Dillinger4
Es gibt Zeit
Right, here is the thread I promised. I am not great at writing this stuff, so if some of it does not seem clear, point it out and I will do my best to explain. It is from my notes, you see.
I will have to start with an incredibly brief overview of Continental Philosophy
The four main figures of Continental Philosophy are Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (I wont deal with Merleau-Ponty here though).
Husserl was the founder of Phenomenology, Heidegger was also a Phenomenologist, but took it in a radical new direction.
Husserl's main target was "naturalism", the objective, scientific world view codified by empiricist philosophers such as Locke, thinking it was unjustified, and would lead to 'Barbarism' (which in a lot of ways actually has) since a world that is fundementally meaningless and seperate from consciousness is liable to become just inert terrain to be manipulated by technology, rather than something to be understood.
So he developed Phenomenology. If we want to know how things really are, we must forget our unthinking alliegence to naturalism and carefully study how things appear to us. The aim of phenomenology is to intuit essences. This is to be achieved through the Epoche, the method of "bracketing" beliefs about the existence of the world, and our scientific understanding of it. Included within the Epoche is my own (empirical) self, which leaves only consciousness to do bracketing - the "transcendental ego". This "methodological sceptism" leaves Husserl free to describe only what is immanent to conciousness. This isolated consciousness is intention - it is always directed upon an intentional object, which may or may not actually exist. (intentional means to be ABOUT something).
Heidegger came to the view that Husserl's epoche is impossible for the reason that the human being is being-in-the-world. There is no transcendental ego to perform the epoche since our existence is essentially that of engagement with the world.
Our connection to the world is not to be understood as one of knowledge - of a logically independent knowing subject representing a known world (the Lockean assumption) - but rather of one of action.
To exist is not just to "be there", in the sense of "occupy a position in time and/or space" - something presupposed by ALL traditional philosophy, as well as common sense philosophy and science.
This misconception arises through break-downs or disruptions of our engagement with the world (Heidegger uses the example of a blacksmith hammering away at a piece of metal, thinking about usual everyday stuff, and only becomes aware of the hammer when it breaks), which philosophy has fixated upon.
Fundementally, our world is a world of action: the projects and challenges we find in the world are constitutive of both what we are and what it is. However, Heidegger also finds our engagement with the world to be something essentially baseless and disconcerting, liable to lead to anxiety and consequently something that provides us with a motive to misinterpret our own Being.
It is important for me to explain that (I could go quite a bit deeper but that should suffice, for now) before I moved onto Sartre.
Sartre is said to have turned "pale with emotion" when he first heard about Husserl's conception of intentionality (it might be good to look that up if you don't know what it is).
Concieving of consciousness as essentially intentional, according to Sartre, is an antidote to the representational theory of mind (THIS IS A CRUCIAL POINT HERE) according to which we know an object is to have an idea of it/form a representation of it, therefore modifying the mind and somehow "taking in" the form of the object. The belief that "the spidery mind trapped things in its web, covered them with a white spit and slowly swallowed them" (don't you just love Sartre?) is replaced by the idea that consciousness can "burst toward" its object, going beyond itself "on the highway, in the midst of dangers, under a dazzling light" (those quotes are from an article Sartre wrote, I will find the name if anybody wants to read it).
This restores the world its transcendence, since the world cannot be IN consciousness: "a table is not in consciousness... a table is in space, beside the window" (B&N xxvii). Moreover, there are no representations (or ideas) in consciousness - these are "idols invented by the psychologists" (B&N 125)
Consciousness does not exist by having ideas, but by "taking" (bursting forward) intentional objects which exist outside of it. Consciousness is not a thing outside (or inside) the world, but rather an unbreakable relationship with the world (ANOTHER KEY POINT HERE). This undermines the idea of realism and idealism that is created by Descartes and the Cogito, and which is the fundemental mistake assumed by almost all philosophers afterwards.
OK
There is more to come on this. I am going to write about Sartre and "the pursuit of being", but I have to go and eat and then I am off out to a special philosophy lecture thingy. I will be back to continue this, there is more to come.
I will have to start with an incredibly brief overview of Continental Philosophy
The four main figures of Continental Philosophy are Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (I wont deal with Merleau-Ponty here though).
Husserl was the founder of Phenomenology, Heidegger was also a Phenomenologist, but took it in a radical new direction.
Husserl's main target was "naturalism", the objective, scientific world view codified by empiricist philosophers such as Locke, thinking it was unjustified, and would lead to 'Barbarism' (which in a lot of ways actually has) since a world that is fundementally meaningless and seperate from consciousness is liable to become just inert terrain to be manipulated by technology, rather than something to be understood.
So he developed Phenomenology. If we want to know how things really are, we must forget our unthinking alliegence to naturalism and carefully study how things appear to us. The aim of phenomenology is to intuit essences. This is to be achieved through the Epoche, the method of "bracketing" beliefs about the existence of the world, and our scientific understanding of it. Included within the Epoche is my own (empirical) self, which leaves only consciousness to do bracketing - the "transcendental ego". This "methodological sceptism" leaves Husserl free to describe only what is immanent to conciousness. This isolated consciousness is intention - it is always directed upon an intentional object, which may or may not actually exist. (intentional means to be ABOUT something).
Heidegger came to the view that Husserl's epoche is impossible for the reason that the human being is being-in-the-world. There is no transcendental ego to perform the epoche since our existence is essentially that of engagement with the world.
Our connection to the world is not to be understood as one of knowledge - of a logically independent knowing subject representing a known world (the Lockean assumption) - but rather of one of action.
To exist is not just to "be there", in the sense of "occupy a position in time and/or space" - something presupposed by ALL traditional philosophy, as well as common sense philosophy and science.
This misconception arises through break-downs or disruptions of our engagement with the world (Heidegger uses the example of a blacksmith hammering away at a piece of metal, thinking about usual everyday stuff, and only becomes aware of the hammer when it breaks), which philosophy has fixated upon.
Fundementally, our world is a world of action: the projects and challenges we find in the world are constitutive of both what we are and what it is. However, Heidegger also finds our engagement with the world to be something essentially baseless and disconcerting, liable to lead to anxiety and consequently something that provides us with a motive to misinterpret our own Being.
It is important for me to explain that (I could go quite a bit deeper but that should suffice, for now) before I moved onto Sartre.
Sartre is said to have turned "pale with emotion" when he first heard about Husserl's conception of intentionality (it might be good to look that up if you don't know what it is).
Concieving of consciousness as essentially intentional, according to Sartre, is an antidote to the representational theory of mind (THIS IS A CRUCIAL POINT HERE) according to which we know an object is to have an idea of it/form a representation of it, therefore modifying the mind and somehow "taking in" the form of the object. The belief that "the spidery mind trapped things in its web, covered them with a white spit and slowly swallowed them" (don't you just love Sartre?) is replaced by the idea that consciousness can "burst toward" its object, going beyond itself "on the highway, in the midst of dangers, under a dazzling light" (those quotes are from an article Sartre wrote, I will find the name if anybody wants to read it).
This restores the world its transcendence, since the world cannot be IN consciousness: "a table is not in consciousness... a table is in space, beside the window" (B&N xxvii). Moreover, there are no representations (or ideas) in consciousness - these are "idols invented by the psychologists" (B&N 125)
Consciousness does not exist by having ideas, but by "taking" (bursting forward) intentional objects which exist outside of it. Consciousness is not a thing outside (or inside) the world, but rather an unbreakable relationship with the world (ANOTHER KEY POINT HERE). This undermines the idea of realism and idealism that is created by Descartes and the Cogito, and which is the fundemental mistake assumed by almost all philosophers afterwards.
OK
There is more to come on this. I am going to write about Sartre and "the pursuit of being", but I have to go and eat and then I am off out to a special philosophy lecture thingy. I will be back to continue this, there is more to come.
(Once I proved in an online discussion that God exists in the abstract, that was fun because nobody could counter my arguments, but it is not as if I save these little mindgames for later use. Maybe I should write it down somewhere 
