Time and the present
Inspired by reading Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety to pose the question, one which anticipated future existential thinkers. Here is a passage which really provides the original exposition:
One can, quite generally, in defining the concepts of the past, the future, and the eternal, see how one has defined the instant. If there is no instant, then the eternal appears behind as the past. It is as when I imagine a man walking along a road but do not posit the pacing, and the road then appears behind him as the distance covered. If the instant is posited but merely as a discrimen [division], then the future is the eternal. If the instant is posited, so is the eternal, but also the future which reappears as the past. This is clearly to be seen in the Greek, the Jewish, and the Christian views. The concept on which everything turns in Christianity, that which made all things new,* is the fullness of time,† but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past. If one doesn’t watch out for this, not a single concept can be saved from a heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept. One then gets the past not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the future (the meaning of world history and the historical development of the individual thereby losing the concepts of conversion, atonement, and redemption). One gets the future not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the present (the concepts of resurrection and judgment being thereby laid in ruins).
One has to put aside the connotation of terms like 'redemption" and religious ideas in general, and just give the passage its analytical due. It is a framework for a lot of thought to come. What is sin? K asks, and he does this apart from religious dogma, and here, looking only at the structure of time and history. Is there, as K says, a problem of alienation at the most basic level of analysis of "existential" time, that is, lived experience from moment to moment? As resistant as one might be to the idea, eternity has to be taken seriously, as essential to our Being here, for eternity is summarily dismissed by most in the empirical sciences' drive to clarity and existing paradigms. Kierkegaard claims eternity is deep in the structure of experience and I think he is right. After all, how is it that eternity and finitude can be separated at all? This makes no sense, or, it only makes sense if you can treat eternity as a numerical analytic of sequenced events, thereby divesting the concept of meaning, numerical (quantitative) terms being mere abstractions considered AS quantitative divisions. The "fullness of time" (From Galatians. Don't be too put off by this) is to taken very seriously, for, K holds, all of our affairs are encompassed therein, anad it is in the "positing", the revelation of one to oneself, so to speak, that eternity makes its appearance, prior to which there is no "sin". Sin is NOT the angry God concept (of Luther, e.g.) but one of alienation from God and the soul, and these latter stand against our existence in the world.
What K is saying is that when you become alerted to this fundamental struggle (which is not perceived as a struggle at all when one is in the middle of a normal lived life, and this is therefore pre-sin. This is obviously where Sartre got his prereflective consciousness idea), you see that the meanings we posit in our daily affairs are groundless, and our meanings seem then as lost, in a kind of reversal of alienation whereby now we become alienated to the most familiar, going to work, paying one's taxes, friends and familiy (remember what Jesus says about hating one's parents??), and this is the existential crisis.
But what really interests me is the way K brings the past and the future "into" the present, for as one reflects, one is always already in the crossroads of eternity, as eternity is overarching and the moment is a synthesis of the past and the future and all possessed by the eternal present. That is, how does one apprehend the past? By thinking about the past, but the thinking is done in the present. How does apprehend the future? By thinking about the future, which is done in the present. Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL? No.
One can, quite generally, in defining the concepts of the past, the future, and the eternal, see how one has defined the instant. If there is no instant, then the eternal appears behind as the past. It is as when I imagine a man walking along a road but do not posit the pacing, and the road then appears behind him as the distance covered. If the instant is posited but merely as a discrimen [division], then the future is the eternal. If the instant is posited, so is the eternal, but also the future which reappears as the past. This is clearly to be seen in the Greek, the Jewish, and the Christian views. The concept on which everything turns in Christianity, that which made all things new,* is the fullness of time,† but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past. If one doesn’t watch out for this, not a single concept can be saved from a heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept. One then gets the past not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the future (the meaning of world history and the historical development of the individual thereby losing the concepts of conversion, atonement, and redemption). One gets the future not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the present (the concepts of resurrection and judgment being thereby laid in ruins).
One has to put aside the connotation of terms like 'redemption" and religious ideas in general, and just give the passage its analytical due. It is a framework for a lot of thought to come. What is sin? K asks, and he does this apart from religious dogma, and here, looking only at the structure of time and history. Is there, as K says, a problem of alienation at the most basic level of analysis of "existential" time, that is, lived experience from moment to moment? As resistant as one might be to the idea, eternity has to be taken seriously, as essential to our Being here, for eternity is summarily dismissed by most in the empirical sciences' drive to clarity and existing paradigms. Kierkegaard claims eternity is deep in the structure of experience and I think he is right. After all, how is it that eternity and finitude can be separated at all? This makes no sense, or, it only makes sense if you can treat eternity as a numerical analytic of sequenced events, thereby divesting the concept of meaning, numerical (quantitative) terms being mere abstractions considered AS quantitative divisions. The "fullness of time" (From Galatians. Don't be too put off by this) is to taken very seriously, for, K holds, all of our affairs are encompassed therein, anad it is in the "positing", the revelation of one to oneself, so to speak, that eternity makes its appearance, prior to which there is no "sin". Sin is NOT the angry God concept (of Luther, e.g.) but one of alienation from God and the soul, and these latter stand against our existence in the world.
What K is saying is that when you become alerted to this fundamental struggle (which is not perceived as a struggle at all when one is in the middle of a normal lived life, and this is therefore pre-sin. This is obviously where Sartre got his prereflective consciousness idea), you see that the meanings we posit in our daily affairs are groundless, and our meanings seem then as lost, in a kind of reversal of alienation whereby now we become alienated to the most familiar, going to work, paying one's taxes, friends and familiy (remember what Jesus says about hating one's parents??), and this is the existential crisis.
But what really interests me is the way K brings the past and the future "into" the present, for as one reflects, one is always already in the crossroads of eternity, as eternity is overarching and the moment is a synthesis of the past and the future and all possessed by the eternal present. That is, how does one apprehend the past? By thinking about the past, but the thinking is done in the present. How does apprehend the future? By thinking about the future, which is done in the present. Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL? No.
Comments (104)
Then, you perfectly said:
Quoting Constance
Time is one of the toughest challenges of human behaviour. We were born to die. Simple. Nevertheless, we the humans, are ready to fill this time making our lifespan worthy to live. I guess thinking so much about the past is not relatable because this is something we already live so we no longer need to remember this period. Also, past tend to be very dramatic and pessimistic because most of the times we don’t usually have good memories at all.
What the future holds is upon us. My opinion is trying to find something connected to happiness. This always been the main goal of humanity. We have to reinforce it.
We are lucky of speaking/debating about it because there are some people in this world that was born just with wars and violence so they do not have the right of think about future. I guess talking about time is like a privilege fortunately we can speak about.
One book which I have come across on this topic is, 'The Eternal Now,' by Eckart Tolle. He suggests that, '
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.'
I recommend his book because it offers a whole meditational reflection and I found it to be extremely inspiring.
Born to die. But then, it is not the dying is it? It is the caring that we die. You mention a lifespan "worthy" but what is the standard of worth? Of course, there are many answers to this, but here we dismiss incidentals and want to know about what it means to have a standard of worth at all. Something having worth is to care, so why do we care? And what is caring? This goes to ethics and aesthetics, this presence of caring, which is linked to something we care about. In the analysis above, the structure of this caring is time: I care IN time in the form of anticipation, apprehension, excitement, dread and anxiety, and, as you say, happiness, and the like. Though happiness
Thinking about the past? Here, the past is questioned as having an existence at all. One wants to know what reality is. Thought is an aggregate if the past's experiences, the language and culture, personal and historical, but these are realized only in the present, for the thought IN the past is never observed. It is only the presence that has the reality OF the past in it, evidenced by references to the past, that ever has reality in the moment of recollection. I speak language, but the past in which I learned these is never IN the remembered words, they are only IN the present moment of recollection, making recollection really a present affair after all. And the past? Simply a mode of the present.
The privilege of being free to muse, that IS something, isn't it? But it goes a little deeper. It is an ethical question at root: why are those Others forced to suffer and die? And then, you and I as well, for one day I will slip and fall into some wretched machine or they'll find an inoperable cancerous tumor at the base of my brain and I'll slip slowly into madness. No one gets out for free. The question again belongs to Kierkegaard. He asks,
Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?"
No, we were born to pay bills, and die.
It is inspiring. Care to take inspiration its logical end? You have to be, I'm afraid, a bit crazy to relate to Kierkegaard, because he take normalcy and turns it on its head, so that what was familiar is now alien. But no worries, as K is a bit like Descartes, and God steps in to save the day. Just when you are at your rope's end, and the world has become like Kafka's cockroach, and you are there, with your bootless cries screaming to heaven about what is going on and why we are born to suffer and die, there is the eternal present, which is God and the soul.
I like Eckart Tolle, though I haven't read much. He follows through on the tradition of Western mysticism, and I have always held Meister Eckhart in high regard. In a sermon he pleads with God to be rid of God, and this is in the epigraph of John Caputo's book on Derrida, whom he believes affirms God through apophatic philosophy. There is something to this, the idea being what really stands between an earnest inquirer and God is the language that holds belief in place in a way that one hardly even knows one's foundational views are being invisibly constructed. This is how strong the bond of language is. We live in reified language, there a house, here a cloud. What ARE these without the mere familiarity that informs us?
I always recommend Carlo Rovelli’s book ‘The Order of Time’, which explores the changing view of time from ancient philosophy to post-Einstein physics, and attempts to deconstruct and then reconstruct this aspect, positing a reality consisting of interrelated events rather than objects. It also touches briefly on the notion of Eternalism as simply the way we experience reality, or the ‘container’ structure of values or potentiality in which these events interact for us.
We apprehend the past or the future by relating to it from our current position as an ongoing event, which is always changing. Lisa Feldman Barrett describes this from a neuroscience/psychology perspective, in her book ‘How Emotions Are Made’, as an ongoing prediction of attention and effort, generated by past experience and informed by an ongoing state of valence and arousal in the organism. It isn’t so much that past and future don’t really exist, but that our relation to past or future is always relative to an ongoing and variable state of the organism.
Perhaps it is the present that does not really exist, but is merely what we make of it.
At least you made the effort of making those questions. There are people than don't even care about what's going on around us and I think is even scary to be honest...
Trying to answer this philosophical questions in my own personal view I would say: I live in Spain but furthermore in a planet called "Earth" that is a big galaxy where thanks to randomness we the humans developed.
I don't know who I am but I know sometimes I dont like myself.
We came here because is our path and we have to do it. It is impossible just staying in home and do not do it nothig.
What the world means is upon us. First, as you perfectly said, time is one of the most tough enemies of humans, something that the Earth doesn't have. So we can start saying humans always put a lot of meaningful stuff.
I read through the Amazon free pages of Rovelli, and it's not like I disagree with all he says at all, but tell me briefly what it is that he says that you find compelling. Container structure of values? Eternalism?
This is the position of a lot of philosophers, that the present is impossible, and this is because the very fabric of reality is time: the present is a timeless "instant" and is not an instant at all, really, for to conceive of an instant we have to have in place a notion of duration, which is a quantifiable term. So an instant is just, as K says, a metaphor, the best we can do (Wittgenstein said the same, and he was a big fan of Kierkegaard. But with W the eternal present was a piece of nonsense, but nonsense that is foist upon us, irresistible but irrational, as thus, must be passed over in silence). But it is not an instant; it is an impossible eternity: true eternity lies in this reduction. Anyway, the position is you refer to, this denial of the present, sees the past not merely flowing into, but constituting the future. Having an experience at all is to be in time, for what we call the present is, on analysis, the language, culture, concerns, caring all acquired in ones personal history, and this personalt history, of course, has its own history of evolving through the centuries. So, as the argument goes, there really is no escape from history, for the moment you even ask the question, you are always, already IN the past and this past is going to be determinative of whatever future is "made". Richard Rorty (and his pragmatist predecessors) has the strongest view on this: the Real is reducible to problem solving, even at the level of language use.
There is a LOT of philosophy about this, and it goes way back, but is it right?
This is why Kierkegaard is so important. Did we not, the brief sketch above, forget something? As K says, did we not forget that we (or objects, and everything) exist? That we are actualities and not just memories in play. Call the memory in the apperceived moment or event an interpretation, the kind of thing the understanding produces when asked the question, what IS it? The response will be an educated one, framed in language, contextualized in remembered affairs, and so on, and this is what interpretation means. But just because we have this history bearing down upon my apprehension of this cat on the sofa as I apperceive it, there is in this the actuality of the "cat thing" which is that which is be interpreted. And when we attempt to "say" what the cat IS, we find the only predicative possibilities issuing from this past of assimilated knowledge, but: these are not that thing. And we know this, but we cannot SAY this (And again, this is Wittgenstein's Tractatus claim).
One has to pull back for a moment and consider this, for we are in Kierkegaard's territory. Time dominates interpretation, NOT concrete existence. This latter is transcendental. or, as K puts it, eternal.
If you see this bit of reasoning with some understanding, then you understand a major part of existential philosophy. And I would add, Eastern philosophy as well. This "concrete" reality that is timeless, eternal, is what Meister Eckhart would call God without God. It is what Buddhism and Hinduism is all about.
Strong claims, these, but they are readily defensible.
Quite right that the earth does not have this. We impose time ON things when we encounter them, perceive them, talk about them, and so on. Does this mean what Einstein was talking about was really not space and time independent of perception? Absolutely.
But then, space and time as such are entirely uninteresting. It is what occurs in these, and this goes to our existence, not the world's. Empirical science is out the window: we make the rational categories that make science possible. We provide the caring that motivates research, and when the stars' composition is revealed through the categories we generate, the importance of this all lies within the observer, the researcher.
One has see this matter through the eyes of phenomenology. Are there "big galaxies" out there independent of the way we take up the world rationally, affectively? No. Standards of "truth" acquire a new criterion: meaning. Once meaning is at the top of the world-describing hierarchy, everything changes. Now it is not a physical universe at all that tells us truth at the basic level. It is the sorrows and joys of our existence. Empirical science Must be dethroned, and phenomenology does just this.
The passage I provide is from Kierkegaard's Repetition. If you find it compelling, we can talk.
Agreed :100:
For Husserl and Heidegger the present is a fulfillment of a past which comes out of the future, so it is the present that is inessential rather than past and future, and eternity becomes incoherent.
In evolutionary terms, all peoples adopted an objective authority as a basis for social law, and even if Creator worship is necessarily backward looking, creating an objective authority is a fundamentally correct relationship to reality. The tragedy is that, upon discovery of the method to systematically establish generalisable laws that govern Creation, we did not recognise that as the echoing word of God, and forge a sacred moral relationship with objective truth - such that, knowing what's true and doing what's right; applying technology in accord with rational and moral reason, we'd have made a paradise of the world, and it would have been proof of God's blessings.
We didn't do that; we branded science a heresy, and used it without regard to the understanding of reality it describes, and so failed to harness the rationalising influence and functional truth value inherent to a scientific understanding of reality to the benefit of human affairs. We developed and applied technologies with regard to motives supplied by pre-scientific - overlapping religious, political and economic justifications of authority; understandably perhaps, but consequently, here we are now, looking toward a disastrous future unto extinction, unless we adapt.
We are far from the ideal; and so should not be idealistic. We have to get there from here, and it is possible - given the virtually limitless energy of the earth's molten interior. Philosophically, we would be jumping the tracks - I accept that; but it has happened before, when hunter gatherers joined together to form multi-tribal societies, unto civilisations, they transcended themselves - as we must do now. They adopted God as an objective authority to make multi-tribal civilisation possible; as we must now adopt science if but in this regard alone; that acting accordingly, we claim the energy to overcome the climate and ecological crisis, and that I think would put us on the path to the path to God.
[quote=S.K.]Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.[/quote]
[quote=L.W.]If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.[/quote]
[quote=A.C.]Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.[/quote]
Kairos (??????) time rather than chronological time or la durée:
Quoting 180 Proof
This is the piece of reasoning I am struggling with:
I see it as an argument from actuality. How can Husserlian "adumbrations" of past experience make any claim on the present actual experience if all there is to verify is cognizance in the present? I am aware of the argument: every thoughtful experience one can possibly have cannot be free of the historical constitution that delivers it. As Foucault asked: Am I not being ventriloquized by history when I speak and listen and understand and the rest?
But this annihilation of the present is an illusion, just as thinking my cat is a cat just by the calling it so. Not that it is not a cat in the everydayness of things, but to say that language and actuality are joined at the hip, bound together in meaning making as Heidegger does, leads to an incompleteness, an omission, in ontology, which is the giveness of things. I may be given the world through language and logic, but this certainly does not preclude the intuition of the giveness in the present. Of course, intuition is out of fashion because it is considered reducible to its interpretative parts, its "regional" deferential associations (Both Heidegger and Husserl use this term, I recall), but I beg to differ. The present giveness exceeds the interpretative possibilities that would attempt to own it.
There is Levinas and others in this thinking. But Kierkegaard rules here in that the past and the future are subsumed by the present's actuality, as the latter pervades both; both are IN the present. Call it a terminal "existential "trace" (though I have a way to go to really understand Derrida. Frankly, other as well).
But Gallagher writes :“Some of Husserl’s later texts on time-consciousness, especially the Bernau Manuscripts, which were written around 1917–1918, introduce a reframing of the original tripartite account. In this later account, primal impression, rather than being portrayed as an experiential origin, “the primal source of all further consciousness and being” (Husserl 1966a: 67), is considered the result of an interplay between retention and protention. Thus, in the Bernau
Manuscripts, Husserl defines primal impression as “the boundary between […] the retentions and protentions” (Husserl 2001). Whereas retentions and protentions in the early lectures were defined as retaining the primal impression, or projecting a new primal impression, respectively, in Husserl’s later research manuscripts, the primal impression is considered the line of intersection between retentional and protentional tendencies that make up every present phase of consciousness. Even in his earlier account Husserl had claimed that primal presentation is not self-sufficient, rather it operates only in connection with retentions and protentions.
In the Bernau Manuscripts, however, Husserl seems to suggest that the complicated interlacing of retentions and protentions is constitutive of primal impression. Not only is primal impression not self-sufficient, it is a constituted product rather than something that makes a constitutive contribution of its own. This more radical claim is expressed in Husserl’s idea that the initial
event of experience is the empty anticipation.
“ First there is an empty expectation, and then there is the point of the primary perception, itself an intentional experience. But the primary presentation [or impression] comes to be in the flow only by occurring as the fulfillment of contents relative to the preceding empty intentions, thereby changing itself into primal presenting perception.” (Husserl 2001: 4; translated in
Gallagher & Zahavi 2014) . The primal impression comes on the scene as the fulfilment of an empty protention; the now, as the present phase of consciousness, is constituted by way of a protentional fulfilment (Husserl 2001: 4, 14).
“ Each constituting full phase is the retention of a fulfilled protention, which is the horizonal boundary of an unfulfilled and for its part continuously mediated protention.” (Husserl 2001: 8)
Rudolf Bernet writes:
“In his genetic time-analysis Husserl no longer takes it for granted that the intentionality at work in time-consciousness is an egoic act- intentionality with an objective correlate, like a typical static examination of the correlation would have it. Though such act-intentionality plays an important role in time-consciousness and in its constitutive function, Husserl is now more interested in its arising from pre-intentional tendencies, inclinations, and inhibitions, which characterize the intentionality of a passively flowing originary process. Furthermore, this process, as a life-process, is not simply an automatic process; it has a goal and the tendency to draw near to this goal. This determination of the originary process of life as striving toward intuitive givenness forces Husserl, as already mentioned, to a new, dynamic reformulation of the process of temporal fulfillment.
The passively experienced, hyletic originary process stands therefore at the source of the egoic acts of turning-towards, perceiving and grasping. However, it is not only the subject of the egoic performance that is born from this originary stream, but also each present givenness. In fact, the consciousness of the being-present of a givenness arises, as was indicated above, from the interplay between the retentional and protentional intentionality of the passively experienced
originary stream. With this new insight, the privilege of the present as the most originary dimension of time-consciousness could not remain unquestioned by a genetic phenomenology. If each present has a genesis of its emergence, and thus is a present having-come-to-be, then one understands even better why Husserl engages in such a detailed way with the question of whether
there can be something like a first primary presentation. “
Rudolf Bernet
Since Rovelli is an empirical scientist, it is safe to assume that the indeterminacy of time has to do with relativity. I gather this also from the way he talks about "meaning which changes between here and there" and the lack of a "single global order" in temporal events. Am I right about this?
Actually, he’s a theoretical physicist, working in Quantum Field Theory.
Let me take a metaethical position: the interlacing retentions and protentions constituting the primal impression? Is this spear in my kidney constituted? It is as a "fact" constituted, and my talk about it, my informed awareness, but the ethical/aesthetic dimension of it, the searing pain that issues forth, registers unmediated. Experience is permeated by value, but what intrigues me is the metavalue of value, that elusive "Good" or "Bad" that attends value, making the presence of pain exceed the factual.
In short, for me, if all there were in the world were facts and the logic that rules them, then I suppose this discussion on Husserl you provide would be adequate, and presence would be reducible to some featureless qualia, the features of which bound to the interpretative contexts of before's and after's (minus the jargon of the philosophy) imposed on them, rendering presence, as Dennett put it, a nonsense term. But there is nothing that has ever crossed our perceptual path that is anything like this. There is no "redness" as such; this is just an abstraction from the fullness of experience, which is always in or of value. Anticipations are inherently "caring" anticipations. And this points directly to value, and puts the fate of the discussion of presence and existence in the hands of a metaethical, metaaesthetic analysis. I.e., what is value? What is the ethical/aesthetic good and bad?
And this presents a new discussion on contingent goods and bads vis a vis absolute goods and bads, and the sense that can be made of this.
So I am saying matter of presence rests with the matter of metavalue.
religion? How is this about religion?
I haven't read the entire book, but I have read "through" it and about it, and it is clear to me that he is an iconoclast to the scientific community, but what is striking is that he brings in Heidegger and Husserl, so he might be worth looking into. I say this because Husserl was famous for keeping science at bay in philosophical discussions, for science does not ask basic questions or go into the presuppositions of empirical research. It doesn't ask, what is a concept? How can we describe the experience that delivers the world to us? How is what we have before us as objects in the world actually constituted as "what we have before us"? An object is given in time, so what is the temporal structure of giveness?
Questions like these are ignored by science, which is why I don't go to the scientist for philosophical insight. They don't deal in basic questions, foundational questions. They often think they do, but they don't.
How is this about religion?
Quoting Constance
It's about the temporal orientation of civilisation; backward looking. Unsaid, is that we retreat, bowed from the presence of the Creator at the beginning of time, and so enter into the future blindly, and arse first!
In reality, we are not devolving from perfection in the past. We are evolving from animal ignorance into human knowledge over time. Hence, God is in the future - we grow to meet Him.
No wait. I do see that the passage mentions Christianity and sin. I almost forgot. But these should be considered as merely incidental. The focus is time. It is an apriori analysis of time, its past, present and future structure. Kierkegaard is not just "a religious writer" as Heidegger called him, and I am certain K made significant contributions to his thinking, as with this analysis I provide in bold print.
This eternal present encompasses past and future, says K. After all, when you are recalling or anticipating, is always IN the present, so how can an ontology of time e consider past or future without
the present. Of course, the present is elusive, hence the discussion.
Quite right. I responded even before I read this.
No, we were born to pay bills ("the bill" we pay to be here, our work, our very weird biological embeddedness and all the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to), scream bloody hell to the sky, then die.
Could you not just take turns Constance? Only child were you? My goodness me!
I don't think the emphasis in this passage is on how time works, but rather how time must be perceived for the purposes of the religious civilisation of Kierkegaard's era. He imagines a more rational, scientific concept of time:
Quoting Constance
...he imagines will be devastating to the values of civilisation.
Quoting Constance
It's Nietzsche for beginners. But it's mistaken. Human beings are imbued with a moral sense by evolution, and in fact - religious values are expressions of that innate moral sense; adopted when hunter gatherer tribes joined together - to forge a social group under a common belief system.
Consequently, I would argue, civilisation is in no danger from realism. In some large part, the values of civilisation are from us, and unto us. That so, by knowing what's true and doing what's right in terms of what's true, rationally, we can turn and face reality and take it on and win. Our moral and rational sense are sufficient - insofar as they are manifested in civilisation. We did that. Imagine how much more we could do if we were confident enough in our decency and genius to be forward facing in our approach.
This is from Repetition. Living forwards, in its perfection, is to be a knight of faith, something K confessed he could not do. It would be to live in the eternal present AS one recalls in daily affairs. Quite an idea, eh?
Quoting 180 Proof
K puts the matter in the hands of the soul's or God's prevailing over the moment, living IN grace, and he shows hw this works in the structure of time. But anyway, The Great Law of the Iroquois? This sounds like it has to do with consequentialist thinking. A knight of faith does observe ethical obligation as the driving force of our true self. One is to be above this, and goods acts issue from God's grace. It is not a propositional affair at all. It is a mode of existence, you might say.
And God still remains a mystery :P
That depends what area of science you’re looking into. The idea that all science is empirical is outdated by at least a century. The scientific method itself begins with these basic, foundational questions, before formulating hypotheses. But the language of philosophy has often been deliberately unhelpful to scientists for some time now, and science has also avoided the complication of interpreting what they’ve discovered in relation to reality in general. These strategies are self-protection more than anything, if you ask me.
The problem is that most working scientists are happy to have their hypotheses formulated for them, rather than face the questions themselves. They leave that to philosophers. The reason Rovelli gets the attention he does in the scientific community and beyond is that he’s not afraid to face these questions. He speaks to the scientist and the philosopher. That he approaches these questions from the other side, from the point where empirical science fails us, and attempts to restructure ‘what we have before us’ in a way that makes sense in both a scientific and philosophical discourse, is where he has my attention. It’s what’s often missing from science.
I’m certainly not suggesting that Rovelli has all the answers. Far from it. But the questions he asks, and where he is willing to take theoretical physics, both in relation to the structure of time and in relation to information theory, is worth exploring. Where Rovelli falls short, Lisa Feldman Barrett fills in more of the puzzle for me - with a theoretical approach to emotion, awareness and energy distribution, based on empirical research in neuroscience and psychology, which (probably quite unintentionally) draws intriguing parallels with Rovelli’s restructuring of reality as consisting of energy-based events rather than objects, and explores in depth the question of what is a concept?
I’m just saying don’t write science off just yet. I have a feeling they’ll come around eventually, and the more that philosophers are informed by - and strive to inform - the frontiers of theoretical science, the faster this may happen.
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
[b]Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.[/b][/i][/quote]
Sorry but, with all due respect, that's fatuous nonsense. It's like saying ... 'before Mt. Sinai the long wandering ancient Hebrew tribes stayed together "by the grace of" goober without already having had prohibited Murder, Adultery, Lying & Theft'. Even if so, that wouldn't explain every other large human grouping for the prior one hundred or so millennia at minimum prohibiting the same modes of social violence without "divine permission" and yet still function more or less as cohesive peoples like the Egyptians behind the Hebrews at Sinai and the Canaanites ahead of them. "Faith" and "grace" have meaning in the context of the rest of my previous post (pace Kierkegaard), particularly, but not only, with respect to 'seven generations thinking'.
Humans are this-worldly, eusocial, creatures (for whom the consequences of present actions provide for (or steal from) their descendents' futures) and not other-worldly, Kierkegaardian subjects ("knights of faith" always on standby passionately ready to "teleologically suspend the ethical" who "take therefore no thought for the morrow" like cave-dwelling, flagellant ascetics or virgin-seeking suicide bombers). I, however, affirm (in the Spinozist sense of immanence) that time is "grace" (kairos) and agency is "faith" (ethos) as my other quotes indicate, and that therefore
[i]"No eternal reward
will forgive us now
for wasting the dawn"[/i]
~JDM
:death: :flower:
This is a longstanding presupposition in philosophy, the idea that feeling is somehow immediate and non-intentional.
Quoting Constance
Value is a differential, as is intention. It is not the subjective side of intentionality but both sides. There is in fact no subject and no object in the way you are conceiving them as somehow split off from each other. Value is how we find ourselves in the world and this ‘now’ is a becoming, not an immediate presence to self but transformation. The ethical/ aesthetic good and bad is a function of the ongoing organizational integrity of the process of experiential change, not a self-inhering content that hoves above or beyond or underneath ‘facts’.
Here’s a snippet from a recent paper of mine. I think Zahavi’s and Henry’s positions are similar to yours.
“Dan Zahavi posits that my awareness of myself cannot fundamentally be comparable to my experience of an object. For one thing, if it were mediated in this same way it would lead to an infinite regress. The I that views my subjectivity implies another I that experiences this I, and so on. Even more damaging to the claim that self-awareness is the intending of an object is that it presupposes what it is designed to explain. ”..a mental state cannot be imbued with for-me-ness simply as a result of being the object of a further mental state. Rather, if awareness of awareness is to give rise to for-me-ness, “the first order state” must already be “imbued with some phenomenally apparent quality of mine-ness” (Howell and Thompson 2017)
To avoid the specter of an infinite regress, the subjective pole of intentional awareness must be of a qualitatively different nature than the object pole, goes Zahavi's argument. He explains that the pre-reflective self-awareness that opposes, but is at the same time inseparably connected with intended objects, is a peculiar sort of experience, something of the order of a feeling rather than an objective sense.
Zahavi(1999)approvingly cites the phenomenonologist Michel Henry's view:
“When we are in pain, anxious, embarrassed, stubborn or happy, we do not feel it through the intervention of a (inner) sense organ or an intentional act, but are immediately aware of it. There is no distance or separation between the feeling of pain or happiness and our awareness of it, since it is given in and through itself. According to Henry, something similar holds for all of our conscious experiences. To make use of a terminology taken from analytical philosophy of mind, Henry would claim that all conscious experiences are essentially characterized by having a subjective ‘feel' to them, that is, a certain quality of ‘what it is like'”.
I want to take note of the fact that Zahavi treats both the subjective and the objective sides of intentionality as self-inhering interiorities, states, identities, before they are poles of a relation. Because he makes self-inhering content do most of the work of establishing the awareness of the affectively felt and objectively perceived sides of the bond between the subject and the world, the relation between subject and object becomes a mostly empty middle term, a neutral copula added onto the two opposing sides of the binary. In settling on feeling as a special sort of entity that does the work of generating immediate self-awareness , Zahavi is harking back to a long-standing Western tradition connecting affect, feeling and emotion with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.
For George Kelly, these dichotomous features: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as belonging to interacting states of being; they are instead the inseparable features of a unitary differential structure of transition, otherwise known as a construct. In personal construct theory, there are no self-inhering entities, neither in the guise of affects nor intended objects. In the place of Zahavi's three-part structure of subjective feeling, relational bond and intentional object, Kelly proposes a two-part structure manifested by the bi-polar construct. For Kelly subjective affect and objective intention are equi-primordial features of a construct's referential differential hinge. Put differently, every construed event is already both feeling and object of sense. This being the case, there is no synthetic relational connector needed to tie subject and object together.
Heidegger's approach complements Kelly's. He critiques Western notions of propositional relation as external bond, tracing it back to Aristotle. As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating.” Instead, taking something as something means transforming what one apprehends in the very act of apprehension. This integral structure of self-temporalization implies equi-primordially and inseparably affective (Befindlichkeit) and intentional-cognitive aspects.
From Kelly's and Heidegger's perspectives, Zahavi's concerns about an infinite regress is a byproduct of the way the issue of subjectivity is being formulated, and Zahavi s solution only reaffirms the problem, which is that the affective and cognate aspects of events are artificially split into separated entities, and then have to be pieced together again in an interaction . To ground experience in radical temporality is to abandon the concept of subject and world in states of interaction, in favor of a self-world referential-differential in continuous self-transforming movement.The functioning of a construct within a hierarchical system allows Kelly to maintain along with Zahavi that one is intrinsically self-aware in every construal, whether that construction is specifically directed toward the self or an event in the world. But unlike for Zahavi, the self component of awareness is not a self-inhering feeling state. Rather, the ‘for-meness' aspect of a construed event is the contribution my construct system as a unified whole makes to the discernment of a new event in terms of likeness and difference with respect to my previous experience. In other words, the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense. As discussed earlier in this paper, Kelly's organization corollary indicates that the system is functionally integral, which I interpret to mean that one's superordinate outlook is implicit in all construals. “
Sorry but that is not it. I mean, I'm not saying things you say here an there are all not true, but that this has nothing to do with what Kierkegaard is saying. Case in point: what do you think he means by "heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept"?
Begs questions. God??? Mystery?? Remains??
This implies that an analysis of what it means to have life reveals the nature of what it is to be now. Explain, pls.
Energy distribution? Neuroscience and psychology? But what is it about this that is not outdated by a century? Not regarding specific content, but regarding it NOT being empirical in nature. Rovelli does not take the matter to its foundational level if he is still talking like this. Tell me, how does Husserl figure into this?
Explain, such that I understand how this is not, as it seems - powerfully evocative of Nietzsche, 20 years before Nietzsche. Nietzsche didn't just fall from the clear blue sky. This was the character of the thought of his age.
Quoting Constance
It is about a rational concept of time, as opposed to theological concepts of time. Is it not? Then what is it about?
Quoting Possibility
I agree that science has made progress in catching up with where philosophy has arrived( and why not? I don’t think there are any hard and fast distinctions between what constitutes the boundaries of a science and a philosophy).
I have read carefully a number of writings by Clark , Friston and Barrett, and I can say with confidence that their thinking is squarely within the realist tradition( not naive realism, as Barrett points out, but a more sophisticated neo-Kantian version which distinguishes between real sense data and constructed human realities).
Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here: “ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”
There are more philosophically progressively psychological models to be found in enactivist embodied approaches influenced by phenomenology , which reject representationalist computationalist realism in general.
I reviewed what you said earlier, and it is not wrong, just not really to the point. You are being asked to look at time as a structure of experience. Consider the various things you object to to be extraneous. It's really not about Goober at all, though Kierkegaard did think this mysterious eternal present was a dramatic break from typical thinking and di call it God and the soul, but then, it isn't a bunch of Bible beating references to Biblical passages. The analysis doesn't depend on these. Take it more as an analysis of the "event" of our Being here, and an observation that in a given event, any one will do for the content is incidental, we are moving along in a Heraclitean river of experience, if you will, but the flow of events from past through present on to the future is an essential ontological feature. We are this "flow" into the future. Kierkegaard;s thinking is that this temporal movement is encompassed by the present, the only actuality that is ever really there. After all, the past is conceived and the future is conceived, always, already, if you like, in the present.
Ok. I think it's more than that, Constance. Time is the structure of co-existence, or the commons, and I've sketched that. My response deliberately calls mere "experience" into question which you don't seem willing to consider. Look what idealism – yes, (proto)existentialism is idealism-in-action – has done to the secular West in the last century or so as it's dovetailed into "doing me" "my truth" "not real until I experience it" consumerism. "The leap of faith" is now nothing but the faith in leaping. Is Kierkegaard's 'subjective time' remotely relevant today? I could be way off-base but I don't think so.
I’m not going to pretend that I have read much on Husserl, or that I can discuss phenomenological description with any academic confidence. But the way I see it, both Rovelli and Barrett recognise that the base unit common to both empirical science and phenomenology is not the ‘object’ but the ‘event’. In my view, this changes how we look at phenomenological descriptions of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. The notion of the ‘intentional object’ is no longer necessary - we simply don’t need to reduce this far to make the connections between human thought and behaviour. In fact, to do so is to ‘overshoot’ the relational structure of consciousness.
But I’ll leave it there until I have looked more into Husserl in particular.
The past is just a measurement taken from “now” to as far back as one wants to go and the future is a measurement forward. However, life itself, does not exist in the past or future, but only in the “now”.
Because philosophers want to discuss God and love. And worshippers want to idolize God and love.
And atheists want to deny God and love. And politicians want to regulate God and love. And artists want to paint God and love. I just go with the flow
Actually Kierk argued the opposite here in this short read: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/18/kierkegaard-concept-of-anxiety-time/
Think about having a 'religious experience' or a revelation of sorts while doing something, and the feelings associated with that exerience including the perception of time stopping. At that Maslonian moment as it were, there is no anxiety, no anxiousness, no worry, no anticipation, no nothing. Everything stops, presumably, like the feelings/perceptions in Eternity (Kierk alludes to this...) . Yet, everything constantly changes, even during the simple act of cognizing about those experiences themselves.
Quite paradoxical indeed. Eternity doesn't really exist, in this temporal world we find ourselves in... . However, it does exist through what we know about Einstein's theory of Relativity.
And too, as Possibility alluded, perhaps the present doesn't really exist. Just thinking about time is paradoxical (think about the concept of time zones viz. what it means to live in the present moment):
This one was so interesting to read. Time and all of the interpretations are one of the things I like the most inside philosophy.
I agree - that doesn’t mean they can’t inform or be informed by phenomenological idealism. It’s the similarities in relational structure that interest me here, especially when you take away Husserl’s struggle with references to an intentional object.
Quoting SEP, Edmund Husserl
It may be that I haven’t really come down firmly on either side of the realist-idealist debate at this stage. I do consider myself to be an ontic structural realist to some extent, but that’s a relatively new development. FWIW, I can see realist structures echoed in Husserl, and phenomenological structures in Barrett and Rovelli, so I’m intrigued by the overlap.
Quoting Possibility
Contrary to many misinterpretations, Husserlian phenomenology is not an idealism but a radical subject-object interactionism.
Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:
“ But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance
of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out
of mthe proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)
What this quote from Barrett illustrates is the fact that idealism and realism are two sides of the same coin. Barrett’s cognitive system is a relation. between a ‘real’ independent external world and ideal internal
representations.
Merleau -Ponty echoes Husserl on idealism and empiricism:
“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it. This may be shown by studying the history of the concept of attention.”
“...in a consciousness which constitutes everything, or rather which eternally possesses the intelligible structure of all its objects, just as in empiricist consciousness which constitutes nothing at all, attention remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work to perform. Consciousness is no less intimately linked with objects of which it is unheeding than with those which interest it, and the additional clearness brought by the act of attention does not herald any new relationship. It therefore becomes once more a light which does not change its character with the various objects which it shines upon, and once more empty acts of attention are brought in, in place of ‘the modes and specific directions of intention'.(Cassirir)
So, I'll field these as I see fit, though I may be a bit on the outside of the issues.
As to immediate presence, I see no alternative to thinking of the self as transformative, or an event, rather than a presence simpliciter. But calling it an event, a process, a becoming, does not make the reduction to presence any less, well, present: Presence is a place holder term for what is otherwise impossible to conceive, and so it is delivered from all characterization. Becoming and Being, these are ancient terms. What I will call the extended reduction takes the matter asymptotically toward the impossible (you know where I get this; it is Jean Luc Marion. Not his words, but he thinks like this), and language falls away.
As to the split: I claim that value cannot be conceived without an agency that receives it. I think that a perception of the color red simpliciter doesn't require a transcendental agency to receive it. There is "myness" there that brings all things under the synthetic inclusiveness of my encountering them but this does not implicate anything beyond this, and so an efficient phenomenology would have no grounds for positing a transcendental I. But then there is metaethics, the good and the bad of experience is an altogether different matter. I hold this for good reasons, but that would take another argument. Metaethics changes everything in ontology: not so much about Being as it is about value-in-Being.
Quoting Joshs
Perhaps. I find this argument the kind of thing analytic philosophers take seriously, thinking of those Third Man arguments about Plato's forms. Regressions
For me, I have to go no further than the palpable experience joy and suffering, pleasure and pain. The hammer smashes my thumb and I take a hard, direct look at this pain as pain and ask, what is this? I conclude as Moore did: it is a nonnatural property, but then, so what. I am acutely aware of the way language disguises reality, brings such things to heel, reduces what is Other to what is the Same, to talk like Levinas.
Quoting Joshs
This is an interesting paragraph. Note that in the following there is casual appropriations from those I read. From what I have read and thought of the issue, it is the "understanding" that not just steps between the perceiver and her object, but is part of the constitution of all affairs, cognition, affect, raw terror or blankly gazing outward as what informs the event as "that which is" in the same way that walking down the street possesses no explicit reference to streets, walking, trees and sky, yet all of these are "proximal" and such proximity in the moment constitutes what we call reality in the everyday sense: I see a cloud and having seen many clouds I can safely anticipate what will follow, and this anticipation normalizes the world; when we ask what reality is, the "sense" of normal anticipation is what is behind the question. Thus all events are mediated, pragmatically mediated, if the pragmatists have it right, and I think they do.
And yet, there is it, palpable value. Ouch! and Wow! (trying very hard NOT to trivialize experiences with mere reference language). When Kierkegaard attacks rationalists for forgetting we exist, this is what he was talking about, I would argue. The question that strikes at the heart of this is, how is it that I can understand things that are not in the interpretative functions of pragmatically apprehending objects? We don't understand them, would be the answer, but we are merely familiar with them, and we reify this familiarity, but then, this reification is exactly of this pragmatic anticipatory apprehension. I see no way to avoid this. The hyletic feels are of a piece with the interpretation.
But on the radical other hand, there is metavalue. Ouch! is bad, and this is has a very special status epistemological status as, while it is understood in the usual way, entangled in one's complex affairs, Pain qua pain is not, as you put it, differential.
I think I also claim (a thought in progress) that reality IS value, knowing full well that this sounds absurd. One has to take that Husserlian suspension of natural science very seriously.
Quoting Joshs
Joined at the hip, or, of a piece, this taking AS transforming its object. One of the many things I have to thank Heidegger for is this. For me, this completely reconceives priorities when it comes to foundational questions. Material substance, e.g., is not a false theoretical idea, it simply is now considered equiprimordial with other context bound, taken AS, regions of interpreting the world. What rises to the fore is meaning, not so much Frege's "sense" (but then, not not this either. I am reading Ricoeur for the first time now on how narrative and metaphor make novel meanings that evolve into novel interpretative possibilities) but aesthetics and its affect. Heidegger thought poetry was an instrument of meaning making, as I've read. The question I ask is a timeless one: Is the secular taking the world AS sufficient to span the distance of nihilism.
I am sure it is not.
Quoting Joshs
But this: the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense brings things to what Kierkegaard is telling us: the past constructs the present as a movement toward the future, and the present here is freedom, a migrating freedom of the soul. Putting aside the religious talk, K is saying the "superordinate system" is the present, the past and future are subsumed by the present, and this is confirmed by ontological authority of "existence" in the palpable engagement in the world, and mediation, the taking AS, is part and parcel of the phenomena in a given encounter, making this superordinate system a complex present.
Thanks for that glorious bit of thoughtful and engaging writing, btw. The kind of thing that helps me understand what I am trying to say.
Yep. I think Keirk would agree with the aforementioned video. The question concerning the absurdity (lack of definitive logic) associated with Time relates to its common sense description, and ultimately, explanation of it. Thus the question (from Keirk and the video) how much sliver of present time is actually present? Human Beings require time for their existence, right? Seems, once again, paradoxical. This notion of Time, using logic, can't square the phenomenal circle. But for using sense data, yes.
Keirk, being the sensitive man that he apparently was (with his sentience), tries to parse the emotions associated with describing time. For example, if we try to, say, meditate on nothingness, we usually come to experience anxieties about the past or future motivational wants and needs (in our stream of consciousness).
So one question becomes (a popular form of modern day Mindfulness) how does one approach the present using logic? I say you can't a priori. However, you can a posteriori, through having the aforementioned experience or feeling or sensation of time stopping (peak experiences, religious experiences, euphoric experiences, love experiences, any intense experience doing something, so on and so forth).
And so just from that little example, you have the human body, requiring time for its existence, yet in your consciousness you experience timelessness, at times. But here on earth it cannot be. And that's because we cannot explain the nature of the present, as previously mentioned... .
Does that mean we should experience doing instead of just thinking? Can we get more out of life by doing? Or do we wear both hats... .
He was right because time is always floating there around our lives and remembering us that our lives are limited. When I finish some experience that lasted some years randomly appears to me mind a weird sense of nostalgia because I think I will never live that period again in my life so I don’t how to explain this emotion... sadness or happinesses? It depends in the emotion and the memory we talk about.
Also in this context can appear the so called chronophobia that it means anxiety and uneasiness about time (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chronophobia) which could be very serious mental problem...
Quoting 3017amen
True! I guess I going to be more able to answer this questions from a Kierkegaard's point of view soon because I bought a book from him: the concept of anxiety
Cool! Let me know how that goes... .
In the meantime, maybe this sums up our musings:
Kierkegaard writes: Man … is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.
Perhaps in a Platonic vein, we experience timelessness when we do mathematical calculations ( a priori truth's tthat describe physical/non physical objects).
BTW, do you have that Chronophobia book?
Sure I will :100: :up:
Quoting 3017amen
No. Sorry I only have the brief analysis which appears in the link above
Okay. So here is the passage:
One can, quite generally, in defining the concepts of the past, the future, and the eternal, see how one has defined the instant. If there is no instant, then the eternal appears behind as the past. It is as when I imagine a man walking along a road but do not posit the pacing, and the road then appears behind him as the distance covered. If the instant is posited but merely as a discrimen [division], then the future is the eternal. If the instant is posited, so is the eternal, but also the future which reappears as the past. This is clearly to be seen in the Greek, the Jewish, and the Christian views. The concept on which everything turns in Christianity, that which made all things new,* is the fullness of time,† but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past. If one doesn’t watch out for this, not a single concept can be saved from a heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept. One then gets the past not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the future (the meaning of world history and the historical development of the individual thereby losing the concepts of conversion, atonement, and redemption). One gets the future not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the present (the concepts of resurrection and judgment being thereby laid in ruins).
Imagine there is no instant, that is, no "present moment" between past ad future, which is easy to do for all you have to think of is a smooth sailing of the past into the future, and is occurring now as I type. A seamless process, and one might conclude there is no present at all since to break away fromt his process, to suspend its continuity would require precisely in the suspending, that which you are trying to suspend; I mean the thought itself of a suspension is itself part of the flow. So positing a present seems a paradox.
K argues that if there is no instant/present, then actuality is lost, that is, the actual event of being there as a real agency where the past is literally unfolding before one as a process, a palpable affair. Clearly there is something to that smooth sailing, but just as clearly there is something to concrete experience that is NOT a past generating a future existence.
K argues, if there is posited a present, but the present is only a demarcation between past and future, then the future is just a replay of the past, out into an eternal vanishing point, the same as looking back at mere recollection, only into the future.
The only way to reconcile time is to bring all under the subsumption of an inclusive present; after all, it is this actuality where past and future have the possibility to be conceived at all. The actual is the present, and there are no temporal instantiations in the future or the past; or, the past is not conceived in the past, nor is the future, but both have their, say, evidential basis in the present.
Now, what Kierkegaard means by the heretical and treasonous mixture that annihilates the concept is clear: It is the positing of the past and the future as merely a running stream of events, an inviolable Heraclitean continuity with no way out. History, personal and world history, possesses no possibility for freedom and reality becomes an abstraction and the meaning of all things is trivialized. We become slaves of time.
And if you are a Christian, like K is, God, by this heretical mixture, becomes an impossible concept.
But cultural relevance hardly matters here, and more than it would matter for quantum physics. Alas, if people take idealism seriously, something might happen, a loss of confidence in the the objective claims of science, or, an excessive concern about the self. In the end, a loss of Christian faith may be responsible for a degradation in human values. So is this a reason to argue for Jesus?
Not is it relevant? Rather, is it true?
But then, idealism NEVER has had this kind of power. The closest I can think of is in the 50's when beatniks actually tried to read Heidegger, sat around in cafes like Dharma Bums questioning existence.
And I certainly do not think consumerism can be tied to idealism, as if consumers could even begin to fathom the Copernican Revolution of Kant. But if you care to sketch out how you think this is the case, I would like to hear it.
Okay. I would genuinely like to know. Some of Husserl is very accessible, like Cartesian Meditations and others. Ideas get rather technical, but it is here I think you can see how phenomenology works. I haven't read Logical Investigations. On my list.
Well then, you sound like a Kierkegaardian. the trick is to become a knight of faith, which is to live in the present and embrace the past and the future in this lived present. I think Buddhists do this, or try to; I mean, if you meditate effectively, you find, on the one hand, you are still you and your constructed personality is still there informing you of the world and its details, but on the other, the past and the future anticipations the past imposes are all realized in the present, and you live both in the eternal present and in the world of daily affairs. You could be a butcher, an accountant, and no one would know that you have mastered the world and live in God's grace.
K thought this was beyond his abilities.
Quoting Constance
...because of different concepts of time. The reason concepts of time were at issue around 1859 is that Darwin published Origin of Species that year, in turn based on a geological concept of time - that proposed a hugely ancient origin of the earth and lifeforms fossilized in rock layers.
I don't know what that means until I know what you think the flow is.
Thank you for this, and for the quotes - the more I look into Husserl, the more I find this to be a more accurate description. Idealism is far too confining a term for what he had in mind.
Excellent link. This is from The Concept of Anxiety, a seminal work. As you read through this text you find Sartre, here, Heidegger there.
I wasn't being very careful. In a sense, K argues that past and future do not exist, because the only way they do exist is in the present. We live in time, I would argue, such that past and future are subsumed under the present, or, rather, such that our experience of the past moving into the future is a reality in the giveness of the presence. The past is a dimension of our worldly giveness, and once spirit is posited and we leave the aesthetic moment to moment existence behind, we come to see that even when the past and the future stand before us, there is really only a true ontology of the eternal present.
He is devilishly difficult to get right, for me, at any rate, because he is so playful. Playful geniuses are hard to read because their thinking is so idiosyncratic.
No. K was responding to Hegel. At any rate, K died in 1855. Aristotle is behind this. See 3017amen's:
https://youtu.be/vh-IW9Y1htA
I’m reminded of one of John Lennon’s songs “life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans”. Also, there is a Buddhist saying “do each thing, as if you do nothing else”.
Presents of mind, is to be where you are. Wherever you are, your five senses will be feeding the brain with information about sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. However, the thinking mind, as John Lennon points out, may be busy making other plans. One may not stop thinking, by thinking about it, as that would be like trying to wipe up blood, with blood. The trick is to watch the thinking and allow it to be there, simply because it “IS” there. To allow things to be, just as they are, is to be in the present moment, or in the NOW. Anyone whom is reading this, is reading it NOW, because there is no “other”time.
In the meantime...
Quoting “The Past, Present and Future of Time-Consciousness: From Husserl to Varela and Beyond”, Shaun Gallagher (in Constructivist Foundations, November 2017)
Barrett describes instead three event structures: an ongoing interoception of affect constructed by internal and external sensory data as the state of the organism; an ongoing prediction of affect generated by conceptual structures; and a 4D instructional map of attention and effort (energy) distribution across the organism, constituting the ‘complicated interlacing’ of interoception and conception, similar to Husserl’s primal impression.
This relates to my suggestion that the present is a construction, what we make of it, and doesn’t seem too far from Husserl’s internal time-consciousness. The ‘present’, or primal impression, is not understood as an ‘object’, but as a constituting event operating only in connection with ongoing interoception and prediction.
I also see a similar relational structure, at a three-dimensional level, reflected in the bio-chemical function of DNA and mRNA, but that’s another discussion... anyway, I’ve just picked up ‘The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness’, so bear with me...
Sure, no worries Constance. K makes the point of both phenomena occurring from within the human condition, hence is emphasis on dread. (Logically, it breaks the rules of excluded middle.) Our existence is such that without past and present, cognition could not exist the way it does. However, it seems when discussing that which is present, the question becomes how big is that sliver of present(?).
Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al. as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable. However, in theory, Einstein said it was possible, out there... .
Too, in the aforementioned Platonian sense, we get to play with eternity from time to time. Whether it's through the phenomenal humanistic experiences that we engage in, or from experimenting with mathematical entities...
Note that the ideas I set forth here is not exclusively an attempt at weaving textual agreement, which is what academics hold so dear. I explore, appropriate freely.
The impossible present. Heidegger accused Husserl of trying to walk on water in his impossible affirmations of "things themselves" but that really is the way this idea works: The way to make this plausible is first to remove the standard concept of time from our imagination, for this is a quantitative abstraction. And the law of the excluded middle only has application here where the past and the present are mutually exclusive. This logical attempt to bring the world to heel is exactly what K opposed, but on the other hand, I think he does not violate it at all since a quantitative temporal order is not existential, but pragmatic, I would call it reified pragmatics, the measurements we impose on the world, then take them AS the world.
This being "without past and present, cognition could not exist the way it does" is, K is telling us, the wrong way to look at this. There is only ONE actuality, and this is the eternal present (which IS eternity; See Wittgenstein, a big fan of K. He draws on K in his Tractatus), and we live in this and only this, but we do it AS we live in a temporal world, making the temporal world and all of our ordered thinking and engagement mere constituents of the eternal now. This is, I claim, exactly what the Buddhists are talking about when they say one does not achieve Buddhahood, but only realizes that one, to borrow from Heidegger, always, already IS this. For K, to "posit spirit" is to posit sin, for in this positing one realizes that what we call time is possessed by the eternal present, which is God, the soul.
Quoting 3017amen
Tricky. Realizing the eternal present subsumes time is to become aware of sin. Early on in K's Concept of Anxiety, he refers to the child and her wonderment and free adventurous spirit as being indicative of this radical movement, prior to which there is no sin. I am moving toward the realization that the idea that "no time is impossible," is wrong minded. Of course, we can talk like this vis a vis past, present and future, but "positing the spirit" is to pull away from normal discourse, not just in thought, but existentially, and indeed from all that creates separation from God: culture. Hereditary sin is to live in devotion to culture, to live, as Tillich put it, as if the institutions we created were our ultimate concern.
Einstein theorized an a world prior to positing spirit, what Husserl called the naturalistic attitude. Certainly nothing wrong with this, but it is pre-sin. (Btw, the term 'sin' here is not, as K tells us, the Lutheran concept of the foulest deed imaginable, but a kind of Augustinian absence of God. This is my take on K).
Quoting 3017amen
The sense you refer to, I can't say I remember. But K is critical of the Greeks, here and especially in Repetition. The idea of Platonic recollection in Meno makes the past rule the present, to put it one way. Repetition is to live in the eternal present such that the past is the fullness of time,† but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past.
It occurred to me that I really didn't address this: Heraclitus 's world of flux, one has to ask, why is this exclusive of affirming the present? WE are the ones who look at the stream on time as a logical succession, but the term "stream" belies this, for it possesses no boundaries at all. The law of the excluded middle is a positivist's way of misapprehending the world entirely.
Of course, the existential ethos of life not being so neat and tidy, and frankly illogical, rears its ugly head here, once again. As mentioned, in normal everydayness we are unable to, as you say, affirm the present. I agree that the LP would struggle with making sense out of consciousness/the process of cognition itself/cognitive behavior, as not only does it violate the logic associated with the a priori law of excluded middle axiom, it also (consciousness) has obvious metaphysical features to its existence and functionality.
But back to the matter at hand, what sliver of time does the present represent? The answer to that question, I think, will speak to your concern about affirming the present, because perhaps, the present is made up of past and future, in an illogical mix of same. And so which of the three elements of time enjoy the special status of primacy, I wonder (?)… .
Maybe as a thought experiment, think about how the intellect and the Will function together. Throw in sentience, and see what you come up with....
Quoting Constance
Quoting Constance
Why is the eternal present God, rather than God-sin as the inseparable poles of every present?
Something I wrote on Caputo;
“to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.”
Quoting Joshs
Why is this not God-sin? But this begs the question, what is God?
As for sin, speaking for K, I would say, first, there is no "every moment" as this quantifies the present. (He does speak of "the instant" but this is what makes K so frustrating, because he does reconcile apparent contradictions, but one has to read the full context of what he says to see this). All there IS, is the present, and for us, the temporal world contained therein. Sin is knowing, positing, spirit, which as I understand it is an existential qualitative movement out of daily affairs (culture, our "inherited sin") and into a kind of "pure" present, and I think of this purity as not unlike what Kant did with reason: In our entangled affairs, as we live through them, we recognize nothing of the structures of reason in judgment and thought, but turn toward these, in analysis, one comes to see at a higher order. Only here, the higher order is existential, non discursive; the "movement" is nondiscursive, though getting there is--obviously, one has to think.
As to how God and why it is privileged over God-sin, K would say things like, through God lies redemption, making for the fullness of time, but the fullness of time being the instant as the eternal, as the Bible says. But I leave K (who has been accused of endorsing silliness) here. For such fullness, I turn to the Buddhists and the actuality of intimated "ultimate reality" as the Abhidhamma puts it. Ultimate reality is only meaningful in the intuited way it is apprehended, and here, one has to put aside or "suspend" critical judgment that pounces on such a thing. This is why philosophers like Levinas speak so cryptically about "the ideatum that exceeds the idea" and others are intent on whittling down time to the present to some primordial intimation, but end up talking around it, not about it, for this is the best that can be done.
After all, what is falling in love, phenomenologically, looking at the "thing itself"'; and what is pain, in the same manner? This is not a matter for thought's adumbrations; it is transformational, cannot be spoken, yet they are the principle features of Being Here, that is, all these terms subsume. Talk about God is talk about value, and this ushers in a discussion about metaethcs, metavalue.
Quoting Joshs
I'll have to look through Caputo for this. Off hand, this "for an instant, semantic unity, nameable as God, love...." is an instant outside of the apophatic annihilation of all such instants. Such terms, in the reductive attempt, are the last to go. But then, it may very well be that, if K is right, the closer one gets to "eternity" the more philosophy falls away, and one can be a butcher, an accountant, but live AS these in the eternal present. Like Abraham.
It does not in the end come down to time, or any analysis of anything. Philosophy is really a search for value, which is what God is about: a consummation of this search.
That doesn't help. If you don't side with the atheists, the believers, or anyone else you mentioned, the "trend" certainly isn't going to be a step up. What trend? What is it that everybody is thinking in this trend that you find so important?
One element that has not been mentioned as yet in this discussion of The Concept of Anxiety is how the "single individual" is the one who has to face the prospect of the "eternal." The limit to psychology often mentioned in the book is directly related to the "inward reserve" needed to be the one who can make a choice.
The "generational" inheritance of sin described at the beginning is related to a model of the good parent who helps their child deal with this element. The book is a manual of religious education along with whatever else it may be.
Well done with this reading. I agree with the dynamic (though my K is limited), I only find it hard to bear up under the weight of this as a constant state. Every movement is not an action, nor is every expression intended--are we to be skewered at every passing moment on our angst for the state of our self? Cavell talks of a philosophical or moral moment, which is not ever-present; but, say, when we don't know what to do and are at a loss. K seems to capture this with what you quoted:
I can't help hear the echo of Emerson's Experience, which was written a year before Either/Or.
We don't know our customs, our world, our self; whether to go backward or upward. We enter a world already made, with the past in place, our language already imbued with the interests and desires and judgments of our culture. We have not signed the contract; most of the time we act and speak without standing for ourselves; we quote others Emerson says. The past simply continuing into the future, the abstraction of our self from this moment "annihilates the concept" as K says. The word is dead, and we are quiet (our life is, desperately). But there is an instant which makes all things new; when time is full (of possibilities Wittgenstein might say). We may need to be adverse to expectation (Emerson), convert our interest in our concepts, atone for the unspoken, redeem our judgments--to give them new life and power over our present deliberation. It is we, at this moment, that are responsible, now, before we define our life with our culture, our expression, our action. When duty calls us, we must answer for our current state, beyond our (past) knowledge, or suffer the sin of that lost chance. If we are to say our original sin was the creation of the past--our desire for certain knowledge of it--then our Eden is the sight of the sun at the top of Nietzsche's ladder, at noonday as Emerson says.
And so is the "eternal present" ever-present? or, if it is, is it that we are only at times aware of it, or have the opportunity to rise to the occasion of it? Not that we may not be brought up at any time by society for our action or inaction, but are we to be held to the grindstone by ourselves at all times (as if every second was subject to sin, our grief endless)?
This leads me to also comment on your question: "Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL?" We could say the past is outside of our self: knowledge, language, culture. And the future is the implications and consequences and judgments from that past. Our default aspect to the present is unrecognized consent, complicity, blindness, inattention, alienation. We fail to shake off our lethargy (or apathy) when our moment arrives. That is to say, the past and the future are ALL that exist; before we are thrust (drawn) into the present to face our eternal, if yet unconnected, unlived, self (Emerson speaks of a "next" self).
That stair can be a very strange place, depending on the individual. Some experience a powerful alienation from all things and familiarity itself is lost. One has a sense of being two selves, the daily rote self, and then, this uncanny presence which cannot identify any longer with this. This is played out in phenomenology as a central theme, and it is considered a structural feature of our existence.
Obviously, there is philosophical opposition to this. I can only conclude that we are all put together differently for reasons impossible to fathom.
Quoting Antony Nickles
He really nailed it. But the confidant (in Repetition) who was so confused by his affections and what to do, this hardly makes the case, does it? It is the "impossible" cases that drive one to top of a mountain raising a fist to oblivion in hopeless outrage, cases like pneumonic bubonic plague and the like. Language nullifies such things, everything, really, which is part of its job, to reduce the world to a manageable totality. We are not aware that this is happening, of course, but common speech reduces that world to its level. But then, to follow Emerson, walking along a bare common, "glad to the brink of fear" we see there are two sides of this. The Manichean way was to give horror and delight equal place, and there is some truth in this, but this is a quantitative equality. Qualitatively, the differences are stark and clear.
The point being that K doesn't quite penetrate to the heart the "metaethical" discussion of this outrage.
Quoting Antony Nickles
That is nicely put. Keeping in mind that people don't live an abstraction, and there is a "fullness" in getting married, raising a family, even going shopping, and K's thought is that these things are not to be abandoned, but "sin" is doing all this, taking the world AS all of this, with no foundation in the" eternal", and what is this? This has to be played out in its cash value, for we are not dealing with a "sliver of time" between past and future, but an encompassing presence of God (not to put too fine a point on it), and then the question goes to what is "given": what is there about being glad to the brink of fear, or being tortured horribly? These are the kinds of questions that loom large, for we are no longer on familiar ground as our world is cast in high relief upon eternity, that is, what language has so tamed is now unleashed and its true nature becomes clear: These are not localized affairs, as empirical science would have it, for we have made a "qualitative" movement beyond the "naturalistic attitude" (Husserl's term) and the boundaries that would otherwise localize them are undone.
But then, this also de-localizes the qualitative natures of (ethical) good and evil, and "ontic" presence is now ontological (these kind of language I lift from Heidegger. Ontic refers to our lived lives in everydayness while ontological refers to the structure of Being. But we are not in Heidegger's world here; we are in Kierkegaard's, or, at least hovering around this). So the conclusion seems irresistible: The Good really is the Good in an absolute moral way. Moral realism is the much derided term in modern philosophy. But now the question progresses further, how is this to be understood? In utility? In a rational good will (Kant's deontology)? Both of these beg the question, what is all the fuss about? Reason is an empty vessel and utility is measuring magnitudes and qualities of the Good, but what is the Good?
My point in all this is to get to this one point, around which I claim all philosophy tends, implicitly The good and the bad, in the ethical/aesthetic sense, are intuitive actualities: taste that chicken cordon bleu, falling in love and be enraptured by all things (for to be in love is to love all things in one's gaze indiscriminately; Walt Whitman's poetry is founded on this idea, his "tallying the world"), the pneumonic plague, i.e., palpable meaning is an actuality not confined to the boundaries of finitude.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Emerson, the three I's: I, eye, aye! Reading his famous Nature is always inspiring, and philosophers don't take him seriously because he is kind of a crank romantic idealist. But then, so am I, though I think in different terms. Nietzsche really liked him because he was an iconoclast, rejecting dogmatism and orthodoxy, inviting us to be a "transparent eyeball" which I take as the dramatic reductive move to Kierkegaard's eternal present. I think if you walk with Emerson in the woods and leave behind the interpreted world, the past and the future disappear. Now, this gets us to the big issue in phenomenology, which is, even though you are not explicitly thinking of anything at all, there is still "the world" there before you, and you know it, and what allows this comfort of knowing is the past, or rather, it is the past to future event, and it is argued that there is no "in between" for this is just impossible: to grasp what the present could BE would require a medium outside the past to future, but this would be to posit something beyond the conditions of positing itself, beyond language, and language is the understanding's structure. This eternal present is after all, only as good as sense can be made out of it. Eternal??
Of course, this is the kind of argument that stands in way of positing anything that is not discursive in the positing, and K is doing just this. But is he? As I see it, the present is not constrained by the past into future at all, and K's framing of the idea holds the key that at once allows the present to sustain positioning the past and the future within this. We cannot, as he says, forget that we exist. Existence IS the present, he is arguing; to Be is to be now, and this makes the past a now actuality. And history is a now actuality, to recall is to recall now. To anticipate is to anticipate now. All roads' analyses lead to the present, and, as K says, not positing this, not realizing this, is our distance for God, God being the actual, inevitable existential embodiment of the Good; after all, we have admitted above that the Good we realize in the everyday affairs we have is no longer localized. The question about the Good that remains is the hierarchy of the Good, which is the basis from K going after concupiscence.
The single individual? Pls elaborate, if you would. How is it related to model of the good parent? And, inward reserve?
Well, it's an interesting fact, but no it doesn't help. "I don't know" does fall short of the mark for discussion. Tell me more.
Fine, I'll contemplate on it once more. Chances are the discussion ends here.
I believe the discussion of time you are referring to in The Concept of Anxiety begins in the third chapter (section IV 355). It begins with:
The remainder of chapter 3 builds from his explanation of the temporal in order to separate expectations of fate from freedom and the consciousness of sin. I would summarize that portion if I could. But, even if I was more able, the summary could only be understood by some one who traveled the distance by themselves. So, with the caveat of how the sentence could be wildly misunderstood out of context, I will pluck the following out of section (IV 374):
However, to explain how my religious existence comes into relation with and expresses itself in my outward existence, that is the task."
(Same translator as cited above)
The next chapter, Number Four, is titled: "Anxiety of Sin or Anxiety as the Consequence of Sin in the Single Individual." The chapter includes the distinction between good and evil and it how that relates to the possibility for freedom. Kierkegaard also introduces his view of the demonic as a result of that relationship. The problem of "inclosing reserve" is that it is a necessary condition of any single individual acting as themselves but is also a source of suffering and personal existential peril. To answer your question about a "model of the good parent", I will rip another bit of text out of context. It comes with that bitter quality of understatement Kierkegaard uses when very pissed off about something:
Well, K makes alot of assumptions about others having experience as horrible as his own, as he was required from an early age to work 364 days a year, just getting Christmas off, for almost no pay.
As N said, every philosophy is a kind of specious autobiography. That might also not apply in all cases, but from one existentialist to another, it appears particularly suitable.
I can't agree with K's assessment. My parents left me entirely alone until I did something stupid, then blamed the other for raising me wrong as part of their 15-year-long-divorce, while punishing me for it with relish. So we all serve different purposes to our parents, dont we, lol
The key term here would be that of semantic unity, which, too, is under erasure. I think Caputo thinks that since Derrida thinks the apophatic nature of the trace cancels even itself and conceptualization is out the window, any and all thinking is under erasure, when the erasure is complete, there is an existential residuum which is the basis for positing God: the noncontingent Good, the Bad. I say what the erasure cannot touch is metavalue, which of course, is a concept, but the signified in this case "speaks" aconceptually: a lighted match on one's finger is very different from a "being appeared to redly". What remains after analysis has exhausted the event of the former is, again, an existential residuum
The present, according to Kierkegaard is certainly not some radical sliver of time that escapes erasure, but an infinitely overarching actuality that subsumes time; and this is logically unassailable, for it is founded on faith. This is the absurd in Kierkegaard. It does not endorse silliness, as has been claimed by some, because it is based (somehow, loosely) on the reasoning above.
Still thinking......
But then, it may be that one biography exceeds another here as it does in all regards. I may not be able to do math like Quine could, but I don't think Quine had an inkling as to what K was talking about, nor an inkling as to what Meister Eckhart was talking about. Some are tone deaf while others receive the aesthetic of music naturally; but then, when one does acknowledge this aesthetic, is it merely a localized "perspective"?
Is mathematics speciously biographical? Of course not.
I think it is a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard's intention to read being 'present but not present' before a child's inward reserve to mean the same thing as a "hands off" style of parenting that only notices the child's experience when bad things happen.
The key element is found in what cannot be delegated:
" the task is very difficult, and one cannot exempt oneself by employing a nursemaid or by buying a walker."
One has to engage with their own struggle in this regard to have any relationship to what is happening in another by themselves. We can help each other but we can't do certain things for each other.
Quoting ernest meyer
Specious? I have read a number of places where N said the philosophical is autobiographical. I don't recall where that element was said to be all it meant. N judged philosophical views by their fruits according to what he valued.
Well I dont know, lol, being forced to work 364 days a year by his parents, with only Christmas off did, apparently cause his obsessive reiteration of one tragic religious narrative about one of Christ's ancestors, Abram, and his intended sacrifice by his father, in an entire book on the subject titled 'Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death.' One needs to bear in mind that Christ also was to be sacrificed by his Father, even at his birth.
So I'd have to say, with regrets, the extent his views were colored by his childhood experience can only be a matter of opinion. I mean, how many people ever want to talk about trying to forgiving their father that much? lol.
Personally, if I learned anything important from K, it was how much suffering God must have felt Himself to sacrifice his Son for the sake of our sins in the conventional account of Christ's life, something normally ignored during the glittering Christmas celebrations of Western Protestantism.
I do not dismiss the notion that Kierkegaard's experience provides a background for better understanding of what he writes about but it doesn't explain the concept of the Single Individual, presented here and elsewhere, by itself.
To relegate this view of parenting as only the product of abuse is to dismiss any reason to engage with Kierkegaard as a thinker.
Please cite your favorite version.
There are other references in other books but I am not going there now.
Up until a couple of hundred years ago, it was ALL about survival. It's just of late that people became obsessed with the delusional state of happiness, that temporary biochemical rush we prostrate ourselves for when we believe we have outsmarted The Universe (only to be set-straight when the gods inevitably prick our bubble and we sputter back down to Earth (and beyond)...only to resume our never-ending search for yet another wall in which to bang our heads.
The survival was the main goal, yes. But only for those who were just natural and human: born, reproduce and die. They did not improve their knowledge at all so when you are "ignorant" of circumstances you tend to be happier because it does not affect you as much as it should be.
Quoting synthesis
I think this happens because humans tend to be so stubborn in all painful things or issues. It is quite a paradox right? Repeating aspects that hurt us.
One of the most challenging and influential books on this, of course, is Being and Time.
Heidegger is highly influenced by Kierkegaard. It's worth the effort in reading it.
Heidegger, in my reading, rather than focusing on what time "is," per se, discusses the perspective upon which all interpretations of time (and being) are based. Starting with Aristotle's essay on time (in the Physics), he'll argue that Aristotle's perspective ("being" as ousia, which in Heidegger means "constant presence") is one where time itself gets treated as an object that's "present-at-hand" -- viz., as a series of sequential, changing now-points (which align with the measure of "seconds" of the moving clock pointer), perceived as such because "presence" (phusis as enduring, persistent identity -- the ???? Plato) gets privileged in the thinking of thinkers (philosophers).
Time therefore needs to be analyzed anew, as does the human being that interprets and defines "time." Why? Because this all comes out of the human mind, the human being. As Heidegger says, "time temporalizes itself," meaning it emerges and is constructed out of something else. That "something else" is human being, human experience, human needs and interests. Particularly, human projection, goals, possibilities, plans (which becomes the "future"); memory, tradition, and the already-existing ("throwness") which becomes the "past"; and being amidst things in action (the "present").
The same can be said of interpretations of what it means to be human generally, what it means to be an individual, and what it means for anything to "be." The understanding of "being" (including human being) and "time" are very much connected, at least in Heidegger's thought. Human beings instead get re-interpreted as embodied time, or "temporality" in the sense mentioned above. This temporality -- this human constitution -- has been hidden from most thinkers through history for the very fact that everything (humans, time, being, nature) gets interpreted from the perspective of presence, or what is later called the "metaphysics of presence."
From this perspective -- which itself is based on a privative (derivative) mode of a human being (namely the "present-at-hand", which is detached from the everyday, integrated, holist world of automaticity, habit, and skill of the "ready-to-hand") -- one cannot help but interpret human beings as "rational animals," and time as a kind of number line or "container."
That's the best cartoon version I can give, but I find it compelling indeed. It makes all these questions about "time" fairly irrelevant. Ditto the "mind/body" problem, et al.
I think he was much more influenced by Nietzsche, who he wrote two volumes about , than kierkegaard, who he only mentioned disparagingly. Unfortunately a whole generation of West Coast Heideggerians ( Dreyfus, Haugeland, Rousse) were mostly influenced by Kierkegaard in their reading ( in my view misreading) of Heidegger. The writers I find most useful in understanding Heidegger are Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche and Derrida , but Kierkegaard very little.
Keep in mind that Heidegger didn’t want to equate Dasein with anthropos , the ‘ human being ‘ as biological entity.
Yes, It emerges and is constructed out of Dasein, but more specifically , it is the structure the the past only existing as what it occurs into and is changed by.
I can't find a single time he "disparages" Kierkegaard. As for Nietzsche, he didn't write two volumes, he taught several courses -- and later than Being and Time.
That being said, the similarities between Kierkegaard and Heidegger are much more striking to me than Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Quoting Joshs
True, but nothing I said (and nothing you quoted) implies a biological perspective. Perhaps "needs"? But even there, there's no reason it has to be considered strictly in biological terms.
Quoting Joshs
This isn't very clear, I'm afraid. What does the second "it" refer to? Time or temporality? As for the rest, it's not clear enough to guess.
These were published as 2 two volume books of 200 pages each.
Quoting Xtrix
Past , present and future are the same moment, what Heidegger calls the three ecstasies of the ‘ now’, The past isnt what is behind me, but that part of the past-present-future hinge which projects forward into the now. The present occurs into this projected past. So there is never a past other than this past which is always already changed by the present which it projects itself into.
This gives the relation between my past ,present and future an extra-ordinary intimacy, the intimacy of Care. It makes the now a becoming rather than a ‘state’.
Quoting Joshs
The lectures being published in two volumes is not the same as him writing two volumes. But yes, he did consider Nietzsche important enough to have four courses in. Ditto with Hegel, Parmenides, Aristotle, et al.
Quoting Joshs
Not sure I like this explanation. Sounds very Buddhist. I don't recall Heidegger saying anything like the ecstases being part of the "same moment" or the "now," either. But they do appear to be a unity rather than separate dimensions. Remember that he considers the future to be the more "primary" of the unity, not the present.
From Gerhard Thonhauser
“Thinker without Category:
“The first volume of the Black Notebooks is exemplary for Heidegger’s hostility against an anthropological and/or existential reading of Being and Time, which Heidegger associates with the name “Kierkegaard” (GA 94, 32–33 and 74–76).
Heidegger’s view of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel is a major aspect of his understanding of Kierkegaard. Heidegger’s perspective remained the same throughout his intellectual development: From a philosophical point of view, Kierkegaard is a Hegelian. Kierkegaard himself, however, did not notice this de- pendency. For that reason, his criticism of Hegel is mistaken, as he failed to see or misunderstood the crucial metaphysical issue that manifests itself in Hegel’s philosophy. In short, Heidegger considered Kierkegaard a Hegelian that deeply misunderstood Hegel, which is why his criticism of Hegel, from a philosophical perspective, is hollow and pointless.
Heidegger:
The pertinacity of dialectic, which draws its motivation from a very definite source, is docu- mented most clearly in Kierkegaard. In the properly philosophical aspect of his thought, he did not break free from Hegel. His later turn to Trendelenburg is only added documentation for how little radical he was in philosophy. He did not realize that Trendelenburg saw Ar- istotle through the lens of Hegel. His reading the Paradox into the New Testament and things Christian was simply negative Hegelianism.
Regarding Heidegger’s relation to Kierkegaard, we can summarize with the observation that the first half of the 1930s is characterized by a tendency to embrace the Dane alongside Nietzsche. That changed around 1935 together with a transformation of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, whose “The Will to Power” is henceforth considered the completion of metaphysics. As a consequence, Hei- degger includes Nietzsche in his history of being as the final step in the oblivion of being (Seinsvergessenheit), whereas Kierkegaard continues to be excluded from Heidegger’s idiosyncratic history of Western thought. In Contributions to Philosophy he states: “What lies between Hegel and Nietzsche has many shapes but is nowhere within the metaphysical in any originary sense—not even Kierkegaard.”
The first time Heidegger clearly explains his new point of view is in summer term 1936:
Nietzsche’s attitude toward system is fundamentally different from that of Kierkegaard who is usually mentioned here together with Nietzsche...All of this is said, by the way, in order to show by implication that the combination of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which has now become customary, is justified in many ways, but is fundamentally untrue philosophically and is misleading.31
Through this shift, Nietzsche gains an importance for Heidegger that Kierkegaard never had.
Who knows? And yes, it is quite the paradox.
Nice copy-and-paste of secondary sources, but nowhere does Heidegger disparage Kierkegaard.
The only Heidegger quote (I think):
Quoting Joshs
This isn't a disparagement. Not even close. That Heidegger sees Hegel as the culmination of Western metaphysics (since Plato) is not in question. I never once said Hegel wasn't an influence on Heidegger; I said Kierkegaard was a large influence on Heidegger. And he was. Heidegger had nothing but respect for Kierkegaard, just as he had for Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Descartes, and others -- despite the fact that he considers them still operating within the realm of Greek ontology, and thus within the metaphysics of presence.
Quoting Xtrix
Indeed, as well he should respect them, because they represent the foundation on which his own philosophy is built. Let me clarify what I mean by disparage in the context of Heidegger’s relationship to Kierkegaard.
Of the philosophical predecessors to one’s own thinking, there are those whose work is distant enough intellectually ( this isn’t necessary correlated with chronology, since Heidegger felt a philosophical proximity to the pre-Socratics) to be of only tangential or historical use to them. By contrast, there is usually a much smaller circle of thinkers whose ideas are considered close enough to one’s own to be considered kindred spirits. For Heidegger, Nietzsche and Holderlin became those figures whereas Kierkegaard was one step removed from this circle. This is what I meant by his being ‘disparaged’ by Heidegger.
:up: