Old 03-5-2004, 11:57 AM   #1
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I am bored once again here in School Study Hall so here I go....

This post is primarily for the person who asked for an intro to phenomenology...if anyone else learns something, gains pleasure from reading it, or even disputes my 'story' then I am pleased. I am going to kill two birds with one stone...deal with phenomenology and Sartre together.

Phenomenology arose basically out of a single problem...what is called the 'problem of cognition' (this is Husserl's term for the problem as stated in his Ideas of Phenomenology...a book I highly recommend to the uninitated). The problem of cognition is nothing more than 'Can, and if so, how can we have knowledge of the objective world?'. The problem goes all the way back to Descartes. Remember, Descartes believed that the only things we could have indubitable knowledge of are our own thoughts (other conclusions he had, which most all philosophers post-Descartes rejects, and they are all grounded on this knowledge anyway). The backdrop of this is the sense-impression theory of perception. Things in the external world impress my senses, which send those impressions to my mind, I have the ideas of them that sometimes corresponds to the objects that caused the impressions (think of the bent looking oar in the water to see why this view might seem correct). But all we are cognitant of are our ideas, so how do we know if they correspond? The answer is, we don't. The conclusion, solipsism. Nobody wants that, so there was a big reaction to this view. Of course, nobody proved that solipsism is incorrect (and if anyone came closest, I would argue that it was Sartre) but several things happened that had important influences on phenomenology.

Descartes, and other sense-impression theorists, believed that the mind is a completely passive substance...it simply recieves information from impressions and reacts. kant comes along and says 'no no no...the mind is very active...so active in fact that it is the mind itself that provides the very structures that make an experienced world possible'. These are the famous categories...space, time, causality, and so forth. Kant argued that beyond the phenomenal (what is experienced, i.e. structured by the categories) we can have no knowledge...as a matter of fact, it doesn't even make sense to talk about things outside this scheme (that is why the idealists became idealists, they saw the existence of things not experienced, and in light of the active mind, as contradictory and thus rejected them). But, we exist as more than just experience...we are also that thing that is doing the experiencing..that is providing the categories, and so forth (or at least Kant thought). Because we can only experience according to the categories, we cannot experience our true self as it is in itself independent of the projecting structures that it has already been subjected to. This self, the one that cannot be experienced but projects the categories, is called the transcendental self or transcendental I, and is very important (think about Descartes' view of the self...once we bring in Kant, we find that what Descartes thought was the self is not really the true self...that is just one implication). Very important for phenomenology (read almost any phenomenologist and you will run across the term transcendental seemingly a million times...what I said above is basically the ideas that they are referring to).

This is where phenomenology takes off from. Husserl comes in and says that both Descartes and Kant were right about certain things. Descartes was right in that all we are directly aware of are our own thoughts. kant was right in that the mind is active. But, Husserl suggested, neither of those conclusions lead to solipsism, or the view that we cannot have real knowledge of the objective world. What did he propose to offer to show us this? You guessed it, phenomenology.

Phenomenology is a method. The first step of the method is Descartes first step in the 'Meditations'...there we call it methodological doubt, Husserl calls it the 'epoche' taken from the Greek skeptics...it basically means to suspend judgement. This means that you look at phenomena, or your experiences, and you suspend judgement on whether they correspond to external reality. Doing this does two things, or Husserl believed. First, it will provide us with a deeper understanding of consciousness itself...we will examine consciousness as consicousness without the external world hindering us. Furthermore, in doing this, we come to find that certain 'essences' provided to us from what we experience necessarily ('necessarily' is important) lead to the conclusion that they are not mind-dependent...these essences are objective...even though the objects as consciousness are not (except for Sartre)...and solipsism is refuted.

For the most part, most post-Husserlian phenomenologists do not believe that Husserl was successful...and Husserl himself probably did not in the end...he later in his life took a very Kantian turn in his philosophy and pretty much became a full blown idealist. To explain to you what the above is all about, how it is supposed to work, I will use Sartre, because in my view he is quite convincing and I have a much better grasp of his philosophy.

When we look at our experience, we can basically divide them into two types...physical and non-physical (this is not a deep metaphysical issue of materialism or something like that...Sartre doesn't even play that game) it is a very general..and sometimes fuzzy but usually pretty accurate way of thinking about our experience. The physical is basically experiences that are sense-grounded...what we see, hear, touch, and so forth, and the non-physical are basically our ideas, emotions, and so forth (Sartre believed that our emotions and ideas do superviene on the external world, but did not think it was accurate to call the external world either physical or non-physical).

Is there anything about certain objects of our experience, the ones that we would call physical or seem to have an 'objective' aspect to them, that would lead us to believe that this is true...and this something being something that we experience about them? Sartre believed so...and it is the essences that these things have. The essence of these kinds of things...non-mind-dependent things, is what he calls the principle of the series of their appearing. It is not seeing this that led philosophers like Berkeley to remain at the level of phenomena and conclude with idealism.

There are at least two aspects to the principle of the series of the non-mind-dependent....the unknown and the lack of control that we have over this unknown. What is meant by this can be shown by an example and distinguishing it from the mind-dependent.

You are looking at your computer screen right now. What appears to you is an aspect of it...only so many of the sides it has. The sides not given to you in your experience are the unknown...you have to turn the computer around or get up and go look...you can see that it is there or whatever, and then some other side is hidden from you. It is possible that when you got up and looked at the unknown (making it known) that it be different from how you thought it might be, different from how you want it to be, different from how you remembered it the last time, and in the case of some phenomena, nothing (john was not there when I looked for him). The principle of the series is the sum possibilities of ways that a thing can 'be'. This sum is not subject to our minds...not even a miniscule of the possibilities are...I cannot make the computer pop out of existence just by thinking it, I can't make the unknown appear blue just because I think it to, and so forth. We have to physically use our bodies to alter physical things, and that is fine, because our bodies also fall under the non-mind-dependent (I cannot make my brown hair turn red just by thinking it...although I can believe it is by thinking it, but beliefs are mind-dependent...hair is not).

In distinction with these kinds of things, there are mind-dependent things, like ideas, concepts, beliefs, and so forth. These are mind-dependent because there are no aspects that are unknown and it is within our power to decide the principle of their series. The backside of my computer can be blue in my idea, john can be in my imagination of the room even if he is not physically in the room, and so forth. However, even though these things, unlike what we think of as physical objects, are mind-dependent, they are objectively existing realities...everything is 'external' for Sartre...but that is a long conversation in itself.

Later on, Sartre says that he doesn't think that what he has said has refuted solipsism, although he does say some interesting things that he does think his views imply. What is important for this discussion is that you have an idea of phenomenology and an idea of Sartre. What you notice is that they are dealing with a problem and they attempt to resolve it not through logical reasoning, deduction or inductive reasoning or anything like that, or even through experiments, but by examining the appearances themselves and from the appearances suggesting what must be the case. I say this because true phenomenological claims are necessary claims (although just how many of such claims are successful is a matter of debate).

Damn, I knew I would ramble on too much but oh well, enjoy!
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Old 03-5-2004, 12:55 PM   #2
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umm wow
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Old 03-22-2004, 07:21 AM   #3
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Did you actually read it?
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