Status Updates From Husserl's Account of Our Co...

...our being in the world, which is also “in” us, never gives us the distance to fix the lived experience. Our being in a world that is also in us is such that we can never stand outside the circle of affecting and being affected by this world.’

...There is always a divergence between the “aerial view of life” which fixes essences and “life, which is inherence in the world.” For Merleau-Ponty, then: “If one takes this residue into account, there is no longer identity between the lived experience and the principle of non-contradiction: the thought, precisely as thought, can no longer convey the lived experience”. Behind this incapacity, is the fact that...

‘When we act, we affect our situation and the result—the excess that our action has created—affects us. In other words, everything we do changes our situation and, hence, affects our description of it.
Our being affected by our situation, insofar as it changes us, changes the way we affect our situation, which changes its action on us. Because of this, there is always a residue....

...He “is the one who placed the arbitrariness of the sign and the differential characterof the sign at the foundation of general semiology, particularly linguistics. And these two motifs—arbitrary and differential—are inseparable in his view. There can be arbitrariness only because the system of signs is constituted by differences [between the terms], and not by the [intuitive] fullness of the terms”.

‘...the signified concept is never present in itself in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself”. If we grant this, then we are faced with a network of signs referring to signs, without any anchoring intuitions. In the absence of the latter, the significance of a sign is purely arbitrary. It depends on the system of differences in which it is located. This, for Derrida, was Saussure’s great insight....

‘​Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Levinas, initiates the French tradition of seeing Husserl from a Heideggarian perspective.’

‘What underlies our temporalization and, with this, our ability to engage in constitution is, according to Heidegger, not presence but radical absence. This insight marks the fundamental divide that distinguishes his account of temporalization and, hence, of selfhood from Husserl’s position.’

...What Heidegger does not stress is that my being subject to death is an aspect of my organic functioning. As such, the same claims can be made about its other aspects. It is, for example, equally true that no one can eat for me, go to sleep for me, go to the bathroom for me, and so on.’

‘That there is another, non-communicable level, one that is essentially private is evinced by Heidegger’s statement, “Insofar as it ‘is,’ death is essentially, in every case, mine,” (SZ, p. 240). His point is that no one can die for me. It is something that I must do by myself. Death, in other words, is irremediably private....

‘Subjectively, there is a certain pleasure in yielding to an instinctive impulse. For example, before an infant learns to control his body, “there is a ‘joy in wild-movements’ [Freude am Strampeln], in moving the body through moving the limbs.”’

I have Lustaffektion für Freude am Strampeln! :))

‘Here, Husserl seems to feel that as long as there are sentient beings, the absolute expresses itself through them as a “stationary remaining form” of primal aliveness.’

‘As another manuscript from the same period makes clear, the absolute is not the same as this totality of human subjects. As individuals, monads are temporally limited. The same holds for “humanities.” They, too, are born and die. One cannot, however, assert this of the pre-individual absolute, which is not temporally determinate. Here...

‘In the Logical Investigations, Husserl quotes Natorp only to dismiss him....Phenomenology cannot deal with a non-appearing ego. It is, thus, “quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary center of relations.”
However, in a footnote to the Second Edition of the Investigations, he admits: “I have since managed to find it”...

‘It is stationary because “the specious present, the intuited duration, stands permanent, like the rainbow on the waterfall, with its own quality unchanged by the events that stream through it” (Psychology, p. 286). What we have here, in essence, is Husserl’s “stationary-streaming present.” It is an extended “living present” that is animated by the streaming content that fills it.’

‘As for the present, this “has no extent of duration at all.” It is only “that point of time which cannot be divided into the minutest parts of moments” (ibid., pp. 16-17).
This last, of course, is Aristotle’s point that the present is not a “part” of time.’

‘...Husserlian ‘marginalia’ to Augustine.” Among such “marginalia” are the understanding of the past and future in terms of our consciousness of them. There is also the understanding of the present, which contains these consciousnesses, as having a certain distension—that is, as being the place where time has its extension.’

Augustine ‘influenced Husserl’s own introspective method. As Rudolf Bernet writes, “The personal copy of the Confessions kept at the Archives shows that Husserl carefully read Book XI. This is not surprising since in his phenomenological description of internal time-consciousness he is so inspired by the observations and implicit presuppositions of Augustine’s analysis of time that one may candidly speak of...

‘...Without students, he cannot be a teacher in the sense of realizing this ability. The same holds for color. Without eyes with color vision, there is no color. There remains only the physical phenomena—e.g., the electromagnetic waves—that we register as color.’

‘The now, in other words, is the body’s presence to the mind. Thus, nowness and presence are synonymous. Both indicate being’s presence to us. Behind this view is Aristotle’s belief that the actuality (energia) of a thing is where it is at work (en ergon). Thus, the actuality of the teacher is “in” the student. This is where he actualizes his being as a teacher...

...It does not have any deductive necessity. What motivates the path is the goal of achieving clarity with regard to a given issue. Thus, the determination is teleological.’
Or, in my case, soteriological...

‘The hermeneutical task of tracing out this path is, thus, to see the original question, as Husserl’s insights into it deepen, as determining and determined by the path of his inquiry. The fact that the question determines the problems that arise with given solutions does not, of course, mean that it gives the response to these problems. A motivated path is neither causally nor logically determined....

Husserl’s depiction of his method in the Bernau Manuscripts is quite telling. He writes: “As in this treatise so generally, we bore and we blast mineshafts in all possible directions. We consider all the logical possibilities to catch sight of which of these present essential possibilities and which yield essential impossibilities, and thus we ultimately sort out a consistent system of essential necessities.”