Mind Unmasked: A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness by Michael A. Weinstein & Timothy M. Yetman

Author:Michael A. Weinstein & Timothy M. Yetman [Weinstein, Michael A. & Yetman, Timothy M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, History & Theory, Mind & Body, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351662901
Google: 8NcuDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35927839
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Phenomenology of Mind

The present reflection has been an application of phenomenology of mind aimed at describing the structure of experience, in its most general and framing terms, of a particular “life” grasped by a conscious finite center; it is an exercise in the phenomenology of life-experience.

The word “particularity” is emphasized here. There is no claim made that the structure(s) of life-experience that have been described are universally or even generally relevant to all “lives.” Phenomenology of mind as understood here is a personal affair; the reflective review of experience is undertaken by a particular individual; it is intended to clarify my “own” experience, which might or might not be representative and, even more to the point, might or might not be useful to other particular “lives” seeking their “own” clarifications. Rather than an argument intended to convince others that they should understand the structure of life as “I” have presented it, the present reflection is an invitation to experience and “organize” life as I do, offering the possibility that the account might point others more precisely in their “own” direction.

It is not clear that the kind of reflection defined here can even be called “philosophy.” In one sense, it is closely linked to the philosophical discourses of the past through much of its vocabulary and, more importantly, through the problem that it puts to itself of defining framing concepts of the highest generality. In another sense, however, the present reflective review departs from the philosophical tradition by restricting its initial applicability only to myself, indeed, only to myself at the period and place of my “life” at which I am meditating and writing.

By restricting the claim to applicability so sharply and stringently, I am trying to avoid the excess of what the twentieth-century American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry called the “egocentric predicament,” which he concluded had defined modern philosophy. That predicament was built-into the founding of modern philosophy in Descartes’ cogito, the starting point in the thinking process itself, from which all other judgments about the structure of being/reality would be derived.

As generations of philosophers who succeeded Descartes undertook the inquiry into conceptions of the “frame of things,” the subjectivity of the starting point clung to them. Meanwhile, the natural sciences became modern philosophy’s competitor, but, although their practical supremacy was indisputable, they did not produce conceptions of the frame of things; indeed, they renounced the effort to do so, restricting themselves to identifying and theorizing processes within an unspecified frame. Attempts to universalize scientific theories and rekey them as ontologies ended up as monuments to the state of scientific theory in one or another discipline at a particular time. In addition, scientific “worldviews” did not refrain from addressing problems outside the scope of science that had been essential to the philosophical tradition, such as what the best way or correct way of living is; and once those problems had been broached, the egocentric predicament reasserted itself.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the pretensions of modern philosophy had been

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