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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2023-156
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
European disunity:
Aukus:
Iran:
Non-disclosure:
Miscellaneous:
Use as open (not Ukraine related) thread…
I think Scorpion has a quite good feel for the concepts and terms that came up with the Heidegger thread. It carries the discussion along, and I gotta say, I’m genuinely impressed with your curiosity. It appears to me that we’ve come close to the essential questions that arose, as we are trying to make sense of “reality” as good as we can, looking into the past with an eye on how the most basic views of the “world” have come upon us.
Let me be just be playful a little here, letting some of the Begriffe go through my hands, and then give them back into the thread again.
To translate Dasein as Being-here-ness is neat. The “right here, right now” aspect to it is the basic mantra of phenomenology, as Husserl developed it. This leads to a different concept of time itself, one that is close or even identical to that of Henry Bergsson. Phenomenological time is essentially the observer’s time, as it flows, in contrast to the abstract and impersonal time that clocks convey. Making music in a swinging ensemble perfectly captures the difference of those two views, and methinks that both are “true” independently of each other.
Suppose you are playing along to a metronome. Here, the “outside” clock, which is itself calibrated to other outside clocks [i.e. periodical processes, like length of day or year, the swing-by of a pendulum, or the vibrations in an atom], is used to relate your inner stream of consciousness to synthetic patterns, like accentuations, phrasings and melodies, and, in case of free improvations in an ensemble, the voices of others.
The state of awareness of “nothingness” is a buddhist thought that predates calculus and the concept of the infinitesimal. No-thing-ness is not a “thing” itself, at which you arrive by chopping at “some-thing”.
As Husserl says, all awareness (Bewusstsein) is awareness-of. That is, to state that experience is (to make) experience-of.
The concious act (Bewusstseinsakt) of experience, together with that which is experienced [cf.latin existence], form a “whole” impossibly to analyze apart, as there are no things (to speak about) without someone observing them, and awareness of nothing is not a thing either. Remind you that both of these endpoints are illogical, while everyday experience of the world hardly ever needs to make such a subtle distinction, as kitchen tables etc. tend to be stable enough to lend the notion that they have an outside presence independent of a (generalized) observer. But this is different in quantum mechanics, and I believe that this forces a rethink of the most fundamental concepts of substance.
Husserl calls the two sides of experience noesis and noema. The first one is the fundamental ability of awareness, and the latter one is the experience that comes with it as it “is”, now and here. Only then “things” constitute, and we may learn about them basically in hindsight reflection, upon returning to the experience again, as in experimental physics, as well as in pure thought when we learn e.g. mathematical ideas. What the idea of objectivity fails at is to incorporate the noematic foundations of all noemata.
Awareness-of, here and now, restated is: noesis + noema = experience
It follows that phenomenological time is something else, not a space-like concept. Consequentely, Husserl speaks about protention (the expected future) and retention (the past as memorized), both of which are centered in the here-and-now.
This is fundamental to all presence, so that all presence is not simply being (Sein), as a naive naturalism would have it, but being-here-ness: Dasein.
An awareness that does not conceptualize “things” so much as we do is certainly still aware, just less abstract and full of manifold associations. This is why I use the term sentience, to describe a kind of experience that is not an experience of “things”.
Having sentience means, with Aristotle’s wonderful term, to have nous. To be noetic, Husserl says, is to experience noemata. I used the term spirit above.
I need to leave two loose ends here, at the end of a difficult essay, which I hope is at least a little helpful to your thinking – I advise to calmly let your associations come to you; the insight is more an act of creative renewal than a learned, complex theory.
1 – The metaphysics of substance is very closely related to roman catholic thought and history. Simply having the bible in latin, and not greek, creates a host of huge problems. nous and logos are just two concepts that are very differently related in roman vs. orthodox theology.
2 – Spirit and one-ness is another problem which naturally arises here. I’ll say as much for now: the monotheistic notion of a “one” is another concept that derives from extrapolation of Dasein; hence, “God” must be omniscient. But then, why do we experience free will? (I posit we do). There is a natural answer to this dilemma, which also satisfies Occam’s razor: God was never “one” as far as we may tell; all that we ever experience is the “many”, which all are still connected and related to the “one” (spirit, nous, god). As the old persians had it, WE ARE HIM, though we don’t fully realize, like gazing through a haze.
This notion, however, is not a monotheism anymore; which is why I keep coming back to Mani. Indeed, Mani said of himself that his teachings are not in opposition to those of others before him, like Zarathustra, Buddha, and Jesus, all of which he acknowledges; but that, rather, the full message had not yet come through.
I’m not sure what to make of this, but there are vital conncections to other religions, and that will be of interest to some of the barflies.
Posted by: persiflo | Jul 4 2023 18:15 utc | 208
Re: Heidegger
A poster above mentions that Husserl was more instrumental in western philosophy for unwinding the Gordian knot that Descartes had weaved for modern man and the supposed concrete self from which to spring forth from. Other than that, I haven’t read much of him other than to know that his phenomenological approach differed from Aristotelian ontology.
In the preface to Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger makes clear that modern man is ruthlessly interested in interrogating the nature of beings, not Being. This is most clearly evident in the construction of the Higgs-boson particle collider, that seeks to break apart beings into even smaller pieces for study. There is an archival quality to this all, a misguided and mistaken Freudian attempt to inventory all of existence, to know knowing completely. But this is undoubtedly a fool’s errand. The so-called God particle discovered through the Higgs-boson can be one-upped in the future by discovering an even smaller particle. So it is too on a macro level that this occurs. We are not content with building the biggest telescope possible, but we also want to eventually travel to a barren-planet, inhospitable to life, for the pursuit of the knowledge of other beings to archive.
Meanwhile, two thoughts occur: 1) the ocean is as much a mystery to us still as deepest space, and that 2) Heraclitus already found out that you can not step into the same river twice, thus the modern scientist-man seems like a fool that can not see the forest for the trees.
This is not to disparage modern scientism, it is only to establish the limits of the physical sciences that seek to explain everything but yet can not touch upon the nature of Being, the nature of the Self, what language and knowing is, and how our relationship with the world is unique to the human being.
In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger begins by banishing the ontological question of Being for a moment to make clear that at the end of the day, the question of Being is still staring us right in the face. At this moment, it becomes understandable how sad most of man’s existence is for the reason that interrogating this question: “Why are there beings instead of Nothing?” is forcibly put-aside by modern man who instead opts to ride safely in the herd in the hopes of some Deus Ex Machina to come and save them, whether in their life or in their death. Contemplation thus looks like the child who instead of ramming two toy trucks together until he has outgrown them for “real, adult trucks,” thus putting away childish things, looks at the toys in a puzzled manner, feels the weight, runs their finger on the smooth edges of the metal sides of the toy, and who gathers paint flakes under his finger nails. The child then notices the room he is in. He notices the other children playing with the same toys. When another child sees that he is not playing with the red trucks anymore, the other child grabs them from him and the child caught in wonder registers no complaint.
For those who dismiss Heidegger, it would be easy to say that the child just foolishly let his toys go and now has nothing to play with, has nothing to occupy his time. He is the fool, not the other children in the room who are happy in their play. But we all know that these childhood toys (beings) will not serve to alleviate our boredom forever, despite what Henry David Thoreau would say about the old newspaper he kept reading over and over again, content in his solitude. Rather, the uninterested child will graduate to other toys more for his age, when he hits puberty, he will begin to set his mind towards learning because he wants to imitate adults. This learning is equivalent to the digesting of information gathered about beings until he reaches adulthood where he can apply this archived knowledge towards a profession or where he if were to develop his own curiosity, might seek to be the first man to land on that distant planet to archive new information.
But the question of Being remains untouched by him. This does not mean that he has had no encounter with it. On the contrary, modern man is constantly being called back to this question, whether he is aware of it or not, because it is in the nature of man to be curious about Being.
“A man hears a babbling brook that calls to him like a siren from his daily life. He sits down next to the water to listen. The most beautiful sound can be heard, delighting his ears and senses. And it goes on and on, ceaselessly. Surely what he is feeling could never be duplicated by man, whether by art or music, he thinks to himself. What is its secret? The man sits by the brook continuously, hoping it would reveal this to him. But the man grows old and the answer it gives never seems to satisfy.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
Posted by: NemesisCalling | Jul 4 2023 18:52 utc | 209
@juliana.
When I was a student at Naropa Institute for a couple of years there was a Buddhist-Christian conference, which I did not attend, but which attracted contemplative Christians from all over, mainly teachers like Brother Stendl-Rast. I think there are transcripts somewhere of some of those conferences. But I did go to a couple of evening lectures at one of which I believe it was Stendl-Rast (also Kabat Zinn was there, Carmelites, Franciscans) who said that the reason there was such interest in this gathering (which I gather had been requested not simply invented out of the blue for fun) was because they felt that most Christian denominations had lost their contemplative traditions so they wanted to get them from authentic Buddhist sources in an atmosphere such as this so that they could first receive good instruction and then be able to translate and transmit basic meditation into their own mandalas/congregations. I don’t know how successful or not they were, though I remember the buzz generally being good and the Christians I saw walking around seemed content – but I do recall that point being made.
For example: eternity sounds like a heap-big Thought to wrap one’s little brain around, but from a contemplative point of view featuring meditation experience of course, the whole thing is far more approachable, although it can get vast and cosmic as well in feeling tone.
But the experience of timelessness, for example, or nowness if you prefer, is quite immediate and ordinary. You can witness every young child (before speech) dwelling therein. We slip in and out all the time. However, we are used to identifying experience as that which happens in our minds and their running commentary. We mistake the commentary for experience after a while, an unfortunate habit responsible for 90% of the world’s ills and one of the first thing that must be addressed, usually with mindfulness training which does have a bit of a boot camp aspect to it because of our addiction to habitual identification with the internal monologue – mental chatter.
It’s not that the chatter is bad, it’s the identification with it. And that identification tends to rely upon particularization in the form of what we call words. We scramble in images, sense perception but altogether it is knit into something akin to narrative. Indeed, one could argue that the mental faculty that perceives narrative continuity in stories is the same that constructs seeming continuity of the perception of self. It’s a story we tell ourselves. Stories writ large in olden days we now call myths but they displayed, to the listening community, a panoply of terrain and individuated identifications which were exposed to something larger, wiser, grander, impersonal, deep. They were a form of communal prayer, perhaps.
In any case, in the simple, direct experience of meditation once the initial boot camp period relaxes, something which takes anywhere from a week to a lifetime depending, it does become possible to simply rest the mind on a basic object like the breath or a picture (like an icon) and in that resting an ocean of awareness gradually is revealed. It is always there. In that experience there is no past or future only an eternal now. So this experience of now and eternity is very simple and direct and available to all. Compared to the running commentary we identify with, it can feel huge, vast, deep, cosmic but these are the habit mind reacting with comparisons and gradually this too is relaxed.
Zen haiku, for example, is a playful way of expressing what it is like to rest the mind in the present. Because of course it is in the present that everything is always arising, like a natural spring. So it’s not like nothing happens anymore, it’s that one doesn’t stray into concept-born identifications which chop this and that and also then, now and later.
I don’t know your tradition but I suspect from what little I do that there are extensive guidelines on working with icons as objects of contemplation/prayer. The whole thing can sound high-falutin’ but the actual experience of eternity is very, very ordinary. I personally don’t think of it as eternity because that has a sense of lasting for a very long time. It’s more like that this present is always there and is never born and that which is never born never dies. It is not a thing. So in Buddhist lingo this is called ‘absolute truth’ versus ‘relative truth’ and actually it’s absolute and relative dharma. Dharma is sometimes translated as truth, or fact, but it is also the path or ‘that which is experienced directly.’ Absolute is experienced in an ever-present awareness wherein there is neither anything born or anything dying.
So the awareness field is entirely unaffected by whatever arises within it, just as a mirror is unaffected by whatever image is in it. And of course as we know the image or rainbow, is not ‘in the mirror’ or ‘in the sky,’ but some interdependent arising of mirror, image and perceiver. The outer and inner worlds are not two. So also the experience of eternity doesn’t so much last for infinite number of moments, there just aren’t any moments only
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Ooops: Supper’s Ready!
Posted by: Scorpion | Jul 5 2023 0:05 utc | 230
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