Astrology as Phenomenology
I am waiting for the wind which was predicted for
"Wednesday or Thursday" to rescue us from the heavy smoke which has
descended on Seattle. It hasn't come and it's 9:13 p.m. Wednesday.
I
just removed an old large dictionary plus three paperback books from
under my laptop in order to get it down from its Netflix position to its
writing position. Better.
I
am reading four popular, relatively superficial books on the history of
philosophy concurrently, one page from each every day, or more than one
page on some days. I find it liberating. I may never really study some
of these philosophers who are in these books subjected to inadequate
capsule presentations, so knowing a little of them may be better than
knowing nothing. It is easy to fill in some of the blanks left by one of
these encapsulating writers with what turns up in the other three. It's
an adventure. Sometimes there is profundity in superficiality. A crude
grasp of what Paul Feyerabend said is exhilarating, for he wanted to
make "science" and "scientific knowledge" more democratic and
individual. Therefore he could have been a champion of astrology, for it
is a democratic and individual science. It is, as I have called it, an
experimental, experiential, phenomenological science. That means its
conclusions may be somewhat different for everyone who becomes
proficient in it. Is not that true anyway of psychology, for example?
There are perspectives, observations, and speculations in psychology but
not a rigid science. Who would want it to be a rigid science, making
human behavior entirely predictable and taking away all free will or
spontaneity?
Systematic
thought, systematic speculation, and systematic observation are what I
take to and what I believe in. I do that with diet. I read many words
from those who study diet, dieticians and whatnot, and never believe any
of it totally but draw my own conclusions from eating what seems right
to me and noting how it affects me. Is this "scientific"? Maybe or maybe
not, but it is certainly experimental and experiential and
phenomenological.
How
do these popular books define phenomenology? From one: "the study of
experience." Or: "An approach to philosophy which investigates objects
of experience (known as phenomena) only to the extent that they manifest
themselves in our consciousness, without making any assumptions about
their nature as independent things." ("Independent things" are called,
since Kant, noumena rather than phenomena. But what are "independent
things" if we know them only through our consciousness?)
Another
of the "superficial" phllo books says: "Phenomenology is a philosophy
founded by Edmund Husserl that says that 'intentionality,' or attitude,
always goes along with consciousness."
Another:
"Husserl envisioned his phenomenological method as a descriptive
procedure for examining conscious experience. It was not a psychological
method but, rather, one that brought out certain and necessary aspects
of experience. It did not deduce these from presuppositions, but
revealed them by phenomenological reductions, a most arduous process as
carried on by Husserl . . ."
Another:
"The central doctrine of Husserl's phenomenology is the thesis that
consciousnesses is intentional. That is, every act of consciousness is
directed at some object or other, perhaps a material object, perhaps an
'ideal' object--as in mathematics. Thus the phenomenologist can
distinguish and describe the nature of the intentional acts of
consciousness and the intentional objects of consciousness, which are
defined through the content of consciousness. It is important to note
that one can describe the content of consciousness and, accordingly, the
object of consciousness without any particular commitment to the
actuality or existence of the object. Thus, one can describe the content
of a dream in much the same terms that one describes the view from a
window or a scene from a novel."
To
me, all this means that we have the freedom to be aware of and
understand our own conscious experience in our own way and be our own
scientists! Husserl probably would not agree with that because he (an
Aries!) probably thought that he and he alone knew how to do it! Here I
am putting "Aries" against "Husserl" in the sense that I am saying he
does not realize that his month of birth influences how he thinks and so
when he thinks the world is all contained in his own "head" (Aries is
the sign of the head and brain) he is merely thinking as an Aries has to
think! Does that mean I am putting the temporal order, that is, the
month of Husserl's birth, as superior to thought per se? No, it means I
am noticing things, namely, that Aries people are individualists and
believe in their own visions, and this has been made evident to me
through observing how many Aries people act, and that probably Husserl
is not immune to thinking that way since he was born in the month of
Aries. I call this astrological phenomenology. And I care not if Husserl
would say it is nonsense! My own experience, according to he himself,
could not be nonsense.
Oh
well, there is a sample of philosophy, and you can see why it is that
while philosophic discussion may expand the consciousness or awareness,
it hardly ever leads to resolutions into agreements. So if one were to
set down "resolutions into agreement" as the goal of philosophy, one
would have to say that philosophy has never attained its goal at least
in any universally agreed-upon way. Of course Hegel and maybe a few
others have believed that they had in fact resolved everything into
agreement. Hegel made the best attempt ever, it would seem. But how many
philosophers nowadays would agree with that?
So
it goes. And goes. But I do not give up and may even resolve all the
philosophers who ever lived into agreement in my own mind and
consciousness! So there. (I too am Aries.)
8/22/2018 10:07 pm
