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The Being of a Bracket


In yesterday's post I quoted Jorge Ortega y Gasset summarizing a lecture he gave that itself displayed his equivocal attitude toward the phenomenological movement of the early 20th century, led by Husserl. 


Husserl believed in the great bracketing -- precisely of the question of Being.  He thought the whole Cartesian question, about an evil demon creating a matrix for a Hollywood movie just to confuse me about which century I'm in -- Husserl thought all that could be just set aside.  We give ourselves plenty to think about if we simply focus on the world that does appear to us, and the selves that appear to our own introspection. 


Ortega y Gasset admired Husserl's synthetic/intuitive thinking, as opposed to the sort of "conceptual-abstract thinking" that may be left homeless by such a bracketing, But he said that in order to get this right  "it is necessary to start out from a phenomenon which may be a system by and in itself....human life."


As a semantic note: the word Husserl used for bracketing, Einklammerung, can also mean "putting in parentheses." It sounds mathematical to me.  And if we do think of brackets/parentheses in mathematical operations, we have to remember that [1 + 1/n] x [1 + 1/n] is very different from 

1 + [1/n x 1] + 1/n.  where you put the brackets matters, and the mattering of it becomes obvious as the brackets come off. 


To take the most simple case: If n=1, then the difference between these two operations is the difference between 2 x 2=4 on the one hand and 1 + 1 + 1 =3 on the other. 


As engineers say, if you are indifferent to such things the bridge falls down. 


At any rate, stripped of his love/hate relationship with Husserl, what Ortega y Gasset was saying was, I think, simply that the harmony of the parts with the whole validates itself, accordingly it doesn't need validation from anything outside of that whole and its harmony.


Human life is the whole, yet any one of our bracketed experiences is simply a part of that whole, and we struggle for the harmony.  We never need to dissolve these brackets, in thsat we will never need nor should we try to ask, "WHY are we striving for harmony?"! 

 
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