Another fundamental source here is Kant -
who, although he did not finally succeed,
still forthrightly fought to 'save the appearance'
of the 'experience of unconditionality',
that is, our *consciousness* of our *freedom*,
from what were, in his time and ours,
the ascendant natural sciences and their
*mindset* ( ... ie reducing all cause/explanation
to the 'efficient' or 'material' version only.)
Kant somehow, through a difficult 'criticality',
reserved and justified the 'supersensible',
particularly our subjective sense that we
somehow transcend the simple chain
of scientific determinism. Once again,
I do not believe his version is final,
but apropos of what is in question here,
viz. the 'inability to articulate the human',
what strikes me is that a wrestling with his
epoch-making ideas & their presentation -
which is not easy, certainly, but all the same
which is *required* as a 'table stakes' for then
making some claims thereafter, two centuries
in their wake, about: "human obsessions
[w/ the] supernatural" (a quote from the article) -
... a wrestling with his ideas, I say, ought to be
a fundamental criterion vis-à-vis writing as a
"philosopher, psychologist, ethicist" etc. (quote.)
And so it is a pedagogical question; I believe
we come into this world with a (correct) intuition
that we are *born free* - and the elaboration &
retrieval of this intuition (actually, this *truth*),
against the contrary models (did i say models?
i meant idols; idols of the *study*, idols of the
laboratory ... scientist-as-pygmalion, falling in love
w/ his own edifice of understanding, forgetting
its artificiality, no longer able to see the chisel-marks...)
- the models, that is, that (paradoxically) make the
wonderful discoveries of 'natural philosophy'
into workaday, disenchanted collisions of
"purely natural and material entities" (quote.)
It is a pedagogical question to *provide the scaffolding*,
which is abundantly and *centrally* present
in the intellectual tradition - I mean, the earthquake
of Kant's critical investigations led to so many
rejoinders, etc. and so these sorts of debates
ARE BY NO MEANS without precedent ...
(this is what strikes me MOST here - does one think
one is 'philosophizing in a vacuum'?? does one think
that proceeding in 'sovereign disregard' of what has
been said previously on the same topic is admissible??)
... the intellectual scaffolding to stand on in order to
say (to *yawp*, perhaps):
I am here, I am me, I am free.
(
@theoeides4 , did i get this right?)