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Lecture for April 15th 2024

The lecture discusses philosophy as a mode of inquiry that engages with reality, emphasizing the importance of universality, subjectivity, and contingency in understanding consciousness and truth. It explores the contributions of Plato, Descartes, and Hume in thematizing the unthought aspects of existence, and highlights phenomenology and existentialism's focus on the evental nature of being and consciousness. The concepts of worlding, being-with, and the interplay of presence and absence are presented as essential to understanding human existence and sociality.

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Lucas Scott Wright
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5 views3 pages

Lecture for April 15th 2024

The lecture discusses philosophy as a mode of inquiry that engages with reality, emphasizing the importance of universality, subjectivity, and contingency in understanding consciousness and truth. It explores the contributions of Plato, Descartes, and Hume in thematizing the unthought aspects of existence, and highlights phenomenology and existentialism's focus on the evental nature of being and consciousness. The concepts of worlding, being-with, and the interplay of presence and absence are presented as essential to understanding human existence and sociality.

Uploaded by

Lucas Scott Wright
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Lecture for April 15th 2024

Not a Review – A Reading of Our Work to Now


1. Philosophy as a mode of inquiry
a. Philosophy as a way of dealing with reality
b. Mythology opens to philosophy & religion which opens to science
c. Philosophy as wed to our sense of engagement with the world, with our ability to
place things into question
d. Philosophy thematizes that which is unthought; you use, because you presuppose,
‘thinking’ in your work here at the university and in your lives, but philosophers
do not only seek to live within this ‘use;’ rather, philosophers seek to think that
which if often only used and presupposed – i.e. consciousness, being, and
meaning

2. Plato, Descartes, Hume


a. Three examples of the quest to thematize the unthought
i. Plato attempts to draw our attention to the more universal, conceptual, aspects
of our being, in contrast to the everyday sense that we have of all being
confined to our own experiences and subjectivity
ii. Descartes attempts to show us that even where we must affirm a universal
aspect to being and truth, there is always a subjective aspect to ‘certainty’ that
we have to which we must give proper attention
iii. Hume attempts to show us the limits of attributing too much to our own,
subjective, thought by demonstrating how our sense of self emerges only on the
basis of our engagement with what is other than our Selves

3. Universality, Subjectivity and Contingency – three hard to separate concepts that we


can now place within our own schema
a. Universality – the aspect of our consciousness and communication that we all
share; for a statement to be ‘true,’ in the strict sense, it must be a statement we all
can affirm, understand, and (arguably) communicate; this is the idea upon which
Plato focuses; in contrast to the idea that we cannot ‘really’ affirm anything as
true, Plato again draws us to the fact that, at some level, there must be this sort of
universality, this sort of necessity, that characterizes the human experience,
consciousness, language, concepts, and thus truth
b. Subjectivity – this does not mean truth is ‘objective;’ as Descartes teaches us, any
universal can only be ‘recognized’ by way of our subjective sense of Selves; for
Descartes, this does not mean only that your ‘experiences’ contribute to how you
think, but that for all of us, it is our minds that must contribute something to how
we arrive at truth, i.e. the sense that whatever is ‘true’ is assimilable to my Self,
that whatever we say is true is something that we affirm as part in parcel with our
sense of who we are, part in parcel with our sense of existing and thinking; the
Self must, then, in some sense, be the condition by which we are able to have
‘objects’ of knowledge
c. Contingency – the universality and subjective elements of being and truth are,
though, only encountered by way of another sense that makes us who we are, i.e.
what we are not, the real that exceeds the boundaries not only of any experience
that I have had, but of any possible experience; this does not get rid of the aspects
of subjectivity and universalism; Hume reintroduces a qualified universalism that
is grounded in our sense of the real that we then piece together through our
association of ideas

Phenomenology and Existentialism

1. All three elements are present in phenomenology and existentialism; we must affirm
that there is a universal aspect to our consciousness, a subjective element that is
proper to consciousness, and a contingent condition by which we have any sense of
our Selves and what is ‘universal’
2. A turn toward the verbal over the noun
a. Being or Reality is not a noun; it is an event
b. Being be’s; the task of philosophy now is to draw our attention away from the
‘substantial’ or ‘objective’ language that we use when we speak of ‘being’ and
‘consciousness;’ what we are after now is the verbal sense of each of these
terms, the evental sense of these terms
3. Openness [Erschlossenheit]
a. Consciousness is world-openness; consciousness is not a ‘thing,’ it is rather the
opening, the perpetual event, through and by which all ‘things’ are recognizable
4. World / Worlding
a. Similarly, the world must not be thought primarily as an object, but as a
phenomenon or event that is proper to humane consciousness; humans are not
‘in’ the world, where this means a pre-given space; humans in-habit, live-in and
thus create the world; humans world, are engaged in ‘worlding,’ where all of
this means a verb, an activity
5. Being-there
a. Humans be; our sense of existence is our sense of being-here; this is not
abstract, but rather, is concrete
6. Being-With
a. Our sense of existence, of being-here, is, further, enframed by our sense of that
which we, as individuals, are not, i.e. Others; human beings are, at bottom,
social beings; our being-here is, thus, also, a being-with
7. Presence and Absence
a. The verbal sense of being-here, being-with, worlding and openness
(consciousness) = that being is not a ‘thing;’ being is rather the perpetual
interplay between presence and absence, the ambit or virtual sphere in which
expansion and retraction, birth and death, occur
8. Thrownness / Abandonment
a. Our being-here is thus contingent upon other people and upon the fact that
‘being’ always entails death; expansion and retraction are coincident
phenomena; the individual and the collective too;

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