Dear Diary Moment 6/28/21:
It’s been a tough going on this run through my book on Phenomenology and Marxism. It’s dense and technical and full of references I’m not familiar with. Still, I tend to judge a book based on what it offers me in terms of what I can use for my own process. And sometimes you have to settle for getting to know the individual trees (the individual conceptual models (until it collects into a general understanding of the forest: the primary thesis behind the text.
In that sense (via my study points at the “library”), this particular run has paid off: mainly in some clarifications of terms I’ve been dealing with for some time now. One was, as the title of the book would suggest, phenomenology. As one article defined it: it is a reductive process that traces all possible experience back to consciousness as a product of intentionality. As Phenomenology argues: consciousness is always consciousness of something. Therefore, in order for something to be conscious, it has to be conscious of being conscious. And this seems like a proper thing to trace back to.
The other point (the one that inspired this post (has to do with teleology. And in this case, I have to give Google more credit to the extent that an article on teleology and corporality in the book forced me to look it up. I had always thought of the term in the philosophy 101 sense of a metaphysical goal that all things were heading towards: the Hegelian sense. And that was included in the definition in terms of the theological. But what really helped me was the more secular definition (especially in terms of the book): that which focuses less on causality (the push (and more on the purpose of a given phenomenon: the pull.