sorry for previous post & continuation for Lebensphilosophie

[j laari]

Greetings

I realized that I had not made couple of points I intended to make in
my previous post. However, while I was glancing the post I realized
that I had written few very awful sentences in hurry. Sorry for that!

The points I had in mind were these:

(a) Terms 'transcendence' and 'transcendental' should not be confused:
previous one refers to that what is opposite to 'immanence', i.e. it
refers to the real, physical world outside my consciousness (so
'transcendent' is roughly Kant's 'Ding an sich' ('thing') as well as
the world of naive understanding); the latter - 'transcendental' -
concerns the conditions of phenomena and meaningful experiences et al.
And that question is not a question of empirical study but of
philosophical reflection.

(b) Efforts to reach the 'thing'- whether a god or a stone - are in a
certain sense metaphysical, but transcendental (or
transcendental-constitutional) analysis is not. It doesn't try to
reach anything. It only tries to clarify how I (any 'I' or 'ego')
experience this or that, on what condition this phenomenon is possible
- conditions in question, it should be repeated, aren't empirical but
transcendental. They are neither metaphysical nor empirical, but
transcendental.

(c) What kicked Husserl onwards in the early days (at the turn of the
century)? Psychologism - and that's one form of naturalism.
Psychologism in question was psychologism in relation to the basics of
logic and mathematics (formal reasoning). I'm not an expert on this,
so it's better not to elaborate that. One way of explaining
psychologism could be this: it was an effort to explain 'the formal'
by the capabilities of mind/psyche. But that is a problem of its own!
More important: psychologistic answer to the problem concerning 'the
formal' accepts several presumptions or presuppositions. Instead, the
constitution of phenomenon must be explained only by reference to
something evident (i.e. evident in philosophical sense, as something I
can't dispute or suspect in cartesian sense). So the
philosophical-constitutional analysis is immanent whole of the time,
there should be no naturalistic transgressions. You don't tell that
the possibility of mathematics is in the fact that there are "a lot of
things in the world" or that "our minds are constituted so that they
can combine and compare things". The philosophical answer to the
question concerning the formal cannot be found out in the
(transcendent) world. Roughly so.

(Therefore I'm a bit suspicious of young Adorno's criticisms of the
thinking of his days, esp. Husserl. He was insensitive to the problems
- partly because he seemed not to understand them all in their
philosophical significance - and offered simplistic, dogmatic answers.
It's quite different with older Adorno of Negative Dialectic. Marcuse
was better on the track in the thirties - that's why Horkheimer
originally hired him as "the Institute philosopher", I believe.)

Confused? Don't worry - more in June in the next episode of... "Soap".

Sincerely, Jukka L