I have been thinking about Continental philosophy.It is certainly closer to how my life really is like.It is like a big wave in the ocean which submerges everything in its path.
Analytic philosophy is like playing with small pebbles.It maybe amusing but when the wave arrives (of fear and loathing and dread) it washes away everything-the pebbles and the players.
I was trying to post a link to a paper from Academia, The Elemental Past (2014) by Ted Toadvine, but it only took you to the sign-in page where you have to login.
Reading just the first several pages of this paper made me think of Holden's thoughts on the analytic-continental divide. I will attempt to summarize it in case the link doesn't work. Or, better still, some direct excerpt to get a feel for the kind of reading it is. One must be patient when reading those working in ivory towers on their theses and such things.
I suppose we are to believe there are "insider" and "outsider" groups when it comes to the value of our opinion on this matter, but I still can't help but wonder what it can even mean to say that the sun did not exist before the world in our heads. Take it for what it's worth and don't feel pressured to make up your minds once and for all.
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In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.”
I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivist critics by arguing that the world emerges in the exchange between perceiver and perceived. A deeper challenge is posed, however, by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the “correlationism” of contemporary philosophy rules out any account of the “ancestral” time that antedates all subjectivity.
Against Meillassoux, and taking an encounter with fossils as my guide, I hold that the past prior to subjectivity can only be approached phenomenologically. The paradoxical character of this immemorial past, as a memory of the world rather than of the subject, opens the way toward a phenomenology of the “elemental” past.
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the absolute past of nature and the anonymity of the body, as well as Levinas’ account of the elements at the end of the world, I argue that our own materiality and organic lives participate in the differential rhythms of the elements, opening us to a memory of the world that binds the cosmic past and the apocalyptic future.
In a lecture to the Collège philosophique on 12 January 1951, Georges Bataille recounts a barroom debate held the night before with British philosopher A. J. Ayer, who was at that time stationed at the British Embassy in Paris and had presented a lecture to the group that previous day. The topic of the debate, in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty and atomic physicist Georges Ambrosino also participated, is described by Bataille in the following terms:
We finally fell to discussing the following very strange question. Ayer had uttered the very simple proposition:
There was a sun before men existed. And he saw no reason to doubt it. Merleau-Ponty, Ambrosino, and I disagreed with this proposition, and Ambrosino said that
the sun had certainly not existed before the world. I, for my part, do not see how one can say so.
Although Bataille suggests that a compromise was finally reached at around three in the morning, he says nothing about its terms. Instead, his lecture takes up Ayer’s proposition as an example of “nonknowledge,” non-savoir, since, even though it is “logically unassailable,” it is nevertheless “mentally disturbing, unbalancing.”
This disturbing character is a consequence of the proposition’s violation of the requirement for both a subject and an object, since what we find in this case is “an object independent of any subject”—and, consequently, “perfect non-sense.”
This may seem little more than an interesting anecdote, but Bataille’s account of his debate with Ayer has been identified by Andreas Vrahimis as “the first explicit announcement, in the twentieth century, of the division between Anglophone and Continental philosophy.”
(footnote 3: Andreas Vrahimis, “Was There a Sun Before Men Existed? A.J. Ayer and French Philosophy in the Fifties,” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1, no. 9 (2012), 11. See also Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 36)
As Bataille puts it, the conversation with Ayer “produced an effect of shock. There exists between French and English philosophers a sort of abyss which we do not find between French and German philosophers.”
I suggest that this remark concerning the parting of ways of philosophical traditions is of more than merely historical interest.
The debate over the sun’s existence prior to human beings anticipates and even enacts the split between analytic and continental philosophy because it already sketches out what is at stake philosophically in this split, namely, the fate of naturalism. To any naturalist, and especially to the inner naturalist of common sense, the position taken by the “continental” thinkers in this debate is so absurd as to function as a reductio of their position. Even for those whose sensibilities align with the “continental” side of this debate, or at least for many of them, it will be Bataille’s position that seems shocking rather than Ayer’s.
How, today, could anyone—continental thinkers included—deny the anteriority of the sun to human existence? Indeed, it is precisely by criticizing such absurdities that Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism has attracted attention. Nevertheless, it is my intention here to reanimate this old debate and to argue on behalf of the “continental” position: the sun exists only within a world, and a world emerges only at the confluence of a perceiver and the perceived. But this does not deny the insistence of a time before the world, a primordial prehistory that haunts the world from within, which is the truth of the naturalist’s conviction about a time prior to humanity. Yet only the resources of phenomenology can clarify this encounter with an elemental past that has never been for anyone a present.
Close readers of Merleau-Ponty will immediately recognize that the debate over the sun’s existence echoes an infamous passage at the end of the “Temporality” chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty considers the objection that the world existed “prior to man.”
In response to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure,” his imagined critic counters that “the world preceded man,” since “the earth emerged from a primitive nebula where the conditions for life had not been brought together.” Merleau-Ponty nevertheless insists that “[n]othing will ever lead me to understand what a nebula that could not be seen by any-one might be. Leplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world” (494/456).
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I have not finished reading the entire paper, but I thought this might spark some reflections for Holden during his commutes.
My take on this is that, since the sun is involved in defining the passage of time, the sun is outside of time and does not exist "in a world" as such, a Lebenswelt, until there is a perceiver and a perceived. I think it is liberating, psychologically at least, to consider the mysterious nature of our consciousness and the role it plays in presenting the "world as representation."
That is, even the so-called powerful are subjected to the same "inherent nature of our world."
Even the preacher man, as he confidently gives his congregation advice on how to get through this life is subjected to the mystery of consciousness and the formation of his own Life_World.
In other words, you don't have to know the truth in order to be standing in it. People can think and say whatever they wish about what they suppose the nature of our existence or "world" is.
It defies common sense to suggest that the sun had certainly not existed before the world. The problems we have imagining this scenario are at the heart of the divide between Analytic and Continental Philosophy.
How different this subject matter is from computer programming topics!
To just sit and ponder such things ... things that presidential clowns, businessmen, and war thugs rarely consider. They are too obsessed with power and their delusions of "control," when, the truth is that each little emperor and gang boss are just as "thrown into this" as anyone else.
May we find some comfort in the knowledge that we are not alone in this great riddle, and that no social hierarchy can dictate the quality of one's inner life.
There are so many grand delusions shared on a mass scale, so much so that we can refer to "common sense reality" as a mass hallucination.
It might turn out to be something very pleasing to consider, that we may be stuck in mass cultural hallucinations, going around in circles chasing our tails with circularly defined words.
I'm going back to writing a little code as I appreciate the simple and elegant logic necessary for computing, but I have a feeling I will be revisiting more "philosophical" ideas before I lose consciousness and the morning returns.
The world emerges in the exchange between perceiver and perceived.