A Critical Path to A Reconstituted Humanism: Freedom's Struggle with Logos

Author: Kevin Boileau, PhD

9,624 words

In the postmodern situation, humans become the center of the world,

developing mechanism, cause and effect science, and the expansion of

commerce, rationality, and dominion over the Earth. There is a triumph

of reason over faith, self-constituting subjectivity, subject object

polarity, individualism, and a metaphysical possessive self that

prioritizes knowledge and violence over being. We valorize

instrumentalized, competitive thinking, fear and noxious anxiety.

Everybody is objectified into things to be manipulated including human

sciences and arts. We have developed an alienated approach to the

natural world.

This kind of subjectivity created and continues to create an illusion of

freedom that is barbaric and competitive. It has created a false

individualism, alienation from other sentient life forms, other humans,

and our-selves. We have confused reason with power, and the ideals of

evolutionary progress such as eugenics, and interpreted reason

instrumentally. However, because it is an anthropocentric vision of

reason, and because it valorizes ontological DIS-parity, it became and is

aggressive, destructive, and nihilistic. Moreover, it interprets this reason

as a will to truth, and in so doing is dishonest about its underlying will

to power.

This dominating and possessive self-topology has led humans to a world

of oppressive objectivity, and structuralized an alienated subjectivity,

one without a home, with existential fragmentation, dis-integrations

between intellect, intuition, and emotion. From this, comes the rise of

algebra and set theory, a focus on the objective, and subjugation of a

participating subjectivity, nature and non-humans.

In this enslavement, we lose our underlying deep connection to nature,

to all others, and ourselves, which produces an ontological constriction.

Even though there are seeds of the moral, the participating individual,

and rationality, it is distorted into terror and oppression. This is a

noxious modification of our inter-relational, participatory being into

cultural narcissism and fear, a way of seeing that is limited to a fragile,

fragmented self.

It appears that the human has triumphed over the rest of nature

because we prioritized human individualized power over inter-relational

reciprocity and philosophical reason that does not involve self- interest.

With a dying faith in God as foundation for value this subject became

even more nihilist, aggressive, violent, confused, cancerous and full of

fear and despair.

We are now motivated primarily by the death extinct, which is now a

race to extinction. This has triggered great interest in facts, equations,

theories, and expansion of the self at the cost of empathy, intuition,

responsibility, solidarity, the moral, and respect for life itself. There are

critical questions we must examine about how we should live and from

where we should seek the source of meaning. We are at a dangerous,

critical crossroads, a historical singularity, an ongoing event.

The humanism of reason, though seemingly liberating and

emancipatory, now legitimizes alienation, oppression, violence, and

destruction. This condition triggers a serious critique of our conception

of the human and our future. This necessitates an examination of how

deeply we want to transform our beingness, which requires us to give

up our current conceptions of truth, knowledge, and our reality. This is

deeply terrifying unless we rebuild this in a way that eschews desire,

reason, self-actualization, the quest for dominance, and a quest for

knowledge that is based on power. We must question our very

understanding of critical thinking and reasoning.

We presently live in a state of nihilism, a war against Being, the

destruction of other sentient beings, and a construction of ontology

that is destroying our creative, imaginative subjectivity, and annihilates

a clear foundation for moral existence. We lack a subject that is

grounded in a full participatory inter-relationship with other humans,

non-humans, and the Earth. We experience severe levels of existential

disjunction which leave us without a center and lead to totalitarianism,

fascism, and violence. We fall into Thrasymachus’s position that “might

makes right.”

The difficulty going forward is that we cannot separate ourselves from

our historical situation. However, we can engage in a project of

deconstruction because of the transcendent faculties of consciousness

and their very structure. We can challenge reifications, ontologies,

logocentrism, and historically based ego structures. The hegemony of

tradition must be examined, particularly now when human existence is

at risk because of the hubris of Newtonian-Cartesian science, violence,

nihilism, and the subjugation of important values to capitalism.

The challenge is to understand how to transform structures that close

off our participation in the world, in terms of our present historical

circumstances. Fortunately, we have the faculty of transcendent

consciousness, in which we have the fullest access to Being. This is the

opening of our ontological structure, which brings new existential

possibilities. These new possibilities open questions about the body,

senses, ego, unconscious, interpretation of our historical situation,

suffering, death, political situation, science, art, meaning, and how our

truths have excluded deeper understanding in relation to and

connection with the world.

This becomes a criticism of humanism, and an examination of

alternatives that are based on different foundations than positing the

human as the center of the universe. These include a deeper sense of

empathy, responsibility, solidarity, inter-relational awareness, capacity

to learn, and a more authentic choice for the source of meaning. Thus,

a critical practice must focus both on history and practices of the self

that coincide with each other. These practices, through time, would

create a new version of humanity.

This new practice avoids seeing Others as object-instruments;

approaches life in a way that is not based on our self-interested desire

and the totalization of the Other. It converts a passive, spectator

philosophy into full participation in life. The practice requires a review

of reason, subjectivity, and the social institutions and structures within

which we project our lives. This allows us to develop a deeper

understanding of our biosphere, in which continued, flourishing

existence within healthy, participatory ecosystems are situated as the

foundation for value.

A more rigorous questioning assumes that we are never outside Being,

in which we articulate the relationship between the source of meaning,

freedom, and the reality principle. In the transcendental consciousness,

we give up our quest for domination and control, and de-center

ourselves individually and collectively. We replace the traditional Ego

with a new kind of self that does not seek to become the center or

measure of all things. We commit to ontological parity, respect for

ecology, love for all beings, and the eradication of destructive reification

and totalitarianism. This requires us to think against received and

accepted interpretations of the world and to seek an openness for

radically new ones.

This critical method seeks a pre-ontological mode of consciousness

from which we can develop a logos that supports our new foundation of

value. Thus, it is both existential and intellectual, and explores

experience that has, heretofore, fallen out of current scientific

paradigms. This includes feelings, empathy, intuition, poetry,

imagination, fantasy, and other experience at the border with the

unconscious that opens pathways into a deeper inter-relational

understanding. It is this transcendent, pre-ontological level that will

reveal transformational possibilities within the human anthropology.

This pursuit will help us to understand our basic life structures of life,

and the ontological structural possibilities for interpreting them.

This foundational level of consciousness includes the pre-ontological,

the existential the rational, and the moral, which range from the most

primordial to the most complex articulation of them. By re-integrating

these basic levels of experience with our logos, we can build a new kind

of humanism that avoids the destructive impulse of our current

ontological commitments. Let us now delve into this method.

Let us now explore a phenomenological approach to freedom’s struggle

with logos. Let’s apply it to the problem of our inter-relational self and

the human intimacy with nature. This is the method that puts into

question the meaning of what we perceive. This is the logos of

phenomena, in which we focus more on the questioning itself rather

than on final answers. Our approach focuses on the dynamic

relationship between phenomena and logos, the process of which is to

break free from and to transcend conceptual paradigms and

theoretically driven ontologies. Its project is to seek the source of

meaning by deconstructing conceptual categories, the language of the

arabesque, and convoluted semantics that confuse rather than clarify. It

is to reveal the ontological background of those phenomena that

presence themselves.

We are focused not just on the words, the theories, the concepts.

Instead, we are focused on the transcendental, existential process

through which we interpret and critique them. The words themselves

are sedimented and inert, whereas our perceptions about them, the

possibilities they raise, and the ontological transformations that they

promise, are not self-coincidental. They are provisional because there is

a fissure in the very heart of logos, of reason, and of thinking. Thus,

logos is always material, bodily, and existential even though we may try

to cover it up by hiding the ontological field within which phenomena

presence themselves. This is the very problem of the subject-object

split, in the way that it exists historically, in the present.

It is the way that we draw meaning within this existential condition that

determines our ontological structures, our knowledges and truths, our

political and economic structures, moral universes, the realm of art,

education, and self-reflective projects that involve psychoanalysis and

critical theory. This is more than traditional empiricism, and different

from abstractive theory because it involves the transcendental-

existential engagement that is missing in recondite theory and scientific

positivism. This critical penetration into the ontological explores and

analyzes this gap between logos and phenomena and seeks its

foundation in the lifeworld of humans. It does not seek definitive critical

descriptions and interpretations of reality but instead, it is a critical

enterprise that focuses on method.

By its nature, phenomenological criticism is a foundational approach

that puts all other dimensions into question. For example, we may

choose to re-think our epistemologies based on phenomenology;

replace our ontologies based on our existential experience of

phenomena; or re-constitute our notions of subjectivity and the self.

Critique that only focuses on culture, or critique that only focuses on

the self, does not go far enough for a radical revision of our

philosophical anthropology, source of meaning, moral reasoning, and

how we understand the human. Instead, we must focus on the

relationship between our existence, through an inquiry into pre-

reflective consciousness, and how this relates to the inter-relational,

participatory being-world we share.

This is not an inquiry into the objective world of positive science nor is it

an inquiry into subjective, constituting consciousness. Rather, it looks

for the foundation of this type of being in the world, its knowing, and

the kinds of ontologies that support them. It bridges the subject-object

alienation.

There is a fissure in the core of the transcendental, the ontological, and

existence itself. This fissure is in the human individual, who is divided

against oneself. What we take to be the given is unsettled and defies

any straightforward logical or traditional analysis. What phenomena

reveals to logos, therefore, both is and is not. In the self, it focuses on

the possible and not merely the actual. At the level of the social and

cultural, it perpetually de-stabilizes ostensible, perfected systems of

thought. It is a perpetual scission between the entropy and self-

annihilation of logos and phenomena as they presence. Foundationally,

critique means to separate, to distinguish and to discern. This is a

perpetual and ongoing critique of what becomes functionally

provisional. This is the dictum to think against oneself. It is why we exist

in disquietude.

The formula that we seek in this relation between logos and

phenomena is “letting that which shows itself be seen from itself in the

very way in which is shows itself from itself.” It does this by opening the

concept of rationality, instead of the closed concept we have created in

the West and in the East. Let us consider intuition, feeling,

proprioception, emotion, love, availability, receptivity, and empathy.

This is an opening to the inter-relational dimension, in which we allow

the Earth to inhabit our consciousness and our bodies. This is obviously

very distinct from the typology of reason we have manufactured with

science, governmentalization, reification and totalization. That type of

objectification is noxious because it attempts to annihilate the self’s

participatory experience in the world by one that constructs a subject-

object metaphysics, thereby relegating our human experience to an

alienated one that is solely based on the dominating, destroying gaze.

We can see that this approach opens what we consider to be reason to

experience that is subjugated or rendered invisible. It is a way to let a

deeper and broader sense of the world to come into consciousness

especially and even though it may cause us anxiety for not falling within

boundary conditions of our current diet of reason. This is an open

consciousness of availability. We note that it is phenomenology and

availability that interrogates reason. This is our integration with the rest

of life, ecosystems, biosphere, and all sentient beings. It is a deep

reconstitution of the human with our-selves, which is difficult to

articulate because we don’t yet have a mature language for it. It is an

overcoming of violence and a rejoining of humans with a foundation of

life, instead of the kind of humanism we have heretofore lived. Here,

we can see the tension between the way we understand life and life

itself.

We can imagine that there could be several foundations for reason,

thinking and theorizing, with different values, assumptions, virtues,

approaches, and relationships with life, including humans, all sentient

beings, ecosystems, and all the natural world. We can imagine that

some approaches would promote and protect life and that others

would not. For example, humans presently have a paradigm of power

and domination, no matter what the cost is to others, except and

insofar as it might harm humans. This exploitative and extractive model

has created the sixth extinction, a moral catastrophe toward animals, a

deep destruction to the natural world, and annihilation. The Earth

situation is a crisis, and it immediately calls for us to re-think our logos

to open new ontological possibilities.

This calls for us to renew our efforts at a first philosophy, basic guiding

principles for the reconstruction of our civilization. It also calls into

question the notion that one kind of reason can be utilized in all

domains. For to do that means we step back from a totalitarian style of

reason. We are seduced by the idea of a unified reason to our own

detriment apparently. However, a critical phenomenology eschews this

strategy, acknowledging that because of the complex fissuring in the

core of phenomena, the very foundation of transcendence and infinite

ontologies, logos itself cannot be unified into a monolithic structure lest

it distort our ability to apprehend reality.

We have a rationality that is divorced from the things themselves -

things as they are in themselves - in which we are seduced by the

interplay of abstractions. This is in part due to capitalist influence that

becomes hyper-aesthetic. It becomes systemized in individual and

structural channels of desire and fear in which we lose our power to be

rational, self-constituting, moral agents. What is this distance between

logos and phenomena? How does the unfinished project of

phenomenology re-invigorate our interpretations of constant rupture?

Of regional areas of rupture in which we explore domains like the

aesthetic, the political, the scientific? Our creative instinct? How does

this uncover pathways for critique, ontological transformation, and

epistemology?

For the one who would think against himself, there is no goal of finality,

“Truth,” or substantive result. Instead, there is only incessant

questioning and critical reflection. Phenomenology expands while logos

contracts, wherein assumptions, values, logic, and ontological

foundations become provisional until they are replaced with a greater

participation and understanding of the lifeworld.

Here, we deconstruct, antagonize, unsettle, and challenge our reason

by stepping back from abstraction and focusing on the given, i.e.,

phenomena. This occurs at the pre-intentional, pre-ontological level of

holistic, adumbrative, intuitive awareness. It is the level at which we are

non-interpretive, in which we co-exist with the rest of the lifeworld to

such an extent that there is no separation into a subject-object dualism.

Here, there is no tendency to reify experience especially in alienating

and noxious ways.

This is a process of a developing, transforming, expanding reason, one

that takes us far away from what we know now. Far away from what

know as humanism, replaced by a much deeper awareness of the whole

and our place in it. Pure reason gives way to a reason that is more

closely aligned with the givenness of beings as we perceive them

phenomenologically.

We must also engage in a critique from the opposite direction, in which

there is a contraction. Here, we analyze, evaluate, and attempt to

circumscribe what counts as phenomena by and through our

provisional logos. The goal is to reveal the transcendent domain and the

ontological structures that spring from it. This is also where we think

against ourselves in the ways that we understand the given. In this

process, we eschew a totalizing transformation of reason, focusing on

method rather than final answers. Our investigation focuses on the

given, modes of given, how things are given phenomenologically. It is

the attempt to reconstruct reality in terms of transcendental and eidetic

bases. This type of reason moves from epistemology into ontology.

Here, logos expands and in turn, opens its reach back into a critique of

phenomena.

Further, this ongoing critique from both directions always addresses

both the historical and personal domains. This assumes a connection

between the personal and historical, perhaps an isomorphism, a bi-

valent relationship in which we cannot do the historical work without

doing the personal work. In this way, critique becomes moral. This is

how my existential projects and choices take on importance for they

have impact on historical transformation.

I am called upon to be responsible for those personal projects as I

contribute to and participate in the social and cultural whole. In

exercising our responsibility to the present and to the past, we also

become responsible to past thinkers, to revitalize in their work those

ideas that we can apply to present historical and personal

circumstances. This is the work of correcting our ontologies,

epistemologies, and moral charges. It is a de-sedimentation,

reactivation and transformation of past thinking that can be utilized for

the present circumstances. It is a release of that which has been

subjugated by the distortions of power. This often requires a kind of

public truth-telling, a parrhesia, that is risky and dangerous, and may

end up in the self-sacrifice of the thinker.

In phenomenology, logos is not one. It is not a unified type of reasoning

good for all thinking. It is transcendental to former styles of logic that

purported to define “reason” or “logic” for all time. This move is tricky

because we need to constantly re-establish what reason is and what

logic does. What are the criteria for this type of critique? The answer is

clear: Our method must understand the alignment between a logos,

one of many logoi, and the things themselves. When our logos is far

away from the things themselves, we sense this distance, which

manifests itself as a crisis of meaning.

For example, right now, most of us perceive that humans are destroying

vital ecosystems, the biosphere, and perhaps the human species.

Naturally, this is a crisis of meaning because it is the way we think about

things that has brought us to this juncture. It requires that we think

against ourselves, interrogate the source of our meaning and the

methods of logic we use to understand ourselves morally and

scientifically. Right now, we find much of our meaning in capitalism,

competition, domination, totalization, and destruction. Our reasoning is

built on instrumentalizing others, fear and negative anxiety, a self-

structure that lacks a depth of empathy, and a distorted understanding

of our inter-relational reality that is annihilating our biosphere, radical

Others, vital ecosystems, and ourselves.

If we don’t care that the Earth, its life, and our lives continue in the

future, then we wouldn’t be too concerned about the way we are living

and the type of meaning structures we have. If we are value-neutral,

then we would lack the motivation to engage in a phenomenological

inquiry. But if we would intend to destroy our planet and all its life

forms, we would still have a foundation for phenomenological inquiry,

though it would become tedious and disruptive of our plan. This is so

because we would quickly learn that our meta-value of destruction and

our supporting ontological structures and logics deviate from the things

themselves. For example, we would learn from the science of ecology

that our interpretation of meaning, i.e., rampant destruction, in no way

supports natural kinds, other life forms, ecosystems and the whole

biosphere, essential to human life. We would learn quickly that our

reason is distorted.

On the other hand, if we care about the life of sentient beings, the

health of water, land, and air, humans, ourselves, and life in general,

then a phenomenological inquiry would become a constant challenge to

our meta-value systems, our ontological structures, and our logics. We

would continually think against the very way we think about things. In

this way, we would engage in a constant critique whose aim is a

transformed rapprochement of logos and the things themselves. This is

the radical critique of reason, science, art, politics, and all discursive

domains of human experience.

If we do not value living and life itself, then we will continue to act

without regard for the things themselves, in the mode of complacency,

or in the mode of intentionality’s various forms. This is nihilism. In

contrast, if we do value life, we have a method by which we can adjust

our reasoning. We would reconsider our ontological structure, our

knowledges within that structure, and our meta-value system. This is

the opposite of nihilism, and is life-affirming, i.e., how we can live well

and support ecosystems that are also well. Thus, within the project of

phenomenology, we do not seek a universal or totalized solution but

rather separate logos from phenomena, thereby opening conceptual

and existential space for critique and transformation. This is the

thinking against oneself.

Because it is a human individual who lives within a historically

conditioned logos, this process of splitting logos from phenomena is a

radically existential and individual method whose goal is to interrogate

possibility, as a historical problematic. It is a method that constantly de-

stabilizes how we think of reason as our experience and sense of

phenomena deepens and trues itself. Let’s go back to the beginning of

this essay where I identify the problems resulting from abstraction,

reification of the objective, universalization, and totalization.

Phenomenology pulls us back from this alienating, attack on life, and

even though we seek new foundation for knowledge, it is the process

that is more salient. In this way of thinking, even mathematics and logic

are constantly subject to new phenomenological foundations. They are

not independent, but instead, are very much derivative of these

foundations. This makes the development of these symbolic and

abstract disciplines an existential one, for it is an existing human who

engages in these reasoning processes. Thus, we can inquire about the

meaning a scientific, mathematical abstract thought has for a particular

person. Thinking, therefore, must always go beyond abstract science.

This is the transcendental, existential dimension of thinking.

We have, unfortunately, divorced thinking and reasoning from life. This

has had catastrophic consequences in our inter-relational self and social

structures, and our capacity for empathy and moral experience. Here,

our dominating tendency to use abstract and abstruse language that

totalizes and objectivizes our experience of the Other, separates us from

the natural world, the world of the Other, and life itself. Merely

scientific or theoretical critique does not go far enough. It merely opens

the gateway to offer an intra-critique but not a radical critique because

we have not engaged the ontological.

What’s more, I have an intuition that this loss of connection with life is

made worse through augmenting structures like capitalism,

commodification, and competition. What may follow from this, which is

a hypothesis, is increased aggression as we try to reach for life. But we

try too hard, and this results in violence, even sadistic violence. This, in

turn, I posit, creates an even stronger tendency to reify, totalize, and

the like. This is why in times of moral chaos, increased aggression and

destruction, we see increased efforts to theorize a critique which is

inefficacious. At the core of these matters is the existential critique of

existence itself, which is the most difficult, the most crucial, and the

most avoided.

With some reflection, we may start to see that logos is always value

laden. It creates a world, an ontological paradigm, and the knowledges,

truths, and logics that emanate from it. We can commit to a logos that

serves life or a logos that destroys it. But I hypothesize that they are two

different logos. An alternative argument is that our logos is irrelevant,

and that the human anthropology is inherently violent, disastrous and

alienated from life, no matter how we wish it otherwise. This would be,

if we could prove it, because of the organic, anatomic features of the

human brain and nervous system, along with its type of inter-relational

nature that make it this way. That is obviously a non-starter for a

phenomenological critique that pursues the Good, just like the

foundational value of destruction and annihilation.

In the modern world, we have it backwards. We develop logics,

mathematics, and sciences first by focusing on productivity, capitalism,

competition and developing abstract theories that serve these interests,

whether they respect the lifeworld. But our participant-experience in

the lifeworld is more foundational than the symbolic systems we create.

So, we need an inversion in the process. This is the existential-moral

dimension of all historical analysis and critique that requires the

exploration of meaning and human responsibility. It is a critical

challenge to our ontological commitments.

A crucial set of questions involves our intuitive experience prior to its

translation into codes, numbers, formulas, and theories. A second set

involves the relation of this intuitive experience and the abstract

reasoning we form from it. If we believe that these symbolic formulae

are bedrock, we unwittingly develop human structures that are already

alienated from the Earth as it already is. Moreover, because we have

the freedom to choose the way we think about things, it is a moral

issue.

An important part of the intellectual quest is to deconstruct the

givenness of our dominant logos to reveal the pre-given of our

primordial experience. Then to see how closely the scientific logos

tracks phenomena as they are in themselves. Thus, on one hand, we

have a scientific understanding of the world that is heretofore distorted,

causing the negative outcomes I have mentioned. On the other, we

have primordial experience of phenomena that we can come to

understand in a way that is true to the reality of these phenomena. The

pre-givenness of the lifeworld becomes the focus of our understanding

rather than the self-givenness of transcendental consciousness.

If we do not engage in this kind of critical examination, we would

continue to implement all domains of human experience in terms of a

false foundation; not only a false one but a negative, annihilating, and

destructive one. This pursuit is a-subjective, as we define subjectivity in

the Western Enlightenment and humanisms of all varieties. It is also a

pursuit of the Real instead of the Ideal which, by definition, is not real.

Moreover, this topology of the Ideal is self-refuting. It is destructive and

ends in total extinction which ends the critical inquiry from the outset.

The pregiven is the space of evental flow from which we can create new

logics, values, and ontologies. It is pre-possessory, as I have defined it in

much of my work about the modern self. In the main, this is the self

and cultural space of transcendence and transformation that does not

exercise power over language, and that does not attempt to acquire “it”

or anything else. This is an authentic space in which we don’t create a

topology of the self that tries to dominate everything, including other

humans, other sentient beings, the Earth, ideas, experience and the

like. It is the pregiven lifeworld.

This is the Real. This shifts the logos from a human centered one based

on power to a logos that is founded on life itself, and a human

integration with life that is not based on distorted idealizations. Here,

the phenomena of life and a logos of life merge and our sense of reason

is based in this merging. This necessitates the kind of critical

examination I am addressing.

In the light of our previous thinking, we can see how our own critical

self-work is also a historical analysis, so that we can trace through

various idealizations, i.e., power, distortion, exploitation, annihilation, a

genealogy of transformations that will bring us to the original

experience – the interpretation of Being – that led us here. This is the

very heart of critical phenomenology. This is the heart of the critique of

reasoning: that which we have created from it. In time, and with this

method, we may come to understand and articulate a logos of life that

lacks these distortions of truth, knowledge, and value.

The phenomena that we perceive are produced historically, which

means that we are always subject to former idealizations, i.e., distorted

logoi that produce distorted givenness. From the ground up, as we

develop into adults, our very thinking, our bodily awareness, and our

general sense of things is prefigured by distortions that we accept as

truth. Moreover, authoritative discourses like the scientific and the

governmental have exceptional weight and operate as the gold bar

standard of truth and knowledge.

Thus, we must problematize what is immediately given in experience

for this immediacy is pre-structured in language, both linguistic and

bodily. This means that transcendent, meditative experience ought to

be subjected to rigorous historical, psychoanalytic analysis to safeguard

it from the distortions of old logoi. Otherwise, it is too facile and

implausible that we could ever transcend our historical envelope. This

does not mean that we are trying to achieve an impossible pre-

givenness that is pre-historical or extra-historical. For we always are

temporal beings, and I don’t yet see a way to avoid this. I suspect that if

we discount to bracket the temporal, we also lose the critical function

as a cost. However, it is the methodology of exposing and transforming

these prior logoi that remains to be addressed, for example, through

self-examination, psychoanalysis, analysis of power and history, and

inter-relational dialogue. The goal is always to rid ourselves of distorted

assumptions that are latent in the givenness of our logoi.

Let us also consider the hyper-valorization of the so-called objective. I

grew up with this, was inculcated into it, taught it, and drank it as an

ideology: that the objective had value. That it represented the reality of

the world. That the subjective was no more than mere opinion and that

it could not be trusted. It figured in school. It was a part of becoming an

adult, learning to seek the objective. But this meant to become

suspicious of our own intuition, or sacred integration with life. In fact, it

meant to remove ourselves from it, alienate our-selves from it, and

deny our intimate participation with it. This meant to deny life in favor

of a theoretical, conceptual pronouncement, which became the given.

But we can see how this move distorts primordial experience, in terms

of the scientific, philosophical, and governmental relations that are

operating. This is where the critical thinking must focus.

This move is based on power and the government’s objective to

manage its population. Yet, it requests of individuals their renunciation

of reality, its adumbrations, originary experience of life, and any other

kind of experience that is authentic. The request is that we buy into an

ontological structure that falsifies reality. This is not to say that

subjective experience results in mere opinion which should not be

trusted. It is to say that there are authentic characteristics of this

originary experience that overcome the distortions of objective logoi.

Further, it is a question of the source of meaning: do we find it in

abstractions that are alienated from our transcendental experience, or

do we find it in this transcendental experience which is subjective by its

very nature? Thus, mere subjective opinion may not be distorted

opinion at all; instead, our subjective intuition may give us the greater

access to reality.

We can benefit by both methods: scrutinizing the existential, historical

critical bases for our abstract, foundational principles of epistemology,

science, and reality; and scrutinizing our subjective, intuitive

experience. This will tie together and integrate a constant evolution of

our experience, thought, and value. This is the dynamic interplay

between our originary intuition and a corrected and clarifying logos. We

can then be in position to clarify phenomena and the reality of the

world; to develop an understanding of phenomena that is not distorted

because we have the right logos. This is the logos that understands

phenomena in their originary givenness, i.e., which we can call

“pregivenness” if we are engaged in a critical phenomenology. This is

the critical ontological project, and an epistemological project. In the

end, there is always a gap between phenomena and logos, for the

critical work is never finished.

A further concern is to constrict our ontologies with a constricted logos.

These ontological structures are typically built around what we think we

can control. This implies that we also constrict our logics. This comes

down to our collective choices about how constricted or how expansive

we want our logos, logoi, to be. If we choose a constricted logos with

stripped down categories of thinking especially those that focus in

different areas of our lifeworld, we thereby create systems of thinking

and logics that become handmaidens to these small sub-ontologies.

The logics can hold but they are transcendent closures that prevent us

from experiencing life at deeper levels. They are intoxicating precisely

because they hold analytically, but they consist of the formalism that

we see in simple arithmetic. The question, however, is what they tell us

about Being, the lifeworld, and the way humans integrate with them.

Highly accurate control logics condense and restrict experience, the

richness and depth of that experience, our perception of the Real

world, and therefore, our ability to respond morally. Note that our

current, dominating logical systems are historically grounded in the

Greek ontological tradition but it is precisely historical traditions that

we must critique. The danger is that these logical traditions may have

inadvertently distanced humans from phenomena, thereby creating the

alienated condition I have delineated.

Our obligation, therefore, is to constantly evaluate and assess our logic’s

fittingness with the things themselves. This process reconstitutes and

reinvigorates the process of reasoning so that its forms better match

the experiential intuitions we have. This means that we are charged

with going further than a critique of the internal coherence of the forms

of logic by challenging the current system. The charge is always to test

these forms against intuition to see how well they fare as idealized

unities of our experience. If they do fit well enough, we create abstract

reasoning with them; but all too often, we take these abstractions to be

Reality itself instead of acknowledging that they are shorthand ways to

articulate former and ongoing intuitions that must be constantly re-

evaluated. Critique is a method and a practice that thinks against the

given. They result in active intentions and, unfortunately, theoretical

sedimentations.

This active practice of exploring the relationship between subjective

experience and logic is the cynosure of critique. It is an act of

transcendence as it pulls back from the immanence of life experience. It

withdraws so to think, to reason. Phenomena, therefore, play a

subtractive role, and vanish in our perceptual field to the extent that

logic matches, and hover incessantly as it does not. Here, we seek the

given, stripping our reason of its distortions, and filling in intuitions with

form. One level of critique operates within a certain paradigm, logic,

and epistemological-historical framework. At this level we evaluate

coherence, implementation, social-political usefulness and the like. Yet,

the deeper level comes from examining ontological and value

presuppositions. These presuppositions are the theories and

abstractions that we develop from our experience of phenomena. In

short, effective critique always involves the ontological.

Phenomenological critique reduces predications to pre-predicative

assessments of experience. This broadens the notion of judgment to

include all experience, not just that which fits into a conceptual

framework; it also includes the relationship between non-thematic,

fulfilled and non-fulfilled intuitions and their expression within an

intentional structure. Pre-predicative judgments are always included as

evidence within predicative judgments. Why is this? The evidence held

within a predicative judgment comes from experiencing something as

something. This experiencing of something as something is already

prefigured as a judgment, a pre-interpretation that is built into

perception itself before it becomes a predication based on cognitive

interpretation. At this level, critique is not cognitive. Rather, it is

existential and ontological.

Pre-predicative judgments are grounded in immediate experience,

therefore, they are practical. They are a foundational level of the human

experience and offer experiential evidence in the direct business of

living. For example, a thirsty person enjoys a drink of fresh water. The

truth of the water is grounded in the experience of thirst and satiety

before predicative judgments are made of it at the cognitive level. At

this deeper level, we look directly to the phenomena for evidence

rather than to cognitions that are grounded in theory and concept, i.e.,

predication. This is the basic lifeworld that always accompanies

reflected scientific judgments. Note that the evidence and its

confirmation is immediate. There is no standing back in a reflective

process. There is just the ekstasis of the present, which is a full

participation in the complexity and beauty of life.

Just as subjective intuition critiques objective knowledge, we may give

up our focus on epistemological certainty (through that cause-effect

focusing which I discussed earlier, a way of approaching phenomena

that is restrictive but more certain) which, in the end, treats our

perception of phenomena as provisional, and which offers us greater

breadth and depth in our apprehension. In this inversion, we give up

the virtue of precision, which comes from theoretical sedimentation

and replace it with the virtue of provisional inexactitude and the quest

for the noetic understanding of a phenomena’s givenness.

Our method builds in a reflective methodology that works against

sedimentation. Here, we want to understand the factors that comprise

a perception which, in the end, is a pre-predicative judgment, based on

an ontology, and a subjective experience within such ontology. Here,

the perceiving consciousness remains open to changing conditions.

This method can help us sense and understand the way phenomena are

given to us without seeking the more constricting goal of the absolute

certainty we attempt to control.

Because of these fissures immanent within logos, pre-predicative

judgments are those that apprehend the most foundational divisions in

Being, i.e., the things themselves. It is they who divide up the lifeworld

at the ontological level. Any epistemology relies on these initial

determinations in being to provide reference for its level of critique

with relative evidence that depends upon noetic and cultural

conditions. Yet, if we focus solely on critique at the level of

epistemology, we exclude, first, the constituting acts of consciousness

that led to them and second, the things themselves. In contrast, at the

epistemological level, there are cognitive judgments without the fiction

of the judging subject, at the ontological level that critiques what is

taken to be absolute evidence.

I highlight the inability of a logic to engage in its own critique, for at the

epistemological level it suppresses the conditions of experience that led

to it. Logic is necessary, of course, at the epistemological and moral

level, but we can critically review and evaluate it at the ontological,

transcendent level, by examining the subjective conditions of

experience that led to its promulgation. In short, we must examine the

structure of epistemological (and moral) judgments to understand the

abstraction that we assume and how closely it approximates the things

themselves.

In this approach, we also set aside the assumption that there is a

universal method for legitimizing all phenomena. This replaces the

pursuit of a universal, general approach, and substitutes in its place a

study of the transcendental conditions that lead to each phenomenon,

which are unique. This ties a phenomenon to a particular consciousness

and focuses on the noetic structure of the consciousness which gives

rise to phenomena. This is the path to the things themselves. This

approach prevents the subjective intuition from disappearing.

Moreover, it protects the phenomena itself from being subjugated by

power structures.

When we critique logos, we critique words. We ask if they articulate the

truth of the things themselves or if they are misrepresentative. Words

that are distortions or that are alienated from the fullness and nearness

of our experience with the things themselves cannot provide the basis

for an epistemology, a morality, or more deeply, an ontology that

closely aligns itself with Being. We must, therefore, evaluate first,

whether words are so far removed from their source in life that they

lack the richness of meaning and its sources; and second, how far these

words deviate from the things themselves. For example, I might refer to

a forest as board feet of lumber, but lose the value of its ecosystems, its

beauty in poetry or art, or the intrinsic value of life forms. For another

example, I might interpret a wolf pack as a threat to my cattle rendering

business and shoot them on sight instead of recognizing their

importance to the ecosystem, and to their moral right to exist. We make

these judgments with words, and hopefully we aim to build a cultural

semiology that does not distort the things in themselves.

It is our authentic intuitions of life, our intimate participation in the

whole, that leads to discursive truth. Our approach to Being presences

it, but only in terms of our noetic structures, how we interpret the pre-

given in its wholeness, as we allow the whole world into ourselves. In

this way, we avoid words that lack an authentic source of meaning,

poisoned graveyards of greed and power that idealizations removed

from the things themselves. This condition is a diseased form of life

permeated with many forms of distortion, avoidance, and denial. It is

the structure of experience that is articulated by words and that is held

into place by words. It is in this place that we use phenomenology to

critique logos, i.e., the words.

Where we can come to a deeper understanding of critical

phenomenology, when we understand that experience itself is not

enough justification of perception and cognition, i.e., that we must

investigate and analyze the underlying structure of that experience. This

is phenomenology, as it seeks in its core, those words that articulate

originary intuitions, and that presence the full structure of experience.

The framework is the noetic-noematic correlation, in which we explore

the relation of the source of meaning of our intuitions and how they

manifest through the words we use. Here, we seek more than material

correlates to our words. Instead, we seek words that reveal

phenomena that are full of meaning, embodied, expressive of the

things themselves. Here, words become the very materiality of

transcendence. There is a close relationship between the word and the

flesh of the world. This gap is where we direct our critique.

Let us know that phenomenology’s very method is to steer a course

between idealism and materialism. For the things themselves always

outstrip what we can say about them, what we can idealize. What is

worrisome is how words have become dominant in assertions of reality

when, in many cases, they are simulacra, false, deceptive, or lack power

and influence to guide us to the things themselves, i.e., the world as it

truly is. Further, if we extol abstractions without such deep correlations,

we may create a human world that is distant from the true nature of

things as they are in themselves. This is not to rid ourselves of words.

Instead, we must reflect more deeply on our experience, the toolkit we

use for perception and interpretation, the source of meaning of our

significations and words, and the judgments we make. This is where we

delve into the noetic structure of our experience, consider unconscious

content, distorted social content, and the very performance of using

words at all. It is the exploration of structures of experience that give us

a genealogy of the history of meaning, as articulated with word

structures.

The critical intentionality of phenomenology thinks against itself. This is

a thinking that thinks against its everyday, received intentionality that

flows in experience. Here, we move from our everyday use of

significations, language, and words to an inquiry into their meaning

structures. This shows us that by problematizing words we see that they

are nothing in themselves. That they are not enclosed within

themselves but intend a noematic object. This is the meaning of words,

which are always more than what they are. Thus, there is a dialectic

between the flow of lived experience and the reflection of

phenomenology.

Phenomenology changes the way we think the emergence of

phenomena, i.e., that which appears. Words are used to create

otherness in phenomena, and likewise, the phenomena makes

otherness in the words. In the dispersion of logos, i.e., the way we

conceptualize the objective world through time, we can discern the

things themselves. We do this through our critical method, which

includes a dimension in the logos that we use to critique our very logos

itself. For example, we may critique the Kantian notion of reason as a

version of logos, but not logos itself. We can see that this method is

constantly in movement against itself, taking critical flight in such a way

that it provides the perspective we need to mediate logos by the things

themselves. Logos is always moving against itself. Always divided

against itself. Always producing material ontologies in the different

domains of the lifeworld.

We see here a distinction between the empirical, the ideal, and the

transcendental constitution of sense. This means that instead of relying

on the more rigid boundaries of logos that we see in empiricism and

idealism, the phenomenological approach constantly adjusts our

interpretation of logos and its very seat of meaning. This is the essence

of the critique: to explore and investigate the method and approach of

the current forms of logos. This allows us a flexible process within the

transcendental, pre-ontological. This means that we are first guided by

the things themselves rather than the method; by reality itself instead

of our conceptions of it, which are in the end, only pointing us to that

reality. In short, the things themselves teach us how to understand

them. Being is our teacher.

The things themselves demarcate the boundaries and awareness that

consciousness has of them, and in response, we may choose to remain

open and available to them. Together with the bracketing process of

anything that is not given in consciousness, we can focus on what is

immanent to consciousness, paying attention to the gap between logos

and the things themselves as we constantly re-adjust that logos. This

gap is the space within which we constantly adjust our very critique.

This is the critique of cognition.

This critique of cognition determines the scope of logos that we use to

understand that which appears, i.e., the phenomena. What we bracket

determines the scope of cognition. This is what we allow ourselves to

sense and to understand. When we engage in both historical critique

and a self-critique, we engage in a critique of cognition itself, as

phenomena. This implies that we bracket all natural scientific methods

concerning cognition, opening consideration for other approaches. This

leads to the pre-given, the region of experience that provides

transcendent perspective on the ontological field, both chosen and

otherwise. It is the critique of cognition whose aim is to transcend

phenomena and presence our-selves at the border area of the

noumenal realm, i.e., the things themselves. This is a radical

disponibilité, the availability to what is. Coincidental with intentionality

itself, it is what we give to ourselves of reality through cognition.

This is the reflection about cognition, which starts with the skeptical

orientation toward scientific and other cognitions. This kind of thinking

about thinking unsettles the claim of the natural science orientation

toward cognitions. It means that we subject all cognitions to a rigorous

critique. The goal here is to find a new starting point for the sense,

understanding, and interpretation of phenomena. This is a starting

point that overcomes and transcends the starting point I have been

examining in this essay. It is the beginning of a method for examining

our starting points – our first philosophy – no matter which we have

established. In short, we must always examine the very essence of

cognition itself.

This is more than an understanding of subjective cognition. It is a

convergence of intentionality, disponibilité, and the world, i.e., “the

what is.” In short, we stay open to what we cognize, not as object, but

as the field of transcendence itself as we sense the world and our place

within it. Instead of repressing or suppressing this availability to what

we cognize, we remain open to future transcendent possibilities. The

thinking and behavioral practice is to keep transcendent consciousness

open so that we are affected by the world, i.e., by the Other; and that

we sense the world for what it is in itself. It is, therefore, a kind of

reflection of reflection, a purified reflection.

In this sort of reflection, we subject to constant scrutiny the correlation

between the noetic and the noematic for each type of phenomena. It is

an active, dynamic process in which we examine the relationship of

noetic possibilities and the effects on the noematic focus, i.e., what we

see and how we understand. This is first philosophy, a self-critique. It is

a critique of cognition that first focuses on the self. This method

requires us to engage in a self-critique whenever we engage in a

historical, cultural critique.

This is a difficult critique because it means to unsettle our-selves, our

noetic structure, and the objects we provisionally presence in the

phenomenological field. It involves a continual attempt to create

equilibrium between self-criticism and historical, cultural criticism. It

means to constantly reflect about the intentional, noetic structures that

create noematic phenomena. This enables us to understand what

possibilities flow and emerge from the current, individual intentional

structures to which we are currently committed. Instead of the external

critiques like we see in Critical Theory, or various idealisms or

intellectualisms, psychologisms or positivisms, it is an internal criticism

of the given. It is the given that we must put into question because the

given, writ large, is what leads to society, culture, and history. That is,

we must examine the given, not as such, and only in itself, but the

context of the given with its presuppositions, assumptions, and noetic

context. Thus, we can examine the intuitions we have of givenness.

Logos is, therefore, an operation in which we explore the

phenomenological field in which an individual item presences itself. This

is the cultural, historical, and social context in which some things exist

within the phenomenological field and some things don’t even though

they are suppressed from the phenomenological field. The

consciousness that engages in phenomenological criticism detaches

from the given. It creates a fissure between consciousness and what

consciousness criticizes. Yet, the criticism is not negative. Rather, it is

positive and creative because it creates an understanding of the

objectivities that are the very product of the critical view.

These noemata are the product of intentionality that has gone through

the critical process. They are created and not discovered. The goal in

this type of criticism is not to arrive at a position about truth and falsity,

and it critiques any discourse that so tries. Thus, it does not posit or

oppose claims to truth but instead tries to understand what underlies

such claims, i.e., what structural, discursive elements and processes

lead to and presence them. Furthermore, it is creative because in its

very critical process it seeks to understand new noematic structures,

and therefore, new noetic structures and the kind of intentionality that

emerges. This is intentionality. It is substantively groundless, always

unsettling provisional foundations, but methodologically critical, always

seeking the things themselves.

It is difficult to not take a position, but this is not what phenomenology

does. Instead, it seeks to understand the foundations of such a position,

and ultimately, what is prior to all standpoints, prior to the given. This is

Being prior to what we make of it, i.e., our interpretations that produce

ontologies. There is no standpoint, no argument, and no position here,

just intuition, adumbration, and a proto-understanding of reality.

However, this must be mediated by the very fact of adumbrations and

how they indefatigably lead to the temptation of standpoints.

Here is where we can see that the idea of critique is problematic at the

phenomenological, ontological level. Critique has traditionally operated

at the level of epistemology, in which we do commit to standpoints.

Where we do take positions. Where we do argue for the truth or falsity

of propositions. Where humans have a will to this truth or falsity. Yet,

traditionally, this is in the realm of knowledge and not the realm of

Being. So, the difficult maneuver is to take the critical attitude from

epistemology and adopt it at the level of Being. The task is to use this

critical method against the will to truth, which is so deeply embedded in

humans historically. Further, recall that in pure phenomenology, we

seek description, which is a different goal than epistemological critique.

It is a different interpretation of Being and, it has a different self-

structure. Maybe we need a type of critique, and perhaps we need a

new concept that replaces it. IF we are to evolve and survive, we must

find a way to overcome the dualism intrinsic to the true-false division.

Critique is not merely externally focused, but it is also internally

focused. At the epistemological level, it fragments experience through

the perspectives consciousness takes. These are fissures that become

the noetic-noematic correlates that we understand in our thinking. Yet,

these fissures are sedimentations that alienate us from our inter-

relational being and our deeper participation in Being. In critical

phenomenology, we bracket these fissures as we seek the pre-given

from which they arise.

Phenomenological reduction is not a criticism of distorted judgments. In

contrast, it is a critique that is not a judgment which includes

affirmation or negation or theoretical positions. This allows us a

distance from our current ontological structure even though we cannot

escape this structure. In the reduction, we don’t seek a new position or

foundation in Being but instead, operate in a trans-ontological way. In

the reduction, we retain our capacity for discernment so we can

understand what is immanent to consciousness and what is

transcendent. We can see here how there are different ways to draw

the boundary between what we can know and what we cannot, at the

level of epistemology. This leaves the ontological and pre-ontological

questions for a different investigation.

Methodologically, we can engage in phenomenological criticism of any

science, investigating the being-ness of its objects and its methods. It

seeks to understand the sense of being of each object within a science

and its phenomenological field. This is how we unify epistemology and

ontology in a critical way, by moving from an external critique of onto-

logic, to method, to transcendental experience. It is at the level of the

transcendental that critique produces and creates new ontological

commitments. In this process, we replace our comfort in the natural

attitude – our unthinking theoretical commitments – with a freely

chosen self-relation based on experience. The self-relation is in the

transcendental dimension. It shapes the very logos that we use to

examine phenomena. The kind of logos that we derive from our

transcendental subjectivity is, therefore, more closely linked to the

things themselves. It is a primordial logos that creates a new

foundation for natural language orientations in the world and their

evolution in more sophisticated, technical and scientific languages. It is

the rigorous examination of all languages, sciences, and other technical

developments by transcendental subjectivity, which includes empirical,

ontic subjectivity in its exploration.

We use the self-critical logos of transcendental subjectivity to develop

the primordial logos of phenomena. This method is a constitutive

investigation of the sense of experience. It is not a criticism that

operates within pre-given categories. It creates categories of sense. In

this way, logos is a critical sense formation that retraces the given to re-

constitute sense. There is no one method for the infinity of areas of

investigation. Instead, each region of Being calls for its own unique

method to explore possibilities of human transformation from a violent

anthropology to a new kind of human. This is one that is responsible,

non-violent, and constitutive of a new interpretation of Being that

captures a deeper sense of what it means to be human in a way that

transcends violence.

[END]

KCB