Husserl ~ Friday, 6 December 2019

Of essential necessity (in the Apriori of unconditioned eidetic universality), to every "truly existing" object there corresponds the idea of a possible consciousness in which the object itself is seized upon originarily and therefore in a perfectly adequate way. Conversely, if this possibility is guaranteed, then eo ipso the object truly exists. 

§142. Rational Positing and Being. 
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Evidence is, in fact, not some sort of consciousness-index attached to a judgment (and usually one speaks of such evidence only in the case of judgment), calling to us like a mystic voice from a better world: Here is the truth; -- as though such a voice would have something to say to free spirits like us and would not have to show its title to legitimacy. We no longer need to argue with skepticism, nor take into consideration objections of the old type which cannot overcome the theory of evidence which resorts to indices and feeling: whether an evil genius (the Cartesian fiction) or a fateful change in the factual course of the world could make it happen that just any false judgment would be outfitted with this index, this feeling of intellectual necessity, of the transcendent oughtness; and the like. (p. 345) <300>

§145. Critical Considerations Concerning the Phenomenology of Evidence.

From: 

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. 

First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl, translated by F. Kersten. 

The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, a member of the Kluwer Academic Publishers Group. Copyright © 1982.

Translation of Edmund Husserl, 

Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, I. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. 

Halle a. d. S., Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1913. 

Tymieniecka ~ Monday, 18 November 2019

From pp. 9-10: 

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? 

Prolegomena to the Phenomenology of Cosmic Creation 

by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. 

Van Gorcum & Comp. N. V. -- Dr. H. J. Prakke & H. M. G. Prakke Assen MCMLXVI 

(p. 9)

As Wittgenstein says: "How extraordinary that anything should exist!" (2) 

(2) Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir, footnote, p. 70.

Thus the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" appears as the most fundamental question because the real problem is, how is it that something exists at all? It is also the terminal of the major array of philosophical questions, and thus it synthesizes all philosophical questioning bearing upon the whole of reality and being. 

However, by formulating our query about the reasons for existence in this way, we run the risk of falling -- as have others before us -- into a trap prepared by reflection itself. We are tempted to attribute a distinctive and positive denotation to the entirely mind-construed concept of nothingness, putting it on the same level with being, as (p. 10) its counterpart or alternative. With the next step, we consider being as relative to nothingness, and the existence of beings, reality, and being-as-such as a "conquest over nothingness." (1) Whether we then equate nothingness with the void or, as contemporary thinkers do, endow it with a specific plenitude by positing it as an alternative to the being, we vitiate the question by pinning it down too promptly to the assumed instant of its origin, its emergence from nothingness, which is supposed to have always preexisted. 

In fact, the basic truth that "being is and nonbeing is not" remains valid. "Something" is, whereas "nothing," upon careful scrutiny, is merely (to repeat Bergson) "a word that symbolizes a concept." This concept does not possess a distinctive denotation but draws all its content from the reality which it means to negate. 

Should we attribute a positive value to nothingness and accept it as existentially equivalent to being, we would be drawn into a delusive scheme of the mind moving within the narrow circle of its own artifacts. We would fail to approach being in its own right. That is, since being embraces all there is, it cannot have a counterpart, and must account for its reasons itself. 

This all-inclusive plenitude of being, the acceptance of which separates us radically from the philosophers of existence, does not (as Bergson would have it) dispense with the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing" as no more than a "pseudo-question raised on the basis of a pseudo-idea." (2) 

(1) Bergson, L'Evolution Créatrice, p. 728.

(2) Ibid., p. 745. 

Snippets ~ Wednesday, 19 June 2019

Why isn't there more meat on this chicken 
It's as if the damned thing began starving itself 
once it knew what the future had in store for it 

from "Domestic Bliss" (2002) by John Yau (b. 1950) 

The Oxford Book of American Poetry 
Chosen and Edited by David Lehman 
Oxford University Press, New York, 2006.

Favorites ~ Friday, 24 May 2019

"Are you the new person drawn toward me?"

BY WALT WHITMAN

Are you the new person drawn toward me? 

To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose; 

Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? 

Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction? 

Do you think I am trusty and faithful? 

Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? 

Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? 

Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion? 

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50394/are-you-the-new-person-drawn-toward-me

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ~ Tuesday, 26 February 2019

From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1967). All Rights Reserved.

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GUIL:  It must be indicative of something, besides the redistribution of wealth. (He muses.) List of possible explanations. One: I'm willing it. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past. (He spins a coin at ROS.)

ROS:  Heads.

p. 682.

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GUIL: See anyone? 

ROS: No. You? 

GUIL: No. (At footlights.) What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened. . . . (Pause.) We've had no practice. 

p. 707.

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Nine Plays of the Modern Theater. Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Clurman. Copyright 1981 by Grove Press, Inc.