Author Topic: Husserlian Phenomenology  (Read 1463 times)

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Nation of One

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Husserlian Phenomenology
« on: November 04, 2015, 10:15:47 pm »
I was going through some old posts at wordpress that came up when I did a search for hentrich and gortbusters, the fcking search engine suggests ghostbusters, goddam pop-culture and advertisement-obsessed heads must degrade the functionality of search engines in general.   "Ask DOT com" did alright (It used to be tecoma DOT com).

Anyway, I was momentarily drifting, and I found a book I owned once, before 2009 when I travelled 3000 miles across the continent to homeless in Seattle, Washington for a spell.  While I was out west battling demons, my mom lost her house, along with hundreds of books I had stored in her basement.  Phenomenology by Dormat Moran was one of them.  I remember paying about $40 for it.  I read the whole thing, some parts more than once.  Follow the link to a pdf file.

You might enjoy it.  I am posting this since I recall what you wrote:

"Im reading Husserlian phenomenology.Will let you know what I think of that soon."

« Last Edit: November 05, 2015, 08:21:24 am by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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Holden

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Re: Husserlian Phenomenology
« Reply #1 on: November 05, 2015, 01:43:00 pm »
I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.”
― Edmund Husserl

How do I philosophise?By thinking slowly.How do I think slowly?By repetition?
Do you repeat the same concepts time and again,in order to understand them really well?
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: Husserlian Phenomenology
« Reply #2 on: November 05, 2015, 05:59:52 pm »
I definitely do repeat things again and again hoping to better understand, to remember, or simply to bring the concepts into focus.  After all, we seem to be continuously transforming.   I may understand something when I am going over it, and then months or years later, have to rediscover it.   Look at me, I obsessively go over things.  I take notes from textbooks and from information I hunt down on the Internet.  Once a notebook is full, I then digitize the pages, page by page with the scanner ... I have to confess, it is all I can do to restrain myself from taking notes from what I am reviewing even when going over digitized versions of previous notes!  At that point, I stop myself.  Maybe I don't have enough faith in my memory.  I often stay awake late into the night for fear of having to start over when I wake up after I fall asleep.

I tried to read Husserl's works earlier in the 21st century ... I then read some Merleau-Ponty ... and, well ... it's all just words, right?

When I read Husserl, it is like I have the ghost of Schopenhauer inside my skull.  He and Kant were always referring to the phenomenal world, or "phenomenon."

So what's the significance of the -ology?   The study of phenomena?  The simplest explanation of phenomenology I ever heard was "introspection".  Phenomenology is a fancy word for introspection, where we suspend judgement as to whether or not there is an objective world "out there".  Bombs are falling from the sky from aeroplanes, and the goon squad is kicking down the door dragging professors away in chains ...

What is the difference between what Schopenhauer was doing and Husserl's project?  They can't be compared.  Husserl stuck to his terminology.  Schopenhauer was a radical pessimist with an agenda.  Maybe it is high time I cease comparing one thinker to another.  Sometimes my words are just groans and animal noises.

I hear Husserl had to write everything down or else he did not understand his own thoughts.  I also write so much down.  Even when going through math books or books on code, I often take detailed notes.

I think of the native who said (and I don't care for adjectives such as white or black or red or yellow or even "brown" when describing a particular strain of our species, but I am quoting someone else), "white men don't understand anything unless it is written down."

For a long time I have dealt with internal conflicts.  I have always identified myself with the colonized and not with the colonizer ... and then when I see my actions, my obsession with words and writing things down ... uhh ...

Even using such language as "colonizer" and "colonized" or "native, indigenous, aborigine" versus what??? versus ... invader?  descendent of invading culture?

What does any of this have to do with Husserl's phenomenology?  You may suspect I have returned to drinking and have lost my power of concentration.

I suspect Husserl and so many other "official thinkers, philosophers, phenomenologists" were obsessed with their specific terminology and did not dare expose too much of their inner doubts about what they were really doing.

In other words, many of those we look to for guidance and instruction were not as honest as we are.  Their fears of what their colleagues would say prevented them from expressing their doubts pertaining to the meaninglessness of their projects.

 :o

Neither of us appears to be hampered by such social pressures to present ourselves as "authorities" ... We are quite possibly liberated by our insignificance, and hence permitted to think and say whatever the fuuck we want to ... Is it decadence or is it freedom from the kind of pressure that forces people to suppress their doubts and present themselves (dishonestly) as being confident?

At what point is it all just words?  And why did I write "just" words?  Words seem to be all I have.  When I am trying to understand any concept, I look for words to help me understand ... We are symbol-using creatures.  This is just what it is.   Hunters-gatherers were also symbol-users ... Many stories and songs ... ceremonies ... they preserved their culture with songs?  I'm not sure.  It's all over my head.

... but I can't eat words or ideas ... and we are, like the worms and other creepy crawlers,  Eaters-of-Food.   Eating food and making babies seems to be what living is about.  It has nothing to do with understanding ideas and concepts ...

Dinner time?   Start without me!



I eat dinner ... tummy full ... I must be in La-La Land.

I am currently focusing on some practical algorithms and slowing down long enough just to think., and yet, it is quite possible that when we apply our intelligence to solving the problem of existence itself, we are over-reaching.  We can't understand a process that we are inside of.  I get a certain satisfaction when I understand some formulas and algorithms.  This is something we are capable of doing, even if it takes some effort. 

And yet, even though final solutions to the dilemma of existence itself are beyond our grasp, it does not stop us from reaching.  Our inability to transcend the limitations of our mental apparatus does not stop us from demanding some kind of evidence that this is not all a dream, or even equal to the stuff of dreams when viewed from a distance (in time).  When we see others die, we understand how transitory all this is, and how we too will vanish as if we were never here.  Wittgenstein thought that we should stop talking or writing when we reach this limit where words lead in circles.  Not me, I think we ought to let our nonsense loose.  Let it loose!  Let it at least attempt to express its own bafflement.

I don't think philosophy is a waste of time.  Nor do I think studying mathematics is a waste of time.   

Some might say we think too much.  Some say that our species is cursed with consciousness.  We are not required to enjoy our mental faculties.  In fact, my own consciousness can be quite bothersome to others, especially if they are "not trying to hear this shiit."

Some people are proud of not even wanting to know.

I am constantly reminding people that I am a slow thinker, not to portray myself as mentally deficient, but to show my disdain for fast thinking. 

Quote from: Holden
Do you repeat the same concepts time and again,in order to understand them really well?

Yes, again, it is worth repeating: I go over basic and fundamental ideas over and over again. 

End transmission.  Someone who was a little easier (for me) to read was David Abram ... Spell of the Sensuous as well as Becoming Animal.  He also calls himself a phenomenologist of the Husserlian variety.

I wrote an essay describing his work:  Animism and Phenomenology
« Last Edit: November 05, 2015, 09:38:29 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Abram, Animism, and Phenomenology
« Reply #3 on: November 05, 2015, 09:11:17 pm »
Essay from several years ago (I think I'll remove some sections at this time (and correct some spelling errors) - what fun  ::) trapped in a web of words):

David Abram has breathed new life into Phenomenology.   Exploring his work gave me a greater appreciation for concepts grappled with by Transcendental Idealism.   Alphabetic writing had tremendous influence upon the emergence of the concepts of homogeneous “space” and linear “time.”  Oral cultures had no concept of “linear time” – for a time that is cyclical, or circular, is just as much spatial as it is temporal.  Schopenhauer made clear that time and space are two sides of the same coin, that one cannot define one without reference to the other, and so are the same – part of the mental apparatus of the nervous system.

In the oral universe, there is no distinction of space and time at all. Unlike a straight line, a circle demarcates and encloses a spatial field. The Lakota define the year as a circle around the border of the world. The circle is both the symbol of the earth (with its encircling horizons) and the symbol of time. The changes of sunup and sundown around the horizon during the course of the year delineate the contours of time, time as part of space. Navajo experience calls for a complex notion of space-time or “time-space” rather than clearly distinct concepts of one dimensional time and three dimensional space. Benjamin Lee Whorf discovered a similar situation in his analysis of the Hopi language.

Benjamin Lee Whorf found no analog, in the Hopi language, to the linear, sequential, uniformly flowing time that Western civilization takes for granted. Whorf found no references to any independent temporal dimension of reality. The language of the Hopi belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of languages. The neighboring Navajo speak an Athapaskan language.

Navajo language also seems to maintain a broad notion of the influence of human desire and imagination upon a continually emergent world, a notion very analogous to that found by Whorf among the Hopi. (Abram 1996) Existence should be understood as a continuous manifestation. So where did this “focus on history” come from? What we know of as “history” is only 0.1% of our lived-story.99.9% of the story is prehistoric. Writing is a necessary condition for the belief in an entirely distinct space and time.

According to Mircea Eliade, the ancient Hebrews were the first people to “discover” a linear, nonrepeating mode of time. The Hebrews are the first alphabetic culture we know of, the first “People of the Book.”

At the time when the written commandments were revealed by YHWH, about 3200 years ago, at the time of the exodus from Egypt, the 22 letter consonantal aleph-beth was coming into use in the area of Canaan, or Palestine. The new recognition of NONMYTHOLOGICAL, nonrepeating time by the Hebrew scribes can only be comprehended with reference to alphabetic writing itself. The variously scribed layers of the Hebrew bible are the first sustained record of this new sensibility (linear time and three dimensional space).

The ancient aleph-beth, as the first thoroughly phonetic writing system, prioritized the human voice. The increasingly literate Israelites found themselves caught up in a vital relationship with an all powerful human voice. It was a voice that preceded and outlasted every individual life. The written text became a portable homeland for the Hebrew people. Many of the stories are about displacement and exile.  (Abram 1996)

The Hebrews were the first real caretakers of this great and difficult magic – alphabetic literacy.
The pain, the sadness of this exile, is precisely the trace of what has been lost – FORGOTTEN INTIMACY.

It seems as though the Greeks may have further objectified space and time into distinct dimensions. Time becomes inseparable from number and sequence. The thorough differentiation of “time” from “space” was impossible so long as large portions of the populace still experienced the surrounding terrain as animate and alive.

The burning of tens of thousands of women (most of them herbalists from peasant backgrounds) as “witches” during the 16th and 17th centuries may be understood as the nearly successful extermination of the last orally preserved traditions of Europe in order to clear the way for the dominion of alphabetic reason over a natural world increasingly construed as a passive and mechanical set of objects. (Abram 1996)

In 1781, Immanual Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, agreed with Newton that time and space were absolute, that they were independent of any objects. However, these distinct dimensions did not belong to the surrounding world as it exists in itself, but where necessary forms of human awareness, the two forms by which the human mind structures the things it perceives.

Kant actually hardwires space and time into the structure of our wetware. Is there no escape for us? How do we dig our way out of this? How to get disentangled from this web of reason within our own thought processes? JACOB’S LADDER: “The only way up is down.”

John Fire Lame Deer:

    Let us become like stones, plants, and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals. Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it.

    Woniya wakan – the holy air – which renews all by its breath. Wo-ni-ya, woniya wakan – spirit, life, breath, renewal – it means all that.

    Woniya – we sit together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence. A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.


For oral peoples (that’s all of our ancestors), the air is the archetype for all that is unknowable yet undeniably real. Air is tied to breath and to spoken word.

For the Lakota Nation, the most sacred or wakan aspect of Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious (in English, sometimes addressed as the Great Spirit), is Taku Skanskan, the Enveloping Sky – known to the shamans as simply Skan.  We, and everything around us (rocks, leaves, other people), are crystallizations of conscious awareness. Western science calls this creative but unseen realm from which conscious forms arise “the unconscious.” It is the source of all psychology and psychoanalysis. It is the invisible medium between entities.

The Navajo identification of awareness with the air – their intuition that PSYCHE is not an immaterial power that resides inside us, but is rather the invisible yet thoroughly palpable medium in which we (along with trees, the squirrels, and the clouds) are immersed must seem bizarre, even outrageous, to persons of European ancestry. Yet a little etymological research reveals the English term psyche – together with its modern offsprings “psychology,” “psychiatry,” and “psychotherapy” – is derived from the ancient Greek word psyche, which signified not merely the “soul,” or the “mind,” but also “breath,” or “a gust of wind.” The Greek noun was derived from the verb psychein, which meant “to breath.”

The word “spirit” itself is directly related to the bodily term “respiration” through their common Latin root word spiritus, which signified both “breath” and “wind.”

The Latin word for “soul,” anima – from whence have evolved such English terms as “animal,” “animation,” “animism,” and “unaminous” (being of one mind, or one soul), also signified “air” and “breath.”

Anima, like psyche, originally named an elemental phenomenon that somehow comprised both what we now call “the air” and what we now term “the soul.” The more specific Latin word animus, which signified “that which thinks in us,” was derived from the same “airy” root, anima, itself derived from the older Greek term anemos,
meaning “wind.”

We find identical association of the “mind” with the “wind” in many ancient languages. The word “atmosphere” has ancestral ties to the Sanskrit word atman, which signified “soul” as well as the “air” and the “breath.”

For ancient Mediteranean cultures no less than for the Lakota and the Navajo, the air was once a singularly sacred presence. As the experiential source of both psyche and spirit, it would seem that the air was once felt to be the very matter of awareness, the subtle body of the mind.

How did air come to lose its psychological quality?

Abram breathes life into philosophy, proving that the unutterable need not be the unthinkable.

He explains “the forgetting of the air” by taking us inside a circle not normally exposed to the unannointed. In this way, he makes quantum leaps, inviting universal understanding as members of this magical and warped species of ours. We are entangled in a great web together.

Like many ancient languages, Hebrew has a single word for both “spirit” and “wind” – ruach. We tend to view ancient Hebraic culture through the lens of Greek and Christian thought; (Abrams) “even Jewish scholarship, and much contemporary Jewish self-understanding has been influenced and informed by centuries of Hellenistic and Christian interpretation.”

“It is thus that many persons today associate the ancient Hebrews with such anachronistic notions as the belief in an otherwordly heaven and hell, or a faith in the immateriality and immortality of the personal soul. Yet dualistic notions have no real place in the Hebrew Bible.”

We do know that the Ancient Hebrews were among the first communities to make sustained use of phonetic writing – the first bearers of an alphabet.

Unlike other Semitic peoples, they did not restrict their use of the alphabet to economic and political record keeping, but used it to record ancestral stories, traditions, and laws.

They were perhaps the first nation to so thoroughly shift their sensory participation away from the forms of surrounding nature to a purely phonetic set of signs, and so to experience the profound epistemological independence from the natural environment that was made possible by this potent new technology. To actively participate with the visible forms of nature became idolatry by the ancient Hebrews; it was not the land but the written letters that now carried the ancestral wisdom. (Abram 1996)

Although the Hebrews renounced animism, they retained a participatory relationship with the wind and the breath – the relationship is inferred from the structure of the Hebrew writing system.

In contrast to its “European” derivatives, the aleph-beth had no letters for “vowels.” The 22 letters of the Hebrew aleph-beth are all consonants. In order to read a text written in traditional Hebrew, one had to INFER the appropriate “vowel sounds” from the CONSONANTAL CONTEXT, and add them when sounding out the written syllables.
The vowels are nothing other than sounded breath.

The breath, for the ancient Semites, was the very mystery of life and awareness, a mystery inseparable from the invisible ruach – the holy wind, the holy spirit.

The avoidance of vowel notation marks a profound difference between the ancient Semitic aleph-beth and the subsequent European alphabets.

[Abram about how one goes about reading traditional Hebrew text] “The reader must actively respond to the Torah, must bring his own individual creativity into dialogue with the teachings in order to reveal new and unsuspected nuances.”

Some people read the numerical patterns. Most scripted symbols have in and of themselves some original symbolic meaning, but the beholder draws out the meaning necessary at that moment. The I Ching works that way – the Runes …

The true manner of pronouncing the Tetragrammaton, the four letter name, YHWH, often written in non-Hebrew texts as Yahweh, is said to have been forgotten.

This leads us to an answer to our question, how did air lose its psychological quality?

Some esoteric traditions of Jewish mysticism consider each letter of the aleph-beth to be alive. This is much closer to the way the tribal peoples of Northern Europe, who worshipped the spirits of the forests, air, and waters, were implementing their “runes.”

The most holy of God’s names, the four letter Tetragrammaton, is composed of the most breath-like consonants in the Hebrew aleph-beth (the same three letters, Y, H, and W, that were sometimes used by ancient scribes to stand in for particular vowels).

    Abram is a trip: Some contemporary students of Kabbalah suggest that the forgotten pronunciation of the name may have entailed forming the first syllable, “Y-H,” on the whispered inbreath, and the second syllable, “W-H,” on the whispered outbreath – the whole name thus forming a single cycle of the breath.

Is the mystery invoked by the Tetragrammaton the same mystery that breaths our bodies? Breathing connects our being to the atmosphere we are inseparable from. Breathing binds us to the invisible!  How have we come to forget the spirit of the air?

On the journey across the Mediteranean, on the journy to Greece, the letters of the aleph-beth left behind their ties to “the enveloping life-world.” The alpha-beth became a much more abstract set of symbols. The Greek scribes introduced vowels. The resulting alphabet was a different kind of tool from its earlier Semitic incarnation.

Text had lost its ambiguity and mystery, leaving less for creative imagination to interpret. There is one correct way to read it. Active interpretation is not invited. There is no longer any choice about which vowels to insert. By using visible characters to represent the sounded breath, the Greeks effectively DESACRALIZED the breath and the air. By giving form to the invisible, they nullified the mysteriousness of the enveloping atmosphere. The alphabet met with resistance: The Milesian philosopher Anaximenes asserted, “As the psyche, being air, holds a man together and gives him life, so breath and air hold together the entire universe and give it life.”

Not two centuries later, Plato and Socrates were able to co-opt the term psyche, which for Anaximenes was associated with the breath and the air. Plato used the term psyche to indicate something not just invisible but utterly intangible. The psyche was now a thoroughly abstract phenomenon enclosed within the physical body as in a prison. Plato’s trancendent realm of eternal “Ideas” was itself dependent upon the new affinity between the literate intellect and the visible letters (and words) of the alphabet. Plato’s realm of pure bodiless Ideas was incorporeal, connected to the rational psyche much as the earlier, breathlike psyche was joined to the atmosphere.

Unlike the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament was originally written primarily in the Greek alphabet. And wherever the alphabet advanced, it proceeded by dispelling the air of ghosts and invisible influences – by stripping the air of its anima, its psychic depth.

In the oral, animistic world of pre-Christian and peasant Europe, all things – animals, forests, rivers, and caves – had the power of expressive speech, and the primary medium of this collective discourse was the air.
Spontaneous sounds were inseparable from the exhaled breath. The spread of Christianity was dependent upon the spread of the alphabet. Only by training the senses to participate with the written word could one hope to break their spontaneous participation with the animate terrain.

Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.

We live in a matrix of political, economic, and civilizational forces struggling to maintain themselves largely at the expense of the animate earth.

I am wondering if what Christians and Muslims call “demons” are simply “the old gods,” and I wonder if my spirit-helpers (Vonnegut, Carlin, etc) would be considered evil or demonic by those who have been brainwashed by the dogmas of the so-called religions that have displaced our true animistic religions.

The churches (and I guess I now have to also include mosques) have lost touch with the spiritual.  What religion has become is rituals and sets of rules.  There, of course, have always been spiritual healers, but for how many generations has the work of such healers been labelled as the work of the Devil?

I am really getting tired of being Mr. Nice Guy and just getting bulldozed over by those who would force their own submission on me, those who would want to force me into submission and rob my spirit-power … Losing patience … feeling a change coming over me.

     David Abram: Sentience was never our private possession.  We live immersed in intelligence, enveloped and informed by a creativity we cannot fathom.

We stress the importance of the primacy of felt experience as opposed to dogmatic ideologies.  I think it is important for us to be open to the more-than-human non-human dimensions of our experienced reality. What psychologists call “the unconscious” is the entire cosmos: the sun, the stars, the earth itself, the waters, air, trees, rocks, mountains, clouds, and all life-forms … These exist always in what we moderns call “the unconscious,” but what our hunter/gatherer ancestors called “The Spirit World.”

I suppose that it is a sign of merit to be at odds with the dominant society. I hate to keep bringing up “the Devil” (the Christian Devil in particular), but isn’t it true that those who continued to practice animism were accused of worshiping the Devil?  In that case, bad is good, and good is pretty bad indeed.

Now, how has this damaged our ability to be reshaped by the “spirits of the land?” When our bodies are repelled by the meaninglessness of our lives, that is the Force of Life within our blood and bones struggling to breathe free. This longing to breathe free, to return to the Natural World, or even to be idle in silent contemplation (viewed as laziness) are all in some way interconnected with our main Project, which is to  “take our minds back from those who wish to control our mins, our spirit, our very Being.”   We are part of the Natural World, and this system we live under has been abusing the natural world for thousands of years, long before the time of “Christ.”

Through the manipulation of our minds, they control our spirits.  They know this is true.  Those who want to control all life on this planet KNOW that their authority (their authority is artificial power) is based on ILLUSION, illusion such as the myth of private property.   Their authority is enforced with violence and brutality.

While we may tend to idealize the animist state, sentimentalizing a relationship with the Natural World that we envy, it would be wrong to imagine these tribal societies living in a paradise on earth.  Animism articulates the sense people have of a cruel and arbitrary fate.  The “spirits” may be moody or fickle.  The angry gods can withhold protection as easily as they can endow it:  as the animist goes through life, he or she must negotiate a never-ending and often tragic drama.  (Kerrigan 2011)
« Last Edit: November 05, 2015, 10:04:48 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Re: Husserlian Phenomenology
« Reply #4 on: January 15, 2016, 05:18:30 pm »
I found a 12 page paper that you might find very interesting:  Schopenhauer and Husserl.

Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Re: Husserlian Phenomenology
« Reply #5 on: May 06, 2016, 11:11:44 am »
Sorry, another quick link to a paper:  Edmund Husserl’s Transcendence of Early Buddhist Theory of Consciousness by Saman Pushpakumara

Evolution of Phenomenology (minus Hegel, Heidegger, and Sarte):

Kant → Schopenhauer → Nietzsche → Freud → Husserl ?
« Last Edit: May 06, 2016, 11:42:12 am by Kaspar Hauser »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: Husserlian Phenomenology
« Reply #6 on: June 27, 2016, 11:07:19 am »
I stumbled upon this while searching for a book on SAGE programming by Razvan A. Mezei.

A title, World and Life-World, by an author with the same surname, caught my attention.

Uncanny, right?   So, when I say I stumbled upon it, I mean I was not looking for this book, but I found it anyway (by pure accident):

World and Life-World
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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John Daniel Wild
« Reply #7 on: August 23, 2018, 11:00:00 am »
This thinkers books are hard to find, so I am posting a link to a 83 page paper by one David Goicoechea:   John Wild's Transition to a Philosophy of the Lebenswelt

Other finds: The Challenge Of Existentialism

The Return to Reason: Essays in Realistic Philosophy


« Last Edit: August 30, 2018, 10:25:23 pm by Henry »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Existential Phenomenology
« Reply #8 on: September 02, 2018, 01:03:37 pm »
I was very fortunate to have been able to track down a hardcover 1979 reprint of the 1955 The Challenge of Existentialism for only four dollars (with free shipping) - the next least expensive hardcover was over $50, hence the best bet is the Kindle version from Amazon: $5.49 which is not to be found on Library Genesis.

Also of interest is a paperback I got my hands on for about $20:  The Promise of Phenomenology: Posthumous Papers of John Wild edited by Sugarman and Duncan.

I need a magnifying glass to read them, so that forces my brain to read slower than normal, and that can be annoying; but I think John Wild's work is worth investigating even though he totally ignores Schopenhauer (as though Schopenhauer had never existed).  I am sure this is because Wild was opposed to "idealism" and wanted to embark upon what might be called a radically empirical approach to a phenomenology of existence.  He seems to have wanted to take a different route than Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology.

What I like about Wild is his animosity toward Analytical Philosophy, the kind which seems to think it is the only game in town in Anglo-American academia.  I also think he is worthy of our attention since he saw American and English academic philosophy as being bankrupt because of the focus on analytic philosophy and not enough attention paid to existentialism and incorporating phenomenological methods into the day to day existence of the living in the life-world, or Lebenswelt.

I just wanted to keep you posted on my "extra-curricular" activities outside of "school mathematics" ... A certain kind of philosophy still appeals to me, and I think the work of John Wild may help me to articulate my specific animosity toward academic "Anglo-American" Analytic Philosophy.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2018, 01:09:17 pm by Henry »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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Realist Phenomenology? (Roman Ingarden)
« Reply #9 on: September 04, 2018, 12:35:09 am »
Have you heard of a Roman Ingarden?   He was one of Husserl's students.

Ingarden was a realist phenomenologist.

In this 72 page booklet, he claims that Husserl's Phenomenology was interpreted by him in a realist vein!

This is shocking, but exciting as well.   I am currently reading John Wild's attempts to converge Phenomenology and a kind of Realism, and I cringe when he argues in any way against an idealistic view, since this is so crucial in Schopenhauer's philosophy.

Here's the link:  (Phaenomenologica 64) On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism

I did not learn of Ingarden from reading John Wild, but stumbled upon him separately trying to find clarification about Transcendental Idealism versus Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserlian).  I had never considered a Realist Phenomenology. 

When I mention this, please do not be disheartened as though I were abandoning the idealistic view (idealism in the purely philosophical sense, having nothing to do with popular culture's understanding of this word).

I am just intrigued.  That's all.  Curious.

Controversy over the Existence of the World (Volume 1)

Ingardenia

Ingarden is mentioned in this online book (html version):  The Delights of Terror
« Last Edit: September 04, 2018, 10:38:14 am by Henry »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth
« Reply #10 on: October 24, 2019, 10:32:34 am »
I was sent a link to a paper by David Abram, Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth ...

You can find it on his page at academia.edu:

https://independent.academia.edu/DavidAbram

« Last Edit: October 28, 2019, 09:59:59 am by mike »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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If these links are not valid, I will have to take excerpts, or we can check out Library Genesis.

Yes, it seems these were one time links provided to me, and access is denied because the links have expired.  No luck at Genesis.

Here is a link to a webpage containing this "paper" : Magic and the Machine: Notes on Technology and Animism in an Age of Ecological Wipeout

Quote from: Abram
[...] an uncanny form of anxiety begins to darken their dreams and leave a bitter taste whenever they swallow.

I can't resist leaving just an example of this ecological phenomenologist's depth.  Please suspend any prejudices you might feel toward this "eerily insightful" man.  On an old message board, a member once compared David Abram to E.T. since his perception and ability to articulate grand scale scenarios are so amazing, especially to someone like me who is so often grappling within the abstract and mathematical realms of the "magic technologies," an eternally devoted enthusiast living on government relief funds while trying to better understanding at least the fundamentals of these phenomena.  Then again, I feel the "real situation" of our animal bodies as well.   We all must feel this anxiety, not merely from time to time, but constantly.  As the following excerpt suggests, there are those who experience extremes of both of these alternating "collective moods."    I suppose my moods cycle rapidly since I think I experience anxiety and enthusiasm almost simultaneously. 

In my plugged in four walled world, that is, insulated, I am in a trance studying details of the basic implementation of generic programming in C++, at a novice level and quite challenging to me.  There is the excitement of knowing my interests in abstract "modern" algebra and the like have not harmed me in any way.

"Learning math is never a waste of time." ~ Ivan Savov   

And yet I genuinely appreciate Abram speaking to us all on this level, a level where we speak in languages of mood: anxiety vs hypomania : psychotic [homocidal] rage vs psychotic [suicidal] depression.

I believe the most psychologically horrific and even fascinating "stories" must be the ones we are experiencing as "mood machines".

Here is an excerpt from a man far more focused and cognizant than me.  I will not post the entire paper here.   I merely post this to encourage each of us to read it, myself included.

Quote from: David Abram
These two divergent outlooks are not always carried by different groups of people; they can also be felt by the very same individuals at different moments of their life, or even at different moments within a day. This is especially true now that almost every vocation involves engaging to some extent with digital technology and being exposed to the dynamism of its ongoing evolution. And even those who are entirely immersed in the hubbub of urban life, or wholly enmeshed in online forms of interaction, can no longer avoid coming into contact with news of ecological calamity; even if their city has not yet succumbed to rolling power outages, or had its streets inundated by rising floodwaters, they still encounter images of intensifying floods and never-before-seen hurricane winds as those images and video clips bounce around the digital ether. The coverage of news regarding the more-than-human natural world by modern media remains crazily miniscule relative to the coverage of exclusively human goings-on (of human violence and personal scandals), yet not even the most blinkered news organizations can avoid mentioning cyclones and runaway forest fires when these threaten large swaths of the human population.

And so we all come into contact with both trends, and some folks are afflicted—although at different times—by both moods. At one moment, they feel the shuddering horror of the extinction spasm now gripping our planet, at another they’re enlivened by giddy optimism, inspired by the techno-utopian zeal that courses like a river of money through the world of software development, social network apps, and high-tech innovation. In those who are regularly captured by both states of mind, we might expect to see these contrary moods begin to blur and blend into something new and insightful—an understanding of how these two intensifying dynamics actually inform one another. But such is not the case; the two states of mind are so incommensurable that each seems unable to communicate with the other, and so such persons are buffeted back and forth, sometimes afloat with technological optimism, at other times struck dumb with a foreboding that seems to intensify with each passing season.

How, then, can we make sense of this curious juxtaposition?

The full paper is posted at link mentioned above:  Magic and the Machine: Notes on Technology and Animism in an Age of Ecological Wipeout
« Last Edit: October 28, 2019, 10:51:38 pm by mike »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: Husserlian Phenomenology
« Reply #12 on: September 21, 2021, 08:37:08 am »
FIXED hyperlink:

(Phaenomenologica 64) On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism

The other very interesting paper which might help us is SCHOPENHAUER AND HUSSERL: CRITIQUING THE 20TH CENTURY PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRADITION

Quote
As Ted Humphrey points out in his essay “Schopenhauer and the Cartesian Tradition,” Schopenhauer is not the deviant metaphysical and epistemological figure he often is cut out to be. Rather, “because Schopenhauer follows the tendency in Hobbes and Hume to attribute predominance to the will and passions over reason in human nature, he tends to offend the more Cartesian and Kantian tendencies of our present age.”
« Last Edit: September 21, 2021, 09:14:15 am by Mudslide Mike »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~