On May 5, 2023, at 9:37 AM, Dan Bloom <[log in to unmask]> wrote:I love this!______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.Ground is not “there.” It is “here.” Yes. It is both. I think that is thing. Once we pay attention to, it becomes figural. This is a problem in phenomenology in general. We say we are not categorizing or thematizing. Yet in explaining this, we do this by categorizing and thematizing.The moment I attend to the contact-boundary, for example, actually I am attending to contacting and no longer to the ground of its emergence!!!DanOn May 5, 2023, at 11:05 AM, Peter Philippson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.Hi Dan,That bring us to Heidegger and history. And therein is the trouble. It is the same kind of trouble we find in Hegel. Fate. Destiny. Many an evil is justified by historical inevitability. Communism and National Socialism. Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s camps. Hitler as Dasein has a lot to do with Heidegger’s notion of history. I don’t think that disturbs many of the other ideas in Heidegger’s philosophy.It is not the same as Hegel. Marx built on a foundation of Hegel, but Hegel never claimed that Stalin was the embodiment of Russia using the language of his philosophy! Heidegger was a very precise philosopher: this wasn't a misspeaking.I agree with you about truth!I agree with you about intentionality. Heidegger was mistaken re Husserl and especially about intentionality. In fact, I read a few Heideggerians who point out that intentionality is an essential but hidden part of Heidegger’s being-in-the-world since Dasein is always directed toward the world in which it is in.Why doesn’t that fit with the hidden and revealing? Can’t we say that ground of figure/ground is “there”? And figure is “being” as in an existent? “I” cannot be without a “there.” The “there” includes what may be background and not yet available. And so on. This perspective adds an existentiality to the way we usually consider f/g emergence. To say nothing of the contact-boundary.Ground is not 'there' but here: it is the here-not-attended-to. I think this is the same discussion as about 'thrownness'.
I am not a Heideggerian, by the way. My own point of view, for the most part, is closer to Husserl’s. Yet Heidegger’s existentiality makes sense to me. His ontological difference (Being and being) makes sense to me. Dasein makes sense to me. Being-towards-Death and Being-in-the-World make sense to me. Being thrown and being projected towards the future make sense to me. Care makes sense to me.
Make less sense to me as you know. I would say we are NEVER thrown (e.g. my baby example). Human beings can care for other things (their country, their politics or religion, more than their existence more than other animals, who, if they sacrifice themselves do it from instinct.Thrownness makes intuitive sense to me. I am born into an already existing world, which is as if handed over to me. I am thrown into this time, this place. Human beings care for many things other than their own existence. I agree with you on that. Some Heidegger scholars say Heidegger would agree, too. Anyway, it took Levinas to correct Heidegger for all time. It is not merely our knowledge of our being-toward-death that marks us as human, but our knowledge of our being-toward-the-death-of-the-other. We do not live alone. Our dying is a dying away from those we love. Those we love die away from us. Levinas took this further. He said that this is an ethics that precedes being itself, where ethics is nothing more nor less that primordial relationality. This is how I will try to base a pre-dialogical approach in GT, which will rescue the individual from the relational soup. :)Both Husserl and Heidegger are important steps on the way to Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger is an important step on the way to Levinas. And all of them shine different lights on gestalt therapy.
I get that.
Best wishes,
PeterMy best to Mary!And from me to Ora!Peter______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.
love,
Dan
Peter______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.On May 4, 2023, at 12:57 PM, Philip Brownell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
“…since appearance precedes one’s consciousness, consciousness itself is conceived as a realm of givenness and absoluteness.” —Ronny Miron, "The Phenomenologyofthe Nothing: The Hidden Dialogue Between Conrad-Martius and Heidegger” in Hedwig Conrad-Martius: The Phenomenological Gateway to Reality. Springer.
Ronny Miron is a spectacular scholar and has done a great deal to make known the influence of the women who studied with Husserl. Hedwig Conrad-Martius was one. Edith Stein was another.
Phil______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.
______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.
______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.
-- ______________ Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.Heidegger never, ever meant we could clean consciousness or that there is an objective observer. Being-in-the-world is precisely that. He criticized Husserl precisely in that basis. Fairly or not, he objected to the phenomenological and transcendental reductions of Husserl as movements away from the world and into abstractions. Being and Time is an analysis of our being as finite existents in and of the concrete world — practically and existentially. He rejected intentionality because it was consciousness directed AT an object. Some say he misread Husserl. But one thing is clear regarding this, to Heidegger, there is no objective observer.That is the danger, no objective observer, but a concrete world, with this image of a greater gravity. Newton said that with a big enough lever you can move the world, Einstein showed how you can make a bomb that will melt concrete. A baby is born into the world in which a baby has just been born, and changes it in the fact of its birth. Intentionality is not intention, it is consciousness of something, but that something doesn't have to be an object. E.g. I want to look behind that door because I am curious what I will find. Sartre wrote about the experience of absence.--