Continental
Hegel does not include an open future in his world-view. But this was ’learned’ out of the twentieth century.
Heidegger speaks of the event-character of history. This is where novelty is created. This is important for almost everyone in 20th century. The entire Deleuzean ouvre is about creation. How can we explain the emergence of something that is entirely new? This is a real problem for philosophical thought. You can explain the continuity in an event, but how can you explain something that seems to lack any previous existance. How can we explain qualitative changes to the world? Especially when these qualitative changes do not adhere from quantity as in Hegel. [From quantity arises quality].
Without thinking time, we certainly cannot have novely.
Episteme: historical configurations of the sciences.
”Post-” refer to a critical relationship to the tradition and the history of philosophy. The prefix does not mean a negation but a disruptive continuation. There is still a link to that which preceeded, but which is critically reflected upon. It is an elevation of what there was to a new level (though sometimes a de-elevation).
Are the postmodernists actually bringing something entirely new out in terms of the subject or are they just explaining the subject in more complex ways. Can you actually leave the subject behind?
Are we still entangled in modernity?
The post-era is neither a new beginning or a simple continuation.
It seems more to be a desire to be something else rather than a factual saying that we are something else.
In post-philosophy there is a clear feeling that we have some kind of lost unity, coherence, simplicity and/or harmony. There are now more positivistic strands in post, like post-humanism.
Post analysis favours microanalysis over macro. They all try to dissolve identities in multiplicities, which is a methodological choice.
What professor finds best about Husserl, is that he still considers himself a part of the modern tradition: believes in Descartes, Science and math, yet he analyses experiences because he is too honest to push away the complexities about how his feelings about the world remain whatever reduction he makes to a thing. There is already a kind of postmodern dissillution of the self in his heavily conscious-based philosophy, and with it a desire to unify consciousness again.
Altough in analytic philosophy you can easily do well without knowing the history of philosophy, this is not at all possible in the continental. Through continental philosophy you may find access to thinkers in the history of philosophy that will really interest you like many medieval scholars (Deleuze cites Duns Scotus constantly).
Selfhood and anonymity. MP gives it a sensomotoric and affective outlook. The body in Sartre is mostly understood as something to negate (in consciousness) or a thing in which I experience my negation from the other. MP has the body become itself the very theatre of investigation. If you perceive something out in the streets, your body reaches there. All your sensory motor and organs extend toward the world fully.
In Visible and Invisible: MP expands his reflection on the body and says that his body has never been his, and neither yours, it is rather a kind of collective flesh. And it is in different positions that certain fleshes open up and misunderstand themselves as specific pieces of flesh. It is in a chiasmatic relationship in which we are opposed to each other and have consciousness to one another and as such seperate selfhood. All terms in a chiasma require one another. This is a reformulation of dialectics once more.
We did not discuss Hegel. He is in all of these authors. Everyone tries to not talk about Hegel, but his influence weighs heavily on all of the philosophy we have done.
Intersubjectivity: culture is only possible because of intersubjectivity. Because we are all engaged in the same movement of collective meanings. It is wrong to believe that in phenomenology we are allowed to whatever we want as subjects in the world. But rather we are thrown into the world and are given certain worlds. Sense-constitution can be done alone (though that doesn’t lead anywhere) but as soon as you engage in collective sense-constitution the world can be changed, and this turns into culture.
prereflective consciousness: a reflection on something that is pre-given. It is returns to something that is either happening or is passed, and is an activity that which you experience. Reflection is something you can trigger or withhold. The very awareness of being in the room has a prc.
The quasi constituting acts that happen in the sphere of the prc, here is where the body comes into play, where the unconscious comes into play. Seeing the room as full of equal chairs as a unity is part of the microprocesses of the prc.
Once you go into reflection you objectify. You decide that things are the case, you experience pain as pain and as such objectifies as something that is really there. You can be damaged without transforming that damage into an object of attention in prc. In MP the gestalt vs its background. What is in the foreground, what is implicitly supposed in the background.
The transcendental is not transcendence but what allows for transcendence. This is a crypto heideggerian style. In Kant it’s quite obscure what the transcendental is. It refers to the apriori conditions of knowledge in Kant, but is also an activity. In phenomenology it is only an activity, a dynamism of consciousness itself.
The empirical is what is given in experience. Everything that is coherent with the conditions of experience like time and space, resistancy. In the positivistic framework it is what is quantifiable, or what becomes determinable in a scientific paradigm: the object of it.
The apriori refers to what is presupposed, that which precedes what follows out of it, ie. a posteriori. In Descartes and Locke they are innate ideas. In Kant it is called apriori. It is what comes before the facts. Ie. what the facts presuppose to become what they are.
Body and its corporeality. The reality of the body.
The body as a corporeality is the german distinction between Leib and Körper. Leib (char in French) is the living flesh, and the körper is the corpus (latin). You can also say subjective body or objective body. Flesh must be permeated by spirit. The body is the gateway to the being in the world.
It refers back to prc and referential consciousness. It is through consciousness, or the body as consciously animated thing, that we can transform the experiences of the body. We are most often neither fully objectified or fully subjectified. Every existence is always circulating immanence and trasncendence.
The body is also the asubjective ground of our subjectivity. And then it is neither Leib or Körper. In the anonymous activity of our body, like age, there are transformations of the body that one is subjected to and you experience it as something strange and foreign, but not as an objective body. Objectifying your body is distancing your body from you, it is creating a line of discontinuity. In the asubjective body, we have a third term. It is the basis of the circulation itself. It relates us back to nature, to the cosmos, to the metaphysical.
Sartre, despite not being entirely spoken of in the course, is behind people like Lacan as well, Lacan rejects a lot of Sartre but also take parts like the gaze from him.
Body is essential for the acquisition of language in the lacanian picture. Because the body is the center point of castration. It is only through castration that we become a part of the language community, and become alienated in it. We have to abandon a body part in order to fully enter the symbolic realm.
We are supposed to understand the philosophies related to the key terms (check slides from last class). This means using the terminology of that framework. You have to put yourself into the theory and inhabit it from the inside. Be technical.