age/sex/phenomenologist?

I was having some uber late-night/early-morning gmail chat with a philosophy friend of mine, where I was taking the cantankerous position of trying to belittle some philosophy greats, while my friend tries to keep me grounded....thought it was worth putting here, if just to remind myself to think on this more so I can develop a more coherent presentation of this "hunch" I've got....name changed, of course.

Here's the philosophy part of it leaving out the rest:

Me: when i'm working on plato i'm constantly dazzled by his multilayered brilliance

4:28 AM JB: yeah, it's fuckin' insane

me: but then I don't think you walk away from plato with anything you wouldn't get from nietzsche, emerson, kierkegaard.....

all three of which are heavily indebted to him, but you don't have the temporal ambiguities involved

4:29 AM JB: eeeehhhhh

well, it would seem that in order to make such a claim one would need to have fully plumbed the depths of all those thinkers

4:30 AM to be able to know that he's not offering something significant that the others are...I really couldn't say

me: you're just inventing an impossible standard!

4:31 AM JB: well, i'm just saying what I think one would need to know in order to legitimately make the claim that plato offers nothing that the others don't

me: it isn't that I know the full extent of what he's offering, it is that the essence of what he's offering is transcendent the "depths of one's thoughts" in an important way

there should be an "of" in there...

4:32 AM JB: I'm not sure I'm following...could you rephrase what you're saying?

me: that was an awful sentence, I apologize =)

I mean that there's a reason Plato never to pen a literal list of his ideology on the highest matters (7th letter, right?)

4:33 AM never put to pen

and that reason was that he wanted his writing to stimulate philosophical mind-play

4:34 AM he was much more interested in showcasing the dangers of falling prey to things like pleasure, easy cop-outs (timeaus), false assumptions about doctrines...

than he was proving x or y

to liberate from what holds the mind down and set it in beautiful motion, was what plato sought to do...I think

4:35 AM JB: that there was a reason we can be pretty confident; what that reason is, I'm not quite sure, myself (although I have some hunches)

well, i guess i wouldn't disagree, but it would seem that one could go about doing this in many different ways, some much better than others

4:36 AM me: true

JB: that is to say, depending on what one is liberating it from, and what sort of motion

me: I guess I just think....we all live in the same meta-world, or whatever you want to call it

JB: this, as far as I can tell, would be a big diff between him and Nietzsche

what is a meta-world?

4:37 AM me: I was just about to type "we all live in the same world"

but then wanted to clarify against a possible definition of "world", and said that. I should have said "life world"

4:38 AM JB: i haven't read husserl, so i'm not up on what that means either...

sorry, just my own lack of understanding

but i think i see what you're driving at

me: well, we're all human, and seem to have minds that interact in the same basic ways

4:39 AM I just think that it isn't like any one philosopher has privledged access to some kind of truth that others can't decipher

which is why Heidegger's "last god" and some of that stuff is bullshit

JB: why do you think that such a privileged access doesn't exist?

me: because to think that you've pushed beyond the limits of what others have thought so radically that you need to go inventing new things for it....is absurd

4:40 AM JB: why absurd?

isn't this the nature of genius?

perhaps inventing, or perhaps (as Plato might say)...discovering

me: well, you can be really good at listening to your genius

4:41 AM and certainly there are ways of thought that have gone unarticulated by others

but you can always tell where and how a philosopher cheats by what it is they desire

4:42 AM and Heidegger desired to get at a foundation ever-more foundational

JB: what do you mean by "cheats"?

4:43 AM me: I think that you can pay attention to the world as hard and as openly as possible, but I don't think that you'll ever come away needing to describe something as the "last god"

4:44 AM or with Kant, I don't think you can ever discover 12 categories in symmetrical groups of 4

4:45 AM i'm not against taking leaps, since the conviction to never take leaps is itself a pretty large leap

but I do think people should be very suspicious of where they land and why, and that's what Plato sought to solve through paidia

paideia through paidia

4:46 AM JB: as to the first, i don't know what the hell heid means by that, so i can't really speak to it...

as to Kant, a triad of categories such as actuality, possibility, necessity does seem -- in terms of modalities -- pretty darn exhaustive

me: but the ranking and numbering of such was absolutely subjective to his desire for symmetry

4:47 AM for instance, why not un-necessity?

JB: how do you know that that was his motivation/reason?

4:48 AM and, he does have un-necessity -- he calls it possibility

me: oops, you're right... I mean, un-actuality. aka, fictionality

4:49 AM since he has the counter-part of necessity, but not that of actuality

JB: one could just as easily accuse the person who discovered integers of stacking the deck, and only finding integers because he desired symmetry

4:50 AM well, i'd think that fiction, insofar as it is actual, is something that falls under actuality

me: I don't know that that was his organizing telos or anything, but I don't really think they're an absolute necessary means of describing human experience

4:51 AM exactly my point, possibility and necessity also have a degree relationship.

JB: yes, which kant would acknowledge

me: so why one and not the other? he liked his groups

4:52 AM JB: well, perhaps i'm not sure what you mean by degree relationships

me: i think that if you pick apart the statement "there IS a category x or y"

4:53 AM you'll find that it says nothing at all

or rather, "when we are attempting to describe fairly essential properties that things have, we tend to use one of these labels"

4:54 AM JB: i wouldn't feel comfortable saying that one of the most brilliant humans in history set up one of the central elements of his philosophy just because he liked groups, or liked symmetry, and then unknowingly (or knowingly) just went around trying to find confirmation for what he wanted

i'm not sure what youre referring to

4:55 AM me: the critique of pure reason isn't my strong point, so I picked a dumb area to make an example out of kant =)

a much better instance of him cheating is in the 2nd critique

4:56 AM where he argues from an assumption in lots of places

like, he doesn't think we can comport to the moral order because of happiness, but he thinks we have to be rewarded in happiness eventually because of that

so he posits god from that basis

4:57 AM and no philosopher's ever going to be perfect, so I don't see this as a knock on kant's brilliance!

4:58 AM JB: i haven't read the second critique, but I do know that no genuine philosopher can be 'refuted' as easily as that