Friday, October 19, 2007

Being-in-the-Chaosmos

Patočka argues against an ontological difference according to Husserl's thought, claiming instead that lived experience and the world are given at once.


The world as a whole is never verified but is rather always the presupposition of all verification. From that it follows that the givenness of the world as a whole is not less inubitable than the givenness of lived experience in its self-givenness.


From that it would again seem that if the reduction proves to be one to indubitable being which is indubitable because it is self-given, then the givenness of the world as a whole is as ultimate and unshakable as the givenness of lived experience as such. The being of the world as a whole is thus unshaken by the reduction as the being of lived experience. Hence it follows that transcendence as such, given in that transcendence of the world as a whole is not reducible, deducible from anything else, that it therefore not be somehow deduced, "constituted," from pure immanence.


The world as a whole is ever-present, present as a horizon; this horizonal givenness is something original. For the horizon is neither a particular perspective nor an anticipation. Perspectives and anticipations are possible only on the basis of it.


(Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology, pp. 104-105)


Patočka considers whether a chaos would be a world and decides that it would be a world but not a world of a certain type (that of an ordered world). I wonder, though, whether the concept of world isn't already weighted down with a sense of it being ordered, whether it can so easily be cast aside. How can we consider the chaos to be one type of world, but not the world to be one type of chaos? Is the chaosmos both at once, or would that both at once constitute an order? If the reduction were simple, how would we begin to describe the lived experience that is given with chaos? Would being then appear phantasmagoric? Schizoid?

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posted by Fido the Yak at 6:52 AM.

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