These are some notes and comments on the essay read in the following video. It is manifestly a phenomenological study that arrives at some epistemological considerations. Attempts has been made to turn the rather fleeting, droning, chanting arguments into clear English, some might benefit from that.
First he gives a phenomenological account of either empathising with an object in what it is in its essence, like being another person, versus looking at an object and observing its properties, like observing a person and their manners. Observing a person and their manners is analysis (discrete, formulaic), reducing the understanding of them to an aggregate understanding in terms of something else (like, a list of actions they perform, and a list of properties). The other is understanding the person fully and emphatically (intuitive, continuous). The first assumes a choice or vantage point, or different choices of vantage points for each observation, the other doesn’t. Like the difference between looking at a cup and being the cup.
This same distinction is very common in mathematics. It’s the difference between on the one hand working in a chosen coordinate system, where you, say, have your space embedded in another space and discover its properties that way, or use algebraic formulas expressing the space and study the space working with those (the algebraic formulas are often not unique); or on the other hand studying the space intrinsically, in a “coordinate free” manner. The first approach is common to physicists, because it’s a useful way to get numbers. The second is used by mathematicians because they want to understand intrinsic “invariants” of spaces.
“Positive science” studies objects from an analytical point of view, and thus sees organs and their workings, denotes this with signs, in contrast to empathising with the being. Metaphysics is the science that tries to fully empathise with something’s being without sign.
My friend notes a lecture by Judith Butler.
“she was talking about transgender people and androgynous people and sexually ambiguous people and how asking them about their gender pretty much serves the purpose of applying them a set of behaviors or expectations
“by gender i mean assigned at birth, you want to know this so you can judge them based on how they should behave”
This is essentially a short-coming of analysis. You impose signs, those signs have meanings that approximate a perspective on the object under study, but successive approximations of an “external” character does not eventually give the metaphysical perception.
Foucault points out how analytical approaches to psychological disorders might be used as an instrument of power. An approach to understanding, say, being with anorexia by starting with a transcendental ideal of a body, and working out what it means to strive toward that ideal, etc., will only give a perspective and a partial picture, and may in fact impose structure, remove agency, and fail to grasp or help.
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