Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics.

Paul Ricoeur demonstrated the shift from knowing being as it is in-itself, or as it is essentially, in the sense of without relation to a knower, to uncovering being as a process of relational interpretation, which might be thought of as the shift from the Husserlian "Eidetic" reduction to the Heideggerian "Hermeneutic Circle." Edmund Husserl hoped to disclose the things-in-themselves of the Kantian noumena without the observers intention, so that what appeared to us could show itself from its own intention without the interference of our projective presuppositions. However, he discovered that without the intentions of our presuppositions, nothing can be known. We know what there is through concepts, concepts that are motivated by our intention, rather than neutral observations. Martin Heidegger then showed that this conundrum, sometimes called the Observer Effect, was the result of our having been thrown into the facticity of a particular body at a particular place and time, which necessitated a particular intention. 

But the limitations of situated-being's facticity was also the horizon of any possible knowing because knowing is intentional, which is to say that knowing is motivated, motivated in the first place by "Dasein's" thrownness, which is the limit and horizon of its knowing, and then motivated in the second place by the uncertainty reduction of niche construction. Therefore, all knowing is motivated by care about being and not by knowing itself, or rather, knowing itself is care for being. Ontic beings care about the Ontology of the Being from which they were thrown, as well as the particularities of the situation into which they have been thrown. Ricoeur's great contribution to knowing about being was to formulation how an observer's situated intention can contributed to an open circle of other intentional situations. The differences of intentional situations require interpretations of being rather than a closed, determinate identification of being-in-itself. Ricoeur's version of the hermeneutic circle was formulated as the circle of "Self as Another," in which each self knows itself through another, or through the indeterminacy of otherness.

https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

We'll go back to failure case for you. We are talking about the interpretation of being. Interpretation is to be juxtaposed to the sort of scientific knowing that has dominated epistemology for at least the last three centuries, or at least since the beginning of the Enlightenment, which took as its, I guess, defining principles the rational methods of logic, as well as the empirical methods of the sciences, in which you have the standard of third-person, objective, independent verifiability. Aristotle is often credited long before the Enlightenment began with the laws of rational thinking. These laws center around the law of non-contradiction, in which a statement cannot be true if it is contradicted by an actual state of affairs, which is the tie-in with empiricism. So empirical knowledge is experiential knowledge. So what is observed cannot be in contradiction with what is said about it if we are to consider it to be true. And this is the sort of founding principle of falsifiability within the sciences. If somebody says something, you can check it. And if it doesn't turn out that way, then it's not a true statement. If it does, it is. This is the classic super played out idea that if somebody says the cat is on the mat, then you can go check and see. And if the cat is, that's a true statement. If the cat is not there on the mat, then it is a false statement. One of the important admirations of the law of non-contradiction is the law of excluded middle, which basically means that something can't be both what it is and something else at the same time. And so this is the identity that excludes other identities. For example, I can say that is a cat, and then another person says, that is a dog. There is a fact of the matter. Something in front of us, a referent. So we have two different signifiers, cat on the one hand and dog on the other, and they have a referent. So either that referent, that signified thing, is a cat or a dog. It can't be both. Both people cannot be right. But notice that truth relies on an observer. And this is the problem that science has been trying to get around with the formulation of third-person objectifiability, but alas to no avail. I'm setting up the juxtaposition between scientific objectivity and its kind of apotheosis in Housterl's phenomenology on the one hand versus hermeneutics on the other, to introduce the reasons for and the transitions between this sort of objective scientific kind of phenomenology and the kind of phenomenology most well exemplified by Paul Record, at least for me, which is the kind of phenology that includes interpretation or includes some indeterminacy, which can only be determined in a very loose way with a dialogue with otherness or a dialogue with others, so that various perspectives can be correct or true even if they are contradictory, so that there is no absolute fact of the matter or omniscient view from nowhere. The observer affects what is observed by their intention. Intention has a couple of important meanings in terms of observation here. The first is the simple, normal, everyday meaning of intention, which is something like a goal-directed behavior. So the first thing to notice here is that every observation has an intention, or you could say is motivated, so that each observation, no matter how seemingly neutral and scientific and from some third person omniscient vantage point, nonetheless contains some subjectivity in the sense that it contains some of the subject's intention towards what is being observed, so that there are motivated reasons behind any observation. And those reasons include the facticity that the observer finds him or herself within. So facticity is basically the time, the place, uh, the situation, if you will, of the observer, so that the observer is never observing from a neutral place. It is always a motivated location, starting with the motivation of a particular body that is looking or observing the world for a reason that is related to the body, even in basic research, so-called, because it is supposedly lacking in any uh particular motivation, any particular research and any particular um knowledge outcome. It's just sort of generally speaking, trying to find out what's out there or how the world works on some physical level without any particular concern for developing a new technology, a new drug, a new product to bring onto the market, or anything along those lines. It's just, again, this supposedly unmotivated inquiry into the nature of the universe. But this supposedly unmotivated, neutral scientific observer performing basic research is still a motivated observer, regardless of his or her disavowal of their motivation. The scientific observer chooses what to observe, chooses what to perform their experiments on, still based on their intention. So the second meaning of intention comes from the branch of philosophy that wanted to be a pure third-person science of phenomenology, in which the first person observer would hypothetically collapse into third-person objectivity. The phenomenological intention includes two basic elements as one. So it is both the projection of the world that appears, and it is also the screen upon which it appears. So, what the phenomenological intention is, first formulated by Franz Brentano, teacher of the most famous phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, is that we see the world or the world appears to us as we intend for it to appear to us. So that the world is a motivated world. We see what we see because of its relationship to us. In general, we see the world as objects because it is useful or instrumental. It's an instrumentalized world that is full of the objects that we see because it is adaptive and an evolutionary way of thinking about it, so that the particular objects that we see and the way that we see them, what appears on our intentional screen or what is projected by our intentional projector, is what is necessary for us to transact with the world in an advantageous or in a beneficial way, with reference to us, uh to our bodies that are situated in a world in a particular way. Again, what is often called our facticity. So for Martin Heidegger, probably one of Husserl's most famous students and probably the most famous and important philosopher of the 20th century, albeit a Nazi, but we can't get into that right at this moment. But at any rate, he has a useful idea in which we find ourselves thrown not into a general, open, abstract sort of being, but into a particularized, located, situated being. And that situation is our facticity, which is the relation of the particular human, if we're talking about Dasein, the human body and then the world that the human body interacts with. But this world isn't whatever it is as it is in itself. The world is how it appears to us, so that we are, in Heidegger's words, worlding beings. We make worlds out of our intention for the world. Again, our intention is our world, and it is both the projection of our intention, what Heidegger would call the care that we have about our being, and then it is the screen or the projection of our care about being, so that we see the world according to the projection of our care about our being, so that this projection of our care is actually onto a screen that appears to us as the world. But this appearance of the world is not how things are necessarily in themselves, because the screen is showing us a reflection of our own projection, of our own intention. And for human beings or Dasein being there in Heidegger's way of thinking about it, language is the most important both mediator of our intention, but it's also what in many ways gives us our intention, because language is the culture or the social norms and codes and rules and the things that we desire and all those kinds of things that uh Lacan summed up with his concept of the symbolic, so that language includes all of that. It includes our situation, it includes the culture that we're born into, so that we see the world uh according to the language uh in which we were born into. So it's just another way of saying that we are seeing the world according to the situation that we are thrown into, uh, and part of that situation, the biggest part of that situation, uh, this is why Heidegger says that language is the house of being. Uh, he is saying here that our access to our being uh is through language. So you can start to see how this conundrum is playing itself out. There is, on the one hand, a desire for being in itself, not the world that we project uh onto our subjective screens, but the world as it is in itself. The sciences claim to give this when the claim is that this is a third-person, uh objective, verifiable, independently verifiable truth of some kind. How the universe would be uh without us observing, how the universe would be without the mediation of our language, how the universe would be without our observation of it, without our intention for it. This is the sort of thing that Einstein was responding to in his arguments with Niels Bohr and some of the quantum interpretations, particularly the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, in which the observer affects what is being observed to such a degree that one could say that the observer makes a wave appear or makes a particle appear, depending on how or what the observer is looking for, to which Einstein famously retorts, I would like to think that the moon would still be there whether anyone was looking at it or not. What is being evoked here is observer independent reality. So reality without intention. And then what is being proposed here is that reality, in some sense, is being made or composed of our intention, which sounds a lot like classical idealism. Uh, and this is why idealism, such as Bishop Barclay's idealism, was originally formulated, because it seemed that we were um imposing um our ideas uh onto the world to such an extent that we were actually creating the world by our ideas. Another example we can think of David Hume's famous refutation of causality, in the sense that he wasn't saying there wasn't such a thing. He was saying that it couldn't be observed outside of our own intention for the world. We're the ones who impose this coupling uh onto the world, so that what there was, in Hume's famous example of billiard balls, was uh one round object, you know, hitting another round object or touching another round object, and then the other round object uh moving. The thing we don't see is the as a result of being hit by this other ball, the other ball moves. What we don't see is the causality. What we're imposing uh onto the world is uh this notion, this idea of causation. So the objects that we see in the world and their relations, especially their most primary causal relations uh with each other, how they affect each other, that is all mediated through our concepts, through our ideas. And that is not something that is in the universe itself, that's in the world as we intend the world. Now, as I said before, uh the world is mediated through our concepts, through our language, but before that, on the perceptual level, the world is synthesized in the words of uh Immanuel Kant uh on the intuitive uh intentional screen. So that means before concepts. So Kant's a priori categories um are relations. Uh, in some ways they are concept-like, because as AN Whitehead once put it, uh concepts are um percepts uh put together or related to each other uh via a rule, uh, but they are not uh concepts, at least for Kant. Uh the intuition uh of our most basic level of perception or perceptual experience is prelingual and pre-conceptual, um, so that um the categories which I'll go through now um give us uh a world but uh in a very basic way uh according to uh quantity, quality, relation, and modality, which we'll go through uh shortly. Uh for Kant, these are not concepts, but they are a priori categories. So like our perceptual apparatuses, our uh ways of uh having any sensation at all are through our are mediated through uh our perceptual apparatuses so that we have, you know, taste, um touch, uh, hearing, uh seeing, smelling through uh perceptual apparatuses um that have to include uh those four, uh Kant had more than that, uh, but nowadays they're kind of brought down to those four categories uh in order for any of those perceptual apparatuses to work. So those uh mechanisms they sense the world or perceive the world via uh quantity, quality, relationality, and modality. Um so again, there is this relation. So they're relating percepts uh according to these uh categories, and then you know, for human beings, eventually percepts are related to uh concepts, but first uh they're related to each other uh via the perceptual apparatuses. Now the idea here uh with Husserlian phenomenology is that if we reduce uh our intention to the perceptual level uh before there is any copulation of percepts with concepts, just percepts with percepts to make perception, uh a basic perception that is presuppositionless, as in without concepts that are either blocking or molding uh what we see, so that what we see isn't just the projection of our own concepts, but we can see what is outside of us. Uh, we can, I guess, encounter the numinal world uh somehow because we're just at the level of perception rather than at the level of conceptualization. What Husserl himself runs into and what he discovers is that even our perception is embedded in a particularized intention that has a particular situation, an evolutionary niche, that is not gonna give us the world uh as whatever is outside intends, but is still going to give it us a world in our relation to the world. So it is the relation of my intention toward the intention of what is outside of me or other than me, including uh the blind physical intention uh of something that, you know, using the word intention very loosely is just more like a a force or more like a uh determined physical object or process that I have to learn how that thing um interacts or is going to affect me so that I can uh get some advantage, so that I can make accurate predictions. So again, the generalized laws of the universe that I observe, I always observe them embedded in particular situations or particular uh processes, objects, whatever. But what is most important here is that I always perceive them through my perceptual apparatuses. And those ways of perceiving are intentional in the sense that they are geared towards uncertainty reduction, uh, given uh the particular niche that I find myself in. So they're not how things are, they appear to me through my sensory uh systems, according to how my sensory systems have been calibrated to my niche so that I can make accurate predictions and reduce uncertainty. Every scientist making so called third person, objective, independently verifiable uh observations is making those observations with sensory systems. That are biased, that are intentional in the sense that they intend for survival and reproduction and for evolutionary advantage. And they are also not making those observations on the perceptual level alone. Their percepts have been well copulated with concepts. This is called the theory-laden problem with scientific observation. However, presuppositionless and observation is claimed to be by an objective science or by a phenomenologist, those are nowhere near as neutral or as objective as would befit a certain definition of a scientific observation. Immanuel Compton famously said that David Hume had awoken him from his dogmatic slumbers with this realization that there is a distinction between how we see the world, the phenomenon of the world, or the phenomena of the world, and how the world is in itself. And so this became probably the most important development in philosophy since its inception with Plato, the distinction between the phenomenal world, how the world appears to us through our intention, and then how the world is in itself, which is what Kant calls the numenal world. So there's no question, at least in this form of phenomenology, Kant's phenomenology, that there is a world out there or a universe out there besides the world of our intention. But we don't have any access to it because in order for a world to appear to us at all, we need to have certain, in Kant's way of thinking about it, a priori categories. So the primary a priori category, the grandity of them all, in many ways is causality. So we need to see causality in the world. We need to see that things affect other things via some kind of a relation. Otherwise, uh we cannot see a world at all. There may be only correlations in the world, and there is no actual observable causality. But we need to see causality, uh, otherwise we cannot see anything at all. Kant's uh a priori categories uh are many, but nowadays they're usually broken down into four um general uh categories. So the first one is the wheelhouse of the sciences, which is quantities. So we need to be able to see things uh in terms of quantifiable holes. So this is a world made up of countable objects and countable um intensities. Although the world uh as it appears phenomenologically to us is a world of qualitative um, what sometimes call qualia or experience, um, we need to be able to count uh those qualities in some kind of a way. In order to be able to transact with the world at all, it has to be countable. And therefore, the objectivity of the objective sciences is putting everything into a discrete, digitizable unit of some sort or another and counting it. And that's what uh a scientific measurement is, and that is third person, independent, verifiable, as long as everybody agrees on the units of measurement, and so that's another big push in science is to get this total um uniformity uh of ways of measuring the world. And then there are these big debates about how the world is in itself. Is it full of countable discrete things, or is it actually continuous? Do we just have to make it into objective discrete units in order to transact with it or manipulate it or reduce uncertainty because we are prediction machines, or uh is the world actually like that? And so part of this debate is this whole idea about the um kind of amazing correlation between mathematics and the universe. Um, so there seems to be this weird, uncanny tie between uh breaking the world down into certain quantifiable units and measurements and how the world uh actually is independent of us. So that many claim that the truest description of the world is mathematical, and there are very famous scientists who would say that the world just is math in this very uh reductionary way that uh if you were to ask, like, well, what is you know the universe, they would just say uh it's mathematics. Or they would say something like it's quantities, countable, discrete things that have, at the most basic level of physics, um identities that are just um themselves without any necessary relationality. So the most basic level of uh the universe, let's say, the subatomic level, uh, everything is just made up of these subatomic particles. And then the job of sciences is to just to starting with these raw facts, these beginning points, these absolute, uh, the word atom actually means like cannot be cut down or broken into parts uh any further. So then the physicist's job is just to see how these uh quarks make up an atom, and then how the parts of the uh atom interact with each other, and then how when you put different uh atoms with different electron counts uh around uh each other, you start to form uh elements, and then you start to form molecules, and then you get into chemistry, and then eventually you can build up from chemistry uh into biology. Uh, but all of this is countable in some kind of way, so that every qualitative experience uh of the world, every phenomenological appearance on your intentional screen, um really uh is a kind of illusion or something that emerges from a combination, an infinitely complex combination of subatomic particles ultimately, so that every biological system can be broken to its chemistry and then broken back down into its physics, matter in motion. Or matter energy's modal relation with space-time according to the natural laws, and we'll get back to that shortly. This is in the sciences called the material reduction. So reducing all appearances, all phenomena, to their material quantities. Uh, an example would be something like you see a tree, uh, but the material reduction on the tree would be to reduce it first to its biology, so the interaction of its parts, especially its different cellular systems, and then you can reduce that down to its chemistry, and then you can ultimately reduce that down to uh the matter energy uh that comprises the tree. So that ultimately everything is material. And the problem that we're going to see there is that we still don't know actually what matter is, and it's kind of a strange situation that most of what matter is is relational, so it's not made up of anything or any uh particular objects, it's mostly made up out of a relation uh between things. There is almost nothing solid in an atom, it is almost completely made up of space-time. So that is for uh further discussion as well. But the next uh general set uh of um a priori categories is the sort of relation that is called quantity. Uh notice too that all of these are relations. Again, there is no number in itself or quantity in itself. It's always uh in the relation to uh somebody who counts. And they only are able to count according to what counts to them. You can't even see, uh, we would imagine, something that has no effect on one's facticity, on one's situatedness, on one's body. So that there might be all kinds of things that are just simply uh not possible to measure. Uh maybe somebody might think of dark matter or dark energy in this regard, which might be measurable but only measurable indirectly by the effect and then uh deducing backwards to the presence of something uh that can't be seen in any direct way, like a black hole or something like that. Now uh quantity um so is countable, so it's what we call positive. So this is why you will sometimes hear the scientists uh call uh the science is positivistic. So again, this means that they are observable. So countable means that anybody can count and come up with the same thing. And this is the positivism of logical positivism, it is also the positivism of the modern uh observable, independently verifiable sciences. Now, the next category, quality, uh, is somewhat controversial. There's a bunch of controversies around there. Now, if you are a positivistic scientist, you are going to say that quality is ultimately a measurable level of intensity. For example, something like density, something that can be counted by the equation usually of an object's mass and then dividing it by its volume. This is uh you know what density is defined as in terms of uh quantities. So these quantifiable qualities are sometimes called primary qualities. So they are objective, again, and measurable properties. So you might think of size or shape, mass, uh, motion, uh, even number. Um, these are all things that are related to the intensities uh within uh or attributed to uh an object or a situation. And then the secondary qualities um are all related to the observer. So this is going to be like color, taste, smell, sound, uh, perception. So once you've moved now to perception, you've kind of moved away from the positive, countable uh way the thing is um outside of the observer, according to the scientific paradigm, at any rate. And now you've moved into the subjective experience of something. And this is where the controversy really begins. Because uh, for those people who do not believe that all of life, all of experience, all the universe is ultimately reducible to the countable aspects, the material aspects of being, that there are qualitative aspects of experience that are actually a part of what being is. So if you don't uh talk about these qualitative experiential aspects of being, you're not including uh all that the universe or all that being is. Or rather, if you reduce uh everything that you are talking about to quantities, to countable things, then you are missing a whole aspect of being that is essential to being, which is qualia, the experience that is sometimes called the what it's like to be, which is Thomas Nagel's notion uh in his famous essay uh what it's like to be a bat. His idea is basically like, yes, there are all these quantities out there, but why is there this what it's like to experience or to observe or to interact with uh these uh qualitative intensities? But what it's likeness of experience or of aboutness, the aboutness of the intention, um, isn't something that is necessarily countable because there is a disjunction, it would appear, at any rate, uh, between uh countable intensities uh and the uncountable uh experience of them. And so the example that usually gets used here uh that's the simplest is color. So there are all kinds of objectifiable, uh third-person observable, countable qualities about color. So there is a wavelength uh that has a certain frequency, and I think it's called uh amplitude. But these things are all countable uh and would be there if the person who was counting them uh couldn't see color. All they would need is some kind of a light spectrum measuring device, uh a chromometer or whatever they're called uh that measures the uh uh light lights intensities. This hypothetical person could uh get that reading, and then they could um basically explain uh the color uh just according uh to its quantities. There are famously all these colors uh that we are not able to see that other uh animals are, I don't know, infrared, ultraviolet come to mind, whatever. They're just not within the spectrum of what our eyes can actually take in. So we cannot have an actual experience uh of those lights uh as color. Uh they are invisible to us. We can describe their quantities, uh, but only the animals who have actually uh had the experience uh of seeing uh those color frequencies have had an experience of those things. And just the basic question is is like, is there a difference between uh having an actual experience of uh some what it's likeness of infrared or ultraviolet or whatever the case may be? Um, or is it just the same as being able to say numerically or quantitatively uh what those things are? Most of us intuitively would say, yeah, I've never had uh an experience of uh ultraviolet or whatever. Uh therefore I can explain it. I know it's something that exists and it's got a certain ontology, which just means uh it's a part of what is or it's uh a part of the universe, but I've never had an experience uh of that qualia. And so this is what Thomas Nagel's famous um essay about the echolocation that a bat uses to orient itself to the world is about. It's about how, since we don't have an experience of echolocation, we don't hear uh in that range that a bat is able to, uh, that we experience the world uh in a very uh significantly different way that is unknowable to us. Uh, in whatever way we can describe uh echolocation and how it works, we have no experience of that, uh, maybe a little bit sometimes. Uh as apparently uh some folks who are blind can use echolocation a bit. And we, I'm sure, use it a bit ourselves in the sense that, you know, we can call out and get a sense of the room with our eyes closed just by the way the echoes um bounce off of the objects that may be in it. But just like we could say that our dog knows the world by how it smells, uh, and that's how the dog uh experiences its world, uh, we also can say that the way the bat experiences its world and orients itself is totally foreign to us, and something we don't have access to via any kind of quantitative uh explanation of the uh intensities of the bat's world. So the question comes down to this is this what its likeness ontologically real? Or does it participate or is it a part of being, the being of the universe? Uh is it something, uh, even though it's not measurable in the same way, usually we wind up resorting to poetic uh explanations or descriptions of things when we want to talk about the redness of the rose or whatever. But is this something that is real or is it all just sort of uh an illusion? So this is something that if a positivistic scientist performing a material reduction is going to have to say this is a hallucination or an illusion of some kind that is not real and is not a part of what counts, I mean, in a very literal way, because it can't be counted, is it not a part of what counts uh in uh what is what can be called in a positivistic sense, the universe, or what counts uh as being being, or part of the is-ness of being, of what is, what is called ontology. For the strict materialist science, uh he or she would have to say no, that it does not count uh because it is not countable, and because it is a kind of emergent or epiphenomenal uh illusion, particularly uh of the subjective intention, so that everything that you see as the world is a kind of orchestrated uh hallucination, orchestrated in particular for the um advantage of a prediction machine, so that we see the world not as it is, uh, but we see the world uh according to our evolutionary advantage, or what is it, an advantageous way of being in the world, which is why we only see the colors that we see, uh, because those are the colors that are uh of advantage to us uh in our particular evolutionary niche for survival and reproduction. Same thing with sound. Uh we would have evolved to uh hear a different sound range if we occupied a different niche, uh, if we were in the bats, you know, dark um night nocturnal cave-dwelling niche, then we would have developed, you know, over time, uh something like uh echolocation or just a better uh system of auditory range. But most simply put, the redness of the rose is not in the rose. The redness in the rose is is is in our intention toward the rose. So we have an experience of that red according to our relationship to the rose. So it's in us, it's in our intention, and then positivistically speaking, our intention is nothing because it's not something that can be counted, it's not something that um can be measured, uh, it's something that um emerges out of somehow or another, we don't know how, uh, the complexity of the intensities of the color red, but we don't know how this illusion occurs. And there's a lot of problems with this scientific notion uh of intention that we will come to uh shortly. But for now, we just want to kind of outline how this works. The scientist is always going to tell you that red is something in us, in our intention, not something that is in the rose itself. So it is not. In the world. It is not in the world outside of us. So it is not a part of the universe, the numinal universe that would stand without the observer or without us. So then again, the question gets played back into the first set of categories, those of quantities. Is uh mathematics in the world or is it in us? There does seem to be this uncanny correspondence, but it does seem pretty obvious that without us, uh there is no mathematics in the universe. Now, one of the answers to this is that we are a part of the universe, so that our experience of red or our concepts around mathematics are a part of the universe because they are in us and we are a part of the universe. Actually, in many formulations, we are the universe looking at itself. So that Kant's a priori categories of quantity and quality are universal categories, uh, are what he would call transcendental categories of subjectivity. So that whenever there is an instance of an intention that is able to make observations according to the categories of quantity and quality, uh then you're going to have an instance of subjectivity, in particular the transcendental subjectivity necessary for participating in a conscious way. This is why this is all around consciousness, and that's what intentionality is. It's our consciousness. Can't participate in the universe consciously if you have these transcendental categories. In fact, Kant's basic idea is that these transcendental categories are out there, but they are internalized in our intention, in our consciousness, in our way of seeing things. So this would go along a bit with the evolutionary idea that, you know, we see the world uh according to prediction machines, the advantage that we gain from it. And that's gonna be a somewhat accurate way of seeing how the world is without us, because we're gonna need to know what the Numenal world is doing and all about in order for us to be uh predictive uh of uh how things are gonna go and to reduce uncertainty. But this still doesn't really answer this basic qualitative controversy of why quality should have a what it's likeness rather than just the countable intensities that we normally associate with qualities like size or duration or number or any of the others. And I should say that when I'm talking about uh number as a quality, I'm talking about like experiencing things as countable. I'm talking about like I see discrete units of things, that that's a part of a qualitative uh experience of the world. Now the third uh sort of grouping uh of Kant's a priori categories are around relationality. And this one is the most important by far, because this is where the relation of cause and effect uh comes into play. Again, think back to Hume here. He's saying, or he said, that we don't observe cause and effect, which means that we see cause and effect according to our intention, so that we can't um prove correlation. We can only say that things are correlated and that they may or may not uh be causally uh related. We can describe the correlation uh of the billiard balls. So we can say that this one billiard ball um, you know, was in motion, it touched this other billiard ball, and then the other billiard ball um began to move. But the part where we are imposing our own intention into the situation is if we say, and the other billiard ball caused that billiard ball to move, or if we say the uh cause uh of the motion of the second billiard ball uh was this first one, um, and so that this effect that was observable really wasn't observable. What was observable was a second billiard ball moving. We're calling that an effect. So we are imposing this third category relation uh into the world via our intention. Again, an intention that we need to see the world, uh, that we need to have a world, especially as a prediction machine. We need to see cause and effect relations, even though they are not actually or may not actually be in the world. Without us there at the billiard table watching that happen, there is no cause and there is no effect, because just like color, it's an experiential uh relation that is uh in us. Again, the scientists can reduce uh this category relation to quantities, uh, as everything is reduced to quantities. So we could talk about the um velocity of the billiard balls and their size and their mass and how that is really uh what's going on, is and you can give a perfectly quantifiable uh description of this thing. However, uh it is not true uh when the scientist would insist that this is without any subjectivity, uh, because even in this quantity uh-based description, you still have to impose some kind of relationality, some kind of cause and effect if you are going to be explaining this relationship. Now, cause and effect may be in the situation itself without us there. Uh, but we can't prove that one way or another because it requires us being there, an observer, uh, with an intention, with an intentional subjectivity that is uh knitted together uh through the synthesis of the a priori categories that we call or that Kant called uh the intuition. So without our intuitive experience, uh this synthesis of these categories, uh especially of relationality, we don't have an experience. And if we need uh, as a part of the scientific method, uh the empirical half of this rational thinking bit, we need the observer, the experiencer. Uh and so we just don't know uh what there is uh without our intention. Our intention may be perfectly correlated with how the world is in itself. Uh, but as is noted by the very simple example of color, uh, the world in itself does not include experience of the world. So there isn't uh the what it's likeness uh of the color red or the redness of red as it's sometimes called without intention, without an observer to experience the qualia of red. I've always sort of liked William James's description uh of the Numenal as the buzzing, blooming confusion. And this is just an attempt to analogically or metaphorically uh describe what the world is without us, because we can assume that it isn't at if it has objects, it's not objectified in the way that we make objects. If there's color, it's not the way we experience color. And so that if there are so many different perspectives uh because there are so many different kinds of experience, what happens if there are no perspectives, no intention, no experience? What happens if there is um just the physical uh whatever is out there? That's just again another sort of metaphorical way of trying to get at whatever it would be. Because even when James says, for example, buzzing, blooming, confusion, if that's his exact words, those are all intentional concepts uh from human language uh that have a particular intentional relation to us. So that buzzing is a noise that we associate with an obnoxious insect. There's the sort of metaphorical reach into the numinal. Then we have uh the blooming, so this growing kind of idea, this budding sort of an idea, again, analogically related to our experience of wild growth out of control. And then, of course, confusion is very much uh a concept related to us. In other words, it doesn't make sense to us. So, whatever it is, uh, we don't have access to it. Which is again why Heidegger called us, our intention, Dasein's intention, the world-making intention. Because it is the thing that makes the world uh out of this buzzing, blooming confusion. Uh, but whatever that buzzing and blooming confusion is, uh, we don't have uh any access to it because what gives us our access is our intention. And the most basic level of our relation, and that's why we're on this third category and saying it's the most important, it is our relation to that buzzing blooming confusion that makes a world. So it is nothing in itself, because whatever the buzzing blooming confusion is, that's nothing that we can name, talk about, or measure. This is sort of where process philosophy, especially A.N. Whitehead kind of develop process philosophy where relationality is primary, it's everything, it's what makes whatever there is. Nothing in itself is anything until it comes into a relation. Not necessarily the relation between an observer and an observed, because there are clearly all kinds of relations that are not uh conscious or happening all the time, even among uh beings that are conscious, that are you know uh happening at an unconscious level. So that you know what is required is not the consciousness so much as the relation. But to know it, to know what it is, a particular relationship is required, and that is the relationship of consciousness or the intention uh to whatever is being um related to or whatever is on the intentional screen of consciousness. So in phenomenology, we are aware of what we are concerned with or what we care about, and so or what matters to us, what affects uh if we're prediction machines, and what matters to the uh accuracy of a prediction. But the accuracy is just a quantitative measure. There is also uh an aspect of us that is beyond just making accurate predictions. There seems to be something uh in us that is interested in the quality, uh the secondary qualities, the qualia of the experience beyond just um their accuracy in terms of outcome. So, yeah, we have an intention, we care about the world uh for survival and reproduction, but there also seems to be a care or a concern about the world beyond the accuracy of predictions that has to do with uh beauty, truth, and the good. And so, of course, the scientific positivist can reduce all of those qualitative, secondary qualitative experiences uh to you know quantities, so that you know, beauty has a particular relationship to proportionality, which has a particular relationship to relation uh the relationality of reproduction, um, so that all of these things can eventually, you know, whatever it is, whatever cultural production there is, uh it may appear to be frivolous and unrelated to survival and reproduction, uh, dance, uh, music, uh, art, whatever. Uh, but you know, the scientists can ultimately, especially the evolutionary biologists, can ultimately relate it to some kind of uh niche necessity uh for survival or reproduction, and those can all be you know quantifiably described. Same with uh truth. So truth is this this correspondence where the cat is on the mat. If indeed you go look and the cat is actually on the mat, then cool, like that's true, which is the relation between uh a logical rational statement uh and uh empirical verifiability. And the same thing for the good, it's some countable utilitarian state, and this is really the point of Milsian utilitarianism is like, okay, like, you know, here's how to distribute the calories to a society so that, you know, there's the greatest amount of good and the least amount of uh harm, so that you know the most are able to prosper uh according to what a society values and how it's organized. But then there is this uh ascetic set of concerns that can't really be reduced in that way, or at least uh they can't really be reduced in that way, if you have any concern about the redness of red, which is the ascetic, non-countable value of the experience uh of red, which would mean that our care for our being or our care about our being, our intention uh about our being uh is beyond survival and reproduction and beyond uh predictions uh and their accuracy. The aboutness of our intention matters to us more than just how it helps us to survive and reproduce. And actually, it's more fundamental than survival and reproduction because the question is why survive and reproduce? Why be at all? And at that point, we're starting to look to an answer that is qualitative, but not qualitative in a countable way, uh, although there are accountable aspects of an aesthetic concern. And I I have a trouble saying that word correctly. I don't mean aesthetic like a person who denies themselves, I mean aesthetic, like AE aesthetic, people who are concerned about the beauty, the truth, and the goodness uh of their experience. It's not just enough to say we care about our being. We have to know why, uh, or at least we have to think about why. Because it's not always just an automatic thing. Uh, we don't always uh just care about our being. Sometimes uh being is too much. Uh and so the question becomes like what to be for, or why should we be? If our intention uh gives us uh a world according to uh our care for the world uh and our care for our being, then where does uh that care come from? What grounds it? If attention is grounded in care, we could just say that um care is just a raw fact. We just are born caring. But we know that it isn't. We know that there are many ways to lose that, uh, and we know that oftentimes we have to be enticed either into or back into uh our care for our being. And so the question becomes in what is care grounded in? So it might be grounded in uh nothing. It might just be one of these raw facts, just uh it comes from uh nowhere uh and it just is. But we might be able to say uh something more uh about our intention of this world, that our intention uh of this world or for this world, uh the way we're in this world, uh might ultimately be oriented towards beauty, truth, uh, and goodness. And so this is where we're going uh with Record and the switch from phenomenology uh to hermeneutics, to interpretation of being, rather than an objective uh description uh of being in itself, or as Husserl would put it, uh, of being appearing uh from itself and showing itself according to itself. Maybe there is more to being's appearing to uh itself or being showing itself from itself, uh, what is that ground? If it's showing itself from its care for itself, its concern about itself, its wanting to know itself, uh then what is this care grounded in beyond quantities of physical sciences? Quantities for what? And so this is again why this third category is so essential. It's this relationality. It's this relationality between uh knowing, between the description of the universe and the care uh about the universe that calls being out of itself to try to look at itself, to see itself, to know itself from a third-person, uh objective, verifiable point of view. The interpretation of being only is going to matter to a being that cares about its being. Which brings us to the last sort of grouping of uh categories uh which are grouped around the idea of modality. So, you know, scientifically, modality is like something that remains the same or self-identical but appears as something else, or is uh modified uh but still remains the same thing. And this actually is related to um Husserl's idetic reduction that we're going to get to. So if we want to know what something essentially is, we want to know what we could add to it or subtract from it and the thing still be itself. So the idetic reduction is often um compared to this thing that um Socrates used to do, where he would ask like a question about the good or about justice or whatever, uh, and then he would test out uh different versions or different definitions of the good or justice or truth or whatever, uh according to you know, particular situation. So just like try to apply it, and then he would see if there were any exceptions. And of course, there always were, and so this is what uh is called deconstruction nowadays. You find all these examples where one particular definition of the good uh doesn't apply because it isn't good for you know some of the people in that society, you know, excluded from the good or who actually are suffering because of somebody else's good. But that is one of those secondary qualitative kind of a judgments uh on a scientific way. You know, if you want to just do strictly quantifiable sort of things, you can think about like Aristotle's um using it on like uh the categories of uh animals or natural categories, basically, natural kinds. So um a dog, you know, take away its hair, is it still a dog? Yes, take away this, is it still a dog? And then eventually you're gonna get down to like the essence of a dog. That's why it's called a phenomenological reduction or an eidetic reduction, uh, because you know you're seeing what you can take away, uh what's absolutely necessary for a thing to be a thing. So you want to find uh in Husserl's uh idea again, um, how something uh gives itself from its own essence uh to the appearance. So in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, you're performing the same sort of ethoke, which means like bracketing, uh that Socrates does in uh Plato. Plato's dialogues and in other books that Plato wrote about him. You're kind of like bracketing off what you think you already know about something in order to let the thing speak for itself. So you don't want to project your own ideas onto it. You want to let that thing say what it is without your interference, without your intention. So as we are going to see though, it is impossible to see without your intention, without your motivated intention. You can try to bracket away as many things as possible, but you're always going to wind up having to observe anything, not from a third-person independently verifiable perspective, but from a first person subjective perspective. We always see the world according to our intention. We cannot directly enter into the numeral universe, however it is without us. We are always here in our own observations. You might say we are always interfering with our own observations. Again, the intention is both the projection and the screen. And that is a projection that comes from our intention, our motivated way of being in the world. Total or absolute objectivity, whatever that would be. Purified intention without intention. That would be, again, an observation without an observer. It winds up in a sort of logical absurdity that a lot of folks in the sciences, especially with the publication of this new book now called The Blind Spot, in which a number of scientists have had to accept that there is no way of purifying our observations so that they be in some ultimate way objective, which would be presenting the things as they are or from their own essences. This is another formulation of like why we don't really have essences anymore. Or if we do, they're just sort of provisional essences. I mean, as we observe things, things do appear to have their own essence or their own intention, but those things are fleeting. This is back to process theology in Whitehead, where these things are all relational processes. And so that there is nothing that is an eternal essence, like Plato's realm of the ideal forms or whatever it is. So again, back to A. Whitehead, this is this rejection of substance ontology towards a process-oriented ontology. So the problem that kind of comes into this fourth category of experience or a priori category for experience, modality, is that modality is the question of what stays the same or what is essential and what is changeable or what can appear differently. So on our intentional screen, we see objects, we see things that appear to be objects, even things that are not and that are obviously flowing like rivers, we still objectify that flow, that process rather than a thing by calling it a river, so that we always see the world in these sort of solidified ways. So that what modal logic, for example, is trying to find out is like what is the underlying structure and what is the change that is flowing through that particular structure? And then there is an obvious relation between the structure, the essence, the form, and the structure of the flow itself. And so how that flow flows is basically related to the machinic processes or the assemblages of machinic processes, for example, of the body, and all the flows and intensities within the body are then defined by the structure of the body. So back to Aristotle's dog, like what makes a dog a dog is its underlying structure. And then all the particular attributes or qualities of the dog are things that are somewhat changeable, but there are going to be some essential uh attributes that are going to be a result, a direct result of how that dog is structured. So something like an Aristotelian uh formal cause, where the form causes all of the processes uh and flows of intensities uh within that dog, the uh facticity of that dog's body and how it is situated in a particular evolutionary niche is the relation of the intention of the dog and the external world uh of the niche, so that you can say that the dog's body uh is caused formally by uh the niche, according to uh material reduction. And in the scientific material reduction, there is nothing but the formal cause. In the phenomenological reduction, the idetic reduction, which is has a lot of similarities, you're basically trying to find out what a dog is without uh having any of your preconceived notions uh of what dogs are. You can't just show up and say, well, that's a dog, and I just know that's a dog because it's a dog or whatever. You have to come up with some kind of set of necessary descriptions that describe a dog and only a dog, that are identical to the dog in some kind of a way, that indicate only dogs. So the scientificness uh that Husserl was looking for uh in the identic reduction is basically this bracketing, this epoquet of uh assumptions, of prior assumptions. Uh, but we're going to find out, and this is uh relevant to the turn uh in Record, Paul Record, uh, from phenomenology to hermeneutics, is that as Husrel discovers himself, and as as many of the scientists are discovering themselves, uh, there is no uh presuppositionless uh intention. There is no observation that is not mediated uh through language, through concepts, uh, or just through the motivated intention of an organism observing the universe uh in some motivated way. So, even in this sense of modality, uh this last fourth uh grouping of categories, uh nowadays in the sciences, it's not uh considered simply um what's necessary. So, like you don't go through the modes, uh, the different sorts of arrangements to see what's essential. Um, you're actually going through to find out probability, not uh an actual identity of something, uh, but what you're probabilistically um going to find or see. So you're gonna see, for example, all these arguments uh in modal logic. So starting there without the uh empiricism of the sciences, if you're just talking strict modal logic, you're talking about what would appear to be necessary um for there to be a universe at all. So you go through all these different things that you could change about the universe until you figure out what it is uh that's absolutely essential. So usually it comes down to the natural laws uh in this universe. Um they need to be necessary for uh maybe not to be a universe, but for there to be life uh in a universe. You could have other universes, so there are certainly lots of other possible universes, but most of the other ones, like the vast majority of them, if I understand correctly, uh aren't really universes because they are not gonna have the right natural laws for there to be uh any kind of relationality between matter, energy, and space-time. You kind of need the uh bad word, fine-tuning uh of the natural laws as they are, um, in order to have this uh particular universe. So this is the relation of modality um to necessity that is so important in modal logic, but also continues to be important in the sciences in terms of what is uh probabilistic, what is actually impossible, um, what is uh actually exists. So does our probabilities, do they have any ontological status, or are they non-existent? Uh what about you know, the necessity, uh structures uh that are necessity, are that are necessary, are considered essential, uh, and then uh what is contingent? Um and so there seems to be like a kind of uh wall uh in which there are things that are necessary, but again, is this necessity just necessary, you know, for us, uh for there to be observers, uh, or is it just necessary for uh our kind of observation? Uh I mean, is a universe without observers uh a universe, uh, or is it, you know, just some sort of numeral uh realm that we have no access to and has no real uh ontological status? So that we're just talking about probabilities uh at that point. So when we're talking about multiple universes, I mean, are they just probabilities? Do they have any kind of thing that we could call existence? They have any ontological status, so that in the sciences of today, uh the reduction of whatever there is uh is brought down all the way to the level of a probability space. Uh again, uh are probabilities uh what the universe is? Uh is math what the universe is? And everything else, like our experience, our observation, our intention, simply emergent epiphenomon uh that are basically illusions. So that most of what we think of as our life uh is really nothing at all. That, you know, the tree that we think we see uh isn't really there. What's really there is a system of chemical, uh biological uh interactions, uh, that even that can be broken down further into uh the spatio-temporal relations of matter energy at the atomic, subatomic level, uh where you have these quantum fields uh upon which probabilistically electrons uh uh appear and disappear without any kind of causal uh relation. This is one of the reasons why we think whatever numeral reality is, uh if it is just in the end quantum fields, uh, well, these things don't have cause in them at all. Uh and they don't really operate according to you know space-time or whatever. They have probabilistic determinations. And so you have to wonder like, okay, what does determination mean uh if it's merely probabilistic? And this is the question of quantum in general, uh, so that we can't establish cause and effect there. We can't uh establish that kind of a solid relation. Um, we can only establish probabilistic correlations. An electron uh might appear uh there, uh, but there's also some chance it won't. And so then the question becomes well, since we experience the world in space, time uh as uh a set of objective causal relations uh on our intentional screen, uh, then we might not be in reality, uh the numenal reality at any rate at all. Um with that, um, we're gonna leave off and continue to work on this transition between presuppositionless uh objectivity uh of phenomenology in Edmund Husserl to its transition, first in Heidegger, uh, but then uh through Hans Gautamor. Uh, but we're gonna be focusing mostly on uh Paul Record and its transition there to a hermeneutical uh interpretation of being uh rather than uh a mere description of probabilistic determination. And the reason why we prefer uh Record's hermeneutics is because he uses the hermeneutic circle in a particular way so that we can both retain the intention or the care for being uh that is sort of tainting or warping uh to some degree, or really just motivating uh the intention so that we see things as we intend to see it. But there is no problem with motivated attention, because as we've already seen, if attention wasn't motivated, there wouldn't be an intention, so that the intention arises from our care for being. And when our care for being uh extends beyond the self, as it necessarily does in Record's formulation of self as other. So that means that our care is not only for ourselves, but includes the other or the perspective of the other. Then we have a hermeneutic circle or a way of knowing that includes otherness. Uh, and actually that's the only way to know anything, also, as we'll find, because the binary opposition between knowing and unknowing, between self and other, between inside and outside, uh, is what allows for there to be being through non-being, uh, and any kind of knowing, which is always going to also be uh through unknowing. Specifically, uh the unknowability uh of the other or of otherness, um, an unknowability that is also internal to us in terms of the free unconscious, so that our knowing uh is a community of interpreters who each have a different or an other uh perspective, uh a different sort of facticity uh and therefore a different sort of intention, um, and so that when these interpretations of being uh come into conflict, uh we get a productive conflict. Uh this is the conflict of becoming oneself uh through another, uh, that Rakur uh describes so well uh in his uh notion of uh hermeneutics, which bears some similarity to the modal logic of learning about what is or what is necessary through what is not necessary through what is contingent. Uh so this notion of knowing what is through what isn't, or being through non-being, or matter energy's relation being mediated through the non-being or the openness of space-time according to the natural laws, uh, all of these things are going to kind of uh come together uh in the course notion of her neutrons.