Astrology as Phenomenology

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