In Response to a Blog on Tautology…

“Raw significance is sent to the mind through the senses, through apperception (and what Husserl called ‘the play of fancy’), and also through introspective reflection and contemplation . It is a call to which consciousness of conscious individuals is *called* to (ostensibly) present a conceptually reciprocal and orderly answer to.”

I appreciate the subtlety of your reasoning.  I would only add a tidbit…

Do we ever actually encounter “raw significance”?  Isn’t it always bundled with ‘awareness’, an inextricable web of meaning, of manifold significances?  It may be that ‘raw significance’ is an abstraction.  If so, the questions that press to the fore are political…why would we want to denude the way we find ourselves already engaged in ‘worldhood’ as Heidegger may suggest or Husserl’s horizon?  Why would an abstraction of experience be deemed a suitable substitution for how meaning, sensations, being show themselves?  Perhaps, as Heidegger notes, it is because we are historical beings.  Our truths are never pure and naked tautologies but always clothed in the garbs of circumstance, the accidental, the fullness of the moment (kairos), semblance.  This would make the incidental not circumspect but always already there with, essential to the founding of truth.  To separate tautology from NOT tautology is always already to have never departed from tautology.   It is to re-pronounce the ancient incantation of Parmenides and Plato the one over the many, the eternal over the mortal, mind over body and the other countless ways this has redeemed itself in history.  Yet, the still small voice remains, the voice we think as incidental and unnecessary, the other that has not yet succumbed to tautology.  This is how we find ourselves and ethics is the choice of force or détente.

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