“Full many a gem of purest ray serene…”
Thomas Gray

Thales is credited as being the first philosopher. It is not clear what specific questions he asked, except that, according to Aristotle, he is said to have spoken out concerning the first cause. (Metaphysics, 984a, 3-6) In the same passage, Hippo is said not to be considered as worthy of inclusion among the first thinkers because his thought was too shallow. Thales, who said the first cause was water, made his deep enough.

Then others follow with alternative theories, of air or fire as the first cause. Then still others posit multiple causes, etc. (984a, 6f)

The ball begins to roll. Is this all there is to it?

Aristotle says that the ancients may have speculated about things divine (983b 28f), so that Thales may not have been the first to have a thought on the first cause. Certainly there are ancients sitting about most everywhere who have opinions about divine and other basic, speculative matters. Occasionally, a reporter will drive out to a nearby, rural courthouse to record some of this activity. Is this philosophy in the rough, waiting to be embraced by the next historian?

Clearly it could rise to the standard of dialogue seen in the history of philosophy; to find such quality under the trees of a rural courthouse might be akin to finding a chess game with a new opening, one that could be anointed with a filename in the next Chessmaster program.

If so, then philosophy is not a prisoner of the history of ideas.

A question arises. Without the above historical context, is there an argument as to where there is an appropriate point to start philosophy?

How could this argument arise? Suppose someone says that philosophical questions arise in the history of ideas. Then he asks how else would they arise?

Could one say that scientific questions arise in the history of science and then ask how else would they arise?

Scientific questions arise independently of the history of science. One may need to predict something; perhaps the flooding of a large river. He researches the history of its flooding. He has records of its flooding for hundreds of years. He arrives at a mathematical model with a new piece of statistics that he develops to help him predict a coming era of flooding. Then his work becomes part of the history of hydrology.

Can philosophical questions arise in the same way? What sort of problem arises independently of the history of ideas such that it finds its solution anointed historical status? It is hard to say. Someone generally has to raise a question, given a prior answer to a previous question. The point of his question and answer is in its relation to prior work.

The point of the hydrologist’s work above is to master, in some way, a big two-hearted river. That point is independent of the history of hydrology. His work is successful if it does what he sets out to do. Its place in history is separate. The point of the philosopher’s work appears to be set up by history. While there can be science without a history of it, there does not seem to be philosophy without a history of it.

If this is the way it works, how does one come to ask the first philosophical question? Certainly the way philosophy is taught suggests the importance of its history. Even if we deconstruct it in a post-modern department, we say what the history of it leaves out. Derrida, if anyone at all, shows the importance of the history of philosophy; he would not be in business without it.

To embark on a detailed explanation of Sartre is a task for a commentary. Rather, what I want to do for the moment is to look at these passages in Sartre in relation to starting philosophy. Sartre starts philosophy on a quest for being and boils the quest down to question of the being of the percipi, or of the phenomenon.

He then shows that an analysis of the percipi (what is perceived) leads to an infinite regress if one attempts to ground it, or guarantee it, or found it, or any of those astounding tasks that philosophy claims to do. From the regress, Sartre concludes that the being of the percipi is transphenomenal and that, as a result, it is not an object of knowledge.

Thus, for Sartre, being is a point where explanation stops, not where it begins.

Sartre thus starts with the percipi and ends with its transphenomenal being. He will say a good deal in the rest of Being and Nothingness, but whatever he says will not describe transphenomenality, for then it would be an object of knowledge. But he has already established it is not.

Sartre begins with the percipi because Husserl began with it. Heidegger also followed, offering an analysis of the perceived, which attempted to show that it was somehow secondary to the implements of practice. So Sartre has a context for his quest for being; it is in the hidden assumptions of Husserl’s work and the text of Being and Time, which he read during the war.

The idea of bringing up Berkeley is to examine what it could mean to accept Berkeley’s terms as somehow analytically final. Sartre’s point is to show that they cannot be final. You can start with “esse est percipi” or ‘to be is to be perceived” in two ways.

In the first way, you assert as a matter of metaphysics “that to be is to be perceived.” Irrespective of how you arrive at this metaphysics, it underlies or grounds your theory of knowledge, which holds that knowledge is based on appearance. But the ground is not one of knowledge because it is knowledge that metaphysics purports to ground.

In the second way, you assert “that to be is to be perceived” is a given. Here you say that all there is, is appearance (to be is to be perceived), and that there is no being of the appearance. Here Sartre says that everything “falls away in nothingness.”(B&N, lx) There is no ground.

In the first way, you have a foundation that explains nothing, for it cannot be perception or knowledge. Thus you cannot say how perception or knowledge is founded. In the second way, you acknowledge no foundation; the result is the same.

In a footnote that refers to the ready-to-hand of Heidegger, Sartre says, “It goes without saying that any attempt to replace the percipere by another attitude from human reality would be equally fruitless. If we granted that being is revealed to man in “acting,” it would still be necessary to guarantee the being of the acting apart from the action.” (B&N, lx)

Note the assumption through all of this that there has to be a foundation. The implication is that there are deep problems in looking for a foundation in phenomenology. If you are going to call ‘being’ a foundation, it will be a very different as a foundation. Since the foundation cannot be subject to perception, it must be transphenomenal, i.e., beyond what is perceived. So it is beyond the “object of perception,” as a phenomenologist might say.

Also, it must be beyond the subjective element of perceiving for the same reason. My seeing a field of daisies has a subjective element, i.e., my seeing. The being of this element is also transphenomenal.

But there is no question how this foundation works as a guarantee. It does not and cannot function as a guarantee. If it does, a regress arises once again.

“These dull-witted Aristotelians have no imagination. There is a vista of infinity before them which they just do not see.”

Brief analysis:

The confusion in this view runs very deep. The Aristotelian would have quit at the regress. The regress would not have been an ontological “appeal to being,” as Sartre refers to it. (B&N, lix) The difficulty of the regress is a good reason why in the classical sense, ‘being’ is simply said to be a cross-categorical term, or, for a logician, such as Ockham, a syncategorematic term, which has no meaning in and of itself.

Sartre covers this confusion in one way. He does not think that the transphenomenality of being can be known. Only phenomena can be known, can be objects of knowledge. (Again, note the primacy of the reduction marked in the prior post.)

So the second dimension of being surpasses the knowledge we have of it as a phenomenon in its first dimension. (B&N, lix) At least Sartre sees that the meaning of being is not properly understood as a relational database. It is beyond knowledge, so it is beyond databases.

That only phenomena can be known is another problem for this view. Heidegger’s use of the ready-to-hand and its implication of practical, non-theoretical knowledge have to be dealt with. Sartre will attempt to do this with the “for itself.”

The idea that knowledge is based on appearances also has its problems. The use of the term ‘appearance’ is technical, for appearances plainly understood can be misleading and may prevent one from knowing something, as the term is understood in this example, “He was an appearance of virtue until you got to know him.”

Thus the term ‘appearance’ is a kind of “legacy word” that no one really knows the meaning of. Its meaning is tied up in assumptions that reduce perception ultimately to a series of appearances. There is circularity here.

The term ‘appearance’ is not explained except in the context of the history of philosophy in which it is a term of art which masks as many confusions( the noted reduction, for one) as it attempts to clear up. The use of the term ‘phenomenon’ is also technical, and since it rests on the meaning of ‘appearance,’ it also has correlative problems.

Replacing the old Aristotelian notion of substance with that of the phenomenon may not clear anything up. Nonetheless, Sartre forges ahead with a discussion of the Berkeleyan view that "esse est percipi" or "to be is to be perceived," rethought in phenomenological terms.

“Don’t you give me no dirty looks…”

Following up the prior post:

To start philosophy here, you have to think a number of things.

You have to think that it makes sense to talk in terms of ‘appearance.’ You have to think that it makes sense to reduce an object of perception(e.g., what you see, a table) to the terms of ‘appearance,’ where you talk about a series of appearances, infinite in number, which make up all possible views of a medium-sized piece of dry goods sitting in your dining area. That is what you have to think, just for openers.

(Don’t know quite how this works with the evil eye or patterns in card games. We do see these things, too.)

You also have to think that this reduction of the object of perception to a series of appearances is somehow primary in philosophy, otherwise you would not start there. So to talk about a table, you must think that the reduction of it to appearances is somehow first in order. So if you are going to talk about a table, you are assuming that there is a first way to go(e.g., to see it as a series of appearances) and that other ways are less important(e.g., to see it as Edwardian or Early American).

Then you have to talk about the being of this table , i.e., of these possible views which make up the table, as though it were something distinct to discuss, even though there is no being beyond the appearances that make up the table. In a curious way, being turns out to have a phenomenal dimension and an ontological dimension as well. To view being as a mere phenomenon fails, for it leads to an infinite regress:

“What then is the meaning of the surpassing towards the ontological, of which Heidegger speaks? Certainly I can pass beyond this table or this chair toward its being and raise the question of the being-of-the-table or the being-of-the-chair. But, at that moment, I turn my eyes away from the phenomenon of the table in order to concentrate on the phenomenon of being, which is no longer the condition of all revelation, but which is itself something revealed---an appearance which as such, needs in turn a being on the basis of which it can reveal itself.” ( B&N, lviii)

Nonetheless, Sartre believes that there is a phenomenon of being. There has to be for us to say anything about being. Note the primacy of the reduction here. In a fundamental sense, Sartre believes that you cannot understand being without considering it as a phenomenon, as a series of appearances. As an empirical point, he thinks that being is revealed as a phenomenon in boredom or nausea(B&N, lvii).

Thus being appears as a phenomenon. That is one dimension of it. But it is also transphenomenal, as the condition of the possibility of the phenomenon (a condition of revelation (B&N, lix). That is its second dimension; it is the second dimension that is somehow implied by the regress.

To understand where Sartre is beginning, you have to understand what ‘phenomenon’ means and how it is supposed to have solved a philosophical problem in the first place.

You have to see how the concept of the phenomenon came to be. That it somehow sweeps away the need for the Aristotelian concept of substance, which the British empiricists, beginning with Locke, had trouble with.

Which substance Kant replaced with the notions of the phenomenon and noumenon. Which noumenon the phenomenologists found unnecessary and stayed merely with the phenomenon as a string of appearances.

The result of all of this is that whatever exists(the existent) is a series of appearances, nothing more. Thus the being of the series of appearances needs to be understood. But it has to be understood as a being that is not behind(as a substratum) the series of appearances or phenomenon. Otherwise we are back with Locke, or worse, Aristotle.

The being of the appearing (what appears which is yet only an appearance) is where Sartre starts Being and Nothingness(B&N, lvii).

But why would you start philosophy here, unless you were a kind of prisoner of philosophical history? Because Husserl thought this, or something like it, you start where he left off. Husserl and also Heidegger actually frame the beginning of Being and Nothingness.

(While I believe that Sartre’s phenomenology of Pierre’s absence from the café goes beyond the terms of this history, I will stay within it for now to show the ontological set-up for Sartre’s work.)

Referring back to the prior post:

In the case of beauty, if you do not start by looking at it in a special way, e.g., as what love lacks, you do not get the point of the Symposium. You do not get the point that beauty is somehow all good things: justice, temperance, truth, etc. You do not see that because love lacks beauty and beauty is divine, that love is not a god but is a kind of mediator between man and the divine.

You cannot see how it is that centuries later a Neoplatonist like Porphyry conceives a demonology from Socrates’ recalled discussion with Diotima. You cannot see how Augustine, in the City of God, discusses the idea of a mediator and shows the insufficiency of Porphyry’s analysis. You cannot see how, for the Socratic, a philosopher, as a lover of beauty, is somehow part of this mediation between man and the divine. You cannot see how, for the Augustinian, he is not. You cannot see how a primary relationship of man to the divine is cast in terms of love, but that the Platonists and Augustinians diverge with respect to mediation.

Beautiful thoughts. How to think them?

Examples of a sunset, a ruddy duck, a whitetail in a clearing, etc., may appear sufficient in an account of beauty. What more is there? You might not get the notion that there is more to say. You might not know why Socrates and Agathon are talking. You might not see the point of the City of God.

So you first have to say what it is that one should think about. This cannot be something that you arbitrarily SAY needs thinking about. For then, someone may not see the point of thinking about it in the first place. He can say that it has nothing to do with anything, because it is mere intellectual cookery.

By ‘something that one sees the point of thinking about’ I just mean a non-invented, non-contrived subject for conversation. We can always contrive something to think about in prison to keep ourselves from boredom, such as wombats in Mexico, or waves off the Baja. We can invent our own game of dungeons and dragons. We can play imaginary baseball with imaginary runners as Calvin and Hobbes do.

Philosophy cannot be simply a word game for intellectuals or a device to pass the time or a game for fun. It is supposed to be highly serious and ‘serious’ means ‘it has a point.’

The question where to start philosophy is very important, for if there is no answer to the question, there is no point in gentlemen starting their philosophical engines.

A problem with philosophy is where to start. Sartre begins Being and Nothingness with the remark that modern thought has made “considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances that manifest it.” (B&N, liii)

An intelligent mechanic who reads this, on his first excursion into the Queen of the Sciences, would not have a clue what Sartre is talking about, yet he may read, even write, a manual on how to repair the Renault Alpine in French and English.

So let us ask the question “Where do you start?”

“Start what?”

“The motor.”
“Oh, the ignition key; turn it, and the engine will start.”

“The obstacle course.”
“Right over there, next to the river. See the starter’s stand?”

“My 1040.”
“The instruction packet, page 1.”

“Losing weight.”
“Diet and exercise.”

“Science.”
“Trickier question; you might try Physics 100, if you can do a little math. If you’re 10 years old, you might enter a science fair. There are a lot of ways you might start.”

“Philosophy.”
“What?”

In the first four cases, you know what you are purporting to start. In the fifth case, you might not exactly know. But, from a science fair, after a pupil learns a crude form of empirical proof, he is positioned to go on.

Philosophy is a little different. If you simply tell someone to start thinking, the question arises “Think about what?” If you define what he is supposed to think about by posing questions as Socrates does, such as ‘what is love?’ or ‘what is beauty?’, you assume that such questions have a kind of point. You assume that you may answer a question about beauty as Plato does in the Symposium.

Back on April 10, after I had made a version of the argument that runs through these pages in one form or other, I said the following:

“What about the being of the questioner? Does it not need disclosure? Perhaps so. Perhaps no. Sartre offers an account of the being of the questioner in his ontology, so he must think that one is necessary.However, I don’t need to make Sartre’s disclosure (or any disclosure) to make the argument that questioning is transparent. Irrespective of the nature of the questioner, questioning can be made clear from the context in which it arises.”

(If you have come in late, you may go back to April 8-10 and watch the reruns, as it were.)

The sense of the above argument is that questioning is either clear or can be made clear from the context in which the question is asked and subsequent contexts that arise as a question gets cleared up, if it has to be made clear. I have some examples that show this, and I claim that Sartre’s paradigm case of Pierre and the café shows it as well. So I credit Sartre for the thesis.

The passage from April 10 says that I do not need to talk about the being of the questioner to make the above argument. Which means I do not have to do ontology to do philosophy.

This argument I have called the minimal position, and I believe it can be defended against anyone. In essence, if there is anything to the philosophy of questioning, it involves this position or some version of it, otherwise it is probably in error.

I think the argument is implied in some of Sartre’s bare bones. I also think that the later Wittgenstein reveals this argument in various passages. I also think Austin is aware of it, especially when he talks about “what we say when.” Certainly, if Austin was aware of it, others were also. Since I do not wish to do scholarship at this time, and this is my blog, not a dissertation(been there, done that), I want to acknowledge these people and see where the position leads in Sartre.

If there is time to pull the position out of the others, it will be later, not sooner, that this will be done.

Obviously I have read Sartre, but that does not mean that I have understood him. So I am going to go back through some of the early pages to see how Sartre approaches ontology in order to see if he, as I suspect, ends up with an inflation of the minimal position into something it cannot sustain.

"Like a sunflower that follows every movement of the sun, so I turn toward You, to follow You, my God."

If you manufacture your own question, how do you answer it? Any way you like. You create the context for your question by asserting its importance. You create the expectation of an answer and the form it must take. You create the questions that are open to be answered. If there is some ambiguity in your approach, you are the arbiter of what will clear it up, of other questions to be answered.

You start the cottage industry that depends on your architectonic; you call the order in the court; you say how things count.

(There are to be no answers that are contrary to expectation; certainly no surprises. Is there any bet that Hegel is not going to find his Absolute Knowledge at the start of the chapter on sense-certainty? Those pesky contradictions that need to be overcome: are they surprises that make him go back to the phenomenological drawing board?)

Like Heidegger, you get everyone to accept that questioning is provisionally understood (pre-ontologically), and you lead them to the ontology. If questioning were not provisionally understood, there would be nothing further to understand, no life’s work. So you define provisional terms( e.g., the ontic is ontological) so as to lead to the later terms of non-provisional completeness (e.g., how the ontic is ontological).

Like the sun, reality shines through your window.

The giveaway is that there is no other way. You are not prepared for someone like Sartre to ask, “What if there is no answer to the question of the meaning of being?”

The context of your question calls for meaning only. Meaning is one, all encompassing, manufactured Anrufen.
http://german.about.com/library/verbs/blverb_anrufen.htm

The gambler’s tell for Sartre is that he is willing to acknowledge that there may not be a primary relationship of man to the world (Do you mean no Dasein, no primordial temporality? How can that be?).

You have some reason to believe he is not doing manufactured ontology when you read that he will take a ‘no’ answer. (B&N 5)

(At least the Christians think that there are mysteries. God bless them.)

"This is the song that never ends!!
Yes it goes on and on, my friends!
Some people started singing it not knowing what it was,
And they'll continue singing it forever just because -- "

http://www.answers.com/topic/the-song-that-never-ends

Given that one can ask the question, ‘What is a question?’ What does this mean? Certainly one can form the interrogative sentence and interrupt other conversations with it, as a kind of watering-hole bore.

“What is the point of your question?”
“I just wanted to call your attention to the fact that we do all this questioning and do not know what it is. Here you are questioning me about the point of my question, and you do not really know what questioning is.”
“I don’t?”

At an obvious level, this is a kind of madhouse. How can one tell me I don’t know what drinking a glass of water is, just as I am gulping one down?

It is at the next level that the madhouse turns into philosophy. Here, by questioning what a question is, it is supposed to get profound. Somehow, out of nowhere, I am allowed to ask the question, ‘what is a question?’ and receive nods, nay kudos, for asking it, even though I would never ask it in conversation.

This should lead one to think that there is no context for philosophy, at least for a good part of it. Why not think of it as a kind of interruption, pointless to the normal listener? It is not a merely contextual error, such as when I assume it’s time for breakfast when it’s already lunch time. (Think of putting in a breakfast order at McDonalds, after the burger factory is in gear.)

Philosophy is not simply getting it wrong. It often seems a form of going where there is nothing to say and yet saying something, for decades, centuries even, to others who have made the same error.

When I have to invent a context for my question, I am likely doing philosophy. I cannot even invent a pretext for it, as one might to determine a detail of someone’s love life. Someone’s love life is a topic for some conversation.

“Well, philosophy is a formal enterprise. Remarks about stray conversations have nothing to do with it.”
“ No, actually it is not. Much of it started out as dialogue, as the early Plato shows. There was nothing formal about it in the Euthyphro.”
“ Well then, it has developed into this magnificent theoretical edifice.”
“Yes, in some cases it has, because it has manufactured its own questions.”

If a question is a kind of expectation, as Sartre says (B&N 5), what kind of expectation is it?

“What time are you leaving for the wedding?”
“It depends. I may leave right after work if I am not tired. But I may leave early in the morning and get there just in time.”
“What about your reservation at the hotel?”
“If you need a place to stay, just stay there on me. It’s a two room suite. I’ll call ahead and let them know you’ll be staying there. If I don’t come ‘til tomorrow we can have dinner after the reception.”
“That’s a great idea, I had not thought of where I was going to crash.”

(I’m a terrible sponge, and my friend is always good for something I cannot afford. He just came through again.)

So is my first question a kind of expectation? Yes, in that I expect some answer to it along a well-worn line.

But the second question is where I’m fishing. But just as in fishing, I am expecting the possibility of catching something. I’m not going to a lake filled with concrete and no water. The possible answers are more wide-ranging, but they are embedded as possibilities in the discourse in a way that, in regard to the reservation, this is not:

“I’ve cancelled it and will sleep in my car if I have to. I’m a little low on dough and will clean up at the Y.”
(I would not be fishing, if I had thought this. This answer would get me by surprise.)

The following would be completely out of character for my friend and render me speechless:

“Actually I have no reservation, I lied to you; I’m not going at all.”
======================================
Would a person ever ask what a question is? Obviously, in grammar, one might be asked what a question is, e.g., for a textbook definition.

But how could one ask a question, if he did not know what a question was?

If he could already ask a question, how could he go round about asking ‘What is a question?’

If he could not ask a question, then he would not go asking in the first place.

But given that one can somehow ask such a question, what would the expectation of an answer be?

The only way to go here is to say that he already knows the answer in one sense(because he can ask) , but in a fuller sense he needs an answer( because he can ask about asking).

When he gets the answer in the fuller sense, he’ll know it and be able to say “Ah, yes, I knew that all along.”

Because if there were not this way to go, there would be nowhere to go. If he can ask the question, he knows what a question is; he just needs to know something further to have the Eureka moment.

It's quite odd, though, for there is only one possibility embedded in the discourse. In sales one would call this the primrose path.

A hidden expectation gets uncovered as the answer to one's question fills him to completeness.

(See how profound philosophy is. It tells me what is right under my nose.)