Being Prioritized
March 7th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: Being Prioritized :: Being Prioritized :: Being Prioritized :: Claim 1
Anthony,
it seems that your excursion into the history of philosophy is mostly
designed to avoid the central fnord in Heideggerian philosophy:
I, *this* here, have a first-person viewpoint; and, I ask ‘what am I?’
because just knowing that I am doesn’t tell me what I am.
you seem to be making three claims:
[1]: that asking ‘what am I?’ requires prioritizing being-inside over
being-alongside;
[2]: that prioritizing being-inside over being-alongside is a mistake
because “the enevitable and unavoidable result” is eternal skepticism,
solipsism, and ultimately idealism — precisely where Husserlian and
Cartesian philosophy ended up; and,
[3]: prioritization of being-alongside necessitates the subordination of
Dasein as mind, spirit, soul, a group of neurons.
===
claim [1] seems dubious because the connection between asking ‘what am
I?’ and prioritizing of one mode of being over another is not obvious.
how do you establish that just asking ‘what am I’ requires any
prioritization at all let alone the one you postulate?
claim [2] seems even weaker. as I see it, claim [2] is empirically
false. there are those asking some form of ‘what am I?’ or (more likely)
its third person analogue, ‘what is a human?’. the fields of
neuroscience and philosophy of consciousness seem devoted to pursuing
this and related questions; but, eternal skepticism and solipsism are
unknown within these fields and idealism is extremely rare. the dominant
philosophical position within these fields a monistic physicalism
generally known as ‘naturalism’.
clearly, it could be said that some of these researchers and
philosophers should question more deeply than they have. I would like to
see them actively investigate the origin of phenomenal awareness,
particularly reflexive self-awareness, instead of simply assuming that
these are brain functions.
however, you seem to think that these researchers and philosophers have
some sort of moral obligation to question so deeply that they get stuck
in the quagmire of skepticism, solipsism and idealism. I see no evidence
and I’ve heard no argument from you that would support the claim that
researchers and philosophers have such an obligation.
in any event, you’ve offered no empirical evidence that asking ‘what am
I?’ inevitably results in a philosophy of a very specific features. the
practice of asking ‘what am I?’ and the closely related ‘who am I?’ has
been around for centuries as meditative exercises. if these practices
inevitably lead to such extreme results, don’t you think we’d have
empirical evidence by now?
claim [3] is utterly bizarre. the fields of inquiry mentioned in
connection with [2] make inquiry into the origin of awareness an
important aspect of their enterprise. who is going to subordinate them
…. and to what or to whom?
in the case of the individual, I wonder how a philosopher could even
construct a rational argument designed to persuade that individual to
subordinate their curiosity as to whether a human is anything more than
a human body. is this something that you as a philosoper have chosen to
do in your own case, to suppress any interest in investigating this
matter?
Joe
–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda
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http://what-am-i.net
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