God, Man, Captains, Heidegger and Sartre.

Goldenrod

 "I do suspect that material plenty is an incorrect answer to a question that was asked generations ago." And why? We people tried to answer an existential question with an industrial material answer. Sartre's ego-less consciousness, a sailing ship at sea looking for the wind. Sartre's consciousness, his 'Being-For-Itself,' is a Nothingness which catches the breeze of a choice, a project, or a commitment.

 A material answer to For-Itself leaves nothing but "more" in its wake until it becomes the absurdity of "Let's go to Mars." At the other extreme "There's paradise after death for the dutiful in a world beyond the heavens." This doesn't feed the children or protect the playground from Leopards.

 We were going to talk about Sartre's clash between "Being-For-Itself" and "Being-In-Itself."

 Being-in-itself. The Being of inanimate objects. Solid, fixed, mindless object, it's identical with itself, it has no freedom. It just is.

 Being-for-itself. The Being of human consciousness. It's not a solid object, it is an empty gap, a Nothingness. And because it has no fixed essence, it is pure freedom, constantly projecting itself into the future.

 For Sartre, his "Being-in-the-world" means a being For-itself, a free, hovering consciousness, dropped into a sea of concrete "Being-In-itself" where "Being-For-Itself" is forced to make sense of it all without a safety net.

 Our problem as sentient creatures is who trims the sails, who decides and why.  As for the sapient let them smoke weed, until then Sartre had his idea of "Project" and Heidegger had his idea of "Resolutness."

 Meanwhile, long before Plato the ancients had their Daimōn. Not quite a god, not quite a man. A Priestess once told Socrates that Love was a Great Daimōn, a divine something, a divine what, no one really knew. When Zarathustra went for his Ahura Mazda, to put an end to the quarreling he wanted one source of Wisdom, but far too many minds had wanted to keep their Daimōn, their neither God nor Man, an Aedicule, not good not bad, yet understanding and friendly, fun to be around. Christians, weren't that fond of the semi divine, saw the Daimōn by any other name as a devilish. The Virgin Mary, she's still thought of as an understanding of Daimōn, and she was for Christian Priests, of course different, no devil there.

 In the sailing ship terms and where was the captain if not in the interstitial places between God and man, here's Heidegger and Sartre:

 Heidegger’s Resoluteness.  Heidegger heard the call of his horizon, his captain recognized giveness, the exact build of his wooden ship, he read the specific tides and stars of the waters he was born into, accepting that the ship would eventually sink, he took the wheel with total, quiet authority.

 Sartre’s Fundamental Project. Sartre launched his ship into empty spaces, his captain realized the ship has no assigned destination on any map, picking a point on the horizon purely because he decided to, and catching the wind to sail toward it, knowing full well he could turn the wheel hard west tomorrow if he chooses.

 Called by history. Making sense of nothingness. Interstitial devious Devils. Take your pick

Being-in-the-World

Goatsbeard???

  OK Chaps, what on earth is "Being in the World." What exactly does Being mean to Plato, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre.

 "If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it square-on, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life -and only then will I be free to become myself." - Martin Heidegger.

 First thing to know about 'Being-in-the-world' it's hyphenated because Heidegger saw the word meanings as all belonging to one word. The second thing to know is that over the years 'Being' has had several meanings. From Parmenides and Plato to Sartre. Plato's 'Being' was so perfect and in everyway perfect that it existed Beyond the Heavens. That Perfect Being, whether it was justice or a spoon, was a problem for Saint Augustine of Hippo and a source of humor for some Greeks when the Christians started talking about the Perfect Being sending an only son into the world to experience the vicissitudes of fleshy life. Someone called Celus, I think, thought it absolute lunacy. No Perfect Being in its right mind would reasonably do such a thing.

 When 'Being' got to Kant, Kant concluded that the pure 'Being' was a pure category of understanding. It was a piece of mental software and when you say "the cat exists" what you are doing is telling everyone that rules in your mind have come up with a new category of experience - the category of Cat. Kant's 'Being' was here on earth, in the mind, it was subject to the rules of your mind's structure. 'Being' was not in a land faraway.

For Mr. Phenomenology Edmund Husserl, 'Being' wasn't in an abstract mental realm like Plato's 'Being', nor was it a mental rule like Kant's 'Being.' No, 'Being' for Husserl was how things show up in consciousness. The word he used was 'intentionality' to describe the meeting between an object and a conscious subject. The 'Being' of a cup is how that cup presents itself to your sense, your eyes, your feelings and so on. The other thing to remember about Husserl's thoughts on this matter, he had a conscious observer, an ego, looking at this cup or that cup analyzing how this or that cup, or Elephant, presents its 'Being'.

 Heidegger's point was this: Plato, Kant, Husserl and others had all made a mistake. In the exchange between Human and world they had all treated Human Beings as passive, chin-stroking observers. They had overlooked the fact the we people were there in the world. We people had our 'Being' in the world. Heidegger's Dasein, his person, means "Being There." And he argued that our main way of 'Being' wasn't thinking, it was "Doing, Using and Caring." 

 Worth remembering, it was after the second world war Heidegger wrote his short book on thinking which put a perspective on "Doing, Using and Caring" that added what he called poesy to the dimesnions of his Being-There. Poesy was creative.  Meanwhile 'Being-in-the-World' for Heidegger, you're not "a floating mind dropped into a physical room; you are inherently woven into a context of habits, culture, tools, and relationships." For Heidegger, 'Being-in-the-World,' if it had a fundamental structure, that structure would be Care what he called Sorge. "We are always already involved in a world that matters to us, facing a future, and dealing with our mortality."

 Tomorrow, if I've not been visited by 'Blessed Release' we'll talk about Sartre and his 'In-Itself' and 'For-Itself'.

"Man is Condemned to be Free" and Structure

 

A Colorful Bindweed

 The word "Structurally" in the word "Consciousness?"

 Not sure what it is, Comrade. How do Kant et al picture it. The meaning in structure is "how something is built." The impression I get is a scafolding or a maze. There is only one way to navigate from one end of it to the other. You know when you get to the end or the top because it makes sense. When Kant talks about structure in something like morality, I think he sees a tension rather than an answer to a tension, a herding of cats rather than sheep perhaps, but none the less there is only one way to reduce the tension, and that way is to follow the structure. And then without an "I am in charge, I am the source of direction" I am the ego, Sartre's nothingness makes much more sense, I can see his equivilant to our random place. I think many would agree that consciousness is a long way from being mechanical, which makes sense in an answerless universe. 

 Kant: Structure as the Rules of the Game. When Kant talks about the structure of consciousness (or morality), he isn't describing a physical brain; he is describing the necessary rules required for any coherent experience to happen at all. 

 Kantian Structure is less like a physical maze and more like the rules of language or chess. Kant argued that raw sensory data hits us like a chaotic flood. Consciousness applies internal filters - the Categories of Understanding (like space, time, and cause-and-effect) And why structure? He did it to shape chaos into a intelligible world. You don't "see" cause and effect out in space, nicely labeled. Your mind structures reality causally - this happened, then that happened - so you can make sense of what you see or sense..

 Kantian Morality has a "structure" Kant thought of as a Categorical Imperative. It’s not an automatic track that forces you down a path like a train; it’s a "rational" framework that shows you the only way to resolve the tension of wondering what to do without falling into the sort of logical self-contradiction that people like Kant thought made you look just silly. 

  For Kant, structure is prescriptive, as in exact rules, and it is rigid. The human mind comes pre-equipped with a specific "operating system." One of which is self-contradiction is silliness, dumb ignorance verging on retardation. Husserl is a different fish. For him structure was the "Shape of Intentionality." Husserl takes Kant’s idea of mental structures and softens the rigid, mechanical edge.

 For Husserl, a "structure of consciousness" simply means the way awareness organizes itself around an object. Instead of a steel scaffold, it's more like a spotlight or even a magnifying glass. Consciousness isn't a passive bucket collecting facts; it has a specific dynamic shape Husserl called "Intentionality." Consciousness (awareness) is always consciousness of something.

 For Husserl when you look at a house, the "eidetic structure" of perception, the way you absorb things. dictates that you can only see one side at a time, yet consciousness automatically attaches  the expectation of a back, and an interior to a house. The back and an interior, maybe a family cat and five toothbrushes are objects, spaces, in our mind that are not yet visible elements of the object, the house, we're looking at. These unseen elements of back of the house and interior are expectations, not arbitrary guesses, they are part of the necessary structure of spatial perception that comes from us being born fleshy.

 For Husserl, these structures aren't rigid walls of a maze; they are the fundamental geometries of how meaning gets made and shapes our thinking. 

 If Kant saw consciousness as a rigid machine processing raw data, and Husserl saw it as a lens with a hidden Ego standing behind it, Sartre stripped the machinery away entirely.

 For Sartre, Structure was "Nothingness" and "Hovering Being with a smile or a frown on its face." No pre-built maze ready to lead. Not for Sartre, his consciousness has no pre-set blueprint, no inherited "human nature," and no internal Ego pulling levers. His Clear Beam of consciousness is an openness, a clear, empty space (nothingness) that encounters "Being."And here "Being" is the solid, concrete, mindless stuff of the world, like rocks, trees, and tables and us as "being in the world".

 Sartre's Consciousness "hovers" over the solid world and gives it a mood, a smile, a frown, a sense of dread, or an emotional "magic." The world itself isn't inherently sad or terrifying. It's consciousness that adds that tension, the dread, the lightness or whatever to the solid world. 

 Sartre’s "Radical Freedom" is not a luxury or a privilege - it is an inescapable, terrifying burden. And, don't forget, Sartre cleared out the Ego, he tossed human nature, and got rid of God from the "inside" of consciousness, which means  you have nothing left inside you to direct your choices. You are left completely exposed and free to be manipulated.

 This is why Sartre pissed a lot of people off when he declared, accurately in my view, that "Man is condemned to be free."

The down to earth of truth, bridles and compromise

Cotton Tail

 I am fleshy and I worry that I am leading the us there is between you and I astray. Too close to the sun, we end up like Icarus, but we'd never know it because we'd never smell the burning feathers. Let us today raise a juxtaposition - I think I have the correct word - let it be like a Standing Stone. Truths and  Bridle Makers dance around this standing stone.

 Here Truth is a simple feeling of hope, a glimmer, fleeting glimpses of the Ideal form, faith enough to believe without dying from irony.

 The other side of our standing Stone we might remember one of the debaters in Plato's Dialogue where Socrates questioned Parmemides, a debater who prior to engaging in the discussions had been giving an opinion on brass bridles to a Bridle Maker.

 This Fifth Century BC Bridle Maker might not have been a man of liesure engaged in the greatest happiness, but at the same time in this century Bridles made of something lead the subjective world we live in. 

 Can we give the meanings in bridle as it dances around the promise of Truth to the word objective, or must that always be a matter of faith in a myth.

 Plato saw three levels of reality using the bridle as his example:

 1) The eternal, perfect concept existing in the realm of pure Truth.

 2) The practical craftsman who forge the brass or leather, working in the material world to give shape to an idea.

 3) The actual user who grips the reins, whose lived experience determines whether the bridle actually works in steering a living beast.

 Socrates for his part asked questions. He never compromised. When the voice in his head said: "No!" He said no.