The Nebulas Philosophy that is Phenomenology

The facts of mental life are real; the self comes first.

Logos rationality applies to the whole domain of human experiences.

Know thy self; start with the self, not the world.

The world is messy, and if you start with the world, your understanding of the world will be as chaotic as the world. But just looking into yourself can be arbitrary and not universal; what applies to me may have no bearing on you.

Phenomenology brackets the external world; it shelves it; it’s the process of lifting the gravel from the river’s edge and sifting out the dirty experiences until you get to the gold. Everyone has some gold. It’s the process of straining diarrhea through your roommate’s plastic strainer because you ate a Nickel when you shouldn’t have. The poop washed through, but the shitty Nickel remains that phenomenology.

Left over after the reduction to the eternal essences of the human mind.

The descriptive theory of the introcasm. The structure of the introcasm.

Absolute certainty, without presuppositions, will always be about internal intentional actions.

The goal is that of deriving apriori statements.

These statements are non-empirical, and they are necessarily true.

Husserl was searching for apriori truths about what it meant to be a human being.

To look directly into the eyes of universals, like the scholastics wanted.

We bootstrap ourselves into a permeant reality.

Problems!

There are a few examples of Husserl doing this. Of this phenomenology being used.

Firstly, phenomenology must be used on the self. Inspect yourself. This must occur for us to figure out what Phenomenology is. We must also know what a phenomenon is. When we reduce the word phenomenon, we see that it is that with is direct, that which is disclosed.

Husserl’s primary method was eidetic variation.

He investigated phenomena but also things like numbers, meaning, and truth. Things he believed to be common in all cognitive beings.

In every case, we end up in a circle. The methodological circle!

We are using internal things to discuss inner things because we have restricted ourselves to internal reality.

Let’s perform an eidetic variation of the human being.

We’ll attribute some predicates to human beings.

We’ll add and subtract predicates to see what sticks.

We see what we can dispense with, the shit, the dirt, the contingent gravel running through the holes in the strainer, and what we cannot dispense with the essences.

What we are looking for!

For some examples, the human mind forgets my girlfriend’s birthday. Is that true of every human mind-No

The human mind thinks it’s the president- is this true of every human mind? No!

How about this?

The human mind is self-conscious; can you dispense with that? No!

It is literally built into the idea of what it means to be a human mind.

Clearly, or rather, so unclearly, we have an infinite amount of predicates, and we aren’t going to finish the first thing we are trying to reduce.

This is what he was trying to do. Separate the essential predicates from the non-essential predicates, and when that is done, you have what it means to be human. You know what it is to be human. Then you take those essences and boil them down further, and now you know what it is to be a human being.

It’s fine to try to find out what it means to be a human being with only internal methods, but in practice, it is quite difficult to do.

Other problems

How do we know these predicates are the essential ones?

It is clear that having three sides is an essential feature of a triangle.

How do I know self-consciousness is an essential feature of the human mind, an essential predicate of what it means to be human?

Husserl assumes that these essential predicates must apply to every human mind because they are essential.

Wittgenstein would have posited that the problem abides in how we use the word essence.

Language is not a model of the psyche.

A claim that essence is essential simply concerns how we define essence in English.

A problem with using what is internal only to you as a foundation for knowledge of the self is you are trapped in a vortex of circular reasoning. Trapped in the introcasm!

If you were skeptical about a source, you wouldn’t get that same source as evidence of that source’s truth. Getting a copy of the same article doesn’t make that article true.

This is a nebulas philosophy.

A philosophy that can’t reach outside the self becomes functionally useless.

Husserl, the fly in the bottle, steps up to the limits of language, and he can’t cross over.

Husserl believed that eventually, we’d figure out what the phenomenological method is and how to apply it to something to get some results and then finally use it to lay the foundation for human knowledge.

For Husserl, we know there are other minds because we have empathy. However, this probably doesn’t need such a grand philosophical explanation.

Some philosophers sacrificed the inner world, claiming tabula rosas and other ephemera, while other philosophers promoted the inner world to the point of solipsism. Those philosophers who crucified the inner world are like a tailor selling a pair of pants with one leg telling me that this is how pants ought to be. My experience for me, about me, says otherwise. The crucifying philosophers can truncate experience and make it much more quantifiable, but this kills how we experience the world.

Pure behavioral psychology can give you some very specific descriptions, but what can it tell you about yourself?

Indeed, you can’t stay inside because you can’t communicate effectively with others.

How can you communicate your mental state to others?

It is better to open up the domain of experience.

Philosophy concerning our experience must be molded to suit our experience, not vice versa.

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