I thought you might find these interlinked observations from another thread interesting:
Are you acquainted with the Jaspers lectures translated as "Reason and Existenz"? One of the best explanations that I have read of the connection between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and of their epochal importance...With Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the problem of modernity, of the destruction of tradition, of radical choice and philosophy as clarification, begins...
You are, by the way, wrong to equate phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl's original project was "essentialist", an attempt find more secure foundations for the sciences. Heidegger shifted the attention to the human situation, and was followed by
some others, notably Sartre, but there were others who remained loyal to Husserl's project...
Heidegger wrote a book that has been translated "Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics". Basically, it focuses on the necessity of constituting the lived world in the productive imagination, and questions whether or not that process is as automatic and unproblematic as Kant seems to assume. The center of Heidegger's concern is that the world itself arises out of our meeting with Being (the thing-in- itself generically), and his belief that our
relationship to Being has become perturbed, with consequences that harm the world and society. Of course, the form his diagnosis took was reactionary, fearing that we were becoming alienated from our instincts (to simplify), and that led him to spend time as a
Nazi...But his work is still interesting...
The link for it all is radical subjectivity. In Kant, the imagination takes the "matter" from the thing- in- itself, and gives it the forms of sensibility (time and space), and in so constituting it also subjects it to the logical categories (quantity, quality, modality, relation). Actually, Kant got the idea that time and space were modes of apperception from Liebnitz by way of Wolff, who was the standard for German universities at the time. He just drew out some of the implications... Anyway, the problem is that Kant assumes
that the constitution of the object is automatic and un-problematic. On the one hand, he may be attacked by, say, Nietzsche for not realizing that the object is interpreted, but assuming that it presents itself as well- grounded and "objective". On the other hand, he may be attacked by, say, Hegel for skirting the question of the relationship between the thing- in- itself and the thing-as- appearance, most notably in the fact that objects are presented to us with an inherent relationship--- is that only an appearance? and if not, then we are left to explain the intelligibility of the world yet again...I hope I have given you a sense of the can of worms skirted by the "synthetic unity of apperception"...
I am not sure if mankind must undergo an upheaval, but the kind of development that took centuries for the West is now so accelerated that the very process of modernization constitutes an upheaval for many people, which is the real reason for the hostility of the
fundamentalist Muslim world towards the United States. Even more developed nations have difficulties with the kinds of shifts involved in the processes associated with modernization, such as industrialization and urbanization. I have read that most upper
middle class French families still have ancestral chateaux in the countryside, and the power of farmers in many countries, including the United States, is disproportionate because of the sense that they represent a purer way of life...
Durkheim would love it. This is the sociological aspect of the problem of modernity that I brought up in our philosophical exchanges. Even though tradition persists, it changes
character automatically through having lost its "taken-for- grantedness". The social organization of traditional societies, so dependent on the clan and tribe, on the sense of place for the individual, is eroded, and the individual becomes "rootless". Nationalism was, in part, a response to these changes, which is why it particularly grew in the 19th century, to supplant the local character of loyalties and provide a more comprehensive identification... |
