Keith’s Blog

October 1, 2006

Phenomenology & Being, Part III

Filed under: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Existenzphilosophie — Pahndeepah @ 9:05 pm

“The philosopher is the man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding before he can arrive at the notions of a healthy human understanding. If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our understanding we are surrounded by madness.”
–Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (44e)

“Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility of the people elevating themselves to it, but it must not lower itself to the people.”
–G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Schriften 1801–1807, vol. 2 of Werke  (182)

Philosophizing is for every human being, for the benefit of each person and the edification of humanity. From the ancient thinkers of Greece, India and China up to and including the post-modern thinkers of our own day, to philosophize has entailed a willlingness to embrace what few may see in order that as many as possible might understand. Philosophizing in this sense is a form of hunting, the oldest of human endeavors for we have always been on the hunt–for food, for shelter, for love, for truth.

Yet we have so hidden this essential sway of hunting from our eyes–that we are always already hunting something–that what passes for the hunt these days is not much more than a diversionary trifle. In this same vein, many see philosophizing as a way for idle people to pass the time while engineers, scientists, and laborers keep things running. The philosopher must break free of the mass understanding, how the thinker is with the ones-at-large, roaming as part of the many. Hunting what is there but not necessarily seen, philosophizing comprehends that the first thing to be sought after is nothing less than the ownmost being of the thinker himself.

Thus, it is a diversion in which the philosopher partakes by way of diverting his attention from what everybody sees to seeing his own embodiment, his authentic possibility. This is the repositioning that offers (re)pose, the stillness where intellection is most possible. By way of accomplishing this move beyond being among the ones-at-large, the philosopher must at times appear indifferent and at other moments mad because he is not doing according to the way things are usually done.

 

September 6, 2006

Phenomenology Lectures

Filed under: Philosophy, Phenomenology — Pahndeepah @ 4:55 pm

My first lecture in the Phenomenology class this semester can be obtained by clicking this link:

Keith’s First Lecture

Future lectures will generally be on Friday’s beginning 9/08. Feel free to pop by and download the material.

August 23, 2006

The Holy Grail

Filed under: Religion, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Hermeneutics, Life Quests — Pahndeepah @ 3:11 pm

This is a series of interchanges that just took place with my beloved friend Rob on MYSPACE. Over a decade ago, becasue of a very real, yet very psychodelic experience, while watching EXCALIBUR, Rob, myself, and about four others went on a quest for the Holy Grail.  We are still on it:

COMMENT FROM KEITH TO ROB:
 So Glad you found me on here… maybe we can keep in better touch… after sharing the GRAIL, we need to keep in contact. hugs and blessings beloved brother! :)

NOTE FROM ROB TO KEITH:
Speaking of the grail.
I have done quite a bit of research since we were sent on this quest.
I now may have lost the question that lead us into the quest.

But I know these things.
One) the Grail could be the Songe Greail the blood line of christ.

Two) another metaphor for the trasmutation of the human soul from “mud” to “light”

3) the at least three “last resting places” of the one and only holy grail.

I say three buts that not right ” I believe that the grail rests in one of those three places..”

Now I believe that there is a blood line of christ one way or another.. and I believe that there is a cup that was used or not but has enough faith in it to make it real.

any thoughts??
NOTE FROM KEITH TO ROB:
Hola hermano… sorry I have been long in replying. I wanted to meditate on the question.

I would say that the Holy Grail is the fullness of containment that is the essence of everything in the Cosmos.

The Cosmos is the Holy Grail. What we seek that is seen of the cipher from Arthurian legend is the ability to hold up and give forth the energy of the Cosmos which is the encompassing expression of LIFE itself. According to one Platonic dialog (TIMAEUS), because the Demiurge (CREATIVE ENTITY) in full communion with the IDEAS or FORMS sees that one of those Forms is LIFE, there must be something that lives which corresponds back to that Form.

That which lives most fully is the Cosmos itself and all other life within it is a variation on the IDEA.

The Holy Grail is the cipher of our ability to drink the Cosmos, to contain the Cosmos in ourselves, and because the essence of CONTAINMENT is to take in so that it may be given back out, the cipher of the Grail is the most complete because it reminds us that we are the in-and-out flux of Cosmic Life.

We are the Holy Grail, my brother.

We are the bloodline of the CHRISTOS, the annointment that is taken in and given back, from LIFE to LIFE.

We were always hunting our very own selves that are the ideal container of LIFE’S bounty, that already takes in all and always gives back all.

Love you
Does anybody else have any thoughts on the Holy Grail???

August 4, 2006

Phenomenology & Being, Part II

Filed under: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Existenzphilosophie — Pahndeepah @ 6:31 pm

As these ruminations unfold, I note that before I jump into further considerations of the phenomenological method, I want to situate what I am doing just a little bit more.There are three kinds of peple active in most disciplines: trailblazers, researchers, and bookkeepers.The trailblazer is he who goes where none has gone yet or very rarely. He may be following hints or he may be doing wholly original work. The key is that it is a place not elucidated very well heretofore. This makes of the trailblazer a kind of founding figure or adventurous inventor.The Researcher, as the name implies, goes where the trailblazer has been and in a sense makes sure everything was taken into account. He is not interested in being wholly original although he may put a new spin on old work. The research is a kind of supporting figure or establishing guard.The Bookkeeper does not set out to find the new or rework the old. He just keeps everything neatly in the account ledger. The bookkeeper is a kind of caretaking figure or meticulous curator.

Most disciplines in the academy are clearly demarcated enough that a person can only dream of becoming a trailblazer, hopes to be at least a good researcher, but most often settles for just keeping the books straight.

Horizontalizing the data, all three have a purpose that intersects and makes a discipline viable. The problem comes from one becoming disproportionately important to the hindrance, or worse the exclusion, of the other two.

I am going to be honest and say that I do not see myself as much more than a bookkeeper in philosophy. While my mind is agile, it is also encyclopedic and tends to keeping things straight. This does not mean I cannot make leaps into the unseen. But such leaps are more often than not for purposes of clarifying the record.

I do try to blaze trails in my own soul. That reshapes my own discipline (Gr. askesis) but not a shared discipline a la the academy (Gr. methodos). I will say that I believe if an academic has done little to blaze original trails in his own soul, there will not be much to his work even if it is “original” research.

 

“If it is true that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be reflection or coincidence it prejudges what it will find, then once again it must recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been “worked over,” that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both “subject” and “object,” both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them. Seeing, speaking, even thinking (with certain reservations, for as soon as we distinguish thought from speaking absolutely we are already in the order of reflection), are experiences of this kind, both irrecusable and enigmatic. They have a name in all languages, but a name which in all of them also conveys significations in tufts, thickets of proper meanings and figurative meanings, so that unlike those of science, not one of these names clarifies by attributing to what is named a circumscribed signification. Rather, they are the repeated index, the insistent reminder of a mystery as familiar as it is unexplained, of a light which, illuminating the rest, remains at its source in obscurity. If we could rediscover within the exercise of seeing and speaking some of the living references that assign them such a destiny in a language, perhaps they would teach us how to form our new instruments, and first of all to understand our research, our interrogation, themselves.”

–Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Selected from The Visibile & the Invisible and appearing in Basic Writings (248-49).

Approaching the method of transcendental phenomenology within the philosophy of existence requires agreement upon a kind of map. We have begun the mapping by grasping that world-being appears as both the ALL and the ONE. And as kindred of world-being, BEing-in-kind-with-the-world, we apperceive ourselves within PLURALITY and as SINGULARITY.Filling the map in further: There are three categories of human comprehension…

  • EXPRESSION
  • MEANING
  • VALUE

Moreover, there are two limnal conditions of being human…

  • MATERIALITY (the stuff of our bodies)
  • MINDFULNESS (the stuff of our spirits/minds)

The three categorical comprehensions of expression, meaning, and value intermix through each other within the encompassing horizons of materiality and mindfulness. The categories and the horizons –over the course of history–are continually changing and evolving even as they are evolved and changed. The ancient debate between physis (Nature, stuff) and nomos (Nurture, custom) is unending. Nature and nurture metamorphose out of each other into ever new ways of being-in-the-world. This is the movement of mindfulness in history and the progression of history by being-mindful.

Knowledge for the sake of knowing is taking up one way or one thing in order to be somewhere or someone else. For this reason, philosophizing should not strive for theoretical purity at the expense of life-world simplicity nor practical forthrightness at the expense of life-world complexity. Rather, philosophizing should take-on the duty to imagine how things are possible while embracing the responsibility to judge what things are necessary. Only thus can we achieve to ever deeper levels of understanding, ever broader expanses of comprehension.

Nonetheless, such a radical uncovering requires that all investigation and research be interconnected as well as interpenetrating. Methodology should be explicitly designed to guard against what Jose Ortega Y Gasset calls, “the barbarism of specialization.”

Human beings are singularities, whole mind/body continuums with thoughts, desires, affective receptors, etc. We are not totally free to act as we choose. We choose only what is present before us in phenomena. The freedom is limited, not absolute. We are given a number of possibilities from which to pick depending upon the actualization of previous possibilities.

Thus we are forever grounded in a moment destined by a past and purposed toward a future. Past/present/future exist simultaneous in every moment.

 

“The visible about us seems to rest in itself. It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand. And yet it is not possible that we blend into it, nor that it passes into us, for then the vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible. What there is then are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them – but something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look, things we could not dream of seeing “all naked’’ because the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh. Whence does it happen that in so doing it leaves them in their place, that the vision we acquire of them seems to us to come from them, and that to be seen is for them but a degradation of their eminent being? What is this talisman of color, this singular virtue of the visible that makes it, held at the end of the gaze, nonetheless much more than a correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation of its own sovereign existence? How does it happen that my look, enveloping them, does not hide them, and, finally, that, veiling them, it unveils them?”

–Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Selected from The Visibile & the Invisible and appearing in Basic Writings (249).

What I know is the passing of I through-the-life-world.

What I project is the coming of I with-the-life-world.

What I reflect is the happening of I in-the-life-world. The boundaries of I-ness within the I are then the past and the future as they have been and may be experienced. The boundary of I-ness outside the I is the spatio-temporal not-I-ness of the world. This Other is that which surrounds and encompasses, interacts and interchanges with the unmovable spot.In all of these cases I am dealing with objects; only objects can be known or apprehended. Even the I is being considered as a known object although it is also the knowing subject. The establishment of an idea of the fluid self gives me the ability to perceive, conceive, adjudge, remember and imagine more than one absolute world-view.

Yet most of our lives we apprehend our context via conventional ways of looking at shared phenonemna we would otherwise see differently if not ignore. Such apprehension is by first accepting the convention then reflecting on the perception.

The clock, for example, is a truly rational instrument whose rationality is ignored for its usefulness. Yet its usefulness is as precise ratioing of time. The clock, by convention, provides a mean or an averaged approximation rather than a holistic representation. This is accomplished by first accept, in some way, that the clock is a kind of measurement that converts the temporal duration into spatial movement (the arc of the pendulum or the sweep of the hands). This is the steady progression from one number to another, a way of counting that signifies change. You may experience what is called a minute of time by sitting perfectly still, doing nothing, yet in the lapse of moments, you know glancing at a clock before and after that there has been movement nonetheless.

And we are always moving as I said somewhere else. Never are we still. But does the clock appropriately capture the whole meaning of that movement or just provide something a little too approximate while attempting to be exact?

We are mortal which primarily is being toward death, moving to the (apparent) end of life. In the experience of time/space we call embodied consciousness, there are two states and two functions. The two fundamental states: being awake and being upright. The fundamental functions: questioning and moving.

We sustain the two fundamental states so that we may fulfill the two fundamental functions. Our being in the world is limited by the absence of answers and the absence of stillness. Our hands, empty and grasping, reach out toward that which is both far and near: distant corporeally and close mentally. I believe that we mistakenly separate these secondary structures called body and mind en lieu of the primary experience of embodiment.

The fundamental movement of being human is “to take.” This makes us dependent upon the content of the world to provide us options toward which to act. The general constitution from this being-in-the-world is called “to partake” which reveals the intersubjective character of both what we “take-from” and what we “take-in.”

 

“…a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world – less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.”

–Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Selected from The Visibile & the Invisible and appearing in Basic Writings (250).

All philosophy must sooner or later treat of the facticity of being embodied consciousness, of being a SELF-AWARE, FLESHLY entity in a physical world. While I can take apart my being and separate myself into various pieces, none of those pieces means anything outside of a relation to the other pieces. Moreover, the lines of demarcation are rarely more than merely arbitrary.I have a body that is capable of self-movement. That movement is in some cases working without my having to direct it. In other cases I direct the movement.I am breathing and my heart is beating as I type. I am only directing the typing. So I have at least two kinds of movement: autonomic, or self-regulatory, and voluntary, or willed.Without the unwilled (involuntary) activity there can be no willing action.And yet, this is not to say that there is no target for the autonomic. Survival, in a sense, moves the self-regulatory. The function of any autonomic organ is for the survival of the organism. To be deprived of any organ system is death. The organism can live only as long as the organs all function.

This functioning is the ontological character of involuntary movement.

We are never still no matter how still we try to become. Many times we hear about the shark that never ceases swimming even when it is sleeping. To stop is to drown. We too are always on the go in our sleep or in our most quiet meditative moments because the organs never cease working.

The body is always at work until it stops in death.

When we seek to become still, then, of what do we speak? The organs continue, even the brain as organ does not cease at our most quiet moment. It is not body that must be stilled but spirit, or mindfulness (German Geist, Latin Spiritus, Greek Nous).

As embodied consciousness, our ability to will is backgrounded by the working power of the involuntary but foregrounded in the context of thinking. 

“The look, we said, envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style, and yet the views taken are not desultory – I do not look at a chaos, but at things – so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command.”

–Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Selected from The Visibile & the Invisible and appearing in Basic Writings (250-51).

August 3, 2006

Phenomenology & Being

Filed under: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Existenzphilosophie — Pahndeepah @ 5:16 pm

This begins the reworking of a blog that I originally posted on myspace but I think has more to say here and will be more available as well for classroom use. I open with some fairly long quotes from Heidegger and Jaspers to help orient those who may not be so familiar with existential phenomenology. By way of introduction to these quotes, let me define DASEIN as “open existence”, how we relate to what is going on; and EXISTENZ as “the possibility for self-actualization,” how we are always the fullness of our decisive possibilities.

“…[A]ccording to its essence, philosophy never makes things easier, but only more difficult. And it does so not just incidentally, not just because its manner of communication seems strange or even deranged to everyday understanding. The burdening of historical Dasein, and thereby at bottom of Being itself, is rather the genuine sense of what philosophy can achieve. Burdening gives back to things, to beings, their weight (Being). And why? Because burdening is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the arising of everything great, among which we include above all else the fate of a historical people and its works. But fate is there only where a true knowing about things rules over Dasein. And the avenues and views of such a knowing are opened up by philosophy.

“The misinterpretations by which philosophy remains constantly besieged are mainly promoted by what people like us do, that is, by professors of philosophy. Their customary, and also legitimate and  even useful business is to transmit a certain educationally appropriate acquaintance with philosophy as it has presented itself so far. This then looks as though it itself were philosophy, whereas at most it is scholarship about philosophy.

“When we mention and correct both of these misinterpretations, we cannot intend that you should now come at one stroke into a clear relation with philosophy. But you should become mindful and be on your guard, precisely when the most familiar judgments, and even supposedly genuine experiences, unexpectedly assail you. This often happens in a way that seems entirely innocuous and is quickly convincing. One believes that one has had the experience oneself, and readily hears it confirmed: “nothing comes” of philosophy; “you can’t do anything with it.” These two turns of phrase, which are especially current among teachers and researchers in the sciences, express observations that have their indisputable correctness…

“It is entirely correct and completely in order to say, “You can’t do anything with philosophy.” The only mistake is to believe that with this, the judgment concerning philosophy is at an end. For a little epilogue arises in the form of a counterquestion: even if we can’t do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us, provided that we engage ourselves with it? Let that suffice for us as an explication of what philosophy is not…
–Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (12-13)

“THERE IS truth, we think, as if that were self-evident. We hear and speak truths about things, events, and realities that are unquestionable to us. We even are confident that truth will ultimately triumph in the world.

“But here we stop short: Little can be seen of a reliable presence of truth. For example, common opinions are for the most part expressions of the need for some support: one would much rather hold to something firm in order to spare himself further thought than face the danger and trouble of incessantly thinking further. Moreover, most of what people say is imprecise, and in its apparent clarity is primarily the expression of hidden practical interests. In public affairs, there is so little reliance on truth among men that one cannot do without an attorney in order to make a truth prevail. The claim to truth is turned into a weapon even of falsehood. Whether truth will prevail seems to depend on favorable chance events, not on truth as such. And in the end, everything succumbs to the unexpected
 – Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie (33-34)

I am coming into my own at the dawn of the twenty first century. All around me, after decades of psychologistic introspection, reflection is becoming rarer and rarer. The twentieth century witnessed the effects of discovering that certainty is not so certain. The ideologies of the nineteenth century became the totalitarianism of the twentieth. Many people, including myself, seem to float around in Prufrockian indecision; those who do not have the halting character act too quickly with a pseudo-decisiveness. Neo-liberals are sure globalisation is destroying human as well as natural diversity. Neo-conservatives revel in the rhetoric of World War II while trying to press the advantage of being the only super-power. Amerika is set on a course by politicians and merchants that will soon encounter a Spenglerian fork: Are we at the End of Old Times or the Beginning of Something New? The choice we make at the fork will determine how we answer the more fundmental Socratic questions, Where are we going? From whence did we come?

We have made ourselves more aware of the physical world in which we live as well as more cognizant of each other, inter- and intra-culturally. Nonetheless, as bright as such a scientific broadening of the mind may appear, the problems of past/present neglect and/or abuse of the earth, not to mention of each other, communicates to us the great probability of a dim future. How are we to change the course of environmental suicide and/or cultural homogenization? For we cannot be so naive as to think that we can, at this point, stop the interdependence of socio-economic structures anymore than we can return to a time when we did not waste/destroy our natural resources.

The emphasis for reform has run the gambit between individual awareness (existentialism and eco-anarchism) to an over-riding community involvement (Marxism, certain deep ecologies, and eco-feminism). The general consensus has been that humanity cannot continue on the same path(s) yet we also cannot come to a full stop in changing course. Still, holding aside the destiny of Amerika as a done deal–i.e. recognizing that the Spenglerian fork may be a false dichotomy–we can use philosophic technique to (re)orient our thinking. If we can carefully get back to the basis of contemporary action, deconstructing the scaffolding layer by layer, correcting the correctable and accepting the essential, we may possibly start at a more propitious juncture in the road if not find our selves on an entirely different path.The main thing–socially, politically, ethically–is to take responsibility for being wrong and not to hold to dogmatic assertions about historic destiny, human nature, or physical reality. We seek after what we share, how we exchange with each other: communicability. This does not limit us to the confines of words. Communication can come in many forms. But learning to appreciate communication is all around us in each of our actions will be paramount to the evolution of our collective and individual world views.

My experience in the academy demonstrates to me that the benefits of transcendental phenomenology and the philosophizing of possible Existenz have been overlooked as providing the general framework within which a productive dialogue can be expressed for the creation of an enlightened environment.

The on-going purpose of a regular public journal by someone claiming to have a vocation in philosophizing must be to examine the steps between mere existence (DASEIN) and Self-Actualization (possible EXISTENZ). Such an examination opens-up potentialities for future interactive discourse among human beings, between humanity and the earth, and betwixt possible-existence and having-to-be. 

“The first answer to the question of being arises from the following basic experience:

“Whatever becomes an object for me is always a determinate being among others, and only a mode of being. When I think of being as matter, energy, spirit, life, and so on—every conceivable category has been tried—in the end I always discover that I have absolutized a mode of determinate being, which appears within the totality of being, into being itself. No known being is being itself.

“We always live, as it were, within a horizon of our knowledge. We strive to get beyond every horizon which still surrounds us and obstructs our view. But we never attain a standpoint where the limiting horizon disappears and from where we could survey the whole, now complete and without horizon, and therefore no longer pointing to anything beyond itself. Nor do we attain a series of standpoints constituting a totality in which we arrive at absolute being by moving through the horizons—as in circumnavigating the earth. For us, being remains open. On all sides it draws us into the unlimited. Over and over again it is always causing some new determinate being to confront us.”

–Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie (17)

 

Philosophizing is both a practical and a theoretical way of approaching a topic.

The practicality comes from philosophy being that way of apprehending which is the art or skill of making the questions that need asking. Philosophy is born from the facticity of our being-inquisitive. Anyone who asks questions is on the way to philosophizing. What determines if the questioner achieves to philosophy?

Whenever something comes into view, especially something we have rarely if ever experienced, we will begin to collect data so that we may learn about it. The data collection can be of three kinds which are not mutually exclusive and tend to help each other: a) common sense collection, which will gather just enough information to assess the familiarity/strangeness as well as the benefits/dangers; b) scientific collection, which will gather more info in order to categorize the kind of thing being experienced and postulate further explorative potentials according to the matter and form of the thing; and c) philosophic collection, which will gather the information that allows the thing to be seen as both a-part of our experience and why it heretofore was, still is, and possibly will be something apart from us.

When we philosophize we seek those questions that will orient us and free us. Philosophy is not always replacing common sense or necessarily superseding science. The skill of formulating the question that needs to be asked masters the realization that there is more to some given experience than how it is traditionally received or how it is assessed from methodical specialization. The very practicality of philosophy is that it can broaden our capabilities of experience in order to not reject something out of hand or overly restrict it to one kind of viewpoint.

Having acheived to the practical virtue of not letting something be lost or truncated, the theoretical aspect comes forward. In theorizing, (Gr. theoria = to contemplate) we choose to enter into a special relation with a given possibility. The skill of doing-by-questions (asking what needs to be asked) becomes the art of seeing-through-questions (needing to ask what is necessary-for-this). Philosophical contemplation is, therefore, creative reflection. Thinking theoretically, variations and possibilities that are not at first glance present become obvious. Moreover, what may seem necessary on a first practical assessment may be revealed as an accident of the moment. Creative reflection makes a place in the world where something can be experienced in a detached relationship, detached from mitigating circumstances and presuppositions.

Philosophy translates as the love of wisdom… but philos (love) is a kind of brother or freindly love, a love of and by relationship. While sophia is a kind of pure wisdom, a way of doing and seeing that both transcends and encompasses everyday and specialized knowledges. Wisdom itself means “doomed to see” or “to have to do seeing” or “to have to see in order to do.”

Philosophizing is how we reach further to grasp what is possible.

—–

Existence is always already being-possible. To say “this exists” is to enact the powerful ability to draw some-thing from out of the jumbled every-thing. To say “I exist” is to recognize your own being as that which steps-out-from the undistinguished as some-one.

A philosophy of existence is an attempt at making a broad, encompassing grasp of our ownmost (authentic) power as beings: stepping-out to behold.

We are those ones who disclose ourselves between already belonging to something and always longing to be free . By such philosophizing, we mitigate the danger that existence must be only sinking back into an infinite oblivion (automatic nihilism). Practicing such contemplation guards as well against an unhealthy obsession to be totally free from everything until we mistake the Ego as the center/source of ALL (metaphysical solipsism).

To be the one that can see what stands out as well as the one who stands out brings the responsibility of learning how to make viable distinctions as well as comprehending when to let go of distinctions.

“Such is the course of our progressing knowledge. By reflecting upon that course we ask about being itself, which always seems to recede from us, in the very manifestation of all the appearances we encounter. This being we call the encompassing. But the encompassing is not the horizon of our knowledge at any particular moment. Rather, it is the source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible even as a horizon.

“The encompassing always merely announces itself—in present objects and within the horizons—but it never becomes an object. Never appearing to us itself, it is that wherein everything else appears. It is also that due to which all things not merely are what they immediately seem to be, but remain transparent.”
–Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie (18)

 

Obviously as I try to philosophize in this public space, I am unpacking my own historic thinking… not that my thoughts are of great historical weight but that they come from the history of my being a thinker in this place and at this time. Philosophizing existence is beholding the authenticity of our relationship to the world, between each other, and within our ownmost selves.

As an entity that is in-the-world, that inhabits world-being as well as contributes to the entirety of world-being, I regularly enact the disclosure of the All-in-General and the One-in-Particular. This is how world-being appears to embodied consciousness, as the encompassing horizon of all possible experience and as the compassable experience of a possibility.

When I turn such a recognition on my own being as a worldly entity, I behold how I am part of general human kind as well as my own person. In our reflective comprehension that our own being mirrors the basic conditions of world-being, we live our singularity within the plurality of our kindred.

The reflective awareness that we are both many and one, whole and part becomes the hostoricity of our conscious embodiment. This historicity means the active engagement of those circumstances that ex-change the generality of being for specificity and transfrom specific aspects of A-being into general structures. Such an active engagement is the life-world: the place where life itself grows and recedes, succeeds and fails.

We must build a bridge between general, theoretical living and particular, practical life. From doing science to being religious, from scribling lists to writing poetry, studies in the philosophy of existence must be brought back to the center of thinking: Experience of the Life-World.

There are basically five philopraxic notions that add to the social and historical investigations necessary for a broad, open existential project:

  1. The singular subject is the true object-entity (or objectity) for the Existenzphilosophie.
  2. Realizing singular subjects can only be accomplished when the investigator knows with whom/what the subject has relationship and toward who/what (s)he is in relation.
  3. Because the structure of objectity is as at least as complex as the world in which we find ourselves, we do not start at the level of simple impression and may never achieve to a lasting, clear-cut explication.
  4. All philosophy of existence as a human studies project resolves into a hermeneutic circle never achieving a finished goal only recognizing an encountered target as the next starting place for investigation.
  5. All such hermeneutics, because they uncover meaning and revolve around value, will offer dual expressions and therefore a choice for the next study: treating indirectly the singular person qua fellow-subject from his/her point of view or considering directly the singularity qua objective occurrence from the perspective of the investigator.

All of these praxical axioms revolve around one essential NEXUS:

Human beings are embodied consciousnesses, living bodies expressing the values of living mind in a meaningfully enjoined life-world.

 

“As I Elucidate the realm of the encompassing for myself, the dark walls of my prison seem to become transparent. I see the open space, and all there is can become present to me.—As I then ascertain the truth that is to reveal being to me, it is as if I were following the light and became free.—But as long as this light does not fall on anything, I and all things with me seem to be dissolved into unreality by its radiance. I seem to die from lucidity. I cannot love because nothing is real either in me or before me. There must be something that grows in the light of truth: the question of reality itself remains the ultimate question of philosophizing.

“EVEN BEFORE we begin to philosophize, the question of reality seems to be already answered in every moment of our life. We deal with things, and obey the modes of reality as they have been handed down to us. There is this human existence, there are these demands and laws; human relations have an orderly arrangement and there are correct ways to govern them. Bodies exist; we find causal regularity in natural processes. Atoms exist, and energy. There are techniques for mastering nature; nature seems reliable, although the technical results of our knowledge often come about in ways scarcely different from those of primitive magic—with as little comprehension and just about as thoughtlessly.

“In this unquestioning attitude we achieve a seemingly adequate view of the presence of reality. The problem arises only as I become conscious of a lack: when I desire reality that I neither yet know nor myself am, when this reality cannot be deliberately attained by productive and venturesome action or planning in the world, only then do I begin to philosophize. I inquire about reality.

–Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie (65-66) 

The Cross & the Sword

Filed under: Religion, Politics, Christianity — Pahndeepah @ 4:18 pm

It seems that there is a growing movement among conservative Christians to stop the flag waving and the absolute idientification of Christianity with the Republican party. Everyone should got on the NYTIMES site and take a look at this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/30pastor.html

I am always amused by so-called “Bible” Christians who claim to be practicing a religion like that of the biblical apostles. I am amused because the apostles did not have a bible, other than the Hebrew one, and did the following things that most conservative, bible-based christians today would find most foul:

1. Early Christians held everything in common in order to directly serve the poorest and sickest members of the society.

2. Early Christians did not play sports or go to the theater except when they were the sport themselves.

3. Early Christians did not, could not, belong to the military. Conversion to Christianity originally meant that you would leave the military if you were active or refuse to serve if called upon.

 4. Jesus admonition to render unto caesar what is caesar’s means to let the powers of the world be concerned about money and authority and you be concerned about your soul.

 Yeah… “bible based” Christianity is a convenience because many of these things I mention are not there directly in the text but require a very firm understanding of the history of the religion to know how much it is currently off track.

Hello world & Welcome!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Pahndeepah @ 4:15 am

So I start my blogging on IndieWriter today. I am excited. I will be culling at first stuff from old blogs in other places as well as letters I have written over the years to diverse friends and colleagues. Whatever I generate here that becomes actual research for me, I will edit and turn into research documents on my website. I look forward to feedback and dialog.

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