Hear! Hear! Love live the Curmudgeon! Why not, dear sir? I’m always glad when there’s someone around that raises objections that can be dealt with (not mere that’s-rubbish-and-we-need-not-discuss-it types that are all to common these days.)
As a kind of “spoiler alert” not everything in Kelley is all that it appears to be. I’m reading the last 10 pages of the tome and, to my small mind, the book depicts a rather interesting and fascinating journey. For example, Henry Stapp (mentioned in the thread on Sri Aurobindo) whom Mohrhoff engaged head-on makes a substantial appearance near the end. So, for those of us who injest the whole tome (or relevant chunks of it), there will definitely have to be a “discussion [at] another time.” Like you, Geoffrey, I was haunted by a number of doubts in the first two chapters, but now, having traversed the scope of the work, I’m in a much better position to start formulating questions, which, in my experience, is a much more productive way forward. (One of the issues that I have with Sloterdijk is that I’ve never been able to get to that question phase.)
As you will recall – being the die-hard hermeneuticist that I am – we cannot approach anything without bringing our theoretical stances with us. They are there whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge them or not. This is my on-going questioning of fundamental assumptions and presuppositions. What I find most enjoyable about the discussions here is that these become clear over time because, regardless of what they may be or how firmly we may hold them, we actually talk to (not at) and listen to (not just hear) each other. That is what constitutes, for me at least, what I call human interaction, as opposed to personal interaction, whereby “human” in this context means “the person in his humanness (or as the Germans would say, his Menschsein)”, and “personal” is indicative of a kind of “individual personality” (which most often manifests as “someone I agree with”). Or, to put it no anything but Gebserian terms, it’s a whole 'nother level.