see it's like that time i looked up aporia

[dubdobdee]

So I've been rereading Derrida on Levinas, "Violence and Metaphysics", which I first read more than 20 years ago and BACK THEN DIDN'T FOLLOW A WORD OF. (I had it in my head as "wtf this is beyond me: example number one"...)

This time: not so hard. AT ALL. Except crashing into various technical usages which i am too dumb to look up. Back then there was nowhere to look them uop: now there is the whole internet (fsvo "whole" -- ie the bits on the internet about husserl)

Anyway, I cracked and googled 'husserl horizon', to disocver that (a) by "horizon" Husserl means something like "context" (and so presumbly does JD), and (b) here is an essay on husserl vs rorty: who will win? which is surprisingly easy to follow and engagingly put, and gave me a grand idea about epochs of metaphor

Comments

[koganbot]

(1) I did a quick skim of that Thompson article and don't trust it much. E.g., "From a common-sense point of view, the individuality of the apple lies within it and depends on nothing but itself." This is not a common-sense view, in that the question whether the individuality of the apple lies within it is a question that one can easily never ask and can have no opinion on. Rorty does indeed use the phrase "the compulsion to believe when staring at an object," but he does not make it equivalent to the idea that, e.g., an apple is obviously an apple. Rather, it's the idea that, e.g., the apple compels us to think of it as an apple. "This is obviously an apple" and "the apple compels us to think of it as an apple" are different ideas, and according to Rorty the latter was invented by Plato.

"For Rorty, what philosophers have called 'an intuition is never anything more or less than familiarity with a language-game' (PMN 34); the unmediated presence of the object is a myth." I'm not comfortable with "the unmediated presence of an object is a myth" as an extrapolation from "an intuition is never more or less than familiarity with a language-game," since Rorty doesn't think of a language-game as a medium, and neither do I. "Social practice" and "medium" are not equivalent concepts. A social practice would be a medium for what, and between what and what else?

And "for Rorty language is primary, preceding and structuring experience. In other words, language, for Rorty, takes on a transcendental or constitutive function as the source of the individuality of objects." This seems very wrong, conflating "structuring" with "transcending" with "constituting," all of which are separate ideas and at least one of which - transcendence - Rorty doesn't believe in. I mean, transcends what? What do these words mean? And a child learning that Mommy comes when you go "waaah!" or (when a little older) "Mommy!" isn't doing so because something called "language" precedes or structures "experience." Rather, learning to go "waaah!" or "Mommy!" to get Mommy's attention is experience, "experience" meaning something like "experience on the job" rather than "sense impression." (I'm using "waaah!" here not as the instinctive cry that the baby starts with but as something that the child subsequently learns to choose and to use.) The social practice involving "waaah!" and "Mommy!" precedes the child's experience in the trivial sense that the social practices existed before the baby did. But so did wind and water and drinking, and so what?

Also, I don't see how "language" i.e. "social practices" can ever be thought of as a metaphor in the sense that "eye of the mind" and "mirror of nature" are metaphors. "_____ is like a mirror" can be filled in with "the mind," but how do you fill in "____ is like a social practice"?

See my caution in Kuhn 16 where I argue that not all similarities or analogies are necessarily metaphoric. (A tangential thought about Wittgenstein's neologism "language-game." "Game" is a metaphor in that Wittgenstein isn't saying that all social practices are games but rather that they are like games in this respect or that. But games are, literally, social practices, which is why Wittgenstein used the metaphor in the first place, so that we'd think of language as a bunch of social practices; and also the way he then uses the term "language-game" is not metaphoric but literal, simply a straight-up synonym for "social practice." [I'm bracketing the question as to whether nonlinguistic animals can have social practices in the sense that we think of social practices.] So now "language-game" as Wittgenstein or Rorty or I would use the term is not a metaphor, just as "neck of a bottle" and "mouth of a river" are no longer metaphors either.)

(2) So where are you with Kuhn?

very hurried response

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i: "transcends what?" Transcends the inward-directed self-absorbed of self-awareness of nothing but the self, I think. Kant, Husserl and Levinas all use the term "transcendental" in quite a technical way, and all rather differently, in respect of their various theories of the machinery of conscious apprehension of the world and what the machinery requires to work, but this particular aspect of it (transcendence = the fact that things exist whether there's a mind around to apprehend them) seems common to all three. It's never seemed to me a terribly good word for what they 're talking about -- maybe it's a dead metaphor, like the mouth of the river! -- and this is one the reasons I get annoyed with Kant as a stylist, he has a habit of significantly recasting the meaning of words as part of his argument, leaving everyone more muddled than they need to be. So while Rorty may not believe in transcendence in the sense that he thinks it's a terrible way to think about it -- misleading as description AND ultimately useless as information about the world -- I'm not convinced that he "disbelieves" in it.* (Does he believe things exist whether or not there's a mind around to apprehend them?)**

ii: "where are you with Kuhn?" -- somewhat behind, sorry about that...

*There is plenty of disagreement about how these various machineries and teories and definitions work, so there is plenty of stuff embedded in many of the definitions of transcendence floating around that RR can very easily disbelieve in.
**The thing that's being (pre)constituted (as regards the statement you're challenging) isn't the idea of the object, it's the idea of its individuality in the sense of the mathematical conception of oneness and singularity -- which as you suggest is quite strange: so a child's relationship to his mom and his earliest experiences isn't necessarily relevant (doesn't know yet, doesn't care yet about how many there are of something); Husserl's big area was where we get the basic idea-objects of mathematics -- geometry, number, infinity, etc -- from. Are they facts or are they decisions? Does Rorty explore this much?