I quess in sifting through the embers of the last century, the 20th century,
one might come across something of what it means to be 'so human' and what
is the 'tragic sense of life'. Philosophy is an endeavor like science and
techne in that it is a philosophy of the flesh, of nature, of methods: it is
the discussion of life, being, spirit, or what ever, that endures admidst
the conflagrations of time and matter being consumed in the process of
regeneration. 

Interesting. Last night I was familiarized by the image-metaphor of the
spark. The spark of western mysticism, a term used  to call the soul what it
is - perhaps a divine spark. What modern philosophy brings to humanity is a
sensitivity, or sensibility, to recognize the spark in each person, each
species of wildlife, how it motivates, how it expresses itself, it's
infinite desires, it's sexuality. 

The last human frontier, of endeavor, for philosophy is human consciousness.
All other frontiers have been mapped and interpreted, even the humane genome
is mapped and interpreted. Most thinking on a diverse range of subjects has
been highly effective, provocative 'referential' and 'cognitive' thinking
however. The last thing that is to be discovered - the heuristic - is the
nature of 'revelatory essence' [Martin H.], the truth of being, and the
truth of being is the revelation of the Other in consciousness. Some
'excorcising' of unclean spirits may be practiced apace....

The question for philosophy in the 21st century will be re-phrased and
parsed out among millions of thinkers, in all languages. It will be a
pragmatic question, and the search for intelligent answers will be
pragmatic: what to do about over-exploitation, about equity, and
distribution between the nations that have and do not have, about
dependency. The questions of philosophy will be about syncreticism,
rendering out what is useful for the fulfillment in the quest to solve
environmental impacts and inner quests of 6 to 12 billion people. 

The ideologues mapped and interpreted human relations, economic and
political relations well in the 19th century, interpreting the quest of
materialistic solutions for re-arranging human social and economic relations
on a large national scale [national improvement]: the first experience of
democracies, of international trade, and lately the efforts of nations to
collaborate together on solutions to poverty, environmental impacts, family,
war, trade, etc, are called progressive and necessary now. Conflict was seen
as mere sport one time for the leisure classes, but now conflict has the
potential for annihilation if it does not create new opportunities for
reconciliation of diverse and competing interests. 

Still there is this mystique of an occluded world of direct perception that
lies there to be disclosed, to be opened up for revelation. Philosophy this
century embarked on a grand project to analyse and interpret the
phenomenology of consciousness. It took the methods of the last century, the
methods of inquiry common to science, and appraised the notion of the self -
the relational self - in all forms of activity. Martin H. notes in his
memoirs that as a student he had a copy of Husserl's "Logical
Investigations" at his desk:

"...both volumes of Husserl's Logical Investigations lay on my desk in the
theological seminary ever since my first semester there. These volumes
belonged to the university library. The date due could be easily renewed
again and again. The work was obviously of little interest to the students.
But how did it get into an environment so foreign to it?.... I remained so
fascinated by Husserl's work that I read it again and again in the years to
follow without gaining sufficient insight into what fascinated me. The spell
emanating from the work extended to the outer appearance of the sentence
structure and the title page....circumstance forced me to delve into
Husserl's work anew. However, my repeated beginning also remained
unsatisfactory, because I couldn't get over the main difficulty. It
concerned the simple question how thinking's manner of procedure which
called itself 'phenomenology' was to be carried out."

Heidegger cites ambiquity arising from his interpretation of the two volumes
of the Logical Investigations as the source of his difficulty in uncovering
the  procedure for an investigation into the meaning of being. In "My Way to
Phenomenology"  he maintains that he was directed early in his studies to
'penetrate philosophy'....[T]he following questions concerned me in a quite
vague manner: If being is predicated in manifold meanings, then what is its
leading fundamental meaning? What does Being mean?" 

The apparent ambiquity relates to the refutation of psychologism in the
first volume, and the affirmation of psychologism in the second volume of
Logical Investigations. 

"...the second volume, which was published the following year and was three
times as long, contains the description of the acts of consciousness
essential for the constitution of knowledge. So it is psychology after all.
What else is section 9 of the fifth investigation concerning "

The Meaning of Brentano's Delimitation of 'psychological description of the
acts of consciousness? Wherein does what is peculiar to phenomenology
consist it is neither logic nor psychology? Does a quite new discipline of
philosophy appear here, even one with its own rank and precedence?...I could
not disentangle these questions...."

The following year 'brought an answer' with the publication of Husserl's
first volume of Ideen [1913]: 

"'Pure phenomenology' is the 'fundamental science' of philosophy which is
characterized by that phenomenology. 'Pure' means: 'transcendental
phenomenology.' However, the 'subjectivity' of the knowing, acting and
valuing subject is posited as 'transcendental'. Both terms, 'subjectivity'
and transcendental, show that 'phenomenology' consciously and decidedly
moved into the tradition of modern philosophy in such a way that
'transcendental subjectivity' attains a more original and universal
determination through phenomenology. Phenomenology retained 'experiences of
consciousness' as its thematic realm, but now in the systematically planned
and secured investigation of the structure of acts of experience together
with the investigation of the objects experienced in those acts with regard
to their objectivity." 

This statement is of interest since it begins with the existential
presupposition of the transcendental empirical ego or subjective ego that
Kant was fascinated by, but which he left really undiscussed, but said was
the big subject area of future philosophy, i.e. phenomenology. The
transcendental empirical ego is where the new consciousness of the
phenomenological method of 'seeing' that Martin H. practiced - ultimately
expressed I think in his "Hermenuetics of Facticity" for instance, began.
Direct perception of the contents of consciousness and then the ontologizing
concreteness of being seen, or what is being seen as a descriptum.

The transcendental pure ego presupposes an empirical ego - the capable ego
and the enabling ego. What  Heidegger later terms the real and the personal
are the 'new beginning' of philosophy as a method directed toward authentic
being human, of  a new inner life, much like Kierkegaard, and others, gave
to philosophy where attitude, self knowledge, and personal tests of
hypothetical thought experiments, enactments, as confirmation of personal
reality can take place. One need read the interesting biography called a "A
Life of One's Own" by an Anglo-Saxon woman of this century to understand
confirmation. One can only confirm personal existence in freedom, by
thinking and chosing from a set of options and alternatives on anything:
attitude, belief, career interests, leisure, etc., what is this project
called phenomological seeing.  The permit which is given in the supreme
commandment: that shall honour.... with the application of the universal
pronouns of the other: the father, the mother, and the other in deed. 

What Michel Certeau calls the 'split words' of the mystic, is in fact the
split world of the cogito, the I that thinks, acts - and the universal
subject of the referential others: we, us, and all of us together - the
Thees and the Thous, the consciousness of the something, immediate, in
regions, lexical, being...the phrases suggest convergence, or seeming
disorder, of propriation. It is not the split world of two or three, but the
split world of the myriad beings which are seperated off and then connected
by the movement of the spirit. Certeau illustrates terms such as 'silent
music', 'cruel rest', 'blissful wound' or 'sweet cautery' in which the
interior castle [sanctuary of the individuating] soul and the dark night
[absence] of the soul find their own light and king. The human soul, this
spark of animated intelligence, finds its own light as the 'transcendental
empirical ego' that experiences all that it is. It is the spilt word of
philosophy, a modern phrase, that inaugurates perception. The hermenuetics
of facticity is the enabling or enactment of the phenomenological method of
inquiry into knowledge then of it-worlds, and then essences out of
revelatory being. The interpretation is always a description, then it is a
saying, or it is both. The convergence is the saying or speaking in the
internal monologue of seeing. The two converge with practice to become the
master craft of living. 

This property of the ego to first 'grasp' being is embodied in the mythic
nature of Hermes, the youth who steals and covers up his tracks, the
dyionisac rebellion of the soul which takes possession of the truth of
being, when presented with a new revelatory presence, a cow for stealing and
cooking. Hermes is secretive, he retreats leaving no traces of his passage,
he enters his parent's house by transforming himself into a whisper of smoke
travelling through the key hole in the door. It is rebellion against the
odds of being discovered, it is the enactment of the transcendental ego
which appropriates what it is not supposed to. Hermes the archer whose
arrows are likened to hitting the target of truth. The truth is taken by an
enactment. That is what is the transcendental, the transcending phenomenon,
or purity is; it is first 'grasped' and then later transformed in the
'granting' of being. The contrast between the old and the young mountain.
They are the same mountain, but seperated in experience. Even Hermes is of
noble lineage, the son of Zeus, and as such could be have cattle entrusted
to him. According to Sophocles, the Nymph Cyllene says "just consider his
lineage". Gods don't steal, the are entrusted. 

So how could the consciousness enact what is termed transcendental, how can
it  enact what is an idea, except through 'theft'. Hermes equates himself
with Apollo. If Apollo is the entruster  of the care of beasts, then so is
Hermes. The comment that Normam O Brown makes in his "Hermes the Thief: the
evolution of a Myth" is that the Greeks understood the Goddesses and Gods
this way: quoting Aristophanes: 

"This is the root of the derogatory satire which inspires Aristophanes'
portraits of Hermes; for example, when he puts into Hermes' mouth the
cynical epigram that a man's country is wherever he can do business, he
attributes to him a morality of the audience -witness the fervor with which
the orator Lysias repudiates the same idea in a speech to an Athenian jury." 

Hermenuetics, or interpretation, is now the enactment of consciousness
within a new concrete ontology, and it is still the interpretation of sacred
texts. 




 


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