connections/oppositions

There are a number of philosophical approaches that lie behind my analyses and recommendations. These approaches are related but not identical, and there are some tensions among them that would benefit from further explication.

One approach is Kant's point that any unified experience must contain more than sequential connections. There have to be categories and concepts that provide unity on the side of the object, so that the relations in the object can be distinguished from the relations of perceptions.

I rely on this to argue

that no place is experienced as pure sequence, and
that all places have grammars, and
that there is always a openness to more complexity, since concepts can always be multiplied, connected, and self-referring.

Another is the phenomenological point made by Husserl that any profile of an object is surrounded by a horizon of other possible profiles, and the concept of the object is the rule that unifies these profiles. This is amplified by Heidegger into the doctrine of 'world' as an indefinite totality of connections of possible actions and consequences, first as known practically and then as theorized.

I rely on this to argue

similarly to the Kant points, but also to assert
that places contain fields possibilities beyond the actual items present, and
that the horizon of possibilities includes actions and bodily movements, not just perceptions, and
that that horizon goes beyond any formula which links only perceptions of one object, and
that those possibilities are not fully controlled by rules. This item is at odds with Kantian notions of concepts as rules
but is reconcilable with it by bringing in Kant's doctrine of judgment in the construction of empirical concepts rather than transcendental categories. In the doctrine of judgment, types and relations are extendible ini ways uncontrollable by rules.
Also, by bringing in Kant's notion of reason as the totalizing of conceptual rules that is never done according to larger rules but only practical ideals.

Another approach stems from Hegel's claim that any immediate appearance is in fact mediated, both in the sense that there are various processes that have brought it about, and in the sense that it only appears as such when it has already been brought under varying types and levels of conceptual and social unities.

I rely on this similarly to the Kantian and phenomenological points.

But in addition I rely on this to argue

that there are processes by which those unities and worlds come to be, both processes within the dynamics of social content and meaning, and more familar social and economic processes.
that no grammars or rules or expectations, or places, are immediately given. They are the result of mediations by the processes that create concepts and rules, and by the process of historical production, economic, biological, social, cultural; these come togehter in the hermenutic process that reproduces and reointerprets grammars and concepts.

Kant's doctrine of reflective judgment gets extended, with Hegel and the other German Idealists,to include the constitution of determinate finite selfhood as part of a process that separates that creates concepets, rules, and grammars, so separating and relating universal and particular, along with other dualities. Modern individuality comes about when that mediation is the most completed and self-reflective.

I rely on this to argue

that the self is not above or below the process but within it, itself mediated
that the self is not a given thing, and so neither a basic universal nor a basic particular.

There is an important contrast issue. Hegel has a dynamic and a teleology towards totality and self-comprehension that is not in Heidegger, and not in Kant in quite that way.

In Heidegger such a dynamic is either impossible, or a manifestation of metaphysical thinking that should be rejected. (In Husserl the dynamic appears in his goal of scientific knowing.)

The Hegelian structural bias towards self-comprehension has a distant parallel in Heidegger's contrast between authentic and inauthentic existence, but there is nothing like Hegel's cognitive emphasis or his assurance of success.

Heidegger's world cannot be totalized in a Hegelian manner, and it leads ultimately to the complex relation of Ereignis and Da-sein, a relation that has no exact parallels, though it has analogues, in the earlier thinkers.

Nonetheless, I want to argue that there is a normative or structural encouragement of fuller and complex and self-aware inhabitation with mediations and links known as such. But I can't affirm any automatic dynamic or dialectic to complexity, even a la Robert Pippin.

My intent is to agree with Hegel that self-comprehension and drive for totality is good, but to disagree with him because there is no pure grasp of the process, nor a necessary drive for greater self-comprehension. But there is an implicitly functioning, though finite and indirect self-reflection of the general features of world-ing, which can be made more explicit, and which increases the complexity of our inhabitation.

There is no final totalization of the world or horizon but there is an awareness of the process of inhabitation and meaning-giving.

Index
I want to say