Friday, May 11, 2007

Is Lived Experience a Given?

In my reading of Jean-Luc Marion's books on givenness I got caught up in the difference between the being of the transcendental ego and the being of transcendental objects. I felt that if givenness were to be regarded as foundational, it should then be said equally of transcendental beings and the transcendental ego. A similar set of issues now arises from my reading of Renaud Barbaras, who, like Marion, is concerned with phenomenality as such (though unlike Marion he does not turn to Heidegger, relying solely on his reading of Husserl on this point). Barbaras says that "the characteristic of lived experiences is not given by adumbrations. Nothing in it exceeds its manifestation; it is nothing more than it appears, an absolute identity between appearing and manifestation" (Desire and Distance, p. 21). Does this mean that in phenomenological analysis there is a bifurcation between "lived experience" and plain experience, paralleling the bifurcation between the givenness of consciousness and the givenness of phenomena, and between the being of consciousness and the being of transcendental objects? Is this characterization of lived experience true to experience? If we set aside the natural attitude, is it true to experience as given through the époché? Let's see where Barbaras is leading us:


On the basis of [the] opposition between the absolute being of consciousness and contingent being of of the transcendent, Husserl is then able to take the step of constituting the transcendent within transcendental consciousness.


It is therefore not surprising that Husserl neither sticks to his description of perception as givenness by adumbrations nor attempts to conceive of appearance on the basis of manifestations insofar as they are the manifestations of things. On the contrary, he reinvests in a concept of appearance that lies at the heart of Ideas I and that alone can sustain the manifestation of a transcendence; to say of a reality that it appears is to say that is apprehended in and by a consciousness and therefore that it is constituted by means of lived experiences. The appearance of the worldly appearing necessarily refers to a more originary sense of phenomonality, namely the manifestation of the lived experience to itself; to appear is either to be lived or to be constituted by means of lived experiences.


(p. 22, emphases Barbaras')


So is lived experience is a given? How? Is it only by means of the phenomenological reduction that one can access lived experience? If that is the case, then what else must be given prior to the discovery of lived experience?

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posted by Fido the Yak at 11:32 AM.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, Its me again with a quote from a recent essay by my favourite "philosopher".

"In reality, Consciousness Itself is Senior---subordinate to nothing and no one.

However, in the human world, everything is patterned by ego. Once the ego-pattern gets rolling, it replicates itself automatically and endlessly, relative to everything whatsoever---and you remain trapped in the ego-possessed domain of "point of view". The ego-patterning of each individual human being, and even the collective ego-patterning of humanity as a whole, is ceaselessly replicated---very much in the manner of cellular reproduction.

The ego manifests itself virtually infinitely, in a checkerboard pattern that replicates its own state and position.

As soon as there is the ego-position (or self-contraction), there is the entire conditionally manifested universe. When there is no self-contraction, there is no conditionally manifested universe.

You are "Narcissus". You are looking at an image, and you actually think the image is "there"---as something outside you, as something that has nothing to do with you, except that you are seeing it as an "object". As "Narcissus", you are controlled by that "object". You have already taken up the ego-position---and, from that position you automaticaaly "digitalize" everything into the checkerboard that extends from your little block of presumption.

In the ancient Greek myth, "Narcissus" is absorbed in an image---but he does not notice that it is an image in a mirror. And that it is his self-image reflected in and by a MIRROR.

The entire world of apparently "objective" reality is a mirrored, or reflected thing. What is its Source? What is its Source-Condition, or Root-Condition?

The Mirror, or Consciousness ITSELF, IS the Source, or the Prior and all-and-all-All-Reflecting Self-Condition, of all-and-All.

What Is the State of the Mirror? What IS the Mirror?

The Mirror Is the Truth. The Mirror Is Reality Itself. The Mirror is ME---the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Self-Condition of Reality Itself.

The MIRROR Is the Truth. The reflected imagery of self and world is NOT the Truth. The State of the Mirror ITSELF Is the Truth. The "objects" seen in the Mirror are NOT the Truth.

I AM the Mirror, or the Water Itself---all the while. I Am Always Already Present, Directly Before you, AS the Mirror. But you as as "Narcissus", are always looking at the image of yourself, and either admiring the image or recoiling from it, depending on your attitude at the moment. YOU are the reflected "object".

EVERYONE is always involved in a primary "cult of pairs"---the "relationship" to "self", the "relationship" between the ego-"I" and "its" reflection. That is the primary "relationship" for everyone: Always staring at your own reflection.

If you are simply bodily present, you do not have a shape. In order to see yourself as a shape, you have to abstract yourself from your own Intrinsic Position, because you have to see yourself reflected from outside. In other words, you have to look in a mirror---either a literal mirror or, otherwise, the mirror of perceptual processes and social interactions that give you a sense of outline, a sense of space and time. and so forth.

Every perception takes time. Therefore, remarkably, you are NEVER in the present moment, with reference to conditional appearances. You are always "afterwards---because it takes a fraction of a second for any perception to register in the brain. Therefore, NONE of your phenomenol experiencing is in present time. ALL phenomenol experience is mirrored---and you are CONSTANTLY occupied with your mirrored, or reflected existence".

May 28, 2007 11:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, its me again with some excerpts from another recent essay by the same "philosopher".

"The modern world is a fragmented world---full of individuals who regard their own presumed separateness and independence as absolute, who demonstrate no profundity, and who are not moved by profundity. This includes, with rare exception, those who presume to be committed to forms of traditional religion.

True human culture is the esoteric, and, necessarily, ego-transcending, culture of Reality-Realization---and the process of Reality-Realization requires devotion to a genuine Spiritual Master. However, people in general are not interested in becoming devoted to a Spiritual master. Nor are they intersted in the fact that the Realizer IS the "Who" and "What" to be Realized.

The conditionally manifested world is simply pattern patterning. Enacting their genetic and mental patterning is, in general, all that human beings do.

Mind is artificial intelligence. Mind is the first robot that human beings ever made..... LANGUAGE is the first form of artificial intelligence created by human beings.

There is no mind. Mind is a myth. There is language which is programmed by brains, and which, in turn, programs brains. However, there is no tangible existence to "mind" itself---absolutely none. Nevertheless, human being identify with the "mind" AS "self", and thereby invent destiny for themselves, and even project that self-imagined dstiny into an idea of time and space beyond the present physical lifetime.

Mind is an interior projection of a language-program that, in its imaginative elaboration of itself, conceives or purposes and ideas (in the realm of illusion) for which there are no corresponding physical data. Human beings are all living in a "virtual world" of mind. Human beings are, characteristically, self-identified with a robot, an artificial intelligence.

REAL INTELLIGENCE is tacit, or intrinsically wordless, living existence. Where there is such tacit living existence, a Realizer of Reality can be recognized, and you are immediately able to devote yourself to a Realizer as Master---because such a lived relationship does not,fundamentally, require any words.

That tacit recognition is not about words. It is about the Realzer's state of mind. It is not about the Realizer as an extension of the usual language games. That recognition converts you, on the spot, to the most ancient way of Devotion. That Way of Devotion is a spontaneous happening, which is beyond the patterning that binds you to the world-mummery.

................
The human mind is a facsimile machine. This machine merely replicates language-forms in the illusion of mind. The machine feeds language into the computer of the illusion of mind with which people identify themselves. That illusion is who they mean when they refer to themselves---the body-mind complex, the mortal bio-form associated with the artificial intelligence of talk, of space-time point of view, of ego="I" constructs, of language, of language-based brain, and, altogether, or ego-based and brain-based psycho=physical ideas and perceptual memories.

There is no such thing as an eternal mind. That notion is an absolute illusion. The mind is as mortal as the hardware, as mortal as the bodily machine. When the machine stops working, the mind likewise stops working. The only mind that exists afterward is the mind carried by the other replicating machines. So what is there after death? The same thing as there is before birth---Reality Itself, the Divine Self-Conditiob only. After death, as, also, during the physical lifetime---anything and everything of mind persists only non-personally, as pattern patterning, without intrinsic self-consciousness.

If you were TRULY aware of mind, you would not want it to go on. It is a terrible, horrific source of bondage. It is a dreadful trap. Human beings are not only trapped in the mortality of their physical bodies, they are trapped in the absurdity of mind."

Also Eleutherios:The Only Truth That Sets The Heart Free.

http://global.adidam.org/books/eleutherios.html

May 29, 2007 12:19 AM  

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