What’s the biggest difference Heidegger and Wittgenstein?
Heidegger and Wittgenstein, born one year apart, apparently never mentioned each other’s work , and wrote within very different philosophical traditions. But many have noted the overlap in themes betwee them, in particular the intersubjective constitution of language. But I think a closer look at their treatments of language reveals what I consider to be the central
difference in their approaches( I’m drawing primarily from Being and Time). Whereas Wittgenstein begins from intersubjectivity in his grounding of meaning, Heidegger appears to treat the language game as an inauthentic and derivative mode of being( what he calls the idle talk of das man) . He instead grounds the basis of meaning( significance) in temporality, which he thinks of in terms of the way that meanings are uniquely my own in relation to my ownmost possibilities of being. My participation in normative language practices thus amounts to an impoverished form of understanding.
What do you think? Do you agree, and if so, is this a weakness on Heidegger’s part or Wittgenstein’s ?
(Please restrict comments to their philosophies and avoid political and personal aspects of their lives)
difference in their approaches( I’m drawing primarily from Being and Time). Whereas Wittgenstein begins from intersubjectivity in his grounding of meaning, Heidegger appears to treat the language game as an inauthentic and derivative mode of being( what he calls the idle talk of das man) . He instead grounds the basis of meaning( significance) in temporality, which he thinks of in terms of the way that meanings are uniquely my own in relation to my ownmost possibilities of being. My participation in normative language practices thus amounts to an impoverished form of understanding.
What do you think? Do you agree, and if so, is this a weakness on Heidegger’s part or Wittgenstein’s ?
(Please restrict comments to their philosophies and avoid political and personal aspects of their lives)
Comments (75)
Heidegger talked about engaging with life. Wittgenstein engaged with life.
It might be better not to use thei term so freely. See the topic of the same name. It's not a word used by Wittgenstein, nor by his translators - and for good reason.
Quoting Banno
I’m not sure you’re ‘engaging’ with the OP. I should have added: no gratuitous comments on Heidegger’s politics as a substitute for having read the work.
That’s a good start. Give me a better word to describe his understanding of the public.
Try speaking of the public nature of life.
I agree that a philosopher’s ideas and personal choices inother aspects of their lives are intimately connected. For that reason you won’t have the slightest idea how to interpret the way they lived their lives without some acquaintance with their philosophies. Which brings us back to the OP
And you won’t have some acquaintance with their philosophies without the slightest idea of how to interpret the way they lived their lives.
Your point?
In so far as Heidegger "thinks of (meaning) in terms of the way that meanings are uniquely my own" he fails to recognise that meaning is embedded in life.
And that is exemplified in their respective biographies. I answered your question; but perhaps not in the way you wanted.
My point was, and don’t take this personally, and correct me if I’m wrong , but I get the distinct sense that you’ve never read Being and Time.
Indeed, I'm only familiar with Being and Time from excerpts and secondary sources. It's never looked credible enough to warrant the effort. I'd count it as one of the lesser works of existential thought, far behind Sartre or Kierkegaard.
So, will you critique my criticism of Heidegger, or are you just going to reflect on my biography?
Sartre’s master work, Being and Nothingness, would not even exist without Heidegger’s writing. It’s a second rate misinterpretation. of Being and Time.
Here’s Derrida’s view of Sartre:
Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger.
I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader.
He and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted.
What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure?
Go back on topic.
:up: Poseur & bricoleur, respectively.
Quoting Joshs
For Witty, understanding of the forms-of-life within which we undertake living is gained from, or enriched by, shared practices, which thereby undermines (lazy, passive) conformity. For Heidi, however, shared practices (somehow) "impoverish understanding" of "the meaning of ... temporality", suggesting a preference, or priority, for withdrawal from shared practices – the commons, or cosmopolity – into (the) "ownmost". IIRC, this 'solipsistic stance' is Heidi's ethical (Levinas, Adorno) failing compared to Witty's more 'cultural-pragmatic stance'.
Well, as they say: Covfefe is as Covfefe does ... :mask:
Yes, this is a common criticism of Heidegger. For instance, Shaun Gallagher writes:
“ In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”
Gadamer seems to concur:
“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed even as he was developing the idea, his wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted. I must say that conscience — having a conscience — no, that wasn't terribly convincing.
"Care" is always a concernfulness about one's own being, and Mit- sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him.”
But matters are not so simple. Dan Zahavi makes the opposite critique.Zahavi interprets Heidegger’s account of the primordiality of being-with as consonant with the approach of Hans Bernhard Schmid.
“In Schmid’s recent work, we can find a position that is partly inspired by Heidegger...”
“...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication (Schmid 2005, 138, 145, )
I think Gadamer , you and Zahavi are both right and both wrong. You are right that Heidegger makes Witt’s notion of primary intersubjectivty a derivative modification of the primary self-understanding of Dasein. You are wrong to interpret Dasein’s self-understanding as prior to sociality. Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as
a referential differential inside-outside.There is no solipsistic inside for Heidegger, because self -relation is already relation with an outside. We find similar arguments in Derrida:
“Derrida says all speech is writing , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social.
“...it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other.”
“When he writes himself to himself, he writes himself to the other who is infinitely far away and who is supposed to send his signature back to him. He has no relation to himself that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other...”
In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public’: , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation’ : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with
Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public.
For Derrida, like Heidegger it is not the other person, but time itself that separates me from myself, and when I do engage in language with others I never simply introject normative meanings but interpret them in relation to my own background.
A big part of the increased interest in him is coming from theorists in cognition and emotion, who find his analysis of affect indispensable. Heidegger was among the first to recognize the inseparable interpenetration of emotion, mood, feeling, and intention.
...I think you made that up. Subjectivity is critiqued in PI; so suggesting the primacy of intersubjectivity strikes me as problematic.
So I wonder if there is anything in Heidi that talks of following rules. For Witti, this is a public activity.
Exactly. No subjectivity for Witt, and what’s the only alternative he offers? The structure of publicness. joint engagement , rule following , language games. There’s no room for each participant to form slightly different interpretations of the same rules for everyone, because the notion of participant and individual interpretation of a language game are problematic ,
as they should be. But what Heidegger is on about is not the social as a subjective , a solipsistic self ,an ‘I’. That’s his whole point. The ‘self’ is always already an in-between that transcends ‘ itself’ every minute of time. That’s what a moment of time is, my past that is defined by my present that comes from my future. Past, present , future are not separate structures but one indissociable whole in each ‘now’. Each ‘now’ that ‘I’ experience is both my past as a totality and a remaking of that past as utterly néw. The entire structure of the social, the Other, the alien and the world originates in each ‘now’ prior to any language game. In a sense that is the fundamental language game , the way my ‘now’ remakes my past. Other persons, voices, gestures are not the basis of this exposure to otherness, and I don’t simply absorb and become shaped by what I engage with in language with others, precisely because I am already other to myself and my relation with other persons is a secondary otherness.
As Derrida asks: How do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without
this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I’ without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I’, that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I’ and
nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I’.
Noticed this little edit; No.
Couldnt you humor me and say it’s ‘differently guided’?
Would probably be helpful if you elaborated on why it’s misguided, although I know the rhetoric well: Witt and olp teach us that such formulations of language as ‘personal interpretation’ are problematic.
If you think the above is obscure you’ll love this:
“let's not misunderstand what I mean by making this distinction between a WITHIN-person and a BETWEEN-person dynamic. The within-person dynamic is already a between in that it is a thoroughgoing exposure to an outside, an alterity, an otherness. For Heidegger, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located publically as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I' or interpersonal ‘we', there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective and objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies, between-person conditionings or public language games.”
Imagine if all your experiences amounted to variations on a thematics which was itself constantly changing its sense, but slowly. Thus you could say that all your experience of meaning was ‘public’ in that who you are and what you think and what your world means to you is in subtle transformation every minute, as it is constantly exposed to new context. But in relation to every other that you engage with, your experience is in a real sense ‘private’ , or at least there is an unbridgeable gap between you and the another person’s experience , even in a ‘langauge game’.
Here’s a paper I wrote about this:
https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social
If you like - for Witti the within-person dynamic is either going to be pubic, and hence a part of the between-person dynamic; or private, and hence outside of the discussion.
What do you make of that?
I agree that this would be his argument. My response is that every moment my experience is public in the sense that it is exposed to an outside that changes its sense and meaning in a subtle but complete way which makes me other than what I am every new moment in time. but this ‘public for me’ is unique to my past history . It is not the same ‘public’ for you or anyone else . There can be no shared public , no joint action or ‘we’ , only , ‘my’ version of we and your version of we in each interchange.
There are two language games proceeding , from my ‘we’ and from your ‘we’. It is not that what I mean to say is not altered and influenced by your response. nBut that change in me, or I should say change OF me is a variation of my thematics and the change of you is a variation of your thematics. There is never a shared thematics, but ther can be enough similarity between your understanding and mine to make it appear as though the understanding is shared.
I know it’s hard to swallow but I want to to the paradox of my referring to my moment to moment experience as at the same time resistant to shared normativity of language games and not a subjectivity or enclosure. I am not resistant to the ‘we’ because i am an interiority , but because I am already a a fully social unfolding , and the ‘weness’ of language games is an abstraction derived from that primary sociality.
Quoting Joshs
Really? Not Spinoza, not Hume, not Kierkegaard, not Schopenhauer, not Nietzsche, not Zapffe, not Sartre, not Merleau-Ponty, not ... but Heidi?! C'mon. :roll:
Wittgenstein didn't write that much. There was very little in his prose that Heidegger could have used and I doubt he ever heard of Wittgenstein. In the other hand, Wittgenstein must have known of Heidegger. But one can think of a reason or two why he wouldn't have refered to him. Witt gravitated around the Vienna Circle. Those neopositivists did not fancy phenomenology at all. Also Witt had Jewish roots while Heidegger became a Nazi as early as 1933. This may have hampered collaboration...
And the later Wittgenstein, whose solipsistic methodology remained the same as the earlier Wittgenstein and who now directly asserted that philosophy was purely therapeutic and descriptive and wasn't in the business of proposing theories, didn't immediately contradict himself by proposing the frankly ridiculous theory attributed to him that meaning is grounded in inter-subjective agreement or in some publicly obeyed rule-set sent decreed from above by the guardians of meaning in Platonia.
The confusion here, seem to partly stem from the public's lack of understanding of the positivistic epistemological ideas of his time that he was attacking, as well as a general lack of awareness regarding Wittgenstein's so-called "middle period", in which he wrote about his phenomenological inquiries and negative conclusions that there was no hope of obtaining a phenomenological theory of meaning of the sort proposed his earlier self proposed.
But that doesn't mean Witt then concluded "in that case, by appealing to the law of excluded middle realism is true. I propose a new epistemological foundation in which there is only one sort of meaning that is decided by the public, platonia or scientific naturalism in a mind-independent reality". All he concluded is that due to the overwhelming complexity and uncertainty of phenomenological analysis, it is impossible for himself to give an exhaustive and unconditional phenomenal theory accounting for his own use of words.
It is therefore understandable, as to why Wittgenstein was sympathetic towards Heidegger and could personally relate to Being and Time on the one hand, while at the same time insinuating that Being and Time was nonsensical when viewed as a collection of propositions with an inter-subjectively determinable truth-value.
Nonsense doesn't mean "false", it merely refers to an inability to determine the sense of a word when it used in a context from which it did not originate. Wittgenstein's sympathies towards Heidegger demonstrate that he did not believe the most important types of meaning to be inter-subjectively decided. Only inter-subjective meaning is inter-subjectively decided.
We can all agree that we can relate to Being in Time, without pretending to ourselves that we understand each-other's understanding of this work when viewing our agreement from the perspective of a different language-game.
Banno, you can't address the title "What’s the biggest difference Heidegger and Wittgenstein?" directly. It is impossible to address it directly or indirectly. The text of the title is syntactically incorrect, therefore semantically nonsensical. How can you address something that does not make sense? that does not make sense.
Thank, you, @slime. You have given me more insight into the works of these two great misspent minds than the ten years of post-doctorate philosophical fellowship I do not have studying the works of Witt and Heid. In fact, getting ANY meaning directly reading the two, pages side-by-side, seems like a game of Seek-and-Heid. I am not being facetious, I mean it that I value your description, as it gave me acceptable knowledge. Very much like the in-the-face difference described by @Banno, whose declared insight was, quoted not verbatim, "one was a weatherman, the other, a soldier." Well, duh. That is not the kernel of the difference between the philosophy of the two. One was blue eyed, the other brown eyed, or one was 5'8", the other, 5'9". Or one used to shave with blades, the other, with a razor.
It's true that you CAN read their professions into their psychological differences, but while psychological disposition may influence one's philosophy, the philosophy of a thinker are not determined purely by the psychological disposition.
I said , AMONG the first. I would not include Spinoza, Hume or Schopenhauer among this group. They maintain a clear separation between what they call
emotion and what they consider as the rational, the intentional, the cognitive. If you’d like to summarize for me your understanding of how Spinoza integrates emotion and rational thought I’ll show you how it differs from Heidegger.
. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were directly influenced by Heidegger , but even so we don’t find affectivity, as Befindlichkeit , being give the central importance it has for Heidegger.
I know that there are many , often opposed readings of Witt. An example of what I would call a
conservative reading is that of Peter Hacker. At the other end of the spectrum are writers like Dreyfus, Lyotard, and Rorty. Where do you see yourself on this left-right continuum of Witt interpretations?
I want to add that there seems to be a converging consensus among philosophers and psychologists influenced by phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, social constructionism and poat-structuralisms like Foucault that intersubjectivity is the primary way that all personal meanings are shaped.
https://www.academia.edu/458222/Heideggers_Attunement_and_the_Neuropsychology_of_Emotion
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290089652_Why_Mood_Matters
(Which readability index is it that penalises abstract nouns? That's what I was looking for... might make it a feature request, if I didn't dream it. Haha, the dreams of a nominalist.)
I do not get it Banno. Why the idea you need to know someone to appreciate his/her philosophy? Seems a curious example of identity politics. The thing in itself is either rational or bollocks independent of whether Kant was a virgin...
Anyway. What I understand from the posts and from Heidegger keeps me wondering why he resorts to all the doublings, a prereflective I, a reflective I... It seems he does not like the idea of the self being construed by the world in which it finds itself. He seems to hang on to some kernel of authenticity. Why cannot the self reflection and the relation to being not be established by the 'object' by a lack of a better word the world itself. I never understood what was won by the Heideggerian move to keep somekind of existential notion together with his beautiful analysis of enframing. It begets all kinds of problems, on an individual level but also on a collective level. I deal a bit with Heidegger inspired theories of law and I usually find them unnecessarily complicated. I also know a bit of the idea of language games and rule following of Wittgenstelin, but too little to readily compare it, though I feel you are correct to insist that Witty has no answer to individual deviations on the use of language. However, why should it be one of the other? No there is no authentic I, and no, there is no purely publically defined I. I am simply a unique constellation of forces through which other impulses (words, concepts) are iterated but never in exactly the same way. there is nothing authentic about it, just small 'corruptions' , which occur gradually.
Oh, not in all cases - this just struck me as apposite for these two.
...but I think one might be constructed. Deviation is dependent on there being an established use. Davidson's A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs heads in this direction.
Not at all. I'm with @Banno in this because I think (though he's just another "broken cuckoo clock" to Banno) Freddy was more right than not:
[quote=Beyond Good and Evil]It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.[/quote]
(Emphasis is mine.)
I read the Tractatus to be saying the opposite in regards to solipsism. The conflicts in our thinking are closely joined to what is said or not said. Instead of a theory of meaning there is this theater of saying. And the observation is not intent upon giving the last word upon meaning. That would interfere with the other observations.
I wonder how Shakespeare and Joyce stack up. It would probably love Hemmingway.
No he doesn't. If anything, Witty's model of language is much closer to Heidi's notion of being-with than anything else in the Heideggarian oeuvre.
Thanks for reading it. I kind of hate to use the term ‘subjective’ to describe what I’m after, and what Heidegger was after. I don’t see that there’s a subject anywhere in our approaches. Every single mention of subjective in Being and Time is in scare quotes for a reason. Dasein is ‘being there’, not a subjectivity. Yes, Heidegger uses terms like self and mineness, but these don’t refer to the relain between a subject and an objective world. All a ‘self’ is is a split , a hinge, a differential between memory, past, history on the one hand , and what is new, other, alien, on the other. This hinge or differential is the ‘now’ moment of experience. In the next moment it will be a changed history,past, memory that meets with a new otherness. Where do you find a subject here? There is no ‘me’ that stands behind or underneath or alongside or around this flow of changing nows. No homonculus or controller or spirit or categorical framer or mind. Nothing but a new past together with a new otherness forming an always new ‘now’ of experience. So why does Heidegger call this ‘mine’? Who or what is this ‘me’? It is nothing but the intimate and intricate way the new present occurs into a past which is changed by that present. It presents the ‘illusion’ of an ongoing flow of self-similarity. So ‘ self’ is nothing but an index of the relationality of one moment to the next of experience.
Welll, you sure told me. Although I don’t know what you told me. It was more like a drive-by refuting. I know you want to get in on this. I can tell. Yeah, you want it , don’t you?
Just so happens that I'm right.
You are always right. And you know why? Because you’re a god.
"Yet one must not fail to notice that we use the term "Dasein-with" to designate that Being for which the Others who are are freed within-the-world. This Dasein-with of the Others is disclosed within-the-world for a Dasein, and so too for those who are Daseins with us, only because Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with. The phenomenological assertion that "Dasein is essentially Being-with" has an existential-ontological meaning. It does not seek to establish ontically that factically I am not present-at-hand alone, and that Others of my kind occur. If this were what is meant by the proposition that Dasein's Being-in-the-world is essentially constituted by Being-with, then Being-with would not be an existential attribute which Dasein, of its own accord, has coming to it from its own kind of Being. It would rather be something which turns up in every case by reason of the occurrence of Others. Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no Other is present-at hand or perceived. Even Dasein's Being-alone is Being-with in the world. The Other can be missing only in and for a Being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with; its very possibility is the proof of this. On the other hand, factical Being-alone is not obviated by the occurrence of a second example of a human being 'beside' me, or by ten such examples.
Even if these and more are present-at-hand, Dasein can still be alone. So Being-with and the facticity of Being with one another are not based on the occurrence together of several 'subjects'. Yet Being-alone 'among' many does not mean that with regard to their Being they are merely present-at-hand there alongside us. Even in our Being 'among them' they are there with us ; their Dasein-with is encountered in a mode in which they are indifferent and alien. Being missing and 'Being away' are modes of Dasein-with, and are possible only because Dasein as Being-with lets the Dasein of Others be encountered in its world. Being-with is in every case a characteristic of one's own Dasein; Dasein-with characterizes the Dasein of Others to the extent that it is freed by its world for a Being-with. Only so far as one's own Dasein has the essential structure of Being-with, is it Dasein-with as encounterable for Others."
The Philosophical Investigations by any other name. It's even got the bit about engines running in idle and the form-of-life. Practically indistinguishable. I know you are wont to agree.
Although I have to admit Witt’s profound but conventional religiosity through the 1930’s influences my reading of his work, and I contrast it with Heidegger’s complex
destabilizing of theology.
Quoting Tobias
Very interesting. Let me address the way you characterize my experiencing of a world and see how it might differ from what I see Heidegger doing.
You talk about the self being construed by the world , Being as established by the object, my self as constellation of forces, corruptions.
So there is an interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. You perhaps would concur if I said these are just poles or aspects of an indissociable interaction between self and world.
But let me observe that the adjectives you use to describe this interaction defines the poles in a certain way. To be more specific, they flesh out the poles as inhering in a certain violence of polarization and arbitrariness. Corruption, force, impulse.( I would also add a host of other terms that various writers on intersubjectivity attribute to Being in the world, like introjection, conditioning , intersection of flows of power) These descriptors are intrinsic to how intersubjectivity creates and recreates subjects in many overlapping approaches in philosophy today ( Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology , social constructionism , post-structuralism , critical theory).
But let me now suggest that such terms of polarizing arbitrariness are only necessary because they assume as certain substantiality the the subjective and objective poles of experiencing a world. The has to be an element of resistantance and force-power implied in each pole in order for change to be a wrenching dislocation, a ‘corruption’.
But what if we give too much power, too much substance to these poles? What if,hidden within what we assume to be the irreducible pre-conditions for being in the world as a play of forces , there is a more intimate, more intricate because more insignificant and insubstantial binary at work in every moment of experiencing? This would be on the order of variations of variations rather than a colliding of impulses. These would be variations of variations with no originating subject or generating power.
Rather than ‘Heideggerian authenticity’ being an attempt to rescue the remnants of the idealist subject from its fragmentation, it would be the opposite , an attempt to show how, functioning beneath the abstractions of ‘fat’ power relations , there is a movement that is at the same time more incessant and radically self-transformational , and more seemingly self-consistent and integral. But this thematic integrity would have to be understood
as not the work of some ghost in the machine, as you and others accuse Heidegger of , the return of idealist solipsism, but the compete opposite. The ongoing ‘self-belonging ‘ of my experience would have to be understood as what is left of moment to moment experiencing when all the abstractive baggage of ‘forceful’ interactive polarity has new deconstructed.
The problem with a Wittgensteinian or Foucualtian model, then, is that it has not gone far enough to unravel idealist assumptions.
What would Witt make of Heidegger’s treating language interchange as idle talk and das man, as impoverished forms of Being’s self-understanding? Why does Gadamer say:
Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got
behind. Indeed, evenas he was developing the idea, his wasn't really talking about the other
at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for
granted. I must say that conscience — having a conscience — no, that wasn't terribly convincing.
"Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-
sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic
"being-interested-in-him."”(A Century of Philosophy. Hans-Georg Gadamer in Conversation
with Riccardo Dottori)
I don’t agree with Gadamer , but not because Heidegger is simply echoing Witt, it because Mitt-Dasein for Heidegger is a true being-with-others that is not simply a Witt-style sharing of language.
I think that, instead, established or normative use is just an abstraction from individual ‘deviations’(interpretations). This is what Heidegger is arguing.
idk what to tell you other than this is a bad reading of Witt substantiated by nothing. As for idle talk, that's the absolute worst part of Heidi's whole oeuvre, a reflection of his peasant-minded village romanticism.
And the critique of being-with that often gets brandied about - that it doesn't properly establish a relation with the other - is something of a feature, rather than a bug, when translated into Witty's terms. For Witty there are indeed no guarantees about any encounter with the other - or ourselves. Misunderstanding - of ourselves, no less than the other - is rife, and common. 'Authenticity' would be anathema to him. Rightly. Which makes language something of a pharmakon - both a condition of possibility and impossibility of communication and meaning.
My sincere apology. My vision seems to be sharp today. My mind? I dunno.
Ohhh I agree with that. I find the parallels between Heideggerian thought, ecological thought (in its small is beautiful variation) and national socialist thought fascinating. To me they share a similar sentimentality. What I would reject is the notion that because a biography shines through, the arguments made can be rejected or accepted. Most importantly, that it would be a reason to spare yourself the difficulty of trying to understand a thinker. Witty was part of the wiener Kreis, the wiener Kreis were connected to positivist science, positivist science fails to take understanding (verstehen) into account, presto: no need to try to understand Witty. I read too little Wittgenstein and I am not afraid to admit it. I have some knowledge from reading the tractatus and some secondary sources, but that is it, my problem.
Yes I concur.
Quoting Joshs
Very true and I am influenced by those branches even describing myself as a social constructivist at times (in a sociological sense, not metaphysically). I indeed chose conflict associated terminology, but that is not the end of it for me. In order to conflict, or to force, or any kind of violence, 'care' is presupposed. conflict and violence indicate that there is something that 'matters', that rejects me and that I feel something about. The world inescapably matters to me and that is why I might conflict with it. So in every conflictual relation, a relation of care is presupposed, if we peel the concepts away. My connection to my world or the world however you want is characterised by care. However, there is no primordial pole somehow beyond that relation. There is no "etre de soi" and "etre pour soi" in Sartrean terminology, or better, there might be but it is a product of a way of thinking and not something over and above it.
Quoting JoshsQuoting Joshs
No there does not need to be any such thing. They are merely a product of some vague theories reiterated and changed in the process. A trace?
Quoting Joshs
I think actually we are not far off. The question though is, as you state yourself, The ongoing self-belonging of my experience would have to be understood. However, that is rather ineluctable. We have no experience without the 'abstractive baggage' of our being in the world. It is all that abstratcive baggage that Heidegger likes to strip away that makes us us. The 'I' is just an interplay (knot) of conceptions beliefs, relations that is tied together in that moment at that place and time. Maybe there is only 'susceptibility', an openness to experience, a 'care locus'.
Quoting Joshs
Herein lies the problem I have with Heidegger. There is something like a 'true being with others', opposed to what, an untrue being with others? But if I am with others I am with others, there is no true or false. Just like Sorge, care, is not a self relation, it is a relation towards the other. that is what I mean with I as constituted by the world. It is not a self relation that lights a seinsverstehen, it is the other way around. I see that I care about things and realise that there is something like an I.
I'm sorry that you think so - perhaps Wittgenstein attracted better translators? :wink:
This sounds like you may be understanding care in a conventional sense. Tell me how you understand Heidegger’s notion of care in relation to his concept of temporality, because this ‘ equiprimordial’ relation between care, understanding, attunement and understanding is crucial to my treatment of ‘care’.
More specifically , the way the my ‘now’ projects my past into my future possibilities means that any ‘object’ in the world I experience is partially build out of my past. This is a crucial point , because it gives all my experiences the sense of a radical belonging to my past, at the same time that the ‘now’ contributes an element of absolute novelty. In this respect , Heidegger inherited Husserl’s formulation of the intentional act as a constitution built on a dimension similarity between previous history and what is encountered.
, Husserl's notion of the foreign must be understood in different terms than that of corporeal otherness. We have seen this difference manifested in the way that for Husserl I maintain an ongoing thread of subjective continuity within my participation in an intersubjective world. I want now to further explore the nature and philosophical justification for the internal integrity of the temporal stream of consciousness . My claim is that Husserl's articulation of the transcendentally reduced sphere of consciousness in terms (mineness, unitary, synthetic, continuous) that risk implying a solipsism closed off to the otherness of the world and history wasn't simply an unfortunate choice of terminology.
In Husserl there is a primordial motivational principle-anticipatory assimilation dominates the foreignness of the noematic object pole. We see the centrality of similarity manifest itself at all levels of constitution, in the subjective achievement of synthetic unities, analogical apperceptive pairing, associative relationality, correlations, harmonious fulfillments, subjective ‘mineness', variations, flowing multiplicities, congruities, nexuses, coherences, etc. Even in difference, negation, senselessness, irrationality, alienation there is no experience in consciousness that is not in an overarching way variation on a thematics (which are already assocative syntheses of variations on variations) for Husserl , a similarity-in-difference.
Now, it is true that Heidegger deconstructed Husserl’s notion of egoic consciousness, but his own work retains this idea of similarity in difference.
It is there also in Derrida’s interlocked concepts of ‘trace’, gramme and differance. The odd verbal construction ‘differance’ indicates
that for Derrida the irreducible primitive of experience, the trace, borrows from my immediate last in forming what differs from me. That is, any ‘object’ of my experience is parasitic in what it opposes itself
to. Therefore, my world cannot be something that ‘rejects’ me or conflicts with me except as
that rejection or conflict pre-supposes a more
fundamental belonging of what opposes itself
to me to my current concerns. It is only because I am already involved with something in a certain way and in relation to ongoing concerns that I can perceive it as conflicting or opposing or rejecting. So the
rejecting of me’ by an object I encounter , always takes place, is possible at all, only as a subordinate to a totality of relevance to which the ‘rejection’ belongs. Put differently , all the various ways in which what I experience affects me(surprising, rejecting, conflicting, agreeing) can do so only within a larger totality of relevance, Superodia to belong of what I encounter to my present understanding, which is why what I find conflictual is never the same as what you find conflictual.
Quoting Tobias
It sounds like you’re situating an I over here and a world
over there and then putting them together, or choosing one as dominant over the other, the world as dominant over my self-reflexivity. But Heidegger isn’t starting from self and world in some kind of relation. Self-relation IS relation to world. What you need to do is look at the self that you have depicted and split it within itself. Split it so that instead of an entity or a reflexivity or a presence , it ‘is’ a change from past to
present, a differential. Forget about the ‘outside’ world that you think you know and see this world as already inherent in the split in the now. You’re starting from
presences ( Self and world ) and trying to create a difference from our of that binary. it you need to put difference BEFORE presencing.
Authentic being with others isn’t ‘true’ and
inauthentic ‘false’. Inauthentic being with
others is a derivative mode of mit-dasein, just as the present-to-hand is a derivative mode of
interpretation.
Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused and ambiguous to describe
Dasein’s being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and
implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday
discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise,
cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never
interpreted identically for each dasein.
“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same
thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is
said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every
difference of level and genuineness.”
To say that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of
being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself, is to say that Dasein explicitly
experiences itself as a constituted self, introjecting norms from other selves , but this awareness
pre-supposes and is grounded in an implicit mineness.
Heidegger says average everydayness alienates Dasein from itself, but without Dasein’s therefore being merely conditioned by others.
“However, alienation cannot mean that Da-sein is factically torn away from itself....this alienation, which closes off to Da-sein its authenticity and possibility, even if only that of genuinely getting stranded, still does not surrender it to beings which it itself is not, but
forces it into its inauthenticity, into a possible kind of being of itself.”
Evidence that the heedful relevance and mineness of Care undergirds the normativity of average
everydayness, preventing it from being a mere introjection from world to self, come not only
from Heidegger’s treatment of idle talk and average everydayness, but also from his analysis of
the propositional statement. Here we see him using similar adjectives to describe what he calls an
‘extreme’ mode of present-to-handness : veiled, cut-off, levelled down.
In the present-to-hand propositional statement, “The as-structure of interpretation has undergone
a modification. The "as" no longer reaches out into a totality of relevance in its function of appropriating what is understood. It is cut off with regard to its possibilities of the articulation of referential relations of significance which constitute the character of the surrounding world.”
So the wider experience of a totality of relevance is that out of which something like a present-to- hand thing emerges. But it cuts itself off from , and thus conceals this contextual richness of significance and meaningfulness that it depends on and implies, and as a result it is impoverished of meaningful significance, intelligiblity, relevance. It is a ‘dwindling down’ relative to heedfully circumspective modes of experience.
Average everydayness of Das man and idle talk shares with the present to hand in general the features of being derivative modes of the ‘as’ structure of heedful circumspective significance, functioning as a contextually rich totality of relevance. They also share the feature of being a ‘dwindling down’ of that wider experience. Of central import here is that primary intersubjective models such as those of Gallagher and Merleau-Ponty and social constructionisms assume that, as Zahavi writes, “we take over from others (and make our own) a language, roles, attitudes and
norms” and that these culturally normed practices that we internalize represent forms of meaning no less robust in significance and relevance to our lives than those which we generate.
In contrast, for Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance. The publicness of Das Man and the present to handness of things are modes of Dasein representing a deprivation and trivialization of intelligibility, significance and relevance, and thus a reduction of meaningfulness. Dasein becomes alienated from itself not by being taken over by an outside but by encountering itself (its ownmost world of possibilities) as almost devoid of sense. Alienation as senselessness rather than internalization of an other.
Wittgenstein thought that the errors in these questioning strategies derived from insufficient attention payed to the context of philosophical language - with philosophy being particularly unmoored and thus occlusive. Philosophy as a dead, beached whale, mourn and then forget.
In contrast, Heidegger thought that errors in these questioning strategies derived from people paying insufficient attention to the context of philosophical language - with philosophy being particularly moored on ossified, unnoticed framing devices and thus occlusive. Philosophy as a still living, beached whale, and gotta save that whale.
Wittgenstein is an undertaker for the living, Heidegger is a necromancer for those that never died.
To clarify my position on how biography might affect a philosopher's work, I'm not claiming the relationship is causal but rather, in a broadly Nietzschean sense, diagnostic (or symptomological). Only by doing the hard work of studying the work are – and I very much agree with your suggestion, Tobias, that intellectual honesty requires this – its problematic aspects of a philosopher's thought made explicit which, thereby, offer cracks in the philosophy's 'reflective mask', so to speak, through which to correlate the role biography's pre/non-reflective face plays in a philosopher selecting, re/making, wearing & even changing his/her mask (or masks).
For this reason I think (for better and worse) Freddy anticipates – invents – psychoanalysis here:
Put another way, both Witt and Heidegger thought traditional philosophy failed to understand meaning as emerging out of contexts of social engagement
Witt associated all philosophy with traditional
metaphysics and did not know how to articulate his thinking as a kind of post-metaphysical
philosophy, having been unable to learn from Nietzsche’s approach. Heidegger, on the other hand , claimed to locate a way of doing philosophy that moved beyond metaphysics.He may very well have located Witt’s work within a religious metaphysics akin to Kierkegaard.
Quoting Joshs
I do not know if I understand care conventionally. In Heideggerian terms, I understand care as an 'existential of Dasein' ;) . However I think there is a difference. Heidegger makes a different between the ontic and the ontological and I do not see that difference. This duality emerges because Heidegger has some sort of primordial idea of Dasein who for itself has a world. First and foremost Dasein is a self relation. I think there is Dasein is created by the world in that our self understanding is not primordial but a product of our relation to the world and how this is conceptualised. There is no authenticity, there is no primordial relation, there is just a relation and there is acting and what not.
For Heidegger the ontic-ontological difference is not the Kantian difference between things in themselves and
my presentation of them, which it sounds like you’re reading him as saying, but transit, a primordial between, which defines identity as relation to something other.
Dasein isn’t an ‘itself’ that happens to have a world. Dasein is not a ‘self-relation’ if you’re understanding that term as referring to a relation that can be in any way distinguished from , separate from , before or outside of relation to a world. For Heidegger self-relation means nothing other than relation to a world.
“That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between," in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other."(Identity and Difference.p.64)
“I think there is Dasein is created by the world in that our self understanding is not primordial but a product of our relation to the world.”
Our self understanding IS primordial because self IS nothing but relation to a world. But this doesn’t mean Dasein is ‘created’ by the world, and it doesnt mean the world is created by Dasein. It means Dasein is the in-between, not between an already present self and existing world but prior to either of these concepts.
Points of commonality between late W and early Heidi:
(1) Holism, especially with regard to meaning.
(2) (allegedly) Attempting to hue close to the contextual aspects of language.
(3) W's "picture frame" metaphor is extremely similar to H's propositional/apophatic as-structure.
(4) Seeing-as in W is tightly related to as-structure in Heidegger. "How does this count as that?" so to speak is a central point of investigation in both, both bottom out in coupling convention to perception.
(5) Both have a rhetorical posture of attending to the every-day, rather than philosophical idealisations of the every day.
(6) Both have ambiguous roles for the individual.
These come with points of contrast.
(1) W's holism isn't unified conceptually into a single category - the "form of life" and boundaries of any given language game remain ambiguous -, in contrast Heidegger's holism is aggregate into temporality - as the unfolding of history is a generator and overcomer of conventions. Heidegger's a proto-historicist and proto-discourse analyst, W remains profoundly ahistorical in his analysis.
(2,5) Heidegger's simplifications in an attempt to hue close to context are politically+religiously coloured and romantic, W can't help but treat such rules as definite but largely ineffable, a "logic of things unsaid" so to speak. Both are huge simplifications and distort their topics of concern.
(3,4) The picture frame is seen as contingent and nothing more, it's something that can be picked up and is located as internal to philosophy/analysis - it's just something philosophers tend to do, Heidegger locates the dominance/over-emphasis of the propositional as-structure within the history of ideas (Descartes role in the forgetting of the question of the meaning of being). Both philosophers can be read as reacting to this over emphasis as a central concern.
(6) Idiosyncrasy poses a problem for conventional accounts of meaning but also phenomenology based on a bodiless and morose every-man. The latter requires analysing the conceptual structure of "mental furniture" and its behaviour - like a logical psychology or anthropology - the former requires attending to individual intentions and states. Both projects get royally undermined by human heterogeneity in bodies and frames.
Quoting fdrake
I like your comparisons between Witt and Heidi.
Maybe you could explain this last point a bit better. I assume by ‘phenomenology based on a bodiless and morose every-man, you mean Das Man? If so, I read Das Man and idle talk not as a founding feature of Dasein but as one of its derivative modalities, and an inadequate one at that. Das man is a kind of illusion , a mistaken belief that one is talking about the same things, shares the same sense of meanings as others one is engaged with in the ‘language games ‘ of normative discourse. This illusion of being on the same page with others in discourse covers over the underlying particularity and individuality of personal understanding.
Quoting fdrake
Could you say more about what you see as simplifications? As far as politics-religious inspiration , the imprint of an intense, devout religiosity is imbedded in Witt’s work.
One difference between them that is important to me is that while Witt was in thrall to Freudian theory, Heidegger effectively critiqued it. Also, implied in Hedeigger’s view of religious faith is his assimilation of Nietzsche’s critique of religion, which Witt was unable to grasp.
I meant Dasein. It can't fuck. It can't even fuck its wife!
I think it fucks. But it doesnt do any embodied fucking. Heidegger’s only elaboration of the role of the body was in the zollikon seminars, where he talked about ‘bodying forth’. Unfortunately he didn’t live long enough to offer any courses on how to fuck that way.
:chin: :fear: