness. We are gonna restrict ourselves to something in consciousness in a different sense from what is in containers. But we can get tripped up on this. We have to overcome biases which arise from the natural attitude – biases about what reality is, waht knowing is, what it means to attain transcendence from a naive natural attitude.
• ‘within’ consciousness: already potentially an embodiment of the natural attitude
• object – something which stands over and against consciousness as opposed to something which is immanent in consciousness. object – ‘over against’, from latin (project, objectus). But we have to overthrow this bias, that this is just what an object is. So we’re going to use knew words – stuff, content, the meant. But we have to struggle against object. Even Husserl has to overcome biases which emerge in the natural attitude and which are sedimented in language.
• Transcendence – that which will transcend consciousness, distinct from consciousness, etc. Husserl calls to attention that that which is transcednent to consciousness is in consciousness – how else could you conceive of it?
• Transcendence – also a theological context, leaving or going beyond this world.
• Epistemological or theological senses for the transcendent.
• Transcendental – conditions of the possibility of experience, knowledge,
• For Kant and the modern turn to the subject: the subjective conditions for the possibiility of experience – what needs to be true for consciousness such that experience is possible at all? The transcendental refers to the deeply internal now –
• If we are talking about the transcendental, we are not exactly talking about transcendence – it is almost even reversed in a particular sense (but with both we have an outside-immanence)
  • For Kant the transcendental is unconscious
• Question – what counts as conscious? If I am indirectly aware of something (e.g. I receive representations or measurements from something), am I really conscious of it?
• Intentionality does not mean on purpose or volitional – that I consciously or purposely create/intend something. From Brentano through Husserl, rather directedness to an object, term, content, ‘meant’. Volitional acts are intentional. But also just by seeing fish, you are also performing an intentional act; it is directed at something.
  • Why not ‘attending’, ‘attention’? Perhaps attending is one kind of intending
• Epoche – the concrete conscious and intellectual practice of suspending or withholding judgement about the existence or ontological status of the world
  • The world is the generic term of consciousness at this point which we all have – whether that world which we have has anything to do with the world, we are bracketing for now. Stop presupposing a world beyond my word or your world.
  • So do we run into transcendental solipsism? Maybe, but no – it leads towards transcendental intersubjectivity. But we won’t judge whether it is my world
  • Not a mere mental experiment, but a practice – you have to actively engage in it; it cannot be done for you.
  • While you are on a jury, you suspedn judgement until you have enough evidence to suggest otherwise
• The natural attitude is the attitude of consciousness which apodictically presupposes the existence of the world which is wholly distinct from the subject. The world transcends consciousness. In the epoche, we bracket the question of transcendence – ‘objccts’ are immanent terms of intentional acts. ‘Objectivity’ is attaining knowledge which is existent independently of our consciousness.
• We’re not given being as being.
• Phenomenology as a religious conversion
• People were doing phenomenology before phenomenology – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche (psychology), St. Augustin
• For Kierkegaard, the Abraham-Isaac story reveals that we have to be willing to sacrifice immediate attachment to existence in order to relate to it on an ethical and religious level; Husserl demands something similar on the rational level
• St. Augustin: memory is almost infinite, and in some sense all of the world is in my memory; but maybe my memory is in the world? I can live in memory… Phenomenology of memory is wild
• The ‘naivete’ of the natural attitude – to be phenomenologically naive is to fail to critically account for consciousness to posit the existence of the world; world is presupposed and already posited, set out; not realizing that existence is posited by us
• Phenomenology comes in after the fact
• Hegel: we constitute the world but we ‘forget’ it – we do not recognize our own activity in the world; and we confront it as a gegenshtein; as already out there. Then you do philosophy and you think the problem of philosophy is the problem of the bridge.
• There is an epistemological problem of objectivity, but not about getting from the subject to the object – the problem of the bridge is a false problem. We’ve presupposed that the world must already be out there rather than something that consciousness posits for itself.
• Who inhabits the natural attitude? Everyone.
• qua – insofar as
• You can realize when you are asking problems with basic naive presuppositions
• Husserl vs Decartes – we “haven’t really lost things” – we’ve changed their identities in a particular sense, by what and how do appearances appear to me?
• Why practice the epoche? Demand for apodicticity in knowledge – emerges from reason’s drive to achieve unity of knowledge
• The idea that if knowledge is knowledge it has to be absolutely certain – this is potentially a presupposition, maybe emerges from the background of disagreement Husserl emerges from – for Husserl this is not good
• A layer below utter apodiciticity – an evidence which excludes doubt but still can be doubted; for Decartes, “I am” is indubidable
• The being of the world is not apodictic (which is why we bracket it): we see red, but we do not see being-red; we hear a high pitch but we do not hear being high-pitched

Week 3 Thursday: Universality in Phenomenology II (Meditation 2)

• Introduction to Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy – Hegel is a major thinker bbecause he establishes the concept of intellectual history, history of thought / philosophy / the mind / the spirit – the mind emerges over time / history
• To understnad philosophy, you have to understand the history of philosophy
• Hegel draws heavily from biological analogies – more than analogies, even; geist goes all the way down; the World is spirit. It’s not just an analogy, but ‘this is what the mind is like’ on another level
• The ultimate moment of a plant’s development is when it bears fruit. At a certain point the fruit is a determination of the plant – but it can fall off, go to the ground; it can reach a point where the object it produced is now distinct from it. Parallel movement for the mind – a hypothesis which has been verified – something is true. Up until you verify it, it’s just you – truthood is the moment of ‘transcendence’
  • When the mind bears fruit and it transcends, “it’s not just me” – in being not just you, it doesn’t leave your consciousness.
  • Nature as petrified spirit
  • The fruit is the same ‘nature’, the same ‘nature’ as the tree – even if the tree ‘forgets’ that (i.e. does not recognize its self in the other)
  • Nature speaks to a hidden knowledge of what spirit really is, but only spirit qua spirit can recognize itself – distinctions are made in you
  • Something about objectivity and truth, universality wihch has to be something more – beyond the consciousness
• THe distinction between you and the other is within you
• Understanding things – you are with them, things are in your consciousness. But it can seem like it’s over there, but you’re understanding it over here.
• You desire to be the thing which knows – is anything I know more than me? But firstly you change; you develop, self-transcend, but generating a hypothesis.
• Epistemic / experiential move – everything which you say and can conceive of must be registered in your epistemic claims
• Lonergan – being is divided from within
• Apodicticity instead of truth – an approximation of what we call ‘truth’
• Why practice the epoche? To make philosophy more rigorous and strict – strenge Wissenshaft by grounding all judgements in evidence
• Evidence – that which is actually given in experience vs the infered, supposed, hypothesized, implied; it is the phenomena, that which actually appears
• First, just describe phenomena as they appear without judging whether or not they ‘really exist’ or not
• ‘Explanatory science’ – physics, chemistry, etc. – entail things which are inferred and entailed, but which are not given
• Other sciences rely on mere suppositions and beliefs about objects which are not directly given to consciousness
• Question on evidence – things are never given to us necessarily – are feelings given to us? Can we choose whether or not to experience?
• Lonergan – the criteria of indubitability is not indubitable – knowledge is not apodictically apodictic
• Decartes carries out assumptions from Science; and then Husserl does the same thing (what is the criteron of apodicticity if not another presupposition, of an ideal of science which he has not grounded himself)?
• Performative self contradiction – the performance of making a claim is in conflict with the content of the claim – your performance contradicts what you say (but why is this bad necessarily?) – not particularly a logical claim
  • Maybe not a contradiction, possibly ontological distinction between a claim and the operation of claiming
• Reason itself as the drive for apodicticity – phenomenology is the only disciplline ‘which gets it’ – studies the pheonmena as they appear and doesn’t deal with hypothesized entities which don’t appear
• Fichte, the infinite striving – maybe presupposed by Husserl
• Kierkegaard’s absolute is paradoxical
• Regulative ideal – a term/end which you strive for but you can never really reach, the end is absolute as a goal but it’s just regulative as opposed to constitutive (you get it) – you direct your inquiry but you never get there
• Hume - causaity is not apodictic
• Husserl and Freud, contemporaries
• Objects of explanatory science never real themselves an sich
• Primary and secondary qualities – a philosophical not a scientific distinction
• I can intend something but what is given to me is actually a particular profile. My attention exceeds what is given. I can fill my exptent attention and over time constitue not just a profile but the thing – the naive attitude is that is what you see, vs. what you intend
• Transcendental reduction
  • Ego - cogito - cogitatum, a structure which is given in experience
  • My acts are given – think ‘experienced’
  • We don’t know what the ontological status is, or rather the ontological status appears to us
• My personal argument: givenness and intention occur simultaneously, in fact what is given is always already intended – as symbols, as judgements
  • Sight, hearing, etc. – always already given to us as symbols, as these things – I can’t not see it, the pervasiveness of language. The moment I am conscious of something is the moment I predicate it
• Husserl trying to fulfill a project of founding all philosophical claims in apodictic evidence
• Totalitarianism
• What is the point of the state? Hobbes – to end philosophical disagreements.
• The utopianism of phenomenology; the violence of modernity
• To view the cogitatum, and then to understand the act of the cogitata which intends it
• Things appear to be hapepning in the universe, but that’s really all happening in my head. Acts are conscious – there is a fundamental phenomenological onlooker – you exploit thef act that you can in some sense make your own acts objects (the infinite regress) – you can also onlook upon your ego – there is the galaxy, and here are my acts; they are both present to me on consciousness: a transcendental onlooker which describes things as they are given
• Ego (self), cogitationes (mental acts), cogitata / cogitatum (intended objects)
• Cogito ego sum – doesn’t really understand that cogito is really an act with a term
• One ego, one field of consicousness – but you can have multiple acts
• To perceive, to hear, to see: what is restricted?
• Meaning-intention as protention, retention, anticipation
  • Perceiving a symphony – I can distinguish how in order to perceive the symphony (I can describe perceiving a symphony – this is given in my experience)
  • At any given time there is an act of hearing with a cogitata and within the ego, conscious of protentions (anticipate the note to come) – sometimes the protention may not be harmonious witht he content
  • Retention of previous notes – in order to hear the symphony I must hear the aggregate
  • The continuum of consciousness
• What is given in experience is that you do retend
• “I think, therefore I am” – what is the “I”? How much of this is already a predicative experience?
• What is the constituttion of meaning
• Nothing is ‘lost’ in the epoche – you just don’t take it to exist a priori – this is how I experience it, through these acts
• There is no pre-cogitationes which is distinct from the cogitatum

Week 4 Tuesday: Evidence and Truth (Meditation 3)

• The natural attitude is ‘in’ the transcendental ego; it is a kind of diminishment or even impoverishment / restriction on the transcendental ego
• You take on this attitude and relate to a ‘world’ whose existence you presuppose
• If the existence-meaning of the object is not the effect of the transcendental ego, then error is impossible: being is or isn’t present to you; how can you ascribe existence-meaning to something if it is a matter of seing if it is there or not? How do you distinguish between illusion and reality? There are possibilities, but whether they be is a determination you make
• Zahavi: Any interest in the being / non-being of the world is forbidden, but Husserl doesn’t really mean that – nothing is lost in the epoche
• The scientist presupposes even the presence of the world ‘out there’
• The ‘practical interests’ – these are the ends of the natural attitude.
• We intend things as possible things which we can do things with – free play of images
• Animals’ objects are not quite what our objects are
• We’re always perceiving something as if it is something we can do things with
• Disharmonious experience: protention does not agree with intention
• Part of the fanstasy – ‘as if it could do this, as if it could do that’
• Subjective correlates are revealed – objects are subjective correlates
• Ontic – ontology (being as being) – ontic meaning of being is the beingness of whatever being it is; people can be possible (hypothesis) (be as a possibility) vs actual
• The natural attitude comes after the fact
• Delphi the Oracle – know thyself, a new meaning in transcendental phenomenology – transcendental science is ‘lost in the world’; I must lose the world by epoche to regain it by universal self-reflection
• No – something is lost, the world as taken by the naive attitude is lost – the totality of your world, all phenomena, are lost; but as the world of the natural attitude, it is lost; it gets its meaning from you.
• For Decartes, the cogito is a worldless I: Decartes, imagine this is all the matrix / an illusion – the entirety of the world is dubidable, but myself as an isolated monad of an ego with no world is apodictic; pure consciousness detached from the world.
  • Naive reading: there is no consciousness without object, so there must be a ‘real world’
  • But there also is not an object without consciousness
  • The world as more than the phenomenon is lost
• Zahavi – the problem of the bridge is solved because there is always a bridge
• Intentionality is a correlation: it is not a spatial reality; I don’t have to move there to see the tree, the tree is ‘here’ ‘in me’
• “Cogito ergo sum” – the “ego” is implied. The “ego cogito”. What is the “cogito”? There is no thought without thinking; there can be no world without an I and no I without a world: to think is to have a thought
• Decartes: says, there is just “I think”
• Heidegger – you can have an ‘I’-less world
• Meditation 3: Decarte clarifies / argues that thi s idea of God as personally finite idea – he can not give an idea, he cannot cause it
• Questions about infinity
• You must lose the world by epoche in order to gain it
• Augustin – do not wish to go out, go back into youself; it s the inenr man whoo holds truth.
• Basic structure of intntionality for Husserl is this concept of meaning-intention (cogitationes) towards meaning-fulfillment (cogitata, cogitatum)
  • Cogitata somethines do not fulfill the expectations – no cogituatum, not filled, at least no cogitatum not adequate to the intention itself. The intention is not filled; empty
  • Seeing – fulfilled in the seen
  • But I percieve a thermos. I could stop percieving a thermos – I could restrict my intentionality
  • Two aspects of phenomenological reduction & epoche: bracketing, focusing on phenomena as phenomena, and analysis of syntheses
  • Some cogitatum remain unfulfilled and as mere possibilities because there is no cogitata which is adequate to them, which is filled. I can shift my seeing to other things
  • I cannot see a thermos until I conintend
  • Constituting is synthesizing
• Temporality of the subject and temporality of the object: while cogitationes are correlated to cigtata, the temporality
• Questions
  • To what extend does the object existing for me precede evidence of it?
  • How can we establish what things ‘really are for me’ before they ‘appear as things for me’? Why? How?
    • It seems like we’re trying to pursue a ‘phenomenal nouemna’ – if things appear to us as objects, why are we hoping we can get at what they ‘really are’ for us? In what sense are we replicating the problem of the bridge in the phenomenal?
  • Intentionality and constitution – don’t I have to first constitute the object to be intentional of it?

Week 4 Thursday: Truth & Evidence, Self-Constitution (Meditation 3, 4)

• Being – you can intend impossibility
• Lonergan: evil doesn’t exist; if evil existed, then God would be responsible for it; so evil qua evil doesn’t exist
  • The horror of evil is its absence – a lack of intelligibility
  • Conceiving vs understanding
• The problem of error - metaphysically, how can you ever be wrong of something? Epistemologically, how can you think of something which is not? It must be for you to be able to think about it
  • Parmenides
• Negative judgements – you cannot refer to that which is not
• The quality of being results from the way that we intend it (possible being)
• When I have a hypothesis, I am intending it as possible
• Marx and Hegel – “many an innocent flower will be crushed” – evil isn’t really real, it’s always in service of the good
• How does consciousness constitute the object according to modes?
• Being and non-being as exclusive disjunctions which although have modes exist for the meant (the object).
  • By contrast, truth and falsity relate to the intentional act, or the meaning-act – (the subject, or the relation between the subject and the object)
  • Truth and falsity are predicates that refer to the relation between the subject and the object. This seems to make sense – if you’re intending the object correctly, you’re in the truth. Fulfillment, adequateness, etc.
  • There’s a question of the being and non-being of the object, but even further the question of how to relate to it
• Comparison – to say that you can think of the process of verification/falsification as comparing the object in consciousness with the object ‘out there’. To be clear this is a common way to think. In Meno’s paradox is an assumption for comaprison – I see the object in here and does it match what’s out there? If I don’t have it in here how can I compare to begin with? How do I know what to look for our compare once I’ve found it?
• You have never been conscious of the thing which is not in your consciousness
• If you already know it, what are you comparing it to? You need to know the ‘real thing’ and then compare your knowledge to it – if your knowledge is adequate to it then it must be true. But how do you know this ‘real thing’? It’s a fundamental problem in the history of philosophy – breaking the idea that generating truth is comparison with the ‘real’ (the true…)
• Hegel – the object emerges from consciousness
• Knowledge has to be self-validating in a certain sense: it can’t be validated with comparison – the knowing itself has to be self-ratifying. It cannot be validated by some kind of comparison. You ‘decide’ if something is real
• Reason is self-ratifying
• There has to be another way in which knowlwedge qua knowledge emerges in you
• The World for Husserl is all possible givenances – and this is an idea –in this anticipatory relation here; in cointending the backside, I am really cointending the world. What is it that I am cointending? I don’t know yet … it is intended as the unknown
  • “You know it when you see it”
• To break Meno’s paradox, you both know and don’t know what you are looking for
• Something changes in you from being told “this is what a circle is” vs. it “appearing to you as true” (e.g. you vary – and you experience, this is what a circle be – not a comparison)
• Truth – not two objects, acts which get fulfilled, because acts intend something
• Husserl – the horizon of infinite possible fulfillments of intention which I already have (Aristotle: yes Plato, all forms are in us already – but possibly)
  • Mind and being – go together
• How can you know or get to know without knowing?
• What about the things Ican’t anticipate?
• Acts are in some sense abstractions – first is the unity
• Concretely, anticipating a restriction of a larger anticipation of all being, the result of having cultivated certain habitualities
• You are more than any particular conscious act; the ego is the unity of acts; do you experience the unity of your consciousness as given? When you experience things are you cointending things?
• Insofar as we restrict ourselves to the red as meant, we think about red and not being-red. But even so predicates hav ea phenomenological origin – even if they are bracketed in the epoche, we have to account for them phenomenologically – how do these predicates appear to us in consciousness? Why do we assign being or existing to some meants and not tohers? How to conclude true and false meaning?
• Evidence is a universal primal phenomenon of intentional life, vs. other consciousness-of, which is capable of being non-presentive. Evidence is directly given. ego – not aiming confusedly at something with expectant intention, but it is at being with itself.
  • Evidence is the givenness of the intended object as intended; the fulfillment of the intentional act.
  • Some intentional acts are not fulfilled – cointentions, e.g. future notes in a melody or the backside of the object
  • Consciousness is aware that that which it intends is itself there vs merely imagined or anticipated
  • Consciousness is not ‘aiming confusedly’
  • All evidence is experience – the totality of that which is given in experience is evidence.
  • Evidence vs sense-data
  • passive synthesis and active synthesis. To see dog running, we have to synthesize it – but this is a passive synthesis. (But synthesizing is acting…) – it’s passive in the sense that you’re not acting – quintessential active synthesis is the act of judgement
  • Judgement – fundamentally separating – krisis, to divide. What is being divided? The subject and its predicate – and then they are synthesized. In order to make a judgement wiht a subject and a predicate, we have to divide the predicate from the subject and then reattach it. “The dog is running” – there has to be a passive synthesis of perceiving the dog running, but then the active synthesis of saying “the dog is running” – to separate running from the dog and then reattaching them.
  • Passivity is habitual – no effort involved, you don’t experience effort qua effort when you pass by
  • An active heightening of consciousness when you say, “this is” – this is the affair complex, which can be given passively or you can make an explicit judgement

Week 5 Tuesday: Truth and Evidence, Self-Constitution; Meditations 3 and 4

• Genesis vs synthesis
• Derrida – “The Problem of Genesis in Husserl”
• Passive synthesis, active synthesis
• Beyond as transcendent, also transcendence – the realm beyond this Earthy realm
• “The religious turn in phenomenology” – a lot of Husserl’s early students were Catholic, then maybe athiests took over like Sartre, but then a rebirth of other Catholics and Protestants – can you do a phenomenology of the religious experience? – of that which is intrinsically transcendent experience.
• Is Husserl a neo-Kantian? Neo-Kantians – Hegel takes over 1800 - 1850 after Kant, then the neo-Kantians after 1850, Husserl is born into a movement against Hegel, a deeply neo-Kantian strain to Husserl
• Transcendent: that which is beyond/independent of conscioussness & for the ‘world’
• Transcendental: the universal and necessary conditions of the possibility of something, typically experience and/or experience of an object
• First usage of the ‘transcendental’ (prior to the one solidifed by Kant in the modern era) – by the Scholastics, have a tradition in which transcendentals are the conditions of the possibility of any object in order to exist
  • Basic transcendentals are truth, being, beauty, goodness, and unity
  • Most necessary and universal categories
  • The transcendentals are convertible for the Scholastics
  • We all exist as unities but God exists as unity an sich; so in that sense we only live in God
  • We have a turn to the subject in Kant: they are categories too, but for experiencing the object – not for the condition of the existence of the object itself.
• Substance is the unity underlying the qualities of the object – what is this the thing which unifies the various properties? Substance – to first experience the thing at all, we must first apply the category of substance in order to experience the object itself – we can’t derive the category of substance from experience.
• Causality: Hume’s critique – you can never see causality. Kant’s claim: in order to see an ordered sequence of events, you have to apply a category of causality to your experience. To experience things happening, you have to in advance apply categories to your experience.
• Kant calls these forms – causality, substance, etc. – Plato’s forms – we don’t know where the transcendental ego but it goes into the mind
• One of the things Husserl does is to say that you can actually study these ‘transcendental forms’ whereas for Kant it is kind of outside of consciousness
• Thing-in-itself interacts with the matter of sensation – a unity of the matter and the form (back to Aristotle but now the form is in the subject)
• Kant – principles of synthesis. Kant only really deals with synthesizing temporality in terms of causality.
• Husserl is not really talking about forms, more about intentional acts.
• Passive synthesis – in order to see a dog runninng, there needs to be a passive synthesis of protention and retention, you are not deliberately doing it even though you are doing it.
• Active synthesis – actually doing it, detatching the blue thermos from the blue thermos and re-attaching it – from seeing a dog running to really seeing “a dog running”
• Most active synthesis are acts of judgement
• als struktur of experience
• Consciousness is always consciousness of something as something
• Can you be conscious of something not as something? This seems to imply prior active synthesis
• Can we experience the thing not as something but as given
• Both yes and no; we can distinguish what we perceive it as vs what we simply perceive
• Multiple perceptions synthesized into a unity: the question of genesis is how does this first occur? On the basis of what do I generate a perception as? It seems like I already need to know what a motorcycle is in order to hear a motorcycle.
• Synthesis begin as active and become passive as the ego’s habitualities

Week 5 Thursday – Meditations Recap

Final Paper

• Argumentative paper
• Identify some notable claim or argument
• Need to research outside
• Look specifically at the question and answer its components in detail

Lecture stuff

• Once you practice the epoche – it is you which distinguishes between an illusion and something which really exists.
• Hypotheses are good, you can always contemplate it without affirming or denying it. Its quality of being derives from your subjectivity; it is for you insofar as you posit it as being.
• Hypothermia – less heat. Hypothesis – less posit.
• The being sense of something is something you constiute for it.
• When I say “that is red”, what am I referring to? Not merely red that I see, but the being-red; and where does this sense derive from?
• Natural attitude – being does not derive from the transcendental subject
• What it is and that it is is constituted by the transcendental ego
• The world independent of the ego has already been constituted by the transcendental ego.
• Hegel – consciousness forgets what it has done
  • Facts – they are not done, just given. Fact – facere, to make – it is something which has been made – factory, artifact – being as being is something which is made, the sense of being is made by cnosciousness whereas the naive attitude treats it as given without any prior making
• “Just look at the facts” – still in the naive attitude, for these facts are made.
  • But we don’t make the world arbitrarily
• The naivete of the natural attitude: you don’t recognize the constitution of being
• The de facto object cannot be given with perfect object because there is always another side, but the eidetic object kind of can be – you intuit the totality of the object as pure possibility
• Eidetic reduction and perfect evidence – you are not perceiving the object ‘itself’, but its eidos
• Cointentions which cointend the backside, other tactile experiences, etc.
• There’s a kind of intentionality where the eidos does fulfill completely the intention, you’re not co-intending anything, the eidos fully fulfills in the intention. But the de facto object cannot.
• In the eidos, you intuit what it would mean to have perfect evidence (or the ‘origin’ / generator of perfect evidence)
• Verifying experiences
• When we enter the epoche, objectif becomes pure possibility
• Initial bracketing of the transcendence of the object
• There is an initial sense in which, just entering the epoche, you enter all of that which is possible to be, all which is given is possibly being
• The pure eidos-perception, pure perception-floating
• Empirical ego – accessed via the original reduction – having bracketed the transcendence of the world.
  • Empirical – you as retaining your factual history and existence as this person here, it is still transcendental because it’s not yet “purified” – still an ego with particular indiviudal acts; the ego is in some sense the individual.
  • You as empirical factual thing and you recognizing you constituting it as an infinite horizon – this is elevated into the pure eidetic sphere; this nexus-horizon (your intentionality, in connection to your intentionality since you constittue the horizon) becomes eidetic.
  • We find ourself not in a de facto ego but rather an eidos ego – your de facto ego is finite, you cannot intuit / see the infinite horizon which constitutes the object, but you can enter into an eidos-ego and at one point you see the eidos of the thing
  • You do free imaginative variation in order to see the eidos of the object
  • You’re not restrictred to this finite ego – your perception floats above the ego, nexus of purified ego and purified object – eidos-object
• Analogizing
• There’s a thing beyond what the empirical ego can perceive and there is an ego corresponding to it
• The problem of problems in epistemology – Meno’s problem. How do you know that is the eidos of a pen unless you already know what the eidos of a pen is?
• Reason can lift itself above the merely contingent
• Science, Aristotle: the universal necessary knowledge of things through their causes – universal and necessary
• A pure possible ego can perceive the eidos of any particular pen – no longer me as my own ego – a hypotheticalaa ego viewing the true nature of the object. But who is doing this? It floats above your empirical ego.
• Don’t think of form as shape intrinsically
• Husserl’s last words – phenomenology must start over again
• Two syntheses
  • Object: the multiplicites of noemata, cogitata, etc. of intentional acts (cogitationes) constituting a continuous whole – retented, protended, intended into a whole. You do not experience synthesis an sich, but rather as a whole, as already synthesized. The synthesis is given. The total object is the world, as synthesized. To have a world, there is nothing outside of it – there may be gaps, but those are just gaps. The extraneous is already synthesized as extraneous. There is for Husserl the world as total object, constant passive synthesis of which there can be other syntheses. Even when something new happens, it’s not that you’re new – it can be synthesized in your world (or not!) – the horizon or horizons is world as such where there is constant ongoing passive synthesis where even what is unexpected can be integrated into this synthesis – a baby suddenly crying is startling but it is still within your world – not so radical that you couldn’t experience it
  • Subject: unity of acts and their respective contents as acts of a singular, unified consciousness. One is conscious not only conscious of the intended but of oneself as an intending whole. How do I know that when I watch a movie I am not just re-experiencing a movie which someone has already put in my head? But I still experience the unity of the movie, regardless of its source. This is synthesis on the side of the subject, and this is apodictically given. It is given regardless of its source. The ego is the unity of experience as given.
• Passive synthesis vs active synthesis – acts of judgement (active), separating of predicate from subject and reuniting them. Forming teams is an active synthesis – you can talk about nations, teams, etc. and habitualize them. Passive syntheses in some sense presuppose an active synthesis. How do you know that this really is the circle? Where did you get the original idea of a circle from?

Week 6 Tuesday – More Cartesian Meditations, 4 and 5

• Is intending constituting?
• Analysis – resolution into more constitutive parts
• Phenomenological description & analysis – distinguish things, but concretely are different aspects of the same thing in experience
• Any object which is intended is constituted through that intention, but intentionality is not exactly the constitutive dimension of the act.
• Longeran: consciousness vs intentional – you can distinguish between conscious and intentional
• Part of what Husserl is indicating when he has ego-cogito-cogitatum. Cogito is the intentional act, but ego is the consciousness of the act implicit in the act.
• Ego-cogito-cogitatum as known in act, one reality – phenomenology is the new method by which you can distinguish between elements in the act which are experienced as one.
• Not only are the cogitatum given in experience, but also the acts
• Acts are happening all the time, but we’re not paying attention to them – we’re paying attention to the object
• Are we actively synthesizing different parts? Are there separate consciousnesses for each of these acts? Experience of a unitary phenomenon of one consciousness
• You’ve constituted not only the object but also subject
  • You experience yourself different when you understand a question and when you are understood
  • Beyond merely understanding, we can ask questions about truth – the seeking of verification
  • The feeling of confirmation makes you anew
• There’s not just ‘the consciousness of the object’ – you’re conscious of it as merely seen, as understood, as questioned, etc. – consciousness itself always takes on a certain quality, a certain feeling, even flavor.
• It’s the same object that you see that you then understand – this object is a unity that you intend throughout a succession of acts.
• “Conscious acts are not so much disparate acts of knowing, but coalesce into a single knowing” – approx. Lonergan
• Consciousness is much more of the unity of diverse acts than of diverse acts itself; the consciousness of diverse acts comes through analysis
• You perceive trhough your acts
• The unity of consciousness – a spontaneous unity to the acts as given in experience
• If it wasn’t given in experience, it would have to be postulated – to explain how we could be conscious of unitary objects, we need to postulate a Kantian unity outside of consciousness. But for Husserl, part of the reduction is you realize that you are the projector in the sense that you intend the object consciously in experience
• Husserl vs Kant – you don’t have to postulate the unity of consciousness, it is given in experience
• How do you really hear a melody, constitute from unitary experience a unitary object?
• You don’t have to have this Cartesian anxeity – I hear the music, is there really a band out there?
• Evidence is experience in a maximally broad sense; all that which is given in experience is evidence.
• Synthesis has an objective and subjective pole
  • All constitution is synthesis
  • Husserl – you can come to understand how you link two things together as cause and effect – a synthetic and a unitary experience
  • On the side of the object, percieving both what is given and what is cointended – infinity of harmoniously combinable experiences
  • Correlative synthesis in the ego / subject – quality of being of one consciousness, one ego – no neeed to ‘belatedly’ unify – already unified
• Actuve genesis: Active genesis, the ego is productively constitutive, when you first constitute an object
• Synthesis and genesis – kind of used interchangeably by Husserl, generating the melody in your experience
  • Synthesis is the generative thing, and in that sense it is a genesis
• Eidetic reduction
  • We raise the eidos of pure object up to pure possibility
  • Husserl is fixated on eidetic reduction – it’s tied into Husserl’s traditional view of what science is – of the universal and the necessary
  • Phenomenological epoche reduction – all of those natural sciences contend to be universal and neccessary (since Aristotle) becuase in some sense this is true in the qualified sense
  • Scientific revolutions – what we thought was universal turns out not to be so universal – contingent as opposed to necessary, we don’t have as high expectations. But we cannot develop a scientific conception of the contingent as contingent
  • Husserl – we’ve bracketed what natural science has – we can now see the true universal and necessary dimensions
  • The eidos-ego: Husserl is stuck b/c he wants to retain a traditional view of the sciences but doesn’t know where to find it except through this process of eidetic reduction because it cannot be given through the natural sciences.
    • e.g. Newton’s laws are not necessary and universal.
  • Preoccupation with eidos which goes back to the greek conception of the form
  • This process of the eidso, learning to precede – begins with an initial bracketing of the natural attitude. In suspending judgement, we relate to all objects as just possible in some sense
  • Eidetic reduction – you can intuit an eidos itself
  • The eidos-ego correlative to the eidos-object – we are the same consciousness in some sense when we contemplate a circle
  • Fundamental ambiguity for Husserl – object as infinite horizon vs object as flash of insight
• Phenomenology is a highly purified empiricism “and it did not take long for it to tip over into an existentialism” – Lonergan
• What do we actually experience? Sartre and Scheler talk about facticity – what do we experience, and do phenomenologies of this
• Husserl’s last-ditch attempt to save universality, pure ego seeing pure object – but what does this have to do with our lived experience?
• Husserl seems to run into a dead end, but there is still so much for us to take on.

5th meditation

• You experience yourself as an ego with a body – these are given to you in experience; you can experience it whether or not your mind really interacts with your body
• You experience yourself as governing your actions whether or not you ‘actually author your bodily movements’
• All you are given directly in experience is the body of the other – just as ego is to body, the other ego must be to the other body.
• You simultaneously eperience the other ego as unexperiencable, and the primary sense of other ego; and from there all senses of the other derive.

Week 6 Thursday – 5th Cartesian Meditation and Phenomenology of Affectivity

• Other people are given in experience as ‘other’ and as ‘persons’
• We’re still in epoche, we don’t care if they really are out there or not]
• How do we experience the verifying of others as others?
• We’ve supposedly bracketed otherness by entering the epoche – so how do we go about constituting an immanent other – a ‘real’ other
• Is all other consciousness ultimately immanent?
• How do we go about constituting otherness as a matter of phenomenological fact?
• What is the status of this otherness that we have constituted in our consciousness? Maybe even the ontological status?
• Husserl as how to get out of the epoche, the ontological category of other; vs strict phenomenology (how do we constitute otherness)
• Arguably the fifth meditation fails – intersubjectivity doesn’t get us convincingly out of the epoche
• Givenness in experience
• Transcendental clue: a synthesized object points towards a synthesizing and an ego to do the synthesis
• We constitute the other ego as constituting outself
  • Is this a failure or is this just what happens?
  • We have given up the world in the sense of the natural attitude, so who cares what the natural attitude really thinks being is?
  • Being is this thing that we constitute.
• What is the transcendental ego? Is it everyone’s ego all at once.
• Critique – this is a chauvanist project where Husserl says otherness is what I constitute as other, so not open to the ‘truly other’
  • The Western male gaze – subsuming the World as its project
  • What Husserl is saying is that if you’re staying in the natural attitude and you want to get out, maybe you are not doing justice to the phenomenological conception of being
• Appresentation is immanent, or is it?
• What is the meaning of your being other than me?
• Are we trying to discover an other which doesn’t need to be constituted?
• Critique of Marx – Marx ‘immanetizes’ the eschaton – Communist utopia in this world
• Husserl restricts his analysis to the realm of immanence and restricts himself to immanence transcendence.
• How does the other appear irrespective of if they really are other. Is the transcendental clue a product of the naive attitude?
  • Is bracketing a problematic notion – studying other as other as they appear to me?
  • Materialism
  • In what sense can experience be ‘false’? If a Jew appears as a greedy capitalist, in what sense is this false?
• Where does property emerge from?
• Eigen – also gets translated as property, something which you own but maybe also which is a property of you, or which is proper to you
• How do I go from a primordial sense of ownness to an economic sense of ownership / property?
• Libertarian: ownership is absolute, no need for other’s consent to do what I want with what I own
• Property – presupposes a social contract, it is yours insofar as you constitute an other to recognize it
• A natural attitude conception of phenomenology merely as ‘there’ – but phenomenologically it is constituted by a cointention of others’ consent which was forgotten.
• Materia prima is the analog of the primordial sphere of ownness – you can’t really say much about it, it is – verifiable indirectly, perhaps
• Spheres: primordial (nature 1), scientific (nature 2, nature for the natural attitude), kultur/culture
  • Corresponds to: ego, possible other egos, intended actual egos
  • Experience of a natural objective world requires the positing of possible other egos

Scheler

• Feelings as intentional responses to values
• It’s only in feelings that values are given
• You can’t experience beauty without elation
• The feeling of drunkenness is not an intentional response to an object – values are only revealed as intentional responses. The feelings are the intentionality.
• Indignation is the means by which you experience injustice as a disvalue
• Maybe a very important development in the history of ethics – going beyond Kant, analytic ethics, Hedonism, etc. – we need to understand feelings as that is the mode through which we access values.
• Values are hierarchal – sensible, vital, spiritual, holy/absolute

Week 7 Tuesday – Scheler’s Emotional Phenomenology

• Feelings – some are not intentional. Getting drunk is not intentional. But the feeling of injustice is directed towards a value. Values do not exist outside of their emotions – if you aren’t feeling indignation, you aren’t feeling justice
• Scheler mentions spiritual feeling-states include blissfulness and despair.
• Physical feeling state – can be released via external means
• Something like Sorrow – do we really have a drug for that?
• Distincition between that which is subject to narcosis vs not-narcosis
• What Scheler wants to say – what you call blissfulness or feelings in general, these are fundamentally different realities. We start out by observing qualitatively different realities
• Psychic vs physical feeling states – psychic feeling-states include sorry, joy, sadness. But these are fundamentally different from physical feeling-states of blissfulness and despair.
  • Despair vs sorrow
  • Scheler wants to avoid the suggestion that higher feeling-states are merely accumulations (quantiative) of lower feeling-states, e.g. despair is an accumulation of sorrow
  • Pain you feel at any moment is different from the vital feeling of weakness.
  • Can we do what Scheler is saying which is to assert fundamentally different feeling states? Sorrow vs. despair
  • Despair is about everything, sorrow is over something
• Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy – Dionysius, a birth tragedy on the Dionysian (god of drunkenness) vs the Apollonian () – demonology of Satan as a goat with satyrs – one of Dionysius’ satyrs, terrible wisdom: King Midas, Midas is looking for Dionysius and finds the satyr, demands that the satyr give up the wisdom of Dionysius; satyr is asked What is best for man? Responds: Never to have been born first, second to die quickly. From this despair, gives rise to the Olympian vision of Zeus and Apollo, gives us things like tragedy as a work of art
  • Works of art are underlied by a deeper despair
  • Scheler’s semi-Christian view: below all pagan cult with drunken plays and great joy is a more fundamental despair – this is nice, but it would have been better never to have been born
  • Despair vs blessedness – fully reconciled with reality. Regardless of joy or sorrow, your blessedness cannot be disrupted, regardless of how much sorry you feel. A distinction between the psychic feeling state of joy and sorrow vs the spiritual feeling state of blessedness vs despair.
    • Being high on heroin is lexically different from higher forms of feeling
• Scheler has different means for demonstrating the distinctness of the different feeling-states. Arguments / grounds for distinguishing relative independence of different feeling states
  • Pain vs sorrow is not subject to narcosis – if you take heroin, are you really going to feel bliss?
  • Phenomenological evidence of their distinctness. On what level Scheler is arguing that the qualitative distinctness between sorrow and despair is given in experience.
  • Search for evidence in experience. Can you differentiate bodily feeling states (pleasure) from the expansion of life, seeing life growing in you, greater vitality
  • Spatial and temporal statuses of feeling-states
    • pain has a spatial and temporal quality as opposed to drunkenness, which you feel throughout your entire being as a vital feeling state, or wakefulness – not restricted temporally or spatially in the same way.
    • Blessedness can persist temporally (endure) through all kinds of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow. Not located in the body, but the person.
  • We can’t use one word (‘feeling’) for what are qualitatively different experiences.
  • Some values are spatial and temporal; others aren’t
  • Breaking bread in half – bread half is worth half as much as another
  • The reality of a symphony does not decrease if we both enjoy it, but my enjoying of bread does decrease if you take my fucking bread
  • Communicability of emotion – we can share the same symphony as an intentional object – relationality is also brought in here. In what sense are these different feeling states communicable above and beyond their mere phenomenological distinctness
• Is there a mind/body dualism here?
  • Can someone feel enormous pain and not sorrow?
  • Are sorrow and pain fundamentally distinct; can you imagine a situation in which someone is in great pain but not in sorrow
  • You can’t separate your pain from your sorrow, they are all in you. And there is no absolute independence. But the question is – there are still fundamental differences.
• In any concrete embodeid personality, acts themselves occur in a certain psychic or spiritual feeling-state. You can be perceiving a symphony and also having a really bad ingrown toenail – a quality of your whole experience. A feeling-state is not an object you intend to; it is a state. you don’t get high by thinking about heroin and you don’t feel pain about thinking about a knife or the pain; the pain can persist as a background state which is a quality but which is not independent of your actual acts.
• Feeling states are a quality of the ego, and it shapes the entire world for you
• Feeling states are like noetic states in the broadeest sense – are given in conscious not as objects, but as a quality of awareness. I am aware of you as elated.
• The value of beauty in the tree is an object that you can’t actually be conscious of unless you experience that beauty
• “The eye of love” – they see more because they lov e.
• Fellow feeling (watching the marriage being officiated) vs feeling with someone (community of feeling, marriage)
• Community of feeling (together in feeling) vs psychic contagion
  • The feeling itself is that which is shared, not the response to an object with respect to a ‘thing’
  • Totalitarianism, Nazism – falls more into psychic contagion, but there is also a dissolution of the individual, a communal feeling
• Psychic contagion – laughing? Mobs?
  • “it differs from community of feeling in that there is no active participation in someone else’s feelings”
  • Ah! The humanity of it all. – community of feeling, you put yourself in the group; psychic contagion, you lose yourself in the group.
  • Identity plays a large role in this – self-identification

Week 7 Thursday – Scheler, Emotive Ethics

• Formal vs non-formal ethics
  • Formal ethics: Kantian ethics, as far as Scheler is referring.
  • Ethics of goods – utilitarian ethic
  • Scheler’s non-formal ethics of value
• Scale of values
  • Holy / unholy, or absolute value
  • Spiritual value
  • Vital values
  • Sensible values
• Utilitarianism doesn’t distinguish between any of these values – everything is reduced to sensible values. Vital values are a quantitative accumulation of sensible values. But are they qualitatively distinct, phenomenologically and ‘in themselves’?
  • Is there just pleasure or pain disembodied?
  • If this is all true, whya re we not all hooked onto dopamine hits all day and just sit consuming chemicals
  • Most dystopias are utilitarian ones – why do we recoil? Because we perceive values which transcend the sensible
• Utilitarianism is ethics of good; kantian ethics is formal ethics
• Scheler: utilitarians don’t really understand values as values
• Form vs. content
  • Formal ethics: a priori – Kant – a priori cannot possibly be the basis of our ethic, find what people prefer and then maximize this – totally open to relativism and horrors of any kind. This cannot possibly be a rational method. We must find out what we must do first. Formal, in the sense of rules or forms of reason which dictate what we must do prior to and irrespective of any experience that we might have. e.g. always tell the truth.
  • Utilitarian ethics: a posteriori – consequentialist, wait until who are we as beings.
  • Scheler’s critique: the forms are empty. Kant doesn’t tell you what to do in any particular situation. The form is abstract, abstract rules. Form – universal and necessary. Always tell the truth, but also always help the innocent. What do you do when you’re hiding Jews in your basement and the Nazis come knocking on the door? Abstract forms don’t tell you what to do, you need for the concrete situation to emerge first before the rule can emerge itself.
  • Can we get absolute ethics in a different way through values, from Scheler?
• Scheler: agrees with Kant’s criticism of utilitarianism, we need these universal rules which apply regardless of what our preferences are. There are problems in formal ethics. Scheler is saying that Kant’s ethic is phenomenologically inadequate – it doesn’t account for the full complexity of our ethical lives on a phenomenological level.
• Phenomenological critique of the libertarian account of property – a kind of overlooking of the co-positing of an other as co-constituting property as such. The libertarian is phenomenologically forgetful of the origin of property in your experience.
  • Is wealth distribution theft then? No, it’s not – because it was never ‘yours’ to begin with
  • Can also do a phenomenological critique of utilitarianism. How does utilitarianism reduce all values to sensible values?
• Scheler: the scale of holy/unholy, spirital, virtal, sensible is itself absolute. Well, is this actually given in my experience?
  • Utilitarians feast upon the rotting flesh of the holy – at root everything is a sensible value relative to you.
  • Bentham: the idea that people have rights independent of absolute rights independent of our pleasure and pain is a fantasy on stilts – our masters are pleasure and pain
  • Scheler says: no, this is phenomenologically false. How can we disitnguish the hierarchy of values given phenomenologically?
• A priori but still ethics of value
• Feeling-states – in a Husserlian sense, qualities of the ego as flowing, in the flow of time, temporal consciousness
• Feelings as intentional responses to objects, aka. values; emotive transcendental objectivism, pheonmenological objects given in consciousness, but they are objective too
• CS Lewis as a phenomenologist
  • Alternative thesis: “this is sublime!” – we are not commenting about the object, but really something about our own feelings.
  • Lewis: sublimity is a value, we reach sublimity through the feeling of veneration
  • Theory of the sublime in aesthetics – the sublime is terrifying, overwhelming, but also holy, seeing God and having your face melt. It’s not necessarily pleasurable; but to the extent that it is pleasurable, it is beyond any conception of a ‘material’ pleasure (transcending)
  • We have access to the sublime through feelings (e.g. the feeling of veneration)
  • We cannot reduce everything reflexibly to the person: “You are contemptible” really means “I feel (you are) contemptible”
• Holy/Unholy – another way to speak of the sublime. The value of the sublime is that we have access to it, but only in our feelings.
  • if you truly experience the holy as the holy, you experience it as preferable to all of the lower three values.
  • Contrast with Kant – our feelings can only lead us astray. Scheler is ‘material’ because it’s not just a law, but it is given in our experience.
• Scheler just insists the hierarchy is absolute and true, in a certain sense that it is intersubjective
• Nietzsche – also a critique of utilitarianism, says htat virtal values are really the highest, and the holy is subordinated under that.
• Feeling-states are not intentional responses to objects as such; they can be the result of an accumulation – you can feel sublime and then have a feeling of the risen; but this is not the same phenomenologically as actual response to an object via feeling.
• The waterfall is a bearer of the value; there’s the waterfall and the value, and both are objects. Scheler would say just attend to your expeirence – it’s not just that the thing given is the object, the waterfall as bearing the value of sublimity, and you respond on the level of your senses and feelings. Both are intentional responses. There’s actual seeing and then there’s feeling. Both are intentional acts. A synthetic unity of a total object which is the sublime waterfall.
  • If you couldn’t feel veneration you can’t perceive sublimity, but it doesn’t mean that ‘objectively’ sublimity isn’t any ‘less real’ than veneration
• What is the relativity of values? To waht extent do they require the beings to perceive them? Just as color is relative to vision?
• Scheler emphasizes that objects have the objectivity of being the directed-to of intentional responses
• As opposed to values as illusions – subjective projections
  • Feelings are not subjective projections onto objects – phenomenologically it doesn’t work, values are objects of these feelings
• Absolute values are not dependence on the essence of life and sensibility – exist only in independent pure acts of love
• Nietzsche and Kant – man posits values; Scheler – man is only an ontic bearer of values
  • Scheler: hierarchy and ranking is absolute; the values cannot be given outside of feelings, the feelings are determinations of us. They are dependent on humans existing. But insofar as man exists, the values he experiences are true too.
  • The less relative to others, the higher the value.
  • Distinct meanings of relativity – relative to the relativity of being, but also relative to each other: and as they tend higher they tend towards less relativity
• Values walk silently ahead of the objects to which they refer
• Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity: slave morality
  • Vital values: vigor, strength, political domination, life as growing and expanding (Nietzsche’s wet dream)
• Kill yourself to live forever
• Every value has a disvalue: as opposed to vigor, there is weakness; domination, meekness; health, sickness; political power, poverty
• Nietzsche says that Christianity inverts vital values
  • Story: the Jews of ancient Palestine are under Roman rule. The Jews, though, never lost their sense of self-worth: they were the children of God, but couldn’t express that. Romans crucified people (apian way) – expressing their vigor, strength, political power. Jews were subject to this for centuries and claimed their status as Holy, forced into a state of servitude by the Romans. So, according to Nietzsche, thy said – to be weak is to be strong. Paul: there is strength in weakness. Nietzsche says that Christian morality is the product of Jewish revenge on Greco-Roman conquerers by inverting the values, making them feel guilty (Is Nietzsche an anti-Seitic conspiracist? Maybe not) Christianity is the single greatest guilt-trip of all time.
  • Patience is a virtue – guilt-trip someone

Week 8 Tuesday – Scheler and Nietzsche: The Feeling of the Ethical

Wrapping up Scheler

• Scheler’s analysis of the human feeling complex is incredibly complex and nuanced – bringing apart all which is masked under the single signifier of “feeling”
• Feeling-states vs feelings as intentional responses to values
• Discussion about cognition - intentionalities can be extract and not connected to concrete experience; feeling-states as an abstraction and feelings as given in experience
• Feeling-states
  • Physical feelings – pleasure and pain, agreeable, disagreeable
  • Vital feelings – growth, life developing, decline, sickness, anxiety
  • Psychic / cultural – despair
  • Holy / absolute –
• Scheler remains committed to a tradition of necessity and universality, searching for the a priori – structures which are invariant across experience
• Against a utilitarian conception of feelings – aggregate of pain does not give you sorrow – there is a lexical/qualitative difference
• Hume and empricist skepticism – where do we get transcendental truths from? How to get this from empirical truths?
• Are there things in things? Or are there different exclusive modes of reality that we need to suspend?
• Values
  • Sensible
  • Vital
  • Cultural/spiritual
  • Holy / absolute
• Certain feelings are not merely feeling-states but intentional responses to objects, and these responses are values, and it is only through these feelings that we experience values. There is no other way to phenomenologically access values except through theri feelings
  • Cannot have sublimity given in your experience without the feeling of awe
• Feeling-states have causes, feelings have objects
  • The experience of a beautiful work of art is qualitatively different from taking ectasy
  • Objects (values) are not restricted in place and time, but the causes of feeling-states are existent here
• How much of this is language games / intersubjectivity? – if I feel anxious, how much of the anxiety of anxiety is mapped under the signifier “anxiety” – intersubjectively through language?
• Pain is not spatial – it is not somewhere, it is in you.
• Consciousness and knowledge – the Greeks may have been conscious of their seeing but not to know it; we can be conscious of our anxiety but not to know it
• This separation between physical and vital – how can we make the claim so quickly?
• A triad – is there a difference in the feeling of questioning vs. understanding vs. sensing
  • Sensing – Object
  • Questioning – Object
  • Understand – Object
• What happens to phenomenology when the natural attitude is inextricable from phenomenological experience?
• To what extent is Scheler playing a sophist language play game, where every type of feeling-state can be justified tautologically on the basis that if you phenomenologically reject to the existence of the feeling-state, you haven’t felt it yet – and so I could posit any number of distinct feeling-states which may be in themselves significant but which in their existence are not grounded.

Elements and Stages of Ressentiment

• Not all slavery results in a slave revolt in morality
• Some people constitute themselves as slaves – as much as you are constituted as a slave, there is a sense in which you must constitute yourself as a slave to be in slavery
• The priest of the people of Palestine had a staggering self-esteem, but they became vassels of a greco-roman culture which dominated them
• Stages
  1. Self-esteem: those who eventually experience ressentiment have sufficinetly high level of self-esteem
  2. Domination: an experience of being dominated, subordinated, or exploited
  3. An initial affective response: humiliation, aggrievement, envy, snese of being wronged
  4. Impotence: a feeling that resistance is futile due to the overpowering power of the oppressor
     • You’ve tried to revolt and overcome, you’re too weak
     • The Romans are the “worst roommates” – oppression in close quarters
  5. The Spirit of Revenge: because we retain a conviction of our own worth, we experience the violence and domination as an injustice – it is fundamentally wrong and irrational, and leads towards the seeking of vengeance
     • It is irrational if the chosen people of God are vassels under dirty Romans
  6. Retreat into Imagination: Because one has by historical experience learned by the futility of resistance, one builds memory and imagination leading to brooding over and constantly re-feeling
     • Slaves are crucified often
     • Roads lined with crucified bodies
     • Can’t actively take revenge, retreat into fantasy
  7. “Genius stroke” – psychic tension released. You give your oppressors a conscience. You subvert their values
• Culmination of ressentiment
  • One becomes the master of the master by claiming guilt
  • One elevates a slave value (humility from humiliation) into golden value
  • Sour grapes
• At any turn in the stages of ressentiment, you can turn into yourself
• We see ressentiment everywhere, Nietzsche says, because we are all secretly Christians…
• Envy – not jealousy (I want what they have), but that you are upset that they have it
  • envitere – to look a scance at, to give the evil eye
  • Jealousy is about the object, envy is looking at the person who has it and hating them for having it
  • Envy is hatred for other’s good
• The basis for Nietzsche’s worldview of power and domination
• The word ‘evil’ didn’t exist prior to Christianity: there was the good and the bad
• Nietzsche was a philologist first
• Christian morality as the ‘most delicate flower of ressentiment’ – Christianity inverts Greco-Roman values
  • Aristotle: pride as a virtue. Christianity: pride as a vice.
  • Lying is power; but now it is evil
  • Who forgives? The slave forgives because they have no other way. The Christian God is a product of slave morality
  • Lust and sexual indulgence: Roman male citizens could have sex all the time, now we have chastity and sexual continence
• Semen – ancient word for urine, woman’s body as a recepticle
  • Why do we find it shocking?
  • Because of ‘slave revolt in morality’
• ‘Morality’ proper comes into existence
• The master gets a conscience, revenge is complete
• Marqius de Sade
  • “The religion of that wily little sneak Jesus… Christianity sanctioned these laughable fraternal lies”
  • Crucifixtion is a public spectable, taking pleasure in others’ pains
  • Sade – this is the natural way of being
• What Nietzsche is saying is that in fact the vital should be the height, but in fact got put most primitive, and the sensible got elevated – avoidance of pain directly
• Are there feeling-complexes which constitute values? Difference from the feeling of revenge, envy, versus spontaneous joy at another good? Is that another feeling? To be happy when someone does something well? And experiencing their value as a good for you too?

Week 8 Thursday – Sartre

• Eichmann - instead of dealing with garbage and papers, he disposed of bodies
• Argentina, Brazil, Chile – towns which speak only German
• Eichmann: “We were just being good Kantians” – Kant’s emphasis on duty

Wrapping up Scheler and ressentiment

• A point which hss to do with value
• Scheler: slalvishness in morality is not necessarily the effect of Christianity – anyone can fall into a slave morality
• Fox and the sour grapes – those who get the grapes are evil and sweetness is bad. But it’s a kind of rationalization of one’s failure to obtain certain values
• Pushing a phenomenolgoical critique of utilitarianism
• It is that you lack vitality that you disvalue it
• Values/disvalues on the level of the vital: the noble and the vulgar.
• The martial values – honor, valor, victory, glory – as opposed to defeat, those who are not willing to endure suffering as an expression of life. The flight from suffering is a kind of revolt.
• We have had an unprecedneted amount of access to pleasure. But we’re also in decline, it feels like: that our vitality is in decline, and it is our scrambling for pleasures which is the sign of the inversion – vulgarity is now a value
• Psychic/cultural: beauty/ugly, truth/ignorance.
  • A university is an instantiation of such a value
• The Republic – tripartite:
  • Rational – philosopher-kings
  • Spirited – guardians
  • Appetites – workers
• There can actually be ressentiment directed towards the psychic/cultural
• Eggheads – easy to smash their heads in the ground like eggs
  • “Everytime I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”
  • Trying to reinstantiate noble values of the old order, Greco-Roman values
  • Began as making Germany great again, but basing this off of Rome and Italy: all reading Nietzsche
  • Why persecuting Jews? Blamed the Jews for Christianity. It was the Christians who took over Rome with their slave morality.
  • Mussolini’s march on Rome
  • St. Paul (“the jew paul”) – worried that a new Paul would show up
  • Paul – there is no jew or greek, no man or woman, no slave or free: all are one in Christ Jesus.
  • Nazis: no it’s not. Jew and Greek are different, Jew and German are different, slave and free are different – what we’ve done here is unnatural. Didn’t think that they were doing something bad.
  • Resenting the superiority of a culturew hich cannot be obtained
  • Hitler famously couldn’t make beauty (art) – couldn’t reach the pyschic/culture – but these spiritual-psychic values are really subordinate under vital values
• Utilitarianism: a bunch of eggheads, making us into bugeaters
  • We have healthcare and hospitals
  • The symbol of the crucifix by hospitals
  • Who was crucified? Slaves who dared to challenge Roman power, were made an example of
  • The crucifix is not an instrument of health, but of torture – why does it show up on hospitals?
  • When was the first hospital built? By Christians – neither Jew nor Greek, but also neither sick nor healthy
  • Nietzsche: no, caring for the sick reveals a sickliness of spirit. Slaves can’t tolerate pain
  • Last 30 years, fifth vital movement: need to make pain a fifth vital sign, can’t be tolerated (elevation of a sensible value into a vital one)
  • A fully utilitarian view: you care for the sick because you’re worried you might be sick and you don’t want to feel bad, rather than realizing that it is the natural order of things to dispose of the sick
  • Spartans: if the babies didn’t look right, throw them out. Hospitals would look for garbage babies.
  • Why do we look down on infanticide? It was normal, and in fact it still is done all overt he world.
  • Jesus gave even infants values which they never had before
• Why should I take on the viewpoint of someone else? Some slave?
  • You can’t argue with absolute power
  • The world is a will to power, and everything that we do is a permutation of this will – this can be done authentically or inauthentically
• We can go up to Nietzsche: the Christians won, they gave the Romans a conscience. Hitler is saying that the problem is that we have a conscience. No law other than the will to power – justice, truth, etc. are not valued.
  • Justice is a lie the weak tell to preserve themselves against the strong.
  • The order of nature, the order of justice
• Nietzsche hated Darwin
• What does Mill say to justify utilitarianism: Why respect Christians’ rights? Not any inherent value, but if you had just waited and let them have their thing, they’ll set up hospitals and now we are living a pleasuralbe life
• Eve inherits the agony of childbearing for giving Adam the apple
• The Darwinian view reduces things to pleasure/pain level, Nietzsche says, rather than the recklessness of vital values: you can’t take account of consequences in your pursuit of power.
• Agape – you love out of a plentitude and it overflows.
  • Erotic love: moving towards something you love
  • Scheler says the care for the sick/weak isn’t because of the sick indulgence in the sickly itself and out of a fear of protecting oneself in that they are already in the lowly, but it is the overflowing of a new value.
  • A different kind of love which takes risks and cares for the weak not out of fear but out of fearlessness.
• Anything can devolve into ressentiment – you can be guilty of it at any point
• Ressentiment as a sort of fundamental value error
• Foucault and Scheler as inverted in the relation between history and ethics
• Hegel and the master-slave dialectic
• Ethics as a sham for Nietzsche?
• Maybe for Nietzsche also like Foucault, values are constrained in a historical horizon?

Sartre

• Three positings:
  • Being is –
  • Being is itself
  • Being is what it is
• The contingency of being-in-itself.
• The Being for itself is not in itself because it is pure possibility.
• In-itself: en soi; for itself: pour soi
• Pour soi is pure possibility
  • The for-itself (which is human consciousness ultimately) is pure possibility
  • being is in itself so it has no possibility which characterizes it: being bes
• Where does possibility come from? Where is it? Does imagination exist? If so how is it existing? Does it be?
  • What is the possible?
  • What is the ground of possibility?
  • Heidegger: being exists within possibility. Possibility is nothingness: it’s not anything. The thing Heidegger wants us to believe that Being is a thin film that floats on nothingness. (Sartre rejects this.) And the nothingness is always threatening to take over, to appear. If you think about being as presence: it’s not meaty.
  • Heidegger: possibility is higher than actuality
• Act, form, potency
  • Actus imperfecti and actus perfecti as the origin of the difference between types of acts, where the term and the act can be one
  • Act ultimately points towards pure act, which is God – thereis potency in God, God is pure act
  • Heidegger: actually possibility is higher than God
  • Sartre: what determines what is possible other than what is? Located possibility somewhere else other than some metaphysical ocean upon which being floats: Sartre, possibility is no thing – nothing.
  • Aristotle: the soul is potentially all things
• The thing for Sartre is that we can make the mistake that we are something, that we can start to confuse ourselves as the in-itself, that we can relate to ourselves as merely being rather than…
  • To think of yourself as a slave is an instance of bad faith (de Beauvoir disagrees)
  • The for-itself: you have responsibility for yourself.
• Wherever you are, you are there because you chose it: because human consciousness at any instant is pure possibility – you can leave at any time. Even up to the slave. Confusing the for-itself as the in-itself is an instance of bad faith
• Heidegger: Why is there anything at all instead of nothing?
  • Leibniz asked this before
  • God in some sense is pure possibility
  • Heidegger says that when you actually really ask that question, and you have to sit with it – you realize that possibility is higher than actuality, because there could be nothing instead of something. (But can there be, nothing?)
  • Is all of this smoke? Are we sitting on an ocean of nothingness?
  • Why? vs How?
• When you ask why you are asking one or more of four questions, Aristotle:
  • What brought being out of nothingness?
  • Why was something brought uot of nothingness?
  • …
• Heidegger says that things can just be; Heidegger says you just have to vibe with that there just is no Why sometimes
• Do things exist because they are possible?
• Sartre vs Heidegger on possibility vs being

Week 9 Tuesday – Sartre

• Is romantic love a quasi-Christian invention? Elevation of eros with agape beyond material eros
• The nothing that is
• Between the potency and the existence falls the shaddow – for Sartre, the nothing
• Eclipse, apocalypse
• The Slaughterhouse Five
• The phenomenology of absence – nothingness is the nothingness of hereness
• Death – your absence is present everywhere
• Sartre’s challenge to determinism, the past determines the future: Sartre talks about the causal chain between past and future, succession of events.
• If there is a causal chain, what needs to happen for there to be freedom? You have to self-negate as part of the chain.
• Buridan’s ass – he can have hay on other side, they’re exactly the same. He’s equidistant from both hay. What makes you decide to go one way or the other? What is the reaon? It’s not really determined that he would go one direction or another. What is the source of the decision?
• You can make choices, even if they are habitualized
• If your choice was depedent upon some prior condition such that you wouldn’t make the choice if the condition wasn’t there, then you are… free
• What if at the core of our being, there is a nothing from which we can act?
• Sartre – the point is that in some sense ate very moment you’re in an equivllibrium wrt the totality of your options
• Freedom: acting from the nothing
• Freedom is itself a radical negation of the causal chain between past and future – the ability to change course. But it can’t be anything, b/c it would be subject to external condiitions; it rather must be somethin g which is
• How do we experience our freedom? Through anguish.
  • Why do we experience vertigo? Not that we’re afraid we could fall, but we’re afraid we could jump
  • Why don’t we jump?
  • The very value we place on our loves derives from our own lives
  • Fear – I place myself as an object in the causal chain.
• In-itself vs the for-itself: being is in-itself, for this consciousness, it is for-itself
  • In itself: the world of things and ojbjects with determinate chaaracteristics; realm of neccessity
  • Essence precedes exiistence: I can no the circlness without ever seeing a circle. You can see a plan irrespective of the existence of anh ny plan.
• For the for-itself, existence precedes person
  • Essence to be consiedee a
  • There must b esomething prior oto the essene if we are really free
  • The for-itself is pure possibility, literally no-thing
  • Never fixed, always opent o a new future
  • Possibility and negation are two sides of the same coin – Being is just in-itself. Being as Being is not the ground of possibility
  • Possibility doesn’t exist in being – being just is. Possibility is something which isn’t but could be.
• For possibility to emerge there must be a negation of being at the heart of being – doesn’t come from outside being like the Heideggarian life of non-being where life rests asa t hin film on an occean of nothingness.
  • Heidegger: One of the main ways in which we experience the nothingness which underlies being is broedom. When you’re bored, you confront the mere facticity of existence and being, no particular reason – u=ju there.
  • Heidegger: raising the question of mbeing, in the very activity of asking “Why is there anything at all instead of hting”, you are slipping outside of being, you achieve a distance from it.
  • Consciousness’ ability to negate the mere beingness of the world; emergence of possibility is consciousness’ ability to negate being
  • You don’t have cohices in front of you all the time – for freedom to be at this time, there must be a nothing from which one acts, because otherise, where is the freedom coming for?
  • Acting from nothing.
  • Somehow you experience a nothingness of pure possibility within you as anxiety
  • We posti nothingness, although
• Freedom and responsibility go together, and thtat causes us anguish, but the ground of thirs all is nothingnesss,
• At every moment we constituted. – don’t act as if your past decides your fuutre, white mask – defurments, than letting the hard-wrokin (WWII)
• Essence - what it was. But essence becomes part of the in-itself. You can fall into bath faith by idenifying that which you have been to wht
• Sartre in prison under the Germans during war, escaped
• All these Germans are saying – we are just doing our duty, fulfilling a role that we identify with, as if we couldn’t do otherwise.
• Sartre: this is bad faith, you were free at every instant not to do this. But this goes the other way, too: so is the person which is being oppressed. To identify as a slave is also bad faith and closes off a future which is actually open.
• The ground has to be pure possibility at some point.
• A fundamental response to the disappearance of personality and personal responsibility in the Nazi movement – also ties in with Scheler and the community of feeling
• For Sartre, this comes with a fundamental burden: freedom isn’t fun.
• God is Being: Fullness. So how does anything less than God exist? So God would have to create nothing. But there’s no lack in God; God is Pure Act, you move up the chain from Potency towards Pure Act. How do you create potency from pure act.
• Does God make himself less so that he can make something less than God?
• Where does possibility come from?
• Lack only exists in hindsight?
• What is the solution to the everythingness of God?
• Is Fullness always increasing over time?
• Being as Becoming?
• Are we putting the devil in God? Devil as lack of God
• It’s growing into the void…
• What is above the Pure Act of God? – Possibility, Pure Possibility.
• Nothing – No Thing.
• How do we find nothing?
• Possility is not, but could be – in order for there to be possibility, there must be some sort of negation of being.
• Possibility is nothing, prior to essence – therefore we have that existence exists prior to essence, but this sort of existence as existence just is possibility.
• Does there need to be something which doesn’t just exist in itself but also for itself?
• How can there be anything that is which is not God? Spinoza: there is nothing except for God. But then everything is necessary.
• Is there something which is more nothing than possibility? – Is something equivalent to possibility equivalent to nothing?
• The pure possibility which is human consciousness flees from its own responsibility – this is bad faith. Various examples of bad faith – the waiter who is a little bit too eager and solicitious to help, and in so doing reveals that they are in flight from their own freedom and take it on as their own destiny. They do not take responsibility for the fact taht they have chosen to be a waiter.
• Scheler: a value hierarchy can be experienced. But for Sartre, all value hierarchies are totally contingent.
• When you hear the alarm clock, you hear a command. But that command is in you. Or you can fight wars over paper. Why do we have values? We are responsible for this, all of it. But we would rather not experience it that way. We would rather experience it as given.
• Totemism – when a group identifies with a part of the in-itself, like an animal or a sacred object – a quintessential instance of bad faith.
• Sartre on dating: the man places his hand on hers; she doesn’t do anything – in doing so she allows herself to become an in-itself, to avoid taking responsibility.
• Is Sartre talking about nothing as such?
• Sartre and the other – the other’s gaze causes us shame – because they fix us as an in-itself in their world.
• Is it possible for a populist leader to be an authentic for-itself?

Week 9 Thursday – Sartre and Lonergan

• The Lady or the Tiger: What would make the man choosing between the lady and the tiger freer? To know or not to know?
• It’s not the ability to choose which makes you free, but the ability to choose well
• Are you liberated by knowledge? KNowledge of the good?Or is the freer choice pure spontinaeity?
• Can I even choose not to know?
• If you don’t know what you don’t know, are you free to choose it?
• Choosing in a state of ignorance isn’t free; it’s just like a reflex, a heart attack.
• Does freedom have conditions? Does actual freedom make it that you can’t choose anything else?
• Freedom in some sense is knowledge of the good
• In what does freedom lie? If freedom requires knowledge of the good, then once you know the good, it seems like you would be incapable of knowing anything about that.
• Sartre: we become god, it is only good insofar as we choose it to become good. Once we know the ultimate good, we lose our choice.
• Divine command theory: are things good because God commands them, or does God command them because they’re good. Either the good is arbitrary or God is immortal.
• Is not our greatest moment of freedom when we know the Good and we decide against it, because we extricate ourselves from either God or the transcendent good?
• Arts and sciences used to be liberal arts, that is liberation – you come to school because you are ignorant, you need to be liberated. Libertarian view, which Sartre pulls towards, is that I start out radically free at every instant.
• Hart – in coming to know, you metaphysically change almost, to become a freer thing, because you have liberated from a state of ignorance. Freedom isn’t just choice, but choosing for a reason which you know to be good. But who said that this is good? Did you choose it because it is good or is it good because you chose it?
• Sartre says ‘bad faith’, but doesn’t want to impart a moral judgement, not that you’re being bad, but that you’re not being true to who you are, which is pure possibility, and you are identifying with your given role. You’re lying to yourself. So if everything is purely arbitrary choice, why would bad faith be bad. So Sartre too struggles with the criterion of what makes a choice good. If we give things value, why?
• Lonergan – you anticipate the good or true whenever you ask a question of the moral – you are dynamically anticipating the answer, never in a state of pure neutrality. You anticipate an answer – Meno’s paradox, how can I look for the good if I don’t know what it is?
• Immanent criterion vs external criterion
• Lonergan – the desire for knowledge and the good contains a criterion within itself for distinguishing. You never start in a place of pure neutrality.
• Heidegger’s inauthenticity vs Sartre’s bad faith – for Heidegger, inauthenticity is flight from responsibility for our end; for Sartre, bad faith is flight from freedom
• Sartre – we’re condemned to be free; not choosing is a choice; we must choose, intend, at all times. Husserl: always consciousness of, Sartre: always a decision to
• Bentley Hart – what are the radical stakes for a Sartrean radical freedom? At the apex of freedom is knowledge of the good which in some sense eliminates choice, because you have no reason to choose otherwise. So the Christian account of salvation and damnation can’t be true; everyone has to be saved, becuase you can’t be held accountable if you didn’t know – if you didn’t know God, you can’t get to God, and so you won’t believe in God; those who are in hell can’t be fully responsible for their choices, because if you truly knew God you would never not choose God (universalism).
• Nietzsche: hell is essential to the Christian story, oe of the early theologins – one of the sweetest pleasures of heaven is watching the pain of the damned. The masters are thrown down by God, ressentment – breathing in the smoke of their burning flesh is the light
• Annihilationism – the damned person doesn’t go to hell but just disappears, in that you must exist only insofar as you accept God
• “The truth will set you free” – Heidegger, the essence of truth is freedom
• Kierkegaard, the concept of anxiety – Adam and Eve experience the first moment of anxiety/anguish, the tree of knowledge, they didn’t know what they were choosing yet
• Zizek: we may be responsible for that which we do not know
• “If you really knew, you would believe”
• Is my freedom my ultimate reservation of the right not to believe?
• Temptation can only occur in ignorance? Culpable ignorance… Augustin: it’s not that they willingly choose, but that they refuse to know.
• Do libertarians appeal to a universal conception of the good?
• An escape of disolving the for-itself into the in-itself: we betray our bad-faith. The overly solicitous waiter, overly invested in their role, something is being hidden.
• Origin of shame – when I feel myself constituted as an in-itself by the Other.
  • Shame is the original feeling of having my Being outside in another Being, without any defense, totally naked
  • Pure shame – of being an objective, of feeling dependent, frozen, on another being – an original fall. Merely by virtue of having fallen into the world, someone else’s world
  • Body symbolizes defenseless objecthood.
  • To get dressed is to discard one’s objecthood, to be a pure subject. Adam and Eve know that they are naked and wear clothing. The reason why we put on clothes is to reclaim our pure subjectivity and to hide our objectivity, to reclaim our seeing without being seen.
  • Why is shame such a problem? Why is being constituted through another’s gaze as an in-itself a problem? HUman reality is prue for-itself, pure possibility. In experiencing ht eother’s gaze you feel yourself constituted as mere in-itself which lacks possibility.
  • Why is this a problem vs other forms of restriction, like for instance “I cannot fly”?
  • Freedom and Facticity (p. 629, part 4, chapter 1, section II). The argument brought by good sense against freedom is a reminder of our powerlessness; we are unable to change ourselves; I am not free to escape the destiny of my personness, state, nation… life is a story of failure, experienced as restriction. Man makes himself more than he is made.
  • Determinists: the adversity of things cannot determine us. Adversity is posited by us, such as a rock which I cannot push but can stand upon to view the world. Something impedes you only insofar as you constitute your project with it in your path. Restrictions on your freedom only manifest themselves in your freedom insofar as you’ve chosen an end.
  • Maybe this is a sort of ressentement.
  • Culminating moments of Satan’s final fall, all is lost, evil by thou my good. If I can’t get to God, I will make evil my good. Fundamental ressentement against the good.
• The big Sartrean thing: hell is other people, they fix you as an in-itself.
  • Sartre is a Cartesian: a self-enclosed ego, pure for-itself
  • Scheler: values are in a community of feeling
• My tentative conception of the good – When we face a choice and we do not know what to do, what I experience is not the anguish of freedom, but rather the anguish of not being able to possess the conditions for freedom. My radical moment of freedom is that I may know the Good in a Foucauldian historicist sense and reserve the right to negate it. So I should strive to know the universality and to identify its particularity. And I should embrace my objectness, my objectness feels quite good.
  • How to reconcile Sartre with Foucault?

Lonergan

• What is the phenomenology of a smile?
• Smiles occur in a wide variation of angles, vision; smiles are a gestalt, not missed, recognized as a whole – the meaning of a smile and the act of a smile are natural. Something irreducible about the smile
• The smile as mendacious vs as true – the meaning of a smile is global, the meaning of a fact, not a proposition.
• The meaning of a smile is intersubjective.
• The revelation is immediate
• Can a smile assert a falsehood?
• How to we come to know anything? A fundamental epistemological question
• Lonergan isn’t starting, though, from epistemology (vs metaphysics vs ethics)
• Decartes, Locke, Hume, Kant – a shift from metaphysics to epistemology. Being is first. But Decartes says, how do I know it’s not all a dream, how can I trust that I know being? First philosophy moves from metaphysics to epistemology. But Lonergan says you need to go further back, towards a phenomenology of knowing
• Phenomenology of knowing – what am I doing when I am knowing? Epistemology – How can I be certain that I know (being/objectively)?
• Decartes’ quest for absolute certainty
• Before we try to achieve transcendent knowledge, we need to first figure out what knowledge is (how does knoweldge be, what does it be)?
• Meno assumes that knowledge is a kind of comparison between the thing knowledge and the object, so either I have it and I know it, in which case I can’t come to learn it, or I don’t have the thing, so how do I know what i am looking for? This is Decartres’ problem too: How can I be sure that my ideas sare similar to that which is out there behind them? If I peek back behind the curtain, all I see are more of my own ideas.
• Hegel – what did Decartes and Kant find when they went behind the veil to see the thing in themself? They found (more of) themselves
• Objective of phenomenology of knowing / cognitional theory / gnoseology (what is knowing, what am I doing when I am knowing?)
• We can avoid “how do you know that you know?” because what phenomenology of knowing says is that you can just say “do you do these things that I am describing”
• Why is doing that knowing? Are these things given in your experience?
• Knowing is like looking – that to know something is to see it and see everything that is to be seen about it, which is – Husserl doesn’t overcome this, because his motion of eidso is every possible look of something. Whereas for Lonergan, knowing is something completely different, a structure of operations trhat you do, not an infinite look.
• Phenomenology of knowing – Husserl got us to phenomenology, breaking the immediate assumptions about the question of knowledge as getting out of subjective impressions, but misses what was actually happening, so couldn’t get us to the question of Why is doing that knowing?
  • And of course Husserl retains his own naive set of assumptions.
• “The polymorphism of consciousness is the one and only key of philosophy” – Lonergan. But also Hegel’s argument in The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Week 10 Tuesday: Lonergan

• Piajay – you can’t master an operation until you reverse it
• For children, space is not reversible
• Generaliing the operation: positive, negative, negative – a negative operation is formed
• Raum – room, space – a prescientific conception of the space in which objects move; the walls are the basic point of reference, things move in space but space is moving
• Einstein: from what vantage point do we assert the absoluteness of space?
• Newton tried to show absoluteness of space
• Einstein: you can’t presume you are at rest: you are moving with the ‘room’ of space
• Why can’t I go backwards? Negate? Undo? Reverse?
• Watch yourself moving things around – but that’s your intelligence penetrating your sensibility, intelligence using sense as a mere instrument as it anticiaptes the intelligible; then there is the moment of intelligibility, ah, there is the answer
• There is no answer without the question. 4 gallons – the asnwer to what?
• Your intelligence sets up a criterion which knows when it is satisfied, because you phenomenologically feel different
• There are questions fro understanding, specifically “what is it”? But even the way we ask questions evolves
• Aristotle: points out that what questions are why questions and why questions are what questions – pointing towards the cause
• What is a circle?
• Insight: on circleness, the definition of points equidistant to a center
• Why is the circle perfectly round?
• Formal cause
• The drive of understanding: to understand what something is, the driver being towards what is intelligible.
• Intelligere – understnading – intelligible (all in form)
• A second question – is it so? This si the moment of verii=fication
• Not about is it true enough – it’s about, do you grasp these principles?
• At the moment of insight, something happens
• Immanent, spontaneous – no on e can teach you how to learn, you need toknow hw=w to learn without being taught how to learn
• Setting up the comparison here – people over and over again fall into the pattern of thinking knowledge as two people
  • The form is in the mind for Plato, it i s the immanent mind itself. otherwise we are stuck in compariosn where we already know the object cubt on’t know or understand it.
• There must be an immanent normativity in consciousness itselq
• Acquinus? meas (mind), measure; a idminf o
• It’s not the measuring of a comparison, but the immanent measuring when you get an insight. There’s a new object which you weren’t aware of before – a circle now. Not the same as its prephenomenologal experience
• Is it in uour world?
• Why don’t we just gape? We don’t stop at mere gaping. If knowing is just seeing, why do we askq eustions at all?
• Most of your world you cannot
• Hommer
• Have to wait for memory / consciousness to review or reveal its spontaneous self-organization
• In somse sense, so what if intelligencec onstructs it own object? This only causes problems if being constructs objects here and now, but questions can be probed ande xpapanded rider
• Abstraction is enriching vs impoverishing
• Intelligible objects are a diminished reality – a pale version
• Kant and friends: abstraction, the working of intelligence is impoverishing
• Lonergan: there is a focusing which happens in intelligence, but something additive which isn’t there on the level of sensation , and therefore eliminating uniqueness and complexity and plurality, actually adding intelligibility to mere sensation
• Can we access the sensible world as sensible? Lonergan is not worried about if we’ve actively constructe dsomething on top, is it mediated, etc. – stripping away sense from what intellignece has added to sense via insight. Everything we see has a sense, a moment of grasping.
• Lonergan, experience as experience. A particular definition of experience, we experience all of this, we experience the act of interpreting; of adding intelligibility, meaning-sense to that which is sensed.
• Differentiating that which is merely sensed from what happens when intelligence operates upon it.
• Nominal definitions – it’s like that thing which that thing does, a descriptive but not an explanatory definition
• Intelligence is mediating from the very beginning, always – you can arguably still distinguish from a sensible level and an actually intelligible object which cannot be seen.
• Lonergan: a whole has parts; the whole is related to each of the parts, interpart relations
• Hermeneutic Circle
  • Hamlet: the King is more than kin, but less than kind
  • kin initially means very close to me; but also later saying more
  • kind initially means not so nice to me; but also a different species
  • The part is in the whole, and the whole is in the parts; so how do you understand any of the parts unless you understand the parts
  • This is the hermeneutic circle
  • Heidegger: the challenge is not to get out of the hermeneutic circle, but to get into it the right way
  • Menos’ paradox kind of again: what’s the right criterion?
  • Aristotle: you already are potentially the whole, because if you weren’t you couldn’t understand anything – how could you understand the whole if not the parts? We don’t know but we also do know as we are readingg.
• Not every whole is a structure
• A gallon of milk is a whole, but there is no whole – the milk is an aggregate, a coincidental manifold or arrangement of parts
• Removing any part of the whole destroys the whole, because their intelligibility is related to the whole
• Materially vs formally dynamic; materially dynamic, the parts move and relate to the whole, but it doesn’t assemble itself; the parts are the matter. Matter is always relative to some form that structures it. There are materially dynamic structures like engines and computers. But formally dynamic, the form itself comes into being and is itself forming. Lonergan claims thaet human knowing is a dynamic structure in which it sets the condition for its own emergence; you don’t have to wait; you can go ask questions. You are setting the conditions for acts of understanding.
• Animals are formally dynamic structures; they make nests and go eat and play, and this sets conditions for their own emergence
• When you go eat something, you are making conditions for you to become.
• Human knowing is a formally dynamic structure on the level of intelligence, Lonergan says.
• Insight accumulates and becomes the condition for judgements of the truth or falsity of any given insight. But that’s you, constructing yourself as a knower, giving yourself the form of a knower.
• parts can be material objects and also physical movements or sounds and so on, like the parts of a symphony or a dance, but they can also be operations; so what really is knowing? It is itself a pattern of experienced understanding and judgement which is mediated by uqestions
• Both recurrent and cumulative.
• We’re asking questions – what happened? Experience, Judgement, Knowing – a recurrent structure which goes forth over time, self-constituting: you don’t have to wait for someone to have your insight for you, you don’t have to wait for someone to tell you you have sufficient evidence to affirm what you experience or know
• We often see that different philosophies will identify knowing with just one of these – they’ll do all of the steps but think they’re squishing everything into experience: so they think being is what appears, so to account for negative judgements you have to say that the nothingness approves (Sartre); but Lonergan says no, negative judgements are up here in judgements, you don’t need for the nothing to appear.
• Hegel is trapped in understanding, in order to understand anything, you have to understand everything. But there can be partial increments of knowledge.
• The Hermenetuic circle is real: how can you understand anything without understanding everyone?
• Where do you locate the absolute / unconditioned? For phenomenologists, absolute is in the immediately appearing; fro the idealists in teh intelligible itself (understanding); or, we anticipate the whole but can have partial knoweldge
• We can affirm partial truths absolutely; becuase otherwise how could we say that this is what knowing is absolutely?

Week 10 Thursday: Lonergan and Course Wrap-Up

• Knowing is a formally dynamic structure of intentional operations
• The Lonerganian triad
  • Judgement
  • Understanding
  • Experience – consciousness. Different from phenomenology as perception, which Husserl is limited by from a Lonerganian perspective
• Husserl: all consciousness is consciousness of, Husserl is saying that consciousness is perception of an object, but Lonergan differentiates between intentionality and consciousness
• There are states and trends in which you are conscious, but you are not concscious of an object
• The big Husserlian moment is that discovery that all consciousness is intentional
• A fundamental critique / way of reading Decartes in which “the Cartesian ego is a worldless I” – an I which is not correlated to any world (any kind of objects, content, noema), as if you could just be conscious and not conscious of something.
• One one level this is just a phenomenological / philosophical clarification of the issue, because this might just be overlooked
• To the extent that you think of the ego as a worldless I, then you run into the problem of the bridge; if we’re assuming the I as I is a self-contaiend unit / monad that can exist in a worldless space, then the fundamental epistemological question is then how does the ego get out of itself towards something different
• Husserl – this is phenomenologically naive.
• But there is even a naive way to read Husserl – we don’t have to worry about the epistemological problem at all because we are restored via our perceptions, the foundation shifts to hold the burden of the noumena. Opening up something which is missed. Discovery of a new continent; it takes time over the history of development throuhg the history of philosophy to get to the point where we can have a method by which we can deal with intentional acts as acts
• Phenomenology on one level is a fundamental critique of faculty psychology. You can go towards Aristotle: sensitive faculty, the intellectual faculty, and a subdivision of reason and intellect as sub-faculties of the intellectual faculties, the practical faculty
• Hegel saw the problem of faculty psychology – there’s something in Husserl which is not in Hegel, and vice versa: Hegel doesn’t penetrate yet. But he is keenly aware of the criticism of faculty psychology, which is still in Kant, and not even that different.
  • Kant: the intellectual faculty as pure reason
• First, they don’t have a word for these acts; from a Hegelian perspective, human spirit developed, and developed a rudimentary capacity for self-reflection
• In greek, there is no word for ‘will’ . Desire or want, but not will. Paul: I do that which I hate (sin). For the classical tradition up to Plato and Aristotle, to know the good is to do the good, and practical reason only figures out the means; it is automatic, there is no hesitancy.
  • Kierkegaard, sartre – anguish, anxiety, the frozenness, do I or don’t I?
• There is no will as such for classic philosophers: to know the good is to do the good. Knowledge is virtue, and virtue is knowledge.
• Augustin discovered the world as something autonomous and above; you know the good, but you can’t will it. Whereas for Sartre, this doesn’t really make sense.
• The greeks had a will, but not a science for it, so when do we see an indirect indication of a will/ Achilles runs towards Agamemnon and he doesn’t choose to stop and have the moment of anguish; Athena pulls him by the hair and pulls him back, and you retroactively get the sense of talking about will but they don’t really know how.
• The Gods – Eros is a God, you’re not doing anything, really, it’s the Gods which inhabit you and make you do things.
• Enthusiastic – theos – theology – the god is in you
• There is now a self, not just aggregations of forces pulling your hair and forming you, etc.
• Reduced faculties from the objects that were experienced; insofar as we have an experienced object, there must be a faculty which makes it possible, but there is no really science of these operations, which is what you get all the way up to Kant.
• Faculty – potency, a potentiality, you hav epotencies that become actualized when they encounter an object, a relation of intentionality, not causality; the objects cause the potency to become actualized; but we don’t experience anything in potency; we always take what is given to us, even though no one experiences faculty as such.
• Phenomenology as a movement further from mere faculty psychology
  • Homeric, pre-classical Greek
  • More advanced classical Greek, development of writing (Bruno Schnell)
  • Sapho: discovering desire, but it is through frustration that she discovers it. A new kind of concept of the self
  • No science of internal realities, then we get a science but it is phenomenologically inadequate becuase it deals with causal relations
• For Husserl, the relation between subject and object is not causal but intending; it can’t be taken for granted.
• Cartesian moment: how can I trust that the thing causes the faculty? Doesn’t give up the faculty, says you can trust it because God wouldn’t do that to me – but something is afoot.
• Husserl: you have to have this Cartesian moment of radical doubt.
• Decartes thought he had found a worldless I but thought he found a fundament for knowledge. The Archimedian point: use it as the basis for proving the world.
• Husserlian moment. Decartes’ own account of the I ends up re-inserting all these faculties back into the I as thinking substance, a metaphysical rather than a phenomenological category. Show me substance as it appears! (You can’t.)
• Lonergan is saying that we have intentional operations, and that knowing is a formally dynamic structure of theee intentional operations, all mediated by questions. What and why is it?
• If knowing is a merely a question of seeing, why do children ask questirons?
• If you’re studying a philosophy and they don’t have a thorough, consistent, ongoing investigation of questions, they’re not doing it right.
• You can go through history fo philosophy – Platos’ got it (knowledge is question and answer), Aristotle has it too, then it kind of disappears; we had only Aristotle’s “logical” works for a long time and it seems like he didn’t have questions; for long stretches of history, logic was thoguht to be the basic structure of knowing, deducing things from premises, rather than thinking of logic as embedded within, merely an instrument in, a larger structure which is driven dynamically by questions. You get a traste of this in Heidegger, Heidegger relalizes this is somrthing different. Part of being is recovering the question of being. Reams of philosophy which don’t mention the question.
  • Quine, the archetypical analytic philosopher – wrote so much, so he rearranged his typewriter to eliminate certain keys, eliminated the question mark. (maybe true or not true, but th epoint is made)
  • Questions are needed for an epistemology
  • Not just any old questions: a structural process, not just random questions.
  • Is this worthwhile? Scheler and value
  • These questions involve the notion of being
• Lonergan is saying: what is being? It can’t be defined directly, but being is what you intend with the totality of your questions. You know being at the end of a question, not at the beginnig. You don’t immediately confront being as being. In fact you confront being as true judgement, truth is convertible with being, but only that – we don’t have knowledge of bieng other than that
• Questions mediate between levels, you constitue objects as questions, and if they are answered, then you constitute them as understood, but you also ask “is it true”? Is it so?
• Isnsight – the act of understanding.
• Triad
  • Evidence: What is it? Why is it?
  • Understanding: Is it so?
  • Judgement: Is it worthwhile?
• Have you ever understood anything?
• Lonergan: the history of philosophy is the history of the oversight of insight.
• Your whole world is a tissue of insights, but we don’t pay attention to it; the insight itself is overlook
• The inside of a bag is not reallyt here, but that is where we get the being of it. Being is not snesibl eor material, but being: being as being
• Intellectual conversion: move away from what you thought were real – It’s a turning, you turn around and you will get an isght, e.g. being is good.
• Lonergan: nah, we want to stay attached
• Plato discovered the object of insight, which is ideas, eidoses; Socratic moment, there are things beyond what we can really sense, so where are these things really?
• Plato – is there a noetic heaven? etc.
• No insight: no account of the act,
• But you always feel the tension of inquiry and its release and further captions, why can’t you get the child to shut up?
• Formally dynamic structure: you as a knower provide the conditions for your own emergence as a knower, in anticipation of becoming something further. You are in the process of a formal dynamism, you as a thing are coming
• Plants develop root systems to become what they are, and then those thigns help with the root system
• Newtonian synthesis: unification of a set of insightrs, starting with Capernicus, Galileo, Kepler, major insight, planets move in an ellipse which is not a perfect circle as the Ptolemaic model, Galilean insight about free fall; Newton, why do we assume that sublunar movement is different from celestial movement? Why do we assume that the same laws don’t apply? Newtonian synthesis: the same laws apply – new synthesis that unifies all these different insights, but now you have a synthetic munity – you can explain every body in the universe
• Lonergan: what you are doing is participating in this formally dynamic structure, dynamic – undergoing change
• Materially dynamic structure, like computers and such, as opposed to removing the part of a gallon of milk, you don’t destroy the milk; you might diminish the milk but you can’t keep the car by taking out the piston; the parts don’t assemble themselves; yet knowing does
• How is this different from the Socratic dialectic of knowing?
• Thomas Khuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions?
• Problem of conscious and distinguishing acts as conscious and acts as intentional
• Sartre is clear about th eproblem: what is thi sconsicousness of consciousness? We are willing to turn it into knowledge of knowledge. To know is to know that one knows. He defines reflection, or positional consciousness of consciousness, or knowledge of consciousness, to be understood as an act of consciousness, directed at something it is not – reflected consciousness
• If consciousness is always intentional and always has an object, then in order to be conscious of consciousness, you need to reflect upon that very act, but then consciousness as intentional would seem to always be escaping consciousness as consciousness.
  • Infinite regress: it seems like we can never really know consciousness or be conscious of our own consciousness – it must always be an object, but there is also the consciousness of oneself as conscious of the object – differentiating between consciousness and intentionality
  • Consciousness does not intend always
  • If we don’t fundamentally distinguish consciousness and intentionality, we run into the problme of infinite regress
  • If intentionality is objectifying and we cna only be conscious of things as objects, then we cannot really recognize our consciousness as conscious
  • What about Husserl’s theory fo intersubjectivity though? I can be conscious of subjects insofar as I constitue them though?
• Is every attempt at self knowledge a denaturing?
• Consciousness as a sense of awareness immanent in intentional acts
• Reduction of consciousness to knoweldge imports the subject-object duality. Knowing known (the third necessary term) must be interpreted. Sartre is talking about infinite regress here, which is absurd.
• Consciousness of self is not a dyad – not a consciousness of an object. It must be an immediate and noncognitive relationship of self to self. Reflective consciousness posits the reflected conscious as its object; I am driected outwards, towards the world. Spontaneous perception of the world is a nonpositional consciousness of itself. Lonergan differentiates this from intentionality.
• We have to differentiate the intentionality and the consciousness in the act; consciousness as consciousness is not perception; it is self-present; all consciousness is self-presence. Not conscious of itself as an object.
• Scheler: there are conscious states in which I am not always intending an object, like fatigue and drunkenness, anxiety about nothing in particular, but about nothing (in particular)
• Husserl got us intentionality but didn’t differentiate it.
• So how do you come to understand yourself? YOu can’t just reflect on it, so you have to rias eht elvel of your activity; distinguish between meerely questioning and understanding. As you raise your level of operation, you care conscious of knot only the thing you are questioning but of your questioning. Now I am conscious differently when I understand; the t hing you are doing a phenomenology of is no waht you are conscious of but rather the consciousness itself.
• Breaking Meno’s paradox: how do I know an inch is an inch? Measured vs measuring. Rulers are not self-measuring, but consciousness is. It provides its own immanent criterion, immanent in questions. Getting out of the epoche or transcending, we cna’t fall back into the naive attitude, naive realism – why do we fall into it? It is developmental – the reality si that we develop as animasl prior to our development of knowing. We develop animal psychology. The word perception literally means, “to grab with” – we develop an anticipation of being as that which is spatiallyd istinct from us. Actus perfecti – there is all this other stuff going on you’re not ready to deal with, it’s not spatiallyd istinct from your perception. I think that being is over there, and our words / language actually express that… it gives rise to this thinking of consciousness as perception. And you have to overcome this naivete.
• Why do we fall into naivete at all?
• Lonergan: we don’t know our knowing, we develop as animals prior to knowing as knowers, and we already develop an orientation towards ‘being’, an animal relation. Reference to Santayana, “Animal Faith”
• Is there an immanent soruce of transcendence?
  • Decartes, no – but there is a transcendent source of transcendence, God’s veracity?
  • Kant condemns us to the phenomena
  • Husserl tries to find the absolute in the eidosa s the infinite horizon, but unconvincing
  • Sartre and nothingness
• What is it, why is it?
• Inverse insight: when you understand that there is nothing to be understood
• Much of science emerges as an inverse insight
• Newtonian physics: movement is qualitatively indistinguishable from rest.
• You can see why the arrow starts, but why does it keep on going?
• The fact that you’re in space in one location and not another is irrelvant; nothing significant about point A and point B as such.
• You can do experiments which confirm or disconfirm on different sides of the planet.
• Lonergan: Husserlian phenomenology comes after insight and gets data structured by insight, so it gets the product
• Husserl is aware of insight, especially in the fifth meditation; Husserl knows about insight just as Plato did, but he doesn’t have a clear phenomenology of it, but he knows it’s happening; primal instituting.
  • Apperception – perception of a form or eidos that is the accompanying cointention of the form
  • Apperception is not an inference: you don’t conclude to the eidos, you can just describe it.
  • Every apperception in which you apprehend at a glance and noticingly grasp objects given beforehand
  • Every apperception points back towards a primal instituting in hwich an object wiht a similar sense got constituted for the first time
  • Doesn’t want to talka bout this because now we’re back into empiricsm, the natural attitude: it’s your concrete empirical self which does this, you don’t need the transcendental, it’s you
• Lonergan: reaching of the virtual unconditioned, there are no more questions to be asked
• In order for something to occur period metaphysically, a set of conditions must be set and met; there are conditions that make it possible. No finite cause can produce the existence of its effect because we don’t create the conditions of ourselves to act. Lonergan: there are also conditions which, upon fulfillment, can be affirmed as true – that which satisfies the immanent desire for reason and sufficient evidence.
• Where do we go without an immanent criterion?