Our Lack of Freedom in Being determinate beings; Ideas I Part 9

I always know what this thing is in front of me. Fuck it, no I don't. Damn, I already said I did. It was always and already a shitty songwriter.

In Ideas I we see that we are dealing with absolute truths (eidetic truths). In the last post we saw how an object could forever be determined. The eternal determination was due to eternal possibility of anything being seen from an infinite amount of places. No matter how much we are fulfilled in the idea, there will forever be a phenomenological lack in the perspectives that had given us ideal clarity on that object. To be more precise, there will always be a lack of phenomenological description. We made the distinction between the idea as fulfillment and phenomenological description as a descriptive science whereby description never ended because the seeing always being inadequate. This theme of inadequacy finds a different sense in the idea of always being determinate beings. While it's an eidetic truth that we can never "fully know" an object, we can just as much say that it's an eidetic truth that we are always determining this never-fully-realizable object. The imperfection of the object understood and determination of this object understood are always the case regardless of whether we want it to be or not, meaning it's beyond our volition for us to not be determinate beings, and to always be in a place where we are inadequately seeing things. Of course, this "problem" is solved when the idea is understood as the fulfillment of a temporal process happening in space, or the self recognizing itself (Hegelian verbiage), but as was stated before, we are operating as phenomenologists meaning we are operating independent of Being fullfilled beings. We are "owed" this much by our Cartesian meditations and phenomenological epoches whereby we are no longer subjects in the work, "but transcendental egos" (pure observations of phenomena). In the rigor of our work and the understanding of what happens to us regardless of our mere modes of intentionality, we are owed the place where we don't exist as subjects in the work. What then is the other sense-side of imperfection in perennial determination? In this post we will see through Husserl that in Being determinate beings, we precisely lack what is classically called "freedom" in the most understood sense. We will see another sense of the way in which we occur regardless of the fact that we want to occur like this or not.

Husserl introduces us to "regional ontologies" whereby "an object determined by the regional genus has, as object, in so far as it is actual, its a priori predesignated modes of being perceivable, somehow objectvatable clearly or obscurely, conceivable, demonstrable." A regional ontology is this "always and already" (Derridean verbiage) of consciousness whereby thing always happen to it regardless of anything possible getting in the way of it. We are given over to predesignated modes of making things into objects. We are in a region. We are being in a region. Husserl takes the "Material Thing" as his example of a region. The region of being determines something called "Material Thing." The "Material Thing" is our regional example that consciousness grasps. What is involved in the constitution of this region of the "Material Thing?" "What is involved is the following: the idea of the physical thing, to remain with this region, if we speak of it now, is represented in the manner peculiar to consciousness by the conceptual thought, 'physical thing,' with a certain noematic composition. To every noema there essentially corresponds an ideally closed group of possible noemata which have their unity by being capable of a synthetical unification by coincidence." The physical thing has a certain noematic composition, meaning there's a way in which the physical thing makes sense to us. As we saw in a prior post, the noema was the sense of the object independent of the object understood as the index for our attempts at understanding the sense-happening that happens when we conceive an object. What is the composition of us making sense into an object? Whatever this is (which is a further task of Phenomenology beyond the initial description given by Husserl pertaining to "levels of the noema") is what's called the "noematic composition." Working with the levels that Husserl addressed before, he states that the physical thing has certain different senses that eventually make up (synthesis) the noema of the object. The one sense of the object (the harmonious sense Husserl calls it) is enveloped by noemata which synthesize into it's one mode of sense. These noemata are ideally closed meaning they are off-limits to us in being able to change them into anyway which we want. They combine by coincidence whereby we have no choice in this synthesis of coincidence. This may seem complicated but upon closer inspection is very simple. The parts they combine to make up the whole of the sense happening happen by coincidence. We can't make a coincidence happen. We can't make a coincidence of consciousness happen or not happen. We are always making a synthesis out of sense-parts into one noema that represents the harmonious sense of everything that happened before it. Even in this harmonious noema though we don't have freedom to effect this harmony into something other that what it is. The noemata happen by coincidence so this is by far at a distance from our practicing egos of volition. The noema itself happens in it's harmony at a distance too from our practicing egos of volition. We are already in the process of making sense of something without us being aware of it. I see somebody or something and am already ahead of myself in understanding what it is even without calling it by a name. Husserl elaborates on this idea further when he states "If the noema, as here, is a harmonious one, then intuitive and especially originarily presentive noemata are found in the group--noemata in which all other sorts of noemata of the group are fulfilled in the identifying coincidence, drawing from them the confirmation, the fullness of the power of reason in the case of positionality." The noema is the harmony of the sense-making that has a group of noemata that leads up to its fulfillment. The noemata are fulfilled in the noema. The workings of sense-happenings is fulfilled in sense-happening itself. A work becomes fulfilled. Noemata find their way into coincidentally identifying. They move onto confirmation of an object. They move onto a fulfilling intuition. Noemata have a teleological character in getting to a position-place where something is confirmed. It's easy to understand the sheer amount of levels one can conceive in this specific phenomenological project. These occurrences happen independent of us though. The fullness in which reason understands itself is something that we never chose for but was always going to happen. Husserl explains the harmonious noema and the group noemata more clearly when he states "We can make the noema or the physical thing-sense adequately give to us; but the multiple physical thing-senses, even taking in their fullness, do not contain the regional essence, 'physical thing,' as an originarily-intuitive composition immanent in them." We can think of the object as the object and when we do this we have something called the noema of the object. In this sense we are giving ourselves the thing-sense "adequately." The things (noemata) that make up the sense though don't contain something called the "physical thing." They are on their way towards something they "know nothing about." The regional essence called the "physical thing" happens at the level of noema, i.e, where the noemata coincidentally form a noema. What is original and intuitive to us is the idea of us being in an absolute present mode of sense-being-made. The regional essence happens by accident of noemata, not because of them. The individual essence of a physical thing is something that happens by accident of a process that we can never really know about. When we are making sense though, we can understand this as the noema of whatever is the object of our senses desires. On the a priori level that Husserl allows himself to speak of (and we as phenomenologists accept) we have no freedom in the operation of noemata, nor do we have freedom in the sense-happening in real time understood as the noema concept. This lack of freedom is taken even a step further when Husserl states "what remains undetermined and open in the first place can be made determinate and intuitive in free fantasy. In the continuation of this always more perfect intuitional, more precisely determining process of fantasy, we are in a wide measure free; indeed, at random we can intuitionally ascribe to the fantasied centaur more precisely determining properties and changes in properties; but we are not completely free provided we ought to progress in the sense of a harmonious course of intuition in which the subject to be determined is identically the same and can always remain harmoniously determinable." Husserl eludes to the free-fantasied centaur again as an example of something we can completely change at will allowing us the freedom of morphology, but because we have this freedom doesn't mean we are free in the freedom of morphology. In the process of morphing anything we want in our imaginations into a difference from it's original we are on a course that we aren't aware of that is happening harmoniously. Every time I morph the centaur into what I want, say a centaur with wings that's flying with a hard-cover book on its head, this process of morphology is predetermined by the sense and eidetic truth of determination and development. The centaur as original idea to me is being further determined in my ostensible "freedom." Certainly I seem free to ascribe any determinations I want to it, but why am I determining it in any other way at all? Even in fantasy, I am not free because I am a determining being even in free floating consciousness. I'm adding, subtracting (positing/negating) at will. All these modes of morphology are predefined by the situation of determining anything whatsoever any way I please. Freedom's lack of freedom lies precisely in the fact of Being a determinate being. Freedom is limited to determination. In all freedom of morphology, the "X" stays the same. The centaur is always the centaur no matter what I do to it in my imagination. This centaur always remains the same as the original object of my morphological desire. Whatever I add or subtract to it is a difference from the original, but the index of my free-fantasy always stays the same. This is always the case and whatever I change it to is always by way of determination and not something else that is other than determination. Even in the imagination, being is being, as Being-determinate. Husserl gives space the privileged place of this region of the physical thing. "We are, e.g., bound by a law-conforming space as a frame prescribed for us by the idea of any possible physical thing whatever. How arbitrarily we may deform what is fantasied, spatial forms are always again converted into spatial forms." Space forms the irreducibility of determinate experience. No matter what we do to the object in our mind, in ours and Husserl's example, the centaur, it will always turn into something else that's spatial. The ontological region of the "physical thing" is condemned to space. What would be a free-fantasy and determination of a physical thing if there was no space? Even if I demolish the idea of the centaur completely from my mind, what's left is space, maybe a background for instance, and if I take away the background, I have black. I have a background with no foreground thus making the background the foreground. I have something determined at all times. This is an eidetic truth of consciousness. Any perception can be endlessly amplified without losing the notion of the original "X." In all cases to this last sentence I am determining. In the amplification, I am determining, in having an original notion that would be made for my morphology, I am determining. Determination is the eidetic truth of consciousness, that can just as easily be called "intentionality," but each have their different sense.

In this post we found three different ways in which we are not free as conscious beings. 1. The noemata which make up the noema of experience happen to us independent of volition. 2. The noema happens to us independent of volition. 3. Even when I put myself into making a free-fantasy out of an "X," I am always first determining the "X as "X" (the noematic sense), and afterwords changing the "X" into a difference that goes along a harmonious process of morphing. My active changing is something that happens without myself being aware of the process in "the middle of" doing the changing. In this formal sense, I have "freedom" only by way of deciding to change something that's already been given to me. I can place a book on the centaurs head. That's my freedom in absolute free fantasy. I choose another predefined characteristic to an originally predefined idea to show my freedom. Everything that happens independent of this choice will always and already be the case. Am I even free in my free-fantasizing characterizations? In this post I "found it necessary" to describe (by way of Husserl) how determinate the Being of being is (Being= a presence that can't be described but nonetheless we try to understand, i.e., the a priori / being= Heidegger's concept of dasein that is characterized as being-there). How much volition was there in "finding it necessary." At this point though we are way beyond where we should lie as phenomenologists. The concept of "freedom" has been addressed too aggressively as an existential theme rather than a phenomenological residue of phenomena. If this should stand as an example of how easy phenomenology can inappropriately enter into existential themes, then so be it. I take responsibility for these human all to human instincts, but nonetheless keep the aggressive existentiality in the post to serve as a sign for what phenomenology doesn't do; make a theme out of loaded concepts. The focus of this post was to show three different ways in which being is always a determinate being. At the very least it showed how Husserl saw the operation of free-fantasy as always a harmonious one that we don't ever recognize in the process. As a final aggrandized statement to this post, we saw how coincidence (by way of the noemata) acted harmoniously in the noema. We saw that coincidence's correlate for consciousness was in harmony in the declaration and affirmation of a state of affairs. Both of these aspects of consciousness (coincidence and harmony) are not available to ego-volition. Volition happens after the fact of an operation.

Positing existence independent of yourself; Ideas 1 Part 1

Blue background, white text, this shit's serious.

Every time you finish a book, you feel guilty for not having read another book which makes you read eternally. In this case, I'm guilty of having not read Husserl's Ideas I when I claim to come from the school of Husserl's thought. I really don't claim this for myself, by I talk about him incessantly and reference him in just about every piece of writing that I do. Nonetheless, the most "formal" work I've done is on Husserl and because of this I have recently been castigated by 2 professors for not reading his Ideas I while giving myself the liberties of being able to reference Husserl in sometimes over-generalized ways. I admit this myself. The only defense I have is that I have closely read every other of his published works which has given me a strong sense of the thought of Husserl. It's never an "official" understanding though until you've read every published piece of work by the author. I can take this a step further and say that one never really reads an author because it's easily possible to have 1 bad reading of a text, making one's reading of an author forever "unofficial". Regardless of my caustic response in defending my readings, I always knew that I was going to read Ideas I. I just haven't gotten to it yet! Tout le monde se détendre!

I am in the great position of "having a lot of Husserl on my side" when reading this text, which is considered one of his most important texts. I'm fairly certain that most of the themes expressed in this text I've come across through one of his other texts. If anything, this will be a good reminder of a primary text from Husserl which I haven't visited for about 7 months now. Let us now throw ourselves into the peculiar world of Husserlian Phenomenology done by the man himself.

At the beginning of this behemoth of a text is Husserl's perennial task at creating a method where the "subject" is able to have a sense of existence independent of the subject actually positing anything about it; the extension of Descartes Meditations and/or The Phenomenological Epoche. Always trying to avoid a psychological interpretation of consciousness (pyschologism), Husserl takes great pains to bracket out his existence along with the readers existence during his texts. One of the first Ideas conveyed in Ideas I is the differentiation between "Matters of Fact" and "Eidetic Intuition" which we will go into later in a much more precise manner (specifically, what an "Eidetic Intuition" actually is; What an "Eidetic Science" would be). To be able to do this though, one has to distinguish themselves from themselves which means operate without anything external to them but "purely" within the cogito, the thinking substance that is without ego, the ego that is need of being bracketed out that will always and already want to posit an "objective" existence. "The unrestricted universality of natural laws must not be mistaken for eidetic universality. To be sure, the proposition, 'All bodies are heavy,' posits no definite physical affair as factually existing within the totality of Nature. Still it does not have the unconditional universality of eidetically universal propositions because, according to its sense as a law of Nature, it carries with it a positing of factual existence, that is to say, of Nature itself, of spatiotemporal actuality". The proposition "All bodies are heavy" is a statement of fact. It includes "All bodies". We already have a conception of what a "body" is and are giving it an attribute of heaviness. As a "Law of Nature" for Husserl, it is in the "region" of a "fact". We are attributing bodies to nature. We are attributing a fact. This proposition being stated and belonging to nature make it positing of an attribute. It's something an ego would say based on the fact that there is a totality to nature and things can be said about it. What then is the distinction that will be so crucial for Husserl when he speaks of "eidetic" validity (In Greek, Eidetic means "form". Husserl want's to use the term as a sort of Genus for a fact, meaning he wants to privilege the form of validity over any specific instance of validity in existence. In other words he wants to show the logic of validity independent of humans even existing at all). The answer may be surprising at first because of how similar the look of this statement is in comparison to the "matter of fact" statement. "The proposition, 'All material things are extended,' has eidetic validity and can be understood as a purely eidetic proposition provided that the positing of factual existence, carried out on the side of the subject is suspended. It states something that is grounded purely in the essence of a material thing and in the essence of extension and that we can make evident as having 'unconditional' universal validity'. So the statement "All material things are extended" has a privileged sense over "All bodies are heavy". The former being an eidetic truth and the later being a matter of fact. But a proposition is still being made by a subject. If this is the case, then the grasping of an eidetic will fail. This is where positing on behalf of a subject will be suspended. So we have to think of not stating a proposition while at the same time reading graphematic writing that was posited by Husserl himself. This is not very easy to understand and Husserl never found it necessary to explain some of these complications. The complication is in how he read each statement. If the reader doesn't read the statements like he read them, then you would see both as simply being matters of fact. Lets think about these two propositions for a moment. "All bodies are heavy" is qualified by measuring "weight". "A body" is qualified by the fact that there is a structure of things that make up a whole (set theory overlaps big time here. Pun!). In this proposition about nature, that we want to attribute to nature, we are given the facts of "Body" and "Weight" that are able to make this fact, a fact. On the contrary, "All materials are extended" has a different sense to it for Husserl, an eidetic sense to it. A "material" isn't a fact. It can be "anything whatsoever" for Husserl including anything that one imagines. In this sense, it doesn't have to operate in "real-time". A material is literally anything. On the same line we have the concept of "extension". For Husserl, this would be the case independent of an ego being able to make the statement of extensionality. Anything, whatsoever, are extensions. Anything, can't be nothing. It has to be extended somewhere. It doesn't have to be weight though, nor does it have to be what we call a body. Still, the differentiation is hard to make. Extension is still a property of material, and a material is still a positing by a subject. For Husserl though, he can imagine in his head the idea of an extended material, but he can't imagine a heavy body as fact. He knows for sure that something takes up space and that something, is something. He doesn't know if that something (anything whatsoever) is a "body" nor if that body has some type of quality called "heaviness". The heart of all this is Husserl's idealism or imagination that is able to think of these invariant possibilities that for him show eidetic essences. "We do this by making the essence of the material thing something given originarily (perhaps on the basis of a free phantasying of a material thing) in order, then, in this presentive consciousness, to perform the steps of thinking which the 'insight,' the originary giveness of the predicatively formed eidetic affair-complex explicitly set down by that proposition." A couple things happen here. Firstly, "the material thing is given originarily". Husserl will privilege "material" over the concept of "bodies" because "materials" come to a "subject" (who's not yet a "subject) by "insight", not by a predicated statement regardless of the fact that the subject only knows about this "insight" after the fact of the subject stating it. Husserl gives himself the luxury of being able to use a term that is used as a completely random variable that comes by way of insight and so earns a status of being eidetic. Husserl even says "We do this by making..". We have the option to make something "original". We can do this by freely fantasizing (imagining) about the material thing, rather than seeing it in "real existence". Materials "present" themselves to consciousness, and then we gain an "insight" during this presentation. What is this insight? That we have something that was from somewhere. And here is an eidetic necessity, that something came from somewhere. Husserl though slightly oversteps the tight boundaries he wants to make for an eidetic science by saying that this material will come "originally" rather just from "somewhere". If he wanted to establish the idea of an eidetic science, he would have been better off not to posit an ostensibly "original" place in time. The variable concept of "somewhere" can belong to an eidetic science, but the absolute concept of "originality" only belongs in one place, making it very much a fact. Still we can imagine a material, a random variable coming to something called "consciousness" in which we then are "enlightened" (insight) by the material that comes to us. For any proposition to occur, there must be somewhere that throws something to something called consciousness. As a note, there is a big problem with using the word "consciousness" here. We don't know what he's talking about. We can only infer that it's a machine that takes something from somewhere, much like Freud's psychic apparatus. We aren't giving a metaphor like Freud will give his readers in his writing/psyche analogy. For Husserl, these are things that have to happen for anything to happen in the first place. These are eidetic necessities. Certainly the proposition had to be made for us to realize this eidetic necessity, but an eidetic necessity doesn't require an "us", a subject, an ego, for the necessity of its happen. It's always and already the case that this insight will come to something at one time not understood or called a "subject" before the subject is able to make a proposition based on this eidetic necessity, that the subject will call an eidetic necessity. Basically, Husserl is saying that just because we have words and expression in general to elaborate on what at one time wasn't expressed, doesn't mean that this invalidates the phenomenology. We can borrow words from Being and put it to Nothingness, but this doesn't taking away from the operation of nothing. For Husserl, if we are only subjects independent of ourselves can we understand this. This is the Husserlian leap of faith; to be able to believe that you are nothing in order to do phenomenological science. It is no doubt a leap of faith to borrow signifiers from being in the presence of language and attribute them to a place where there was no signifiers. It's something that Merleau-Ponty elaborated on at the end of the The Visible and The Invisible; the intertwining effect of each which essentially would make any "pure" phenomenology impossible. However, we know this at the very least, that something happens to us, and then somewhere we gain an insight and have a compulsion to represent this empty variable of something happening in loaded heavy-handed concepts (a sure amount of irony here). These are eidetic necessities though independent of expression for Husserl. "That something actual in space corresponds to truths of that sort is not a mere fact; instead, it is an eidetic necessity as a particularization of eidetic laws. Only the actual thing itself, to which the application is made, is matter of fact here". Something Actual is an eidetic necessity, not a matter of fact. It's a fact that there is "something actual". Something Actual is what eidetically grounds a matter of fact. Of course, another eidetic necessity is space and here again, like "materials" and "extension" (which to be fair is basically synonymous with "space") "space" is given a privileged from as an eidetic necessity, as long as the "subject is suspended", in other words, as long as you suspend yourself in making the assertion. It's a law, not a fact, that "Something Actual" has to first be the case for a fact to be established. We can conceive this surely. For me the problems lies in using concepts beyond the concepts that earn their emptiness-status like "anything", "something" "whatsoever" and so on. In this sense, the heart of Heidegger's Being and Time is somewhat more faithful to eidetic necessities because it never allows itself to go beyond ontological categories into a geometrical space, a geometrical space that Husserl to be sure privileged since his first work on the Philosophy of Arithmetic. There was always "pure" Euclidean geometrical space for Husserl. I'm not going to make a criticism of it here because Derrida already did it in his Introduction to Husserl's Origin's of Geometry which I do an analysis of in prior posts in this writing space. Still if we ignore the fact of Husserl equating geometry with ontology, we gain the insight needed into what an eidetic insight is by the deconstructed subject operating only within the ontological category of "something actual" for example. What is a matter of fact is the actual thing itself. The actual thing in space that corresponds to a truth, for example, a ball, a tone, a "cultural fact", are matters of fact. The eidetic necessity that there is "something actual" first for a subject before the subject realizes itself as a subject is privlidged over the signified object temporally, hence the imposed "originality" placed on eidetic necessity. If anything, eidetic necessity is a temporal concept; A first in the line of a series that will end up getting to a matter of fact. I suspect that this will come up later in Ideas I as all of Husserl's text's always end up addressing temporality as the function of the ideality that he is searching out, in this case in the name of "eidetic necessities". But to which this "something actual" is applied, where this application is made, is where a matter of fact happens. Eidetic necessities makes matters of facts then. It's operation is an application to a fact. A transcription from one place to another. Sound familiar to the prior posts on Freud's picture of the Mystic Writing Machine where the psyche was first thought of as being in a place in waiting to be written on? The key to this post though and the beginning of this text by Husserl though is the fact that we are able to use language and expression to posit existence "independent" of the fact that we are using language and expression to posit existence. We can imagine to ourselves by Husserl's "free imaginative variation technique" that something like we just described by the proposition of "material things being extended" happened independent of us having to express it. We can imagine it. Was it the same thing in this type of a-priori consciousness? I doubt it. But can we imagine something being presented to something called "consciousness" that will then "perform the steps of thinking" that will lead to the "insight" which in turn gives us the desire to set it down by proposition? Certainly. For all this to happen, there has to be a place where something is able to happen; something actual. A place where something is able to happen: an eidetic necessity. What we propose as something that has to happen for us to be able to say that this very exact thing has happened.

Dream interpretation, An excessive preoccupation with content; Part 3 of Freud and the Scene of Writing

"Give me your money and I'll tell you things you want to know about yourself little by little."

Derrida finds Freud as a breaking with many traditional schemes of classical philosophy. In the last post we found it in reestablishing "originality" as something that's contingent upon difference. In a prior post to that it was the questioning of the metaphor itself as the machine process that makes writing itself possible. As we continue on in the text, Derrida finds Freud's greatest break with traditional philosophy in his criticism or deference to dream interpretation. If I have choosen this theme specifically within the text to elaborate on, then it probably resonates with me as did certain texts of Freud's upon Derrida. What resonates is what one writes about, and the subject of dream interpretation in general resonates with me loudly in terms of Freud's "breakthrough" on it. This post will not simply be an elaboration on this specific Derrida text, but an emphasis on the ambiguity that Freud throws into dream interpretation. Why would this resonate with me? It resonates with me for reasons that would easily make this writing space into a "blog", which to be sure, it is. But as I admit that this is unfortunately a "blog", I obviously admit it with a sense of dejection. This dejection gives me the luxury of being able to write regardless of the the problems I have with "blogs". Yes, a luxury I seek in guilt. What I can do, is state as quickly as possible the reason why throwing dream interpretation into ambiguity is something that I really love and resonates with me: Because it's an easy way for someone to interpret their life...too easy. And as that one statement goes, it will go no further, and the elaboration will begin on this text with the thought in mind that a personality will inevitably have it's say in a piece of writing.

Derrida states "God, the Egyptians believed, had made man a gift of writing just as he inspired dreams. Interpreters, like dreams themselves then had only to draw upon the curiological or tropological storehouse". Dreams were given to man by God. It had to have been the case for Egyptian antiquity that these dreams were for us if they were given to us by something like a God. Because of this luxury that God bestowed to the Egyptians, there were the "job-openings" for interpreters of these dreams. Surely, everyone could believe in what the interpreter had to say if they believed that dreams could be interpreted in the first place; The curiosity and temptation of man to see what was happening to him when they were not thinking, when they were dreaming. This would lead us to the real truth, the real purity. Afterall, God had given them to us, so it was just matter of a sage being able to interpret what was being reported in a dream. There was a storehouse for interpreting what was being reported, an archive of signs that represented these "original signs" in a dream. Tropological, because it would seriously be considered as a practice to interpret figurative meanings as being literal; Curiological, because everything being reported was using Egyptian Hieroglyphics to represent the things and sounds that were being reported. "They would readily find their the key to dreams, which they would then pretend to divine". Interpreters of dreams who were held in esteem because the idea that God had given man dreams to easily be interpreted had keys to these dreams, ways of taking what was being reported as a dream and turning it into something else, into something that the "wanter of dream knowledge" wanted it to be turned into. The interpreters would come as sources of divination and would be held in esteem for the ease of being able to interpret the reports of a dream. Freud states "if a man dreams of a dragon, the Interpreter assured him it signified majesty; if of a serpent, a disease, a viper, money; frogs, impostors." Here was the key to interpretation. The taking of something being reported by one person to another person held in esteem because of their power to consult a "stored house" of significations that could easily be transposed into to a super-meaning. This super-meaning would have greater significance than the writing in the dream, of the psyche operating on it's own without a need for transcription until the idea of dreams meaning more than their own operation, where God was seen as giving dreams to men, and where God gave the keys to certain people to use other significations to attribute super-meanings to these "original" significations of the dream. Freud states "Their customers would look to find a known analogy, become venerable by long application to mysterious wisdom, for the groundwork of their deciphering; and the Decipherers themselves would as naturally fly to some confessed authority, to support their pretended Science. But what ground or authority could this be, if not the mysterious learning of symbolic characters?" Freud will have no problem calling those who went to dream interpreters, customers. Their customers, already ahead of time, would be looking for a known analogy, a transcription from one place to another. From the original meaning, de-privileged, to the super-meaning that would give them the presence, the purity of what they were seeking, the divine word of God would bestow itself to the interpreter for the customer. The customers would believe in what was being given to them as the word of God by repetition. Those who wanted their dreams interpreted would allow themselves to be guided by "long applications" of "mysterious wisdom". Long applications; the duration of a dream interpretation session, the semblance that work was going on, work that the interpreter was doing that would bring the customer to the idea of what the true meaning of their dream was. Long applications; the repetition of sessions that would fully embody a trust in the customer that the length of the session would first enable. Mysterious wisdom; a knowledge, an intuition, that was only meant for certain people to understand. It wasn't for everyone. It was only those with the divine trust of God where people were found who could speak the word of God through other peoples dreams. But even those who were given the divine trust of God; they would "naturally fly" to a confessed authority in support of their science. So then, the interpreters weren't intuiting the meaning of dreams during their sessions, during their work. They were "naturally flying" to another authority, deferring their ostensible authority to another authority, where they would stop and accept this authority. Was this how a dream session would occur? Would this be how the dream session would work? The customer would come into the dream session, tell the interpreter of dreams about their own dreams, and then the interpreter would go to another "confessed authority" to do their work. Were dream interpreters references upon references? Was their work like a living lexicon? If so, how could there be lengthy sessions if the interpreter was merely a reference to another lexicon? How could they convince their customers to trust them if they appeared to only be consulting other texts when doing their work? "The Egyptian priests, the first interpreters of dreams, took their rules from the species of divination, from their symbolic riddling, in which they were so deeply read: A ground of interpretation which would give the strongest credit to the Art; and equally satisfy the diviner and the Consulted: for by this time it was generally believed that their Gods have given them hieroglyphic writing. So that nothing was more natural than to imagine that these Gods, who in their opinion gave dreams likewise, had employed the same mode of expression in both revelations. " The interpreters were seen as being deeply read. So on command, when given the picture or representation being reported in a dream by the customer, by the consulted, they would have at their disposal a "deep reading" of "symbolic riddling". Interpreters were deeply read on riddles. They would tell customers "riddles". They were used to telling customers riddles, and learned to be good at telling riddles to their customers. The length of a session then can be inferred as the telling of riddles to a customer which the customer found appropriate, which would keep the customer coming back for more. If you told the customer exactly everything they wanted to hear in one second, not only would the work of the interpreter be extinguished, but the customer would be dissatisfied. Even as God gave dreams to man and interpreters to man in order to interpret mans dreams, certainly it couldn't be the case that it was as easy as seconds to be able to interpret a dream. Instead, there would be lengthy sessions where no clear cut answer were ever given to the customer, where the customer instead would be told riddles that would vaguely signify a meaning to their dream. And this wasn't just the riddling of the interpreter, the riddling that they were so "well read" on, but it was the riddling of the customer who actually didn't want to be told the immediate truth of their dreams. Instead, meaning had to be surrounded by a long riddling process, that always would be deferred to another session. Both the interpreter and customer were satisfied. The Customer kept coming back for more and satisfying the interpreter, and the interpreter kept deferring the meaning of their dreams, not-so-ironically to the satisfaction of the customer. But beyond this, how important is the idea of God giving man not just dreams, but hieroglyphic writing? This was the grounding stabilizer of the dream interpretation session. Gods gave man dreams. It was only appropriate that if God was going to be this accommodating to man, that the Gods also "employed the same mode of expression in both revelations". If when I dream I see pictures, and dreams were given to me by Gods, then it has to be the case that the interpretations happen in the same mode of expression, in this case, the pictoral graphic, the hieroglyphic. The Egyptians didn't have Descartes. They didn't have someone saying that it was possible for the Gods to deceive them. The God's superseded reason, they superseded whatever "experience" was in Egyptian antiquity, because personal experience wasn't privileged as form of authority for "reality". Instead all authority was giving to invisible divination. It wasn't personal. Authority was open to everyone not through their own personal experiences, but through going to dream interpretation sessions where they would be told their meaning by someone else who was chosen by God to refer to another authority. For interpreters weren't the Gods themselves, but arbiters of his word, by referring to a text, a text that is not accounted for as being self-referencing to it's own authority.
"It's here that the Freudian break occurs". What is this break? "He makes of psychical writing so originary a production that the writing we believe to be designated by the proper sense of a word-a script which is coded and visible in the world-would only be the metaphor of psychical writing.". In the statements made above, the underlying sentiment was that what was "written to psyche" was not graphic, written, or hieroglyphic, but something even more original than these modes of expression. The use of pictures and eventually words to represent a dream were metaphors, meaning a difference from an originality that Freud thought enveloped the psyche. A metaphor is only in the world, and by this, Freud wants to designate dreams as happening outside of the world. And because they operated outside the world, no interpretation inside the world could account for what a dream was about, let alone how it would be possible for dreams to happen in the first place. Many breaks happen here actually. First, Gods are no longer privileged as the arbiters of truth or the word, the "psyche" is. The psyche, specifically in a dream, is something different from what any interpreter could represent it as, in this case, hieroglyphics. The interpretation itself is a metaphor for something that was original. Being stated as "original", it naturally earns for itself a privileged place over any signifiers that were always going back to some originality in order to understand this originality. The signifiers, the hieroglyphics, were only at the service of "originality". Signifiers are "visible in the world". They are literally "hard-coded". The visibility of interpretation, of the metaphor, strips itself of the authority to be the original mise en scene of the dreamer. Visibility takes away the authority it wants to understand what it wants to understand, the invisible (Merleau-Ponty). What is this primary writing of the psyche that Freud privileges, which inevitably de-privileges the signifiers that want it to mean it's originality, its invisibility? "It works, no doubt, with a mass of elements which have been codified in the course of an individual or collective history. But in its operations, lexicon, and syntax a purely idiomatic residue is irreducible and is made to bear the burden of interpretation in the communication between unconsciousnesses." There are a "mass of elements" that have been "codified" to individuals and to their collective history (I.E. a collective unconscious. Again, as an open question, what is the difference between this Freudian pyschologistic concept of a collective unconscious and Husserl's Transcendental Ego?) but the way in which the operation happens to this individual and collective history is "purely idiomatic" and henceforth, irreducible. Additionally, and for our case, most importantly, this operation that can't be represented but by a "contaminated metaphor" is nonetheless made to bear the burden of a "contaminated metaphor". For us to be able to communicate to each other, about our dreams, we have no choice but in being able to use the metaphor in our communication. "No meaningful material or prerequisite text exists which he might simply use". By "rights" of the irreducibility of "psychic writing", there is nothing in the psyche that could represent itself. Only by always deferring to a metaphor can interpreters have their lengthy sessions of riddling. This is the limitation of the Traumbuch (the Dreambook). "As much as it is a function of the generality and the rigidity of the code, this limitation is a function of an excessive preoccupation with content, and an insufficient concern for relations, locations, processes, and differences". Does content here mean anything else other than an immediate understanding? A word, maybe 2 or 3 words, that signify to the customer that the images that they had dreamed of had an immediate meaning that would nonetheless take a lengthy session to reveal. What is my dream about? What does it represent? These are the questions the customer puts to the interpreter which satisfies both. This is an "excessive preoccupation with content". But what about the context of the dragon? Where was the dragon? What was next to him, even if it was empty space? How did it first come onto the scene as a focal point? Why was the dragon the focal point of the dream and not the cloud in which it hovered over? When a dream is remembered, how come none of the context is of any importance? Why is there an "insufficient concern for relations, locations, processes, and differences?" According to Freud, to put it briefly, because customers wanted to be riddled with immediate meanings by interpreters who could provide these sessions. There was a demand for this satisfaction enjoyed by both the customer and interpreter. In Freud's own words, "I, on the contrary, am prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts". And so herein lies the "Freudian break" with classical philosophy. No longer was anything to be found immediately with reference to an authority that itself had to defer it's authority ad infinitum. Instead, content's depended on contexts, and different people. This isn't just a break with "classical" dream interpretation, but a break with how thinking would happen: To no longer look at the possibility of an immediate truth, but to look at all the circumstances that surrounded this initial desire that privileged a presence, that privileged one thing in a dream. Herein is the place not only where dreams become more ambiguous, but reality becomes more ambiguous. And because both dream interpretation and philosophy are not so easily defined, this doesn't stop an interpretation of dreams nor an interpretation of reality. It simply doesn't make it so easy as referring to some Dreambook to interpret your reality and dreams for you.

Rethinking Originality; Part 2 of Freud and the Scene of Writing

In the last post, thoughts were conveyed about the meaning of a text in general regarding where and how it operates. At the end of it, there was some conclusion in the idea of it being a place of waiting for inscription. As Derrida moves on through the works, and thought of Freud in this text, he comes up against the problem of genesis, specifically the genesis of a text. Some preliminary remarks though before we approach the problem of genesis through Derrida and Freud as the genesis of a text. There's always a difficulty in reading Derrida, not just because literally reading him is the mental equivalent on chopping down trees for 18 hours a day. The difficulty lies in him requiring us to have read all the texts he has read in order for us to fully participate in his reading. I can't emphasize this full participation enough. Derrida doesn't say that you have to read the texts he has read to understand him, but it sure would help. He has been criticized for this, but it was never Derrida's intention to be considered a "serious philosopher" by some "philosophical community". At least I don't think that could have been his intention if he was going to require the reader to have read everything he has read before from entering into his text. Nonetheless, his popularity has come from a faithfulness in style that I think that was borne out of readings of Husserl. The idea of accounting for consciousness precisely is a style that I think severely influenced Derrida. Without going into the biographical notes on why this would be the case (E.G. studying at the Husserl archives for as long as he did) I think it carried over into the way he thought. For Derrida, how could he think about an author and his text if he had not read everything by that author? How could he account for all the proper names he wanted to use without reading everything by that author? Certainly he was interested in the way others thought, but he didn't think he could write on it in any "official" way without knowing the whole text(s) of an author. Eventually, I think Derrida came to see the impossibility of ever knowing the entire corpus of an author, and ever fully understanding it which led to his public polemics against the stabilization of authors by biographies and his insistence on the "genuine" thinker being one who "rigorously" extracted as much out of a small portion of a text rather than someone who could name drop. If this was his idea of "narcissistic reappropration then I think the idea succeeded in a very tremendous way for readers of Derrida. I think anyone who reads Derrida more than once, and keeps coming back to him, is addicted to the fact of never having a "pure" authority of what they are speaking on. Eventually though, when one has read enough of Derrida I think they are reading a sort of working encyclopedia of philosophy. "Working" because he approaches philosophers in a very different way than a "Story of Western Philosophy" that was always going to be the tendency of an anglo-saxon writer and one finds this most obvious in Bertrand Russel; A beginning and end to philosophy which listed authors in historical order, explained their ideas, and judged their ideas. Derrida was the last person who would ever attempt this. Instead, an author was given his due by detail examinations of their texts and quotes, a close read if you will. Really close read.

Derrida works with authors, in authors. He does his best to assume their mindset, and after a certain amount of time reading Derrida, a reader can easily come to trust his interpretations. Still though, there's never a full trust. When he interprets, and we haven't read what he interprets, we have an instinct to want to go to the texts he's referencing not simply to "fact-check" Derrida, but to understand the text on its own terms before going onto Derrida's interpretation. There's really two options here. One can read everything Derrida read before reading Derrida (which I think is almost impossible) or one will have to take Derrida at his word during an explanation of a text and then maybe go back afterwords to that text. I know I have that impulse when reading this specific text on Freud. I haven't read Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology but now feel that I'm going to have to, along with every other text that Freud hasn't written. If anything, when one reads Derrida, they are overcome by how much more reading that have to do. One either accepts this somewhat begrudgingly, or criticizes him for subtly asking this of us. If Derrida's interpretations didn't seem so precise (in the way that Searle didn't find his interpretation of J.L. Austin's How to do Things with Words as being "correct") then one would probably have a feeling of "skipping" Derrida after a certain amount of texts. I for one don't find this at all. Personally my trust in Derrida was confirmed with his reading of Husserl. After reading Husserl for a good 2 years of my life, I didn't think there was a way to go deeper into his thought, and this wasn't simply confirmed by the amount of time and energy I put into Husserl because of the love I had for Phenomenological thought, but because of the weakness of the secondary texts I had read on Husserl, especially those "Introductions to Phenomenology" that were really bad. They were just too simple and had a focus towards perceptive phenomenology rather than a phenomenology that didn't operate soley under the guise of vision. If Phenomenology was Merleau-Ponty, then I probably wouldn't have so much of a problem with these introductions. It was with this in mind that my skepticism towards interpretations of Husserl beyond Husserl's own thought was laid to rest by Derrida, and why I will continue to read him, still begrudgingly though because of how much more reading is ahead of me if I want to be faithful to others when in use for my own thought. So it's something to bear in mind before approaching Derrida. You have to let him have the authors the way he sees them because he's earned it. With this in mind, I think I have exercised some of my anxiety with Derrida's reading of others, to understand Derrida. I simply accept it.

But the title of this post is "Rethinking Originality" and before the anxiety of trusting an author came flying through my consciousness, I stated how the text moves onto the problem of genesis, specifically the problem of genesis of a text, in general. Obviously, "Originality" and "Text" have are related in some way. How does this happen through "Freud and the Scene of Writing"? "It is the very idea of a first time which becomes enigmatic. What we are advancing here does not seem to contradict what Freud will say further on: 'Facilitation is probably the result of a single passage of a large quantity'". What is enigmatic about a first time as originality, as genesis? "For repetition does not happen to an initial impression; its possibility is already there, in the resistance offered the first time by psychical neurons". The idea of a primal impression, this phenomenological idea, is not something that just arrives to a "consciousness". The process isn't streamlined in one swoop. An initial impression can already happen again even before it's "initiality". I can experience something for the first time, but wasn't it already the case that I was going to experience whatever it was that I experienced for the first time? Every time "experience happens", isn't it already the case that "experience is going to happen"? How does this happen? Freud, the early Freud that of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, who operated under making the science of psychology anatomical and physiological refers to "psychical neurons" which offer resistance to life itself. Let's explain this concept a little further. An impression, any impression can hit me but it doesn't "do anything" without a neuronal function that can "do something with it". This "doing something with it" is a resistance to an impression that never was "not going to do anything with it". Freud's psychical neurons don't allow that to happen, unlike the failures of perception that Husserl discuss that never become idealized. Derrida states "Resistance itself is possibly only if the opposition of forces lasts and is repeated at the beginning" and this is where a first time becomes "enigmatic". Firstly, the forces that are in opposition are an impression and the mind, but not just the mind as cogito, not the self-subsistent Cartesian thinking essence, but memory. Consciousness and memory are equivalents here. Memory is the force in which an impression becomes just that, without which the idea of an impression doesn't exist and doesn't happen. Anything can only happen because of memory, because of "the production of the trace as moments of deferring". The trace, as the process of going backwards for seeing a place in which there would be a gap, afterwords where there would be another place. Repetition begins when life and memory contact each other, when memory offers itself to "life" as a resistance. Memory will resist life in it's "purity" by allowing itself to be impressed. Impressionality; the periodicity of the trace, the deferral of life. "Life is already threatened by the origin of the memory which constitutes it, the effraction which it can contain only by repeating it". While life is threatened by memory, the idea of "pure life", it also constitutes it as something to be sought after. When Derrida makes this statement he's implying a teleology not only for metaphysics and philosophy, but for ontology, for Being. Memory, this break with "life", can only be a break if it happens more than once. Memory can only break with the "purity" of what would be a "real-time-life" by repeating itself over and over, by resisting the fact that I can always and already be experiencing something wholly different from myself. Memory breaks "life" by repetition. At the same time, memory constitutes life by repetition. How? Because it enables the "wholly other", the idea of "purity", the "transcendental signified", the ultimate concepts that brings experience into non-differentiation (the religious sublime) . That which is impossible for memory, for Being (Consciousness is memory. Consciousness is the Being of beings. Memory is the Being of beings) is wholly other. The idea of a "present life" can't be established without difference, the difference that pushes one along to think "What about a place with no difference"? Derrida finds it important to mark out where Freud finds a "large passage of quantities" that will be "great breaching happenings" that constitute memory. Freud finds this in pain. "Pain leaves behind it particularly rich breaches". Pain is a great neuronal implication of memory. Freud symbolizes psychological neurons in his early work by symbols that I can't represent here because they aren't on my keyboard. One of these neurons though (to be sure, a symbolic neuron in 1895) is guided by intensity. The neuron capturing an impression as painful has an extra amount of intensity to it making it more of a "facilitation" for the happening of memory. "But beyond a certain quantity, pain, the threatening origin of psyche, must be deferred, like death, for it can ruin psychical organization". Only a certain quantity of pain is allowed into neuronal resistance, enough pain before memory flees away from the scene, remembering why it fled. If memory allowed all the pain in the world without fleeing, it would die. There would be no memory if I had no neuronal impulse to flee if someone was spraying me with a flame sprayer. Remember that old warning sign? "Don't touch to stove!" And if you did, you would remember not to touch it again by the quantity of pain that was endured. What happens though if you keep your hand on the stove? You ruin your "psychical organization". You're no longer being as memory. You are a different being. You are one whose psychical organization doesn't operate by the intensity of a neuron in contact with an impression. B(being) without mind, without neurons, without a sympathetic nervous system. But for Freud, this is not the nervous system. This wouldn't be being as "facilitation's serving the primary function". In other words, Being wouldn't be a function, an operation for itself "under the compulsion of the exigencies of life". How to facilitate these exigencies of life? This "we" don't have to know because our neurons always and already do the work for us. Psychology as Science for Freud was understanding how the primary operation of the mind is to find facilitation's in the face of exigencies. (As a side note; by way of the metaphor of science, was Freud not under the same teleological presuppositions of Rousseau?)

What does this mean for the idea of "Rethinking Originality"? It's to deffer "originality" whenever the concept comes up. It's to deffer the idea of "purity" sought after by western metaphysics and philosophy, not simply as something that is going to be postponed, one fine day (Derrida verbiage), but to see difference as what is "the original happening", thereby making what is "original" enveloped by difference. By the mark of my mind, by the mark of my memory, I trace back periods eternally. The purity of life that I seek, this original "primal impression" that would mark originality is only after a difference whereby I can speculate about what it is to be wholly other than myself, and if this difference always and already wasn't the case, there still wouldn't be originality because there wouldn't be the difference that was necessary to signify something that was "wholly other". My memory constitutes originality. It makes it possible by making it an impossible idea. An idea, as the difference of what a "primal impression" would be without being an idea, without being itself, without being itself as a difference in the semblance of an origin, a genesis. I can only think of an origin. An origin can't happen by itself. An origin is the mind's way of differentiating itself away from itself as difference. It's the very gift of repetition, the very boredom that repetition brings about that makes the memory (those scrupulous neurons firing in the face of repetition) that constitutes what is called "originality". And to be sure, just in case I ever really never wanted to be bored, my neurons would stop this instinct by only allowing a certain quantity of intensity into my psychical organization. My psychical organization that likes to think about "originality", that loves speculating on this fact of the "wholly other" is only allowed by not being in it, by being exactly the difference of it, by constituting it as an idea. The idea, as the difference and the constitution of originality. Who I am, my memory, will always repeat what's happening without myself even knowing that this is happening, and the "originality" that I seek in the coming-to-consciousness of repetition, is nothing other than the difference of myself, the myself that is solely makes "originality" possible...as an idea...as a difference, because of the gift of repetition.

When one is not being Philosophical; Part 4 of "The Visible and the Invisible"

In the last post the rigor in which Merleau-Ponty and us addressed the coming-to-the-scene of the other was done from a Phenomenological instinct of faithfulness to the present; specifically to the present that is always ahead of itself and certainly always inside of myself. The idea of "the myth of empathy" was not a conclusion drawn from some "existential crisis" or a negation of a teleological presupposition, but working phenomenology which can almost be seen as a hyper-empiricism, or if you would like, idealist realism. Empirical solipsism is an interesting phrase we could use to describe this but Phenomenology would be the discipline that envelopes what we and Merleau-Ponty were after in distinguishing ourselves absolutely from the other. That the "structural" consequences of such a thinking are important goes without saying, but as was stated in the last post, we are always limiting ourselves to phenomenologists; beings on the brink of just making sense. The rigor of phenomenology is all pervading. As Merleau-Ponty continues on in the text he comes up against the dialectic as first addressed by Hegel, but seen as being more appropriate in it's faithfulness to Sartre's negative dialectic. Just as Sartre speaks of a someone being in "bad faith", Merleau-Ponty speaks of someone practicing a "bad dialectic". This is a topic I want to address most closely in a later post after the reading of the whole text is finished. For now though, when one is left to oneself and one understands how rigorously they are applied to themselves, there isn't really room for an intersubjectivity that would like to operate under "common ground". This synthesis model though is something that is always practiced by everyone, philosophical or not, when on the scene with the other. And just as obvious as this synthesis model is, there is an antithesis model that is just as obvious, meaning the antithesis of a synthesis in a dialectical model. If one stays in this negation of positivity, essentially, doubt, this for Merleau-Ponty is bad philosophy. It's one not being philosophical when finding a home in a negation, existentially speaking, in being negative. One is essentially not being philosophical when the dialectic could ever come to an end in one negation. There is a style to coming to an end in one negation, existentially speaking, there is a style in doubt. Merleau-Ponty addresses this "bad faith" of the dialectician, or Phenomenologist, or Philosopher when addressing the practice of the dialectic, which for sum or difference, is philosophy (Philosophy is an infinite negation never possible of being a style because of never having the chance to settle anywhere for too prolonged a period of time). Merleau-Ponty states "If, in it's name, we make speculative doubt the equivalent of a condemnation, it is because, as passive beings, we feel ourselves caught up in a mass of Being that escapes us, and we oppose to this adversity the desire for an absolute evidence, delivered from all facticity. Thus the methodic doubt, that which is carried out within the voluntary zone of ourselves, refers to Being, since is resists a factual evidence, represses an involuntary truth which it acknowledges to be already there and which inspires the very project of seeking an evidence that would be absolute". So far, the negative dialetic is in "good faith". So far, we are doubting in order to grasp being because we are overwhelmed by what being could be, and so seek out an absolute evidence that could possibly confirm this absolute by not referencing factual evidence, but by negating factual evidence, and when in the process of this negation, they are then in being; a place where something is not this or that, our basic fundamental state of nothingness that eventually comes into being. When I positively affirm something I have a grasp of it. When I negate the existence of something I have nothing left afterwords. This nothing left afterwords is a "spot of being", "where" being is when it's not making predicative statements, where being is before it's being. It's in "nothing-spots". It's still in something for sure, but this something is passive. A passive something and nothingness are analogical here. But, one can be thrown back into existence and end in this one negation of something, where one is being a bad dialectician, and bad philosopher. "If it remains a doubt, it can do so only by reviving the equivocations of skepticism, by omitting to mention the borrowings it makes from Being, or by evoking a falsity of Being itself, a Great Deceiver, a Being that actively conceals itself and pushes before itself the screen of our thought and of its evidences, as if this elusive being were nothing". The reason why one would want to revive skepticism (not knowing the equivocations of it) is a because of a settled style. If one doesn't admit that one is borrowing all the basic evidence of Being when making their statements of skepticism, one could say that they are home in their style, or simply being bad philosophers, or bad thinkers. Essentially, being home in a style is being a bad thinker. As we should know, when I say "this doesn't exist", I am borrowing the basic facts of being to postulate a "skeptical" statement. I am borrowing being to state nothingness and we see how being and nothingness permeate each other here. What am I borrowing? I am borrowing a "This" from being, I am borrowing an "existence" from being, and I'm borrowing an action from being in the negative verb "doesn't". Nothingness truly is Being. Merleau-Ponty takes this bad faith a step further when one could possibly evoke a Great Deceiver, or a "devil" that somewhere exists to consciously try to fool me that everything in front of me doesn't exist. Even of this were the case, this Great Deceiver is still a being, and everything that he would postulate as ostensibly "nothing" or fake is still a being. I still have a view, a tyrannical view of vision if you will, over something outside. It's thrown, it's "postulated", it's a being. If one sees this as an over-elaboration or a simple redundancy of Cartesianism, one wouldn't be mistaken.
If one stops at this skepticism posing as a stable negation, "The philosophical interrogations therefore would not go all the way through with itself if it limited itself to generalizing the doubt, the common question to extending them to the world or to Being, and would define itself as doubt, non-knowing or non-belief. Things are not so simple". Philosophy doing philosophy (incessant interrogation) can't stop at a stable negativity. The Negation of the dialectic is essentially being generalized as doubt. When one is badly practicing philosophy or the dialectic, they are generalizing the process overarchingly as "doubt". This manifests itself in language when the sense of doubt becomes defined as doubt itself, or non-knowing, or non-belief. Essentially if you were to ask me "What is the Dialectic?", you would be asking a question as a bad philosopher and if I answered the questions with something like "It is doubt", I would be a bad philosopher. By you thinking that the dialectic could ever come to a simple summarization or a synthesis, and by myself thinking that I can provide you with an abstract direct object to signify this synthesis, we are being bad philosophers. Nothing is continuing on and moving, but stopping and settling down. There is a being for this, the human being. But unfortunately (or fortunately for the phenomenologist), if we are to follow the phenomena of consciousness through faithfully, then the answer is not so simple.
"In being extended to everything, the common question changes its meaning. Philosophy elects certain beings-'sensations,' 'representations,' 'thought,' 'consciousness,' or even a deceiving being- in order to separate itself from all being. Precisely in order to accomplish its will for radicalism, it would have to take as its theme the umbilical bond that binds it always to being, the inalienable horizon with which it is already and henceforth circumvented, the primary initiation which it tries in vain to go back on. It would have to no longer deny, no longer even doubt; it would have to step back only in order to see the world and Being, or simply put them between quotations marks as one does with the remarks of another, to let them speak, to listen in...". Beings aren't just Dasein being. They are not just others and/or myself. They are anything outside of itself. These beings such as "thought" or "sensation" which try to elicit an impression of the invisible, or nothingness are always binded to being. When I describe passive activity, in the Husserlian sense, I'm relying on a world, or something, already thrown to me. I certainly entertain myself by describing what nothing is by describing it. To think what's it's like to not recognize oneself in the process of grasping something for one time only (before it became Ideal by repetitive "perfectings") is to be in being. To think is to be in being, even if the thinking is an attempt at non-being. I can't evade the fact that I have to borrow being to try to get to nothingness. By realizing that this attempt at the a priori/nothingness/invisible description is "in vain", one would have to no longer deny or doubt being. This is where the equivocations of skepticism comes in. If I take myself seriously as a philosopher, I can't doubt my doubt (doubt then is a being). Again, this is a reference to what Descartes already discovered. By being faithful to myself and not doubting my doubt, I in turn negate my negation. I am no longer skeptical of what is outside of me, but step back and listen to what's in front of me; the being that came from the nothingness, the nothingness that I could not faithfully stay put in from the perennial movement of the dialectic. But, the perennial movement of the dialectic always moves;
"At the same time that the doubt is renounced, one renounces the affirmation of an absolute exterior, of a world or a Being that would be a massive individual; one turns toward that Being that doubles our thoughts along their whole extension, since they are thoughts of something and since they themselves are not nothing-a Being therefore that is meaning, and meaning of meaning. Not only that meaning that is attached to words and belongs to the order of statements and of things said, to a circumscribed region of the world, to a certain type of Being- but universal meaning, which would be capable of sustaining logical operations and language and the unfolding of the world as well. " The perennial movement of the dialectic sees it's "growth" (We are almost reaching a metaphysical Aristotelian concept of "growth" here) in constant negations, not just one negation, but ad infinitum negations. Once the negation of the world is renounced and we "step back and see the world" as what is exactly in front of us, thoughts come to the Dasein, and in a gesture that is faithful to Husserl and the original project of Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty states that this not only means "words and statements", as if words and statements are tantamount to the sense of thought (This topic was addressed with Derrida's encounter with Husserl), but to Being that is meaning, a sense of being. But even this sense, this thinking, that would be manifested in words and statements for the Dasein, that would be renounced after the negation of this same exact sense, this sense as a "Transcendental Logic" (or "universal meaning" if you will, what Merleau-Ponty names it) would be negated, essentially the stepping back and "seeing the world for what it is" that tends to spawn a certain amount of fast-food holistic and spiritual "experiences". The positing of these experiences with a style and attitude is bad philosophy just as skepticism pivoting off the first negation is bad philosophy. In existential terms, both the believer and non-believer are bad philosophers. Always settled in a style, never moving in the infinite dialectic. That thought always comes to oneself (the Dasein) is the case, that one can always doubt the thought that comes to oneself is also the case, that both can possibly happen is also the case. That one then negates the negation of thought into a "stepping back and listening to the world" is the case. That thought comes thrusting in with a sense of "enlightenment" over this awe of the world is the case (thereby describing it). That this sense-of-enlightenment is negated by the fact that what's it's trying to describe "in awe" is not the case of what's happening when one is in this mode of "stepping back", is the case, ad infinitum. The end of that last sentence is the case, the final Latin phrase of ad infinitum, is the case. The final words of that sentence and this post is the case, and the semblance of ad infinitum as the "settled notion" of philosophy and the dialectic, is bad philosophy.

Horizons and Temporality; Part 7 of Derrida's interpretation of Husserl

In the last post, we saw the seemingly inescapable nature of language in regards to phenomenology. I mention seemingly because Derrida proved for himself that sense existed independent of language when he makes the solipsistic assertion that geometrical evidence would remain imprisoned "in the inventors head" without it's liberation through language. Phenomenology though is put into 360 in the coming passages of Derrida's interpretation of the Origins, not simply because he proved for himself the ideal of pure sense, but because language has it's own implications. While history seemed imprisoned to language, there is certainly something prior to language that nonetheless will be explained through language which takes us back to the fact of sense occurring regardless of it's expression. We find more decisive explanations of this in Husserl's concepts of "Horizon" and his explanations of temporality (retention and protention relative to Presence). Out of fairness, it must be noted that these themes are elaborated on enormously not only in his published works, most descriptively in his Ideas I and his Internal Time Consciousness, but in his recently published manuscripts, most descriptively with his Analysis concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Derrida will touch upon these themes but a real justice to the reading would require reading the above texts.

In regards to temporality, Derrida states "Husserl dwells on the receptive acceptance of signs-first in reading-than on the secondary technical or logical activity that is not only not contradictory to the first passivity but on the contrary, supposes it. The synthesis which awakens the sign to signification is first, in fact, necessarily passive and associative". The concept of sign here we will use analogously to language, but only for now, because these are two themes that are obviously different and can be elaborated on in their own rights. The matter at hand though is the idea of the receptive and passive acceptance of signs to signification, or syntax to semantics. How do we interpret passivity and receptivity? Husserl means to say that the "coming-into-being" of ideal objectivity happens by way of a passive retention. For example, while we at first may subjectively 'target' a sensuous formation outside of ourselves, this formation can either be retained or may fall into an abyss. If it's retained though, it's a process of further retentions on it's way towards the ideal. A pure sensuous formation then must be 'targeted' more than once (again and again) and gain a sense of "exactitude" every time it's targeted. Not only that but whatever this sensuous formation is, it must give itself also more than once to a subject. It's with this in mind that the constant distancing of the subject-object divide in late 20th century philosophy becomes so paramount. A good lecture on this was just posted by Mike Johnduff in his Working Notes Blog. The lecture was on Judith Butler's first encounter with the thought of Alfred Whitehead who made this distinction in a very simple yet insightful analysis. Husserl always eludes to this especially in the middle sections of the Crises but never comes to conclusions, being the good phenomenologist that he is. This characteristic of this retention for Husserl is not only the fact that it requires many subjective retentions to become perfected into an ideal, but also the fact that these retentions are always passive until they do become ideal, and an idea. A passive retention then is one where the subject has no idea (because nothing is yet idealized) of it retaining the milieu of phenomena outside of itself. In this sense, it's active, or what Husserl calls an "active passivity". These are literally ideal assumptions and/or implications, however one would like to contest or not contest their "values", or "legitimacy". When one reads Husserl's Analysis concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, one sees themselves actually doing phenomenology. By entering into an always deffered presence without coming to conclusions but still making statements about the temporality of subjectivity, one strikes at the center of the Husserlian Phenomenological pursuit, one that is understandably regarded as solipsistic based on the above description. With subjective receptivity and it's passive characteristic established, Husserl continues his reduction further to the requirements for passivity and receptivity; in other words, subjectivity in general.

In the most clear statements regarding Husserl's origins, Derrida goes into Husserl's establishment of his Horizon concepts as the grounds for subjectivity. It's the most clear statements because these are Husserl's most clear statements on subjectivity. Derrida states "In order to be able to establish facts as facts of history, we must always already know what history is and uner what conditions it's possible. We must already be engaged in a pre-comprehension of history". This pre-comprehension of history and for this post, that of subjective grasping, what's required is an already established way to comprehend. This transcendental theme goes as far back to the scholastics, but finds it's most concrete grounding in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason where his transcendental aesthetic first establishes the modernist project of understanding the a priori. Husserl though doesn't simply state the fact that space and time are the two conditions necessary for subjectivity. If elaborates on them to the point where they're no longer simply space and time. The vague notion of "Horizon" he uses expresses and gives it a "lived evidence, to a concrete knowledge which, Husserl says, is never "learned", which no empirical moment can then hand over, since it always presupposes the horizon". A horizon is every possibility of experience and thus ever possibility of subjectivity. Even if the experience for subjectivity is incomplete which it always is before it's ideality, it has an anticipatory thrust in the sense that it's always thrown into a situation or whether it wants to or not. Here, Heidegger's concept of "throwness" is paramount for it establishes throwness not just phenomenologically, but ontologically as a fundamental state for Dasein. Of course, Husserl's interest was not ontological for every reason stated in the beginning of the Crises. Derrida describes Horizon specifically as "the always-already-there of a future which keeps the indetermination of its infinite openness intact". You can simply equate horizon with the possibility of never getting away from the fact of experience. There's always something on the Horizon. Again, it's with this in mind that Heideggerian concepts, in this case as the Dasein "always ahead of itself" becomes paramount. To say that Heidegger simplified Husserl is easy to understand. Underscoring this is the fact that Ontology simplifies Phenomenology.

So two things are then established as implications of language, which is an implication of history (not historicity). To be able to speak, I must first be in a place (a horizon) where there is something that I subjectively "grab" for no apparent reason that still makes no sense (is not an ideal, or ideal objectivity), until it's grabbed more than once, again and again, und so weiter, to a place of exactitude where an object becomes ideal. Without again going into the problems of the subject-object division, we will give Husserl the luxury of his idealist proclivities and understand the phenomenological project in the gaze solely of the subject (where the life-world is taken by the subject, rather than the other way around). These retentions happen often and always deffer the presence, and give it the characteristic of passivity, meaning the outside milieu is always and already passing over the subjective being that is reaching out to grasp anything, for a time, without meaning. The activity in this passivity is something that Husserl elaborates on his is Analyses mentioned above. To be able to grab and have the characteristic of a passive flow, one is already in a state of historicity, or Horizon as the lived experience of anything that can be called experience and can't be called experience, a future that is always and already there for a subjective grasping. Questions emerge here. How coincidental are the concept of the "Horizon" and "Temporality"? Do they imply each other? Is Temporality the Horizon of Being (Heidegger)? Does "the notion of horizon thus make the a pirori and teleological coincide" as Derrida states? What is for sure is that Husserl created the most abstract concept possible for experience by giving it a connotation of infinity. As we will see in the next post, this above is the concern of a pre-predicative world but for which is different from the pre-scientific world. These two "worlds" will be distinguished, and the components of the pre-scientific world will be established for Husserl with much more detail because of the "bound idealitys" that envelop it, unlike like the infinite concept of the "horizon" and it's never ending operations of "temporal grasping" which firmly place Husserl's thought as the radical expansion of Descartes and Kant. Hopefully in future posts, we will get back to the phenomenological pre-predicative experience because of how fascinating it is in brining experience to it's most absolute limits.