/lit/ - Literature

>Through what method do we obtain a universal and also fixed a priori of the historical world which is always originally genuine? Whenever we consider it, we find ourselves with the self- evident capacity to reflect— to turn to the horizon and to penetrate it in an expository way. But we also have, and know that we have, the capacity of complete freedom to transform, in thought and phantasy, our human historical existence and what is there exposed as its lifeworld. And precisely in this activity of free variation, and in running through the conceivable possibilities for the life- world, there arises, with apodictic self- evidence, an essentially general set of elements going through all the variants; and of this we can convince ourselves with truly apodictic certainty.

>This explicitness brings objects and human beings closer; it also brings meditative meanings to lower levels, which allows automation to be dominant. For Simondon, automation is the lowest level of perfection of machines (we understand here that by automation, he refers to the simple repetitive operation of machines); in contrast, automation must be problematized and the human must be reintegrated into the technical system. It seems to me that Simondon’s seeking to restore human beings as technical individuals (in which the human is able to create an associated milieu of its own) is similar to Husserl’s agenda to retrieve experience from abstract symbols and rules. Husserl’s phenomenological method has been little used in the construction of web ontologies, because most of the ontologies we use today are merely inductions from the empirical experiences of engineers; however, Husserl’s phenomenology seems to me valuable in its problematization of pairs such as logic– automation and ontologies– meaning horizons. The Husserlian method remains a useful motif for us to
think about digital objects.

>We can also see that this metaphysical difference contributes to the opposition between culture and technologies. But if all logical thinking has to be grounded in transcendental imagination, then can we not also see these as two different orders, one coming out of logic, the other out of temporality? In the interpretation of Kant, Heidegger performed a second transcendental deduction (compared to the transcendental deduction Kant discussed in Critique of Pure Reason) which proposes temporality as the ultimate a priori of philosophical thinking. Only through the reduction of the transcendental apprehension to time instead of schemas does it regain its transcendence without losing the world.

-- YH/OEDO

"can we not also see these as two different orders, one coming out of logic, the other out of temporality?"