My primary encounter with the world is not theoretical

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Alok never wanted a court case against Peter": To Copernicus: "No, they'd rather not have that freedom . . ."

Perhaps YOU would rather not have that freedom although you seem more than anxious to exercise it here. As you feel so strongly on the issue why don't you write and publish your own book to better inform what you consider to be all those "mislead" readers of Heeh's book? That would be constructive and something to be genuinely proud of rather than mere easy and unreflective criticism. Posted by Anonymous to Savitri Era Open Forum at 12:33 PM, June 23, 2009

Re: Unending Desire: de Certau's 'Mystics' by Philip Sheldrake Debashish Mon 22 Jun 2009 02:50 PM PDT

He also challenged Christian exclusivity by saying publicly, "Christianity is something particular in the totality of history.... It cannot speak in the name of the entire universe." This earned him the immediate censure of the Catholic church. His teacher Lubac now denounced Certeau's views and defended the universal Church and its hierarchy. He attacked his former student as a "Joachimite," seeking, as had that medieval visionary, a golden age of pure spirituality without Church institutions or disciplinary institutions of any kind.

It wasn't true that de Certeau was entirely against institutions. What he was calling for is a critical tradition of thinking and practice which resists the inevitable attempt of institutions and organized ideologies to form human subjects and capture identity within their collective mental constructs and prescriptions. DB

(title unknown) from enowning by enowning
In-der-Blog-sein Shunya's Notes on the dearth of A.I..

In many ways, Heidegger stood opposed to the entire edifice of Western philosophy. A hammer, he pointed out, cannot be represented by just its physical features and function, detached from its relationship to nails and the anvil, the physical experience and skill of hammering, its role in building fine furniture and comfortable houses, etc. Merely associating facts, values or function with objects cannot capture the human idea of a hammer, with its role in the meaningful organization of the world as we experience it.

Simon Critchley makes a similar point in this week's installment on B&T.

Heidegger insists that this lived experience of the world is missed or overlooked by scientific inquiry or indeed through a standard philosophy of mind, which presupposes a dualistic distinction between mind and reality. What is required is a phenomenology of our lived experience of the world that tries to be true to what shows itself first and foremost in our experience. To translate this into another idiom, we might say that Heidegger is inverting the usual distinction between theory and practice. My primary encounter with the world is not theoretical; it is not the experience of some spectator gazing out at a world stripped of value. Rather, I first apprehend the world practically as a world of things which are useful and handy and which are imbued with human significance and value. The theoretical or scientific vision of things that find in a thinker like Descartes is founded on a practical insight that is fascinated and concerned with things.