Misunderstanding Heidegger
People misinterpret the introduction to Heidegger's Being and Time as an introduction to Being and Time.
It is not.
Instead, the introduction to Being and Time is an introduction to an anticipated 6 part project of which Being and Time comprises only the first 2 parts.
The most significant problem with this misinterpretation is that it then causes people to mistakenly presume that the primary subject matter of Being and Time is the meaning of being.
It is not.
Instead, the primary subject matter of Being and Time is an explication of Dasein in its average everydayness.
It is not.
Instead, the introduction to Being and Time is an introduction to an anticipated 6 part project of which Being and Time comprises only the first 2 parts.
The most significant problem with this misinterpretation is that it then causes people to mistakenly presume that the primary subject matter of Being and Time is the meaning of being.
It is not.
Instead, the primary subject matter of Being and Time is an explication of Dasein in its average everydayness.
Comments (212)
Why don't we compile an anthology consisting of how various philosophies/philosophers are/can be misunderstood.
It's my contention that ways things go wrong (here gross/pardonable misunderstanding) can be as informative and illuminating as ways they go right (here correctly understood).
What's that?
In find that sad in that his own ontological views stand quite well on their own and do not depend on everybody else being wrong.
I have this vague intuition that the Greeks had a certain Greek way of looking at things (cultural biases) and their philosophy is so colored/tainted. In other words, there's nothing right/correct about Greek ontology/metaphysics; it's just one culture's take on ontology in particular and philosophy in general. Heidegger's claim that he knew exactly what the Greeks were talking about then does nothing to close the distance between us and the truth. Understanding Greek philosophy is simply to get an idea of where the Greeks were coming from, that's all. Just saying.
Though I am not convinced that all philosophy is quite as local as you suggest. In fact, I am quite confident that most of the early Greek philosophers considered themselves to be expounding more on being in general rather than Greek being in particular. Though you could be absolutely correct and they could all have been fooling themselves.
After all, human being is the being that questions being and that is true cross-culturally.
It is only the answers that vary between cultures.
And the answers are far less interesting than the questions.
Just thought I'd mention. Please continue! It's out of my system.
Being and time. How's Dasein connected to time?
[quote=Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Notes 1936-1938]Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by ‘facts,’ i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.[/quote]
Note N's prescient criticism sixty-something years before:
[quote=The Gay Science, 173]Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.[/quote]
(Emphases are mine.)
Quoting Arne
:up:
That having been said, any serious philosopher who rejected Heidegger's ontological views because of Heidegger's despicable politics is as much a fool as an engineer who rejected the engineering principles of SS Officer Wernher von Braun.
If you want to prosecute Heidegger, then by all means prosecute Heidegger. If you are looking for someone to defend Heidegger, I am not that someone. If ordered by a court to defend Heidegger, I would surrender my license to practice law.
If you are looking for someone to discuss the nature of being that Heidegger pushes, then I am most definitely such a someone.
I have no answer to that question. I am generally confused by Division II of Being and Time.
I like Nietzsche. But he too is no slouch when it comes to offering up obscurity. Much of his reputation is built upon the notion that he must be profound because he is so hard to understand.
And you know that to be true.
And I make no claim to understanding Nietzsche in any significant way. Even though I know I have read far more Nietzsche than most people who pretend to understand him, any understanding I do have is rooted primarily in Kaufman's interpretations.
Of course his philosophical writings stand separate from his political activities, it's just that I don't understand that he tells on the one side that you have to care about things to know what they are, and on the other side doesn't seem to be bothered to care about Jews, and following his own philosophy, the truth about them. I'm not saying you shouldn't discuss his ideas. He just doesn't apply them in practice. Had he cared about his fellow men, he would have known the truth about them.
If one truly cares about white supremacy, then one will be a good Nazi.
How unfortunate. Do let us know when you find out. G'day.
My interpretation is that you have to care about stuff to know the stuff. Be it a rock, a neighbor, or a Nazi party. Most of the universe stays hidden because we don't care about it. Dasein, the being there.
Heidegger said that people are the only creatures with a dasein that has a notion of its own dasein. Didn't he mean simply that people are overly self conscious? Maybe he was himself to much self conscious. It can be a hindrance.
Has he a general theory about caring?
:100: Same (plus R.J. Hollingdale's translations).
I disagree.
No. He does not have a general theory about caring. The German care does not have the same emotional and moral connotations as the English care. Again and for Heidegger, care is simply that which motivates and organizes your life. If you care about rocks, you might be well advised to become a geologist. What ever it is that you care about in whatever situation you find yourself is going to go a long way in explaining what you do and why you do it.
You can count on it. I only hope you will do the same.
Well here's what I recalled about metaphysics with great difficulty I must say:
Metaphysics
1. Causality
2. Ontology
3. Identity & Change
4. Necessity & Possibility
5. Space & Time
It seems Heidegger chose two areas in metaphysics (ontology & time) and tried to weave a coherent tale around them. Why and how, I haven't the foggiest.
In division two, Heidegger moves on from average everydayness to talk about authentic angst and time. So even though what you say is true, once we have finished the book, we know about both inauthentic ( average everyday) and authentic Dasein.
I have not come across Heidegger ever saying that humans are the only beings with Dasein. And if it turned out that other beings had a Dasein, it would matter not to Heidegger. Either you recognize Heidegger's description of the average everydayness of human existence or you don't. If we recognize it, then Heidegger is correct. If we don't recognize it, then Heidegger is incorrect.
Dasein is far more than consciousness of consciousness. Dasein is easier grasped if understood as a structure within which one makes their way about in the world. Dasein is always in a mood, with a certain understanding, and moving forward in the world in a purposeful manner. And that is the structure of the average everydayness of human being.
Heidegger does not equate average everydayness with inauthentic existence. Average everydayness is the context that allows Heidegger to explicate the structure of Dasein. A Dasein living inauthentically has the same structure as a Dasein living authentically. And even the authentically living Dasein lives most of its life in average everydayness. They wake up, fall out of bed, run a comb across their head. . .
And again and consistent with my original post, "finishing the book" only gets us through 2 parts of an incomplete 6 part project. Having an understanding of the average everydayness of being human and an understanding of what it means to live authentically does not get us to the goal described in what is mistakenly treated as an introduction to Being and Time, the meaning of being.
Whom Hitler had made all-aquiver
Tried hard to be hailed
Nazi-Plato, but failed
Then denied he had tried with great vigor.
I'm incorrigible, sorry. Imagine not acknowledging his supremacy. World's greatest Nazi, for sure. Philosophy's Fuhrer, as it were.
Heidegger was not a good person.
Sounds like you identify Dasein with a human being, who are always in a mood, have a certain understanding, and move forward in the world purposefully.
That holds for animals too. It's my guess (I'm not sure) that Heidegger puts us aside of animals in that our Dasein has a Dasein about itself, wich is the much debated topic of the self, the I, self consciousness, or whatever. I'm not sure if this is a unique human quality. Too much of it maybe, especially in the current era. It's a necessary condition for freedom though.
But always in the context of the question of the meaning of being, which Heidegger repeats over and over again.
The explication of dasein, even in what's published, is oriented towards the goal of eventually re-interpreting dasein as temporality (hence Being and Time). The move will ultimately be: our perspective for interpreting the meaning of being is based in time -- because that's what we are, and we're the one's asking the question about the meaning of being. He'll argue that since the Greeks, being has been interpreted in terms of the present (presence, ousia).
That's the entire thesis.
We're all well aware of this criticism. Heidegger in fact addresses it immediately and explicitly in Being and Time. For something so incomprehensible, how is it that I can explain it? If you think I can't explain it, then point out the contradictions or murkiness.
I think Heidegger did indeed strive for clarity. What was being discussed was so mired in traditional words and concepts that it requires more effort to understand his language, but that's not the same as obscurantism.
Average everydayness is what Heidegger calls Das Man, which is a comportment toward beings which is inauthentic. Inauthentic simply means that Dasein falls prey to beings rather than understanding its own being directly.
“But the average everydayness of Da-sein must not be understood as a mere "aspect. " In it, too, and even in the mode of inauthenticity, the structure of existentiality lies a priori. In it, too, Da-sein is concerned with a particular mode of its being to which it is related in the way of average everydayness, if only in the way of fleeing from it and of forgetting it.”(BT Sec.9)
Quoting Arne
I read Time and Being, Heidegger’s final statement of the meaning of Being in 1962, 35 years after the publication of Being and Time. Being and time ends with the following questions:
“The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Da-sein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?”
On Time and Being , he answers this question in the affirmative, with an addtional feature.
“Time, which is addressed as the meaning of Being in Being and Time, is itself not an answer, not a last prop for questioning, but rather itself the naming of a question. The name "time" is a preliminary word for what was later called "the truth of Being." “ Being and Time is on the way toward finding a concept of time, toward that which belongs most of all to time, in terms of which "Being" gives itself as presencing. This is accomplished on the path of the temporality of Dasein in the interpretation of Being as temporality.”
His 1962 work doesn’t add much to what he tentatively pointed to in Being and Time. “The ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is temporality itself.”
We can know how we are and we can recognize a description of how we are. Heidegger also maintains that we are the being who questions being and we have no basis whatsoever for claiming that any other types of beings question being.
In addition, each Dasein has an "ultimate for the sake of which" and that different Daseins can have a different "ultimate for the sake of which." And we have no basis to conclude that other types of beings of any "ultimate for the sake of which."
Certainly other animals appear to have an understanding, be in a mood, and act with purpose. But we have no basis for presuming animals have their own individualized "ultimate for the sake of which" or that they are beings that question being.
Heidegger makes no claim that Dasein is unique to human beings and his views do not depend upon any such uniqueness. If it turned out that every Dolphin had their own "ultimate for the sake of which" or that Dolphins spent a lot of time questioning being, Heidegger wouldn't care.
Heidegger never considered consciousness or consciousness of consciousness to be particularly interesting topics. Ultimately, the only recollection I have of any fundamental Heideggerian position on consciousness is that it is derivative of being-in-the-world. If anything, I suspect Heidegger would be a bit perplexed by the all the attention it receives in contemporary philosophy.
That is incorrect.
Heidegger differentiates ‘life’ and ‘animals’ from
Dasein in the following way. Animals are poor in world.
They do not experience beings in the world , have no ‘understanding’ because not comportment toward things, only stimuli which trigger their instinctive drives. Thus animals have no Dasein. They ‘are’ but do not exist as being in the world.
Quoting Arne
To be more precise Das Man is the subject of average everydayness.
“Initially and for the most part, Da-sein is taken in by its world. This mode of being, being absorbed in the world, [average everydayness] and thus being-in which underlies it, essentially determine the phenomenon which we shall now pursue with the question: Who is it who is in the everydayness of Da-sein? …
In this kind of being, the mode of everyday being a self is grounded whose explication makes visible what we might call the "subject" of everydayness, the they[Das Man].
As true as that may be, it is true for all Daseins regardless of their state of "authenticity." "Even in the mode of inauthenticity" is not the same as "only in the mode of inauthenticity." Surly you must see that.
Quoting Xtrix :100:
and therefore?
When it comes to Das Man, Heidegger is getting at the forces that create the ego in its average everydayness. And those forces work powerfully upon all Daseins regardless of their state of authenticity. The most authentic person in the world may still mow their lawn or send Christmas cards for no reason other than "that's what one does." There are no Daseins immune to the forces of Das Man. There are simply some who are better able to work the shackles than others.
For reasons I do not understand, you are trying very hard to draw non-existent distinctions between the basic structure of authentic living Daseins and inauthentic living Daseins. You could be the most authentic person in the world and I could be the most inauthentic person in the world and we would both wake up each day with an attunement to a world of which we have an understanding and project ourselves forward through that world based upon our own ultimate for the sake of which. Every Dasien is in and attunement to world of which they have an understanding and proceeds therefrom. That is the basic structure of Dasein. We all have it.
Average everydayness is not a mere , generic reference to what we do day to day , it’s a description of a particular mode of interpreting ourselves in our relations to others in the world. His use of the word ‘average’ refers to the way that we think of our selves in generic , normative terms in this mode of inauthenticity. In the mode of average everydayness, as Das Man , we are closed off to what particularizes our own experience.
“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].”“Usually and for the most part the ontic mode of being-in (discoverture) is concealment [Verdeckung]. Interpretedness, which is speech encrusted by idle talk, draws any given Dasein into 'one's' way of being. But existence in the 'one' now entails the concealment and marginalization of the genuine self [eigentlichen Selbst]. Not only has each particular given itself over to 'one', 'one' blocks Dasein's access to the state it finds itself in [Befindlichkeit].”(Heidegger 2011)
As I clearly stated earlier, "average everydayness" is the context Heidegger uses to explicate the basic structure of Dasein, i.e., the structure common to all Daseins regardless of any particular state of authenticity.
I agree.
As I clearly stated earlier, "average everydayness" is the context Heidegger uses to explicate the basic structure of Dasein, i.e., the structure common to all Daseins regardless of any particular state of authenticity.
Heidegger does not use the context of average everydayness to explain our behavior in any situation, let alone particular situations. Instead, he uses the context of average everydayness to explain the elements common to every situation in which we find our self, i.e., we proceed based upon our attunement, our understanding, and our projected outcome. That is true all Daseins whether they be good, bad, short, tall, authentic, inauthentic. . .
Average everydayness cannot be independent of any particular state of authenticity. On the contrary, it manifests precisely as a particular state of authenticity, the inauthentic mode of average everydayness. Authentic Dasein cannot comport itself toward beings in this mode , since it is the very nature of authentic interpretiveness that beings become irrelevant and insignificant to the mode of authentic Dasein. There is no longer an ‘average’ or an ‘everyday’ in the mode of interpretiveness of authentic Dasein.
But that is of little help.
If I am confident I can reveal to you the meaning of baseball if I can explain to you hitting, pitching, fielding, and baserunning and I explain hitting and nothing more, then neither you nor I can claim I have revealed the meaning of baseball notwithstanding the number of times I refer to the meaning of baseball. In fact, Heidegger's continual reference to it makes it even more likely that people will mistakenly expect Being and Time to reveal the meaning of being.
Heidegger did explicate the structure of the being who questions being (the goal of Being and Time), but we cannot understand the meaning of baseball simply because we understand hitting.
Reason alone tells us that it is better than not to understand that what is referred to as the introduction to Being and Time is intended to be an introduction to a 6 part work of which Being and Time is the first 2 parts.
And the greatest fatality to not understanding this point is the endless number of people who cannot tell you the goal of Being and Time.
But there is authentic and inauthentic attunement and understanding. Average everydayness is a mode of inauthentic attunement and understanding. It is not a categorizing of elements common to every situation, but a way of interpreting these ‘elements’ that is peculiar to average everydayness.
Quoting Arne
Quoting Arne
It sounds like the limitation resides as much with your comprehension as it does with Heidegger’s explanation.
I strongly encourage you to try and make your way through Division II successfully before you render judgement on how successful Heidegger was in dealing with the question of the meaning of Being in Being and Time, given the fact that his concept of temporality is central to the question of Being in general.
Seems like H expresses the same as science does. There is everyday experience. Conceiled (verdeckte) and hidden Daseins (the things that are there). The true Daseins (scientific reality) is clouded by idle talk. What is needed is an originary language talk, "ursprunglichen Ansprechens", the language of science. Idle talk obscures the true appearance of the world by imposing "herschende Ansichte" (non-scientific ones). Usually one is in the world by disregarding the true nature of Dasein and concealing it with idle talk ("wir verdecken das Dasein mit Kwatsj") and sually one doesn't see the reality science sees. Every particular aspect of the Daseins not only presents itself to us, it can be blocked by the silly idle stuff we say or think about it. Which involves the ego and not our genuine self, which is involved in the "Befindlichkeit" (perceptiveness) of the true Dasein, the scientific reality
Old wine in new bottles.
I have read it dozens of times. I have been reading ten pages a day of Being and Time every day for almost twenty years. I find Mulholland's study guide to be extremely useful for understanding Division II. But thanks for caring.
But be careful, Heidegger is a slippery fellow. He actually wrote what is referred to as the introduction to Being and Time after he wrote Being and Time. So it is somewhat specious to later claim that the two parts you have written completes the 6 part project you set forth in what is referred to as the introduction to the two parts you have written. Yeah, that's the ticket. . .
And if you haven't done so already, I strongly recommend Heidegger's History of the Concept of Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Both are essentially lectures converted to books. The former was from a class he gave prior to Being and Time and the latter is from a class he gave after Being and Time. And the classes are essentially Being and Time as taught in the classroom.
And now that I think about it, Mulholland does suggest that the body of Heidegger's work is sufficient to meet the objectives set out in what is referred to as the introduction to Being and Time. But he certainly does not suggest that Being and Time alone is sufficient. I am quite certain he made his way through Division II successfully.
Heidegger argues that the scientific language of logic-mathematical reasoning belongs to average everydayness as its theoretical expression. The ‘ real’ that empirical science reveals conceals as much as everyday comportment.
He would not claim that everydayness and idle
talk are untrue , only that they cut themselves off from the wider contexts of pragmatic engagement and relevance which make them fully intelligible.
That will be a good thread. I'd like to collaborate, if you don't mind.
It saves many (including myself) from arcane arguments about Dasein this and Dasein that.
So only pragmatic engagement is relevant and make idle talk fully comprehensible? Action speaks louder than words? If only the members of his party hadn't followed his advice! If only the idle talk of the Nazis had remained just that. Idle talk...
Pragmatic engagement isn’t something above and beyond idle talk as some sort of physical activity, it is the condition of possibility of idle talk and all other forms of language and experience in general. All experiences of perception and thought emerge out of contexts of relevance.
Quoting Raymond
You may or may not find the following interesting:
“Gandhi, Marx, Dilthey, Buber, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, McKeon, and many others taught me deeply. But so did three writers whose politics were highly objectionable to me: Jung, Dostoevsky, and Heidegger.
Jung offers deep and indispensable insights. I did not like knowing that Jung had said: "Hitler is the embodiment of the German spirit." The Nazis knew his views. Records show that they considered sending for Jung to help Rudolph Hess with his mental trouble.
Similarly, I had not wanted to know that Dostoevsky hated Jews, Germans, and Poles. He gave influential speeches in favor of the Panslavic movement. That movement was a direct cause of the Russian-French alliance and the World Wars.
What I heard of Heidegger's Nazi views made me decide not to read him at all. I read him when I was almost 40 years old. Then I realized that Heidegger's thought was already in mine, from my reading of so many others who had learned from him.
With these three we are forced to wonder: Must we not mistrust their seemingly deep insights? How could we want these insights for ourselves, if they came out of experience so insensitive to moral ugliness? Perhaps it might not matter if the insights were less deep. But they open into what is most precious in human nature and life. The depth is beyond question. The insights are genuine.
So one attempts to break out of the dilemma on the other side: Is there a way Nazism or hatred of other peoples might be not so bad? Could it have seemed different at the time? No chance of that, either. I am a Jewish refugee from Vienna, a lucky one to whom nothing very bad happened. I remember what 1938 looked like, not only to a Jew, but to others. I remember the conflicts it made in people. They could not help knowing which instincts were which. Many writers and ordinary people had no difficulty seeing the events for what they were, at the time.
So we return to question the insights again. But by now they are among our own deepest insights. We go back and forth: Nothing gives way on either side. Did these men simply make mistakes? We can forgive mistakes. A human individual can develop far beyond others, but surely only on one or two dimensions. No one can be great in more than a few ways. And silently to myself, when other Americans discuss and share Heidegger's view that to be human is to dwell historically as a people on a soil. How do my fellow Americans manage to dwell with Heidegger on German soil?
My colleagues read this in a universalized way. For us, in the Heidegger Circle, the human is the same everywhere in this respect, and equally valuable. Humans are culturally particularized, certainly, but this particularization is itself universal. Humans are one species. They are all culturally particular. This universal assertion holds across us all, and we see no problem.
Indeed, after 1945 Heidegger writes of the dangers of technological reason on a "planetary" level. But it is reason, which is thus planetary---the same universal reason he says he had always attacked. (Spiegel Interview.) Heidegger's planetary view differs from our more recent understanding of human universality. The difference has not been much written about, so there are no familiar phrases for it. For Heidegger there is no common human nature which is then also particularized and altered in history. There is no human nature that lasts through change by history. There is only the historical particular, no human nature.
Humans eat and sleep differently in different cultures. They arrange different sexual rituals, build different "nests," and raise their young differently. In an animal species the members do all this in the same way. Humans are not even a species. So, at least, it seemed to those thinkers who entered into what is most deeply human. To them, the deepest and most prized aspect of humans was the cultural and historical particular.
In our generation we easily and conveniently universalize the particularization. Not Heidegger. For him, what is most valuable is the necessarily particular indwelling in one people's history and language, on its land, and not another's. We change it without noticing, to read: any indwelling in any people's history is this most highly valued aspect.
it was Heidegger who pioneered a thinking beyond logical universals, beyond the thin, abstracted commonality categories. He pioneered the thinking which consists of situatedness (Befindlichkeit). He said that situational living is already an understanding. He said that understanding is always befindlich. "Understanding always has greater reach than the cognitive can follow." He called it "dwelling" (see Gendlin, Conference Proceedings, 1983). He also called it "indwelling" (einwohnen). He thought its more-than-logical creativity limited within historical soil and nation. To him non-rational meant non-universal.
But with his own books, and through Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and many others, it was he who opened the way to our kind of thinking---the kind that now dwells universally beyond the rational common---although it is only beginning to say how. To work on that is our problem. He contributed enough for one human.
Heidegger must be credited for a great share in that very development because of which we no longer feel the old either/or: either the deeply human historical particular with its political savagery and sadism, or the merely rational commmon.
It is partly the influence of his work in us, which now makes us unable to grasp how he could have failed to sense the nonrational universality of humans. Today, in Chicago, when we look at Louis Sullivan's buildings, the ones that created modern architecture, we wonder why he used so much granite. Why didn't he use just steel and windows?
To understand may be to forgive, but it is certainly not to excuse. Without pretending to lighten the horror, we need to understand why that tradition of thought also brought horror. Only so can we think through what we draw from our immediate past. Only then can we recover the other past, right behind that one. We need both, to articulate our own, non-rational universalization of human depth.” Eugene Gendlin
I don't think pragmatic engagement is the condition for idle talk or other forms of language. On the contrary. Idle talk and language can even be the condition for pragmatic engagement, especially in the field of poetry, literature, mathematics, theoretical physics, religion, etc. Pragmatic engagement can be of importance, but it fulfills an auxiliary role only.
Contexts of relevance emerge from thought and shape perception. The relevant context of one can be the the irrelevant or absurd context of others. Who is to say which context is relevant. They are relevant, but relevance is a subjective notion. You can set relevance of pragmatic context apart, and give it an objective importance, but then you cut it off from the real context appearing in practice. But it offers good fother for an abstract philosophical approach. The relevance of pragmatic engagement can be doubted though.
I don't condemn the ideas of the Nazis or deny their right to live a life as they see as fit. They should be given their part of the pie. I don't like their way though, and any attempt on their behalf to impose their way on others by force should be acted against.
That's a big if. We love to get drunk on words, my friend. We may get the best high exactly when we don't understand, when perhaps the triviality or absurdity of our mantra is hidden from us.
Exactly. Heidegger’s point, which is also the argument of the phenomenologists and Wittgenstein, is that objectivity is a derivative product of subjectively determined contexts of relevance. There is no such thing as a ‘real’ context if that is supposed to mean a state of affairs or facts existing independently of those who subjectively experience them. We can form intersubjective agreement concerning subjectively formed experiences , but this is only a relative consensus. This is what scientific practice is all about.
"Human speech was originally poetic. As Vico wrote, 'Poetry is the primary activity of the human mind. Man before he had arrived at the state of forming universals forms imaginary ideas, before he can articulate, he sings, before speaking in prose, he speaks in verse, before using technical terms, he uses metaphor.' It is difficult for modern man with his prosaic mode to realize that poetry is more natural to man than prose, and yet all the evidence of history shows it. The further we go back in time the more we come not on prose but on poetry." Bede Griffith
Heidegger always had a poetic touch but he knew what he wrote
Then H and me agree! A pity he was so adversive to the Jewish way, so to speak. I know it was pretty common in those days to be antisemite, and I think everybody has the right to be one, but to put your aversion in practice and remove "the problem" is fucking wrong. Nice piece you cited! Who wrote it?
I like to interpret idle talk as automatic talk, as bot-speak. One is governed by habits of interpretation so automatic that one takes such interpretations for the essence of the world.
It'd be interesting if being were viewed in a spatial sense e.g. Johanna Arendt's being could be described as that between Linden (born) and Manhattan (died). Then Heidegger's book would've been Being and Space
Why not both? :chin:
That went over my teensy-weensy head, señor!
Being has (always) been contextualized in time.
Parmenides, the father of ontology, however, didn't do so - his argument rested on a contradiction entailed by Unbeing. Contradictions, though, have a time constraint: yes and no in the same sense and at the same time.
Quoting Agent Smith
:yawn:
History is a nightmare from which the fundamental ontologist is trying to awake.
[quote =Heidegger]
Being-there as being-in-the-world is primarily governed by logos…Coming into the world, one grows into a determinate tradition of speaking, seeing, interpreting. Being-in-the-world is an already-having-the-world-thus-and-so. This peculiar fact, that the world into which I enter, in which I awaken, is there for me in a determinate interpretedness, I designate terminologically as fore-having.
[/quote]
Hebert Dreyfus essentially called Being and Nothingness a masterful misinterpretation of another philosopher (Heidegger).
That is good stuff. It would be great to have a citation if it is easily available. I am not asking you to go and track it down. But I like it.
I have never heard anyone say Heidegger is easy. And it is definitely hard to determine what his primary goal is. And that is the primary purpose of the post.
Failing to recognize that the primary goal (revealing the meaning of being) set forth in what is mistakenly referred to as the introduction to Being and Time causes many to presume the primary goal of Being and Time is to reveal the meaning of being. Instead, the goal of Being and Time is much less ambitious than and "preparatory" to revealing the meaning of being. As such, its primary goal is to describe the being who questions the meaning of being. And it is from there that one should be off and running.
So in that sense, what is possibly an inherently confusing subject to begin with (the nature of being) becomes ever more confusing beginning at page one.
I have been reading Heidegger for years and still have to orient myself from time to time by reminding myself that, in Heideggerian terms, I am being-in-the-world or I am an understanding of the world or I am an attunement to the world.
But my all time favorite orienting mantra is being is that on the basis of which being is already understood.
I have wasted many a fine summer hour smoking a cigar while trying to understand what the hell that means.
:smile:
Thus Spake 180 Proof
:smile:
The introduction is indeed an introduction to Being and Time. The fact that the book wasn't completed doesn't negate this. Why? Because in the introduction -- and not elsewhere, since it wasn't written -- you have a discussion of the entirety of the book. For example, what was to be the second part: the "destruction" of the history with time as a clue, in Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle; and the 3rd Division of Part 1, "Time and Being." All discussed in the introduction.
So the introduction is very valuable indeed. If you want to fill out Being and Time, then Basic Problems of Phenomenology and Introduction to Metaphysics will do so.
The primary goal of Being and Time is, indeed, about the question of the meaning of being. That is the goal. What I see as a common mistake is when people assume he gives a definition or an interpretation of "being" himself. He most emphatically does not. So that is a common error. But to argue that it's an error to think his goal is what he in fact repeatedly says it is? That itself is an error -- in my view.
Also, the word "reveal" is misleading. His goal is to work out the question of the meaning of being -- to see on what basis the question is asked and upon which any interpretation whatsoever of being is given. That, it turns out, is time -- the "structure" (or "being") of dasein. Again he cites the Greeks's parousia and ousia as examples of this in the introduction (i.e., presence assumes the present moment, and hence time).
There are points of convergence between Heidegger and Eastern nondualist philosophy. There's an apocryphal tale that one of his colleagues came across him reading D T Suzuki - recall that Suzuki was lecturing at Columbia University mid-century - and Heidegger remarking that 'if I understand Suzuki correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings'. There has also been quite a lot of exegesis by Japanese academics of Heidegger in relation to Zen Buddhism, particularly the influential Shobogenzo of Dogen, the founding text of the S?t? school.
This is not to say for a minute that Heidegger would ever have considered appropriating anything from Buddhism in his own writings. From what I understand whilst he had measured admiration for Buddhism - there's a youtube video of a recorded German TV dialogue between him and a Theravadin monk - he believed that the Western intellectual tradition had created its own crisis and had to find its way out on its own terms. Where I think it's a fruitful comparison, is that non-dualist philosophies are similarly antagonistic to discursive metaphysics but nevertheless provide a profound perspective on the meaning of being, which offers another way into understanding the meaning of 'being-in-the-world'. There's a book on this subject, Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on his Work, Reinhard May. Also Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy, Carl Olson.
It's "on the basis of which entities are already understood." That's a crucial difference.
That's interesting. Can you provide a reference?
:up:
1. Being and Time is complete. The 6 part project of which Being and Time is just 2 parts is incomplete.
2. At no point did I suggest that there is no value in the what is mistakenly referred to as the introduction to Being and Time. I only cautioned against mistaking it as an introduction to Being and Time when it is clearly an introduction to a much more ambitious 6 part project of which Being and Time comprises just 2 parts..
3. Your emphatic insistence notwithstanding, Heidegger defines being as ". . . that on the basis of which entities are already understood." (M&R at 25-26, 6 in the German.). I am always surprised by the number of people who miss that.
The below is from the last page of what is mistakenly referred to as the introduction to Being and Time. As you can see, the last page of what is mistakenly referred to as the introduction to Being and Time makes clear the introduction is to a 6 division project of which Being and Time comprises only the first 2 divisions. Surely you can see that.
If I can be any further assistance in clarifying the matter for you, then please consider me to be at your disposal.
I was not quoting Heidegger. I was stating my favorite mantra. And that is a crucial difference.
And I am teasing you and I stand corrected. Though changing the contents of a mantra can be a difficult undertaking, I will do what I can.
:smile:
This does not surprise me. Heidegger was raised Catholic, converted to Protestantism, and in his old age began to sound quite pantheistic.
Being and Time is most certainly not complete. It consisted of 2 parts with 6 divisions. Only two divisions were written -- both of part 1.
I don't know what "6 part project" you're referring to. Perhaps you can clarify.
Quoting Arne
I'm not emphatically insisting, Heidegger emphatically insists.
Quoting Arne
I'm well aware of that line. It's also ironic that you mis-quoted it.
I wouldn't myself say that's a definition -- it's a one-time instance where he's trying to communicate how being gets interpreted: namely, as the basis for which beings are already understood. Later, he describes this as a pre-ontological understanding of being.
But let's assume you're correct, and this is his definition. Odd that a book about the question of the meaning of being only has one line about its meaning. What I described seems more probable.
Quoting Arne
It's not a mistake to refer to the introduction of Being and Time as "the introduction to Being and Time." Because it IS the introduction to Being and Time. Whatever "six-part project" you're referring to, again I have no idea. I think it more likely you're confusing the proposed six divisions with "six parts." Being and Time was to have 2 parts consisting of six divisions. Where are you getting parts 3-6?
Quoting Arne
Yes, can you?
So now you say it's six divisions. Before you said six "parts." So let's be clear about that, first. That's not me merely nit-picking; it's absolutely essential.
You're quite right: Being and Time, as we currently have it, consists of only 2 divisions of the proposed six divisions. Thus, it is incomplete. So why, then, did you say, above:
Quoting Arne
Did you mean 6 divisions? If so, why do you say Being and Time is just "2 [divisions]" of a six-division project, but then say it's complete?
The bottom line is this:
Being and Time was proposed as a 2 Part, 6 Division work. Only 2 divisions of Part 1 was published. The introduction touches on all of it: all divisions, both parts. Look no further than the last page you provided to see that the introduction goes through all of it, including the historical destruction of Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle.
Given that this is true, my statement stands: it is in no way a "mistake" to refer to the introduction of Being and Time as exactly that. Why? Because that's exactly what it is.
Fair enough.
Seriously? He needed to provide a name for the completed parts so they could be published (the publish or die of academia.). He named the 2 completed parts Being and Time. It really is that simple.
And even if you want to stand on that, people who wish to understand Being and Time should still be aware that what is labeled as an introduction is clearly intended to be an introduction to a larger body of work.
Surely you can see that?
Not at all. The title was given to the entirety of what was proposed, which you yourself cited. He just never got around to finishing it. Which is why the introduction is so valuable -- in the introduction (really, the introductions), he goes through the entirety of the six-division proposal.
Most of Being and Time, including the divisions not finished, were eventually published in different works and were an outgrowth of lecture courses Heidegger gave in the 1920s. So both before and after 1927, you have plenty of material.
So it's not quite that simple, no.
I’m not sure that qualifies as a ‘definition’ of Being in the sense of revealing the meaning of Being. Understanding Being in terms of temporality comes closer to the mark, but even here, Heidegger is not satisfied that a final ‘definition’ of Being has been achieved.
“Time, which is addressed as the meaning of Being in Being and Time, is itself not an answer, not a last prop for questioning, but rather itself the naming of a question. The name "time" is a preliminary word for what was later called "the truth of Being." “ Being and Time is on the way toward finding a concept of time, toward that which belongs most of all to time, in terms of which "Being" gives itself as presencing. This is accomplished on the path of the temporality of Dasein in the interpretation of Being as temporality.”( On Time and Being)
Of course. But who doesn't see that? Is anyone out there thinking that because there's an introduction to the entire outline, that therefore every part of that outline was finished? All one has to do is look at the table of contents to realize that it's an unfinished work.
I still fail to see how referring to the introduction is a mistake. Perhaps you mean to say that people really aren't aware that Being and Time is an unfinished work...in which case, perhaps you're right, but again I don't see that as a major problem. They will quickly realize it's unfinished.
Mozart left some work unfinished as well. So what?
We are clearly not going to agree. I find The History of the Concept of Time (pre) and The Problems of Phenomenology (post) to be useful in understanding Being and Time.
Mulholland also argues that Heidegger's complete body of work is sufficient to consider the project complete. Taylor Carmen leans that way. I do not disagree.
Well we agree on that at least. :ok:
I am right and you are wrong and I can live with that.
:smile:
As you know , some argue that Heidegger’s ‘Kehre’ in the 1930’s was a decisive break with the direction of thinking Being and Time represents. For those writers the completion of his project amounts to a renouncement of his 1920’s approach. Others, such as Derrida, see a continuity between his earlier and later writings. For my part, I see the later writings as clarifications and further articulations of the earlier project , but found little additional enlightenment in Heidegger’s post-Being and Time work.
Undergrads by the thousands are unable to tell you that the primary goal of the only 2 divisions of which Being and Time is comprised are about the fundamental analysis of Dasein and Dasein and Temporality and that is in part because the introduction written for a 6 part treatise of which the entire contents of Being and Time comprises just 2 parts repeatedly sets the goal at the revelation of the meaning of being.
And besides, if you agreed with me, then all you had to do was say so and we could have been doing other things.
I would have, but I don't agree with the statement about the introduction. It is not a mistake to refer to it as such. I hope you now concede that.
You're quite right that to refer to Being and Time as a completed work is incorrect.
I agree. I am not a Heidegger disciple. It would matter not to me if Heidegger unequivocally renounced Being and Time. I would still read at least 10 pages a day as I have done for many years now. Had Heidegger not published Being and Time, we wouldn't even know who he was.
I absolutely do not concede that. I suspect that if Heidegger had continued with the work, the next publication would not have been called Being and Time with any sort of suffix and would likely have been called Time and Being.
It is not as if the binding or the cover page of Being and Time as published reads Being and Time, Divisions 1 and 2. How could the publications of subsequent divisions have the same title without further compounding the confusion?
He submitted a manuscript entitled Being and Time with two divisions and no introduction. He was told he needed to write an introduction and he used the opportunity to point beyond the submitted manuscript. Thereafter, the publisher adjusted table of content headings accordingly. Had he not been required to write an introduction to an already submitted manuscript, then we would not be having this discussion.
Heidegger published what he needed to publish to get what he wanted to get. Had he not been forced to publish and under hurried circumstances, we would not even know his name. It is sloppy and students of Heidegger deserve better.
Going forward, our time would be better spent on substantive discussions of Being and Time. I greatly appreciate your knowledge of the subject matter. It is difficult finding people who have such knowledge. After all, this ain't Europe.
Few American universities teach Heidegger and those I attended did not. All knowledge I have of Heidegger and his work was acquired post-formal education and out of desire. I read Heidegger and then I listen to lectures by Dreyfus, Kelly, or Carmen and then I read Heidegger and then I listen to lectures by Dreyfus, Kelly, or Carmen and then I read Heidegger. . .
Until our paths cross again. . .
But that has nothing whatsoever to do with accurately calling the introduction an introduction. Come on man.
Quoting Arne
He was a pretty big deal even prior to publishing this book, so that claim is at best speculative. But yes, I agree it was written in haste.
Quoting Arne
That was me for two years. Minus Carmen. Mostly I just read Heidegger. Dreyfus is extremely helpful and I love his lectures.
That's a rich and circular line.
[quote = Heidegger, first draft B & T, chap. 4, quotes in order ]
Dasein is history.
...
Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself. What is preserved in the generation is itself the outcome of earlier views and disputes, earlier interpretations and past concerns.
...
The wellspring of such persistent elements lies in the past, but they continue to have such an impact in the present that their dominance is taken for granted and their development forgotten. Such a forgotten past is inherent in the prevailing interpretedness of being-together-with-one-another. To the extent that Dasein lives from (cares about) this past, it is this past itself.
...
The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors and the variable forms of their realization. And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character. However, the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past.
[/quote]
'Being is that on the basis of which being is already understood.'
That's a tough one. Given the quote above, I think of us as self-interpreting interpreters acting upon and thinking from inconspicuously automatic and therefore unquestionable interpretations of ourselves and the world. One might say that, with especially automatic ('unconscious') interpretations, culture is mistaken for nature, the contingent for the necessary.
source
Seems to be from Contributions, which I haven't looked at. But it's on the theme that I find central to Heidegger. A little more from that source, to amplify my previous post:
One simple reason for that is if two beings wish to meet up, they have to be at around the same time (contemporary/coeval). If they're not, either would forthwith realize that a meeting is impossible. Of course, if they were being (alive) at different places on earth, that too would preclude any kind of encounter. However, we have 6 degrees of freedom in space (up, down, front, back, left, right) and only 1 (forward) in time. Thus, it makes sense to view Being in time; hence, Being and Time.
I think this is on the right track. We are beings who care about things, tend to the things. We survive by working together, by synchronizing our activity (you do this part, while I do that part). Most of us get up in the morning and not at midnight because the sun makes it easier to see. So the sunrise comes to symbolize the time to get up and work. Even if I'm the exception who works the graveyard shift, I do that against a background of 'one [usually] gets up in the morning,' (and perhaps I enjoy myself as an exception.) In this sense time is 'there' in the world as a being, as the sun as a triggering signification.
Quoting ajar
This would be the vulgar concept of time for Heidegger, time as measurement of things which take place ‘within’ time, which appear and disappear as an endless sequence of before, now and later. Authentic or primordial time( What Being and Time is about) , by contrast, doesn’t have to do with things that occur ‘in’ time, but with temporality as transcendence and relevance.
“What does it mean to be "in time"? This "being-in-time" is very familiar to us from the way it is represented in natural science. In natural science all processes of nature are calculated as processes which happen "in time." Everyday common sense also finds processes and things enduring "in time," persisting and disappearing "in time." When we talk about "being-in-time," everything depends on the interpretation of this "in”.” (Heidegger)
Quoting Joshs
Explain.
From a paper I’m writing:
Eugene Gendlin writes:
“I propose an expanded model of time. Time does not consist only of nows.” Linear time consists merely of positions on an observer's time line. The positions are supposed to be external and independent of what happens. Linear time is an empty frame.““ The linear unit model of successive self-identical times is generated from the more intricate model of time.” (Gendlin
2012)
As Gendlin(1997b) argues,
‘The continuity of time cannot first be made by things next to each other, because such a continuity is passive; each bit IS alone, and must depend on some other continuity to relate it to what is next to it...”(p.71)
Comparing Gendlin’s model of temporality with Heidegger’s, we see that for Heidegger also , the past,
present and future don’t operate as sequential modes which mark distinct states of objects. They interpenetrate each other so completely that they together form a single unitary event of occurrence.
“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment [my experience of something ‘as’ something], and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b)
The returning from a totality of relevance in the act of understanding something constitutes temporality not as a present object happening IN time but as temporalization.
“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is
in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)
Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger’s unification of the components of time.
“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37
I'm ambivalent about Heidegger. There's the stuff that seems both clear and good, and there's the stuff that comes off as confused spirituality. The challenge is finding honest English when possible for some of the insights...or in letting go of the attachment to some blurry promise that never quite materializes.
Also, I find 'temporalization' to be an extremely ugly word. There must be a better way.
Here's an edit of what I quoted above.
[quote = Heidegger]
The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors...And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character...The 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness.
Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past.
[/quote]
I find this echoed and developed in your quote.
[quote = Gendlin]
The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past....the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning.
[/quote]
Once a thinker becomes aware of this, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. He himself is this history awake from his own blinding, imprisoning past --the one that governs his dreams of the future and his interpretation of the present.
This explains how philosophy personified could be trapped by ancient decisions that were never questioned since but experienced rather as 'obvious' necessity. I imagine fish seeing objects in the water, not the water itself. Heidegger tells me to look for the water, the unquestioned inherited framing of the situation that only becomes questionable and editable when foregrounded, made 'visible.'
Heidegger is talking about the inauthentic understanding of the future. But even here, frameworks of intelligibility aren’t stagnant. When I interpret a new experience by reference to such a frame , the frame is developed and articulated. That constitutes a kind of change within the frame , and of the frame. A variation within a theme is a kind of modification of the theme. This is crucial to understand with respect to Heidegger, because his entire project uniting affect and intentionality rests on the idea that the past that frames my present comes already altered by that present. That is what feeling is. That is also what understanding is. This is what Gendlin is arguing. In Gendlin’s work, there is no such thing as a past that just sits there influencing my present.
If inauthentic interpretation. is a plodding kind of self-transformation, Heidegger nevertheless considers this sort of change subordinate and derivative of authentic time.
“Discoverture’s authentic way of being is uncanniness , while the most common everyday mode of discoverture is concealment.”
"Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. Tranquillized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and
ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon." "The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar.” (Heidegger 2010)
“Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence...Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in
his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.” (Heidegger 1995)
“The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "(Heidegger 1994)
That beings (essences) are produced by Dasein in the act of taking something as something is
not to be understood as intentional activity that ‘takes for granted’ a world constituting space of experiential possibilities that is not itself changed in the act of intending objects. For Heidegger the condition of possibility for Befindlichkeit , for a world constituting
space of possibilities, is that this totality of relevance be modified anew each moment in an act of bringing forth. Beings can only be produced because the foundation of their being is created anew as a ‘ground-laying’ every time we see something as something. The creative re-making of the ground is a pre-condition for the productive seeing of an intentional object.
“Every “foundation” in the sense we discussed comes too late with regard to the positing of the essence, because the productive seeing of the essence is itself a productive seeing of that in which the essence has its ground—a productive seeing of what its ground is. Knowledge of the essence is in itself a ground-laying. It is the positing of what lies under as ground“(Heidegger 1994)
Sounds rather like a description of karma.
If they were, we'd have a framework rather than frameworks.
Quoting Joshs
Sure, the way we approach things ('mentally' or physically, individually or as a community) is modified as we go.
Quoting Joshs
:up:
I think most would agree with this.
[quote=Heidegger]
Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. Tranquillized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and
ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon.
[/quote]
Yeah, I've seen that. I'm not sure there's a reason to believe it. The game of 'more primordial' seems to touch on the quasi-religion that Heidegger sometimes seems to be brewing. His talk about death is fascinating but eventually frustrating. I get the impression that he himself didn't quite know what he meant, that it was more of a feeling-clump than a thesis. Perhaps you can make a case, but I expect you'll want to venture outside the familiar jargon, else it's just repetition and not exegesis.
I don't know much about karma, but I like the theme, so I encourage you to share more on this.
The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing.
[/quote]
In other words, ??????? (poesis) is central. :up:
To see X as Y (metaphor, analogy) is primary and even creates the culture. Dead poems stack up until rivers have mouths but no teeth. The tree stump is a chair. The stone is a hammer.
Heidegger himself is subject to an unpredictable taking-as.
I should note that 'nightmare' is more negative than necessary (but allowed me to connect Heidegger and Joyce.) Another way to talk about this is in terms of a snake trying to slide out of its dead skin.
'I am the prison and the prisoner.' Today's escapee is tomorrow's warden.
https://iep.utm.edu/gadamer/#SH4c
Some find his account of being for death the most
valuable feature of his ontology, but I agree with you. I find it muddled and unconvincing. Derrida did a great deconstruction of it. I like the idea his model of
temporality implies, that each moment is finite and so the passage from moment to moment is its own kind of death and re-birth. He should have focused on that instead.
[quote=The Buddha, Rohitassa Sutta; https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN4_45.html]I tell you, friend, that it is not possible by traveling to know or see or reach a far end of the cosmos where one does not take birth, age, die, pass away, or reappear. But at the same time, I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering and distress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception and intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.[/quote]
The problem is that it is nearly always interpreted as nihilism, as a literal nothingness, although I really don't think it is. It is just the ending or stepping outside the 'nightmare of history' that is being talked about. My view is that there's a shadow, in the sense intended by Jung, in the Western psyche, around this question, as a consequence of the particular religious history of the West, but that is a big argument.
We westerners tend to be very attached to thingness. We grasp at things as though they were lifeboats that facilitate the very possibility of our own life and, by extension, the possibility of life itself. We even tend to regard our own identity as a thing: if not a stable body than an unchanging soul. Indeed, the very word that English employs for “indefinite nonoccurrence” is “no-thing-ness”. Such that the absence of things is equated to absence of being itself.
Not to refute your hypothesis, but I find this archetypally existential – to not say metaphysical – motif that modern western culture is subliminally steeped in to be at least equally a product of a materialistic tendency: wherein being is equated to physicality. And this carries over into the spiritual as well for the common westerner: If God is not a psyche, a guy, hence endowed with thingness - be it on top clouds or waking the earth in some garden - then this God is no God whatsoever, for whatever is addressed must must be devoid of any real being … so the western intuition tends to flow (notably, this for atheists and theists alike). In contrast there can be found the concept of “the One” in the west and (tmbk, at least some interpretations) of “Brahman” in the east, such that both are here conceived as devoid of thingness … and, yet, rather than being nothingness, are then deemed the essential source for everything. This “no-thing-being” - to so term it - is within these cultural contexts maybe even interpretable as the core essence of life itself. This, again, in direct contrast to the typical westerner’s views that upholds the principle that the only reality there can be can only consist of thingness.
Quoting Joshs
I agree that living is dying is being born. Life is a controlled burn. It has a learned, inherited shape (genetic, cultural, and even little bit individual).
For me it's the intersection of Heidegger of language and history (and therefore what we are able or not to think now.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology
I connect this 'one' with the generation.
[quote=Heidegger]
Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself.
A definite sense of being guides every natural interpretation of beings....Precisely by its being inexplicit, it possesses a peculiar stubbornness...
The fundamental way of the being-there of the world, namely, having the world there with one another, is speaking…
[/quote]
In another thread we disagreed about whether it makes sense to call the community prior to the individual. Well, I had this kind of thing in mind:
[quote=Heidegger]
'Being together with others' implies an ontological characteristic of Dasein that is equiprimordial with 'being-in-the-world'.
[/quote]
Attempts to separate language from the world tend to crash and burn. The purified, isolated subject is ultimately unintelligible, but so is the notion of the purely physical. Note that I can snap the words together, but this is like writing a check I can't cash. It won't stop the philosophers from thousands of pages of intricate fun, of course.
Anyway, I credit Heidegger as one of several thinkers who seemed to grasp the shape of philosophy as a whole (or/also he creatively took-it-as such.) This take on Gadamer (H's student) gets it right.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#DiaPhr
I think this is because the presocratics were ecstatic in orientation. Compare from the Wiki entry on Parmenides: 'Parmenides describes the journey of the poet, escorted by maidens ("the daughters of the Sun made haste to escort me, having left the halls of Night for the light"), from the ordinary daytime world to a strange destination, outside our human paths. Carried in a whirling chariot, and attended by the daughters of Helios the Sun, the man reaches a temple sacred to an unnamed goddess (variously identified by the commentators as Nature, Wisdom, Necessity or Themis), by whom the rest of the poem is spoken. The goddess resides in a well-known mythological space: where Night and Day have their meeting place. Its essential character is that here all opposites are undivided, or one. He must learn all things, she tells him – both truth, which is certain, and human opinions, which are uncertain – for though one cannot rely on human opinions, they represent an aspect of the whole truth.'
Whereas when this becomes the subject of discursive metaphysics, then it looses its awe-ful immediacy. It becomes quotidian, no longer ecstatic. I think that's maybe what he means by 'overcoming metaphysics'. Be interested in others takes on that.
Quoting javra
'The nothing that is everything'. Echoes of the apophatic. But there's no use trying to turn that into any kind of conceptual understanding.
In some sense, "objectification" is the end of philosophy.
It serves no meaningful purpose.
has a point. Scientific thematization and objectification have their place for Heidegger, albeit distinctly circumscribed as regional ontologies. He claimed that science doesn’t think, by which he meant it doesn’t think philosophically , because it derives its sense and bases its inquiry on an already generated frame of intelligibility rather than constituting a fundamental questioning and ground laying.
If wayfarer wants to throw out words such as "objectification" and fail to clarify that he is using it as a synonym for the "scientific method", then isn't he "covering up" at least as much as he may be "uncovering"? Though Heidegger indeed has a significant amount of respect for the scientific method, the scientific method is derivative of being-in-the-world and has no use in the absence of world.
And in Heideggerian terms, isn't the real issue the degree to which a scientific mode of being can be an authentic mode of being? And if so, then the scientific mode of being is inauthentic insofar as it leads Dasein to mistakenly live as if Dasein were outside the world looking in. You cannot be more "in" the world than Dasein.
Though Heidegger embraces the subject/object observer/observed dualisms as useful to understanding the universe, he unequivocally rejects them to the degree they are rooted in Cartesian substance dualism. For Heidegger, transcendence is from Dasein to the world, not from subject to object.
Nobody should give a shit what a Nazi said. As in, at all. Most people misinterpret Mein Kamf. You see how that's working there? That's exactly what it sounds like to ethical philosophers when someone entertains the theories of people whose ethical framework allows for complicity in genocidal violations against the Human Consciousness, through imperial statism, as if they deserve to ever be brought into the same league as philosophers.
On the contrary. We should be incredibly curious about what the Nazis had to say, if for no other reason than to understand one's own enemy.
Quoting Garrett Travers
This is short-sighted and simplistic. People who do horrible things can still have deep philosophical, ethical and/or scientific insights. It would make things a lot simpler if this weren't true, but it is true.
If you want to prosecute Heidegger, I certainly will make no objection. He was not a good person for many reasons with his Nazism being foremost among them. If you expected me to defend Heidegger, then you were mistaken. If the court were to order me to defend Heidegger, I would turn in my law license and go and grind lenses.
But Heidegger is dead. It is no punishment of him or any other Nazi to ignore what he had to say regarding the nature of being. Instead and for a serious philosopher, ignoring Heidegger because he was a bad person is self-flagellation.
I wish you nothing but the best.
But don’t forget, it isn’t just the objectively present objects of empirical study that Heidegger considers inauthentic. It is all intraworldly beings , including ready-to-hand being-with-tools. The ‘as’ structure of experiencing something as something is inauthentic.
“...in interpretatively addressing something as something, one addresses the thing encountered against the background of a more or less explicit acquaintance with it: as a tool as suitable for this or that, etc….The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.”
All pragmatically relevant engagement in activities in the world , all the things, activities and projects Dasein is being in the world with , are inauthentic because of the fact that they are interpretations within a larger frame of intelligibility. This indicates that, as Heidegger says, authentic Dasein depends on and is in fact a modification of inauthentic everyday being in the world.
“… authentic existence is nothing which hovers over entangled everydayness, but is existentially only a modified grasp of everydayness…. Falling prey reveals an essential, ontological structure of Da-sein itself. Far from determining its nocturnal side, it constitutes all of its days in their everydayness.”
This is also why we must spend most of our time in inauthentic existence and only momentarily and occasionally attain an authentic comportment. Once we attain authenticity the particulars of the world lose their significance for us.
That is incorrect. Inauthentic, undifferentiated, and authentic are temporal modes of Dasein's being that have no application to entities other than Dasein. To say that something ready to hand (such as a hammer) is authentic or inauthentic makes no more sense than to say that something ready to hand (such as a hammer) is happy or sad.
And most of the time we spend making our way through the world is spent in an undifferentiated mode of being rather than in an inauthentic mode of being. And the only difference between inauthentic and authentic is choice. And the hammer has no choice.
Didn't disagree with this. I said care and relate them to philosophy, no not happening.
Quoting Aaron R
No, they can't. They can have deeply held beliefs and intellectual explorations, but evil is contradictory philosophy. I'll take short-sighted and correct, over entertaining genocide support. Heidegger should be analyzed in exactly the same manner his master should, and in the same ways all their views should. Evil shoud be analyzed philosophically, as a means to remain philosophically consistent and Ethical, so as to produce the greatest harmony for all humans possible.
I would almost agree with this, and I see the elements of reason, however miniscule, in such an approach. But, no. However, I didn't say ignore him, by the by, I said care and relate to philosophy, he isn't, neither is his master. Self-flagellation would be regarding him as philosophically relavent, and seeing as philosophers have been endlessly exterminated throughout history, and seeing how the world collective group of "philosophies" are predicated on the very evil that Heidegger's and Hitler's are, a world that is now inching closer to another global conflict as the result of those horrifying ideas that justify them, I think the time has come to dispense with fake philosophers, and truly give life to the concept Dasein by regarding it as inviolable. Then, I will explore Heidegger with the world. Until the carnage stops, I simply find no reason that outweighs the impermissability of ideas that violate reason itself.
Ready to hand is a mode of encountering entities, and present to hand is a further modification , a derivation of the ready to hand. Both of these , as modes
of falling prey to the world, are inauthentic modes.
“As factical being-in-the-world, Da-sein, falling prey, has already fallen away from itself; and it has not fallen prey to some being which it first runs into in the course of its being, or perhaps does not, but it has fallen prey to the world which itself belongs to its being.”
The hammer that we experience can be experienced as an objectively present object, this hammer, with such and such properties of size , color and weight. This is the mode of present-to-handness, which is a derivative mode. It is inauthentic because it is a closed off and flattened mode. The object only has meaning relative
to its pragmatic relevance to our ongoing pragmatic , goal-oriented engagement with the world. And this pragmatic ready-to-hand use of the object as a tool only has relevance in relation to the totality of relevance of Dasein’s self-understanding.Grasping dasein in terms of this holistic self-understanding is authentic , grasping dasein in terms of a particular object that is present at hand is inauthentic , and grasping dasein in terms of a particular pragmatic tool use is also inauthentic.
Heidegger is not a realist. He does not accept the ideas that there are objects in the world existing independent of dasein’s relation to them.
“Equipment is “in order to.” This proposition has an ontological and not merely an ontical meaning; a being is not what and how it is, for example, a hammer, and then in addition something “with which to hammer.” Rather, what and how it is as this entity, its whatness and howness, is constituted by this in-order-to as such, by its functionality. A being of the nature of equipment is thus encountered as the being that it is in itself if and when we understand beforehand the following: functionality, functionality relations, functionality totality. In dealing with equipment we can use it as equipment only if we have already beforehand projected this entity upon functionality relation.”(Basic Problems of phenomenology 1927)
“The kind of being of these beings is "handiness" (Zuhandenheit). But it must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such "aspects" were discursively forced upon "beings" which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were "subjectively colored" in this way. Such an interpretation overlooks the fact that in that case beings would have to be understood beforehand and discovered as purely objectively present, and would thus have priority and take the lead in the order of discovering and appropriating association with the "world." But this already goes against the ontological meaning of the cognition which we showed to be a founded mode of being-in-the-world. To expose what is merely objectively present, cognition must first penetrate beyond things at hand being taken care of. Handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are "in themselves. " “(Being and Time)
In the following , Heidegger critiques the notion of a world of objects existing independently(objectively present) of Dasein's pragmatic structure of the in order to'.
“… the understanding of the being of an entity which is and can be in itself, even without the Dasein existing, is possible only on the basis of the ontological rooting of functionality relations in the for-the-sake-of-which. Only on the basis of the clarified ontological interconnections of the possible ways of understanding being, and thus also of functionality relations, with the for-the-sake-of is it at all decidable whether the question of an ontical teleology of the universe of beings has a legitimate philosophical sense or whether it doesn't rather represent an invasion by common sense into the problems of philosophy.”
I don't see where you said this, but it's moot if we're in agreement.
Quoting Garrett Travers
I'm assuming that you wouldn't ignore a scientific discovery because it was made by a Nazi scientist or reject a revolutionary engineering technique because it was invented by a Nazi engineer.
Quoting Arne
Heidegger makes only a one-sentence reference in all his work , as far as I know, to an ‘ undifferentiated mode’ of being, and many many pages to authenticity and inauthenticity. What in the world is ‘undifferentiated mode’ supposed to mean? Can you tell me?
Heidegger uses expressions like ‘falling prey’ and ‘thrown’ to refer to inauthenticity, to indicate that it is not a choice. It is something we succumb to.The hammer for Heidegger isnt a thing in the world independent of dasein, because he is not a realist. It is a relation between us and world, given in a certain mode of interpretiveness.
“To say that the world is subjective is to say that it belongs to the Dasein so far as this being is in the mode of being-in-the-world. The world is something which the “subject” “projects outward,” as it were, from within itself. But are we permitted to speak here of an inner and an outer? What can this projection mean? Obviously not that the world is a piece of myself in the sense of some other thing present in me as in a thing and that I throw the world out of this subject thing in order to catch hold of the other things with it. Instead, the Dasein itself is as such already projected. So far as the Dasein exists a world is cast-forth with the Dasein's being. To exist means, among other things, to cast-forth a world, and in fact in such a way that with the thrownness of this projection, with the factical existence of a Dasein, extant entities are always already uncovered.”
I suppose I didn't use those words, fair enough. It is what I meant, however.
Quoting Aaron R
No, I would ignore the methods by which he justified such a discovery as dispicably evil, and to be ridiculed, ostracized, and reasoned into the dust bin of history where it belongs. But, we aren't talking about discoveries of objective nature, are we? Because objective standards could never be used to justify the genoiced of the Human Consciousness. No, such discoveries would have to be tainted with a behavioral framework distinguished by evil, and I think that is what is in question here. Wouldn't you say?
Presumably it would have been his use of the scientific method that justified his discovery. Beyond that, I'm not sure what methods you have in mind.
Quoting Garrett Travers
A philosophical insight is a philosophical insight, regardless of who conceived it. Do you think that none of your favorite philosophers ever acted in a way that was inconsistent with their own philosophical insights?
Batman's right.
Similar to that of Unit 731. That kind of shit.
Quoting Aaron R
An insight that can be used to justify negating human life in the form of genocide, or lead one to suppot it actively, is not philosophical, but contrary to it.
Quoting Aaron R
Inconsistency isn't the issue. And, as it happens, the principles of the philosophical tradition from whence I come, and am a continuation of, have NEVER been used to justify atrocities and violations of the Human Consciousness. In fact, the principles of that tradition have only EVER produced the most peaceful, non-violent, wisdom pursuing, virtue seeking, mysticism dispensing, and pleasure/happiness maximizing communities and societies that have ever in history existed. Which is why they have been murdered, oppressed, and slandered for thousands of years by the war pigs and fake philosophers. So, it isn't about consistency, it's about objective standards, outcomes, and production.
:lol:
[quote=Jargon of Authenticity, p.9]Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.[/quote]
(emphases added)
As specifically relates to H, "resolute" (i.e. subjectivist aka "ownmost") "being-towards-death" makes for "authentic Dasein", reminiscent of soldiering (kamikazi-like), that resonates with a Kierkegaardian "knight of faith's" fervor rationalized by the theodicy of death at the drum-beating heart of H's SuZ. "Authenticity" – purportedly the highest subjectivist (and historicist) goal – is the hymn of this Absolute (which for H's Dasein is (my) "death") invoked as en-chanting (i.e. "jargoning" Adorno suggests) in lieu of, or over above, public reasoning. :eyes:
“One gains the impression that Heidegger's temporary entanglement in National Socialism rather suited Adorno; in this way he could aggressively philosophize with Heidegger and yet keep a distance-which, in philosophical matters, was not all that marked.”
(MARTIN HEIDEGGER :Between Good and Evil
RUDIGER SAFRANSKI)
It's precisely the issue because it leaves open the possibility that even a moral degenerate could expound profound philosophical insights despite their own repugnant behavior. Heidegger may (or may not) be one such person.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I've been told more than once on this forum when complaining of Heidegger's mysterious pontificating that it's my fault I can't understand him. I would, if I just read enough or really tried to do so in some fashion--I think someone even said I must read the work of all phenomenologists in order to grasp what point. I like to think of this as deciphering the "Heidegger Code."
It's not a synonym for scientific method. It is an implicit assumption. By describing it in terms of 'objectification', attention is being drawn to this fact.
I'm going to safely conclude not. And no, that isn't the issue. A singular philosophical insight within an ethical framework is negated by the implementation of the framework, unless it is the intent of any who interact with it to extract such a concept and diviorce from the framework entirely. As clearly such a concept wasn't enough of a friend to the human to be expected to inhibit genocide. Now, if that's what you wish to do, I will do it with you, as I said above to another commentor. But, this entertaining of Nazi's as relavent is not going to fly.
Fuck Heidegger. If someone can't tell you about a concept without worshipping the Nazi it comes from, then they've more philosophy to get to. Besides, the Dasein concept was covered over a thousand years before he got here, it isn't profound, and there are better explications of it. Hell, I can give you a better explication.
His insights on Hitler and National Socialism are indeed very interesting, and very clearly stated. There's no need to decipher what he wrote about them, I must admit.
A small and relatively insignificant corner of his philosophy. If you find that part the most interesting, then by all means read that, and refrain from troubling yourself about the other 99% which remains incomprehensible to you, or perhaps inaccessible on account of your poisoned feelings..
Not sure what you think of John Dewey. I'm rather fond of him. Another philosopher (Joseph Margolis) asked him to read some of Heidi's work. He did, and reportedly said "Heidegger reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me."
I await a revelation. Like Paul on the road to Damascus.
https://archive.org/details/johndeweymartinh00blac
No it isn't, any more than a true premise is made false by its inclusion in an invalid argument.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Correct. We take what's true and leave the rest.
So, some good work, but unfinished. His Epistemology is sound, but neuroscience hadn't revealed what's really going on there yet, so it is unrefined. His politics can go to hell fast. Being inclusive of women in important affairs is a concept stolen from the epicureans, so credit goes there first in that regard. His eductional ideas are also Epicurean. Pragmatism, by and large, is not sufficient as a stand-alone philosophy, and is completely reductive in regards to the function of thought, which hearkens back to his unrefined epistemology that would have demonstrated such had he known more about the human brain. To his credit he rejected Hegelian stupidity, so he definitely gets points there. Over all, I don't think he was corrupt, or evil, but just not that relavent to philosophy overall. However, I would like to say that I don't really care about most philosophers, per se. I care about their ideas. I have a new found place in my heart for Epicurus and his role in the tradition, but I swear that's insanely rare for, and will likely never happen again after him.
That's correct, it is to be negated until formulation of the argument includes true premises and true conclusions. That's why whenever you give me a fallacious argument that isn't tautological, I can reject it as invalid. That doesn't mean there is no truth there, but that it is not prepared to be implemented as a view. I must extract from the bullshit argument that which is true, and negate the rest.
Quoting Aaron R
This completely contradicts your above expressed understanding. It appears you are thinking half-clearly. Which is a good sign.
No, it doesn't. But feel free to demonstrate how if you disagree.
A false premise makes an argument invalid, meaning it can be dismissed.
Quoting Aaron R
Here you are saying that we can most certainly dismiss what is invalid.
If you were meaning to differentiate, then I am mistaken, but it wasn't clear.
My original point was not that anything Nazi-Warpig said was true or not, but that his philosophy can be dismissed as invalid, and exctract that which can be shown to not be compatible with the destruction of human life.
You are flailing in the wind. You cannot possibly extract anything from Heidegger's work if you do not read it. And even if you do read it, you cannot possibly extract anything from it if you do not understand it. And people misunderstand what is mistakenly referred to as the introduction to Being and Time as written.
You are the one who chose the word "care" without providing a definition. I don't "care" about Heidegger's ontological views any more than I "care" about the rocket engineering principles of S.S. Officer Werner von Braun. But I will use Heidegger's views to reach a deeper understanding of the nature of being just as rocket engineers will use the views advanced by Braun.
And you may rest assured I do not "worship" Heidegger or any other being. I don't even worship God.
That is correct. However, not toward you. Just to Nazi-Warpig.
Right, and I didn't say otherwise. What I said is that a true premise doesn't become false just because it's part of an invalid argument.
Quoting Garrett Travers
Correct. We can dismiss the invalid argument but should retain the true premise(s).
Quoting Garrett Travers
I don't see where you clearly stated or even implied any of this additional nuance in your original post, but I think we're on the same page now.
Gotcha, simple misunderstanding.
Quoting Aaron R
I like you better already, old chap.
Quoting Aaron R
I can always be asked for clarification, I don't mind at all. Glad we're seeing eachother now.
I think his view that we only really think when we encounter problems (broadly defined) is quite true. This is essentially Peirce's position when he criticizes Descartes faux doubt. His rejection of dualism, his support of intelligent inquiry (of which the scientific method is an example) in understanding ourselves and the world, and his position that we humans are living organisms functioning as part of an environment, part of the world not apart from it, all appeal to me.
Thank you. It looks interesting.
Yes. And the issue with any detraction, that's any whatsoever that sounds theortically intelligent, or compelling, is simple proof. I would change my tune in literally the moment any proof, of any kind, were ever presented, at any time. No exists to date, outside of theories that lead to an intellectual conclusion that 'only' such could possible stand to reason, which is an argument from ignorance. So, until the empiricist model becomes not the most reliable framework, all of those theories have to be placed in the "that's cool" compartment, and reserved for the day they can be shown to be relavent, or applicable.
For example, what can I even do with mind/dualism...? Sit there? Float off the body? Speak telepathically? What? I know what I can do with mental states when I manipulate the chemicals in the brain, any day of the week. It's gibberish.
That it is"stolen" from Epicurus is an overblown claim. Being inclusive of women in important affairs is (not so common) commonsense and social justice.
Cheers. Enjoy.
No, it isn't common sense. That's why it has only happened in Epicurean societies that value the pursuit of knowledge and pleasure as a base requirement for ethics. This was specifically an Epicurean development, and didn't come back to the world until well after the emergence of a state predicated upon protecting that very freedom to pursue knowledge and pleasure, inspired directly by Epicurus, and enshrined in the 1st Amendment:
http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/jefflet.html
Thomas Jefferson's philosophy was transposed to the 1st Amendment by James Madison who drafted it. Jefferson was Epicurean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women's_suffrage
As I said it is commonsense to include women in all affairs simply because there is no rational reason not to, and a rational sense of justice demands it. But rationality has been, and remains, uncommon.
Funny— I’ve offered to explain (and have done so) Heidegger several times.
There’s no code to break. It’s not a mysterious thesis.
Talk about Heidegger being a Nazi is boring. Don’t like it? Fine— go do something else.
No, it was a tradition started by Epicurus 2000 years before his ideas were adopted by the rational world, post mystic-garbage. As far as my pet theory, sure, if you can find something that doesn't correspond directly to his teachings, I'd love to see it. But, it's established philosophical history that these are his ideas, and specifically his contribution to the history of philosophy. I don't really know what else to say. He even invited legal slaves to his communes and taught and pursued philosophy to and with them, long before the concept of abolition, or Jesus' teachings about treating slaves well. This guy was the real deal. Even ole Karl liked him so much that he plagiarised his entire philosophy from him, that ole people's champion.
Quoting Janus
I know it's fundamental, because I value the Human Consciousness, like Epicurus did. Almost nobody has throughout history, however. This is not common sense. It took the tradition of Empiricism to bring us out of mystic babble-thought to that point, my friend. And it took alot of that thought being conveyed to women before they were even comfortable, by and large, with that prospect. You're thinking on this subject is reductionist. The history is bigger than that.
Quoting Janus
It seems you've agreed with me the entire time. That is correct, rationality has almost NEVER been valued. And has almost ALWAYS been scorned, or persecuted. So, I don't know where this common sense analysis was coming from in you.
It's coming from the thought that even though rationality is uncommon, natural human diversity suggests that it is plausible to think it exists and has existed throughout history, even among those who have or had never heard of Epicurus, much less been influenced by his philosophy.
Epicurus does not have the monopoly on, and is not the sole source of, rationality AKA commonsense. So I remain convinced that it is an overblown claim that the movements for liberation of women finds their origin in Epicurus, even if he may have been the first proponent of it known to us.
Again, this kind of thought is reductionist. The paradigm of thought with which we all operate, is influenced by years of specifically ethical philosophy. Most of the philosophers you've been influenced, have in turn been influenced by the grandfathers of the tradition. The Enlightenment, from whence most everybody's views extend, are predicated upon Epicurean empiricism, and the science springing from Aristotelian physics and Epicurean Atomism. So, yes, you're sure to be influenced by him, with almost no way of denying it.
Quoting Janus
Of course not, nor did I mean to imply as much. My apologies if I did. However, where the mystics did their best to hush him up, post-Christendom, he doesn't get the credit he's due all that much, and throughout the entirety of his dazzlingly successful 500 year experimental presence on earth, he and his people were endless slandered by any one who could grab a lying tongue about them. Christians, Jews, Skeptics, Stoics, everyone. So, I'm a little more inclined to shoot him some dabbs for a while. Especially with how much the lies about Capitalism are going around, yowza! Not only does Capitalism see first light, historically, in an anarchic Epicurean society, but so does communism, what a FUCKING twist of news that everyone just keeps hushed up, or ignores entirely. An Anarcho-Capitalist Commune! HAH! That's unbelievable news to me at 29 years old. You know how much I've bickered with damn commies, and ancaps, and libsocs, listening to them bitch at eachother back and forth ad fuckin nauseum, only to find they're the same damn people, split only by mystic woo of Christendom tainting philosophy, and how they'd know this if they'd just shut the fuck up and be sweet on eachother for ten minutes or so? Needless to say, my week's been pretty good, apart from this Russia stuff.
Quoting Janus
Well, buddy, that's all I meant to convey. I wasn't saying Epicurus hopped his dead ass up out of the grave and liberated a bunch of women and gave us pussy hats as an f-you to the crazies. I was saying that it's his tradition made manifest, one 2000 years in the making, and I love him for it. I'd invite you to do the same. Do worry, you don't gotta lose love for any of your heros in the meantime.
What I've said is that the idea of liberating women (and slaves and the oppressed in general) does not come from him, and would have been around without him; he was just one of its proponents. The idea is natural to rational fair-mindedness which, if not common, has nonetheless been kicking around, I have no doubt, through the ages. Anyway it's the rationality, the fair-mindedness and social justice that matter, not who its first, or for that matter any of, its proponents were. The ideas stand on their own, in my view.
And I'm afraid I'm also different from you in that I view capitalism as a disease, and this was one of the points that your much beloved Nazi philosopher also propounded (although of course, he wasn't the first).
I don't doubt you mean that. I just don't think there's enough evidence to support the thesis. We're barely free as it is. Russia is showing us that right now. I don't think rationality supercedes the hunger for meaning that is a vaccuum in the lives of people who've lived their lives without what we here discuss. That causes confusion, frustration, aggression. Rationality is a value, and a practiced one, my anti-capitalist friend. It isn't natural, any more than language, or mathematics.
Quoting Janus
Different view, eh? Proabably another strange conclusion dispelled by Epicurus. As far the Nazi Warpig, no, he was just a forked toungue opportunist, praising Marx here, Capitalism there. Of course, none of these fools understood that Capitalism hasn't existed that I know of, just words they tossed about that nobody can define. No, my friend, what you know, and have only ever known, is neither socialism, nor Capitalism. Socialism, because it isn't a thing. And Capitalism, because it has never existed. What you think is a disease, that you call Capitalism, is actually Dirigisme.
Such being defined as:
sate control of economic and social matters.
And Socialism being defined as: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
And Capitalism being defined as: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
If you read carefully, you'll notice only the top economic model definitiom has ever existed in all of human history. And such is the poison. But, the Heideggers and Lenins, Trumps and Obamas, Popes and News Agencies, do their job well. Thus, you will never notice or accept this fact if you are convinced one way or another. You see, if the Dirigists do their job well, they maintain control of the money, and keep you pissed of at just the wrong people, your feellow citizens no less, so that they can plan a new war every couple of years to exctract more wealth from a neighboring Dirigist controller, and convince all your irrational breathren we were speaking about earlier that dolce et decorum est pro patria mori, and of to the gas clouds they go with pride in their heart for their dear masters, convinced its for you that they're dying, and when they come back to all the vitriol, they hate you even more than you hated them. And, while the rest of people are blaming eachother for racism that isn't there, starting emaciated make-believe revolutions and destroying your fellow humans property and killing eachother, blaming Capitalism, and Socialism, while the Capitol Class, the Dirigists, are laughing their assess off at what you're all doing while their eating ice cream in 5 star restaraunts, and taking trips to pedeophile Island at their pal Epstein's place, on your dime without lifting a finger to do a days labor in their entire lives, planning the next invasion on repeat for literally 1000's of years. But, no, Capitalism is the poison, good call on that one. People have to use that rationality sometime, bud.
:100: :up:
I agree, my astute friend. I agree. And I hope Epicurus, and the the dicoveries of that tradition do find a way to come in and lead us. I fear that such is our only hope as a society moving forward. Great chat, bud. Think about that Dirigisme thing for me, if you would. It's important, if you follow the trail.
That's not funny at all.
Quoting Xtrix
It must be me, then. Incapable of understanding him, I must await a revelation, as I've said. Perhaps Heidegger selects us. I may yet be his greatest apostle.
Quoting Xtrix
Yes, that someone is a Nazi means less to some of us than others, I know. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Could you point me to where he discusses capitalism? I'd be very interested to take a look.
What is so mysterious, exactly? Once you understand his nuanced language, it's not quantum mechanics. He's saying that since the Greeks, entities have been interpreted in terms of the present (ousia), which is a particular human state (the "present at hand"). That's the thesis. Not particularly difficult, but with interesting implications.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Maybe it is a matter of taste. Ditto with any thinker or artist in history. Not all a bunch of great guys (or gals). But if Michael Jackson isn't your cup of tea because of what he did, for example, don't listen to his music. Simple.
I dig the Groucho picture, btw. Beat me to it.
I tried looking into it. The best I could find was his critique of technology and American ‘gigantism’. He was certainly no fan of Marx, though. One would assume he would critique Enlightenment and modernist philosophical groundings of capitalism.
My guess is post-marxist postmodernist political positions like those of Foucault, Derrida, Rorty and Deleuze may have some overlap with Heidegger.
It seems we are pretty much in agreement, Garrett, on the most pressing issues at least. I haven't heard of the "Dirigisme thing" before, but I'll certainly look into it, suffering from chronic curiosity syndrome as I do.
Seems obvious enough. So much for Heidegger, then.
Hehahah. Gotta love that NAzi profundity.
Okay— I draw similar conclusions. I thought perhaps there were texts I overlooked.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Well that’s obviously a very broad summary, but I did so to show that it’s not that mysterious.
Not that remarkable, either .
:shade: Big whup.
Quoting Ciceronianus
:up:
Quoting Garrett Travers
:smirk:
It all depends on whether and to what degree you have an interest in phenomenology, psychotherapy and philosophy of science, postmodern philosophy , embodied and enactive cognitive approaches to the study of feeling, mood and emotion and their relation to psychopathology and mood disorders. If these disciplines don’t thrill you, then yes, his work is unremarkable. But if they do interest you, then his writing is essential.
Quoting 180 Proof
Yes, we all know that neither of you are serious about this matter, and come here simply to register your uninformed “thumbs down,” but what I was responding to was the claim that he’s incoherent, mysterious, etc.
So, given that you’re unwilling (or unable) to read, I wanted to show that it can be synopsized. If you now want to mock how simple that summary is, then I guess the jokes on me for engaging with trolls.
The summary is fine. I don't mock it.
Stop whining. Your synopsis is spot-on, it's just that H's "thesis" is unoriginal and uninteresting – Laozi, Buddha ... Schopenhauer, Bergson, Dewey et al say more or less the same thing far less obscurely. Xtrix, you're hypnotized by H's oracular sophistry and, because we're not, you trollishly call us "trolls". :sweat:
I’m glad you quoted Nietzsche. Assimilating his critique of
Schopenhauer, and by implication Bergson and Dewey, brings one to the doorstep of Heidegger’s project.
re: Bullshit and Time :sparkle:
“More or less”? That’s quite vague. So I suppose they’re uninteresting as well?
Quoting 180 Proof
I’m not hypnotized by Heidegger any more than any other thinker I’ve learned something from.
And I don’t call you a troll because Heidegger isn’t your thing — I don’t care about that. I call you a troll because you contribute nothing except Twitter-like one liners.
“Heidegger is obfuscating. No one knows what the Hell he’s saying!”
I point out, as simply as possible, what he’s saying.
“Heidegger is so unoriginal and uninteresting.”
:yawn:
Don’t feed the trolls. It’s the mistake I keep making.
You’ve been hanging around Joe Mello too long.
True, but he did Nazi it that way. YouknowwadImeen?
The one bearing the words "Arbeit Macht Frei"? Perhaps that was another doorstep, though, and the project of other Nazis.
Fol de rol!
Or as Xtrix would say, Fol de troll
Heidegger was not a good person for several reasons, with his Nazism foremost among them. However, I have no desire to either prosecute or defend his absurd politics.
But I have long been interested in the nature of being. And anyone interested in the nature of being would be a fool to ignore Heidegger, particularly Being and Time.
This is true only of someone who, IME, hasn't already studied e.g. Laozi-Zhuangzi, Epicurus-Lucretius, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Karl Jaspers or P.W. Zapffe ... thinkers who have much more cogent things to say about "the nature of being" than Herr Rektor-Führer. :eyes:
Quoting 180 Proof
Gadamer’s conversation with Ricardo Dottori:
D.: Hence the analytic of Dasein in Heidegger. Is this the same thing as the illumination of existence of which Jaspers speaks?
G.: Insofar as Jaspers even thought conceptually at all, one could answer this question very harshly. On the other hand, it is a very elegant expression — the illumination of existence — an expression that one understands immediately, but not one, in any case, that suggests a fundamental critique of the history of being in the West.
…these days, all of a sudden, I find Jaspers wrongly being
considered important. He wasn't really all that important.
D.: To what extent is he now considered important?
G.: One detects it everywhere. One notices it in every corner. Whenever we don't want to read Heidegger any more, we read Jaspers.”
Thank you for proving my point. Your credibility regarding your position rests upon having read and understood Heidegger.
Keep up the good work.
:up: