On the transcendental ego
Are we not committed to affirming the transcendental ego? It can be said that this egoic presence IS thought, and that there is no separating thought from identity. One can say this even of the structure of experience itself, so while there may certainly BE a structure to thought, and, as Wittgenstein said, this structure dominates in describing the world and cannot be second guessed, its embodiment, thought, that is, can be made an object of intention (or, attention, if you prefer). Keep in mind that the "true" nature of logic never makes an appearance, so what we say of logic remains only about the way logic "shows" itself. And in the act of reflective thought, thought becomes an object for itself.
It is this "distance" between the thinking subject and the thought that is thought I wish to look at more closely, for it is in the reflective act, where one stands apart from any and all possible experiential events, that "distance" is made possible. In other words, when I think, I can bring question to the thought (question, the piety of thought, says Heidegger), or when I simply observe the thought as it is being thought, and thereby, I no longer identify with the thought, but stand apart from it. This distance is essential to understanding what a person IS at the level of basic questions and assumptions.
It is this "distance" between the thinking subject and the thought that is thought I wish to look at more closely, for it is in the reflective act, where one stands apart from any and all possible experiential events, that "distance" is made possible. In other words, when I think, I can bring question to the thought (question, the piety of thought, says Heidegger), or when I simply observe the thought as it is being thought, and thereby, I no longer identify with the thought, but stand apart from it. This distance is essential to understanding what a person IS at the level of basic questions and assumptions.
Comments (400)
When one thinks, one is doing something. Thinking is conduct resulting from interaction with the rest of the world. It's inapposite to say that we observe ourselves when we're doing something, as if we're watching ourselves when we, e.g., walk. When I walk, I don't observe myself walking, I merely walk.
I'm aware that I'm walking, but that isn't the same as observing myself walking. There is no me apart from the me that is walking, observing the walking me.
We can certainly think about what we do. We may also think about how we think. But in doing so we don't stand apart from ourselves, we're just thinking (something we do). Understanding this, we don't create entities out of metaphors, which is to say needlessly.
Saying thinking is conduct merely exchanges one problematic word for another. Conduct, how one comports oneself, it too confining. Thought is an event, in time. This works best. But then, there are other features that cannot be simply dismissed. I walk along, but how is it I know this? Not IN the walking, certainly, for walking is not a reflective affair. Only when I stand apart from it, if, say, I trip, or something stands in my way, then walking is suspended, pending a resolution. Of course, I may take up other "issues" about walking int his suspension a well. I may ask, what is the nature of "knowing" how to walk at all? I could take the idea of walking up in a variety of contests. But consider, I walk, and AS I walk, I place the event of walking in before my awareness. This is a different event altogether from merely carrying out a well practiced routine. When one is walking, it might be said, the walker IS the walking, and if one is hammering one IS the hammering. Just so, when one IS thinking, one IS the thinking, but here is the rub: When I place my thinking before my awareness, I am not the thing I am aware of. Just as when I stop hammering and consider what hammering is about, or, while hammering I allow my attention to pull apart from the rote, physical process and "observe" the unfolding of the hand grasping the handle, the muscles squeezing, and so on, I no longer AM simply the act of hammering. I am doing something altogether different.
This "difference" makes the distance I refer to above. I argue that this distance always has its object, but all that is can be made an object, and so there is no one thing that the subjective end's egoic center can identify with.
There is mechanical associative thought and conscious thought. Dostoyevsky describes mechanical thought:
“Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.” ? Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
Plato refers to conscious thought which begins with forms. It is the process of immediate intuition, apprehension, or mental 'seeing' of principles. Can the philosopher become capable of more than babble and pouring from the empty into the void? Can the philosopher stand apart from mechanical thought so as to invite conscious thought to respond to the deeper questions or the aim of philosophy as the need for meaning?
There is not a transcendental ego, per se. If it is affirmed that there is a conception under which all my representations are united, and it is called “ego”, the representation of which is “I”, then the deduction of its possibility, is transcendental.
Parsimony and speculative consistency suggests, then, that the question become, are we committed to affirming the ego transcendentally, to which the proper response would be.....yes, but iff one wishes to affirm the conception of ego at all.
But still....this is metaphysics, so if one doesn’t satisfy, pick another.
You're hammering and thinking about hammering as you hammer. We're quite capable of doing both if we want to, and without distinguishing ourselves from our thinking or our hammering.
But Heidegger would never say that the ‘I’ stands apart from the thought , and neither would Husserl, so your transcendental ego is not the ego of phenomenology but of Kant.
Interesting. Care to say more?
Not asking. Listening.
Your initial statement, your follow-up exposition.
In matters of skill, I agree. But you asked about knowledge of being human, which is more than a skill.
Why isn’t it the case that I must be human in order to even ask what a human is?
Nahhh. Using a chainsaw is a skill. If a human is a member of a certain class of carbon-based intelligence, then the being of human, is a condition of that class. Skills are learned, conditions are given, in this case, given naturally.
People can choose who they want to be all day long. Choosing and attaining are two completely different things, though, right?
Can I choose to want to be a physicist? Sure, I can. Will I ever be one? Not impossible, from a practical point of view. But I can also choose to want to be an inhabitant of Mars, which is impossible for me practically, even if not impossible logically.
If this is what you meant by identity being limited by understanding, than I will agree, but only with respect to limitation in choice to a particular type of human I might choose to be, predicated on the means for attainment of that identity. However, as for the identity of being human in general, I don’t agree.
And not letting beliefs restrain you falls into the realm of practical possibility, rather than human identity predicated on a limiting understanding alone.
Attainment vs choosing?
I suppose you can't build something without blueprints
Errrrr....no it isn’t. It does not follow from the fact that not everything is known, that everything is possible. I mean....it’s not possible to know everything, so knowing everything is possible, is itself impossible.
Free will is not a thing, hence cannot meet the criteria regarding knowledge of its reality. Best I can say is, there is free will if one needs there to be. It may be nothing more than an explanatory conception, the reality of it being irrelevant.
I think it's an important idea but the following observations come to mind.
First, the term 'thought' is rather vague, isn't it? I'm not asking for a definition of 'thought', but a distinction can be made between the habitual flow of thought, the 'inner voice' which accompanies all our waking moments, and the kind of thought that characterises the attainment of insight or the pursuit of rigorous principles in mathematics, or engagement in a creative act, for example. 'Thought' exists on a lot of levels from the transitory to the foundational so using it as a general term is not sufficiently precise, in my view.
As for the structure 'dominating in describing the world' - I agree that the mind interprets experience according to the structured processes of apperception that are built up by the process of socialisation, education, and so on. That we can't step outside that structure and see 'the world as it is' in another way (although the significance of the term 'ecstacy' might be noted, as it means precisely ex- stasis, outside the normal state.) However, I think that realising that the 'structure of the mind' does this, is extremely important, in fact it's the very first step in philosophy proper (as for example in the opening paragraph of World as Will and Representation.) Few attain it.
As for 'thought thinking about itself', in one way that is true - I'm doing it now, writing this post. But in another way, it cannot be true. There is a saying from the Upani?ads, 'the eye can see another, but cannot see itself, the hand can grasp another, but cannot grasp itself.' That is an analogy for the impossibility of the mind making an object of itself, which it can't do, for just that reason. Knowledge, generally, presumes that separation of knower and known - but in the case of the question 'who or what is the knower', we're not outside of or separate from the object, or, put another way, object and subject are the same. The response to which ought to be something very like the Husserlian Epoché.
Ehhhhh.....I don’t do advice. But I can tell you, without experience, you’re usually gonna lose.
Books. And more books. Always books.
[quote=Britannica]Transcendental ego, the self that is necessary in order for there to be a unified empirical self-consciousness. For Immanuel Kant, it synthesizes sensations according to the categories of the understanding. Nothing can be known of this self, because it is a condition, not an object, of knowledge. For Edmund Husserl, pure consciousness, for which everything that exists is an object, is the ground for the foundation and constitution of all meaning.[/quote]
[quote=Wikipedia]Transcendental apperception is the uniting and building of coherent consciousness out of different elementary inner experiences (differing in both time and topic, but all belonging to self-consciousness). For example, the experience of "passing of time" relies on this transcendental unity of apperception, according to Kant.
There are six steps to transcendental apperception:
1. All experience is the succession of a variety of contents (an idea taken from David Hume).
2. To be experienced at all, the successive data must be combined or held together in a unity for consciousness.
3. Unity of experience therefore implies a unity of self.
4. The unity of self is as much an object of experience as anything is.
5. Therefore, experience both of the self and its objects rests on acts of synthesis that, because they are the conditions of any experience, are not themselves experienced.
6. These prior syntheses are made possible by the categories. Categories allow us to synthesize the self and the objects.
7. One consequence of Kant's notion of transcendental apperception is that the "self" is only ever encountered as appearance, never as it is in itself. [/quote]
NOTE: '4' seems anomalous to me, but i include it for completeness.
As to Dostoyevsky, What I am defending is rather up his alley, for what it means to Put distance" between oneself and thought is to deny the priveleged place of reason in defined what it is to be human. It is an antirationalist position. Where the underground man says, am I a piano key? here, the answer is no, for the rationality that would lay claim to choice, to meaning (remember Kierkegaard who mused that Hegel had forgotten that we actually exist!), is denied, and what takes its place? Freedom. the freedom to deny the dictates of reason.
Plato: the mechanical thought, as you put it, has an inevitable place, certainly, but keep in mind that thought has no content. It is merely the form of meaningful utterance, so while a person is bound to rationality for the very thinking itself, rationality is bound to nothing save the power of the tautology and the contradiction. Outside of this, the thought that would claim me is always subject to second guessing regarding content. Reason does not tell us to be good, healthy; as Hume put it, reason would just as soon annihilate the human race.
But the question does bring the structural feature of dasein, freedom. The hammer is ready to hand, but when the head flies off the hammer, the nail is missed, something goes awry, the ready to hand yields to an openness as to what to do. This is freedom, the vacancy of rote behavior.
I use Heidegger to make my point, which is not Heidegger's, for I think the question really IS the outset ofreligious piety. The question is what makes the space that is the liberation from dasein possible. Not Kant. Kierkegaard.
But even during the breakdown of the hammering, the being drawn to the broken hammer still belongs to and gets its sense from the totality of relevance of the pragmatic activity of hammering. So this openness is constrained by the larger purposes of which it is a part. And the successful and uncomplicated hammering activity itself is not devoid of freedom of decision. It is a more primordial engagement with things in the form of taking care of them. This engagement with the work rather than staring at the broken hammer represents a greater openness to the world via our pragmatic engagement with it.
But it is not pragmatic engagement all the way down. Sure, when you turn the key and the car doesn't start, you don't have an existential crisis, but turn quickly to alternatives that hover near by. But the problem of one's whole Being has no ready to hand. When there is distance between the intending agent and the world qua world, one stands apart from all possibilities, and they are suspended.
In a letter to Rudolf Otto, Husserl said his epoche had a profound effect on many of his students' religious thinking. He himself was so moved.
I put thought in the front seat because thought is a reflection of the structure of experience, and generally it has been believed that while incidental matters come and go, thought sustains (going back to Parmenides). However, I don't think thought is the be all and end all. It is essential, for the present is structured by thought--no logic, then no human experience to talk about the weather or say hello (but I further believe that animals possess a proto-rationality. Our conditional proposition, say, is grounded in experience in a very primitive way, which is anticipation, and they clearly anticipate, and they negate, the grass being greener here than there, and so forth).
But of course, you're right about thought being far more tan the simple term suggests. It is a, if you will, thought experiment of mine in which I think, then observe my thoughts as I do so. This act of reflection has a qualitative distinction to it, apart from the usual kinds of reflection that come up when you're looking for your keys. Looking for keys is a disengagement from what you want to actually do, and is "removed" from this. It is an openness that was supposed to be a closed, routine affair. But to observe the looking, to stand apart from all possible modes of Being by retreating from Being altogether, and not encountering the world as a problem to be solved, but to simply stand apart from the totality of all possible engagement, this is an extraordinary event.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, I think you're quite right about that. The question that follows on this is, what IS it that one is doing and what is it that one encounters? In order to continue to be the agency called "myself" there must be something of that apperceiving event that is essential, surviving the apophatic process of elimination. The closer one gets to the "purity" of the present, the reductive finality (I am using Husserl's jargon. See his phenomenological reduction) the more revelatory. It is really because of the this that I take up the issue at all. If the reduction (again, Husserl's epoche) simply yielded more boring reality, a reduced form of the Same (this idea is played out in Levinas. See his Totality and Infinity), then it would dissolve into nihilism.
But this is not what happens. It is an uncanny event such that, as Levinas puts it, the idea is exceeded by the ideatum, the passion is not confined to the totality of that of which one can be passionate about. Transcendence is not an abstraction. It is embedded in existence, that is, us. We usually consider eternity to be simply beyond all things, and give it little attention, but it is actually deeply existential. Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety is an extraordinary read.
Quoting Wayfarer
Apophatic theology, it is called in the West. Post Husserlians, the post modern French philosophers, give very useful analyses of the only logical meaning of the epoche: it is a drive for givenness, the givenness of the world in thepresent (Jean Luc Marion, Janicaud, Michel Henry). And I thought Eugen Fink's Sixth Meditation a penetrating attempt to describe the foundations of phenomenological production. I find these philosophers, and others, helpful because in elaborating, in building systems of thought about the epoche, there is a tearing down of the totality that spontaneously rules our thinking. Heidegger is very helpful, not because I agree with everything he said, but because his Kierkegaardian influences give his Being and Time an openess to exploring that critical moment when a person stands before the world and the question of Being looms large. And here, one stands at a distance to all claims of knowing, to, I am claiming here, the thoughtful ego itself.
But I think you have in mind some kind of simple multitasking event, and no significant distinction to be made doing two different things. I would invite you think of a thoughtful engagement in the world as a world making event. Hard to take this seriously if you haven't taken up Kant Critique of Pure Reason. He defended transcendental idealism. The hammering is not an empirical observer's hammering, as if it were an object in motion, there when all perceiving agencies were absent. Rather, the hammering is an event brought into being by our meaning making, it is an event in experience, not an event out there entirely beyond our perception. To perceive is not a passive process, but constructive one.
Once this is understood, then the structures of consciousness become an ontology. We make Being by our presence, and Being is conceived as thought itself, along with, of course, the full body of experience.
So when "I" stand apart from thought, it can be seen as a schism in ontology.
What does perception construct?
Again? Last time you claimed I couldn't understand you unless I had read Being and Time if I recall correctly. Now I must be admitted into the mysteries of Kant before I can grasp what you say. I admit I find the ancient pagan mystery cults and their influence on and interaction with early Christianity and Gnosticism fascinating, but am surprised to find a similar reliance on rites of initiation on the one hand, and claims of exclusivity on the other, in this context.
Sorry about that. If you find pagan mystery cults and gnosticism fascinating, then we should be agreeing a lot more. You see, I find that, for me, the only way to consummate this kind of, well, affirmation of threshold values, intimations from something that is not found in the totality of regular thinking, is to tear down the language and general assimilative processes that continue to insist the world is as is described by big consensus that is all pervasive in our culture. Gnostic intimations are fascinating, but only from afar are they usually realized. The question is, how does this make progress deeper into the understanding? Kant and the tradition of phenomenology (and not the positivism that also has its grounding in Kant) challenges common sense, and overwhelms it when it comes to ontology. Once the dramatic move (dramatic for me) is made toward transcendental idealism, marginalized thinking that can be given its due. Kant opened two doors. One was extablishing the delimitation of meaningful utterances to what is either tautology or empirical.. The other is that while we live and think within this delimitation, there is this nebulous matter of the "outside" of this which at once impossible to conceive, yet an imposing presence in ways that Kant doesn't really take up, but post Kantian thinking makes a huge deal our of: the transcendence that somehow is present in a way that is not merely an abstraction. Kant was close to this, but then, as Kierkegaard said, we cannot forget that we actually exist.
And this moves on into an extraordinary body of literature that ends up with deconstruction (which I need to read more about). Deconstruction seems to be the final nail in the coffin of the assumptions about knowledge and the world.
What doesn't it construct? I mean, the moment you say what this could be, there is a trace to a perceptual event that has to be there, the absence of which would make for nonsense. Then, how does perception construct an owl, e.g.? Do you really think when a perceptual system vacates the presence of the owl, the owl is still there?
But there is no “problem of one’s whole being” as something outside of heedful circumspective relationality with one’s world for Heidegger , or a ‘whole being’ outside of noetic-noematic activity for Husserl. This only becomes a problem when you create an artificial “distance between the intending agent and the world qua world”. Only then does it appear that you “stand apart from all possibilities”, rather than always BEING IN particular possibilities.
Ok. Just wondering from whom this philosophy originated, for it certainly isn’t Kantian, in which perception does not construct anything at all. And you mentioned the CPR, so.....just connecting possible dots here.
Those initiated into the ancient mysteries took their oaths of secrecy very seriously. That secrecy together with the intolerance of "triumphant" Christianity has made it very difficult to understand what the mysteries were and what they meant to their initiates, but it's clear their impact was profound, even on philosophers of the time. We know little of the Roman cult of Mithras beyond what can be inferred from archaeology, making it even more difficult to understand than the cults of Isis or of Magna Mater. Certain of their rituals took place in public; those of Mithras were secret except to members of the cult as all took place in the Mithraeum. I just read a book where the authors proposed that the reliefs of Mithras and the Bull that are found in all places where Mithras was worshiped (the tauroctony) actually depict a mind-altering mushroom used in the rituals. I'd find it unsurprising if some such substance was used, but why it would be depicted in the form of the god, the bull, Helios, Luna and the torchbearers which are shown in relief baffles me.
The mysteries are lost to us, but I think it likely that what they were and what they meant, and did, to their initiates cannot be described in any case through use of language. They'd have to be experienced, and by a believer.
Philosophy isn't religion, nor is it art, or so I think. We shouldn't look to philosophy or philosophers for any deep insights into life or the world or ourselves, because philosophy can only be expressed through language, and there are limitations on the power of language to explain. Philosophy is supposed to explain, not evoke or inspire. When we look to philosophy as we look to religion or art, we read into it and the language used by philosophers far more than that language can reasonably be construed to mean.
My opinion for what it's worth.
Most people would disagree with you. That's why there is a new "Is there free will" thread every week. As if it matters.
Tell me how in Kant the perceptual act does not construct anything at all.
That would be ego, and conditioned thought, and discursive reasoning, in my reading.
Sorry, but the burden isn’t on me. The assertion is yours, and I’m interested in how you arrived at it.
Sometimes see three or four of ‘em, all lined up one after the other, same things being said by the same people, as if repetition makes the case.
Maybe some of them are right....dunno.
I take this issue the way Jean Luc Marion does: Husserl's reduction is incomplete, but it has a trajectory, which is toward givenness, and givenness issues forth in a negative correlation to reduction: the more one dismisses presuppositions that, to use Levinas' term, keep the moment pinned to the "same" that is, the totality of knowledge claims, the more what is given simply, or purely, is manifest.
Yes, I'm afraid I do believe there is something transcendental about our being here. Wittgenstein insisted such things are nonsense, but then, he wrote, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics." This, in 1929, the same year of his Lecture on Ethics, in which put ethics in the nonsense bin. What was he talking about? It was the "presence" of ethics as an absolute. He knew it all rested with ethics and aesthetics, and he was right, AND wrong: one could not speak what ethics is, what value is, but one can speak in its vicinity. this is what Marion does. And Eugen Fink and Michel Henry.
You said this. I just want to know what you mean.
In Kant's philosophy, 'perception' is one of the sources of knowledge, but it is 'the understanding' or 'judgement' which actually construes things. (Or misconstrues them.)
Never mind. Sorry I asked. First, even.
The contention is “constructs” not “construes”.
Agreed on understanding/judgement, but perception is the source of that which is empirically knowable, but it is not the source of empirical knowledge. It is possible to perceive a thing and not know what it is.
“...Our knowledge springs from two main sources in the mind, first of which is the faculty or power of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions); the second is the power of cognizing by means of these representations (spontaneity in the production of conceptions)....”
(CPR A50/B74)
This grants the strict passivity of human perception. We are affected by objects, which is called sensation, is supplied by specific physical apparatus, but at that point, no cognitive faculties are employed in the pursuit of knowledge. Nowadays, of course, that theory is......diminished.
But i do take issue with this. I think philosophy is THE religion. It's the people who are either inclined or disinclined to see it this way that makes the difference. I think ancient thought and its mysteries are important not because they are right, but because stand apart from systems of understanding which trivialize what it is to be human. Philosophy can reinstate something lost, only do so intelligently. And this is being done now, and has been for a long time, but few notice because, simply put, people are put together very differently.
Philosophy and deep and inspiring? How about Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety? Or Levinas's Totality and Infinity? There really are many, but they are embedded. Kierkegaard is very off putting in his idiomatic style and his endless references. Levinas is impossible, at first, but then you ease into his language.
I mean, it isn't a welcome thought, but the best stuff, and it does get really good, is hard as hell to get familiar with.
Like Kant.
I really should add that I am by no means a master of any of this. I simply read with understanding, and I usually do passably well. I read Heidegger for the first time about four years ago. Had to know, so I read Being and Time. Simple as that.
Astounding thing to wrap your mind around.
I take transcendence the way that Heidegger and Husserl do, not as a divine beyond this world but as an otherness immanent in being in the world.
But I think you’re on the right track putting Wittgenstein in the company of Henry, Levinas and Marion. He was a devoutly religious person even though he did not identify with organized forms of religious practice. That is why he admired Kierkegaard and St Augustine so much.
His biographer Ray Monk wrote:
“ “To Waismann and Schlick he repeated the general lines of his lecture on ethics: ethics is an attempt to say something that cannot be said, a running up against the limits of language. 'I think it' is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics - whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable.' On the hand, it is equally important to see that something was indicated by the inclination to talk nonsense. He could imagine, he said, what Heidegger, for example, means by anxiety and being (in such statements as: 'That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such'), and he sympathized too with Kierkegaard's talk of 'this unknown something with which the Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion'.
St Augustine, Heidegger, Kierkegaard - these are not names one expects to hear mentioned in conversations with the Vienna Circle - except as targets of abuse.”
I agree. You can't complain about the rent. You move in and learn how to do some things for yourself.
If we shouldnt look to philosophy for deep insights then we shouldnt look to religion or art either. First of all, it’s impossible to tease out where the philosophical or the religious or the artistic or the scientific begins and ends , because all these fields of cultural are helplessly entangled in each other. Secondly, shifts in religious thinking owe a great debt to the philosophical innovations of their time , as well as of previous eras. It’s hard to imagine reading Aquinas or Maimonides without noting the direct influence of Aristotle in their work, or the effect of Kant on Buber, Tillich and Niebuhr, or the influence of Levinas, Heidegger and Kierkegaard on a current generation of theologians.
Quite right.
Chosen consciously - 'Construe' is the same root as 'construct' but pertains to language and meaning, in particular.
Quoting Mww
Just the point I was making, thank you.
Agreed, in principle. But the originating assertion is operating under the auspices of transcendental idealism, as stipulated by its author herein. As such, to construe carries the implication of understanding, as you say, but understanding presupposes that which is to be understood, which is an antecedent construction, in the Kantian sense, called synthesis, and that is the purview of the faculty of imagination alone, having nothing whatsoever to do with perception in and of itself.
Hopefully we agree that perception does not construct anything at all. Or, if it does, that I may be shown how such should be the case.
But this ego is a slippery discussion. If it is taken to mean the assertive self, with confidence and even aggression behind it, as if in competition, then the ego is, by my lights, something objectionable, in need of a good critical censure. But if the ego is beyond this, an agency that is "other-worldly" then the best we can do is construct arguments and descriptions that are in the field of where this transcendence leaves the mundane. It's like ethics: we don't know what it IS, but we do know how we experience it and talk about it, and these can be objects of analysis. Ethics is an injunction to do or not to do something, and this is grounded in the "givenness" of experience, ande THIS is not reducible, or, if it is reducible, it is so in the language that constructs the idea that can be talked about, NOT in the injunction and its palpable counterpart: the OUCH! experience.
We can talk around it, about it, how it fits, is contextualized; we just can't interpretatively nail it down like I can nail down what a bank teller is or an igneous rock.
Well, the individuals you refer to are philosophers and theologians. They purport to explain things, or justify claims. No doubt I should have been clearer, but the religion I refer to (including the ancient mystery religions) generated a profound feeling of understanding through very emotive rituals and dramatic revelations of sacred objects or displays. Art, also, shows rather than explains.
Augustine was a very odd person. There's something strange about his eagerness to confess his sins and misdeeds. He seems to revel in them in a bizarre way, rather like Rousseau does. But like Rousseau he appears to think he's better and wiser than others for having been a sinner and proclaiming his sins to the world.
One of the qualities Kierkegaard exhibited in The Concept of Anxiety is that the "self" who loves or not is always represented as a result of a process geared toward completing a certain end. The possibility of being an agent is presented in contrast to that.
The prospect of selecting between "competing" desires is interrupted by another dimension where the options are not easily laid side by side.
I agree! I was trying to elucidate the point you made to that effect, but sidetracked it by my idiosyncratic terminology.
Quoting Constance
This is suggesting of the idea of 'higher self' or 'higher consciousness'. You find that in Fichte, who distinguished the finite or empirical ego from the pure or infinite ego. The activity of this "pure ego" can be discovered by a "higher intuition". It is also reminiscent of Schelling's 'intellectual intuition' or Jacques Maritain's 'intuition of being'. (Dermot Moran says that the German idealists retained some fragments of the 'doctrine of illumination' which had othewise died out in Western philosophy during the preceeding centuries; Maritain, of course, was a Catholic philosopher.)
I'm receptive to the idea; I think the term 'transcendental ego' is a plausible synonym for the 'higher self'. But it's hardly respectable in current philosophical circles; you will find it in Rudolf Steiner or theosophy but not in existentialism or phenomenology where it will usually be rejected as occult and or new age.
If you read Vedanta, the ego is precisely what has to be 'slayed' by the aspirant (chela) so as to awaken to the Self (see The Teachings of Ramana Maharishi). There is a parallel in New Testament in that the disciple is urged to 'lose his life for My sake', where Adam is the personification of ego and Jesus the higher consciousness. Buddhism rejects the idea of 'higher self', or any self, altogether, although arguably the Buddha Nature teachings can be mapped against it (with strict caveats).
Quoting Constance
In my view, the problem of ethics is in the constitution of modernity itself. 'Being modern', apart from being born at a particular moment in history, is also a distinctive and novel form of consciousness, based on a new conception of what it means to be an individual. This article about Max Weber casts some light:
And also this one on Emile Durkheim:
I noticed, when studying Buddhism, that one of the supreme virtues of the Buddha was yath?bh?ta?, 'to see things as they truly are'. It was simply assumed that this was one of the attributes of the Buddha's omniscience. Whereas in techno-culture, 'how things truly are' is devoid of value, meaningless, as 'what truly is' are the elemental particles or forces of physics, within which the individual has emerged due to fortuitous circumstances.
Food for thought, that's all.
YEA!!!!
Why this widespread prejudice against "the composite"? Why isn't matter magical and spiritual? Why assume a soul separate from matter is better than matter? All these are assumptions from dualism
But you will have to deal with objections that come in later. If there is to be a true phenomenological description of what unfolds before us, the "no show" of this higher consciousness, and here just think apophatically, so that when the inventory of what is "there" is all there is to be accounted for, cognitive, eidetic, structural, and so on, never shows up. This is why meaningful talk about this is usually cast int he negative. As Kant reasoned, by extrapolating from what IS apparent in experience, to what has to be the case in order for this to be. Reason, is there, and it presents itself in the forms of judgments we make in a regular way. But where does this come from? Even if you are a Kantian about the "soul" and its rational functions, you realize that when we look upon these functions, you're perspective is circular for to affirm the rational form of judgment occurs IN judgment. There is no third perspective that is removed fromt he very condition you are trying to affirm. Can the eye "see" the eye, so to speak? This is what Wittgenstein was very clear on. Transcendental reality cannot be conceived, for the understanding can only understand itself, and to speak of a "beyond" of this is nonsense.
But on the other hand, ASSUME that our power of reason is an absolute, say, a "function" of the mind of God, and assume that when a function of the mind of God, through the agency of a person, a transcendental Unity of Apperception, if you like, conceives itself, this is an absolute conception, for what else can the mind of God produce? That is, God's judgment cannot beg questions.
But this is a very tough row to hoe. Here is where Wittgenstein comes in, for in order for a concept to make any sense at all, its opposite has to be conceivable, and the opposite of thought and its logic is not conceivable.
But then, how do account for these apodictic intuitions? they are at best, representations of something we cannot conceive. But it is my view that while we cannot conceive of the nature of logic (btw, Kant didn't call logic an intuition, but only a discursive function. But how do these discursive maneuvers work? Well, intuitively. What else?), we certainly can talk around it, look closely at how our conception of logic and other intuitions are engendered, get in proximity to the generative source. This is what Eugen Fink does in his Sixth Meditation. He follows Kant (or the Kantian Fichte) through to further reaches: the "enworlding" of the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, theosophy is off the table in respectable philosophy, and I think there is good reason for this; but then, it is not WHAT is said, but the intuitions behind saying. The disagreement is in the justification for positing something, and this always goes badly extravagant metaphysics, systems of unseen ontologies.
What circles are you talking about? Phenomenology? No. The issue of a transcendentla ego in phenomenology goes back at least to Kant (Plotinus and Christian metaphysics, and lots more, of course) in serious contemporary philosophy, but this is sin continental philosophy, where Kant never died an untimely death. He was never refuted, only ignored. there is Kant, then the three H's, Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger, and everyone else in the system of this thinking. Check out, for example, The Transcendedntal Ego by Sartre, his refutation of Husserl on the nature of the ego.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't read much Eastern metaphysics, because it's metaphysics. That goes for explicit Christianity as well. But I am willing to read "around" these thoughts. Kierkegaard, Otto, Buber, then Husserl, and oward, these articulate the matter very well, better than their popular counterparts.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't really agree with this kind of thinking, on either side. Reason is not cold and calculating; it's not anything at all! Just the form of judgment. And the humanistic dimension of our existence is better handled by Levinas. But most if not all really miss the boat on ethics. The business of philosophy is to get as far into basic assuptions as possible, and this means ethics has to be revealed for its "parts". It has parts, and is not irreducible. What is MEANING?? This is the question. Not Frege's "sense" but meaning, like this lance in my kidney, or my love of Ravel. Value is the center of philosophical concern. It is first philosophy. Ask, what is the Good? This is where an inquiry into human existence begins. NOT what is reality? This begs the question: why do you care what reality is? It is a performative QBing, this asking the question is motivated, concerned, there os a mood, an affect that makes it all important.
Quoting Wayfarer
I do get this. But I want to take the matter where philosophy goes, and not stop where issues are so entangled. Quoting Wayfarer
A feast, really. Read the Abhidhamma and there is talk about confronting ultimate reality. The trouble is, there is no real explanatory concepts that reveals what this is. Like ethics, it cannot be spoken, but one CAN speak around it, of it, and phenomenology offers the vessel for just this. Heidegger's language of Being, dasein, hermeneutics, time, space, authenticity and so forth opens doors. Husserl, too. Kierkegaard, and Levinas, and there are so many who present the case, provide a contextual framework for serious discussions about what enlightenment and liberation really are.
This issue is fraught by the tension between spiritual enlightenment and The Enlightenment. Ultimately there has to be some form of rapprochement with religion, which for historical reasons, Western philosophy is deeply unwilling to consider. ‘Not believing in religion’ is a powerful undercurrent in Western philosophy - there’s an implicit barrier between secular and religious, and you have to be very mindful of where you step.
Another tension is that in the West, with its characteristic belief in Progress, there is a constant sense that a new philosophy or a new solution to the predicament of existence has to be invented. It's constantly struggling to come up with novel forms, new expressions, ideas that haven't been heard before - the impilcation being that 'liberation and enlightenment' are presumed to be conditions or states which have never been previously understood.
These are deep problems, I'm not proposing any solution. But I think what has to be worked out is, if enlightenment and liberation are the goals, what do they mean? Christianity doesn't often utilise that kind of terminology, especially Protestant Christianity, which casts everything in the light of sin and redemption, rather than ignorance and enlightenment. That's a shadow to the whole enterprise and whatever philosophical proposal is made to address these issues has to navigate these treachorous seas!
(In the early 00's, Jurgen Habermas had a series of dialogues with Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, on the dialectics of secularisation. There's an interesting OP on that here.)
Quoting Constance
:clap: :100: But there is a response to your rhetorical question: we care about what reality is, because, in Aristotle's phrase, 'we seek to know'. The desire to know, to understand, to make sense out of existence, is surely a deep drive.
But again, the philosophical issue, in my opinion, revolves around the conception of knowledge that develops out of the Enlightenment. Actually, a lot of that is covered by Husserl in Crisis of the European Sciences - his critiques of Galileo and Descartes. And then that leads to Heidegger, so I can see the trajectory of your thinking there.
I think the challenge is to come up with a fresh perspective taking all these factors into account. Tough row to hoe!
But I do propose a solution. It lies with phenomenology. And Wittgenstein. And Husserl. and others. The point is not that any one has put their finger precisely where it needs to be, but that once the Husserlian epoche is is understood, one can finally see where philosophy is supposed to go. the reason there continues to be so much controversy is not that philosophical understanding has yet to achieve this monumental task, but that people are all put together so differently/ If you ask me, the Buddha had it right, and that was long ago, but he didn't have the theoretical tools to talk about it, to provide a phenomenological exposition on the actual descriptive features of enlightenment. As I said, such things are notoriously unsayable, but what is sayable are the contextual features, and phenomenology shows just this. But still, it does depend literally on how a person is put together to acknowledge this. Not all can, and this I affirm from discussions and reading. Not all are math wizards, nor artistic geniuses, or acrobatically inclined and so on. This is just the way it goes, and it is the fundamental reason why what I will call existential aptitude is not universal: it is not like the ability to understand the basics of logic or experiential intuitions, what every person simply knows. It takes a talent, if you like. Don't really care how this sounds, but I am convinced this is just the way it is.
Sin, redemption? See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety.
As far as I]'m concerned, philosophy is done, already reached its end, and in theory, this would be Derrida. But Derrida is just pointing to something that remains a complete mystery, and I think he was a remarkable thinking person, but likely too smart to see that it was the intellectualizing that finally had to be dropped. It's fun to be brilliant, but to put it in Buddha's language, it does encourage attachment.
I'm am done with navigating: Calm the breath, suspend thought and its moods, attitudes, affect, and just put it all down, and here is where one stands close to something really profound, which is the eternal present, a Kierkegaardian idea that found its full expression in Heidegger, who sought passionately for a new grounding in human existence, and thought perhaps the answer could lie with....Buddhism. (see his famous Spiegel interview). Of course, the Buddhists have been light years ahead of everyone for a very long time, but they were never good at telling people why. Not that I've read.
Quoting Wayfarer
Case in point: why does one seek to know? Seeking is not a logical move, it is a passionate one. One cares, wants, desires, as you say, but these are not "reality" terms. Not ontological categorical terms. I am saying that every act ever committed by anyone is performative question begged when the purpose is made known, for the purpose is bound to motivation, desire and the rest. None of this? Then there is no substantive meaning to what is done. WE bring meaning into the world of facts, ways Wittgenstein. Every utterance, thought, moment of experience may have its own end and content, explicitly stated, but underpinning this the quest for meaning, the foundation of all things.
There’s a few gems in that interview.
[quote=Heidegger] my conviction is that only in the same place where the modern technical world took its origin can we also prepare a conversion (Umkehr) of it. In other words, this cannot happen by taking over Zen Buddhism or other Eastern experiences of the world. For this conversion of thought we need the help of the European tradition and a new appropriation of it. Thought will be transformed only through thought that has the same origin and determination.[/quote]
I gloomily suspect that this is true, but I have no inkling if it is being done. If any of Heidegger’s successors are doing that, I’d like to know, but I suspect not. I am familiar with the anecdote of Heidegger being caught reading from D T Suzuki and saying ‘if I understand this man aright, this is what I’ve been trying to say all along’. But I take his point that we can’t assimilate Zen Buddhism tout courte. We - westerners - have created the cultural predicament which we suffer from, and we have to find a way out of it on those terms. I think that’s what he’s saying.
In my case, I have been quite involved with Buddhism during my adult years, mainly as a result of some excellent Buddhist books and advocates, including Suzuki. In fact I self-identify as Buddhist but am also painfully aware of the ‘problem of cultural appropriation’ and my own native unsuitability for the kinds of discipline that Buddhism enjoins.
(Have a look at David Loy's articles, http://www.davidloy.org/articles.html)
Might as well have said ‘only a miracle’. I think he’s right, which concerns me, as I have grandchildren, and I honestly don’t know what kind of world they’ll be facing. I think what he’s saying is that man has created a world over which s/he has no control, or even any real understanding. A ‘reset’ of any such world must needs be an immensely traumatic affair.
And this one:
Gee, I bet the French just loved that. :blush:
Sorry for the digression.
This guy was so naïve, so simplistic sometimes... It really makes one wonder about the lack of street wisdom of some overly theoretical philosophers, who don't have much patience for empirical facts, nor any awareness of their own cultural biases apparently. Also there is this "manifest destiny" of the German volk here, as the "thinking volk"... Ja ja. My grandfather really liked their metaphysics in the camps.
But the proof is in the pudding, a conversation about doubt, moral realism and the rest. Otherwise, it is just a generic complaint. Do you think the Buddha in his phenomenological prime, had doubts?
You have to see that Heidegger believed that language is an integral part of the construction of Being, and so, when you examine works of philosophy, literature, poetry, rhetoric, and then, even in the hard sciences (think Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions), you are FIRST looking at language possibilities, meanings as that which can be brought to bear on any novel affair. I don't speak German or ancient Greek, but who knows, Heidegger could have a point. I leave it up to the philosogists. As to Heidegger's bout with Nazism in the 30's , it is universally agreed that it was despicable.
But then, he know nothing at all about what they were doing in the camps. But then again, he never properly condemned all of this afterwards. So, do what Hubert Dreyfus did: take what is there and just put aside the rest as irrelevant to the philosophy, which was absolutely amazing.
Naive is the last term I can imagine that would apply to Heidegger. On the other hand, at the time there was this infatuation with volkism, wasn't there? Himmler and the rest took it seriously, that there were ancient divisions between the pure races that were corrupted by "foul practices". I don't think he bought into this at all, but he did buy into the spirit of a German rebirth which he thought the Nazis could pull off. But then, they went sideways.
Everybody is put off by that. But I think, if it were discovered that Louis Pasteur were, say, a child molester, would we simply stop taking vaccines? Heidegger was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and to bypass him is to miss something essential to understanding the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
The gloomy part is in the way culture has yielded to technological attitudes, and the world becomes more and more like "standing reserve", enframing, I think he called it, which amounts to, in my thinking, a complaint similar to Kierkegaard's regarding Christendom: what is meaningful and originary is lost, so we are alienated in the world, no longer "at home" because our lives are now made out of utility concerns and is not responsive to this primordial part of what we are (alienation from God, said Kierkegaard. And for him, it was this cultural fascination that was the essence of sin). See how the Marxist's frame this in terms of class exploitation and alienating capital. Nietzsche went after Christian resentment against the greatness of certain men, and this resentment became a metaphysical institution. Everyone has their terms of alienation, but all seek redemption somewhere in the body of thought they inherit. I tout the Buddhist approach because it is a method (as is Husserl's epoche, I should add) of liberation from all structures of thinking. Husserl and Heidegger laid a foundation for discussing what this is about.
As to Heidegger's successors, well, that would be what I am reading now. Right now, I am reading Being and Time again, critical works on this by Michel Henry, Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditaion, I go back to Kierkegaard often to remind me that Christianity doesn't have to be so nitwitted, and as well, I read Meister Eckhart, Buber, Levinas, Caputo (see his Radical Hermeneutics!), I review Kant sometimes, never read Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit but I've been meaning to, Marion (On Givenness which extends the thinking of Husserl, as does Fink. I am fascinated by the idea of presence. Reading Heidegger put the framework of being human as Time, but it was Kierkegaard who inspired this: his Concept of Anxiety is a bit hard to read, but if you stick with it, it reveals the basis of existentialist thinking, and you can see why Heidegger goes back to the Greek, where Being was a central issue, that is, being and becoming, Parmenides and Heraclitus. Derrida. Can't say I understand him well, and I don't have the patience to read Grammatology, but I have read Differance and others, and I think he puts the nail in the coffin of analytic philosophy.
Why do I find all of this so important? Because of hermeneutics, for one thing. This makes the system open. Open to what? Truth? What is truth? This lies in a description of the world as it is, and this is phenomenology: dismissing the natural attitude, making a qualitative move to enlightenment. to move forward from here, onw has to inquire and read.
Quoting Wayfarer
It does sound like a weird thing to say. I think it is as I commented above, Heidegger believed enlightenment is forged out of language, and there is some primordial way to disclose the world and erase its alienation that is the brass ring of philosophy. He had a lot of confidence in the Greeks, used their original terms a lot. I don't know, maybe he was right about something here.
I read in some edition to the Tibetan Book of the Dead that Tibetan monks, in their day, and now, as well, I think, for this is not a publishable affair, anyway, they would discuss their "subterranean" experiences in language that is very exclusive, esoteric. I wonder....
Or "only a Fuhrer." But for him, it seems that "god" and "Fuhrer" were much the same.
That is fine, and not what my disagreement is about. My point is about the idea that he "attributes to the Germans a special task" via the German language. Which strikes me as nationalo-centric.
To illustrate my disagreement, IF language is an integral part of the construction of Being, in my interpretation of this sentence, it would imply that a human being speaking several languages is a more complete being than one who speaks only one language. But this is not the conclusion Heidegger draws. Rather for him, who to my knowledge spoke only German, perhaps with a smattering of greek, learning another language such as English or French would have been closer to a compromission with lower forms of thought than those possible in German. There is a striking parallel with the idea that racial diversity is a problem rather than an asset.
His philosophy, his world-view, was consistent with nazism, which he adhered to voluntarily. The Dasein is Hitler-compatible. THAT is the problem.
One aspect of this whole game -- and a reason why I think his Spiegel interview remark about French philosophers speaking German was a kind of joke but a telling one -- is that a great deal of 19th century German philosophy can be seen as a response to 18th century French philosophy, the time when Voltaire was advising Frederick the Great in Prussia. Followed by the revolution and napoleonic empire which swept over Prussia. By the 1950s though, the relation was reversed and many French philosophers spoke of Dasein, Umwelt and Gestalt... Here too I see a parallel between Hitler's revenge after the humiliation of WW1.
That really is the issue. I think of it in terms of Heraclitus and Parmenides: the ego that is conversing here with you is memory that seizes the present, and this is a constant process, this generative and generated self. But there is that mysterious present, isn't there? This is not an abstraction, not a Zenoistic contrived play with time and space. The Kierkegaardian analysis has two fronts that I see. One is the remembrance that we actually exist, and existence is not an idea, and Hegel thereby misrepresents what it is to be a person, for we are apart from the conceptual agreement that circulates and steals our identity. The other is the paradox of sin: We are only sinful when we posit spirit, for in this positing we see our alienation from the eternal. His Knight of Faith is one (beyond what K is capable of) who can make this qualitative movement into faith, and be here, in the world, a baker, a butcher, but reside with God as well. As I understand it, this is understood in a temporal analysis of our existence. A long story having to do with historical sin and culture and the turning away from our primordial relationship with God.
So how does one even conceive of the soul and God? As I see it, apophatically. the soul is this ineffable essence that is our eternal reality, and is revealed only as the sin of our obsessions (our historical/cultural fixations) yields to the eternal present, and this present (which Wittgenstein takes seriously) is the true eternity.
I look at what meditation is, and I find precisely this analysis. Turn off the imposition of culture and its temptations and engagements, i.e., turn off thought and affections, and time vanishes. The eternal present.
Yeah, that is annoying. But I don't know why he makes this claim about German and Greek so I just leave it alone. On the other hand, how is it that he can make claims about other languages' deficit in meaning possibilities if such a thing can only be understood by native speakers, and he is NOT a native speaker of French or English or Swahili anything else? After all, the difference he must have in mind must be nuanced, what only a native speaker could know.
Oh well.
Quoting Olivier5
I suppose. But Being and Time carries none of this resentment itself. Was it in the background? You know, it is speculated that B&T does open this door, after all, dasein is an historical construct, so this invites a competition between cultures and their languages. But I still say, who cares. His phenomenology is an extraordinary reinterpretation the world. Powerful and compelling. F*** the rest of it.
What the "ego" may seen to be in these different psychologies that you refer to is not self explanatory from my point of view. Noting the limits in each theory makes me less inclined to state what is true for everybody than to see the works collectively pointing to one thing.
What have you read of Kierkegaard?
No full works, just extracts now and then. I never get anything from them, and for me that's rare with a philosopher. Sorry if I put him down. This whole thing about "superiority" is good to address, since we all feel it. I don't mind if straights feel superior to gays, if men feel superior to women, or if Germans feel superior to everyone. It just depends on how far they take it, and usually someone's sense of superiority will eventually be tested and the truth revealed
It sounds like you are mainly interested in finding echoes of what you already have concluded.
Possibly, but Kierkegaard doesn't present a philosophy that I find philosophical. He went to lectures by Schelling (as did Engel) who was arguing that Hegel stole his philosophy and Schelling was probably right about that. However Schelling and Hegel present avalanches of thought that create many dimensions in my mind. To me that is true philosophy, and I don't think Kierkegaard learned very much from Schelling at the end of the day
I don't get how you could assert such a claim with only having a passing familiarity with what Kierkegaard actually said.
I've read about 20 pages of his work all in all. Ye not much but many talk bad of Hegel although they read maybe a few paragraphs from him. Kierkegaard probably read less Hegel than I've read of Kierk. Hegel doesn't define his terms upfront, so often you have to read a whole book of his before you get his point. I don't see Kierkegaard's thoughts going anywhere and that's just how it is (I'm a very abstract thinker)
"Kierk" went to Berlin specifically to read Hegel along with other people. The notes to Kierkegaard's books include detailed references to his objections to Hegelians in his milieu.
Perhaps you are mistaken about the conversation that happened there.
Kierkegaard claimed Hegel was confused by his own identity, yet Kierkegaard himself was always looking for supernatural agents to save him. Perhaps they were equally sure of themselves
What text are you referring to in both cases?
It was mentioned above about how Kierkegaard felt about Hegel, and it common knowledge that he called on spiritual beings to save him from anxiety
What limits?
There is nothing of a textual reference in this. Why is it that Kierkegaard opposed Hegel?
So, something you claimed earlier as a point of common knowledge is supposed to be a point of reference to a body of work you have no familiarity with.
Pardon me if I am not engaged by the logic.
Kierkegaard clearly was not a very abstract writer and was intimated by Hegel's logic. That's enough context for me
Quoting Constance
Many of the thinkers you have been referring to have presented themselves as resisting an error of one kind or another. Along with the version that is being put forth as the truth is an explanation where others have gone wrong. Discourse may require the continuing lack of of answers on some level.
What error? Don't be shy, what are you talking about?
I don't have a view that solves differences. But the difference between Lacan and Foucault strikes me as a sharp disagreement about what is happening. We live our experiences and the mirror we view them through is significant. The right thing to do is is incumbent upon understanding what is happening correctly.
Easier said than done.
At worse he was just expressing a prejudice, at best a joke. The French too think highly of their own language, supposed to be more logical than some other languages... which most French don’t happen to speak! It’s just a self-congratulatory cliché circulating in the culture.
Quoting Constance
I cannot comment, as I’ve never read B&T. I happen to think that ‘being’ cannot be understood, and that ontology is a waste of time. I’ve read Husserl though, and Merleau Ponty who said that B&T was a mere expansion on one of Husserl’s late intuitions.
So my question is: does B&T pay its debt to Husserl, or does it not? Does it recognise that it is entirely based on the brilliant, revolutionary thoughts of a JEW? Or is it an attempt to arianize phenomenology?
Not at all. It is beneath the consequent moral realist's dignity to discuss such things.
The pudding proof of consequent moral realism is precisely in its authoritarian, inapproachable stance.
It's that "this is not up for discussion" that makes the consequent moral realist who he is.
No.
Doubt (vicikiccha) is one of the hindrances, and the Buddha has overcome all hindrances.
:yikes:
I’ve gotten a lot further with Husserl than I ever did with Heidegger, in that, a lot of what I’ve read from, and about, Husserl, simply rings true with me - his critique of naturalism, for instance. I’m casting around for an edition of Crisis of the European Sciences, I feel as though it’s a book I really ought to own.
In defense of H., such linguistic supremacism and exclusivism has been a trend in many European nations. In the light of this, learning a living foreign language (or even just a different dialect of one's language) is seen as being beneath one's dignity.
But maybe the sins they confessed openly were just the tip of the iceberg, an effort to hide their graver sins?
Of course he did:
[i]pa?icca-samupp?da
Dependent co-arising; dependent origination. A map showing the way the aggregates (khandha) and sense media (?yatana) interact with ignorance (avijj?) and craving (ta?h?) to bring about stress and suffering (dukkha). As the interactions are complex, there are several versions of pa?icca-samupp?da given in the suttas. In the most common one, the map starts with ignorance. In another common one, the map starts with the interrelation between name (n?ma) and form (r?pa) on the one hand, and sensory consciousness (viññ??a) on the other. [MORE: SN 12.2, DN 15 ][/i]
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/glossary.html#pa%E1%B9%ADicca-samupp%C4%81da
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.002.than.html
But the problem is, rather, and I don't know how to say this to you nicely, is that you lack respect for the Buddha. Yet you nevertheless keep referring to him. You are determined that you already know what enlightenment is and isn't, and anyone who doesn't match those ideas of yours, is, per you, wrong or insufficient.
I wonder why you look to the Buddha, if you clearly have no intention to take his words seriously.
Yes, but this sort of parochialism ought to be seen for what it is: a rejection of the other.
Philosophy, ie. love of wisdom entails rejecting foolishness and lowliness.
Sometimes, this seems to work out in less than democratic ways ...
Have you read Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics? It was linked up to on another thread. It reads really well, looks in many ways similar to the Krisis.
Intimidated by what? And you are seeking out "abstract writers"??
He used Hegelian dialectics in his own reasoning to confound Hegel. His complaint with Hegel goes to the very foundation of existential philosophy. What is real is existence, and this is experienced as a single subject. Kierkegaard presented a phenomenology of alienation that saw rationalists like Kant and Hegel privileging an abstraction, as if the universal of a concept AS a concept could encompass palpable existence. You have to read Philosophical Crumbs and Repetition, among other things to see how this complaint plays out, especially in ethics.
But the real reason why K is so important is that he proclaimed the true reality we face lies in the interiority of experience, in the "passionate engagement" of actuality. This yearns for consummation and redemption beyond dogma of mere ideas. We are made of the dramatic stuff of a lived existence, and Kierkegaard thought this is a place where the finite meets the infinite at the level of ontology, the "meta" level of analysis of existence. Of course, he was, as Heidegger called him, a religious writer, and explicitly so, but his philosophy is not like this at all. In fact, in The Concept of Anxiety, he argues largely outside religious references.
Then there is Hegel who, like a good rationalist, put the onus of religious understanding on reason. I'm with Kierkegaard, in my own way: what is reason? It has no content as such, but is the mere form of judgment, and always takes its meaning from the content delivered by actuality. Saying that the real is rational is not entirely wrong, but only if we keep this in mind: reason is an abstraction ONLY because it is taken (abstracted) from existence to be observed analytically, and the same goes for all such inquiries. Originally they are part of an ineffible whole, ineffable because one cannot stand apart from it to say what it is; one is always , already In it the moment inquiry even begins. "Actuality" is the same. Originally it is an integral part, not separable at all. We do the separating when we think about it. Talk about reason and actuality as separate is like talking about heat and molecular activity separately (both scientifically conceived terms, here).
In the context of Kierkegaard's position, rationalists simply ignore actuality.
Don't worry about being nice, you do just fine.
But you know where I am going with this: When Buddha had is his significant enlightening moment (moments, period, whatever), was he following the four noble truths? Did he read this somewhere, follow the methods laid down after the fact? Of course not. The four noble truths is not an ontological dogma. It is an observation and a method. I am interested in how to describe the enlightenment experience in the context of Husserl's epoche. This is actually being done. If Buddha had read Husserl and others, he would have said, why yes! Of course!
I like to talk to all kinds of thinkers, but some schools of thought i dont like to read. What could eventually resolve Kierkegaard's anxiety if God is a fiction? He did not want to go to reason, it was a path too arduous with its anxiety for him. Hegel's dialectic comes to an end while continuing forever. I do not know what Kierkegaard's final conclusion was. He is too Augustinian for me
It is not to say this wrong at all. But it is incomplete, and ANY philosophy that can help complete it is valid regarding what Buddhism is.
Incomplete how? Because it's a short paragraph from a glossary? Every term in that paragraph has numerous references in the suttas and in the commentaries, which have further references in suttas and commentaries.
The incompleteness is in your approach to the matter.
Why look outside of Buddhism for things to help one understand Buddhism?
Then it is a mistake of philosophy. This chimera of a philosopher king is what it's all about.
But here we speak of philosophy. We make inquiries, describe, contextualize, and not to make the unspeakable speakable, but to explain what it is all about at the level of basic questions. Just that!Quoting baker
Because this is what language does. It is inherently interpretative. Calling something ultimate reality is seriously incomplete. Language is, as I see it, a yoga, and there is nothing new here. But consider, when ideas were first put forth, they were ideas, a way of disclosure as to what things are. Such ways are malleable, open. Life is suffering, e.g. What is suffering? You can dismiss this question, but there IS an answer to it, a metaphenomenological answer. And this stands to elucidate concepts like enlightenment.
But this begs the question. God? What does Kierkegaard say about God apart from the religious dogma? And what does he say about religious dogma? You really have to comes to grip with the profound differences between rationalism and existentialism.
Augustine is revered by the church for many reasons, and he does provide interesting philosophy here and there, as with sin: the absence of God, essentially. Not a complete argument, but Kierkegaard saw this as true. See his analysis of sin and the "positing of spirit" but do so as he does, with no scriptural references as all. Nor with any of the church's metaphysics, but rather with an explicit denial of this: the book's full title is, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. It is an existential analysis of experience, making Time, history, culture, finitude and infinitude, and most of all, the real palpable stuff of what human being are, their heartaches and joys as central to understanding what Christianity really is all about.
How is anxiety possible at all? How does the mundane affairs of our anxious and concerned spell out in a phenomenological ontology? This is where Kierkegaard puts his timeless stamp on things.
I don't think analyses of systems of implicit power in social institutions is helpful here, and I don't know much about Lacan. But getting understanding of the "right" view is not therefore impossible because it is not easy. why do we disagree so much? Why was Quine so adamantly against Derrida? Why is there such a wide schism between continental and analytic philosophy? It is because, I claim, of the way we constituted intuitively, and the way theory clouds reasoning and experience. I read Being and Time and I knew he was right, instantly. I also knew Wittgenstein was right about his Kantian claims about the delimitations of understanding. These were platforms to build on, but foundationally, right. And Husserl's epoche, I knew instantly he understood something deeply important, the same thing Buddha knew, only the latter knew it so much better.
Others look upon the epoche and all the post Husserlian work (especially by the French) as just the 'seduction of language". But the proof is in the pudding?
I think Augustine was such a big sinner that he had to posit the idea of taking on Jesus's merits in order to feel clean again. I think he went to hell, if there is such a place. I don't know enough about Kierkegaard to say more than I've already had. I appreciate his influence on Heidegger
His Confessions do sound suspiciously confessional in the extreme. I mean, confessions are commensurate with the deeds done, and he was way over the top. Popular Christianity is a huge guilt trip, especially when it comes to original sin the way Luther talks about it (see this in the Smallcald articles) as the monstrous act we all share in.
But on the other hand, and this would be Heidegger's response as well, since that time we have become trivialized by our instrumental mentality that issues from the dominance of technology. The world is now a "standing reserve" rather than a dynamic for meaning making in human life. this is why Heidegger championed poetry as a kind of crucible where our dasein creates value. German romanticism has a long history, and the essential idea is that the arts are redeeming. But the arts, I should add, are not complete.
It's a dilemma because reason says its immoral to take someone else's merits yet spirituality seems to necessitate it in order to become new again. Even Jesus must have had some assertion with his penis in order to be "man" instead of "child" but how and should we reproduce if the whole of our being is mired in sin?
But this is just the dark side of Christianity, the only thing Nietzsche thought about. There is another side altogether.
Take the confessional. If the priest is invalid, no sins are removed. Because all repentance is insufficient. But if the priest is valid, ah hoc there goes the sins. There is no way to justify the legality in Christianity. If we say its just above our thoughts, well so is the mysticism in all other religions. So why give preference to the Bible in our society?
But consider that you put the whole matter in the arena of people with a vested interest in the status quo, whether they are simply believers or institutional fixtures, they all, all that are included in your comments, without an intellectual conscience in place well enough to think philosophically about religion. So yes, most Christians lack, well, the capacity for sound argumentation. Kierkegaard is famous for exactly this. See his Attack on Christendom. Thre is a reason he is called the father of Existentialism.
One doesn't have to be a moron or a predator to be a Christian, I suppose is the point.
Well thanks, if I read more of him I'll check out that work
Sartre and many others were big fans of H. To my knowledge it's only Merleau Ponty who saw H. more as an usurper than as a heir to Husserl.
By H you mean Heidegger. Heidegger did not pull B&T out of a hat. It is the phenomenology that Husserl gave him, and they do agree a lot. But Husserl did not encompass the whole human dasein, and if you read Heidegger's thoughts on space, time, hermeneutics, moods, das man, the Greeks, freedom, authenticity, instrumentality, ready to hand, presence at hand, and so on, you see how original he is.
Of course, I certainly haven't read all of either, so I can't speak authoritatively, only based on what I've read. But it was surprising to read Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. There was Sartre there, Husserl here, Heidegger there, I mean this guy really laid the foundation for all of this.
Sure, but my question was: does Heidegger pay his debt to Husserl in B&T?
Quoting Constance
Your are correct that those analyses do involve the power of social institutions. I brought them up more in the interest of introducing personal development as seen through psychological models as an element that deserves a seat at the table if one is to bridge across so many expressions of thought regarding the "ego" as you are endeavoring to do. I threw out one conversation I am interested in. That is not to put them above, Piaget, Maslow, Vygotsky, Jung, etcetera.
When I said: "The right thing to do is is incumbent upon understanding what is happening correctly", I was thinking of that as the ethical component of all these philosophies under discussion in this discussion.
Did Husserl pay his debt to Kant? Kierkegaard to Hegel? Kant to Aristotle? Heidegger to Kierkegaard? But then, no, he didn't. In the end, after Freiberg, the Heidegger's reached out to the Husserl's, and the latter told the former to go F*** themselves. It was because Heidegger sided with the Nazis, even for a brief time.
As to theory, reading Husserl's Ideas is nothing like B&T at all. Both are extraordinary.
But there is The transcendence of the Ego by Sartre in which he takes issue with Husserl's generative ego, very busy as the fountain of experience. Sartre thought this compromised the unseen, which he infamously called nothingness.
Haven't read Mereau Ponty. He is on my list, along with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
What I found most interesting in The Transcendence of the Ego by Sartre is the argument that Kant meant the "ego" could be assigned to any action at any time but that the experience comes from another source.
Not visiting the text right now, I think what is meant is that the transcendental unity of apperception is a functional center of all experience as it produces pure synthetic form. It is an essentially rational agency that is, of course, transcendental. Thus all judgment issues form this. Experience is also intuitive, and sensory intuitions have there source in something completely other. Noumenal "reality" has two fronts, the TUA is us, the other is not. Husserl called it hyletic. Reading Patrick Whitehead: "Hyletic phenomenology allows for ontological reversibility and recognizes the “unhuman” elements in things."
Yes, of course. The very name of phenomenology — a word invented by Husserl to describe his approach to philosophy — is based of the Kantian idea that only phenomena are accessible to us.
But the point is he does go on without self effacing disclaimers, even though Kant's "Copernican Revolution" thesis hovers over everything he did. Of course he was allowed to do this because his handling of things was done as an independent synthesis of Kant and others. Heidegger is the same, though Husserl hovers close by at times. Husserl's natural attitude obviously played a role in the das man of B&T, as well as the idea of authenticity, but then, where did Husserl get it? Of course, he read Kierkegaard and others. Time? Clearly Kant's Deduction is behind this, but no mention of Kant in the exposition of Time's adumbrations of memory in the Ideas I.( Elsewhere? I haven't read of it.)
People want to diminish Heidegger, but it can't be done. In Heidegger, the human reality lives and dies and cares and is presented in the fullness of our Being in the world. But he does not affirm the transcendental ego, as Husserl did, and it is here, at this juncture this ego makes no "appearance" that interesting phenomenology lies.
The word was used before husserl though.
I don't share your confidence in finding a unifying viewpoint amongst these different thinkers regarding the experience of consciousness.
For what it's worth, here is Sartre's statement in the Transcendence of the Ego:
The thing is: You're not doing your homework. I'm tired of referring you to suttas for the questions you ask. There are Buddhist answers to the questions you ask about Buddhism. But you ignore them. Forget them. Apparently, don't even think of looking to the suttas for them.
It's as if you actually aspire to keep yourself ignorant of Buddhism, so that you can keep making up your own parallel Buddhism and your own definitions of terms.
:( :( :(
Hegel used the word in the title of his first major work in 1807. This is because he invented phenomenology. Kant was in the tradition of Berkeley and Locke. Fitche tried to break from this mold and make a new type of thinking possible, but he only made the prototype blueprints. Schelling invented a lot of ideas for Hegel (who wrote an early work on Fitche and Schelling, siding with Schelling) but his philosophy was Vendentic, simply mystical idealism. This is not what Hegel is because he defends realism AND idealism in a unified system, which is phenomenology. Hegel's works presents experiments of thought that move and pass into other in long sequences. You have to actually read large portions of these pages to really understand what he was talking about and why he was an innovator
The question is why Stein goes one way, Heidegger another? What makes for the timeless indecision of philosophy is not the issues being so vague, but the vagaries of people's experiences. Some people are simply intuitively wired for existential affirmation of religion.
Just as Kierkegaard ignored much in Christian dogma, and was a better Christian than all of them, it could be argued. It depends on what it is you think is the essence of the matter at hand. When I say if Buddha were at the time of his phenomenological epiphany exposed to contemporary phenomenology, he would affirm it, welcome it, consider it as a penetrating thought, you ignore this. Or if God's grace were explained phenomenologically to Jesus he would have tossed it into the sermon of the mount. I think this true. For phenomenology provides the genuine foundation to understanding human existence. It takes what is essentially important in all religions, spiritual practices, and provides an explanatory basis. I claim that if you follow Husserl's reduction to its logical end, you end up with what is essentially important about Buddhism: Liberation and enlightenment. Who cares about the other things/ They are incidental to this.
You disagree but do you really know what it is I am talking about? All religions, all cultural institutions, language, indeed, the entire human endeavor is really describable at the level of phenomenological ontology. The Four Noble Truths begs questions, and phenomenology has the only responses, for only here are basic questions at their most basic.
No, you're like someone who reads only a few entries from a language dictionary but claims to be proficient in the language.
If all paths would lead to the top of the proverbial mountain, then everyone would already be enlightened and all your efforts are redundant.
Yes. I think it was Hitler who reinspired theism (of some sort) in Heidegger's soul. This happened in the early 30's after some years of atheism
But is this not already unified as a structure of thinking distinctly phenomenological? The devil is in the details, of course, but to turn away fromt he naturalistic attitude, away from the science that popularizes its ideas through technology, toward the basis of experience that is logically antecedent to science: phenomena.
Ex nihilo? Such talk! Now that's metaphysics, there with God creating out of nothing. The mind cannot even conceive of such a thing, and in fact, makes it a point to tell us it is apodictically impossible. Existential freedom has to do with choice and possibilities, but as to what is more fundamental than choice, which is the principle of sufficient cause, it says nothing of. But absolute freedom issuing from our por soi essence is nonsense, and they say he posits this simply because he wanted to hold French Nazi collaborators accountable.
To say experience is generated ex nihilo is no way to remedy an unseen cause. Granted, the generative source (keeping in mind that it is not a brain, for this leads to circular argument, for it is a brain that conceives this brain. Only a third perspective could actually say what the generative source is, and this is nonsense, says Wittgenstein) is transcendental, but that doesn't mean it is "out of nothing".
Dewey said the same in Art as Experience". Those of us who live without struggle are, I would hazard, the least substantive people there are.
No, it's not like that. You want to think of it as an historical phenomenon. To me, it is much more interesting than that. Parsecs more interesting.
Quoting baker
But Buddhism gets it right. All others are trying to get where this goes, but they don't know it. The question is, what is the means of accounting for this, describing it, explaining what enlightenment is in experiential descriptive contexts. Phenomenology. Why? Because it rigorously dismisses assumptions about the way things are explained outside of the immediacy of what is simply there, the bulk of explanatory distractions.
Possibly. But for me, such exhibitionism (so to speak) is an aspect of artifice, or a sign of a deeper psychological problem.
:up:
Quoting Constance
Yeah, a(nother) boon for solipsistic banality. As Olivier5 points out: "The Dasein is Hitler-compatible." :shade:
Quoting Olivier5
:100:
Re: der Wille zur Einklammerung ...
People exaggerate German self promotion in relation to other peoples because of non-German fascination with Nazis. Most countries, tribes, and civilizations thought themselves superior to their enemies. This holds for Huns, Zulu, Arabs, and Jews. There have been more books written on Hitler than any other human because of the aesthetic fascination of it. What Nazis did many others did or would have done if they had the logistic capacities of the Nazis. The greatest killer in history was actually a Dutch king who ordered the slaughter and butchering of Africans over his lifetime. People won't get over WWII until they realize that there was nothing unusual about it. Heidegger was a very sheltered man, but since he never ordered the murder of any person whatsoever, I don't consider him a Nazi. He was simply swept up in a cultural revolution
You must be "very sheltered" too.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/18/in-his-own-words/ :eyes:
Or perhaps Heidegger understood phenomenology better, and took the epoch to a more primordial beginning , than did Stein.
“The lightest of the slight is beyng.
The most entity-like of entities is God.
In beyng, the distinction between beings and being (in the sense of beingness) comes into its own.
Being means: presence.
Seyn never lets itself be identified with God. It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity.
As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”(Heidegger)
“ Can we be satisfied simply with the notion that human beings are subjects for the world (the world which for consciousness is their world) and at the same time are objects in this world? As scientists, can we content ourselves with the view that God created the world and human beings within it, that he endowed the latter with consciousness and reason, that is, with the capacity for knowledge, the highest instance of which is scientific knowledge? For the naivete that belongs to the essence of positive religion this may be undoubted truth and remain a truth forever, even though the philosophers cannot be content with such naivete. The enigma of the creation and God himself are essential component parts of posi-tive religion. For the philosopher, however, this, and also the juxtaposition "subjectivity in the world as object" and at the same time "conscious subject for the world," contain a necessary theoretical question, that of understanding how this is possible. The epoche, in giving us the attitude above the subject-object correlation which belongs to the world and thus the attitude of focus upon the transcendental subject-object correlation, leads us to recognize, in self-reflection, that the world that exists for us, that is, our world in its being and being-such, takes its ontic meaning entirely from our intentional life through a priori types of accomplishments that can be exhibited rather than argu-mentatively constructed or conceived through mythical thinking.”(Husserl, Crisis)
Quoting Constance
If you follow Husserl’s reduction to its beginning you end up with the structure of time consciousness , which is both liberating and conforming
In theory all men are equal. In practice that principle can never be perfectly established. The Nazis saw the Jews as promoters of communism and modern art and in fact many were. I judge the Nazis for their crimes against humanity (genocide, abortion, sterilization) but finding one's national Volk or whatever is something all nations do. Cite the worst text from Heidegger on the subject and I think under scrutiny it can be shown he's position was no so unusual.
One must order a murder to be a Nazi? Well, that lets those who were ordered to murder and did so off the hook. Swept up by a cultural revolution too, poor fellows, who as we know always said they were just following orders. As much victims of the real Nazis as those murdered at the camps, no doubt. I suspect Heidegger would agree with you.
I am not sure what not being satisfied with these conditions imply. When I can change my conditions for the better under these conditions, I try to do that. Every other person I know operates under the same principle of recognizing opportunity and trouble as tightly wound aspects of possibility.
What are you proposing, a polity where circumstances occur upon a different basis?
If Heidegger wasn't for killing anyone I could care less what he said and thought
Probably all nations are heinous, morally repugnant, and savage. Most people are. To be intolerant only of intolerance is the new doctrine, but there is nobody who is tolerant and unbiased. Did not Nietzsche say all this already?
“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)
“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185)
What Husserl is doing here is showing that for each person, their participation in interpersonal activities
and consensually objective meanings is not simply an paring of you and me to make a we, but a ‘we’ from
each person’s own interpretative vantage.
Funny thing. I feel the same way about the craven, miserable, pretentious, obscure, mystical, romantic, jackboot-licking, Hitler-loving, Jew-hating Nazi bastard.
How do you feel about Wittgenstein?
Differently.
Sure he was, according to his biographer, Hannah Arendt and many others , Jee and non-Jew, who knew him.
He never bought into Nazism as a political ideology. He was trying to promote his own philosophical revolution , and when he discovered it had nothing to do with what the Nazis had in mind, he broke away from them.
He was never particularly anti-semitic, certainly no more so than Wittgenstein.
I have always thought that Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Böll is an important kind of witness of this. Eating from the host. Don't receive everything you are offered.
Read the wiki I linked. Not convinced? Ok. We'll have to agree to disagree. Other German intellectuals of his stature (such as Jaspers) showed before during and after the war what not collaborating with nazism, intellectual anti-nazism, looked like.
His student that he seduced, yes.
I agree completely. If one is going to attack a historical figure, it’s usually a good idea to at least do one’s research.
I didn't say violence is right. Nobody can prove within reason that a fetus is not a person. In all reasonableness, emotion aside, it could be a person. But half the world has violent emotions towards it and many follow this to its end. Just add to this the violence done to those who have been born and you can see its a horribly violent world. There was nothing unusual about Hitler. He was just another Stalin, Napolean, Atilla, Caesar, ect. It's a terribly violent world, a very violent day this day. People need to get over their Nazi fetishes
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
She never complained, so who the hell are you to pass judgement?
I suspect you’re probably as morally suspect as Heidegger. perhaps more so, since I never knew him to engage in lazy, cheap shots at historical figures without bothering to do any of the research, as you do.
I see that connection as a kind of standing wave where it is difficult to make out if the observation is a limit to be observed as something applied to the region of the "personal" or a limit that restricts the use of a universal.
Put that way, there is something missing here. People claim to own some territory. I am trying to follow the logic as best as i can.
Why do you assume I've done no research? Because I poke fun at the fellow? Not all of us follow in his goosesteps, you know. His infatuation with Hitler, the fact he was a party member even to the end of the war, his contempt for the Jews, are all well known. His acolytes just don't care about such things. I do. Have you read those charming speeches he gave as rector in Freiburg? Pertinent parts of his Black Notebooks and letters to brother Fritz? If not, I'm ahead of you when it comes to research. But it may be you find them endearing, or at least tolerable. So be it, but don't get peeved when others point out what he said and wrote.
Prove that the term "the Jews" meant all racially Jewish people for Heidegger. If Trump says the Chinese started the virus, does this mean every mom and pop store owner in Beijing is responsible for the pandemic?
What would you contend he meant by referring to "the Jews"? So-and-so who lived a few blocks away? In what way do you find that pertinent? No doubt some of his best friends were Jewish.
Sorry, this is fun but I must sign off for now.
No, his contempt for the Jews is NOT well known, it is up for constant debate. He never bought into the virulent Nazi anti-semitism that presented Jews as amoral vermin. His comments about jews in the black notebooks had to do with a very different sort of cultural analysis, the same sort he applied to the Russians and the Americans. I asked you about Wittgenstein because Wittgenstein himself harbored many anti-semitic views
that were fashionable at the time: that jews are secretive
and mere copiers of European creativity. He even said he understood why a European country would want to keep Jews out.
Thre reaearch you’ve done is one or two-line snippets from the black notebooks with absolutely no background context from his philosophy to put it into any perspective. He approved the release of these notebooks because they are philosophical notes, and cannot be comprehended properly without knowing the philosophical background.
From his biographer:
“Was Heidegger anti-Semitic? Certainly not in the sense of the ideological lunacy of Nazism. It is significant that neither in his lectures and philosophical writings, nor in his political speeches and pamphlets are there any anti-Semitic or racist remarks. Thus, when Heidegger in his circular before the May Day celebrations described "the building of a new spiritual world for the German people" as the "command of the hour," he did not wish to exclude from this task anyone willing to cooperate. Heidegger's Nazism was decisionist. What mattered to him was not origin but decision. In his terminology, man should be judged not by his "thrown-ness" but by his "design." To that extent he was even able to help hard-pressed Jewish colleagues. When Eduard Fraenkel, professor of classical philology, and Georg von Hevesy, professor of physical chemistry, were to be dismissed be-cause they were Jews, Heidegger in a letter to the Ministry of Education tried to prevent this. He used the tactical argument that a dismissal of these two Jewish professors, "whose extraordinary scientific standing was beyond doubt," 17 would be especially harmful to a "borderland university,"l8 on which foreign critical eyes were particularly focused. Besides, both men were "Jews of the better sort, men of exemplary character." He could vouch for the irre-proachable conduct of both men, "insofar as it is humanly possible to predict these things."19 Fraenkel was dismissed despite Heidegger's submission, while Hevesy was allowed to stay on for the time being. ”
From Heidegger’s biographer:
“ In the cultural field, competition anti-Semitism genera]]y includes the as-sumption of a specific "Jewish spirit." But this Jewish spirit that one should beware of does not exist for Heidegger. Indeed he always objected to this kind of "spiritual" anti-Semitism. In a lecture in the mid-1930s he defended Spi-noza, declaring that if his philosophy was "Jewish," then all philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel was Jewish too. This rejection of "spiritual" anti-Semitism is all the more surprising as Heidegger is usually fond of emphasizing the German element in philosophy, contrasting it with the rationalism of the French, the utilitarianism of the English, and the obsession with technology of the Americans. But unlike his comrades-in-arms and rivals Krieck and Baeumler, Heidegger never used this "German element" in philosophy for differentiation from the "Jewish" one. Karl Jaspers, asked in 1945 for an opinion on Heidegger's anti-Semitism, came to the conclusion that in the 1920S Heidegger had not been anti-Semitic. "With respect to this question he did not always exercise discretion. This doesn't rule out the possibility that, as I must assume, in other cases anti-Semitism went against his conscience and his taste."27 Certainly his kind of anti-Semitism had not been a reason for him to join the Nazi movement. Nor, on the other hand, did the (soon to be revealed) brutality of Nazi anti-Semitism deter him from the movement. He did not support its actions, but he accepted them. When Nazi students in the summer of 1933 stormed the building of a Jewish student fraternity and proceeded with such violence that the public prosecutor's office could not avoid initiat-ing an investigation, and in this context requested information from Rector Heidegger, he brusquely refused to pursue any further inquiries on the grounds that those involved in the raid had not all been students.”
Except all the people who carried out the program.
Who were those people? Why were there so many of them?
I disagree. The desire to understand it as an event is healthy and is much different than framing the matter as an outburst of inchoate rage. You want to assign an explanation where others are exploring causes.
Maybe not this:
From Wittgenstein’s biographer:
“...it is clear that for most of the time when he talks of , Jews' he is thinking of a particular racial group. Indeed, what is most shocking about Wittgenstein's
remarks on Jewishness is his use of the language - indeed, the slogans - of racial anti-Semitism. T-he echo that really disturbs is not that of Sex and Character, but that of Mein Kampf Many of Hitler's
most outrageous suggestions - his characterization of the Jew as a parasite 'who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favourable medium invites him', his claim that theJews' contribution
to culture has been entirely derivative, that 'the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed', and, furthermore, that this contribution has been
restricted to an intellectual refinement of another's culture ('since the Jew ... was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others') - this
whole litany ofIamentable nonsense finds a parallel in Wittgenstein's remarks of1931.
Were they not written by Wittgenstein, many of his pronouncements on the nature of Jews would be understood as nothing more
than the rantings of a fascist anti-Semite. 'It has sometimes been said',
begins one such remark, 'that the Jews' secretive and cunning nature is a result of their long persecution':
Wittgenstein wrote:
‘That is certainly untrue; on the other hand it is certain that they continue to exist despite this persecution only because they have an inclination towards such secretiveness. As we may say that this or that animal has escaped extinction only because of its capacity or ability to conceal itself. Of course I do not mean this as a reason for commending such a capacity, not by any_means. ‘
'They' escape extinction only because they avoid detection? And therefore they are, of necessity, secretive and cunning? This is anti-
Semitic paranoia in its most undiluted form - the fear of, and distaste for, the devious 'Jew in our midst'. So is Wittgenstein's adoption of the metaphor of illness. 'Look on this tumour as a perfectly normal
part of your body!' he imagines somebody suggesting, and counters with the question: 'Can one do that, to order? Do I have the power to
decide at will to have, or not to have, an ideal conception of my body?'
He goes on to relate this Hitlerian metaphor to the position of EuropeanJews:
Wittgenstein said:
‘Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated as their intervention in European affairs would actually
merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life [and no one wants to speak of a disease as ifit had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones).
We may say: people can only regard this tumour as a natural part of their body if their whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up with it. You can expect an individual man to display this sort of tolerance, or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things that
makes it a nation. I. e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone both to retain his former aesthetic feeling for the body and also to make the tumour welcome.
Those who seek to drive out the 'noxious bacillus' in their midst, he comes close to suggesting, are right to do so. Or, at least, one cannot expect them - as a nation - to do otherwise. ‘
It goes without saying that this metaphor makes no sense without a racial notion of Jewishness. The Jew, however 'assimilated', will never be a German or an Austrian, because he is not of the same 'body': he is experienced by that body as a growth, a disease. The metaphor is particularly apt to describe the fears of Austrian anti-Semites, because it implies that the more assimilated the Jews become, the more dangerous becomes the disease they represent to the otherwise healthy Aryan nation.”
I dunno. It seems, in part, to involve the Nietzschean idea of where the "Christian" form of ressentiment enters the conversation. That point of view suggests that whatever one might say about cultural differences has been absorbed into another culture. And that is why one could notice it as such.
Reading that did make me feel noxious, especially since I have Jewish family, but there are Hindus who say you cannt be a true Hindu in heart unless you are indian. Racial identity goes from history straight into our psyches and archetypes (to use a word from another man suspicious of Jews: mr. Jung). Whether race is truly a biological thing or not does not change the history and psychology of it
Then what is it then? It is supposed to be something independent from other categories but nobody seems able to say what they are.
Race is similarities among people sharing a past history. You can call a single immediate family a race, their past ten generation, or any other combination you like. The fact that there are similarities is genes among groups of people is uncontestable. It's hard to discuss though because it seems to get into taboo territory and I honestly don't know enough about the science to discuss it much further. They say Asian people have the highest amount of Neanderthal genes (usually) and African people have none. But I am sure there are black people who do because race is not really a discrete thing. It's all a continuum, yet it is still certainly true that you are more similar to those in your side of the continuum then to people at other places in it
What is the area of taboo? Characterizing people through stereotypes?
Anthropologists say that race doesn't exist in spite of the fact that everyone know knows that a race is not a discrete unit. A lot of people don't like talk about race, and the word itself is becoming less and less acceptable
I am not sure how to place this observation along side of your comments saying response to the genocide of WW2 is too wrapped up in assigning blame.
People simply fetishisze the evil of Nazi leaders
Well, some people are not focused upon the cult that perpetrated the crime but the crime itself.
That's fine
First, the logic is all wrong, and it actually has a name, which is affirming the consequent. We don't first theorize about freedom, then concerns, worries, fear, issue from the mere assumption. Phenomenology is descriptive, not some self fulfilling prophesy. It begins with anxiety, that is, were ARE anxious, concerned in our everyday lives. Second, materialism in this reasoning would be ad hoc: not backed by its own merits as a sound theory, but just posited for the sole purpose of refuting freedom.
Third, and perhaps most important, and certainly the most difficult, is that what Kierkegaard and his ilk have in mind is not a description of social changes creating circumstances that are anxiety producing, but a structural feature of consciousness itself, as consciousness, that is what makes anxiety possible at all. Read into the third chapter, and we will have found that K is putting Time at the center of this possibility, that is in time the past, an established body of experiences, makes claims on the future, and if we simply go along with things and never question, second guess, interfere with events, then we never are able to sin (sin and its exposition IS the point of the book). What is sin? Sin occurs when we "posit" spirit, and this means we step back from our worldly existence and exercise freedom from the regular stream of events (as animals do, as things are, predictable) that would otherwise claim us. What K is talking about here is really a very simple matter: the stopping of one's affairs altogether, then, in the wake of this, realizing that you are not simply a thing, but are free to make choices. THEN, once this distance between you and rote behavior is achieved, you stand in sin, because in this affirmation, you realize that you are really a soul, and your essence belongs to God. I think K is close to Augustine on this: sin is the absence of God.
Or something like that. Those that follow, Husserl (not so much, really), Heidegger, Sartre, et al, don't take God as an essential part of it, but K's analysis of time and freedom and the anxiety of facing an unmade future is central to existentialism.
Quite.
I have acquired an edition of Anxiety now and will proceed with it.
The question is not which people killed the most. The question is: do you want to live in a Nazi society? If yes, you are welcome to read from Nazi philosophers and find them fascinating. If not, I would suggest to read Husserl's phenomenology rather than the arianized version of Heidegger.
Prepare to be irritated. He is not reader friendly. Doesn't even try to be. A lot in response to Hegel, and Hegel is ridiculous. But you don't need Hegel to read this.
If I were to go back in time, to "those" times, I would hate everyone's views, nearly everyone's. Blacks were Sambos, Chinamen were squinty eyed fools. But Heidegger wasn't nearly as bad as you suggest. He murdered no one, refused to post anti sematic materials while rector, didn't know how vile things were going to be, and only lasted a year at the post. Only kept his party membership to avoid persecution. His anti-Semitic statements are embedded in a general way of thinking, not hateful, but not constrained by our "postmodern" conscience which is often rather absurd.
But he considered it just an occasion bad judgment, and never publicly condemned what the Nazis had done. That pisses me off.
He was one of those good Nazis. Sort of like Sergeant Schultz from Hogan's Heroes. Even looked like him. He didn't see anything, either.
https://images.app.goo.gl/sxyhxbeamfbx7tux7
Who cares? He had high hopes for the Nazi party, but that was in 1933. Didn't know or condone what came after. Not as if he were Himmler.
And yes, there are gradients participation. Imagine yourself a member of the republican party and Donald Trump had secretly committed genocide.
I'm not fascinated by Nazis. I just recognize it was easy for Heidegger to fall for the Nazi ploy.
Who indeed? Nazi, schmazi, eh? But you might want to read some of what Thomas Sheehan wrote about Heidi and his devotion to National Socialism sometime.
A bit too easy in my view. I would think a good philosopher would know better.
He's dead and only Gott can help him now. But a guy who fell in love with Hitler can't be that smart. His philosophy can't be any good. A great Jewish thinker once said: "you will recognize them by their fruit."
You didn't live back then.
Since you would have forced Heidegger to apologize, I guess you need to start forcing Christians and Jews to give up the Nazi OT. Oh boy
Not really, no. I couldn't care less. I am just going to take his 'thinking' with a ton of salt. Judging from his politics, he was easy to fool.
Really? More like a do-nothing Nazi. Here is the story of a truly good Nazi:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
Indeed, it's the banality of evil.
I confess I was being ironic.
Oooops.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
:clap: :rofl:
Quoting Constance
He unapologetically supported murderers and antisemites and fascists. Again, the Dasein was Hitler-compatible ... And even after the war Heidi had to be "de-nazified". :shade:
He did not openly support Nazism after they started murdering people. That party has been around for almost 20 years before genocide started. As with ancient religious texts, I'm all for reinterpreting in order to have a new modern take on them. As for Heidegger, I don't see anything that is Nazi about his philosophy and thus there is nothing that needs to be reinterpreted and cleansed. Imagine a Cambodian wrote Being and Time as you read it. Does this really matter??
So what?! Heidi enthusiastically recommended the militantly racist, antisemitic Mein Kampf (1925, 1933) – ideological bible of Endlösung der Judenfrage – to his own brother. WTF. :brow:
Can you cite the passages that call for murder of Jews? That work was clearly a hysterical attempt to unite a nation and many people didn't take everything in it literally. The "Address to the German Nation" by Fitche was more self-consistent and although he too called for Jews to leave Germany, this idea that Germans and Jews could in no real way cooperate together in a nation goes back before the time of Kant. Hegel and Nietzsche were read by Nazis, although they defended Jews. So the whole issue is rather complicated and it's hard to pass judgments on times we can't fully understand. What we can pass judgment on is murder, which Christians say God can and does command and which Heidegger's rejection of Christianity did not support
That's our era. You can't judge things that happened 100 years ago except for violence and murderous acts. Other things are too easily misunderstood. Even nowadays we need to have a certain amount of understanding for Christians who defend old testament genocide. If they actually kill someone, no then we don't have any more sympathy
He remained a member of the party until the end of the war in 1945, but perhaps you don't think being a member of the Nazi party constitutes support.
It constitutes not being strong enough to condemn the war, but Heidegger didn't know about the concentration camps until they revealed by the Allies
Does the following count as such a passage?:
Quoting 180 Proof
That wasn't Heidegger's fault. He was unapologetic, but then it wasn't Heidegger ran the death camps. Essentially what Heidegger haters are saying is that they don't like Nazis. You don't really look at Heidegger at all.
Dasein Heidegger compatible? So is the British monarchy. So is American manifest destiny. Are you serious?
Sounds like Hobbes. In our age nobody would say this openly. Back in the day this was not unusual. I have a book by an old English judge written in response to J.S. Mill's book on liberty. The judge talks of crushing skulls instead of following Mill's utopian vision. That style of talk is just what it was like back then. I am sure every German suspected Hitler at schizophrenia, but they tricked themselves into thinking the German "geist" moved within him. Hegel too, I am sure, had schizophrenia, but he turned it into some of the most beautiful and truthful philosophy ever written. Hitler turned out to be a failure, yet keep in mind those were hard times for Germany and many felt that harsh language was not inappropriate
Given your Buddhist background, I'm eager to read your impressions of it!
Where did Fitche call for Jews to leave Germany?
:up:
I've started Kierkegaard's 'Concept of Anxiety', but can't shake the feeling that anxiety/angst/dread is simply what the Buddha terms dukkha. I will persist with it though, it provides many insights into the culture of that period and also some interesting perspectives on other philosophers of the day.
https://www.google.com/search?q=fitche+and+jews&rlz=1C1OKWM_enUS867US867&oq=fitche+and+jews&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i10j46i10j69i61j69i60l3j69i61.2273j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
He has a lot of quotes on Jews throughout his writings. He wanted a German nation run by Germans alone
Considering the circles Heidegger worked within, it's unlikely he knew anything about the exterminations
Of course it makes a difference if he supported geonocide. My number one problem with the three major religions on the West are their endorsement of mass murder at "God-Allah-Yawweh's" commands
"…the Jewish nation excluded itself…from the German nation by the most binding element of mankind—religion…It (the Jewish nation) separates itself from all others in its duties and rights, from here until eternity... I see absolutely no way of giving them [the Jews] civic rights, except perhaps if one chops of all of their heads and replaces them with new ones, in which there would not be one single Jewish idea." Fitche
So your argument is that Heidegger must have smelled the bodies that were burned and knew it was extermination and not soldiers bodies?
This brought to mind a powerful essay from The Hedgehog Review two years ago, The Strange Persistence of Guilt, Wilfred McClay.
Perhaps this too is a manifestation of Kierkegaard’s ‘angst’. (The remainder of the article is paywalled although I was able to read it as a trial article when I encountered it.)
The number one thing people feel guilt over is sex. According to Freud and Jung (and I think they are right) active sexuality is a choosing of one parent (i.e. boy for his mom) and rejecting the other; in essence, rejecting all parenthood for independent ownership of "thingness". This has very deep affects on the whole psyche and the guilt from it spills over into other areas. People will think they feel guilty for one thing when it really springs from somewhere else
I suggest you go back to hate sites and leave philosophy alone.
That's how to read it. Try thinking
So you know for a fact that in what policy was right in Fitche's age? That's not hate on your part but it is arrogant. I don't judge past ages because I didn't live then. Does not modern cultural theory suggest the same? I support Biden, many Democratic policies, but I don't go around judging people from the past as if I knew what it was like to be back then.
I've often pondered that this may be the case. There is a strong overlap - dukkha - suffering, pain, stress, unease. Is there a text that articulates dukkha/discomfort with more of a psychological perspective? Pretty sure there was something great by Alan Watts on this but can't remember where I read it. Can't help but feel there is a special resonance in 'angst' - Kierkegaard talks about anxiety as a dizziness of freedom. We might have the capacity to become anyone and this, shall we call it liberty, may be experienced like an ominous sense of mounting disaster. Or something like this. It sounds like slow motion Nietzsche to me.
Overcoming that sense of dread or angst is the meaning of ‘liberation’ but it’s a very difficult goal to realise. I think Kierkegaard probably is more aware of that than almost anyone else in recent European culture.
The problem is that ‘discursive mind’ can never realise that goal - something which Kierkegaard makes clear - that’s his meaning of ‘unscientific’ - as in his book ‘concluding unscientific postscript’. ( I’ve downloaded the audiobook of Concept of Anxiety, and have learned something already!)
Yes, that is certainly a clear point of K's. That which truly matters is not reasonable. But then I can't help wonder about how miserable K was in life, how crippled he was by his own choices and how much he got in his own way. Is he really someone we should take heed of?
Watts is similar but different. Chain smoking, hard drinking, busting his arse to feed his many children. Dead in his fifties. Is it a case of physician heal thyself? Or is it the case that we are who we are no matter what we believe or profess? I always remember that Watts called himself a spiritual entertainer. And that is probably right. Nevertheless he was a compelling figure of great reading and syntactic talents. And these days we can hear him and see him on YouTube.
The fatal coastline of the transcendental ego sinks many ships.
It seems you judge past ages after all, then. Is mass murder the only exception to your inclination not to judge those who lived in the past?
We know we share some type of "human nature" with the past and we know murder is wrong. I believe we can know some philosophical truth and it is wrong to say "God can command murder". However, we don't know apart from this many circumstances from the past, who was good, who was bad, what was the greater good in each case. You guys are saying we should throw out the entire philosophy of a great writer because of possible poor judgments of his in terms of politics. I don't like the Nazis but we don't even know everything about what was going on back than although we can say, based on human nature, that when they murdered they committed crimes
Well philosophy and psychology are indistinguishable. It's a modern error to separate them
I’ve read it. I know Tom Sheehan pretty well. He’s kind of a wild man of activist philosophy, a real character. But as I said before , the route to an adequate understanding of Heidegger and the Nazis is through his philosophy , and I never thought Sheehan grasped his ideas very well . Kind of like Jaspers , who wanted to get rid of Being and Time because he thought it was nothing but dangerous mysticism.
"Poor judgments" forsooth. "The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law." Also sprach Heidegger. Something more than poor judgment is involved in that kind of thinking.
Regardless, though, I don't think his philosophy should be thrown out, but I'm in any case personally unimpressed by what I've read of Heidegger, as I tend to agree with Carnap that his prose is obscure (and for me often portentous), his views mystical and romantic, and to the extent I can understand what he's said to have written, prefer the views of Dewey regarding technology, art, education and what we are and do as parts of the world. So, my disregard for his work isn't merely based on the fact that he was a Nazi, though I think his romantic and mystical bent inclined him towards fascism and authoritarianism. I find him loathsome as a person, and can't entirely separate the person from his philosophy as others seem able to do.
I referred to Sheehan because of his useful summary of the conduct of Heidegger as a Nazi during and after the rectorate, and because of his analysis of the excuses made by Heidegger in his efforts to rehabilitate himself after the war. Jasper, of course, had his concerns about Heidegger as well, as did others who knew him.
Hitler would have been remembered as a great leader if he was properly lead by his cabinet. He was a crazy man given drugs to appear as if he had the "spirit of Germany". It was an attempt to save a nation, but there were bad people involved who's ambition and pride led them to mass murder
Whose report are you basing the idea that Hitler was not directly involved in the genocide from its inception to its execution? It contradicts everything I have read upon the subject. It sounds like some crap Buchanan used to spew.
He was technically insane so there is no way to know
So, your testimony is a first hand account?
No but we have video of Hitler. Just look at him and you know he's crazy. You can't really judge a puppet mental patient like you do. We know who the people were behind the Holocaust (Himmler, ect). Hitler was in his own world and Heidegger was not a member of that group
I was only asking where you got the information that Hitler was outside of the Holocaust or was simply the tool of others. The passage I quoted earlier shows him the author of a role you claim was impressed upon him. None of your perspective makes sense from anything I have read of the history.
What have you read to give you such a different understanding of the facts?
Hitler didn't write all of his rambling book. What I'm saying is that the man was psychotic most of his life and watching videos of him completely confirms this. People watch him with a fascination with the Nazis. Yes! it's not me who is doing this, it is people obsessed with the "evil man Hitler". He was mentally ill and may have been evil but I don't know that and neither do you considering he had a serious mental illness. You can't know how those people really process reality and its irrelevant what papers Hitler signed
Are you really saying you can't tell Hitler was 1) crazy, and 2) on drugs from his videos? That's ridiculous
I am not disputing any claims about his condition. I am disputing the distance you place between him and the crimes he committed as reported in multiple histories, biographies, etc.
So far, all I can tell is that you watched a lot of the History Channel.
I don't own a TV. I go by what I've studied about Hitler's doctors and above all on reading Hitler' condition from all his videos out of here. If a person is crazy and on drugs he can't possibly be the one really running a nation. He's a puppet
Have you read any history books or biographies that detail what he did and when he did it?
Hitler was crazy long before he came to power. Dr. Morell gave him meth, opiods, and cocaine on a regular basis. Hitler was given shots around every hour and they were concoctions of over 70 substances. They had to keep him under control
I've read books Hitler, yes. I consider writings of such to be easily mistaken about facts of personality. I have known a lot of people who were crazy and a lot of people who used drugs. Watching Hitler is seeing all of them in one person
:up:
The ethical void (re: Destruktion ... das Man .. die Kehre) at the heart of Heidi's philosophy was/is susceptible to being filled unapologetically by "Only das Führerprinzip can save us" (i.e Seinsgeschichte aka "destiny").
From previous threads:
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
You seem very racists against Germans. I'm Italian and not offended, but your use of words is racist
Why are you quoting German words as if they are wicked?
Oh, well quoting German words as if they are Nazi implies that can't be used apart from the Holocaust
German words are wicked. Have you ever tried to decline German adjectives before?
Ortega y Gasset has a great rebuke which goes along the lines of "what it explains, you already knew, what it leaves out, is kept that way."
I would link but he is one author that is under represented in the Internets. It is in his book upon Metaphysics.
So the German language is bad? Hebrew is not bad and neither is German. A language is part of a culture so you are condemning a culture. We don't know all the connections between language, culture, and biology, so maybe your condemnation extends to all of German descent.
A reminder to cumpari for whom believing is seeing (... "und denken ist dank"). :roll:
Is mysticism really seen as such a great thing in philosophers? by philosophers?
Heidegger is not just resented for his swastika but also for his style, and probably more for his style: it's not that strange for clever people to do wicked or stupid things, but folks hate to have their time wasted with twisted, indulgent prose. I like some of Heidegger's early work, but I don't like the mystic stuff or the ethical stuff. He's very good on a few important issues (basically where he intersects with Wittgenstein.) But you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Have you looked at The Jargon of Authenticity?
[quote=link]
The rhetoric function of using the apparent archaism of language to uncover the true meaning of words directly relates to a philosophical conception of truth as something that has to be rediscovered after being ‘buried’ by modernity (as Dasein needed to be retraced from the wrong tracks of ontology in Being and Time). Concepts of authenticity are marked precisely by such lines of argument, by rhetorics of return and rediscovery. It is the political aspect of such ideas that interested Adorno, the functions that such reasoning fulfils.
[/quote]
https://epochemagazine.org/26/revisiting-adornos-jargon-of-authenticity-1964/
https://www.arasite.org/adjarg.html
[quote =link]
Some sense of the 'aura' communicated by the jargon of authenticity may also
contribute to understanding how it supports the fascist state. The aura is
partially communicated by the fact that the words employed by the jargon don't
have any specific conceptual content, but create the impression that something
meaningful is being said just because these words are being used. The 'aura'
created by the use of this language is specifically the impression that
something of the speaker's very 'essence' or 'being,' something of the
speaker's very self, is conveyed through his or her words. Once this
impression has been conveyed, that is sufficient to satisfy credibility demands
regardless of the actual conceptual content of the speech. But it is the very
lack of specific conceptual content that causes the aura of an authentic self
associated with these words to submit to decay. The individual is robbed of
his or her individuality by the jargon. The speaking subject is virtually
eradicated since the language used to convey the speaker's 'self' is itself
empty of specific content (15-16).
Adorno begins his direct attack on Heidegger from this point. Heidegger's
speech about existence (the Da) in terms of immanence and the immediacy of
life, with its theological undertones, essentially 'whisks away' the boundary
between the natural and the supernatural. Transcendence is tamed and brought
into close reach for everyone. This bringing of transcendence close to home
via a widely disseminated form of speech imposes a generic 'person' upon
everyone using the speech, a mass-consumption person not unlike the
'interchangeable persons' posited in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of
Enlightenment. The jargon itself disseminates the very 'they-self' that
Heidegger condemned in Being and Time. The jargon's political and economic
functions consist in the fact that by it the 'formal gesture of autonomy
replaces the content of autonomy' (18). Adherence to a mass, socially imposed
self creates the illusion of participation in a homogenous middle class by the
lower and working classes. The language implies a social contract without
actually providing one, and masks the fact that it has done this by the very
act of forbidding specific content to be attached to the notion of the self.
Doing so, according to Adorno's account of Heidegger, would reduce
existentialism to 'anthropology, sociology, psychology' (28).
[/quote]
https://lists.srcf.net/pipermail/theory-frankfurt-school/2003-May/002345.html
Also I really don't think there's a fear of German culture. Instead there's a rational concern about racism rearing its ugly head. Personally I don't like talking about the average IQ etc. of various peoples. I think it's intellectually and morally suspect. Even if there are such differences according to some hypothetically sensible metric, let's just leave it alone. I don't see any good coming from it, and we've already seen as a species the bad that comes of that kind of talk.
Heidegger admittedly does leave you wondering what the truth is, so his style is a segway into something else. I'm not sure who you read after Heidegger. Hegel didn't have a good style but he always has an idea he is looking for. Heidegger perhaps was obsessed with language and it's abstractness and I don't consider him top-notch thinker like Hegel, Einstein, Hawking, or Aquinas. Those thinkers presented ideas in their fields that far exceeded what someone would usually expect. But this cannot be said for Heidegger
You know, I think "oompah oompah" must be German as well. I thought of linking to "Der Fuhrer's Face" but reconsidered.
https://photovault.com/226756
Is there a superiority of Hebrew over German, of Kabbalah over Heidegger? Heidegger's tradition started by Meister Eckhart, of who's following quotation I have attached my commentary:
Eckhart, Sermon IV, Latin Sermons: Teacher and Preacher,
"Here note that when we say that all things are in God this means he is indistinct in his nature..."
This is kind the opposite of what Aquinas says and in line with Kaballah
"and nevertheless most distinct from all things, so in him all things in a most distinct way are also at the same time indistinct."
So everything is indistinct, God included. But He makes everything most distinct by His existence.
"The first reason is because man in God is God. Therefore, just as God is indistinct and completely distinct from a lion, so too man in God is indistinct and completely distinct from a lion, and likewise with other things."
God is all in all
"Second, because everything that is in something else is in it according to the nature of that in which it is."
God is everything within things
"Third, because just as God is totally indistinct in himself according to his nature in that he is truly and most properly one and completely distinct from other things, so too man in God is indistinct from everything which is in God"
So God is indistinct by being distinct from other things which He creates. Everything has distinction and indistinction, and God has both in the highest grade. God's indistinction makes us distinct and or distinction reveals the indistinction of us within Him
"(‘All things are in him’), and at the same time completely distinct from everything else. Fourth, according to what has been said note that all things are in God as spirit without position and without boundary. Further, just as God is ineffable and incomprehensible, so all things are in him in an ineffable way. Again, every effect is always in the cause in a causal way and not otherwise."
God's distinction makes things indistinct and his indistinction makes things distinct. That part sounds like Hegel.
Oy vey!
What do you mean by this?
Are you not familiar with the Buddhist suttas that talk about dukkha? If anything, the concept of dukkha can be classified as what is nowadays termed "psychological" (the second arrow).
Watts wasn't a Buddhist, mind you.
But does Kierkegaard offer anything that would resemble pasada?
Zen points a way to The Way
which, from the article you've linked, is described as 'a confident path to the Deathless. That path includes not only time-proven guidance, but also a social institution that nurtures and keeps it alive.' I don't know if he does - but in fairness I've only just started reading Kierkegaard and he has a large body of work, so I will withhold judgement on that.
Ye, literally the First Reich. Christianity has a weird effect on the paganism that preceded there. Mysticism is a way to escape all that. Can a philosophical mysticism really be objectively bad?
This, Hegel recognized as the first expression of dialectic in his culture.
FWIW, Hegel's lectures are pretty clear. He also gave some great public speeches.
[quote=Hegel]
But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit. Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone – this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14] It can indeed be said that, ever since philosophy first began to emerge in Germany, the condition of this science has never looked so bad, nor has such a view as this, such renunciation of rational cognition, attained such [a degree of] presumption and influence. This view has dragged on [into the present] from the period before our own, and it stands in stark contradiction to that worthier [gediegenern][104] feeling and new, substantial spirit [of today]. I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit, and I address myself to it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content [Gehalt] and when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity [Not] and is inherently [für sich] capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is at home, which it [itself] constructs, and which we share in by studying it. Whatever is true, great, and divine in life is so by virtue of the Idea; the goal of philosophy is to grasp the Idea in its true shape and universality. Nature is confined to implementing reason only by necessity; but the realm of spirit is the realm of freedom. All that holds human life together, all that has value and validity, is spiritual in nature; and this realm of the spirit exists solely through the consciousness of truth and right, through the comprehension of Ideas.[15]
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/1818/inaugural.htm
He rejects the reduction of spirituality/religion to mere feeling. , and he rejects with disgust the idea that the height of philosophy is some kind of complacent skepticism/relativism/etc. Note his insistence on the 'comprehension of ideas' (AKA 'the labor of the concept'). Even if his themes make the mouths of mystics water, his method was 'rational.'
Thanks for the quote. His three targets are Catholic scholasticism, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic supremacy of "sensibility". The idea of a new religion of the Holy Spirit taking over from the obsolete tradition of Jesus and of the Popes was prophesied by Franscican friar Gerardo Dan Donnino and Joachim of Fiore and seems to have started (to the mind of the First Reich) with Eckhart and continued through Tauler and systematized by Jacob Bohme. This was a properly new cultural religion like the Italian philosophy of Antonio Rosmini and Giovanni Gentiles. Maybe Heidegger was outside his great tradition as B. Croce found himself to be in Italy. In separating politics from philosophy and mysticism, I would be interested to see more passages from Heidegger that people have issue with. I always found him profound
Here's what I'd consider an off-putting Heidegger quote:
[quote=Heidegger]
What about this nothing? The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity. But when we give up the nothing in such a way don't we just concede it? Can we, however, speak of concession when we concede nothing? But perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an empty squabble over words. Against it science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing—what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it. Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help. It has recourse to what it rejects. What incongruous state of affairs reveals itself here? With this reflection on our contemporary existence as one determined by science we find ourselves enmeshed in a controversy. In the course of this controversy a question has already evolved. It only requires explicit formulation: How is it with the nothing?
II. The Elaboration of the Question
The elaboration of the question of the nothing must bring us to the point where an answer becomes possible or the impossibility of any answer becomes clear. The nothing is conceded. With a studied indifference science abandons it as what “there is not.” All the same, we shall try to ask about the nothing. What is the nothing? Our very first approach to this question has something unusual about it. In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that “is” such and such; we posit it as a being. But that is exactly what it is distinguished from. Interrogating the nothing—asking what and how it, the nothing, is—turns what is interrogated into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object. Accordingly, every answer to this question is also impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing “is” this or that. With regard to the nothing question and answer alike are inherently absurd.
[/quote]
http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/heideggerm-what-is-metaphysics.pdf
I think some of Heidegger is first-rate, but I can imagine a person reading this and saying 'nevermind.'
Where is it leading?
[quote=Heidegger]
Only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects
of investigation. Only if science exists on the base of metaphysics can it advance further
in its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose
in ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history. Only because the
nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings
overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and
evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder—the revelation of the nothing—does the
“why?” loom before us. Only because the “why” is possible as such can we in a definite
way inquire into grounds, and ground them.
[/quote]
I'm sure we can talk endlessly about the Nothing, and I have been struck by wonder now and then, that the world exists, against the background of something like nothingness. But the idea that the 'why?' is driven only by wonder seems silly. Why is the baby crying? Is that wonder or the desire to solve a problem? Also a rhetorical objection: why oppose sober science to foolish philosophy? Fortunately Heidegger wasn't always like this. I have some of his early stuff that's solid all the way through (which is not to say that he never struck gold in his later stuff, which I mostly know only through secondary sources.)
Eh?!
Why MHD, arguably, the least comprehensible stage of German??
It depends on how well someone understands the concepts presented by any language. The German language is capable of having a very multifaceted presentation of philosophy, according to German writers, which allows one to think quickly about matters which could otherwise cause someone to get stuck and rushes the mind to the ends of philosophy rather quickly. Each language perhaps is suited to a particular philosophical outlook
For Heidegger our bodies are made of matter but our consciousness comes from nothing. This and how it is connected to how we experience being Dasein (beingness IN time) was a mystery for him. Sartre wrote of this too, saying our consciousness is always being created anew
That doesn't sound quite right to me. Perhaps you could find some quotes to support your interpretation?
Quoting Gregory
I can only go by translations, but I find it hard to believe that B&T-and-after Heidegger was easy reading for the working class. I am aware that he could be brilliant with terminology, such as 'it worlds' or 'the world worlds' and so on. He had some early breakthroughs that only much later became well-known through Being and Time (just as the 'Blue' and 'Brown' books already contain many insights from Philosophical Investigations.)
[quote=link]
Heidegger takes the path of repudiating the primacy of the theoretical attitude. For him, we are never in the position of experiencing the sensedata of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
For Heidegger, in contrast, the theoretical attitude is secondary, being predicated on the existence of a preconceptual understanding that is the basis on which we conduct our day-to-day life. We do not see sense-data, what we see – at least as students and lecturers – are, for example, chairs, desks, windows. There is no problem of the external world because we are always already in that world.
He gives the example of the lectern from which he is speaking. He doesn’t see brown surfaces, arranged in such and such a way, from which he infers the existence of a lectern; what he sees is the lectern ‘in one fell swoop’ as either too high or too low, as convenient to his purpose or not. He sees it as already something meaningful. No doubt a farmer from the Black Forest or a Negro from Senegal would see it somewhat differently, but for the young Heidegger and his audience it is simply part of the environment (Umwelt) in which they live, it has the character of a world (Welt). Further, in a neologism which is to become characteristic of his manner, he turns the noun into a verb – ‘es weltet’ – that is, ‘it worlds.’
[/quote]
https://philosophynow.org/issues/32/Towards_the_Definition_of_Philosophy_by_Martin_Heidegger
Perhaps what I like most in Heidegger is his insistence that human being is being-in-the-world and being-with-others first and foremost. We aren't dreamers trapped in skulls, who need to figure out
how contact with the world and others is possible. The very language we express such theories in is radically dependent on the [s]assumption[/s] of a world-with-others (which is not 'made' of something definitively ultimate.) Many of games that philosophers play (those that seem silly in retrospect) depend upon taking a massive 'pre-conceptual' background utterly for granted.
I was listening to Dr. Gregory Sadlers videos on this last night. Type in "Gregory Sadler Heidegger nothing" on YouTube and you'll find 4 ten minute videos on this. I will try to write more on this later today
I agree. Or it's buffoonish to solemnly and pompously drop phrases like 'the nothing itself noths.' Nevertheless, Heidegger could and did do much better at times. One my favorites (in just 75 pages) is https://ia802907.us.archive.org/30/items/heideggermartinontologythehermeneuticsoffacticity_202003/Heidegger%2C%20Martin%20-%20Ontology%2C%20The%20hermeneutics%20of%20facticity.pdf
Fair enough. And I think one can get "Heidegger's" insights elsewhere. It's the same with Jung. To me it's more about the 'chemical reaction' of a reader and a book. As we get older and less unwise, we can look back and see the absurdities and blindspots of thinkers who nevertheless helped us become a little less foolish. With Heidegger, it's easy to speculate that he never recovered from the nazi disaster, & that he reinvented himself as a kind of shepherd guru. I find even B&T somewhat tiresome and pompous.
For me the issue is not that Heidegger has nothing in mind when he says the nothing nothings. I do expect him to go somewhere with this strange rhetorical device. The issue is how such rhetoric comes across and the type of listener it seems to be aimed at (gaped-mouthed followers sitting at his knee.)
Nothingness's existence (Heidegger's claim) leads back to Eckhart's statement that "man in God is God". Heidegger failed to see this and retreated to the materialism of the pre-Socratics with a little does of Pythagorean mysticism. Nobody believes he was a great man, but Heidegger did have an impressive range of thought. In the end, nothing must be filled by Dasein
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeOTbyy7uYE
We don't need to reject these lines of thought merely because Japan joined Hitler in declaring war on the world, right? His thinking is much like Heidegger on this subject. Hegel said that in self-consciousness being and nothing stand to each other as completely empty, and find a synthesis in the synergy of living, which tries to discover the divine through the concepts of universals
I looked into Nishida back when I was making sense of Stirner.
[quote=link]
Starting with An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida’s early work calls into question two basic presuppositions of most modern epistemology: the assumptions that experience is individual and subjective, and that it leads to knowledge only via a corrective process with input from the mind or other individuals. For Nishida, experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out of it.
[/quote]
This intro is nice approximation of what I make of Hegel, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and others (not claiming to have mastered any of them or even that any of them is masterable or has some exact, final meaning ---to the contrary). These thinkers vary in important ways, but all of them saw through the limitations of a crude ego-centered empiricism. (The Crisis-era Husserl could also be included.) What puts people off a connection between Wittgenstein and Hegel is the rational fear of cryptotheism. I say that because religion also treats this theme, and not always in sophisticated ways. As I read Hegel, he saw that religion had an element that enlightenment lacked, which is a recognition of 'the sociality of reason.' Logic is not some dry, dead neutral thing (excluding mathematical logic.) There's a norm involved, a love directed at an ideal community. (You know, gross hippy stuff.)
Quoting Gregory
Again, I really don't think that's the issue here. Of course some people can't get over the political sins of thinkers, but I don't think folks are really so squeamish. I suggest thinking in terms of the tough-minded versus the tender-minded approach. As I see it, Wittgenstein used a tough-minded approach to gesture vaguely toward conclusions more often found among the tender-minded. The tough-minded are anti-systematic, always worried about oversimplifying things, with a pessimistic tendency connected to their openness to facts. The tender-minded 'must' fit things into a usually-optimistic system.
Everyone philosophises at the ontic level. Its implicit because as Heidegger says Dasein is metaphysics. I think that is where you are directing your post in a way, in the stuff about sociality of reason?
I like to think that we foolosophers can sometimes manage to be ontological and not just ontic (which is maybe what you meant?). The 'sociality of reason' is the theme and the title of a good book about Hegel. The intro is especially impressive, and it's nice that Pinkard tries to put the gist of Hegel in more modern terminology.
What 'the sociality of reason' means to me is something like: we don't think (primarily) as individuals. Obviously we have individual brains, but the point is the shared cultural software that runs on these brains. For instance, I'm using my individual hardware to expound on a thought which is not my own so that another brain/person can 'be there with me' 'in' or 'with' the thought. Another way to look at it: rationality and science imply a community. To tell the truth, to see through illusion, etc., implies a community in a world, some gap between the finite (individual, frail) mind and 'what really is.' I think this 'what really is' cashes out in terms of something like what an ideal community would eventually decide. (Or, in more banal terms, what 'those in the know' have already agreed on.) This makes more sense if one thinks of the word as 'all that is the case' (in terms of facts in human language.) While we are all quite sure of some kind of ineffable direct experience, this stuff has no epistemological weight, precisely because it is 'unmediated' and a private show for the lonely humunculus in the skull (or so runs the questionable tale.) What makes more controversial propositions true or at least plausible is their relationship to less controversial propositions. This seems like a digression, but it gets us out of the useless habit of seeking non-verbal truth-makers that can't actually function in a rational discussion.
I'll stop there & see what if anything seems worth elaborating on.
Also, I like 'Dasein is metaphysics.' It's a nice overstatement to get a point across the gulf. I read it as 'we are language' (at least our most particularly human aspect is something like our bravest and highest thoughts and their associated passions.)
I've seen evidence of a collective subconscious that stretches across the globe in human minds. The fact that we understand ancient text is evidence for me for the reason that language changes every generation and there would be no way to connect to the past through pages of history were we not united to our ancestors via the images and archetypes that we inherited from them
Were you referring to Hegel's philosophy of right (1821)?
I don't dispute something like archetypes or biological inheritance, but I had something far more ordinary in mind. I'm talking about us both speaking English, both living in a world where there is the internet, there are automobiles, there are dishes to be washed. Then there's these thinkers we can talk about, which exist publicly. Finally, there are unwritten and perhaps unwritable norms for having a conversation about such things, to which we mostly automatically conform.
Pinkard's book is about the The Phenomenology of Spirit.
I'm reading his German Philosophy book, Hegel's philosophy of Nature, and the lesser Logic. I'm almost done with all of those but I still need to read the greater Logic, which might be a chore like washing those dishes
I think the big version of the Logic will be like the smaller version (which overall I liked, without grasping all of it or needing to.)
That's cool, a lot of writers on this forum don't like Hegel. I read the Phenomenology 3 times, the Philosophy of Mind 3 times as well, and on my second reading of the Nature book. I have a good background in his thought you could say
I think this is the tender-minded thing. There's also the tedious anglo-versus-continental thing. I got around to Hegel because so many thinkers I already liked make positive references toward him, but that's my general method for finding stuff.
Anyway, here's one of my favorite Hegel quotes.
[quote=Hegel]
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did in fact consist in nothing else than doing away with its character of familiarity.
[/quote]
Lots of what I also find in Wittgenstein & Heidegger in that.
:clap:
I wanted to find a 'salute' emoji, but no luck. I'd be glad to hear any thoughts you have on that quote. It's rich!
Agency, for instance, I'd begun to conceive of as an inclusive commons (from Witty's "Private Language Argument" and by adapting Amartya Sen's & Martha Nussbaum's "Capabilites Approach") and thereby an analogue – I admit with no shame – for Dasein (or, even more so, Existenz), but only in so far as it's informed by (the dialectical and yet non-dual/non-cartesian approaches of) e.g. Buber, Jaspers, Levinas & Merleau-Ponty rather than Heidi's man-shaped hole ("Lichtung") in being.
Thank you! Amatya Sen is a new name for me. I've been curious about Cassirer (I like Gadamer, and they are connected rightly or wrong in my mind.) I'm just recently really looking into and appreciating Peirce. Couldn't get into Merleau-Ponty when I tried, but perhaps the moment was wrong. I do like Epicurus, and in general Lange's history (which really celebrates him) impressed me. (I could only get the first volume, so I guess he's barely in print.) I stop there, even if some of the other names tempt me to say more.
I like that you mention the order of your exposures/studies, because that seems important here. For you, Heidegger wasn't offering anything fresh. I read and thought about Wittgenstein first, so I largely understood him as being systematic and explicit where Witt was elusive and aphoristic. I'd also read many criticisms of his work, so I went to the wizard well warned. I wasn't completely numb to the dark charisma of the ethical stuff, but I could never quite make sense of it, and I'm not sure that Heidegger could either. I like Van Buren's dissertation on his early stuff.
Anyway, I think our ontological stances are similar, and I appreciate you taking the time to pass on some experience.
:up: :up: :up:
Nice, thanks!
Einstein said the universe wasn't matter connected by magnet-like forces nor matter moving because its naturally heavy and falls when space is empty. So he threw out the Newtonian and Aristotelean ideas. Its not entirety clear how the universe even can be said to exist in his system. Heisenberg and Bohr thought (in the 20's) that the world was probability waves (potential) that was actualized by consciousness (Copenhagen interpretation). Einstein rejected the randomness in his system but with the "equivalence principle" the reality of the universe falls out of view just as people's thoughts fall to oblivion when they mentally accept that principle
Then why. You seldom engage others and instead write wordy sophistries. Einstein showed that matter has no objective size but it has objective substance whether you or he like it or not
What makes things move in general relativity. Easy question
[quote=link]
—The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dis may, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”—this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public manner.... But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death—though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: “recompense” and “judgment” became necessary (—yet what could be less evangelical than “recompense,” “punishment,” and “sitting in judgment”!). Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an historical moment: the “kingdom of God” is to come, with judgment upon his enemies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the “kingdom of God” as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfilment, the realization of this “kingdom of God.” It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the Master—he was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! On the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their revenge took the form of elevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him on a great height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were products of ressentiment....
—And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: “how could God allow it!” To which the deranged reason of the little community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!—Jesus him self had done away with the very concept of “guilt,” he denied that there was any gulf fixed between God and man; he lived this unity between God and man, and that was precisely his “glad tidings”.... And not as a mere privilege!—From this time forward the type of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection, by means of which the entire concept of “blessedness,” the whole and only reality of the gospels, is juggled away—in favour of a state of existence after death!... St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that indecent conception, in this way: “If Christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!”—And at once there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the shameless doctrine of personal immortality.... Paul even preached it as a reward....
...
In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings”; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses.
...
When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in “the beyond”—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the “meaning” of life.... Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or concern one’s self about the common welfare, and try to serve it?... Merely so many “temptations,” so many strayings from the “straight path.”—“One thing only is necessary”.... That every man, because he has an “immortal soul,” is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the “salvation” of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The “salvation of the soul”—in plain English: “the world revolves around me.”.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm
This point is also in Feuerbach. Personal immortality is something like the most intense expression of egoism. It encourages petty identifications with face, name, a thousand idiosyncrasies, and the all-too-typical negative narcissism that can't lose itself beautifully in a project, with other human beings, down here, in this world, the real world, the only world.
I trust in your sincerity. To be honest, though, your style is a bit all over the place. IMO, you might want to quote more.
Thanks for the criticism. Its hard to quote when I'm not on the desktop but can do better I think.
I think sin is a possibility and so must hell be as well. Heaven and virtue are a "not giving in to sin" but I don't know if anyone knows for sure if they are virtuous. The Christian system though has a God who couldn't make a world where people were good and went to heaven based on merit and grace, otherwise he would have done so. Indeed, by predestination, he has actualized the damnation of people who could have acted virtuously is he allowed, and the salvation of the guilty who don't deserve heaven. By a self-sacrifice Jesus took on torture to let the guilty into heaven but also allowed everyone to sin when they could have gone to heaven by being virtuous. No corruptor system of theology has ever been devised by man and Nietzsche is right in saying Paul played a large role in its acceptance (as did Augustine). A little latter today I will provide verses from the Bible so those who are unfamiliar with Christian theology can see these arguments for themselves
1) God could have immaculately conceived everyone and had them all enter heaven based on their merits and God's favor
Or
2) God could not have created this way
So either 1 is true and God doesn't do what's right, or 2 is true.
If 2 is true we have God allowing people to sin and then getting them to heaven in spite of their total worthlessness, we have a God who is forced to set up an absurd and unrighteous system in order to create in the first place
Being merely a creature, I am not sure how to view these options you ascribe to "God."
I don't understand how "total worthlessness" relates to the idea that sin is an offense against one's own existence. There are many contradictory ideas about what that might entail but they all come back to a simple idea that you have been given a precious thing and you fucked it up.
If that is what sin is. Or is it malicious?
What text are you quoting from? Your translation does not correspond to any that I am familiar with.
Thanks for taking my criticism in such a friendly spirit.
On the absurdity of the usual theology, you mention one of many issues. Even if the afterlife experience was merit-based, there's still the issue of free will, which I can't make sense of. The idea seems intrinsically vague and magical, something like a pure randomness that one has to nevertheless take responsibility for. For whatever reason, this was the crack in the dam for me. I could not figure out how the God I was told about as a child was a good guy. It's absurd to worship a monster just because he's got 10 million teeth. Hellfire is the most evil and hateful fantasy I can think of. Threatening children with eternal torture is a wee bit problematic.
NIV. You might be looking at the wrong verse
Don't try to figure out free will. There too many monsters of the conscience that interfere with objectivity. Daoists say to live spontaneity, as I read in Huston Smith's book on religions and the newer book God is not One (which is an ironic title)
I gave up that impossible project many years ago. I'm something like a soft determinist. I'm simply not troubled by religious issues (which is not to say that I don't have the usual human troubles.)
I am looking at the text in Greek at the cited passage. It says nothing like what you quoted.
https://www.google.com/search?q=romans+3.23+tanlsations&rlz=1C1OKWM_enUS867US867&ei=5WRqYM-IHMartQainqTYBw&oq=romans+3.23+tanlsations&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyBQgAEM0CMgUIABDNAjoHCAAQRxCwA1DwGFi6G2DzJWgBcAF4AIAByQGIAdwDkgEFMC4yLjGYAQCgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6yAEIwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwiPj7mQ9-XvAhXGVc0KHSIPCXsQ4dUDCA0&uact=5
It's all saying the same thing here
None of those translations say what you said:
Quoting Gregory
That's me, not the bible
I'm sorry my commentary on the verse confused you. I talk a lot about ethics and religion because I am forever questioning my relationship to the world and looking to understand it. We have so many levels. I think I have made a good case though that Christianity does not provide a good answer to the nature of To Eon ( "what is")
It ain't ! It's crazy. And yet somehow barrels and barrels of such kool-aid were guzzled down.
For me it's been so much easier to let it all go as madness and confusion.
Hen To On (Greek for "being is one")
Hen To Pan (" universe is one")
I seems to me belief in these ideas started for Einstein with reading Spinoza and that these ideas are how he justified motion in General Relativity. It was a very modern theory but has roots in ancient Greek thought. Even Plato thought objects lacked substance and many modern physicists accept a kind of Pythagorean Platonism wherein the truth of reality is not in matter but in mathematics