What is the structure of the Western Worldview?

> Michael Fogleman was kind enough to ask “How are you going about answering this question, Kent?”

I have been working on the problem since the days of my first Ph.D. at the London School of Economics which was called “The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence” which was about how discontinuities, and thus emergent events happen in the Western worldview, such as paradigm changes (Kuhn), episteme changes (Foucault), and epocal changes in the meaning of Being (Heidegger).

Since then I have refined my problematic, somewhat and wrote The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void which is available atPage on Bepress.

This lead to the discovery of the Special Systems and the relation between those and the various kinds of Being that occur as a face of the world in an Emergent Event. You can see various presentations about this atArchonic.net, but also they are mentioned in my second dissertation called Emergent Design which is at Page on About.

Most recently I have begun to consolidate the results of my research in a book at bout the structure of the Western worldview. I am on chapter 10 of that now, but have gotten busy with other more pressing matters and so may not get back to it for a while.

In the current book the approach is to go back to the four civilizations that contributed to the western worldview which were the Indo-Europeans, Semites, Egyptians and Sumerians and to understand as best I can their contributions to the current Western worldview which is in terms of the existential that they have in their language, rather than Being which is only in Indo-European languages. For a long time I only studies Indo-European contributes to the worldview, but later realized that was too narrow an approach.

From the underlying existential basis of the worldview I go on to describe the actual structure of the worldview that I discovered, and then on to describe the field out of which it arose which I call the Pleroma. Right now I am stuck in an analysis of Hesiod’s Theogony as an example of the genealogy of the structure of the worldview, which I have found fascinating. This is a little studied work even though it is recognized that it is very important because it is one of the major intact sources of the actual structure of the gods and their unfolding and various dramas along the way.

I was taken off my track by writing a few books on Agile and Lean approaches to Software Development, and some research into Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that I hope to compare to Jung’s Red Book. Having other interests sometimes precludes me working on the prime directive of solving the problem of the structure of the Western worldview. You can see recent papers on Agile and Lean at Kent Palmer’s Resume. This is a life long project so I don’t expect to be finished until it is over. But the current study probably needs only a couple more chapters and then I will be done with this version of the solution to the problem, probably the most far reaching of the various solutions I have proposed and written about over the years.

Sartre is famously said to have misunderstood Heidegger in Being and Nothingness and Heidegger rejected Sartrean Existentialism in Letter on Humanism. However, given the fact that Being and Time essentially goes back to Hegel in order to escape Husserl’s overwhelming presence in Heidegger’s mind along with the phenomenological reading of Aristotle, it may be that Sartre was closer to the truth than many admit when he uses quasi-Hegelian terms to interpret Heidegger. The reappraisal starts with: Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century: Bernard-Henri Levy: 9780745630090: Amazon.com: Books.

What is interesting is that Sartre’s inversion of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being into Nothingness was very prescient in as much as it predated the frenzy in Physics over black holes but essentially builds a philosophical model of a black hole at the center of consciousness. We can think of Being-in-itself as what is within the black hole. Being-for-itself as the event horizon, and being-for-others is what is outside the blackhole. The ground of consciousness is groundless and that produces this dynamic of nothing called nothingness. This is like the Process Being (ready-to-hand) of Heidegger. But for Heidegger Pure Being (present-at-hand) and Process Being form a monolith because the different modes of Being are eqi-primordial. M. Henry criticizes this ontological monism of early Heidegger.

Sartre has a radical dualism between what is within the blackhole underlying consciousness (bieng-in-itself) and what is out-side the blackhole which is (being-for-others) and the dynamic of nothingness by which experience is a falling into this black hole creating the being-for-itself of consciousness in the process. As things become nothing they are a dynamic nothingness which is the negative self-ungrounding of consciousness, which Sartre takes as the meaning of existentialism, i.e. that existence comes before essence. For Heidegger on the other hand the ecstasy of exi-stance (standing outside of oneself) is precisely what defines dasein. Exi-stance is the projection of the a priori prior to the split between subject and object for Heidegger. Dasein is at first lost in the mists of the Mitsein and has to separate itself from that in order to Be what it is, i.e. the source of the meaning of being for itself. We could naively equate being-in-itself with Sense Certainty in Hegel, and Being-for-itself with Self-consciousness, and Being-for-others with Spirit. But that skips over the creative use of the Hegelian terms that Sartre appears to employ. Schopenhauer, contra Hegel, recognized that the Wille is the noumena in man himself. And this profoundly changes the simple equation by introducing the unknown into the equation. Sartre sees being-in-itself as materiality. But it can also be seen as the unconscious which is a deep well underneath consciousness. Once we see that we have being-in-itself both inside us and outside us, then we are ready to think of our relation to the mitsein differently. The mitsein supplies what we need to be human as Heidegger recognizes, and Sartre emphasizes and it is also the source of inauthenticity and false consciousness. We come to treat being-for-others as if it were being-in-itself which is a fundamental mistake of objectifying others producing alienation.

Existentialism is about radical freedom in each instance and how we create the meaning in our lives and we don’t have to take that meaning from anyone else. In a sense it is a radicalization of Nietzsche’s idea of free-spirit. Everyone is already a free spirit but just does not know it yet. We reify by being too immersed in Being-for-others and by reifying others into material objects. These are like the two Parmedian failse ways. The only true way is being-for-itself which is self-consciousness but that is ungrounded, but also unverifiable, because consciousness is not just founded over an abyss of groundlessness but is in fact the implosion of that groundlessness as nothingness, the infalling into the black hole at the center of consciousness which renders things to our self-consciousness.

It is really an amazing and tantalizing picture as things that are nothing fall into the groundlessness of consciousness and vanish within it into the being-in-itself which is our materiality. They are subject to our self-consciousness for only a moment as they realize their nothingness which is self-negating dynamic. Positive meaning is realized in the moment of the dynamic nothingness of everything being realized on a moment by moment basis. This dynamic negation is what frees us from the chains of convention, and prior interpretations of things. In a way we could see this as a precursor to the deconstruction of Derrida. It is this nothingness as a dynamic that destroys meaning which is for Sartre the thing that allows us to create our own meanings giving us radical freedom to at any moment change who we are. This is the antipode of the Process Being of Heidegger, as recognized by Merleau-Ponty who defines Hyper Being as the Hyper Dialectic between Being (ala Heidegger) and Nothingness (ala Sartre). Hyper Being is Differance seen as an expansion of Being-in-the-world. Being-in-itself is closure to the world. Being-for-itself is a reflexive move that makes us aware of what is closed  in the context of the intersubjective immersion, i.e. Being for others. We stand naked before the gaze of others. But they cannot see our Being-in-itself. Our own materiality hides the nothing within us from the materiality of others outside us which are also nothing. Only in the moment of self-consciousness are we released from that materiality momentarily by the realization of the groundlessness of everything which makes nothing though a dynamic nothingness of everything. But for that very reason we can positively create meaning ourselves, and thus the negative moments and their dynamic relation are just there to define he positive moment of creativity which is positive but remains groundless because it is merely a spark over an abyss.

This is from memory, in a far away time when I studied Sartre fairly deeply. This may be just a fantasy, now. I often thought that Sartre needs to be reconsidered based on the Hegelianism of Heidegger. Sartre’s misreading of Heidegger may be closer to the mark that we have imagined so far. But by far the better book by Sartre is Critique of Dialectical Reason and his discussion of the fused group as the substrate beyond all reified institutions. Merleau-Ponty was truer to Heidegger in his rendering present-at-hand as pointing and ready-to-hand as grasping in Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty goes on to discover the other two kinds of Being: i.e. Hyper and Wild. Sartre’s attempt to make Marxism relevant by crossing it with this strange reading of Heidegger, as caused him to fall from favor. But he could be read as a proto-deconstructionist.

We could read the in-itself as Ultra Being. If we did that we would take Heidegger seriously when he says that Being is no-thing, and so what is inside or outside is no-thing, but the falling into the black hole of the Abyss of groundlessness would be the dynamic of Process Being inverted as its antimony. This would make Being for others into Pure Being. The differance would be between the two false paths of Being-in-itself of materiality, which is unconscious as well. and Being-for-others. So Hyper Being would be the difference between Being-for-itself and Being-for-others. We are either immersed in the Mitsein or we are reified and alientated as objects by others. This is like the difference between the It and Thou of Buber. Wild Being would then be what separates the two kinds of false path from the real path of self-consciousness (being-for-itself) which is reflexive. It lifts us out of the Mitsein and at the same time allows us to de-objectify ourselves which is the projection of others on us. So the whole basis of Sartre’s philosophy is to give us freedom to change things radically. He attempts to reconcile materiality and the unconscious and show us that self-consciousness is the path of liberation.

As I remember there is also the synthesis of being-in-and-for-itself. This brings up the question why there is not being-in-and-for-others as a counter synthesis? And of course it brings up why there is no being-with as in Heidegger’s mitsein. See Being-In, Being-For, Being-With: Clark E. Moustakas: 9781568215372: Amazon.com: Books. As I remember there is no being-in-the-other for Sartre. And Being-with does not play a role which is the important intermediary position that Heidegger recognizes. Thus there is an asymmetry in relations in Sartre who concentrates on two sorts of alienating relations rather than just inauthenticity that Heidegger discusses. There are then without the asymmetry six relations when you pair up the in, for, and with to the division between self and others. Better to explore the whole field. We are literally are “in” others when we are in the womb. Being with is an intermediate category between materiality and the unconscious of the In-itself and pure For-itself of self-consciousness and reflexivity. Heidegger is always trying to get to the point prior to the subject-object dichotomy as a dualism arises. Sartre does not get this at all. For Sartre the individual as existential being is always self-conscious. But can fall into materiality/unconscious of the in-itself, or into being-for-others where we are alienated by their gaze. What he misses appears to be the fact that there is a being-in-others literally, and then a being-in-the-family which is close knit and organic immersion when we are children. But then there is also a looser immersion of being-with. What is normally missed is the idea of Being-with-ourselves as the opposite of Being-with-others, that Moustakas is sensitive to, when we are with ourselves in solitude rather than alone.

One good way to get a picture of the underlying assumptions of existentialism is to look at Existence And Love;: A New Approach in Existential Phenomenology: William Alan Sadler: Amazon.com: Books. Sadler notes that existentialism concentrates on the individual and visual perception is taken as the primary metaphor. On the other hand if we take sound as the primary analogy then we can see that there are states in which individual isolation is not the major theme. Of course, Sadler uses romantic love as his example which is unfortunate. See Coming to Our Senses: Morris Berman: 9780553348637: Amazon.com: Books for a critique of Romantic Love. AlsoLove and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love: Dorothy Tennov: 9780812862867: Amazon.com: Books. Note also Eros the Bittersweet: Anne Carson: 9781564781888: Amazon.com: Books.

So we can see that Sartre’s existentialism has many distortions built in and although it was exciting at the time, it has lost favor as time has gone by due to the extreme position that it took toward meaning production by individuals who realize in their self-consciousness that they are utterly free to create themselves as they see fit so as to break from society and also to de-reify themselves so that they are not objects. The pure for-itself of self-consciousness as complete freedom in existence beyond the projections of Being as essence is seen as a negative dynamic of the in-falling of experience into the black hole of the in-itself from the for-others. It is really quite an amazing vision, especially when you pair it up with the fascination with Black Holes in physics which was to come later as a philosophical precursor. Another way of looking at it is via The Stone Monkey: An Alternative, Chinese-Scientific, Reality: Bruce Holbrook: 9780688006655: Amazon.com: Books. All illness in the Chinese medical system occurs when we depart from the natural rolling over of opposites in the combinations of Yin and Yang, through the generation of Yang Splendor or Closed Yin. We can see the self projection of the a priori of Dasein as yang splendor, and the falling into nothingness within consciousness as a version of closed yin. As Merleau-Ponty recognizes these are antimonic duals. It is out of these two antimonies that he generates Hyper Being as the possibility of the expansion of being-in-the-world. Which then makes possible the idea that being-in-the-world could also contract giving us Wild Being.

As you can see there is confusion about the distinction between these terms.

First of all this series is must larger than suggested by just these three terms.

Lets try this larger series:

—->suchness
given
—->facticity
data
—->theory
information
—->paradigm (Kuhn)
knowledge
—->episteme (Foucault)
wisdom
—->ontos (Heidegger)
insight
—->existence
realization
—->absolute

The indented interleaved elements are the scopes of emergence which are social and cultural.

The bold items are our ways of processing or relating to the various thresholds of emergence.

Givens are what comes directly from experience.

This is turned into Data by representation that collects some data from some source that is given.

Information must relate at least two variables to each other, one of which is usually what Klir calls a background or reference datum like space, time or population. Information must contain surprise, i.e. some significant  and relevant change in the data to be meaningful.

Knowledge is the fulcrum of this series and it is the one thing in experience that is fairly stable. Knowledge is normally the recognition of some pattern in the information changes that has meta-stablity and which is transferable to others via language.

Wisdom is knowing what is right, or good and what is the right or good time to do what is right or good depending on the level of nonduality that we are speaking of in a given situation. Wisdom has to do with Virtues and knowing how to avoid vices and what virtues to exemplify in a given situation. Wisdom is usually gained by applying knowledge to experience and seeing what worked and what did not work in give circumstances.

Insight is called Prajna in Buddhism. It is insight that is the source of Wisdom. Insight is a deeper understanding that reveals the inner coherence of experiences and this is what generates the criterion by which one knows what is the right time and what is the right thing to do or not do at that time, i.e. how to act with wisdom. For instance, Insight is understanding non-action Wu Wei [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei].

Realization is when we actualize our insights in the world and embody them. This of course is very rare. However, a good example of this is when we are able to follow the golden thread of our existence and to make nondual non-nihilistic distinctions, or when we go off track find our way back to a way to make these distinctions again within our lives.

However, we notice that these individual ways of dealing with data, information, knowledge, wisdom, insight are the interstices between the socio-cultural scopes of emergence. So for instance it is theory that turns data into information. It is on the other hand a paradigm (Kuhn) that turns information into knowledge.

Recently at the INCOSE-LA mini-conference I saw a talk by Richard Burton which one of his colleagues of San Louis Obisbo Polytechnic on Mental Models, and it was proposed that there was an iceburg in which mental models produced structures that then produced behavioral patterns that finally gave us visible events above the surface of the iceburg. I am not sure where this model comes from. But paradigms are mental models that have assumptions that we unconsciously and unthinkingly project on experience unquestioningly. Paradigms are these assumed root metaphors that we assume without thinking about it such as Lakoff talks about. [George Lakoff]. All knowledge is based on assumptions that have deep metaphorical roots upon which we depend for its expression.

It is our epistemic categories that allow us to transform knowledge into wisdom. These categories change discontinuously in the history of our tradition. In this case we are talking about received wisdom, not necessarily the wisdom of the individual in the moment. Received wisdom is even deeper than the mental models because they are social models that are culturally instilled which determine the fundmental categories that organize knowledge. An example of this is in Durkheim where he says that the Kantian Categories are socially constructed. It is fairly obvious that the social comes before anything the individual might produce on their own, as we are immersed completely in the social even before we know who we are as individuals, and as wolf children show we cannot become fully human without a given social milieu that precedes us and from which everything we are as individuals proceed from.

We might argue in the Western Tradition (Indo-European) that it is the unique idea of Ontos (Being) that transforms received wisdom into a deeper insight. For the Greeks this deeper insight was called phusis which Kelly says was the whooshing up, lingering and fading away of experiences that later were attributed to nature (NTR gods of the Egyptians). This insight was that there was a substratum to experience that was univocal as Aristotle says and which Deleuze still echos. Insight is seeing into the depths of experience and finding patterns there, and for the Indo-Europeans that pattern was the structure of Being (which by the way was fragmented and not unified or totalized despite what you may have heard). Being has meta-levels as has been noted in other answers to questions. The interpretations of Being changes throughout the tradition as we know from All Things Shining of Kelly and Dreyfus. Being is the root of all the metaphors, the underlying substance that allows us to say Odysseus IS a lion as Homer does.

But the meta-levels of Being (Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild, Ultra) undergo a phase transition at the fifth level into Existence (Wajud or ‘what is found’ in Arabic). [As an aside this appears in Thus Spake Zarathustra as the zany ode to the dancing grils in the desert an orientalist ode to the mystique of existence.]  It is existence that allows us to transition from insight to realization. Insight is the door to existence (via prajna). Realization is the finding of the other side of existence, i.e. the deeper nonduals. [gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate; Heart Sutra]

The absolute is the limit of realization, sometimes called for instance in Meister Eckhart the Godhead, or in Hinduism Nirguna Brahman.  But of course this is equivalent to the suchness as such. So there must be another moment on the scale between absolute and suchness which has no name in this schema. As the Tao Te Ching says the tao which is named is not the Tao. Wang Bi calls this the Great Dark. There are many absolutes that are named but the ultimate absolute is never named. However in revelation it may speak and say I am I as to Moses in Tuba or refer to itself in the royal we and say He as in Quran. Here we find the limit and the source of revelation. The Greeks had a name for the way of knowing what was absolute but at the same time present in all phenomena which was called nous. Nous is the comprehension of the nondual supra-rational limit of the Divided Line of Plato. The other limit is the Paradoxical. The Divided Line encompasses Ratio and Doxa and spans all of experience.

The whole idea that there should be a reward in exchange for changing ways is the problem. The question is ambiguous as to whether it is Humans in General or specific humans. But we will assume Humans in general. I recommend the book Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robins which brings up the whole question of Death  and Immortality and oddly connects it to Perfume in a wild romp through human history and the decline of human beings as they become more “civilized”, etc. It posits that what is necessary is a change in the attitude toward death. That might not be such a bad idea as a place to start.

Nicholas Rescher

We must realize that Gandalf’s real name is Mithrandir, which means that Tolkien saw him as being related to Mithra of Mithra and Varuna fame that appear in the Vedas as the Asuras, and which causes us to think who the other asuras are in the story. Asuras are basically Titans who are also equal to the gods of the Mesopotamians like Enki and Enlil etc. What is happening in the Lord of the rings is a Titanic struggle. In Mithrism a greek mystery religion indistinguishable from Christianity by Constantine, and which gives much of the form to Christianity as it is supplanted later and stamped out. Mithra was seen as the leader of the forces of light against the forces of darkness, and Lord of the Rings tells the story, much like that of the Hobbit of a small group that is weak that stands against great evil powers and wins in the end after great hardship. Mithra was for Tolkien an Indo-European model for Christ complete with death and resurrection.

I have written about this numerous other places on Quora. What makes Achilles character compelling is that he is an archetypal example of the confrontation of nihilism within the Western worldview. He realizes that Trojans and Achaeans are basically the same, they both steal women, and that the whole war which the Achaeans are involved with against the Trojans is meaningless. Thus he refuses to fight, but that leads to Patroclus being killed in his armor, which sends him into a Berserker rage which is the nihilistic opposite of doing too little, enraged he becomes inhuman doing too much, and is only brought back to his humanity in the encounter with Hector’s father, when he realizes that he like Hector will never see his own father again. The Iliad puts its focus on the human being caught up in a nihilistic situation which when it is realized that it is nihilistic sucks meaning out of their world, and this is the situation we all find ourselves in within this worldview, and so the Epics are a manual on how to live in a worldview that at its core generates nihilism continually and causes both alienation and anomie in its inhabitants.

I recommend you read W. Van Dusen’s dissertation on A dimension Theory of the Nature of Mind.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CD0QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ruor.uottawa.ca%2Fen%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10393%2F20911%2FDC53485.PDF%3Fsequence%3D1&ei=Ib0VUcW4M4qaiAKe2YCoDQ&usg=AFQjCNECUERV0xAnGCMkeTD1T2PjoG6F-w&sig2=mYaUD-sVr_nfbPPz-Jz8SQ&bvm=bv.42080656,d.cGE

Summarized in http://www.ifpe.org/Conference/2007_Presentations/Silvestro_Presentation.pdf

See also http://instituteoftheology.org/PDF/vandeusen.pdf

First of all concepts do not exist in isolation.

Second words and concepts are different, and you can have the same concept with different names, even in different languages.

Concepts are the semantic referent of symbols and signs.

M. Schlick distinguishes between concepts and precepts and sees them as distinct.

Husserl distinguishes between noesis and noema and sees them as a spectrum with various mixtures of intentional morphe (meaning form) and hyle (content). Pure Noesis has mostly meaning with a little sensory content, and Pure Noema is mostly sensory content with some meaning.

A noematic nucleus is the outward combination of phenomenological characteristics of something whether concept or percept. Even almost purely noetic objects have a noematic nucleus associated with them.

But the inward coherence and constraint envelope of the noematic nucleus of a concept or percept is called an essence. Husserl is famous for saying that abstraction and essence perception are different. Essence perception is synthetic and Abstraction is analytic. These turn into Ready to hand and Present at Hand in Heidegger’s Being and Time, and ultimately they are associated with different kinds of Being in the Continental Tradition of Philosophy with others kinds or meta-levels of Being such as Hyper Being (DifferAnce) and Wild Being etc.

Concepts are different at different meta-levels of Being and in Existence.

Pure Being they are frozen IDEAS of Plato who is following Parmenides in saying that these ultimate ideas are categories and are static. Schlick wants to find a set of concepts unmixed with percepts that form an axiomatic platform from which reasoning can take place.

Process Being they are in Heraclitian flux and are more like tattvas and dharmas in Shavite or Buddhist philosophy.

Hyper Being they are all about distinctions between the concepts not concepts themselves, and the fact that the semantic fabric is not stable, and the interface with language is complex, and thinking is hard when it comes to making stable distinctions which keep slip sliding away.

Wild Being concepts are reduced even further from distinctions to tendencies, propensities, dispositions, what Deleuze and Guattari call Lines of Flight. See their What is Philosophy?

Ultra Being concepts are singularities that are utterly non-representable, like mantras in Tantra

Existence concepts are the natural meaning of things that spontaneously arise which are not fabricated from the natural world and in consciousness. This is the actual realm of meaning, while all the other levels are dealing with higher orders of signification and relevance.

So Nietzsche says that we do not think our thoughts they think us. This fundamental revolution in thinking was taken up by Heidegger with his concept of Dasein (Being There, being-in-the-world). The whole notion that concepts are our property and they can be controlled and used as instruments is flawed from the point of view of existential philosophy. Heidegger goes on to say that given a thinker and his thoughts we only can say we understand them if we can go beyond his thoughts in a way that is true to his thoughts ourselves, thinking the unthought in his thoughts. And one of the rules of dealing with concepts is that you do not define them, but rather you allow them to express themselves in different contexts as much of the significance of concepts comes from the context in which it appears. And concepts may be in a passage without there being any name of that concept in the passage because concepts can be expressed implicitly rather than merely cited explicitly, and this is why hermeneutics is so hard and so important.

So there is a lot to say about this, but basically we do philosophize a single concept, but aggregates of them that have significance mostly through their relations with each other. Here we enter the place where Peirce’s Philosophical Principles come into play which he calls Firsts (isolata), Seconds (relata), Thirds (continua), which we can extend with B. Fullers further principles of Synergy, Integrity etc. Concepts are not just isolated units made up of other sub-conceptual elements as even Deleuze and Guattari say, but they can also be isolata, or relations, or continuities (ideas) or synergies, or integrities etc following a geometrical like unfolding of sign systems and marks such as we get in Euclidian Geometry which can be called a semiology because the word for point is sign.

This brings us to the fact that concepts may be parts of higher dimensional thought structures, and this means that the 7+-2 limit of working memory is for  independent concepts not a linear stack. So we are always thinking multi-dimensionally and having to bring that down to 2 and 3 dimensional representations in which we lose fidelity. This is part of what happens when we linearize thought in language.

So there are no good ways to learn to philosophize a concept because we only reify them when we think of them as isolates and try to define them. Concepts primordially only exist in context, and usually in the context of a thinkers thought which we get a synchronic view of in a book say. So the advice is to understand the thought of the philosopher as a whole and go beyond it to fully understand it yourself, and then come back to see the continua (ideas), relata, (relations between ideas) and isolata (concepts, or semantic nuclei with a meaningful essence). This is hard because philosophy is sophisticated, but can be very rewarding to work to understand as fully as possible a whole philosophy book that fascinates you, or the work of a philosopher, and then eventually be build up one at a time to an attempt to understand schools of philosophy, and even the philosophical tradition itself.

The best way to do this conceptual analysis is to diagram the relations between the concepts as you read the book, then write working papers that capture your understanding of what you are reading in your own words, and then iterate the digrams and working papers until you think you can extend the thoughts of the philosopher you are studying to subjects he did not consider, when you can do that with some assurance of not distorting the philosopher’s ideas then you are ready to start thinking yourself about the same ideas as you evolve the diagrams and working papers of thoughts toward what you think on your own about the subject. Then pick another philosopher that fascinates you and do it again, putting yourself as completely as possible in their thought system, until you can surpass it naturally, and then relate it to the previous thought system you studied doing compare and contrast, and then develop your own ideas on the subject extending the second, and then the first together. And so on until you have mastered the Western tradition, which is of course impossible, so you must also read summaries, secondary works, history of philosophy, etc to fill in the gaps and get the insights of others into the works of the philosophers who interest you.

All the time you are doing this, you must be developing your own independent view, not just adopting the views of those you are reading, joining their school of philosophy, but attempting to relate what they are saying to your own experience everyday and trying to see the world differently through the conceptual lens they are giving you. A fun philosopher to do this today with is Zizek because he comments on everything. So he is an excellent example of taking philosophical ideas and applying them to everyday phenomena. Another example that is good is Borges who takes idealistic philosophies to and extreme and writes absurd short stories about them.

One thing you should practice is seeing through the phenomena to the conceptual web that drives the phenomena behind the scenes. This conceptual web is not of our making completely but a lot of it is projected as Kant says a Priori as a synthesis, and we don’t know how we do that unconscious projection but much of what we see in the world is just telling us about what is going on in our own selves. So distinguishing your projections from what is out there that is not a projection is a good exercise. Questioning all distinctions that you or others make to see whether they cut through the joints of phenomena rather than through the bones as Plato says is always important. Also apprehending not just abstractions but also essences of things is important because many times abstractions cut through essences abnormally destroying their natural order.

The basic idea is that you have to start with the thought of the philosopher as a whole and work toward understanding the concepts without fully defining them but allowing the context in which they show up to inform their meaning. Same words may mean completely different things in different philosophies. Concepts when rearranged in a different philosophy may mean something completely different. Concepts are even more fluid than language, and if you look at language as John_McWhorter [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joh…] does you can see that there is nothing stable in language, and so there is even less stable at the conceptual level that is only tangentially related to language in the semantical realm which is nebulous, amorphous, ambiguous, vague etc compared with other things like mathematical symbols which are conceptually fairly discrete. From Math as we go through the sciences and into the social sciences things only get more and more confusing and the ultimate refuge of this confusion is Philosophy which has this very odd idea called Being that is only in Indo-European languages which messes with our mind due to its absurdity. It is hard to get out of that down to something existentially core and to think at levels beyond the meta-levels of Being, because here we are entering realms of non-representability not just loss of higher dimensional synthetic content. However, this is what Buddhist Philosophy is all about, so they have worked fairly well producing a tradition of existential thought that rejects Being. But you have to be aware that things are pretty strange within the Western tradition due to the over influence of the Accursed Share (Bataille) of Being.

only know of the work of José Ortega y Gasset through secondary sources. José Ortega y Gasset worked in the phenomenological tradition and tried to humanize it basing it on Life, more or less like Nietzsche had tried to do when he made Life the fundamental value by which to value all values.