Heidegger's vision of philosophy in 1919

Reply to macrosoft For me "formal indication" really stood out in reading this passage. Do you know of anywhere that Heidegger explicitly discusses his methodology of formal indication?

Heidegger attempted and failed at understanding the role language has in one's world-view.

Reply to bloodninja

I'm pretty sure that he really nailed it down in KNS 1919. I could only quote some of it, since I can't cut and paste. I tried to choose the highlights. He was apparently adjusting a concept from a neo-Kantian named Lask. According to Kiesel and the mutual teacher of both Lask and Heidegger, Heidegger was significantly influenced by Lask. If you don't have Genesis already, I'd recommend it. Kiesel had access to just about everything, it seems. I'm finding it very helpful to go back to early lectures. The Ontology of Facticity was very helpful to me. But, as Kiesel notes, important comments were sometimes not published and only recovered from students' notes.

Quoting creativesoul

Heidegger attempted and failed at understanding the role language has in one's world-view.

Could you expand? I love Heidegger, no doubt, but I am very open to criticisms. What did he get wrong?

[quote=K]
Life is sufficient to Itself, Ekhart already said. The trick is to get to this level and stay with it, thereby reaping the harvest of its self-expression. For factic life also gives itself in the deformation of the objectification, which must first be dismantled in order to get to its initial moment of articulation.
..
Such an intuition immersed in the 'immanent historicity of life' must reach back into its motivation and forward into its tendency in order to form those special concepts which are accordingly called recepts (retrospective grips) and precepts (prospective grips), without of course lapsing into old-fashioned objectifying concepts. Heidegger will later improve upon this dualism suggested in the hermeneutic type of concept by having the single term pre-conception imply both retrospection and prospection, which unitively and indifferently stretches itself along the whole of the life stream. In the same vein, a formal indication is sometimes called a 'precursory' indication that 'foreruns' the stream without disruption. Springing from life's own sense of direction, from the indifference of its dynamics in view of its incipient differentiation, the formal indication wishes to point to the phenomenon in extreme generality, indifference, and contentlessness, in order to be able to interpret the phenomenon so indicated without prejudice and standpoints.
[/quote]
Reply to bloodninja

To be here is to time.

('time' as a verb)

Reply to macrosoft

He was concerned with creating a new system of terminology without explicit definitions and merely attempted to do something (he did little more than open up some alternative ways to frame Husserl’s work - most of what he is celebrated for was just a reiteration of Husserl; as has come to light over the past few decades with many Husserl’s notes predating what Heidegger claimed as his own.)

I’ve yet to find anyone who can provide a concise definition of “dasein” given by Heidegger. If anything the whole work of “Being and Time” is merely a pondering of what “dasein” means to Heidegger.

He’s obviously important in the history of philosophy, but he is also (as far as I can tell) seen as expanding from Husserl when I see his work as doing more than treading into territory not even Husserl considered as explicit enough; and Husserl’s writing is often quite vague.

In short he ignored the phenomenological experience and became absorbed with language. He tried to speak of the unspeakable - and obviously failed to do anything other than confuse and confound, or fool, people into believing they understood something unreached.

Of course this is just my opinoin and I’m willing, hopeful, to be shown otherwise (especially regarding the lack of explication of the term “dasein” that everyone seems to have something to say about yet they cannot refer me to Heidegger’s actual words only their own subjective impressions.)

“Time” is not a verb in the manner you wrote it, “be” is a verb. To “time” something is a verb.

The sense used above frames “time” as a noun not a verb. We’re using English here not German.

Many confusions can happen this way. Such as people saying that killer whales are whales when they’re not whales at all.

Quoting I like sushi

I’ve yet to find anyone who can provide a concise definition of “dasein” given by Heidegger. If anything the whole work of “Being and Time” is merely a pondering of what “dasein” means to Heidegger.

What would qualify as a concise definition on your arbitrary standards and why do you feel he needs give one? Your second sentence is half correct, it should read: If anything the whole (published) work of “Being and Time” is a hermeneutic of dasein.

I think it is appropriate for someone to provide a reasonably tangible articulation of the terms they are using. He doesn’t. Of course all philosophers fall short in this category the difference I find with Heidegger is that he does it intentionally and basis his entire premise on an premise that isn;t a premise. His entire written work in that book is embedded in the ter “dasein.” He doesn’t explain it anywhere; yet he is happy to use it as a referential term throughout the book.

There are chapters in the book which are a complete waste. On one occassion I read around 20 pages only to find I had wasted my time and should’ve just read the last paragraph (which was mostly obvious.) The problem there being he doesn’t tell the resder where he is going and pefers to prance around without meaning - or maybe I’m not giving myself credit enough for seeing something others may find hard to grasp? It is possible, as is the possiblilty I am so dim-witted that I missed the entire point of rambling on in a seemingly meaningless and obtuse manner? You can guess which opinion of myself I lean toward? ;)

You’re argument is kind of redundant though. You may as well say any written word is a “hermeneutic of dasein,” which is true enough as the term “dasein” is not made explicit enough by Heidegger and so it can be arbitrarily attributed to any item of writing.

The fact that he uses the term “hermeneutics” means he’s focusing on “words” not thought. He does believe, so it seems, that he’s driving below the surface. I don’t think so.

Anyway, I am scathing of his work because it is worthy of my attention. Just because I take up an opposing position to his words doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the in any way.

Heidegger/Kiesel:Philosophy in its 'poverty of thought' is ultimately reduced to maintaining its proximating orientation toward the pre-theoretical origin which is its subject matter. Philosophy is accordingly an orienting comportment, a praxis of striving, and a protreptic encouraging such a striving. Its expressions are only 'formal indications' which smooth the way toward intensifying the sense of the immediate in which we find ourselves. It is always precursory in its pronouncements,a forerunner of insights, a harbinger and hermeneutic herald of life's possibilities of understanding and articulation.

I've always had a profound distaste for this kind of 'mysterian' conception of philosophy - if I can call it that - which treats philosophy as though it were just some under-maintained half-way house to Deep Truth or what have you. At its best, philosophy does always indeed 'point elsewhere', always feels like a matter of 'fore-running', like you've never quite grasped the so-called 'sense of the immediate'. But I think it is a deep and terrible mistake to confuse this feeling with the positivity of philosophy itself which is a self-consciously and actively joyful practice of artifice, of constructing visions that deliberately and wilfully abstract from the real all the better for us to orient ourselves within it. Or to cite one of my favourite quotes on the topic,

"Theory depicts a world that does not quite exist, a world that is not quite the one we inhabit. ... An interval between the actual and the theoretical is crucial insofar as theory does not simply decipher the world, but recodes it in order to reveal something of the meanings and incoherencies with which we live. This is not simply to say that [we] describe reality abstractly. At [our] best, [we] conjure relations and meanings that illuminate the real or that help us recognize the real, but this occurs in grammars and formulations other than those of the real." (Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty).

I think Heidegger well realized the artefactual nature of philosophy - perhaps better than most - but mistook it for a mark of inadequacy rather than having acknowledged it for granting philosophy the power it would otherwise not have. It's one of the reasons why Heidegger is so utterly bereft of a sense of humour, and why the whole Heideggarian artifice feels like walking in a blackened, Gothic church, creaking with every step. As fantastic as he was a philosopher, it always feels he aimed to ultimately 'submit' philosophy to some kind of other (higher?) calling, and it comes off as though weighing down - like a weight attached to the ankle, as it were - the real and clearly discernable drive of philosophical creativity and vibrancy that courses through all of Heidegger. Heidegger makes philosophy feel like it ought to serve another master, than to buoy in its own autonomous beatitude. I find it a disquieting and ugly feeling.

Quoting macrosoft

Given the spirit of the quote itself, I am just opening the space up for reactions. Please let me know what all of this means to you, if anything.
13h

I think he's riffing on the eye's inability to see itself. What does it mean to you?

Quoting I like sushi

I’ve yet to find anyone who can provide a concise definition of “dasein” given by Heidegger.

I'm no scholar, but my understanding is that one can just start with 'dasein' as individual human 'existence.' I often translate in my mind as I read to see what feels right. Sometimes it's being-there or being-here. In short you are dasein, I am dasein.

Quoting I like sushi

In short he ignored the phenomenological experience and became absorbed with language. He tried to speak of the unspeakable - and obviously failed to do anything other than confuse and confound, or fool, people into believing they understood something unreached.

I'm glad you speak your mind here. I have wrestled with Heidegger for a long time now, going back and forth on whether he was over-rated. I'm now pretty settled that he was indeed great. I'm surprised you'd say that he ignored the phenomenological experience.

Quoting I like sushi

The fact that he uses the term “hermeneutics” means he’s focusing on “words” not thought.

What is this separation of words from thought, though? To me it seems that our thoughts only exist as words embedded in history. The realm outside of time seems to be exactly what Heidegger is breaking down. The future is roaring and screaming. We are the thrown open space in which it roars and screams. But we can also just get immersed in ordinarily life, forgetting our groundlessness/open-ness to this future as possibility, not as not-yet-present event on the time-line.

Quoting I like sushi

The problem there being he doesn’t tell the resder where he is going and pefers to prance around without meaning - or maybe I’m not giving myself credit enough for seeing something others may find hard to grasp? It is possible, as is the possiblilty I am so dim-witted that I missed the entire point of rambling on in a seemingly meaningless and obtuse manner?

I found my way in by tackling earlier works, lectures especially. The Ontology of Facticity is almost as clear as one could ask, given the non-trivial ideas it presents. Being and Time is a beast. Just like Hegel's Phenomenology, it's the most talked about and therefore the first book that one tends to sample. Both books are so crammed with content that they make huge demands on a reader just being introduced to a dense philosophy in a second language read in the light of a different historical context. But why do this, when lectures are available? Lectures in front of an audience impose a natural constraint on some of the run-away writerly tendencies of philosophers. There is also the first draft of Being and Time, a mere 100 pages, which is extremely accessible. I've read this one 4 or 5 times by now. Much of it I grasp completely, but there's still something that's not quite clear. The pieces don't yet gel together perfectly. Individually many of them have already made reading Heidegger well worth my time. I'd say give this one a try: The Concept of Time. The intro on Dilthey/Yorck really sets up what Heidegger is trying to do.

K:Life is sufficient to Itself, Ekhart already said.

‘Ekhart’ being....?

Quoting StreetlightX

I've always had a profound distaste for this kind of 'mysterian' conception of philosophy - if I can call it that - which treats philosophy as though it were just some under-maintained half-way house to Deep Truth or what have you

I can relate to that distaste. I can also see that Heidegger is right on the edge of that. IMV, he is outright rejecting deep/final truth, but clearly some kind of pure lifestream is functioning along those lines. The truth is just the open space that times, self-interpretively. If we are relentlessly pointed back to our own lifestream, however, I think 'truth' is the wrong word. In the above passage I read an acknowledgement/assessment that existence overflows its own self-interpretation. We can't not be open to the future. We are thrown open to a storm of possibility, unable to dominate our future selves, future interpretations. Yet this idea of ourselves as un-close-able spaces might itself be a stable conceptual truth, at least inasmuch as it signifies a mode that we can always be thrown into by a mood or a disaster.

Quoting StreetlightX

At its best, philosophy does always indeed 'point elsewhere', always feels like a matter of 'fore-running', like you've never quite grasped the so-called 'sense of the immediate'. But I think it is a deep and terrible mistake to confuse this feeling with the positivity of philosophy itself which is a self-consciously and actively joyful practice of artifice, of constructing visions that deliberately and wilfully abstract from the real all the better for us to orient ourselves within it.

I can relate to this as well. It would be absurd if the quote above were to be applied to all of philosophy. Instead it strikes me as a very personal sense of what Heidegger could do with philosophy, what he was suited for. The Wendy Brown quote is great, and truly I see some strong similarity, though Brown's tone isn't grandiose and so earnestly romantic.

Quoting StreetlightX

It's one of the reasons why Heidegger is so utterly bereft of a sense of humour, and why the whole Heideggarian artifice feels like walking in a blackened, Gothic church, creaking with every step.

I agree, with some exceptions here and there. This is why Sheehan's book is so appealing. He's worldly and funny, doing his best to cut through all the smoke and music. I'd love to hear what you think of it if you get a chance to check it out.

Reply to Wayfarer

I think I left in a typo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart

Reply to macrosoft For openers (a Poker term), Heidegger is somewhat narrow in his views in that in his book "Being And Time" he states that we can only be sure of our own existence.

This is contrary to Modern British Empiricism in that the existence of others is a given since they can harm you or kill you.

So Heidegger's thinking is flawed. Ergo he is easy to dismiss.

I look for major flaws and then I dismiss the source. It is my method of doing philosophy.

K:Life is sufficient to Itself, Ekhart already said.

This quote points to something that I like about phenomenology as a kind of 'spiritual' path . We don't need anything on some other side of life. We need more awareness of the life we already have. Or rather I (because ultimately no one can do my dying or living for me) prefer to look at what is closest to me and not really noticed. In some ways this is the boring old platitude of not taking for granted what it is to be alive. It's just that the right words bring what is exciting and beautiful about being human to the foreground. For me the quote suggests digging within ourselves, finding the right words for our heightened modes of being so that we can get there and stay there more easily. And there is also the joy in simultaneous exploration and creation. Reality-existence loves to talk about itself, loves to get to know itself. Phenomenology is just a radicalization or self-conscious embrace of speaking life's dialectical-hermeneutical aspect. For Heidegger and others with the same kind of personality, this is adventure and purpose enough for a life time, even in the context of mortality and groundlessness.

Quoting hks

?macrosoft For openers (a Poker term), Heidegger is somewhat narrow in his views in that in his book "Being And Time" he states that we can only be sure of our own existence.

This is contrary to Modern British Empiricism in that the existence of others is a given since they can harm you or kill you.

So Heidegger's thinking is flawed. Ergo he is easy to dismiss.

I look for major flaws and then I dismiss the source. It is my method of doing philosophy.

Thanks for jumping in. Here's my take on your take.

All thinkers are flawed, IMO. An idea I've been working on is that all explicit formulations 'must' be flawed because they are explicit. I won't drone on about it here, but I am coming from a perspective of semantic holism. In short, we can't do math with words. We try, again and again, and the nature of meaning defeats us again and again --if we can bear to look at it and don't just ignore the cracks in our explicit systems.

I also wouldn't personally dream of dismissing a philosopher who had major flaws for that reason alone. I don't care if said philosopher is a fool 99% of the time. It's that 1% of genius that I'm looking for. A smart reader in my book is never looking for a intellectual idol to adopt wholesale. As we age, develop, and become more exposed and experienced, I think we start to judge books by our experience rather than our experience by books. And judging books this way, we can see what 'computes' and what might have just been the philosopher's idiosyncrasies. True for him, maybe, but not useful or true for us. For me or you, really, as individuals. I've never met two intensely thoughtful people who agree on everything.

Quoting hks

he states that we can only be sure of our own existence.

Btw, Heidegger hates all of that solipsism and prove-to-me-that-there-is-world junk. I'd say beware of making judgments especially on Heidegger without some serious investigation. I've done it before, and I ended up with my foot in my mouth. (But maybe this foot-in-mouth situation was educational.)

Quoting frank

I think he's riffing on the eye's inability to see itself. What does it mean to you?

The 'eye trying to see itself' does seem related.

To me he's basically sketching one kind of heroic lifestyle. The phenomenologist described above as much poet as scientist. He is looking for the universal like a scientist, but he is looking for 'internal' or subjective universals. He wants to say the name of that which times and worlds. And yet know name sticks. This is clear. So he wants better and better namings of it, for a more intense life ultimately. Something like negative theology comes to mind. IMV, the incarnation myth runs through German philosophy (blatantly there in the texts). But this incarnation has a Luciferian edge (which is one way to make sense of Heidegger becoming a Nazi, having at one time called himself a Christian theologian in letter). To me Heidegger is not far from Nietzsche in his sense that words are never quite true. In Heidegger I see the anti-Platonic quest for pure becoming. Being itself is dissolved in the rush of time. In the quote, the hero gives himself to this rush of time, seeks the less-wrong-name of this dark god, the better to give himself to this rush of time, this future as splintered possibility. The light of the future also lights up our groundlessness. And giving oneself to the future is like consenting to die in order to really live.

Granted all of this is tangled together, but I find it tangled together in Heidegger. I'm still sorting it out in the light of my own life and what I can do with.

Quoting I like sushi

rambling on in a seemingly meaningless and obtuse manner

You're actually more kind to him that I am.

Quoting macrosoft

The pieces don't yet gel together perfectly. Individually many of them have already made reading Heidegger well worth my time. I'd say give this one a try: The Concept of Time. The intro on Dilthey/Yorck really sets up what Heidegger is trying to do.

Looking at info about The Concept of Time on Amazon, it doesn't seem any more coherent than anything else Heidegger wrote.

Someone quotes Heidegger saying:

"“If time finds its meaning in eternity, then it must be understood starting from eternity. The point of departure and path of this inquiry are thereby indicated in advance: from eternity to time… If our access to God is faith and if involving oneself with eternity is nothing other than this faith, then philosophy will never have eternity… Philosophy can never be relieved of this perplexity. The theologian, then, is the legitimate expert on time."

That's a complete mess.

Just for example, "If x 'finds its meaning in' y, then x must be understood starting from y"? Aside from problems with the idea of "finds its meaning in," which seems to be ignorant of how meaning actually works, the logical structure of the conditional seems like a complete non-sequitur.

How about this sentence:

"Philosophy will never get to the root of what history is so long as it analyses history as an object of contemplation for method."

What sort of gobbledygook is that? "History as an object of contemplation for method"?? What in the world is that supposed to be saying?

Quoting macrosoft

To me he's basically sketching one kind of heroic lifestyle.

Remember Plato has Socrates say that every philosopher's greatest wish is to die so as to gain a vantage point on life in this world. There is no such vantage point from within it. Existentialism provides no fix for that, but it focuses on that which is (in a sense) most real.

As soon as we begin to speak, we're already in a reflective state, dismantling that which exists united. So as I speak now, I appear to conjure up some world beyond our grasp. As Heidegger mentioned, it's not far away. There's nothing closer.

Quoting frank

Remember Plato has Socrates say that every philosopher's greatest wish is to die so as to gain a vantage point on life in this world. There is no such vantage point from within it. Existentialism provides no fix for that, but it focuses on that which is (in a sense) most real.

Yes, well said. As I see it, an anti-philosophy embraces this life, forgoing the vantage point of the dead. On the other hand, Heidegger too puts death at a central place. It's the contemplation of our own death that reveals our groundlessness and terrible freedom. It's this life that we start from and must live from, in this world (in our time in its glory and stupidity). In short, the hero presented is an anti-escapist. Incarnation. Mortal. Thrown open like those arms nailed in an exaggerated and fearsome hug of what is, like it or not.

Quoting frank

As soon as we begin to speak, we're already in a reflective state, dismantling that which exists united. So as I speak now, I appear to conjure up some world beyond our grasp. As Heidegger mentioned, it's not far away. There's nothing closer.

This is not far from Sheehan's take on Heidegger. We are the thrown-open hermenuetical space, condemned to find the world always already meaningful and always already being re-interpreted. If Sheehan is right, then Heidegger is himself close to Hegel. The difference would be that Hegel was (apparently) too mechanical in his interpretation of the mind (too obsessed with logic and explicitness, underrating poetic acts of disclosure and missing the phenomenon of world.) Then there is the formalism of Hegel (The Logic). But the notion of experience turning back interpretively on itself in very much in Hegel, along with an attainment of the self-consciousness of this process. Heidegger's work would be one more piece of that self-consciousness.

Quoting Terrapin Station

"“If time finds its meaning in eternity, then it must be understood starting from eternity. The point of departure and path of this inquiry are thereby indicated in advance: from eternity to time… If our access to God is faith and if involving oneself with eternity is nothing other than this faith, then philosophy will never have eternity… Philosophy can never be relieved of this perplexity. The theologian, then, is the legitimate expert on time

I found that book dry at first, but then I started to get it. The basic approach of philosophy has been theological. It always reaches for something outside time, something eternal. 'True' being is constant. Heidegger was speaking to theologians in that lecture, so he was being polite. He was trying to finally separate philosophy from theology and being from timelessness. Some have even tried to sum him up with 'being is time.' But, as any good Hegelian knows, such pithy summaries are more deceptive than informative. The truth is not the naked result but the result along with its becoming. Heidegger later in that book does sketch Dasein ,being-in-the-world, clock time, etc. In many ways, the gist of B&T is already there without argument supporting it, since he was just indicating current research.

A final note: that's a pretty great translation. But really you should probably look at the other text called The Concept of Time. * --if, that is, you want justifications of the theses hinted at in the 'ur-B&T' you are looking at.

*https://www.amazon.com/Concept-Time-Contemporary-European-Thinkers/dp/144110562X

Quoting macrosoft

But really you should probably look at the other text called The Concept of Time.

There are two texts called The Concept of Time?

Quoting Terrapin Station

What sort of gobbledygook is that? "History as an object of contemplation for method"?? What in the world is that supposed to be saying?

Stress the word object and method. In short, Heidegger thought the standard approach to history was shallow. One of his big themes is a taken-for-granted method that is doomed from the get-go. Our initial grasp is crucial. Again and again I find this kind of insight in Heidegger. It's that blind first step, what we think is obvious, that blinds us. This is what dismantling the tradition is all about. It's the attempt to take off the blinders we didn't know we were wearing. We thought they were just part of our own human seeing. We have, in short, contingency mistaken for necessity.

Quoting Terrapin Station

There are two texts called The Concept of Time?

Yes. A lecture and an article written for a journal that was only published much, much later. Because the article was never published while H. was alive, I guess he never picked out a new name.

Keep in mind that he published nothing for a decade as he developed the ideas he was famous for. Only many years later did all the lectures he was giving during that decade come out to illuminate the otherwise overwhelming complexity of B&T --itself written under economic pressure and never finished.

Quoting macrosoft

Stress the word object and method. In short, Heidegger thought the standard approach to history was shallow. One of his big themes is a taken-for-granted method that is doomed from the get-go. Our initial grasp is crucial.

None of that helps at all, unfortunately.

Quoting macrosoft

It's that blind first step, what we think is obvious, that blinds us. This is what dismantling the tradition is all about. It's the attempt to take off the blinders we didn't know we were wearing.

That part makes sense, at least, but if we're going to say that we are "wearing blinders," we'd need something to support that other than just making the claim that it's the case.

Quoting Terrapin Station

That part makes sense, at least, but if we're going to say that we are "wearing blinders," we'd need something to support that other than just making the claim that it's the case.

Quoting macrosoft

But, as any good Hegelian knows, such pithy summaries are more deceptive than informative. The truth is not the naked result but the result along with its becoming.

Basically Heidegger and Hegel are sometimes a pain in the ass to read, but there is no fast food summary-substitute for at least sweating out a good secondary source.

This is a very readable introduction: https://www.amazon.com/Heidegger-Introduction-Richard-Polt/dp/0801485649

There 'might' be a pdf out there.

Reply to macrosoft Anyone (like Heidegger) who cannot come up with an argument that grants that others exist as well is not worth considering further.

Quoting hks

Anyone (like Heidegger) who cannot come up with an argument that grants that others exist as well is not worth considering further.

hks, you are being silly here. You are basically accusing Santa Clause of hoarding all the toys.

Are you not just gossiping about a philosopher you haven't read? Such idle talk is actually one of the little wizard's themes. I think most philosophers would like some of Heidegger if that was presented to them without the rest. Homeboy is dense and tangled.

Reply to macrosoft I have read Heidegger and I did not like it so I have discarded him.

Quoting hks

Anyone (like Heidegger) who cannot come up with an argument that grants that others exist as well is not worth considering further.

You can skip to near the end if you want when Heidegger calls the scandal of philosophy the idea that such a proof is needed. The phenomenon of 'world' (which is 'primordial') makes all this ridiculous. It's the shallow ontology of dead junk and a theological focus on absolute certainty to the neglect of the meaning of basic terms that makes this possible. Arguments about whether others exist or the world exists presuppose a world with others. To me that kind of wordplay is just the videogame and energy drink version of philosophy. Along with that, I might as well gripe like an old man about cutely arguments devoid of any sincere desire to learn and come to a consensus.

[quote = Heidegger]
We must in the first instance note explicitly that Kant uses the term 'Dasein' to designate that kind of Being which in the present investigation we have called 'presence-at-hand'. 'Consciousness of my Dasein' means for Kant a consciousness of my Being-present-at-hand in the sense of Descartes. When Kant uses the term `Dasein' he has in mind the Being-present-at-hand of consciousness just as much as the Being-present-at-hand of Things.

The proof for the `Dasein of Things outside of me' is supported by the fact that both change and performance belong, with equal primordiality, to the essence of time. My own Being-present-at-hand — that is, the Being-present-at-hand of a multiplicity of representations, which has been given in the inner sense — is a process of change which is present-at-hand. To have a determinate temporal character [Zeitbestimmtheit], however, presupposes something present-at-hand which is permanent. But this cannot be 'in us', 'for only through what is thus permanent can my Dasein in time be determined'. Thus if changes which are present-at-hand have been posited empirically 'in me', it is necessary that along with these something permanent which is present-at-hand should be posited empirically 'outside of me'. What is thus permanent is the condition which makes it possible for the changes 'in me' to be present-at-hand. The experience of the Being-in-time of representations posits something changing 'in me' and something permanent 'outside of me', and it posits both with equal primordiality.

Of course this proof is not a causal inference and is therefore not encumbered with the disadvantages which that would imply. Kant gives, as it were, an 'ontological proof' in terms of the idea of a temporal entity. It seems at first as if Kant has given up the Cartesian approach of positing a subject one can come across in isolation. But only in semblance. That Kant demands any proof at all for the `Dasein of Things outside of me' shows already that he takes the subject — the 'in me' — as the starting-point for this problematic. Moreover, his proof itself is then carried through by starting with the empirically given changes 'in me'. For only `in me' is 'time' experienced, and time carries the burden of the proof. Time provides the basis for leaping off into what is 'outside of me' in the course of the proof. Furthermore, Kant emphasizes that "The problematical kind [of idealism], which merely alleges our inability to prove by immediate experience that there is a Dasein outside of our own, is reasonable and accords with a sound kind of philosophical thinking: namely, to permit no decisive judgment until an adequate proof has been found." But even if the ontical priority of the isolated subject and inner experience should be given up, Descartes' position would still be retained ontologically. What Kant proves—if we may suppose that his proof is correct and correctly based—is that entities which are changing and entities which are permanent are necessarily present-at-hand together. But when two things which are present-at-hand are thus put on the same level, this does not as yet mean that subject and Object are present-at-hand together. And even if this were proved, what is ontologically decisive would still be covered up—namely, the basic state of the 'subject', Dasein, as Being-in-the-world. The Being-present-at-hand-together of the physical and the psychical is completely different ontically and ontologically from the phenomenon of Being-in-the-world. Kant presupposes both the distinction between the 'in me' and the `outside of me', and also the connection between these; factically he is correct in doing so, but he is incorrect from the standpoint of the tendency of his proof. It has not been demonstrated that the sort of thing which gets established about the Being-present-at-hand-together of the changing and the permanent when one takes time as one's clue, will also apply to the connection between the 'in me' and the 'outside of me'. But if one were to see the whole distinction between the 'inside' and the 'outside' and the whole connection between them which Kant's proof presupposes, and if one were to have an ontological conception of what has been presupposed in this presupposition, then the possibility of holding that a proof of the `Dasein of Things outside of me' is a necessary one which has yet to be given [noch ausstehend], would collapse.

The 'scandal of philosophy' is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. Such expectations, aims, and demands arise from an ontologically inadequate way of starting with of such a character that independently of it and 'outside' of it a 'world' is to be proved as present-at-hand. It is not that the proofs are inadequate, but that the kind of Being of the entity which does the proving and makes requests for proofs has not been made definite enough. This is why a demonstration that two things which are present-at-hand are necessarily present-at-hand together, can give rise to the illusion that something has been proved, or even can be proved, about Dasein as Being-in-the-world. If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it.

[/quote]

Beings that are present at hand are experienced like objects (for a universal subject) when we just stare at them. For instance, I can stare at my bike. I can be curious about how much it weighs. But the bike exists in a different way for me when I am riding it. Heidegger gets below bright theoretical curiosity and looks at tool use.

Our initial way of being in the world is pushing and pulling on it, immersed in tool use in which the tool disappears. The obsession with Cartesian candles has covered over this other, primary way in which things exist for us. We are obsessed with rigid object, held fixed in a merely theoretical or derivative present instant. Time is spatialized unthinkingly. Or rather its spatialization (modeled by the real line) was a work of genius that now, like many works of genius, blocks access to other possibilities. Heidegger adores the philosophers he dismantles. He wants to make them brighter. If we are as conscious as possible of what they said, we have them at their brightest without being trapped by them.

What's bad is the lazy common sense that forgets origins and loses possibility. Things are vaguely half-understood, so that there is a 'film' of what Everybody knows that blocks access to the depths of our most intimate situation. The phenomenon of world, for instance, is nothing mystical. It is just a bringing-to-consciousness of what is already there in ordinary life, taken for granted, looked 'through' like a clean window. When we do philosophy, we tend to pick up the old problems and play the same variations on them. Subjects, objects, blah blah blah. Stuck on the surface, having never questioned the blind first step, a naive ontology of present-at-hand objects for an unserious 'curiosity'. To be sure, Heidegger was caught up in the spirit of his own time, and was one more thinker disgusted by a new urban decadence. As far as I can tell, one of his motives was just a frustration with the triviality and irrelevance for life of the old problems.

But I can only speak for myself. I read philosophy and try to paraphrase/interpret/create it in my free time. One little point of honor is that I try to always mean(understand) what I say, even if others don't know what I mean. Hence paraphrases and, usually, not just quoting. But hk was not going to believe a paraphrase.

What is the difference between a being and a thing? What is the significance of the fact that humans are called ‘beings’?

Quoting Wayfarer

What is the difference between a being and a thing? What is the significance of the fact that humans are called ‘beings’?

I think you and Heidegger are similar on this issue. One of his fundamental ideas was that humans do not exist like rocks. For him, we've been mistakenly interpreting ourselves in terms of a flawed ontology --like one more static present-at-hand substance. But we aren't stuff. We are more like the open space for meaning. Nor are we separate from the world. We are being-in-the-world-with-others. We are the world itself being in itself, something like that. We are the future as possibility acting in the present but having a past that grounds all this. Experience experiencing itself as experiencing a world and as the ontic possibility of that world. 'My' world goes when I go. (Influenced by Sheehan in that last bit.)

Quoting macrosoft

But we aren't stuff. We are more like the open space for meaning. Nor are we separate from the world. We are being-in-the-world-with-others. We are the world itself being in itself, something like that. We are the future as possibility acting in the present but having a past that grounds all this.

Have you come across semiotics as a sharper way to make sense of this - being as an Umwelt or sign relation?

What we are looking for is a process metaphysics that works. We don't want either mind, nor even matter, to exist in some substantial and primordial fashion. Instead we want a metaphysics where both are co-emergent in a proper sense. And a problem with phenomenology would be this "we" that is doing the being-in-the-world, etc. That makes it sound like consciousness is the primordial stuff or primordial ground.

A pragmatic/semiotic metaphysics instead focuses on the interpretive relation that forms an Umwelt. A world of experience arises which mediates between the "self" that is implicit in the development of habits and dispositions, and the "world" that then represents all the recalcitrant facts that stand in opposition to this pole of intentionality.

So this is quite a psychologically realistic view. All organisms are agents forming their view of the world - experiencing it as an organised system of signs. But it can also be a physically realistic metaphysics as our best understanding of physics already demands that it be "organismic" in having historically developed habits, dispositions and even (thermodynamic) intents.

Modern physics now relies on information theory to account for why reality is atomistically fragmented into "degrees of freedom". A particle is essentially "a sign" of something that could happen. We know it was there because we record the event - the mark it leaves.

So in a sense that semiosis can make precise - which information theory can measure - we do now have a worldview, a metaphysics, which is founded on "meaning making". And it can apply both to psychological science and physical science.

Quoting apokrisis

Have you come across semiotics as a sharper way to make sense of this - being as an Umwelt or sign relation?

I think the views are related. I still haven't immersed myself in Peirce, despite my respect for him. The damned Germans just speak to me with all their cosmic music in the background.

Quoting apokrisis

And a problem with phenomenology would be this "we" that is doing the being-in-the-world, etc. That makes it sound like consciousness is the primordial stuff or primordial ground.

Put yourself in Heidegger's shows, though. The view from outside was so dominant that the discourse had to be framed 'from the subject' to be intelligible/plausible for that community. The source or nature of meaning, according to Sheehan, was H's fundamental question. Existence isn't dasein, it's the sign. I'm with you that really the subject and object would have to emerge as a difference within a primordial sign system. I'm a pretty radical semantic holist at the moment. The difference might whether one's motivations are primarily scientific or spiritual. I'd say that Heidegger was ultimately a philosopher concerned with how to live in the world not as a scientist first but as a man. I do not at all mean to imply that this is the right way. I'm just explaining why subject talk might remain fundamental: It speaks to our culturally mediated sense of religious freedom, etc.

Quoting apokrisis

A pragmatic/semiotic metaphysics instead focuses on the interpretive relation that forms an Umwelt. A world of experience arises which mediates between the "self" that is implicit in the development of habits and dispositions, and the "world" that then represents all the recalcitrant facts that stand in opposition to this pole of intentionality.

Indeed. And in another lingo existence just is the world. It is 'care' that forces a differentiation. My hand is mine because I can usually make it do what I want without having to think about it. 'I' am the stuff that does not resist my will. One can see how thinking becomes considered the essential self, despite it actually coming largely as it wants to. It is a maximally fluid 'thing.' Given meaning holism, I like to talk about a field of meaning, not a set of meaning atoms. Those atoms are theoretical abstractions, largely dependent on our eyes being prioritized and seeing spaces between written words.

Quoting apokrisis

So this is quite a psychologically realistic view. All organisms are agents forming their view of the world - experiencing it as an organised system of signs. But it can also be a physically realistic metaphysics as our best understanding of physics already demands that it be "organismic" in having historically developed habits, dispositions and even (thermodynamic) intents.

Modern physics now relies on information theory to account for why reality is atomistically fragmented into "degrees of freedom". A particle is essentially "a sign" of something that could happen. We know it was there because we record the event - the mark it leaves.

So in a sense that semiosis can make precise - which information theory can measure - we do now have a worldview, a metaphysics, which is founded on "meaning making". And it can apply both to psychological science and physical science.

This is very promising. As such a view is disseminated, I'd expect it to further open the human imagation and close the gulf between science , philosophy, and maybe even religion. One concern I have is the annoying shortness of the human life-span. To really learn physics requires years of dedication, certain geniuses excluded. It's the same with philosophy. So along with all of this we could use some life-extension and labor-saving technology. I like what I know of physics, but I can barely find time for math and philosophy --and I am already getting a little old. I'll have a Phd in a few years if all goes well. I am more aware of my stupidity than ever. One small mind in a vast world, trying to at least grab at the essence while there's time.

What I can say is that I think I understand your general perspective without having the physics know-how to grok the details. It's a liberating perspective that dissolves lots of old problems and tramples over rigid, obsolete, mind-numbing distinctions.

Quoting macrosoft

This is why Sheehan's book is so appealing. He's worldly and funny, doing his best to cut through all the smoke and music. I'd love to hear what you think of it if you get a chance to check it out.

I've read some of Sheehan's work on Heidegger before and I found all very good. The emphasis on 'meaningfulness' was always - I'd like to think - how I understood Heidegger, although I picked that up from readings prior to Sheehan, even as the latter codified it in a full-throated way I'd not come across before. That said, my 'distance' from Heidi actually takes its cue from readings like Sheehan's: as productive as it is to think of the world as a meaningful whole, it's also a very simplified view of things. As I see it, the world is rather full of holes, perforated by ambivalence and opacity, instances of indifference and insignificance.

Psychoanalytic theory gets at this very nicely, showing how we employ a whole range of necessary psychic mechanisms to patch over these holes in ways that create a whole bunch of very interesting effects that also constitute our 'humanity'. Basically, I take issue with Heidegger's holism, which always struck me as far too ideational and seamless. One of the more devastating charges against Heidegger's whole project was Levinas's, for whom "Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry" - to which he coupled with a criticism of the sheer absence of sensuality in Heidegger. I think this is a nice synecdoche for why Heidegger's project seems so barren to me, at the end of the day. It's far too formal (despite all the excellent and insightful mileage Heidi got out of that formalism, which still deserves study).

Part of the problem of course is the adherence to phenomenology, and with it, intentionality. Unless the latter is put into radical questioning, any philosophical project which take its cue from it is destined to incapacity.

Quoting macrosoft

MV, he is outright rejecting deep/final truth, but clearly some kind of pure lifestream is functioning along those lines. The truth is just the open space that times, self-interpretively. If we are relentlessly pointed back to our own lifestream, however, I think 'truth' is the wrong word.

Yeah, I simply used 'Deep Truth' as a stand-in for that mystical core of Being or whatever that Heidegger consistently tried to 'proximate'. It was more a figure of speech than anything precise.

I don't know if Sheehan is right about Heidegger, but I like this attempt at a general description of what it means to be human.

[quote =Sheehan]
The 'essence' of the human being...consists in its having to be constitutionally ahead of itself, as possibility amidst possibilities. Such essential stretched-out-ness is what Heidegger calls 'thrown-ness.' And since being thrown ahead = being pulled open, the stretch into possibilities is thrown-open--ness. But with us, being thrown-open always entails living into meaning-giving possibilities. Existence thus unfolds as --is thrown open as --the open region of possible meaningfulness.

In its most basic sense, openedness as the possibility of intelligibility remains the one and only factum...of all Heidegger's work.

Soon enough, however, it became clear to Heidegger that, more fundamentally, existence is meta-metaphysical. That is, we transcend things not only in already understanding their possible meanings and then returning to the things to give them meaning, but also and above all by being already 'beyond' things-and-their-meanings and in touch with what makes the meaningfulness of things possible at all. We are not just fully intentional --present to both things and their meanings. More basically, we 'transcend' things-and-their-meaningsto --that is to say, we in fact are--the thrown-open clearing that makes possible our 'natural metaphysical' relations to things-in-their-meanings. Existence is not only transcendental but also trans-transcendental or transcendental to the second power.

No matter how much our engagement with intelligibility may be parsed out into its component parts, it is a strict and original unity that cannot be resolved into anything more primal. If we were to ask what we might be prior to our engagement with meaning, such an inquiry would entail that we already have enacted an engagement with meaning by simply asking the question, and hence we would be moving in a vicious circle. Our very existence is such an engagement, and absent that, we would not be human, much less able to ask questions at all.
[/quote]

Reply to macrosoft

He never drew and maintained the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. In his defense, no one else in philosophy proper has either to my knowledge. Not even to this very day...

That difference helps to acquire knowledge of all thought/belief. That knowledge has the broadest possible rightful scope of application.

His dasein is akin to an unquestioned original world-view... all of which are virtually entirely adopted.

Quoting StreetlightX

That said, my 'distance' from Heidi actually takes its cue from readings like Sheehan's: as productive as it is to think of the world as a meaningful whole, it's also a very simplified view of things. As I see it, the world is rather full of holes, perforated by ambivalence and opacity, instances of indifference and insignificance

Fair enough, but I would frame this in terms of the instability of any given interpretation. And fair enough about the 'simplified view of things. Perhaps every big theory suffers this fate. It is grand at the cost of being vague. I approach the 'limited whole' in terms of groundlessness. We run around in a nexus of concepts, no particular concept serving as a foundation, a Nuerathian rowboat on a vast ocean. There's no apparent 'outside' of the usual, passionate human meaning-making. It can therefore be grasped as a whole, its own ground = abyss.

Quoting StreetlightX

Basically, I take issue with Heidegger's holism, which always struck me as far too ideational and seamless. One of the more devastating charges against Heidegger's whole project was Levinas's, for whom "Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry". I think this is a nice synecdoche for why Heidegger's project seems so barren to me, at the end of the day.

Perhaps. But I found the idea of 'tool-being' pretty revolutionary. For me that welds ideas to the world of the body. And I find holism pretty inescapable --which is to say a description more than an invitation. In practical life one forgets all this theoretical holism and just lives in a world, sometimes immersed in analytical tasks. Anyway, for me philospohy has something like a holistic essence. It grasps for the largest possible situation, the entire open space.

That said, I can relate to that barrenness. I think one just has to be in the mood for a certain kind of talk. In other moods, I feel like shrugging. For me the most revolutionary philosophers have probably been Nietzsche and Hegel-via-Kojeve. Heidegger adds some kind of grasp of continuity. His thinking on time strikes me as trying to get becoming a little more right.

Quoting macrosoft

The difference might whether one's motivations are primarily scientific or spiritual.

Yep. Peirce speaks to me as a scientist. I could never get into the German idealist and naturphilosphie tradition even though it gets oh so close to the same thing a lot of the time. (Peirce was very inspired by Schelling, btw).

However, if you are going to be a holist and process thinker, I believe it is unavoidable that you will end up favouring immanence over transcendence. And so the idea of "spirit" is going to lose all its bite by the end.

A big part of that is that monism also has to give way to an irreducible triadicism. And to make Geist or other somesuch the monistic foundation is already to begin with something too developed. It is a dualism willing to give up its material aspect but insisting on some kind of residual mental aspect.

The Peircean alternative is that "in the beginning" is just the vagueness of a potential. It is a start that is as devoid of spirit as of matter. And then your opposing limits of the real can emerge from that. You can have mind and world develop as synergistic limits to being. You can have causality divided in Aristotelean fashion so that there is both global finality and local action - constraint and freedom - as the vague begins to achieve a more concrete or substantial state of definition.

So the Peircean model is clean. It doesn't impose any emotional motif on the initial conditions. And that then justifies the emergence of mind, spirit, or whatever you want to call the informational aspect of the deal, as the proper partner to the material, entropic, etc, part of the deal.

You don't have to sneak the forbidden into how you start the story. You can be content by the way it emerges as a necessary conjunct of the good old physicalist stuff.

Quoting macrosoft

I'd say that Heidegger was ultimately a philosopher concerned with how to live in the world not as a scientist first but as a man.

And so I'd reply that Peirce's insight is that reality itself is "scientific". It arises by ... the universal growth of reasonableness.

Quoting macrosoft

My hand is mine because I can usually make it do what I want without having to think about it. 'I' am the stuff that doesn't not resist my will.

Exactly. The self at the centre of things is merely the sum of all that is found to be not part of the world. It is a fluid development built on a process of othering. The self is just the other "other" that arises in opposition to "the world" (and thus - against dualism - is wholly dependent on that "world").

Quoting apokrisis

However, if you are going to be a holist and process thinker, I believe it is unavoidable that you will end up favouring immanence over transcendence. And so the idea of "spirit" is going to lose all its bite by the end.

A big part of that is that monism also has to give way to an irreducible triadicism. And to make Geist or other somesuch the monistic foundation is already to begin with something too developed. It is a dualism willing to give up its material aspect but insisting on some kind of residual mental aspect.

You may already know, but Hegel made a big deal of the Christian trinity. I haven't grasped exactly why, but chances are it's along your lines.

As far as 'spirit' goes, I think it's a nice word. It's dramatic. It captures a certain grandiose stimmung.
But it's more realistically just consciousness. I get that this mind/matter distinction breaks down in 'speculative' philosophy, and I understand why. But talk of the subject accords with doings and talking in the ordinary world stuff.

I also have some concerns with the limits of explicit systems, from a perspective of semantic holism. Math/physics is freer from this, but a living language always double back to bite some fine distinction we make. Ordinary language is a metalanguage in which we construct our object language that gets it just right. But then everything still depends on the metalanguage, which wasn't clear enough in the first place. In short, no explicit foundation. No ideal language.

One thing maybe you can answer? Does the sign just exist in your view? Or does it exist for a subject? In a speculative frame of mind, it seems that we just have a flow of signed-sensation, with the subject being a recurrent theme of that flow. Clearly the flow of signs is motivated, directional, even motivated toward self-knowing, though only perhaps indirectly. What do you say?

Quoting apokrisis

And so I'd reply that Peirce's insight is that reality itself is "scientific". It arises by ... the universal growth of reasonableness.

I find this idea appealing and believable. You know I love my Hegel.

Quoting apokrisis

Exactly. The self at the centre of things is merely the sum of all that is found to be not part of the world. It is a fluid development built on a process of othering. The self is just the other "other" that arises in opposition to "the world" (and thus - against dualism - is wholly dependent on that "world").

I see what you mean and agree. I do think things get very messy as we abandon fundamental distinctions of ordinary discourse. We seem to have a world-self trying to know itself via othering. The absolute unfolds in time via distinctions that it recognizes as still 'it.' The old problem remains. A shared world only meaningfully perceived by mortals who come and go. They do accumulate a kind of social consciousness, so that individual minds are neurons. The brain that looks at the world has human brains as its cells (which it can and does replace.)

Quoting creativesoul

He never drew and maintained the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. In his defense, no one else in philosophy proper has either to my knowledge. Not even to this very day...

This is a surprising perspective. Philosophy strikes me as being largely itself a thinking and believing about thinking and believing --and a thinking and believing about this same philosophy. It eats itself to the n-th power in limitless self-consciousness. Examine the Sheehan quote. Let me know what you think.

Quoting creativesoul

His dasein, as I understand it, is akin to an unquestioned original world-view... all of which are virtually entirely adopted.

This doesn't square with my experience. What first grabbed me about Heidegger was his dimantling of certain taken-for-granted approaches to the subject and object theme, the idea of the world, etc. He uses the word 'existence' (dasein) in order to avoid all the meanings attached to person, subject, mind. The so-called mind is largely immersed in (is) its activity. Existence doesn't drive. Existence is driving. Driving is. Existence doesn't wash dishes. Existence is the washing of dishes. For him, being-in-the-world is 'primordial.' The idea of proving that other minds or an external world exists indicates a failure to grasp this pre-theoretical phenomenon. To me it's (among other things) an update of Kant.

I like to think of philosophers arguing about theories of truth. In terms of what shared theory of truth can they be arguing? And yet they argue! This IMV suggests a pre-theoretical 'primary' sense of 'our reality.' Explicit formulations are secondary to this and only entertained and advanced in the light of this receding phenomenon.

Quoting StreetlightX

Yeah, I simply used 'Deep Truth' as a stand-in for that mystical core of Being or whatever that Heidegger consistently tried to 'proximate'. It was more a figure of speech than anything precise.

OK. I guess I somewhat knew that. But in my view this stuff isn't mystical except as a kind of mystified mundane. I think incarnation is the operant theme. We have the most personal kind of experience that is resistant to theory, the kind of stuff Feuerbach accused Hegel of missing. Philosophy should think the non-philosophical, in F's perspective, and all that resists thought.

Heidegger's grandiose style and taste for politics maybe obscures a deep sense of how personal a certain kind of ultimate thinking must be. It's gloomy, etc., but the death theme is important. There's no time to figure it all out the right way. The future roars with too many possibilities. They can't all be claimed or explored. And then some fundamental assumptions just have to be grasped, as risk understood to be risk. That's one way to understand resoluteness. A person groundlessly chooses and makes the best of it, with no Universal Time-safe Entity to insure that leap.

Quoting macrosoft

And I find holism pretty inescapable --which is to say a description more than an invitation.

In a way I do think holism is 'inescapable'; much though, in the same way that the fridge light is inescapable: its not on when you look, its on because you're looking. Which is to say, of course we're bound to find meaningfulness and intelligibility everywhere - we can't but not. But it's important to attend to the asymmetry of our relationship to the world which, for its own part, is largely indifferent to what one can even call our 'primordial comportment' to it, if you like.

Moreover - and this is something the French reception to Heidegger understood very well, perhaps because of their interest in Nietzsche - meaningfulness can be asphyxiating. Heidegger got something of this in his speaking of our 'throwness', but perhaps didn't draw the full consequences from it. To make one's way in a world loaded with inescapable meaning can be incredibly oppressive, and one of the things we happen to be very good at is ignoring much of it and, and it were, playing with reality. The almost fanatical thematics of 'appropriation' in Heidegger - speaking also to his conception of philosophy outlined in the OP - strikes me being insensitive to precisely the liberatory power of disappropriation, of the anonymous and of Das Man that Heidi consistently disparages.

Quoting macrosoft

One thing maybe you can answer? Does the sign just exist in your view? Or does it exist for a subject? In a speculative frame of mind, it seems that we just have a flow of signed-sensation, with the subject being a recurrent theme of that flow. Clearly the flow of signs is motivated, directional, even motivated toward self-knowing, though only perhaps indirectly. What do you say?

This is a difficult area now. We would have to distinguish between two stories - the fairly uncontroversial and scientific bio-semiotic one, and the rather more metaphysically speculative pan-semiotic one.

The biosemiotic one is just regular metaphysics. Creatures form a picture of the world - with themselves in it. So we are only talking about the signs they experience which betoken the world as it is optimally understood by them.

When I see a red light at a crossroads, I see a place where I should stop. There is danger in continuing. The danger is real. But the sign is psychological you would say. And if I see a dark cloud, I know to read that as a feature of the world promising rain. The conceptual essence of there being a cloud for me is this meaning. And then we can quarrel forever about the reality of "a cloud" as some actual object or entity that would deserve being named and taken as a habitual sign of anything in particular.

But if you want to continue on - like Peirce - then everything would only "exist" to the extent it forms a sign or mark that can be read by the world in some sense. So everything that could count as an actual event - something definitely happening, something that is a positive fork in a developing history - would be semiotic. It would be information. A fact. Meaningful in terms of a context that "observes".

Again, this might just sound like a redescription of physics. Things are possibilities, then they actually happen. Big deal.

However the semiotic view does underwrite the new information/entropy distinction that has arisen in physics, along with the contextual or holistic causality implied by QM and the rest. Classical reality is the emergent umwelt - the actuality that mediates between the realm of "pure material possibility" and the realm of "global contextual order".

All sorts of things were possible the moment before that atom decayed. But then it did decay and a degree of freedom was definitely used up. The history of the universe was forever changed. And so the "real world" is the world of all those accumulating marks - each mark being the intersection of some story about global laws and other constraints, some story about local possibilities or degrees of freedom.

So it is the triadic logic that connects, not the dualistic story of subjects and objects. What is real emerges as the substantive middle ground of actuality. And what has been related is a global information-bearing context and a local action-producing propensity. The umwelt become the (somewhat metaphorical) place inbetween where the signs or definite marks are getting written.

Quoting StreetlightX

In a way I do think holism is 'inescapable'; much though, in the same way that the fridge light is inescapable: it not on when you look, its on because you're looking.

I think I see what you mean and agree. In ordinary life we just largely bounce off significations, responding to the signs as individual signs and not the sign-as-node. In philosophical life, for me anyway, semantic holism is switched on in certain kinds of arguments. If both people are sincerely just grasping the other's idea as a whole without having to be reminded to, then there's no reason to sing the song of holism, holism, holism. It does seem largely therapeutic, something like an immune system. I know you like Wittgenstein. That to me is the important holist realization.

Quoting StreetlightX

But it's important to attend to the asymmetry of our relationship to the world which, for its own part, is largely indifferent to what one can even call our 'primordial comportment' to it, if you like.

I agree, and I'd extend this critique to most of philosophy. Sometimes what is needed is the ability to change a flat tire on the highway. From this ordinary life perspective, Heidegger's grandiosity, for instance, is a rubber bullet. 'Speculative' thought is the world turned upside down. What sometimes amuses me (in the midst of my doing it anyway) is that the idea of ordinary life and the non-theoretical can become a fetish for theory. I have a similar feeling about the 'great outdoors' of Meillassoux. Philosophers (myself included) often adore words that point beyond words --perhaps more than whatever is actually not word, at least while gripped by the theoretical-poetical drive.

Quoting StreetlightX

Moreover - and this is something the French reception to Heidegger understood very well, perhaps because of their interest in Nietzsche - meangfulness can be asphixiating. Heidegger got something of this in his speaking of our 'throwness', but perhaps didn't draw the full concequences from it. To makes one's way in a world loaded with inescapable meaning can be incredibly oppressive, and one of the things we happen to be very good at ignoring much of it and, and it were, playing with reality. The almost fanatical thematics of 'appropriation' in Heidegger - speaking also to his conception of philosophy outlined in the OP - strikes me being insensitive to to precisely the liberatory power of disappropriation, of the anonymous and of Das Man that Heidi consistantly disparages.

I completely agree here. But maybe his politics was a way he lived an escape from that. To melt into the nation, etc. To melt into a group. This echoes Sartre's 'condemned to be free.' Except really we are mostly immersed. I can say that sometimes philosophy becomes a little intoxicating and exhausting at the same time for me. It's like stimulants wearing off. One gets tired of talking, explaining, defending, evangelizing, making distinctions. I just watched TV for the first time in a few days (the Coen Brother's new Western). It was great to sink into fiction again and take a break from finding words, decoding other people's abstractions...

Quoting apokrisis

When I see a red light at a crossroads, I see a place where I should stop. There is danger in continuing. The danger is real. But the sign is psychological you would say. And if I see a dark cloud, I know to read that as a feature of the world promising rain. The conceptual essence of there being a cloud for me is this meaning. And then we can quarrel forever about the reality of "a cloud" as some actual object or entity that would deserve being named and taken as a habitual sign of anything in particular.

But if you want to continue on - like Peirce - then everything would only "exist" to the extent it forms a sign or mark that can be read by the world in some sense. So everything that could count as an actual event - something definitely happening, something that is a positive fork in a developing history - would be semiotic. It would be information. A fact. Meaningful in terms of a context that "observes".

This nears the question I am getting at. Who is it that reads the sign? What makes sense to me (in a speculative mode) is that there is no 'I' and no 'world' but just the signs. The 'I' and the 'world' are just two frequent signs that refer to still other signs. There is no viewer. 'Consciousness' would just be the name of something that certain signs have in common (connected the sign for a person alive and awake.)

I understand that if we think of living organisms surviving that we need some kind of subject. This to me is one of the rough edges. What is consciousness? Or is consciousness just a sign that meaningfully exists 'directly.' And what are these individual organisms if not also signs? There is a tension between what we know in non-speculative terms and where we might want to go speculatively. I have followed these lines of thinking before and usually am turned back by linguistic entanglements.

Your 'context that observes' sounds like a 'thrown open space' for interpretation.

Quoting macrosoft

He never drew and maintained the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. In his defense, no one else in philosophy proper has either to my knowledge. Not even to this very day...
— creativesoul

This is a surprising perspective. Philosophy strikes me as being largely itself a thinking and believing about thinking and believing --and a thinking and believing about this same philosophy. It eats itself to the n-th power in limitless self-consciousness. Examine the Sheehan quote. Let me know what you think.

Yes. I see that he skirts around what I'm asserting here regarding the aforementioned distinction being sorely neglected. I mean, there's evidence of that in his words about Heiddy.


Quoting macrosoft

His dasein, as I understand it, is akin to an unquestioned original world-view... all of which are virtually entirely adopted.
— creativesoul

This doesn't square with my experience.

I would actually agree that that was a bit too oversimplified. Still yet, I do think that dasein includes one's initial worldview(thought/belief system)...

What first grabbed me about Heidegger was his dimantling of certain taken-for-granted approaches the subject and object theme, the idea of the world, etc. He uses the word 'existence' (dasein) in order to avoid all the meanings attached to person, subject, mind. The so-called mind is largely immersed in (is) activity. Existence doesn't drive. Existence is driving. Existence doesn't wash dishes. Existence is the washing of dishes. For him, being-in-the-world is 'primordial.' The idea of proving that other minds or an external world exists indicates a failure to grasp this pre-theoretical phenomenon.

Yes. I would credit Heiddy with the very same thing that I credit Witt for... how's that for a surprising grouping?

They both realized and struggled(on my view) to clearly set out what it was that was driving them. The driving force, if I may use a bit of poetic license, was that they both realized that meaning was attributed in far more ways than had been accounted for.

Heiddy wanted to make it a point to talk/write in such a way as to emphasize the fact that meaning is always being attributed... or at least that's how his style strikes me. Admittedly, I've not read a whole lot of Heiddy. Being And Time was left unfinished. On The Way To Language impressed me quite a bit. "Where word breaks off no thing may be..." left it's mark, and the dialogue in the beginning of the book, the one with the Japanese philosopher that is about that which goes unspoken... That dialogue is actually brilliant and very relevant to traditional Japanese cultural mores.

Witt, as much as I like him for a number of ways, was himself the fly in the bottle when it came to thought/belief. Unfortunately he followed the conventional(epistemological JTB) vein of thought regarding belief, and it's wrong at it's very foundation. One consequence was Gettier's foothold, aside from the fact that he also showed that 'logical' entailment is a misnomer.


Quoting macrosoft

I like to think of philosophers arguing about theories of truth. In terms of what shared theory of truth can they be arguing? And yet they argue! This IMV suggests a pre-theoretical 'primary' sense of 'our reality.' Explicit formulations are secondary to this and only entertained and advanced in the light of this receding phenomenon.

I'm fairly certain that I agree with this wholeheartedly. Arguing about theories of "truth" is to argue about a product of thinking about thought/belief. On my view, and I've argued it many times over, true belief is prior to language... thus, either true belief does not require truth or that which makes belief true is prior to language. Only correspondence theory gets close. Although I reject it in it's details, I have supplanted it with my own version.

Correspondence to: fact, reality, the world, the way things are, events, happenings, etc, does not always require language.

This is not in the direct spirit of the thread though, so I'll not expand.

Quoting creativesoul

The driving force, if I may use a bit of poetic license, was that they both realized that meaning was attributed in far more ways than had been accounted for.

Well said. That does square with my perception.

Quoting creativesoul

Witt, as much as I like him for a number of ways, was himself the fly in the bottle when it came to thought/belief.

I've got On Certainty. I haven't reread it for years, but I had the impression that he was more sophisticated than that. We use the word 'know' in 23,456,123,456,789 ways. Semantic holism vanquishes so many of the old problems, reducing them perhaps to a greater problem --the mystery of intelligibility itself. And even this Wittgenstein seemed to see in some way in the TLP. The world (what is the case) is just there, a limited whole, unexplained =groundless.

Quoting creativesoul

On my view, and I've argued it many times over, true belief is prior to language... thus, either true belief does not require truth or that which makes belief true is prior to language. Only correspondence theory gets close. Although I reject it in it's details, I have supplanted it with my own version.

I'm excited that someone gets it. It's early to say we get it in the same way, but I think this is very fascinating. As far as I can tell, all speaking presupposes both others and a shared space of meaning in an IN-explicit way. Theories of truth try to make this space explicit, forced to work all the time in this same primordial and elusive space or sense of shared/shareable meaning. Argumentive epistemologists ask me to prove it. They use it to do so. I can only point, dismantle, point, dismantle. An inexplicit ground is a direct threat to the project of the perfect system, which would like to be its own explicit ground. Uncomfortably, the operating system is quietly functioning, out of reach for the most part, big and soft (hence 'macrosoft'.) We look through like glass until we catch it by the glitch.

To me this is a holistic meaning field, a open space of meaningfully being-with-others-in-a-world.
Everything is caught up in futurity. Static being is a useful fiction, not only for the outer world but also as a model of the inner world.

It's [s]my[/s] version of the Apo's vagueness. I woke up here. I reached for explicit formulations. They always crashed and burned, collided with one another.

If we switch into a third person mode that thinks of evolved brains, we can reduce it to some weird feature of what it is like to be a functioning brain in a its natural environment among other brains. Human beings are profoundly social. Anti-social beings perhaps especially so! They want to be left alone by actual company the better to enjoy virtual company.

We can also just do descriptive phenomenology. That's maybe what is most potent in Heidegger for me. We can try to grip with concepts a blurry-automatic-experience-structuring. The taken-for-granted method that needs to be (and has been) questioned is that only explicitness counts. Phenomena aren't like that, and yet they can be grasped or pointed at via formal indication and dismantling. For me semantic holism is grasped in the same way. Bennington's book on Derrida woke me up to this. If we just really look at the way meaning flows through sentences like a current, it becomes obvious that meaning is a fugitive, distributed ghost.

Quoting creativesoul

This is not in the direct spirit of the thread though, so I'll not expand.

Expand. We are already all over the place, and thatis appropriate, IMV.

Reply to apokrisis Still suspect that ‘signs’ don’t make sense in the absence of an interpreting subject. And it seems to me that the ‘degree of freedom’ attributed to particles is based on an equivocation between the choices made by conscious agents and the mere potential for things to turn out in some statistically possible way. It’s an attempt to eliminate the role of the subject, which was essential to Peirce, but which is of course taboo because of its dualist implications.

Quoting macrosoft

Witt, as much as I like him for a number of ways, was himself the fly in the bottle when it came to thought/belief.
— creativesoul

I've got On Certainty. I haven't reread it for years, but I had the impression that he was more sophisticated than that.

Not sure what the term "that" is referring to at the ending... more sophisticated than what? It may not matter, if that is the case then there is no clarification necessary. If so, then please do so as you see fit...

Either way, curiously enough... it is in On Certainty that Witt is seeking to solve the problem of infinite justificatory regress. Unfortunately, the notion of "belief" that he worked from led him to look for hinge propositions as the foundation/basis/bedrock of all subsequent thought/belief; the kind of belief that is outside the purview and/or bounds of justification. Looking for propositional content as the basis of all thought/belief is looking through the clouded lens of an utterly inadequate criterion. It is to look at an apple pie and conclude that crust and filling is part of the basis of apples. In his defense, it was because of an inherent presupposed falsehood tightly bound wihin that particular notion/conception of "belief"... notably that all belief has propositional content. This also fueled some of his later mantras. Enough of that though...

Quoting apokrisis

Exactly. The self at the centre of things is merely the sum of all that is found to be not part of the world. It is a fluid development built on a process of othering. The self is just the other "other" that arises in opposition to "the world" (and thus - against dualism - is wholly dependent on that "world").

Maybe I can zero-in my question on this. Is the self above the model or idea of the self for another self that is pure consciousness? Are we thinking of an organism with a body evolving its notion of itself, it 'you are here' on the map of the world it uses as a tool to thrive?

Quoting creativesoul

Looking for propositional content as the basis of all thought/belief is looking through the clouded lens of an utterly inadequate criterion.

I can't comment much on OC yet, but I do agree with the statement above. Hinge propositions are too conscious, too explicit.

After finishing Groundless Grounds, I have the impression of WIttgenstein realizing that language is a system. It stands or falls as a system. He speaks of holding a set of propositions up to reality, and not any single proposition. This too is still too explicit. I have been contemplating [s]knowledge[/s], which I associate with Witt and Heid. When I reach for my coffee, I don't know that I have hands. I [s]know[/s] it.

[s]Knowing[/s] is acting with automatic faith, with a sort of basic animal know-how and trust. Our bright and shiny theoretical edifice of explicit propositions is a candle floating on an ocean. The ground is obscure. Our artificial/theoretical grounds constantly appeal to this obscure ground, mostly without knowing it. We speak what is with a sense that what is is not only for us. We can speak about private feelings, but we still speak as if these feelings are located in some hidden way in the same [s]world[/s] with the listener.

Quoting creativesoul

Yes. I would credit Heiddy with the very same thing that I credit Witt for... how's that for a surprising grouping?

I might be more surprised, but they are Lee Braver's favorite philosophers, and he wrote a first-rate book about what they had in common. Highly recommended.

Not much else to add...

It seems that there may be a bit of indirect perception bubbling forth... that is to conflate physiological sensory perception and thought/belief by virtue of talking about perception as if it is informed by language.

Semantic holism...

Explain a bit?

Insert pleading hands...

Quoting creativesoul

It seems that there may be a bit of indirect perception bubbling forth... that is to conflate physiological sensory perception and thought/belief by virtue of talking about perception as if it is informed by language.

Is there a strict boundary? I'm not so sure there is. Given semantic holism as I understand, none of our supposed-to-be explicit categories cut very sharply. This is examined by Braver. We inherited the notion (at least from Kant) of some kind of automatic unifying of pure concept and pure sensation. But this is just a model. It sounds nice and clean, but...

This is one of the more gripping and convincing insights in Heidegger, I think. All he does is notice and describe. Its truth (or not) is up to you to check against your memory.

[quote=SEP]
Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in form. Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).

Heidegger, then, denies that the categories of subject and object characterize our most basic way of encountering entities. He maintains, however, that they apply to a derivative kind of encounter. When Dasein engages in, for example, the practices of natural science, when sensing takes place purely in the service of reflective or philosophical contemplation, or when philosophers claim to have identified certain context-free metaphysical building blocks of the universe (e.g., points of pure extension, monads), the entities under study are phenomenologically removed from the settings of everyday equipmental practice and are thereby revealed as fully fledged independent objects, that is, as the bearers of certain context-general determinate or measurable properties (size in metres, weight in kilos etc.). Heidegger calls this mode of Being presence-at-hand, and he sometimes refers to present-at-hand entities as ‘Things’. With this phenomenological transformation in the mode of Being of entities comes a corresponding transformation in the mode of Being of Dasein. Dasein becomes a subject, one whose project is to explain and predict the behaviour of an independent, objective universe. Encounters with the present-at-hand are thus fundamentally subject-object in structure.
[/quote]

So I'm thinking we tend to while in the theoretical mode take this occasional mode as an image of thinking in general. As philosophers, we learn to operated intensely in this mode and to speak to others intensely in this mode. Everything is known and nothing is [s]known.[/s] With thinkers like Heidegger, we remember and then know that we also [s]know.[/s]

Quoting creativesoul

Semantic holism...

Explain a bit?

Insert pleading hands...

I'll give you an example. Just track your own reading below. Try to watch the flow of concept.

Of this sentence the meaning you expect.

Its end is known, finally, to refer to its beginning

That would be the temporal aspect. I think we naturally have this notion of instantaneous meaning. We see the sentence in our visual field all at once. It is a point on the continuum of clock time, physics time. But really there is a forward movement of expectation and a backward movement of memory or trace. The meaning of the individual words is not even constant during our reading of a single sentence. They are temporally entangled. Atomic meaning is an idealizing abstraction, useful at times, but misleading.

If the real is the constantly present, then we ourselves are not real. There is no time for thinking in eternity, no room for a single living thought. If language is what is fundamentally human, then humans are fundamentally in time and cannot be eternal. This can be read as the ineluctable mortality of meaning. It lives its death as future.

There is also the dictionary problem. One word is defined in terms of others. And these others are still defined in terms of others. All a dictionary can do is aid someone who is already partially 'inside' a language. Correct usage is tested against how people treat us in response. There is no obvious connection to pure meaning. I do not in the least doubt the consciousness of meaning, but I think it is more of a flow with feedback and projection. The meaning is like electrons running through a string of words as their wire. Individual words just stared at do have some meaning. Or we can quickly fish for some by coming up with typical uses. But every serious thinking is immensely complex in the way that meaning rushes through it with memory and expectation. The very complexity involved in our background linguistic [s]know[/s]-how outstrips the complexity of the thoughts so delivered. Explicit systems are sad little shadows of that which makes them possible in terms of sophistication.

I speculate that our phonetic alphabet and the spaces between words are misleading. Our dominant visual sense (which takes static objects as its ideal object) encourages us to 'visualize' thinking and meaning, despite their more plausible connection to the temporality of music/hearing.

Another motive that holds atomic meaning fast (as a default semi-automatic approach to be dismantled) is the common project of making a knock-down argument --often for the projection of authority. We need atomic meaning, as stable as possible, to do 'math' with words and build explicit metaphysical/epistemological systems. So our fear of groundlessness (or of just relying on the inexplicit ground we started with) also encourages an ignorance of a semantic holism that might otherwise be obvious.

Quoting macrosoft

Sometimes what is needed is the ability to change a flat tire on the highway. From this ordinary life perspective, Heidegger's grandiosity, for instance, is a rubber bullet. 'Speculative' thought is the world turned upside down.

Just to be clear, I'm not really trying to set up a distinction between philosophy and ordinary life ('changing a tire'). I'm interested rather in a distinction between two approaches to philosophy itself. When I speak of the need to attend to the asymmetry of the our relationship to the world, by this I mean a properly philosophical attention, and not some naive 'immersed in a life world', pre-theoretical kind of deal. I mean to attend to this precisely at the level of the theoretical. One way to think about this, with respect to Heidegger, is to challenge his account of the role of death in the analytic of Dasein, which you nicely outlined here:

Quoting macrosoft

The death theme is important. There's no time to figure it all out the right way. The future roars with too many possibilities. They can't all be claimed or explored. And then some fundamental assumptions just have to be grasped, as risk understood to be risk. That's one way to understand resoluteness. A person groundlessly chooses and makes the best of it, with no Universal Time-safe Entity to insure that leap.

The question is this: can death play the existentially orienting role which Heidegger wants it to? It has often been suggested - and I agree with this suggestion - that it cannot. The problem is that the possibility of death is far more diffuse and evanescent than Heidegger makes it out to be: death is not merely some future possibility that awaits at some always differed point 'down the track' (death qua 'possibility of impossibility'); rather, the possibility of the death is, as it were, contemporaneous with Dasein at every point:

"Death is imminent at every moment. it is not a moment that lies ahead of the succession of moments before me, it is an event immanent in every event. The last moment may be the next moment. The contingency of the being that is promised in the moment is its possible impossibility. Death is everywhere in the environment; every step I take may plunge me into the abyss, every objective that offers itself to my reach may be the ambush from which there will be no advance and no return. The location and the approach of death cannot be surveyed across the line and distance of the future ... Death which has no front lines cannot be confronted. lt cannot fix a direction" (Alphonso Lingis, Sensation, my bolding).

I quote Lingis but this point has long been made by others, including and especially by Blanchot, who has often riffed on the impersonality of death, and its disoreinting and de-temporalizing power: death as what interrupts, and not (only) what orients. The upshot of this, to link it back to my hesitation about holism, is to 'fragment' death so it is not longer just some single, distant point toward which Dasein is oriented, but something pluralized and dispersed in a way which enables multiple and even clashing orientations and possibly disorientations. To de-idealize and de-singularize death such that we occupy not a single, coherent and unified current of 'timing' (a verb, as you put it), but multiple, overlapping, confusing, timings (and untimings, even). Death in Heidegger plays far too much of a role in 'smoothing over' the tumult that more properly characterizes the trajectory or trajectories which characterize Dasein.

Another way to put this is that it's necessary to shatter the rigidity of the so-called 'fundamental structure of Dasein' whose explication is one of the main drivers of B&T. 'Structure' is one of those terms that saturates B&T, and which has not been given enough attention because people are generally too interested in the more inventive neologisms that Heidi peppers the work with. But 'structure' in B&T is just as important a term as 'being-toward-death' or 'care' or any other well-known Heideggerianisms. For me at least, the importance of this term lies in how its frequency demonstrates just how formalist and ossified the whole analytic of Dasein is in B&T.

This is one of the reasons why I much prefer - following Arendt - to emphasize not death but natality - beginnings and births, not ends - as a far more interesting philosophical theme. The broodiness of Heidegger is not accidental but in fact very much in keeping with his philosophy. So, to bring this all back to the OP, I'm not drawing a distinction between the 'intoxicating', 'exhausting' efforts of capital-P Philosophy qua dark, introspective discipline and 'everyday life', but rather, looking at ways to inject the (sometimes) aerialities and lightness of the latter into the former. It's a question of philosophy all the way through. Speculative thought doesn't have to be the world turned upside down. It can instead be - to quote Elizabeth Grosz - an effort to "enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. [To be] among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought".

Philosophy augments, extends, and edifies. It is not pale imitation and inadequate 'proximating'.

Quoting macrosoft

But the notion of experience turning back interpretively on itself in very much in Hegel, along with an attainment of the self-consciousness of this process. Heidegger's work would be one more piece of that self-consciousness.

And the basic insight is Platonic. Maybe perennial?

If we wanted to focus on the "pre-theoretical," we certainly wouldn't (need to) read Heidegger.

Quoting macrosoft

Heidegger's work would be one more piece of that self-consciousness.

Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did.

Reply to macrosoft

macrosoft:I'm no scholar, but my understanding is that one can just start with 'dasein' as individual human 'existence.' I often translate in my mind as I read to see what feels right. Sometimes it's being-there or being-here. In short you are dasein, I am dasein.

If that is the case then why didn’t Heidegger just say so? I’ve asked MANY people to show me where he says this explicitly - no one has managed to do so to date.

Another problem is that this doesn’t mean anything:

macrosoft:What is this separation of words from thought, though? To me it seems that our thoughts only exist as words embedded in history. The realm outside of time seems to be exactly what Heidegger is breaking down. The future is roaring and screaming. We are the thrown open space in which it roars and screams. But we can also just get immersed in ordinarily life, forgetting our groundlessness/open-ness to this future as possibility, not as not-yet-present event on the time-line.

Thoughts don’t necessarily have to be “worded.” The realm outside of time is known how exactly? It isn’t.

He termed what he was doing as Hermeneutic Phenomenology - the term “hermeneutic” comes from the interpretation of scripture (words written.) Of course he mentions Husserl’s phenomenological idea but he only pays attention to one aspect of the whole as far as I can tell.

Quoting frank

Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did.

I don't know. Accordingly Rorty, Heidegger was trying to leave the power play of metaphysics behind in his later work. I've mostly studied his 1920s stuff. It looks like he's doing a Kantian-type thing in Being and Time. I just got his Logic (last lecture series before B & T), and this (translated by in a friendly English by Sheehan) is a detailed examination of Kant and others. He tries to show where Kant was there and yet held back by Cartesian presuppositions. At this point he was still doing 'pre-science' and aiming at a universal truth about human experience. Kisiel suggests that he abandoned this project as still too metaphysical and returned to KNS 1919 ideas (more along what you are talking about --life cannot be finally grasped.)

Quoting Terrapin Station

4.5k
If we wanted to focus on the "pre-theoretical," we certainly wouldn't (need to) read Heidegger.

I think you are missing the point. The theoretical mind has taken itself for consciousness itself, despite being a derivative mode. Heidegger is himself in the theoretical mode as he brings the pre-theoretical mode to explicit consciousness.

Reply to macrosoft Have you read "What is Metaphysics?" I read it recently and loved it.

Quoting I like sushi

If that is the case then why didn’t Heidegger just say so? I’ve asked MANY people to show me where he says this explicitly - no one has managed to do so to date.

This entity which each of us is himself…we shall denote by the term “Dasein”" (Heidegger, trans. 1927/1962, p.27).[4]

[quote=Enc Brit]
The concept of Dasein
For Heidegger, the human subject had to be reconceived in an altogether new way, as “being-in-the-world.” Because this notion represented the very opposite of the Cartesian “thing that thinks,” the idea of consciousness as representing the mind’s internal awareness of its own states had to be dropped. With it went the assumption that specific mental states were needed to mediate the relation of the mind to everything outside it. The human subject was not a mind that was capable only of representing the world to itself and whose linkage with its body was merely a contingent one. According to Heidegger, human being should instead be conceived as Dasein, a common German word usually translated in English as “existence” but which also literally means “being there.” By using it as a replacement for “consciousness” and “mind,” Heidegger intended to suggest that a human being is in the world in the mode of “uncovering” and is thus disclosing other entities as well as itself. Dasein is, in other words, the “there”—or the locus—of being and thus the metaphorical place where entities “show themselves” as what they are. Instead of being sealed off within a specially designed compartment within a human being, the functions that have been misdescribed as “mental” now become the defining characteristics of human existence.
[/quote]

[quote=SEP]
The foregoing considerations bring an important question to the fore: what, according to Heidegger, is so special about human beings as such? Here there are broadly speaking two routes that one might take through the text of Being and Time. The first unfolds as follows. If we look around at beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be (e.g., in moments of anxiety in which the world can appear meaning-less, more on which later). More specifically, it is human beings alone who (a) operate in their everyday activities with an understanding of Being (although, as we shall see, one which is pre-ontological, in that it is implicit and vague) and (b) are able to reflect upon what it means to be. This gives us a way of understanding statements such as “Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Being and Time 4: 32). Mulhall, who tends to pursue this way of characterizing Dasein, develops the idea by explaining that while inanimate objects merely persist through time and while plants and non-human animals have their lives determined entirely by the demands of survival and reproduction, human beings lead their lives (Mulhall 2005, 15). In terms of its deep ontological structure, although not typically in terms of how it presents itself to the individual in consciousness, each moment in a human life constitutes a kind of branch-point at which a person ‘chooses’ a kind of life, a possible way to be. It is crucial to emphasize that one may, in the relevant sense, ‘choose’ an existing path simply by continuing unthinkingly along it, since in principle at least, and within certain limits, one always had, and still has, the capacity to take a different path. (This gives us a sense of human freedom, one that will be unpacked more carefully below.) This can all sound terribly inward-looking, but that is not Heidegger's intention. In a way that is about to become clearer, Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways in which other entities may become intelligible. Moreover, terms such as ‘lead’ and ‘choose’ must be interpreted in the light of Heidegger's account of care as the Being of Dasein (see later), an account that blunts any temptation to hear these terms in a manner that suggests inner deliberation or planning on the part of a reflective subject. (So perhaps Mulhall's point that human beings are distinctive in that they lead their lives would be better expressed as the observation that human beings are the nuclei of lives laying themselves out.)

The second route to an understanding of Dasein, and thus of what is special about human beings as such, emphasizes the link with the taking-as structure highlighted earlier. Sheehan (2001) develops just such a line of exegesis by combining two insights. The first is that the ‘Da’ of Da-sein may be profitably translated not as ‘there’ but as ‘open’. This openness is in turn to be understood as ‘the possibility of taking-as’ and thus as a preintellectual openness to Being that is necessary for us to encounter beings as beings in particular ways (e.g., practically, theoretically, aesthetically). Whether or not the standard translation of ‘Da’ as ‘there’ is incapable of doing justice to this idea is moot—one might express the same view by saying that to be Dasein is to be there, in the midst of entities making sense a certain way. Nevertheless, the term ‘openness’ does seem to provide a nicely graphic expression of the phenomenon in question. Sheehan's second insight, driven by a comment of Heidegger's in the Zollikon seminars to the effect that the verbal emphasis in ‘Da-sein’ is to be placed on the second syllable, is that the ‘sein’ of ‘Da-sein’ should be heard as ‘having-to-be’, in contrast with ‘occasionally or contingently is’. These dual insights lead to a characterization of Dasein as the having-to-be-open. In other words, Dasein (and so human beings as such) cannot but be open: it is a necessary characteristic of human beings (an a priori structure of our existential constitution, not an exercise of our wills) that we operate with the sense-making capacity to take-other-beings-as.
[/quote]

Quoting macrosoft

The theoretical mind has taken itself for consciousness itself,

What would be evidence of that? (Rather than just being something like a straw man claim, a severe misunderstanding of what anyone is doing, etc.)

Quoting frank

Have you read "What is Metaphysics?" I read it recently and loved it.

Yes, I love it too.

Reply to macrosoft

All of that post where you're quoting Encyclopedia Britannica and SEP about Dasein strikes me as Heidegger saying something both very trivial and very confused--the latter exacerbated by saying something very trivial in the most tortured way possible--in response to a complete misunderstanding (so a straw man) of what anyone else had been claiming.

Quoting Terrapin Station

What would be evidence of that? (Rather than just being something like a straw man claim, a severe misunderstanding of what anyoen is doing, etc.)

That is what you can find in Heidegger. If you contemplate ready-to-hand-ness (we become the hammering), that already shows that the strict subject/object distinction is a fiction. But my primary answer would be to actually read the first draft of Being and Time (100 pages.) Or Richard Polt's book is written in a style I think you'll like.

This reminds me of you asking for a summary of Hegel as I understood him.

Something I wrote in another thread:

No, I'm not saying that. It's like my 14 year old nihilist example. (I talked about how the merely conscious rejection of presuppositions was trivial.) Anything explicitly conscious is still on the level of theory. It's the stuff that dominates in the background that matters. It's the water we swim in that we can't see. This water-we-can't-see is the 'living' past (one aspect of it.) It is the way you reach for your instrument, your way and not someone else's, informed by years of experience. It's the way you read these words right now, the way you unconsciously interpret them, the way that you (like all of us) are trapped in certain habits of interpretation, ultimately learned not only from your personal past but that which you inherited as a child and even further back in the creation of the English language. It's all of this stuff functioning invisibly as you dream up a future and act toward it in the 'present;. [The thrown-ness that you know about consciously is the least important kind, let's say.]

Heidegger is a 'depth' meta-physician. He is trying to get 'under' things that can be argued about to see what makes them visible or invisible as things to argue about. For instance, to the degree that this is making sense to you I am 'opening' new things for us to talk about --hopefully pointing to things already in the background of your consciousness, covered over by louder explicit theory that gets in the way.

Heidegger thought that anyone was saying that humans weren't "being there," weren't "in the world"? He thought that anyone was saying that we were in some "sealed-off compartment"? He thought that anyone was saying that there's only a theoretical mode to being/to consciousness? He thought that noting that we can make decisions about our lives was some sort of insight?

It's difficult to believe that he would have thought any of that.

Quoting macrosoft

that already shows that the strict subject/object distinction is a fiction.

All it's really saying is that you don't always have the distinction in mind. Well, duh! Who would have thought that anyone was saying that we did always have the distinction in mind?

Quoting Terrapin Station

4.5k
Heidegger thought that anyone was saying that humans weren't "being there," weren't "in the world"? He thought that anyone was saying that we were in some "sealed-off compartment"? He thought that anyone was saying that there's only a theoretical mode to being/to consciousness? He thought that noting that we can make decisions about our lives was some sort of insight?

It's difficult to believe that he would have thought any of that.

No, Anyone is immersed in practical life. He did think metaphysicians were trapped in Cartesian presuppositions. We can think of this as a kind of professionalized Anyone (the concepts are related via 'idle talk') (If I had online texts of his early stuff, I'd give you more quotes.)

Reply to macrosoft

Selecting pieces of what he said doesn’t hold up. Does he also define “dasein” in a different way? I ask knowing the answer to be yes btw.

Eric Brit - It wasn’t a “new way” it was Husserl’s way, the principle of phenomenology. The rest is nothing more than word play.

Like I’ve said, I don’t really care much for other people’s interpretations of Heidegger. I want his words used to express what he said. He used “dasein” as a placeholder for “I don’t know, but I’m going to take a bery long time saying ‘I don’t know’ and make it look like I know something.”

To be fair he did use some quite creative language and some pretty good analogies - useful for exposing other people to Husserl’s intent. In this respect Husserl was big picture and Heidegger was small picture thier approaches.

A person who studies snails all their life learn a lot about more than just snails. Those that study everything else and how things connect together also learn a lot. Heidegger “studied snails.”

Quoting Terrapin Station

All it's really saying is that you don't always have the distinction in mind. Well, duh! Who would have thoguht that anyone was saying that we did always have the distinction in mind?

You'll just have to look into more with sincere open-ness or pat yourself on the back for not being taken in. AFIK, you also think Nietzsche sucks. I'm pretty sure you think Hegel sucks, too. This is like being asked to prove that Jimi Hendrix was a good guitarist without being aloud to play the music. I must have used ye old Hegel line 4 times by now. The result without its becoming is always empty. The atomic/analytic approach is locked into doing math with words, assuming that some proposition out of context can beam them up to instant comprehension.

Quoting macrosoft

You'll just have to look into more with sincere open-ness or pat yourself on the back for not being taken in. AFIK, you also think Nietzsche sucks. I'm pretty sure you think Hegel sucks, too. This is like being asked to prove that Jimi Hendrix was a good guitarist without being aloud to play the music. I must have used ye old Hegel line 4 times by now. The result without its becoming is always empty. The atomic/analytic approach is locked into doing math with words, assuming that some proposition out of context can beam them up to instant comprehension.

I even think Russell sucks sometimes, and he's by far my favorite philosopher--or at least my favorite philosopher-as-author. The theory of descriptions, for example--what a stupid, ridiculously fussy/rococo way to try to deal with fictions, just because of the misguided desire to avoid psychologism (stemming from Russell's fascination with Frege).

Quoting StreetlightX

I quote Lingis but this point has long been made by others, including and especially by Blanchot, who has often riffed on the impersonality of death, and its disoreinting and de-temporalizing power: death as what interrupts, and not (only) what orients. The upshot of this, to link it back to my hesitation about holism, is to 'fragment' death so it is not longer just some single, distant point toward which Dasein is oriented, but something pluralized and dispersed in a way which enables multiple and even clashing orientations and possibly disorientations. To de-idealize and de-singularize death such that we occupy not a single, coherent and unified current of 'timing' (a verb, as you put it), but multiple, overlapping, confusing, timings (and untimings, even). Death in Heidegger plays far too much of a role in 'smoothing over' the tumult that more properly characterizes the trajectory or trajectories which characterize Dasein.

I like what you've written, but I think I've interpreted death differently (perhaps a misreading.) If death (as possibility at every moment and not some future event) opens the genuine future, it rips open the timeline and shreds it into a welter of possibilities. For me this would be like clashing orientations and associated disorientations. To experience a stable orientation would be to make the future present in the form of waiting for its already determinate form. As I read him, death reveals us as essentially possibility in a dizzying way. The 'pastness' theme seems important too. We can already image ourselves dead in a way that allows us to grasp our lives as a completed story. And we can author that story within the constraints of our thrown-ness.

Quoting macrosoft

I quote Lingis but this point has long been made by others, including and especially by Blanchot, who has often riffed on the impersonality of death, and its disoreinting and de-temporalizing power: death as what interrupts, and not (only) what orients. The upshot of this, to link it back to my hesitation about holism, is to 'fragment' death so it is not longer just some single, distant point toward which Dasein is oriented, but something pluralized and dispersed in a way which enables multiple and even clashing orientations and possibly disorientations. To de-idealize and de-singularize death such that we occupy not a single, coherent and unified current of 'timing' (a verb, as you put it), but multiple, overlapping, confusing, timings (and untimings, even). Death in Heidegger plays far too much of a role in 'smoothing over' the tumult that more properly characterizes the trajectory or trajectories which characterize Dasein. — StreetlightX


I like what you've written, but I think I've interpreted death differently (perhaps a misreading.) If death (as possibility at every moment and not some future event) opens the genuine future, it rips open the timeline and shreds it into a welter of possibilities. For me this would be like clashing orientations and associated disorientations. To experience a stable orientation would be to make the future present in the form of waiting for its already determinate form. As I read him, death reveals us as essentially possibility in a dizzying way. The 'pastness' theme seems important too. We can already image ourselves dead in a way that allows us to grasp our lives as a completed story. And we can author that story within the constraints of our thrown-ness.

I take it that's all talking about the contemplation of death, and not death per se?

The stuff that Streetlight wrote is a great example of the folly of taking meaning to be communal rather than personal. For example, "death, and its disorienting and detemporalizing power, death as what interrupts . . . " Those would be particular interpretations, particular ways of thinking about death, and they'd only obtain insofar as some particular individual(s) are thinking about it that way.

To try to say that the contemplation of death is disorienting and detemporalizing and interrupting, etc. to Joe (or alternately to no one in particular), when Joe doesn't think about it that way, is pretty disrespectful to Joe, pretty arrogant on the part of the person who is insisting on the interpretations in question. And in some similar cases--again, when the topic is stuff like racism, sexism, etc.--these sorts of mistakes can turn out to have serious (and in my opinion very immoral) practical upshots for someone.

Quoting StreetlightX

For me at least, the importance of this term lies in how its frequency demonstrates just how formalist and ossified the whole analytic of Dasein is in B&T.

I agree that it is quite formalist. Really I don't like that book, despite liking the ideas in it. I get impatient. I prefer to zoom in from the big picture (hence my preference for some of the preceding texts). But I do like his attempt to find a universal structure in existence (an update of Kant.)

Quoting StreetlightX

This is one of the reasons why I much prefer - following Arendt - to emphasize not death but natality - beginnings and births, not ends - as a far more interesting philosophical theme. The broodiness of Heidegger is not accidental but in fact very much in keeping with his philosophy. So, to bring this all back to the OP, I'm not drawing a distinction between the 'intoxicating', 'exhausting' efforts of capital-P Philosophy qua dark, introspective discipline and 'everyday life', but rather, looking at ways to inject the (sometimes) aerialities and lightness of the latter into the former. It's a question of philosophy all the way through. Speculative thought doesn't have to be the world turned upside down. It can instead be - to quote Elizabeth Grosz - an effort to "enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. [To be] among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought".

Philosophy augments, extends, and edifies. It is not pale imitation and inadequate 'proximating'.

Actually I agree with most of that, but inadequate proximating doesn't have to be read in a gloomy sense. As I understood Kisiel's rendition, the point of all of this proximating is to live more fully and openly. I think the heavy style obscures what is finally aimed at (openness to the depths of life) . And of course avoiding the world turned upside down seems central here. In Ontology:Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger writes some beautiful paragraphs about a table in his home, skis in his garage. As we go back we have factic life at the center. Switching to the language of being gives the project a different feel.

I would like to emphasize the H's vision circa 1919 is not at all for me an exhaustive description of what philosophy is or ought to be. I did find it stirring. It's one more direction, one more persona even. I'd say that I experience philosophy as a gallery of vivid personalities. None of them get it right. Most of them offer something, often an excess that needs the others as a complement/supplement.

Quoting Terrapin Station

I take it that's all talking about the contemplation of death, and not death per se?

As I understand it, death is intended as a constant possibility. It allows us to grasp the phenomenon of the world from the outside, as a whole, from the perspective of no longer being there. This vision of ourselves as no longer there can snap us out of our usual Anyone mode. IMV, there is an implicit denial of afterlife in play. A big theme is that no one can do our dying for us. Like no other possibility, the possibility that all possibilities cease singularizes or grabs us by the personal throat, not Anyone's throat.

A person who knows that they are mortal experiences time as finite and his own existence as a story with an undecided closure (but still a closure, which allows existence to grasp itself as a whole.)

Feuerbach also talked about the finitude of time. We can't take every path, can't realize every possibility. Decisions matter. Unless we consent to sleepwalking through life and doing what anyone has planned for us, we are forced to decide without the help of anything eternal. I'd say Heidegger is a philosopher for atheists or at least those who only believe in this world (allowing for some radical Christianity, etc.)

Quoting macrosoft

As I understand it, death is intended as a constant possibility.

A claim that people constantly think about it?

Quoting Terrapin Station

A claim that people constantly think about it?

On the contrary, 'Anyone' always sees it as far off and considers it morbid to talk about or at least not worth the waste of time. The idea is that certain moods can throw us into this awareness. Some choose to keep this awareness close, 'resolute' in an embrace of mortal freedom. Wanting to have a 'conscience,' where 'conscience' is interpreted as being personally responsible for one's decisions. But no explicit ethic is or can be offered here. That would be more flight into some eternal, universal principle --more hiding from death in its fullness.

People debate this stuff. It's not an easy part of Heidegger. He thinks facing death this way opens a vision of man's utter immersion in time (as a futural being in his own or authentic mode.)

Reply to Terrapin Station

I think lots of early readers of H really liked the death and authenticity stuff, for the same reason Sartre was liked. One can find an atheist ethics there, though Heidegger claimed that he was just describing a basic structure, not preaching some new abstract ethic. Given his thorough and detailed critique of Kant in the lectures on logic right before writing B&T, it's clear that he had a great passion at one time for describing the structure of the subject correctly. He felt he also had to explain why the subject had not been grasped correctly. So he traces an idea from the early Greeks all the way through Descartes to Kant. Among other things, he was a meticulous theorist of the subject. He used 'dasein' to try to get beyond the baggage and presuppositions he was dismantling or deconstructing. In his view, facing death as constant possibility opened up the priority of the future and possibility over the present and the actual.

Quoting macrosoft

What makes sense to me (in a speculative mode) is that there is no 'I' and no 'world' but just the signs. The 'I' and the 'world' are just two frequent signs that refer to still other signs.

The 'I' and the 'world' are just further signs in a grand linguistic play of signs. But pan-semiosis would be an actual model of ontology and not merely an acknowledgement of epistemic limitedness. So really, this would be two different conversations.

I like what you have been saying on Heidegger. I am in full agreement with the psychological accuracy of distinguishing between the kind of consciousness which is a biological being in the world - the enactive, embodied, ecological, etc, understanding of mind - and then the socialised, linguistic, second-order structuring of experience that comes once phenomenology is carved up by language.

Only humans have dasein of this form. And where it becomes ontologically significant could be the degree to which it takes existence in general - cosmic existence - to some kind of dialectical, end of history, extreme. We have gone beyond just words to numbers. We speak the language of pure Platonic forms.

An animal is just buried in its little world, its unwelt, in a direct, pragmatic and unthinking way. An organism entropifies. Sure it may have dasein in that there is a running modelling relation in which the world is comprehended as a (neural/experiential) system of sign. But that is a completely particular kind of relation. Task-specific and highly situational. Not at all a general one. That is why I wouldn't rush to give it ontically general significance - like talking about spirit, or soul, or consciousness, as any kind of metaphysical stuff.

But through language, humans came to socially objectify themselves as psychological subjects. That was a first detachment, a first step away from the embedded particularity of neurobiological dasein. And then through maths and logic - completely abstracted symbol play, drained of embodied semantic content to leave just a naked syntax - we have opened up the possibility of grasping something completely general about existence. We can put our hands on mathematical-strength forms or patterns. We can release the mechanistic and technological possibilities that the Universe also happened to contain as potentials.

Now humans of course make pretty pedestrian uses of what seem rather exalted capabilities. And we will probably always do so. Yet still, something new has been manifested. And it seems a key project for philosophy to make sense of that. What do we really think about machines - after we learn that they might in some proper sense stand as existence's other natural pole of being? The mechanistic and computational represents some kind of end state or limit. That would be a fact that still mostly inspires ambivalence.

To give the best example of what I mean, I am thinking about how the Standard Model of particle physics has turned out to rest on the Platonic-strength necessity of permutation symmetry. As the Cosmos developed organisation by cooling~expanding, it had to become fragmented locally by a cascade of symmetry-breakings. It had to bump down the levels of the permutational symmetries, from the most complex to the most simple.

The Big Bang started out in some very large and confused geometry. Let's call it E(8), SU(5) or SO(10), as the question is still open. But then it boiled its way down to SU(3), SU(2) and then U(1) - representing the strong force, electroweak force, and electromagnetic force.

So - as Ontic Structural Realism says - through a mathematical system of sign, a mathematical language for relating to dasein - we, as highly particular biological creatures, have come to grasp something absolutely general and necessarily true about the physical world. Reality turns out to have this hard and mechanistic formal face to it. Only these permutation symmetries are logically possible. And that is a constraint so objective that it always lay in wait as the future of any Cosmos. Chaos thought it could do what it liked. Randomness was its destiny. But permutation symmetry already spelt finitude. The ultimate shape of the future was an inevitability. The Heat Death of the Universe was foretold.

This is a bit of an excursion into the big picture. But I want to demonstrate where the relation between epistemology and ontology may lie. That question is pretty confused. And it is what Peircean semiotics makes clear, in my view.

So the big picture is Aristotelean - reality as a hylomorphic interaction of matter and form, action and constraint. possibility and necessity. Everything rests on a duality - or more properly, a dialectic or dichotomy. In the "beginning" is just a chaos of everythingness. A vagueness. And then that symmetry of fluctuations gets broken so that it becomes crisply organised into a global aspect - an informing weight of history and direction - and a local aspect, the now atomised and fragmented collection of material components or degrees of freedom, which are all the further accidents waiting to happen.

To us humans, living in the Cosmos right when it has got nearly as large and cold as it ever will be, but with still enough fuel to spark some local fires, it seems we exist in a world of reductionist construction. We live in that era of the medium-sized dry goods where matter exists stably as solids in a void. And so a mechanical or technological mode of action - the constructive mode - can have its fullest expression. Us humans are at the apex of that. Biology rests on the possibilities of constructive action, local choices. If we pick up a rock and move it, it will still be there a hundred years later most likely. Then humans have continued on along this path of constructive causality to invent machines of the most absolute kind - like computers. Mathematical machines.

But then - through the sciences of cosmology and fundamental physics - we can now grasp the particularity of the era that has informed our dasein. We have been opened up to its more general or objective mathematical-strength underpinnings. We can see the actual forms that impose a structuring necessity on "everything".

And at this point, ontology becomes semiotic. We see that the duality we are always grasping after is not the trite mind~world relation (a very particular biological dasein or umwelt), but a dualism of entropy and information (or chaos and order, matter and form, flux and logos, apeiron and peras, etc).

So semiotics deals with epistemology. At the level of biology, it become pretty clear that "mindfulness" is just about the particularity of an embedded thermodynamic relation. An organism exists with the sole cosmic purpose of breaking down entropic gradients. Dasein boils down to that. An organism's umwelt or system of signs is really something pretty physical - a collection of on/off regulatory switches.

We think of signs as marks - indelible scratches that can then become the material subject of a mindful interpretation. But really, a sign in the biologically primitive sense is a switch - a logic gate - that can be thrown. It is a bit of machinery or syntax that can be inserted into the material flow of the world so as to start to control that world with stored information.

At the level of biology, the fact that "mindfulness" is purely pragmatic is nakedly visible. An enzyme is a message from the genes to the cell. It says turn on this, switch off that. That is dasein as mechanistic action. It is all about the imposition of constraints, not some exploration of intellectual freedoms.

And when humans invented language, it too was ultimately a means of sociocultural regulation. It was the mechanistic framework which could be dropped over the top of the psychological animal to establish an appropriately detached notion of self as a social actor, keeping a close eye on the wants and impulses of the beast within.

So semiotics gives us the duality that works because it is a properly interactive one. We can see why the trick would exist. The whole of the Cosmos only exists because there is this fundamental duality between entropy and information, local material action and global formal constraint. The Big Bang couldn't have happened any other way except that it would become organised by the constraints of permutation symmetry. Confusion can't stay confused as it has to start cancelling much of itself out. Just as every baby must become organised to have the psychological truth of its embodied dasein. Regularity must emerge as habits form and enduring mechanism arises.

So there would be the story of what constitutes the particular dasein of being a conscious human. We can dissect that in the now standard psychological way to bring out the semiotic levels involved. The arc of regulating machinery from membranes and genes, to neurons and muscle fibres, to words and even numbers. On the epistemological side, this is a story of the embedded semantics dropping away and pure syntactical mechanism becoming fully realised. An enzyme is as dedicated as a lock and key. But technology is as general purpose as mathematical form permits it to be.

And then there is the story of dasein as an ontology of semiosis. The world itself arises as some kind of interaction between information and entropy ... as the most primal constructs we can apply to its description. (Of course, we never escape our epistemological situatedness to talk about the thing in itself in some naive realistic fashion. Ontology is only about the commitments we are prepared to risk our necks by. That too is already taken as read by the post-Kantian Pragmatist.)

Reply to I like sushi FYI here's a quote from intro 2 that you might find interesting regarding hermeneutics:

The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of this word, where it designates this business of interpreting. But to the extent that by uncovering the meaning of Being
and the basic structures of Dasein in general we may exhibit the horizon for any further ontological study of those entities which do not have the character ofDasein, this hermeneutic also becomes a 'hermeneutic' in the sense of working out the conditions on which the possibility of any ontological
investigation depends. And finally, to the extent that Dasein, as an entity with the possibility of existence, has ontological priority over every other entity, "hermeneutic", as an interpretation ofDasein's Being,
has the third and specific sense of an analytic of the existentiality of existence; and this is the sense which is philosophically primary. Then so far as this hermeneutic works out Dasein's historicality ontologically as the ontical condition for the possibility of historiology, it contains the roots of what can be called 'hermeneutic' only in a derivative sense: the methodology of those humane sciences which are historiological in character.

Quoting macrosoft

I like what you've written, but I think I've interpreted death differently (perhaps a misreading.) If death (as possibility at every moment and not some future event) opens the genuine future, it rips open the timeline and shreds it into a welter of possibilities. For me this would be like clashing orientations and associated disorientations. To experience a stable orientation would be to make the future present in the form of waiting for its already determinate form. As I read him, death reveals us as essentially possibility in a dizzying way. The 'pastness' theme seems important too. We can already image ourselves dead in a way that allows us to grasp our lives as a completed story. And we can author that story within the constraints of our thrown-ness.

I guess if I were to summarize the critique it is that Heidegger doesn't pay enough attention to the impossible: that every possibility is equally and also an im-possibility, the possibility of the impossible. And the impossible in turn speaks to the recalcitrance of things to 'worldhood', their opacity and irreducibility to intelligibility. Lingis gets at it thus:

"Does it not happen that we find the onward drift of our environment disconnected from our actual movements and operations? Does not each life extend across metamorphoses, in which it finds itself reborn with tasks that were nowhere yesterday; docs it not find whole fragments of its past drifting behind it, unintegratable like dreams in the daylight reality about it? We go to the cellar to fix a broken chair with drill, screws, and glue; the phone rings and we plan a trip with a friend, mapping out an itinerary, jotting down things that have to get done-have the car greased and oiled, get a passport,
arrange for injections from the doctor; suddenly there is a scream and we drop the phone, hurdle out the door and grab a stick to thrash the cat that has caught a blue jay; on the way back to the house we glance at our watch and realize it is almost time for our appointment with the hypnotist to stop smoking ...The one that grasps the hammer does not comprehensively envision the carpentry of the whole world. The practicable fields are limited and discontinuous. Between and beyond term, there are innumerable impracticable fields."

The unintergratable, the impracticable, the impossible, the discontinuous, the opaque: these are things that Heidegger only tends to think of negatively in the guise of limitation and breakdown, and not as constitutive of the human condition:

"Heidegger's analysis, axed not on the material but on the forms a practical life manipulates in the dynamic field, argues that things are essentially means; - each mundane end is a means in turn. The relay from implement to implement and to work being done returns to the manipulator. Before the hand
grasps the hammer, this whole circuit must have already been laid out. The handling is a movement .rhat fits in this comprehensive system and is de!-ermined by it from the start. But does not the finality in things also come to an end in them? Water which one knows in the savoring and in the drinking, berries which one gathers and which melt in one' s mouth as one walks through the meadow do not catch our eye as refurbishments for our cells and muscles and means for our projects; they are substances in which sensuality glows and fades away. The materiality of things is not just there as the materialization of the dynamic form we grasp; once grasped and brought under one's eyes and in -one's home, the instrumental forms of things dissolve into the density of their substance."

This is 'worldhood' held in suspension, time as condensed into the beatitude of an unintegrable moment, one that resists being woven into some overarching narrative in which would reduce it to just one more story beat among others. Anti-holism.

Quoting macrosoft

Actually I agree with most of that, but inadequate proximating doesn't have to be read in a gloomy sense. As I understood Kisiel's rendition, the point of all of this proximating is to live more fully and openly. I think the heavy style obscures what is finally aimed at (openness to the depths of life) . And of course avoiding the world turned upside down seems central here. In Ontology:Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger writes some beautiful paragraphs about a table in his home, skis in his garage. As we go back we have factic life at the center. Switching to the language of being gives the project a different feel.

While I think there's a rich and laudable tradition of philosophy that links it with 'life', I'd be very careful about the over-determination of philosophy by the concerns of 'life'. Philosophy can be richer than even that. Brassier's well-known injunction on this is well worth heeding imo:

"Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. ... Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter." (Nihil Unbound).

I would like to emphasize the H's vision circa 1919 is not at all for me an exhaustive description of what philosophy is or ought to be. I did find it stirring. It's one more direction, one more persona even. I'd say that I experience philosophy as a gallery of vivid personalities. None of them get it right. Most of them offer something, often an excess that needs the others as a complement/supplement.

Fair enough. I'm a big fan of pluralist approaches to things, and my worry is generally always the over-determination of philosophy by one aspect over others; I want richness, always.

Heidegger/Kiesel:In short, philosophy is more a form of life on the edge of expression than a science. That phenomenology is more a preconceptual, provisory comportment than a conceptual science, that the formally indicating 'concepts' are first intended to serve life rather than science, becomes transparent only after the turn...

For me this passage highlights the schizoid nature of philosophy: poetry aspiring to become what it can never be: a science. The grotesque alternative is philosophy becoming "handmaiden' to science as it has been in the past to theology. while the 'nerdy' alternative is philosophy becoming an endlessly fascinating exercise in conceptual masturbation.

Before the 'turn' Heidegger strove to produce an analytic which would transform philosophy into a phenomenological science. However phenomenology throws science into "Epoché", out of play insofar as it asks 'objectivizing' questions that transcend the subject; whereas phenomenology as conceived by Husserl aims to objectivize subjectivity itself. Heidegger (wrongly, I believe) saw Husserl's project as being still mired in Cartesian dualism, and he tried to circumvent what he saw as a morass via his analytic of Dasein. Husserl introduced the similar notion of 'lifeworld' in 1936 in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (which in turn probably derived from Uexküll's idea of 'Umwelt' and indeed even has it's roots in the Kantian notion of 'intersubjectivity').

After the turn Heidegger gives up on the analytic approach, perhaps realizing that poetry cannot ever become science, to opt for a more poetic approach.

Quoting frank

Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did.

I've been dwelling on this question more. I think he implied something like that. I haven't read much of the later Heidegger, but I have read secondary sources like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Mystical-Element-Heideggers-Thought/dp/0823211533

I am quite curious about how Heidegger reads in German. I hope he's a great prose poet. I expect that he would be, at least when he wanted to be.

'The rose exists without a reason.'

As I understand it, Heidegger understood (in this context) grasping for grounds to be switching into subject-versus-object mode, obscuring the genuine 'thing in itself,' a being which just shines forth without a why. From this angle, metaphysics looks like a power play that obscures the very object it wants to name. I think Heidegger might save said not that we should be silent but that we should listen to the poets on these matters. They approach what is hidden from the greedy subject's objectifying ground-sniffing.

[quote=Wiki]
...embodying a strange mystical pantheism drawn mainly from the writings of Jakob Böhme and his followers. Silesius delighted specially in the subtle paradoxes of mysticism. The essence of God, for instance, he held to be love; God, he said, can love nothing inferior to himself; but he cannot be an object of love to himself without going out, so to speak, of himself, without manifesting his infinity in a finite form; in other words, by becoming man. God and man are therefore essentially one.[9]
[/quote]

[quote=Hegel]
The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself.
[/quote]

[quote = Hegel]
The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realised and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself.
[/quote]

Quoting Janus

For me this passage highlights the schizoid nature of philosophy: poetry aspiring to become what it can never be: a science

I agree that there was some kind of quasi-scientific quest involved, but there is also a rejection of this. What struck my mind was the word comportment. As far as poetry not being science, that is trivially true in once sense and far from obvious in another. Poetry is poesis, creation. Even Popper (who respected metaphysics) had to give the creative element its due. Science is only a filter or criterion. And then of course Heidegger doesn't have physical science in mind but something closer to a praxis-centered linguistic pre-science of life. What we have here is something closer to the actual human situation: an individual exists in the midst of incompatible language games, forced to interpret this total situation not as a professional or a technician but as a living, loving, fearing, mortal individual. The demand that philosophy be science is already questionably, since this presupposes that man's highest function is to be a de-worlded, a-historical 'transparent' subject grasping a public object to maximize public utility.
(Everyone loves this of course, but no one in particular perhaps. ) Or it leaves the 'highest' outside of philosophy altogether. No doubt this 'highest' varies and science largely makes such pursuits possible, but I remain skeptical of the implication/assumption that philosophers ought to be scientists. They are just as easily described as poets who work mostly with grand abstractions.

Quoting macrosoft

As far as poetry not being science, that is trivially true in once sense and far from obvious in another. Poetry is poesis, creation.

Yes, but I didn't say that poetry is not science; which is of course 'trivially true'; a mere matter of definition. I said that poetry cannot become science. To say that poetry cannot become science is to say that the metaphorical cannot become determinate, propositional. I am aware of the ancient meaning of "poesis" as 'making'; but I don't really see what this has to do with the point at issue.

Quoting macrosoft

And then of course Heidegger doesn't have physical science in mind but something closer to a praxis-centered linguistic pre-science of life.

Certainly it's obvious that Heidegger does not aspire to produce science in the 'present at hand' sense; but I think he does aim (in his pre-turn work) at producing a science (in the broadest sense of 'a determinate knowing'). And this aim does necessarily, and ironically, involve looking at the vorhanden dimension of human experience in a zuhanden way, try however you might to evade it.

Quoting macrosoft

The demand that philosophy be science is already questionably, since this presupposes that man's highest function is to be a de-worlded, a-historical 'transparent' subject grasping a public object. Or it leaves the higher things outside of philosophy altogether.

If philosophy aims to be "love of wisdom" does this not necessarily entail knowing what wisdom is? Of course it would not be wise to live estranged from the world (if that were possible) but any account of how to live, that aspires to extend itself beyond mere metaphor, is always already "de-worlded', or so it seems to me. Such accounts are always abstract; that is they are always abstracted from their living context. Of course this doesn't mean that we cannot have 'living' reactions to such accounts, or to science itself, for that matter. I don't believe there is any real, living, as opposed to merely abstractly conceptual, separation between the zuhanden and the vorhanden.

Reply to StreetlightX
[quote=Lingis]
Water which one knows in the savoring and in the drinking, berries which one gathers and which melt in one' s mouth as one walks through the meadow do not catch our eye as refurbishments for our cells and muscles and means for our projects; they are substances in which sensuality glows and fades away. The materiality of things is not just there as the materialization of the dynamic form we grasp; once grasped and brought under one's eyes and in -one's home, the instrumental forms of things dissolve into the density of their substance.
[/quote]
Great quote.
Quoting StreetlightX

And the impossible in turn speaks to the recalcitrance of things to 'worldhood', their opacity and irreducibility to intelligibility.

I like this point very much. Sensuality. Not the pre-theoretical but the non-theoretical. This reminds me of Feuerbach's joyful materialism. You have any thoughts on him? He has the blind spots pointed out by Marx, but he's just a good dude. Some philosophers just shine through their work.

Quoting StreetlightX

While I think there's a rich and laudable tradition of philosophy that links it with 'life', I'd be very careful about the over-determination of philosophy by the concerns of 'life'. Philosophy can be richer than even that.

I quite agree. I get absorbed in very formal questions at times. So much fascinating math can be done around the set of infinite sequences of 1s and 0s. But it's not just math but also an interpretation of what is going on that is not subject to its epistemology. What does one make of the situation that the computable numbers have measure zero? I know I have used it as a metaphor in a life-philosophy context, but the issue has its own life. To me this bit-model of the continuum brings it to consciousness in a new way. The continuum as the set of infinitely long, in-compressible 'files,' yet dotted with those that can be collapsed to pre-loaded Turing machines. I believe you've put some time in with math. I wonder if any of this has caught your attention? And have you given much thought to neural networks?

Quoting StreetlightX

"Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. ... Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter." (Nihil Unbound).

Ah yes, I like him. And I like that harsh attitude. But that's also part of what I like about Heidegger. Late Heidegger is a gloomy hippy waiting for a god to save him. I'm too Nietzschean for that in some moods, though I get that the rose is without reason and that my cat in her groundlessness is a miracle. Give me in other moods Hendrix's screaming guitar on 'Machine Gun.' I'd say part of us loves to destroy meaning and boundary. Even this seems conceptually in Heidegger, despite his often unbearable seriousness. I very much get how annoying his tone can be. In some ways he's one more turtle to smash open for its eggs. 'The spirit is a stomach.' But back to Ray. I like that he really knows some math and writes about it.

Quoting StreetlightX

Fair enough. I'm a big fan of pluralist approaches to things, and my worry is generally always the over-determination of philosophy by one aspect over others; I want richness, always.

I couldn't agree more with you. My process is usually to just grab a personality and really inhabit that personality without truly being dominated. I at least got better at not being captured with age. Nietzsche, for instance, is a mess. Grabbing that personality with the hot blood of one's 20s was going to be a bumpy ride. For me there's just no last word, except maybe a bias for this world in all its sensual brute presence that I've never been able to shake. I love Hegel, but I can't agree that grasping the 'absolute' feelingly or intuitively is bogus. And really who needs the 'absolute.' I tend to use the 'highest' in a sloppy way, it occurred to me. Peak experiences come in all shapes and sizes. There is no single high thing.

Quoting Janus

If philosophy aims to be "love of wisdom" does this not necessarily entail knowing what wisdom is?

Reading that made me think of this haha

Quoting Janus

I siad that poetry cannot become science. To say that poetry cannot become science is to say that the metaphorical cannot become determinate, propositional. I am aware of the ancient
meaning of "poesis" as 'making'; but I don't see what this has to do with the point at issue.

Sorry if I didn't read you charitably. I just don't see why metaphor isn't a mode of knowing. Must science be determinate? Can all objects be grasped determinately? I don't think so. Life is full of ambiguity and rounded corners. Metaphors are the right kind of model for that.

Quoting Janus

Certainly it's obvious that Heidegger does not aspire to produce science in the 'present at hand' sense; but I think he does aim (in his pre-turn work) at producing a science (in the broadest sense of 'a determinate knowing'). And this aim does necessarily, and ironically, involve looking at the vorhanden dimension of human experience in a zuhanden way, try however you might to evade it.

I'd say that indeed he's a theorist of the pre-theoretical. Formal indication is offered as one more microscope. And we can even accuse him of pragmatism. It's of the James variety, but still just about using words to improve life with a rarefied vision of utility at hand.

Quoting Janus

If philosophy aims to be "love of wisdom" does this not necessarily entail knowing what wisdom is? Of course it would not be wise to live estranged from the world ( if that were possible) but any account of how to live, that apsires to extend itself beyond mere metaphor, is always already "de-worlded', or so it seems to me. Such account are always abstract; that is they are always abstracted from their living context. Of course this doesn't mean that we cannot have 'living' reactions to such accounts, or to science itself, for that matter. I don't beleive there is any real, living, as opposed to merely abstractly conpetual separation between the zuhanden and the vorhanden.

Fair points. As to the deworlded subject, I thinks that's a fair description of science. It is about a public criterion. It seduces us ultimately with technology, with some old-timey theological absolute objective truth for the truth's sake. And I am down with that. Some of my favorite personal acts of creativity were 'machines' (algorithms.) (They were crypto systems.) I am down with the a-historical formal subject as the condition of possibility for an ideal language in which one can still write a poetry of pure form. Admittedly I've been experimenting with a certain perspective, but I would like to stress that I am not so captured by the perspectives I inhabit for the pleasure of working them through.

Reply to bloodninja

Ha, that's hilarious (and very wise to boot!). I am fond of Zizek's live performances.

Reply to bloodninja

I found that video pretty moving. It's a hatred of cliche, or sentimentality. 'Wisdom' can be a sickening word. For me this is part of the inability of particular words to stay put. One generation's sexiest words are just mom-and-dad-talk for the next. And I also like the implicit embrace of being a sinner and a fool. Posing as wise may be a fool's errand in the first place.

I love Zizek for being so damned real. He's a maniac. He can't control his own creativity. Those mannerisms are of course unforgettable too. It would be very hard to write your own Zizek. His comic exterior would be easy enough, but the genius that rides such a ridiculous vehicle not at all.

Reply to bloodninja

Thanks for sharing that!

Quoting macrosoft

Must science be determinate?

The hard sciences, including mathematics are on the most determinate end of the spectrum; they are the paradigm cases of determination, I would say. There's little of the ambiguous in science proper (although much of it in the interpretation of its purported ontological or metaphysical implications, of course).

Science, in the broader sense as 'knowing' (of a certain kind) is not poetic or aesthetic knowing, the latter is more like direct experience. Of course you may object that there is no truly direct experience, but that depends on how you think about it. From one perspective (the subjective) our experience is indeed direct, whereas from a "de-worlded", analytic viewpoint it's directness is an illusion purportedly due to our ignorance of its conditions.

Quoting apokrisis

The 'I' and the 'world' are just further signs in a grand linguistic play of signs. But pan-semiosis would be an actual model of ontology and not merely an acknowledgement of epistemic limitedness.

So the sign is just pure meaningful being, the primary 'atom.' My speculative mind is there. The only question is not the 'consciousness' for which the sign exist (because we don't need that along this line of thought), but something like time for the play or alteration of the signs. The sign-stream rushes forward with memory.

Quoting apokrisis

We have gone beyond just words to numbers. We speak the language of pure Platonic forms.

Kojeve liked to call it 'the silence of algorithm.' I think you'd like him if you haven't checked him out.

Quoting apokrisis

we, as highly particular biological creatures, have come to grasp something absolutely general and necessarily true about the physical world. Reality turns out to have this hard and mechanistic formal face to it. Only these permutation symmetries are logically possible. And that is a constraint so objective that it always lay in wait as the future of any Cosmos. Chaos thought it could do what it liked. Randomness was its destiny. But permutation symmetry already spelt finitude. The ultimate shape of the future was an inevitability. The Heat Death of the Universe was foretold.

Who said heat death couldn't be poetic? That's like Greek tragedy. I'm not denying its nonfictional aspect, but I can't help admiring the narrative in other terms as well.

Quoting apokrisis

And then there is the story of dasein as an ontology of semiosis. The world itself arises as some kind of interaction between information and entropy ... as the most primal constructs we can apply to its description. (Of course, we never escape our epistemological situatedness to talk about the thing in itself in some naive realistic fashion. Ontology is only about the commitments we are prepared to risk our necks by. That too is already taken as read by the post-Kantian Pragmatist.)

I like this 'commitments we risk our necks by.' Indeed, lived 'pre-theoretical' ontology keeps us waking up alive in the morning.

Quoting apokrisis

We think of signs as marks - indelible scratches that can then become the material subject of a mindful interpretation. But really, a sign in the biologically primitive sense is a switch - a logic gate - that can be thrown. It is a bit of machinery or syntax that can be inserted into the material flow of the world so as to start to control that world with stored information.

At the level of biology, the fact that "mindfulness" is purely pragmatic is nakedly visible. An enzyme is a message from the genes to the cell. It says turn on this, switch off that. That is dasein as mechanistic action. It is all about the imposition of constraints, not some exploration of intellectual freedoms.

And when humans invented language, it too was ultimately a means of sociocultural regulation. It was the mechanistic framework which could be dropped over the top of the psychological animal to establish an appropriately detached notion of self as a social actor, keeping a close eye on the wants and impulses of the beast within.

Yes, I can see this, even without knowing all the details. And indeed there lurks a beast within, chained up by words and gestures, internalized words and gestures largely.

Quoting Janus

Science, in the broader sense as 'knowing' (of a certain kind) is not poetic or aesthetic knowing, the latter is more like direct experience.

I am generally open to the point you are making, but I think you underestimate metaphor. Speaking from experience with math, the whole enterprise is a system of analogies. The epistemology is formalist and machine like, but actually doing it and understanding it is surprisingly metaphorical.

Also we have thoughts like 'analogy is the core of cognition'. And yet another thinker influenced me on this, Lakoff:

[quote=wiki]
Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as a purely linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development of thought.

In his words:

"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."

According to Lakoff, non-metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk about purely physical reality; the greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons, including that some metaphors become 'dead' in the sense that we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on".
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff#Reappraisal_of_metaphor

Quoting macrosoft

Also we have thoughts like 'analogy is the core of cognition'.

Sure, but I am not disagreeing with that at all. My point is that metaphor is not the core of propositionally determinate modeling, and nor is the discipline and the practice of mathematics (which a computer utterly blind to metaphor can do). I am not denying that analogical or metaphorical thinking may be involved in mathematical discovery and invention of course, because that is a kind of poesis, or making that involves imagination, what Peirce calls 'abduction'.

Quoting macrosoft

So the sign is just pure meaningful being, the primary 'atom.' My speculative mind is there. The only question is not the 'consciousness' for which the sign exist (because we don't need that along this line of thought), but something like time for the play or alteration of the signs. The sign-stream rushes forward with memory.

That gets it. It is the atomism of the event that is the sign. Flashes of actuality that then weave the collective history.

So we do want to search for crisp atomism as the basis of our ontology. But we find it not in atomistic matter - the usual answer. The passively existent answer. We find it being conjured into being as the emergent product of a context of constraints reacting with a ground of naked possibility. A physical event is the answer to a question that was asked. The quantum physicist interrogates with their measuring apparatus - has "it" happened yet? At some point, the sign is given. History branches in definite fashion. There is an updated context that requires the posing of some different question.

So yes, history is memory. Memory is information. Information is the record that constrains future possibility. Yet still, the other half of the deal is entropy or informational uncertainty. Material surprise. The naked ground is probabilistic and contributes its capacity for the accidental.

Nature asks the question - has that damn particle decayed yet? And the decay is spontaneous - within the constraints imposed on it. (See quantum zeno effect.) Nature actually is an observer waiting for the sign the event has happened. The question does have a meaning as an answer has to be given. The fact doesn't just passively exist. A dynamic has to play out.

Again, Peirce is the rare metaphysician who got it because he made chance or tychism as fundamental as law or synechism. His view of probability was propensity-based. He was way out on a limb in accepting spontaneity as real and creative, not merely a convenient modelling fiction.

So there is a play. Events have to manifest. And there is a flow. The answers weave a collective memory. There are even the atoms - definite events. But metaphysically, they have the quality of signs - in the full Peircean sense.

Quoting Janus

My point is that metaphor is not the core of propositionally determinate modeling, and nor is the discipline and the practice of mathematics (which a computer utterly blind to metaphor can do).

In a friendly spirit, I must say that computers don't really do math. Saying so is close to saying that an abacus does math or that a magazine writes shorts stories. Indeed, real numbers don't exist! They aren't even (physically) 'real.' It's worse than that: the integers don't even exist. Nor do Turing machines exist (since they have infinite tapes.) We have finite state machines that can process symbols. They can indeed check a string of symbols representing a proof for correctness, but only a human could understand what was going on there, having built the machine, the axioms, the definition, and the encoding. Only humans care about proofs. Proof is not the essence but only the hygiene of a supremely creative enterprise, which I'd say is founded on basic human intuitions of form.

Quoting apokrisis

So we do want to search for crisp atomism as the basis of our ontology. But we find it not in atomistic matter - the usual answer. The passively existent answer. We find it being conjured into being as the emergent product of a context of constraints reacting with a ground of naked possibility. A physical event is the answer to a question that was asked. The quantum physicist interrogates with their measuring apparatus - has "it" happened yet? At some point, the sign is given. History branches in definite fashion. There is an updated context that requires the posing of some different question.

I follow you here. I agree (without pretending to have gone beyond my first QM class --but I did get that A!--which is not to say that I remember the stuff that well. )

Quoting apokrisis

The naked ground is probabilistic and contributes its capacity for the accidental.

Fascinating. Does time get into the picture here?

Quoting apokrisis

Again, Peirce is the rare metaphysician who got it because he made chance or tychism as fundamental as law or synechism. His view of probability was propensity-based. He was way out on a limb in accepting spontaneity as real and creative, not merely a convenient modelling fiction.

So there is a play. Events have to manifest. And there is a flow. The answers weave a collective memory. There are even the atoms - definite events. But metaphysically, they have the quality of signs - in the full Peircean sense.

I think I am actually following what you say here.

Time is implicit in all of this. Ol' Heidegger made the point that the concept of time is central in a metaphysics. Was he right? I don't know. But having dwelt on that lately, I'd like to see how you might more explicitly weave it in. I am down with chance being fundamental. Is there chance without time?

This is arguably an out of the blue tangent, but I like to read the Germans as a progress, or at least as a family. I have a sense that Feuerbach is not read much, so I'm sharing some good passages which fit in various ways with some of the shards of the conversation so far.

[quote=Feuerbach]
In love, man declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart; he reckons another as part of his own being; he declares the life which he has through love to be the truly human life, corresponding to the idea of man, i.e., of the species. The individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite; because in it the self-consciousness of the individuality is the mysterious self-consciousness of the perfection of the race. But this result of love is produced by friendship also, at least where it is intense, where it is a religion as it was with the ancients. Friends compensate for each other; friendship is a mean,. of virtue, and more: it is itself virtue, dependent however on participation. Friendship can only exist between the virtuous, as the ancients said. But it cannot be based on perfect similarity; on the contrary, it requires diversity, for friendship rests on a desire for self-completion. One friend obtains through the other what he does not himself possess. The virtues of the one atone for the failings of the other.

Friend justifies friend before God. However faulty a man may be, it is a proof that there is a germ of good in him if he has worthy men for his friends. If I cannot be myself perfect, I yet at least love virtue, perfection in others. If therefore I am called to account for any sins, weaknesses, and faults, I interpose as advocates, as mediators, the virtues of my friend. How barbarous, how unreasonable would it be to condemn me for sins which I doubtless have committed, but which I have myself condemned in loving my friends. who are free from these sins!

But if friendship and love, which themselves are only subjective realizations of the species, make out of singly imperfect beings an at least relatively perfect whole, how much more do the sins and failings of individuals vanish in the species itself, which has its adequate existence only in the sum total of mankind, and is therefore only an object of reason! Hence the lamentation over sin is found only where the human individual regards himself in his individuality as a perfect, complete being not needing others for the realization of the species, of the perfect man; where instead of the consciousness of the species has been substituted the exclusive self-consciousness of the individual; where the individual does not recognize himself as a part of mankind, but identifies himself with the species, and for this reason makes his own sins, limits and weaknesses, the sins, limits, and weaknesses of mankind in general. Nevertheless man cannot lose the consciousness of the species, for his self-consciousness is essentially united to his consciousness of another than himself. Where therefore the species is not an object to him as. a species, it will be an object to him as God. He supplies the absence of the idea of the species by the idea of God, as the being, who is free from the limits and wants which oppress the individual, and, in his opinion (since he identifies the species with the individual), the species itself. But this perfect being, free from the limits of the individual, is nothing else than the species, which reveals the infinitude of its nature in this, that it is realized in infinitely numerous and various individuals.
[/quote]

To me this is a great interpretation of God. It's a prosier version of Blake's notion. F saw that language networked us all intensely, that we are really only what we are as individuals in a wider context. The individual is an abstraction, we might say, even if he has to die his own death.

On the other side of Heideggarian angst (which is real) is the sense that what dies is not the essence. This essence is distributed. A node in the neural network of selves goes dark. Others light up. Each node is a snowflake, which keeps things fresh. But the snowflake particularity is also replaced --with an also never-before-seen and never-to-be-seen-again particularity. I love Feuerbach's sense of the earth, of the planet we were made for --apparently by chance, but that is beside the point. He is also quite a generous critic of religion. He sees what is pre-theoretically or pre-critically true in it.

Quoting macrosoft

In a friendly spirit, I must say that computers don't really do math.

To do math is to calculate, measure or follow a set of rules; all of which computers can do. Of course creative math, invention and discovery, is something computers cannot do; as i already acknowledged; so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.

Also, I don't see why you needed to qualify with 'in a friendly spirit"; why would there be, or need to be, any unfriendliness at work in such discussions? Disagreement and critical questioning does not equal unfriendliness in my view: I have nothing to defend in any of this, it's of no crucial import to me one way or the other; I'm just presenting my thoughts on what you seems to be proposing.

Quoting Janus

To do math is to calculate, measure or follow a set of rules;

Well, I'll drop it if you want. But I'm a mathematician, and that's not what I do. Those who just use math might fit that description, but to do math is to create those rules along with the entities they rule. As I mentioned, I invented some crypto systems that were works of art to me. AFIK, no one had ever contemplated exactly those structures, which were machines designed with two constraints --that they work and that they be elegant. That they worked was more like the canvas. I chose to write a sonnet, let's say. Utility wasn't the goal, only a constraint of the genre, to focus creativity.

Quoting Janus

Also, I don't see why you needed to qualify with 'in a friendly spirit"; why would there be, or need to be, any unfriendliness at work in such discussions? Disagreement and critical questioning does not equal unfriendliness in my view: I have nothing to defend in any of this, it's of no crucial import to me one way or the other; I'm just presenting my thoughts on what you seems to be proposing.

Why so touchy about a courtesy? I'm not really trying to hold you to an answer there.

Quoting macrosoft

But I'm a mathematician, and that's not what I do.

Sure, but I've already acknowledged several times that the creative side of math (probably) cannot be done by machines; I think this is so because that would involve intuitively grasping context.

Quoting macrosoft

Why so touchy about a courtesy?

There is no "touchiness", that would seem to be your projection. In fact I felt that the "friendly" qualification ( which seemed unnecessary to me) itself suggested that for you there is a 'touchiness', perhaps in yourself and/or perhaps projectively imputed to me, and that's why I commented on it to allay any such fears. Anyway, i think we can safely move on from that, as it's not important.

You seem to have been objecting that my distinction between determinate (mathematical, scientific) knowing and indeterminate (poetic or aesthetic) knowing is inapposite and yet you have provided no argument for that assessment. Instead you have repeatedly made points against what I have not been saying. (And again, just to preempt any further misunderstanding of what I have been saying; I am not claiming that science or math do not also involve the more indeterminate or poetic kind of knowing).

Check out the proto-Heidegger in the first passage!
[quote=Feuerbach]
The philosophy of the modern era was in search of something immediately certain. Hence, it rejected the baseless thought of the Scholastics and grounded philosophy on self-consciousness. That is, it posited the thinking being, the ego, the self-conscious mind in place of the merely conceived being or in place of God, the highest and ultimate being of all Scholastic philosophy; for a being who thinks is infinitely closer to a thinking being, infinitely more actual and certain than a being who is only conceived. Doubtful is the existence of God, doubtful is in fact anything I could think of; but indubitable is that I am, I who think and doubt. Yet this self-consciousness in modern philosophy is again something that is only conceived, only mediated through abstraction, and hence something that can be doubted. Indubitable and immediately certain is only that which is the object of the senses, of perception and feeling.

The sensuous is not the immediate in the sense of speculative philosophy; i.e., in the sense in which it is the profane, the readily obvious, the thoughtless, the self-evident. According to speculative philosophy the immediate sensuous perception comes later than conception and fantasy. Man's first conception is itself only a conception based on imagination and fantasy. The task of philosophy and science consists, therefore, not in turning away from sensuous – i.e., real things – but in turning towards them – not in transforming objects into thoughts and ideas, but in making visible – i.e., objective – what is invisible to common eyes.

An object, i.e., a real object, is given to me only if a being is given to me in a way that it affects me, only if my own activity – when I proceed from the standpoint of thought – experiences the activity of another being as a limit or boundary to itself. The concept of the object is originally nothing else but the concept of another I – everything appears to man in childhood as a freely and arbitrarily acting being – which means that in principle the concept of the object is mediated through the, concept of You, the objective ego. To use the language of Fichte, an object or an alter ego is given not to the ego, but to the non-ego in me; for only where I am transformed from an ego into a You – that is, where I am passive – does the idea of an activity existing outside myself, the idea of objectivity, really originate. But it is only through the senses that the ego is also non-ego.

Only in feeling and love has the demonstrative this – this person, this thing, that is, the particular – absolute value; only then is the finite infinite. In this and this alone does the infinite depth, divinity, and truth of love consist. In love alone resides the truth and reality of the God who counts the hairs on your head. The Christian God himself is only an abstraction from human love and an image of it.

The old philosophy had its point of departure in the proposition: I am an abstract, a merely thinking being to which the body does not belong. The new philosophy proceeds from the principle: I am a real and sensuous being. Indeed, the whole of my body is my ego, my being itself. The old philosopher, therefore, thought in a constant contradiction to and conflict with the senses in order to avoid sensuous conceptions, or in order not to pollute abstract concepts.
[/quote]

Quoting Janus

And again, just to preempt any further misunderstanding of what I have been saying; I am not claiming that science or math do not also involve the more indeterminate kind of poetic knowing).

The crux is perhaps that I regard metaphor/analogy to be the cutting edge of creation. The essence of math is that creation. The rest comes after, like ash from a flame. I have provided examples and suggested books that inform my view along with personal experience.

At this point, I think we should probably drop this particular issue. I'd rather talk about those Feuerbach quotes (for instance.)

Quoting macrosoft

It seems that there may be a bit of indirect perception bubbling forth... that is to conflate physiological sensory perception and thought/belief by virtue of talking about perception as if it is informed by language.
— creativesoul

Is there a strict boundary? I'm not so sure there is.

I think there is. I also think that that is not something that we decide. Rather, it is something that we discover to be the case as a result of getting thought/belief right to begin with. It's a consequential bit of knowledge stemming from an adequate understanding of what thought/belief is.

Here's something to consider regarding perception that is informed by language...

Language less creatures have physiological sensory perception. They have no language. If perception is informed by language, then either there is more than one 'kind' or language-less creatures are incapable of perception. The latter is obviously false. So, we're faced to bear the burden of the former...

What do all examples of perception have in common such that we're not equivocating when we use the term to describe our perceptions as well as language-less creatures' perceptions?

I would argue that to use the term "perception" as a means to talk about highly complex linguistically informed thought/belief is prima facie evidence of not getting thought/belief right to begin with.

Given semantic holism as I understand, none of our supposed-to-be explicit categories cut very sharply...

What does the many facets of the attribution of meaning(semantic holism) have to do with whether or not we can get things that exist in their entirety prior to our awareness of them right or wrong?

There's been much talk in this thread about pre-conceptual existence(Umwelt???), as though it is an unthinking 'kind' and/or 'mode' of existence. Someone earlier even said as much... 'unthinking'...

I think that that notion stems from conflating thinking about thought/belief with thought/belief. The latter does not always require the former. The former always requires the latter.

What about pre-conceptual thought/belief?

Quoting macrosoft

There is also the dictionary problem. One word is defined in terms of others. And these others are still defined in terms of others. All a dictionary can do is aid someone who is already partially 'inside' a language. Correct usage is tested against how people treat us in response. There is no obvious connection to pure meaning. I do not in the least doubt the consciousness of meaning, but I think it is more of a flow with feedback and projection. The meaning is like electrons running through a string of words as their wire. Individual words just stared at do have some meaning. Or we can quickly fish for some by coming up with typical uses. But every serious thinking is immensely complex in the way that meaning rushes through it with memory and expectation. The very complexity involved in our background linguistic know-how outstrips the complexity of the thoughts so delivered. Explicit systems are sad little shadows of that which makes them possible in terms of sophistication.

I speculate that our phonetic alphabet and the spaces between words are misleading. Our dominant visual sense (which takes static objects as its ideal object) encourages us to 'visualize' thinking and meaning, despite their more plausible connection to the temporality of music/hearing.

Another motive that holds atomic meaning fast (as a default semi-automatic approach to be dismantled) is the common project of making a knock-down argument --often for the projection of authority. We need atomic meaning, as stable as possible, to do 'math' with words and build explicit metaphysical/epistemological systems. So our fear of groundlessness (or of just relying on the inexplicit ground we started with) also encourages an ignorance of a semantic holism that might otherwise be obvious.

Again, here I think that I agree wholeheartedly that the attribution of meaning is largely mischaracterized and misunderstood by many of not most philosophers. I think you said earlier that all of them have something to add(to our understanding?) but none of them got it right.

Quoting macrosoft

Fascinating. Does time get into the picture here?

Time develops. And its character is thermodynamic. So time is not a background dimension but a measure of a sum of changes.

In the beginning, there is no organised passage of time because there is no accumulating register of changes. Nothing is being fixed in the cosmic memory. There is just a yawning vagueness, a sea of fluctuation that is neither coming or going. It is neither a timeless eternity or some kind of eternal present as it is less than either of those contrasting possibilities.

If this sounds poetic, well of course. But it is also what physics rather predicts. If you wind the world we know back to the first Planck scale instant of the Big Bang, then you arrive at a limit state that is so hot and dense that it dissolves into a quantum foam of blackholes and wormholes. Spacetime is so heavy it collapses at every point into pure gravity fluctuations. Time curls into tiny balls along with space so that the fluctuations are temporal wormholes. Causality breaks down as endings can't be distinguished from beginnings.

So we have a timeless jostle. Then the symmetry of that breaks. We don't know how exactly, but we know that it does and that the symmetry breaking has to take the one available Standard Model pattern. A history can begin in which there is a before (the time when the scale factor was smaller and hotter) and an after (the time when the scale factor will be larger and colder - all the way to the complementary limit defined by the entropic cosmic heat death).

So time has a thermal direction. Or thermo-spatial direction if you include both the cooling and the spreading. And change can be measured against that directional backdrop. Where you are right now has a number, a clock, as it is simply the general average cosmic energy density - the temperature of the cosmic background radiation (CMB).

At the Heat Death, time runs all the way down to the point where change ends. You still have a faint rustle of quantum fluctuations - the black body photons emitted by the cosmic event horizons - however the temperature of that is as close to absolute zero as physically possible. There is no longer any possibility of a meaningful change, either locally or globally.

Quoting macrosoft

An inexplicit ground is a direct threat to the project of the perfect system, which would like to be its own explicit ground. Uncomfortably, the operating system is quietly functioning, out of reach for the most part, big and soft (hence 'macrosoft'.)

This is most agreeable...

An inexplicit ground... I've been wondering for quite some time now how it is that so many people think/believe that well-grounded thought/belief requires the thinking/believing creature to be able to provide those grounds...

That's absurd given the evolution of thought/belief.

It is to conflate what being well-grounded takes with being able to talk about one's own thought/belief takes. Again, another consequence of neglecting the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.

Quoting macrosoft

I am down with chance being fundamental. Is there chance without time?

I missed this. Chance would also evolve in character as part of the growth of Cosmic regularity.

So in the beginning, chance has some really wild and violent form. The initial conditions - a Peircean firstness or vagueness, today's quantum foam - are rather absolute chance in being fluctuations without limits. No constraints yet act. And so that defies our ordinary notions of chance where constraints exist to make the randomness comprehensible.

If we talk about chance in the usual sense, we mean put 9 red balls and 1 black ball in a bag. What are the odds of pulling a black ball out? We are talking of an atomistic system in which there are already a set of comparable components confined to the same shared spacetime. That comes way later in the cosmic tale. In the beginning, there is neither vacuum nor particles as yet. The distinction doesn't even apply as there are no gaps between things, and not things for there to be gaps. It's a vanilla bath of radiation hosting every possible particle fluctuation mode.

But as the Big Bang cools~expands, you get things condensing out and getting lumpy. Mass and energy decouple. Chance now appears on the stage in a more definite way as there are particles weaving independent histories. It means something that one hits another, or instead misses. There are events that fix the past as a memory. A pattern of accidents can accumulate to shape what can happen as a further concrete step of the story.

Someone just took out the black ball. The chances of taking out a second have just dropped to zero forever now. Chance has taken on its familiar constrained complexion.

So chance may be fundamental. But also it evolves to arrive at its presently understood character. A Peircean metaphysics really pulls out the rug from under what we think we know. However it is the metaphysics making the best sense of modern cosmology.

Reply to macrosoft

There's been a bit of back and forth between participants regarding whether or not metaphor ought be valued and how/why and/or in what way... A bit of loose comparison between the analytic and continental views(pertaining to methodological approach with particular attention to how it pertains to "meaning")...

I find that when one knows what they're talking about they can speak clearly about it. Speaking clearly requires consistent language use. One dominant trend in philosophy proper was to clearly define one's terms. That trend is indispensable. It is absolutely necessary for reading comprehension... intelligibility???

Problems arise when we (mis)conceive of that which exists in it's entirety prior to our awareness of it's existence. Non-linguistic thought/belief is one such thing.

Now, here the critic may argue that the terms "thought" and "belief" are invented and/or created by us, and thus as a result there is no way for us to have gotten them wrong for what those terms mean is determined solely by virtue of how they're used by us.

That is irrelevant to the point being made. Allow me to invoke a far less controversial thing to talk about: This is Mt. Everest. We can say things about it's elemental constitution that are wrong. We can think/believe that it is existentially dependent upon things that it is not. We can think/believe that it is not existentially dependent upon things that it is. The reason for that is obvious. It exists in it's entirety prior to our naming it.

I would further argue that thought/belief is no different in that respect.

That is not to say that all thought/belief exists in it's entirety prior to our usage of "thought" and "belief"...

Rather, it is to say that some does. All thought/belief have the same set of basic elemental constituents.

The critics point applies here when we consider what method of approach could lead us to such knowledge. We have to start at the conventional notions, all the ways we use the terms "thought" and "belief". We have to discover, determine, and/or otherwise clearly establish that they share the same set of basic elemental constituents. Then we have to consider this set of basic elemental constituents in a different light.

Can we sensibly say that non-linguistic thought/belief consist of them as well? If not, then we surely have no good reason to call both sets of thought/belief by the same name.

Quoting creativesoul

Again, here I think that I agree wholeheartedly that the attribution of meaning is largely mischaracterized and misunderstood by many of not most philosophers. I think you said earlier that all of them have something to add(to our understanding?) but none of them got it right.

It's nice that someone else sees where I'm coming from on this issue. Yes, I think explicit accounts tend to emphasize some aspect in a useful way. But the explicit accounts get entangled, hence the endless arguments between those who assume an explicit account is possible.

I'm suggesting something like a pre-human 'bottom' of our mind/language. Some things are just so automatic that we live rather than see them. With difficultly we can get a vague sense of them, by looking at certain problems in attempts at explicit accounts.

[quote=Wittgenstein]
Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc.---they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.

Does a child believe that milk exists?

Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical things comes very late or very early?
[/quote]

Quoting apokrisis

Time curls into tiny balls along with space so that the fluctuations are temporal wormholes.

For me there is a tension between what I call physics time and meaning time. Meaning time is the time of intelligibility, the time it takes to read this sentence. My question is whether spatialized time can really replace meaning time. This is theme in Heidegger, the idea that clock time (radicalized in physics) is derivative of a more fundamental time (ultimately being or existence itself, with the thrown-open space of interpretation or embedded signs as 'time.')

Clearly we have and use physics time. The relationship seems complicated.

Quoting macrosoft

Again, here I think that I agree wholeheartedly that the attribution of meaning is largely mischaracterized and misunderstood by many of not most philosophers. I think you said earlier that all of them have something to add(to our understanding?) but none of them got it right.
— creativesoul

It's nice that someone else sees where I'm coming from on this issue. Yes, I think explicit accounts tend to emphasize some aspect in a useful way. But the explicit accounts get entangled, hence the endless arguments between those who assume an explicit account is possible.

I would say that no such entanglement is inevitable. It's not fait accompli. I would also point out that it quite simply does not follow from the fact that different schools in philosophy proper hold quite different - seemingly incommensurate - explicit accounts of meaning that the possibility of arriving at an explicit account that gets it right is somehow not possible...

Our agreement is strong when it comes to the fact that we've not quite gotten it right yet...

Seems we diverge from that point.

Quoting creativesoul

I find that when one knows what they're talking about they can speak clearly about it. Speaking clearly requires consistent language use. One dominant trend in philosophy proper was to clearly define one's terms. That trend is indispensable. It is absolutely necessary for reading comprehension.

This is of course a good idea, but one must already be in a language to begin with. Similarly I think one has to feel one's way into another personality. While there's no truly private language. I also think the perfectly public language is an abstraction. A second concern is that even if we could define our terms perfectly, such a concern overlooks the way words join together. Can I define every relation between every word? The assumption might be that definition takes care of this, but I'm not so sure. If I can use words differently in the first place, why can I not understand their combination differently?

Quoting creativesoul

I would say that no such entanglement is inevitable. It's not fait accompli. I would also point out that it quite simply does not follow from the fact that different schools in philosophy proper hold quite different - seemingly incommensurate - explicit accounts of meaning that there is no such account possible...

I think our main point of misunderstanding is that maybe I'm more on the semantic holist side. I think explicit accounts need to use the same word in a different context, hence the problem. Each account builds up its own mini-language.

Quoting apokrisis

There are events that fix the past as a memory. A pattern of accidents can accumulate to shape what can happen as a further concrete step of the story.

I like this. It's to some degree a random walk and in other ways dialectical necessity.

Quoting creativesoul

We have to discover, determine, and/or otherwise clearly establish that they share the same set of basic elemental constituents. Then we have to consider this set of basic elemental constituents in a different light.

For me these would be part of that [s]knowledge[/s] touched on in On Certainty.

[quote= Wittgenstein]
I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something (I did not say 'can trust something').

It is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there---like our life.
[/quote]

Quoting macrosoft

Meaning time is the time of intelligibility, the time it takes to read this sentence.

Physics would have its own version in the holographic and lightcone structure of the Universe. It takes time to arrive at a state of coherence across a spatial interval. If the sun dematerialised right now, it would take about eight minutes to discover that its light and gravity had gone.

So there is a baked in causal issue that defines cogency. If something happens way over there, it takes a time for it to have any effect over here. It takes time to observe a change or read that difference.

Quoting apokrisis

Physics would have its own version in the holographic and lightcone structure of the Universe. It takes time to arrive at a state of coherence across a spatial interval. If the sun dematerialised right now, it would take about eight minutes to discover that its light and gravity had gone.

So there is a baked in causal issue that defines cogency. If something happens way over there, it takes a time for it to have any effect over here. It takes time to observe a change or read that difference.

Right. But I'm suggesting a strange thing, that physics time is (at least for human cognition) derivative from a more basic experience of time. Heidegger used 'time' as a metaphor for what he meant at one point, but I think what is aimed at is something like existence itself, understood not as a static being but as the space in which beings appear. For human cognition, this space is structured by care, so that we act now in terms of a projected future.

Quoting macrosoft

It's to some degree a random walk and in other ways dialectical necessity.

Statistics always expresses patterns. And really, there are only two statistical patterns ruling nature. Either Gaussian - the single-scale bell curve kind - or fractal, the log/log scalefree kind that is in fact more primal because it has one fewer linear constraints.

A random walk expresses fractal intermittency. It resembles nature - a nature understood in dissipative process terms - far more accurately.

Quoting apokrisis

Statistics always expresses patterns. And really, there are only two statistical patterns ruling nature. Either Gaussian - the single-scale bell curve kind - or fractal, the log/log scalefree kind that is in fact more primal because it has one fewer linear constraints.

A random walk expresses fractal intermittency. It resembles nature - a nature understood in dissipative process terms - far more accurately.

That accords with what I non-expertly know. Those are indeed mighty patterns.

Quoting macrosoft

I think our main point of misunderstanding is that maybe I'm more on the semantic holist side. I think explicit accounts need to use the same word in a different context, hence the problem. Each account builds up its own mini-language

Using the same word in a different context is to show all the different ways the term is used. An account of the accounts.

What good is that if this account of the accounts is incapable of showing what they all have in common that makes them what they are... an example of how meaning is attributed?

I would think that having this capability is the only standard to strive for. Otherwise, we're just entrenched in the same ole endless debates...



Quoting macrosoft

I'm suggesting something like a pre-human 'bottom' of our mind/language. Some things are just so automatic that we live rather than see them. With difficultly we can get a vague sense of them, by looking at certain problems in attempts at explicit accounts.

Yes. Where else is there to look?

I would strongly argue that all mind/language requires thought/belief, but not all thought/belief requires mind/language(unless one equates mind with thought/belief, and I wouldn't object).



Quoting macrosoft

This is of course a good idea, but one must already be in a language to begin with. Similarly I think one has to feel one's way into another personality. While there's no truly private language. I also think the perfectly public language is an abstraction. A second concern is that even if we could define our terms perfectly, such a concern overlooks the way words join together. Can I define every relation between every word? The assumption might be that definition takes care of this, but I'm not so sure. If I can use words differently in the first place, why can I not understand their combination differently?

Not sure if this line of consideration is helpful, although there is much to agree with.



"Hammer" is name. Hammering is an experience. We need not know the name to have the experience. Hammering with a hammer is existentially dependent upon language, for one cannot be hammering with a hammer without a hammer and hammers are existentially dependent upon language, although hammering with something other than a hammer is not.

Quoting macrosoft

We have to discover, determine, and/or otherwise clearly establish that they share the same set of basic elemental constituents. Then we have to consider this set of basic elemental constituents in a different light.
— creativesoul

For me these would be part of that knowledge touched on in On Certainty.

Witt would never agree that all meaning has the same basic elemental constituency, would he???

His bit about the fact that there is no commonality that makes all games what they are aside from the fact that we call them that seems to denounce the very idea. Although he was arguing against "essence" I think.

Quoting creativesoul

I would strongly argue that all mind/language requires thought/belief, but not all thought/belief requires mind/language(unless one equates mind with thought/belief, and I wouldn't object).

I think we agree on this point. What surprises me is that you think we can capture this animal pre-thinking in an explicit account. I think it's too pre-lingual to drag into the light. I have the sense that the operating system we use to do so is just staggeringly complex and yet incredibly smooth and elusive. We look through it like clean glass or as a fish through water. An explicit account is like an old floppy disk trying to store a download of the internet. To be fair, our minds are great at getting basic, crucial patterns. So our major accounts presumably all get a basic thing right. I'm still working this idea out, to be sure.

I want to say that the quest is like trying to put walking into words. I believe we discussed the phenomenon of 'true for us.' People debate theories of truth in the light of this 'blind' [s]assumption[/s] that something like true-for-us is already there. Keeping with my convention, I'll call this [s]truth.[/s]

Quoting macrosoft

But I'm suggesting a strange thing, that physics time is (at least for human cognition) derivative from a more basic experience of time.

But how do we experience time? I mean I understand the neuroscience of it. But I'm not getting how you think we experience it in any pre-theoretical sense. How do you think an animal "experiences time"?

Quoting apokrisis

But how do we experience time? I mean I understand the neuroscience of it. But I'm not getting how you think we experience it in any pre-theoretical sense. How do you think an animal "experiences time"?

I don't know about (other) animals. But we can also call it reading time. It doesn't have to be so linguistic, but that was how I began to think about it. It's the way, right now, just look, that (with memory) meaning like an electric current through a sentence flows, bidirectionally. We can measure our reading with a clock, but why is the meaning time inside clock time and not the other way around? What is it to look at the clock and say Now? 'The sun is up. Now is time to drive the cattle out.' Clock time is everyone's time. Clock time separates the me-self and the we-self. Clocks allow for a public event to weld narratives and actions together.

This is not to deny 'objective time,' of course, but to point out a phenomenon. Dasein is the 'there' is the space-time through which this meaning drags and rushes. Interpretation happens in this space, hence hermeneutical ontology/phenomenology.

Quoting macrosoft

A second concern is that even if we could define our terms perfectly, such a concern overlooks the way words join together. Can I define every relation between every word? The assumption might be that definition takes care of this, but I'm not so sure. If I can use words differently in the first place, why can I not understand their combination differently?

Strong agreement here as well...

Quoting macrosoft

I would strongly argue that all mind/language requires thought/belief, but not all thought/belief requires mind/language(unless one equates mind with thought/belief, and I wouldn't object).
— creativesoul

I think we agree on this point. What surprises me is that you think we can capture this animal pre-thinking in an explicit account. I think it's too pre-lingual to drag into the light. I have the sense that the operating system we use to do so is just staggering complex and yet incredibly smooth and elusive. We look through it like clean glass or as a fish through water.

I want to say that the quest is like trying to put walking into words. I believe we discussed the phenomenon of 'true for us.' People debate theories of truth in the light of this 'blind' assumption that something like true-for-us is already there.

Yeah, I kinda got the feeling that you had such a position...

What does being pre-lingual have to do with our knowledge of it, or rather the capability and/or possibility of us to acquire knowledge of that which is pre-lingual?

Mt. Everest is pre-lingual.

What rule and/or law is there that stops us from acquiring knowledge of pre-lingual thought/belief?

Quoting creativesoul

Witt would never agree that all meaning has the same basic elemental constituency, would he???

I don't know, but it sure seems like he is doing a version of my knowledge (or really his) in his OC. At some points if not in others. Quoting creativesoul

What does being pre-lingual have to do with our knowledge of it, or rather the capability and/or possibility of us to acquire knowledge of that which is pre-lingual?

I think we can get some knowledge of it, but we are talking about the most complicated object in the known universe. Or rather it is talking about itself.

Quoting creativesoul

Mt. Everest is pre-lingual.

Agree. But we don't know everything about that. Knowledge about Everest involves knowledge about everything else, including dark matter and our own perception and cognition.

Quoting creativesoul

Yeah, I kinda got the feeling that you had such a position...

Indeed. Though I'm still trying to find the words for it. I'd say think of a conversation with a lover or a friend. Think of those two faces communicating and the complex play of meaning, the flexibility. There's no real line between thought and action, but only between paradigmatic 'bright' thoughts and paradigmatic unsubtle actions. Is voice tone separable? Yes, we can do without faces even, but that is a learned skill. Even as I type to you I have the sense of a person who shares a world with me who listens as I type-speak in my mind.

Or I like to think of my cat in her living complexity. I can analyze this or that sub-system, but her living complexity is something else. I am not saying to stop looking for better accounts. I don't think we can help it. We just naturally synthesize accounts. And even we are part of this with our meta-accounts.

Quoting macrosoft

I think we can get some knowledge of it, but we are talking about the most complicated object in the known universe. Or rather it is talking about itself.

So, we agree that we can get some knowledge of pre-lingual thought/belief. That's good. Is there any good reason to hold that we cannot acquire knowledge of what all thought/belief consist in/of?

That certainly does not require omniscience.

Quoting creativesoul

Strong agreement here as well...

I'm glad you agree about the relations between words just becoming a second issue after defining the 'atoms.' I don't know if you'd agree to this: an entire form of life as the 'unit' of meaning. Of course we can stare at individual words, but I think this is like the parts of a dead cat --no longer really the cat we want.

Quoting creativesoul

So, we agree that we can get some knowledge of pre-lingual thought/belief. That's good. Is there any good reason to hold that we cannot acquire knowledge of what all thought/belief consist in/of?

That certainly does not require omniscience.

What comes to my mind is 'nothing is hidden.' We already live and experience these phenomena. Beyond that we can articulate them better with superior formal indications. IMV, we are always already in the water we usually see right through. But I am working from a first-person perspective (brain stuff is another issue entirely).

Quoting macrosoft

Indeed. Though I'm still trying to find the words for it. I'd say think of a conversation with a lover or a friend. Think of those two faces communicating and the complex play of meaning, the flexibility.

Or I like to think of my cat in her living complexity. I can analyze this or that sub-system, but her living complexity is something else. I am not saying to stop looking for better accounts. I don't think we can help. We just naturally synthesize accounts. And even we are part of this with our meta-accounts.

Nah. Don't give up on the idea of getting it right yet.

Draw and maintain the aforementioned distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. Use the earlier method I presented...

Take it for spin. I'll be here.

The first example was one that is ripe with very complex language use, countless connections...

The second seemed to wave the white flag before it got started...

Quoting macrosoft

So, we agree that we can get some knowledge of pre-lingual thought/belief. That's good. Is there any good reason to hold that we cannot acquire knowledge of what all thought/belief consist in/of?

That certainly does not require omniscience.
— creativesoul

What comes to my mind is 'nothing is hidden.' We already live and experience these phenomena. Beyond that we can articulate them better with superior formal indications.

Not following this...

:worry:

Reply to creativesoul
I also think I am not grokking one of your main points.

Which one? Could you quote me? I'll gladly elucidate wherever necessary as best I can.

I'm thinking of basic structures of consciousness. The inarticulate sense of a shared world with others, the animal faith we live by when we say what is-for-us. So 'truth is correspondence' has to 'correspond' somehow to 'truth' in this shared space, for example. But the point is that the person touting truth-as-correspondence does so from a deeper, vaguer sense of truth that makes the assertion meaningful as an assertion--the sense that inspires explicit truth-as-correspondence.. They are trying to do something like point at pure presence. 'Look, here, in our shared space. It's the idea of truth, visible as correspondence.' What's the problem, then? Am I not talking about correspondence in the space? True, but is this the space of their explicit theory?

What is this space in which this shared idea of truth can be pointed at? This space makes [s]truth[/s] possible. It's not the physical world in some simple way. Because people debate about whether this is a world, or whether it idea or stuff, etc. But again they point at the world as idea or the world as atoms 'within' this [s]world[/s] where [s]truth[/s] happens. It's as if our sociality and sense of being linked outstrips our most radical metaphysical theses, all of which suppose others for whom these theses can be [s]true.[/s]

Maybe I thought (and still think?) explicitness must fail do to the elusiveness of this [s]world.[/s] I think this is close to Heidegger's being-in-the-world-with-others, a basic structure that we can't get behind, the wheels and axle of intelligibility.

Reply to creativesoul Reply to creativesoul
one sec

Quoting creativesoul

The critics point applies here when we consider what method of approach could lead us to such knowledge. We have to start at the conventional notions, all the ways we use the terms "thought" and "belief". We have to discover, determine, and/or otherwise clearly establish that they share the same set of basic elemental constituents. Then we have to consider this set of basic elemental constituents in a different light.

Can you put this in another way?

Sure...

Gimme a minute or two, I'm making some Peet's decaf!

:wink:

The critics point regarding the emphasis upon the fact that how we use the terms is an influencing factor upon meaning applies here when we consider what method of approach could lead us to such knowledge(of pre-lingual thought/belief). We have to start at the conventional notions, all the ways we use the terms "thought" and "belief". We have to discover, determine, and/or otherwise clearly establish that they share the same set of basic elemental constituents. Then we have to consider this set of basic elemental constituents in a different light.

Can we sensibly say that non-linguistic thought/belief consist of them as well? If not, then we surely have no good reason to call both sets of thought/belief by the same name.

We're discussing whether or not it is possible to acquire knowledge of pre-lingual thought/belief. I suggested a method of approach earlier. That method begins by virtue of looking at all the different uses of the terms "thought" and "belief" in an attempt at discerning whether or not they share some set of common denominators that make them what they are.

That would be the first step.

A reminder...

The goal is to discover and/or establish pre-lingual thought/belief.

So, whatever we discover that all linguistic thought/belief consists in/of, we must be able to confidently, intelligibly, and sensibly say that those same elemental constituents make up and/or are also adequate for pre-lingual thought/belief.

That is the strongest justificatory ground for calling them all(these pre-lingual mental ongoings) by the same name... "thought" and "belief"...

Consisting of language or shared meaning is not acceptable, for pre-lingual thought/belief if there is such a thing, cannot consist of either.

Propositions?

Not on my view. Propositions are existentially dependent upon language.

Quoting creativesoul

That method begins by virtue of looking at all the different uses of the terms "thought" and "belief" in an attempt at discerning whether or not they share some set of common denominators that make them what they are.

For me all the different uses would be (potentially) infinite. Context dominates. Maybe you can just make your case and I'll just really open my mind.

Quoting creativesoul

Consisting of language or shared meaning is not acceptable, for pre-lingual thought/belief if there is such a thing, cannot consist of either.

Propositions?

Not on my view. Propositions are existentially dependent upon language

I'm not convinced there's a sharp line between language and non-language. For instances: a peace sign, a wink, a salute. Are these that different from 'hi' or 'uh' or 'hmmm'?

I wonder if you are pointing at thought independent of language/words?

I say the meaning-space I have in mind includes words and gestures, really everything that is interpret-able in terms of either other thoughts or other gestures or actions. The world, I guess, but the world as phenomenon or lifeworld.

All attribution of meaning is existentially dependent upon something to become sign/symbol, something to become significant/symbolized, and a creature capable of drawing a correlation between different things.



All correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content(regardless of subsequent later qualifications).



All utterance of "thought" and "belief" is predication. All statements of thought/belief is predication. All predication is existentially dependent upon a plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between different things. All use of "thought" and "belief" is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things.

Quoting macrosoft

I'm not convinced there's a sharp line between language and non-language. For instances: a peace sign, a wink, a salute. Are these that different from 'hi' or 'uh' or 'hmmm'?

Shared meaning.

A plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between (the same or similar enough)different things.

That is the only line, and it's razor sharp.

Quoting creativesoul

All utterance of "thought" and "belief" is predication. All statements of thought/belief is predication. All predication is existentially dependent upon a plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between different things. All use of "thought" and "belief" is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things.

Oh, well I can relate to this. This predication is something like being. Existence of things is presupposed. And thinking is something like their meaningful presence or making them present, pointing at them in the space. Don't know if that's what you mean, but I can relate it to my theory. Objects in the shared space are referred to, connected in relationships. Relationships themselves are therefore pointed at as a kind of ideal public object (a shared meaning).

Quoting creativesoul

Shared meaning.

A plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between (the same or similar enough)different things.

That is the only line, and it's razor sharp.

In this context I see why you want it sharp. I think that's justified by your interest here in brightly-lit linguistic belief specifically. We might call sitting in a chair without thinking about it [s]belief[/s] in the chair. A wink is not a belief or an assertion of a thesis. So I withdraw that as relevant to a different issue.

If I am getting you, we were just focusing on different issues and yet with some kind of similar intent.

Do you not see the unveiling?

Reply to creativesoul

I tried to slip into your worldview a little, and I realized something important (to me anyway.)

Semantic holism becomes important only as sentences get either complex or appeal to abstractions. If we make simple assertions ('your coat is hanging up in the closet'), the context is so automatic that a particular coat in a particular closet appears. If we believe the speaker, we 'see' that coat just hanging there. We act on it as we would when going downstairs to get an apple from the counter where we last saw it. Thinking of this kind of communication would make the holist issue secondary at best. At this level of familiar purposes and familiar objects we are most clear.

On the other hand, I've been thinking about interpreting Nietzsche and Hegel, which is language at its most self-referential. The meanings and tones shift constantly and radically. In this case a line taken out of context is the limb of the dead cat that you didn't find convincing. Basically the holism I was talking about has been operating in this conversation. We are both trying to say strange things about saying things. We find something that sounds promising in what the other says. 'Wait a minute! I see that in the space.' And yet other words don't compute yet, don't feel right. So we prod one another with questions, elucidations, and subtle gestures of goodwill as a kind of lubricant against the natural friction of being challenged to interpret and not just see the coat in the closet--and maybe just the willingness to share the space so that we keep our eyes peeled and don't hide from the sharing. Slowly the other's total point or mini-language becomes intelligible as a whole. (And I hope this paragraph did exactly what it described in our case, filled in my view a little more.)

Quoting creativesoul

Do you not see the unveiling?

You tell me. Do you recognize your view in my words? I see the positing of objects and thier relationships in a shared space. Is it like that? I think I see what you mean.

Quoting creativesoul

All predication is existentially dependent upon a plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between different things.

If I read you correctly, this underlined part takes into account the vagueness I'm interested in. We just ignore a certain vagueness as unimportant. I mean we really ignore it. If we search out some final exact meaning, we can't give it. Images are at work on the level of ordinary objects. Named images. Philosophers, however, sometimes obsess over winning arguments to the neglect of such seeing the object under consideration in its vagueness. Instead of looking around in the space, they want a particular relation between real or abstract objects (relationships) to be the center of attention --a natural part of the desire to communicate that can backfire.

Quoting macrosoft

I tried to slip into your worldview a little, and I realized something important (to me anyway.)

Semantic holism becomes important only as sentences get either complex or appeal to abstractions.

So much the worse for it...

Sentences are existentially dependent upon written language. Written language:Spoken language. Spoken language:Pre-lingual thought/belief.

Pre-lingual thought/belief must be meaningful to the creature; capable of being so; and consist of correlations drawn between different things.

Quoting macrosoft

If I read you correctly, this underlined part takes into account the vagueness I'm interested in. We just ignore a certain vagueness as unimportant. If we search out some final exact meaning, we can't give it. Images are at work on the level of ordinary objects. Named images.

The content of correlation is sometimes easier to ascertain than others.

Do not conflate our report with what we're reporting upon. The latter is pre-lingual thought/belief and as such it is not existentially dependent upon the former.

That Feuerbach grasped this so directly still impresses me.

Feuerbach:But if friendship and love, which themselves are only subjective realizations of the species, make out of singly imperfect beings an at least relatively perfect whole, how much more do the sins and failings of individuals vanish in the species itself, which has its adequate existence only in the sum total of mankind, and is therefore only an object of reason! Hence the lamentation over sin is found only where the human individual regards himself in his individuality as a perfect, complete being not needing others for the realization of the species, of the perfect man; where instead of the consciousness of the species has been substituted the exclusive self-consciousness of the individual; where the individual does not recognize himself as a part of mankind, but identifies himself with the species, and for this reason makes his own sins, limits and weaknesses, the sins, limits, and weaknesses of mankind in general. Nevertheless man cannot lose the consciousness of the species, for his self-consciousness is essentially united to his consciousness of another than himself. Where therefore the species is not an object to him as. a species, it will be an object to him as God. He supplies the absence of the idea of the species by the idea of God, as the being, who is free from the limits and wants which oppress the individual, and, in his opinion (since he identifies the species with the individual), the species itself. But this perfect being, free from the limits of the individual, is nothing else than the species, which reveals the infinitude of its nature in this, that it is realized in infinitely numerous and various individuals.

I love Nietzsche, but it's hard to imagine Nietzsche writing this. Feuerbach writes from a very open and synthetic point of view. He doesn't see masters types and slaves types, even if such exist, because he's not interested in seeing himself as a master in this attunement. He had two brothers who were very successful in their fields, as impressive in his eyes as he was. Nietzsche was the lone boy genius in a family of women with a dead father. Who's the better writer? Who is more acute? Nietzsche, I think. But the passage above is wiser and more balanced than much of what Nietzsche writers.

In Nietzsche we see the 'wicked' potential of the mangod symbol, 'beyond good and evil,' a transgressive ecstasy. This is 'God' in a man, not 'God' in men. Given his genius, he had a lively enough inner monologue to sustain himself this way. He had a community in his chest and between his ears. One reads him with mixed feelings, though at times with a transgressive ecstasy that understands him.

Feuerbach, on the other hand, despite some blindspots and sentimentality here and there, has a fundamental grasp on the human as essentially social. He is a man with a wife and friends who understand him. He knows the space because he lives in the space, and not just in books and his own vast soul.
[quote=SEP]
Feuerbach, unlike Strauss, never accepted Hegel’s characterization of Christianity as the consummate religion is clear from the contents of a letter he sent to Hegel along with his dissertation in 1828.[7] In this letter he identified the historical task remaining in the wake of Hegel’s philosophical achievement to be the establishment of the “sole sovereignty of reason” in a “kingdom of the Idea” that would inaugurate a new spiritual dispensation. Foreshadowing arguments put forward in his first book, Feuerbach went on in this letter to emphasize the need for

the I, the self in general, which especially since the beginning of the Christian era, has ruled the world and has thought of itself as the only spirit that exists at all [to be] cast down from its royal throne. (GW v. 17, Briefwechsel I (1817–1839), 103–08)

This, he proposed, would require prevailing ways of thinking about time, death, this world and the beyond, individuality, personhood and God to be radically transformed within and beyond the walls of academia.
[/quote]

Quoting creativesoul

The content of correlation is sometimes easier to ascertain than others.

Ok. That makes sense.

Quoting creativesoul

Do not conflate our report with what we're reporting upon. The latter is pre-lingul thought/belief and as such it is not existentially dependent upon the former.

For me this gets tricky when we report on the nature of truth for instance. If I associate truth and correspondence, then what is that?

Quoting macrosoft

The content of correlation is sometimes easier to ascertain than others.
— creativesoul

Ok. That makes sense.

That is where perception does not require being informed by language. The content of a language less creature's thought/belief must be perceptible to a non linguistic creature. The content of correlation is perception. Perception is existentially dependent upon a plurality of things and a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things.

Quoting creativesoul

That is where perception does not require being informed by language

I am open to this idea. Indeed, it goes along with my suggestion that the language/world distinction is not sharp.It's also examined in Groundless Grounds (a sort of intelligent direct perception and not the usual concepts glued to sensation.)

This is more proto-Heidegger.
[quote=SEP]
Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception that reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).
[/quote]

Looking back, I think this encouraged my holism. Mortals come and go and participate in a form of life, sustaining it with a certain drift, with technology accelerating that drift perhaps. While we are 'literally' in individual bodies and brains, language has a 'feel' as described above. The self is mostly inherited from this form of life. Minor invention does happen, extending the form of life, opening this same invention for those not yet born. Other inventions can mostly die out, perhaps preserved in books for a potential resurrection.

Language/World???

Never considered it.

I could name a few dichotomies than are inherently useless for taking proper account of that which is both... and is thus... neither.

Quoting creativesoul

Language/World???

Never considered it.

I could name of a few different dichotomies than are inherently useless for taking proper account fo that which is both... and is thus... neither.

I mean bodily acts like perception and movement. I chose the wrong word. This goes along in some ways with the image of the coat in the closet. It's not terribly conceptual. It's gather as a unity. That's about it. Otherwise it's a visceral imagining, I think. And I suspect cats and dogs grasp objects like this.

Do you follow me?

Reply to creativesoul
Well, I think I see much of what you are saying. And I tend to agree and connect it to some things I've been thinking about.

Good!

One thing that might be clarified is the world this is happening in. Are you taking a metaphysical position? Or is this just the co-perceived world ? Not explicitly defined? What's the rest of your philosophy? For me Mount Everest is out there. It is real. But I don't think the 'external world' can get over-specified without running into old philosophical battles that miss the essence of it as co-perceived --whatever the hell its metaphysical interpretation. (Realism, idealism, etc., etc. I find these battles somewhat hopeless, both sides getting something right, etc.)

Remember that distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief?

Quoting creativesoul

Remember that distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief?

Put it in this context for me. (Please.)

That which exists in it's entirety prior to our awareness and/or knowledge of it's existence...

Quoting creativesoul

3.5k
That which exists in it's entirety prior to our awareness and/or knowledge of it's existence...

I do have concerns here. Is this necessary for the rest of your view? How does it function if unperceived? I'm concerned about the 'thing-in-itself' aporia.

I do agree that an external world is necessary (a feature it seems of human cognition.) But I think making its externality explicit opens it to attacks. Being-with-others and being-in seem primordial to me. Hence the external [s]world.[/s]

Quoting macrosoft

That which exists in it's entirety prior to our awareness and/or knowledge of it's existence...
— creativesoul

I do have concerns here. Is this necessary for the rest of your view? How does it function if unperceived? I'm concerned about the 'thing-in-itself' aporia.

Allow me to ease the concerns...

I'm not invoking Kant.

Mt. Everest...

Existed in it's entirety prior to our awareness and/or account of it.

Quoting creativesoul

Mt. Everest...

Existed in it's entirety prior to our awareness and/or account of it.

This is more like After Finitude perhaps? The arche-fossil?

Pre-lingual thought/belief must as well, otherwise there would be no such thing as thinking about one's own thought/belief.

This quote actually touches our conversation more directly. I am pretty amazed by how much sorta-Heidegger I'm finding in Feuerbach.
[quote=SEP]
In Thoughts Feuerbach further argues that the death of finite individuals is not merely an empirical fact, but also an a priori truth that follows from a proper understanding of the relations between the infinite and the finite, and between essence and existence. Nature is the totality of finite individuals existing in distinction from one another in time and space. Since to be a finite individual is not to be any number of other individuals from which one is distinct, non-being is not only the condition of individuals before they have begun to exist and after they have ceased to do so, but also a condition in which they participate by being the determinate entities that they are. Thus, being and non-being, or life and death, are equally constitutive of the existence of finite entities throughout the entire course of their generation and destruction.

Everything that exists has an essence that is distinct from its existence. Although individuals exist in time and space, their essences do not. Essence in general is timeless and unextended. Feuerbach nevertheless regards it as a kind of cognitive space in which individual essences are conceptually contained. Real or three-dimensional space, within which individual things and people exist in distinction from one another and in temporal succession, he thinks of as essence “in the determination of its being-outside-of-itself” (GTU 250/55). In his being-one, Feuerbach argues, God is everything-as-one, and is, as such, the universal essence in which all finite essences are “grounded, contained and conceived [begriffen]” (GTU 241/48).
[/quote]

Quoting creativesoul

Pre-lingual thought/belief must as well, otherwise there would be no such thing as thinking about one's own thought/belief.

For me this could be explained by a self-enriching space of meanings. Meanings are 'objects' in the space. Right now we are adding meanings to the space.

[quote=SEP]
The species has no existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and destruction of the particular individuals of which it is composed. Similarly, Spirit has no existence apart from the existence of individual self-conscious persons in whom Spirit becomes conscious of itself (i.e., constitutes itself as Spirit). Just as the life of a biological species only appears in the generation and destruction of individual organisms, so the life of Spirit involves the generation and destruction of these individual persons. Viewed in this light, the death of the individual is necessitated by the life of infinite Spirit.

Death is just the withdrawal and departure of your objectivity from your subjectivity, which is eternally living activity and therefore everlasting and immortal. (GTU 323/111)

Arguing thus, Feuerbach urged his readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their individual mortality so that in doing so they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with whom they were accustomed to identify themselves. They would then be in a position to recognize that, while “the shell of death is hard, its kernel is sweet” (GTU 205/20), and that the true belief in immortality is a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself. (GTU 357/137)

[/quote]

Wow. A flame leaps from melting candle to melting candle.

Not everything has something essential that makes it what it is aside from our calling it whatever we call it.

Quoting macrosoft

Pre-lingual thought/belief must as well, otherwise there would be no such thing as thinking about one's own thought/belief.
— creativesoul

For me this could be explained by a self-enriching space of meanings.

As if a space of meanings is the sort of thing that we say can enrich itself?

I say that that's not even close

Reply to creativesoul

For me the shared world is the 'life world,' the world as it is for us in our ordinary lives. This world includes sense perception but also the perception of relations between sense objects and between other relations. Our being-in-it is pre-theoretical. When people call it 'mind' or 'matter' or a (?), they still refer to this that they are in, merely slapping a name on it, connecting it to various relations that exists within it.

IMV, Everest is indeed there beyond what we might say about it, but only because it is there-as-there-for-us, not in a simple kind of idealism but in the inexplicitness of the [s]world.[/s]

Quoting creativesoul

As if a space of meanings is the sort of thing that we say can enrich itself?

I say that that's not even close

What are we as humans? Are we not currently adding meaning to this space? Perhaps your vision depends on something I find problematic. I was trying to find my way around that mountain.

Quoting macrosoft

For me the shared world is the 'life world,' the world as it is for us in our ordinary lives. This world includes sense perception but also the perception of relations between sense objects and between other relations. Our being-in-it is pre-theoretical. When people call it 'mind' or 'matter' or a (?), they still refer to this that they are in, merely slapping a name on it, connecting it to various relations that exists within it.

Of course... our world is chock full of thinking about complex thought/belief replete with correlational content including language.

Quoting creativesoul

Of course... our world is chock full of thinking about complex thought/belief replete with correlational content including language.

That's all I meant by self-enriching space. It's our creative thinking, creative soul, that I have in mind -- and we do this with our macrosoft operating system.

Quoting macrosoft

...Are we not currently adding meaning to this space? Perhaps your vision depends on something I find problematic. I was trying to find my way around that mountain.

Sure... we're adding meaning to this space, if by "this space" you mean the space shared between us.

Quoting creativesoul

Sure... we're adding meaning to this space, if by "this space" you mean the space shared between us.

Precisely. The space where meaning lives. To be clear, I intend nothing supernatural. Anything supernatural is just more explicit metaphysics --which always says too much and slips into aporia (or that's my sense at the moment).

Shared...

Quoting creativesoul

Shared...

Yeah. It's feels that basic. To say too much more gets lost in stuff that is debatable. What is the minimum commitment? That interests me. Others, A world of objects that makes assertions true-able.

Meaning emerges within thought/belief formation. Shared meaning is the birth of language.

Quoting creativesoul

Meaning emerges within thought/belief formation. Shared meaning is the birth of language.

Yeah, and this is also in some of those Feuerbach quotes. Language is something like a 'god' we participate in. I like his metaphors, but I don't want to lean on them too much. Talking about phenomena already looks like voo-doo to lots of people. Heidegger is seen as a mystic, which isn't quite right unless mystics were misunderstood phenomenologists. It's a weird thing that philosophy can do that maybe science can't, since science is largely locked out of even as it functions inside this space.

I've issues with phenomenological jargon.

Quoting creativesoul

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I've issues with phenomenological jargon.

I can relate. It is suspicious sounding talk. But IMV this is what they were doing, exploring the lifeword. If Sheehan is right, then we aren't that far from Heidegger at the moment. His book, btw, is brilliant. It's written in honest English that gets to the point, aimed at sharing one basic idea really. I stayed up all night reading a few days ago. I have been reading, thinking, and writing too much philosophy. It's a mania.

Been great. See ya next time!

Cheers!!!

Reply to creativesoul
You too. Have a great night,

Hmmm... after a re-read, it seems I missed a bit of opportunity. You'll have that when hyper focusing upon making an argument, point, or setting out a position...

:wink:

There's much more to be discussed.

Reply to creativesoul
Yeah, our conversation was good and promises more in the future.

I'll share some thoughts on Feuerbach's philosophical religion. 'God' is all of us, greater than any one of us individually. Some are wiser and brighter than others, but even these are wiser and brighter because they are plugged into others, because they are open to difference, assimilating it and shattering one narrower self-conception after another. This world, in which we have bodies, is already the world for us. It could always use some work (giving something real to do), but a healthy body in healthy relationships with necessities met is already almost in paradise--if the mind is right. With philosophy (Feuerbach's vision), even death can be made sense of. As narrow individuals, we are already dead to the degree that we are not lit up where we should be. The threat of bodily death (ego death) encourages us to push beyond our petty self-attachments and grasp something like Feuerbach's philosophy in the first place.

The narrow world is widened. We think of the billions that come and go, the billions living equally meaningful lives, some of them always more meaningful, wiser and bright. Others get this or that righter than we do as we get something else righter than they do. Thanks to language and matter (the stuff with a kind of memory that resists being engraved), we inherit the work of others. Our work is passed on to 'reincarnated' versions of ourselves. For Feuerbach something like reincarnation seems metaphorically true. If we find the best part of ourselves in others, including those not yet born, then we don't exactly die. We feel and not only think ourselves the flame and not the melting candle.

In early materialism we see a movement toward life, not lifelessness. Heidegger and Feuerbach were both trying to dig below calcified 'theologies.' For both the facing of death was primary.

Philosophy is from this perspective necessarily personal, and yet it is personal in a way that seeks the living impersonal. The 'objective' approach enacts a fantasy of having no standpoint. This denial of our 'thrown-ness' keeps us on the surface, pretending to be armchair scientists. We must pose as already-having-always-known. Anxious interpretation is covered over pretending that the machine of language can do all the work. This machine of language has meaning-atoms for its parts. Philosophy is reduced to a form of dead math of relationships between meaning atoms --a machine for cranking out tautologies. A depersonalized approach also covers over the value of direct introspection with respect to meaning and motivation. The last fantasy is that insincere or emotionally closed conversations are the way to do things. This fits the image of philosophy as turning the crank on the argument machine.

The way of truth is the death of masks.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I need to take a break from the forum to get some work done to pay the bills.

Quoting macrosoft

I'll share some thoughts on Feuerbach's philosophical religion. 'God' is all of us, greater than any one of us individually. Some are wiser and brighter than others, but even these are wiser and brighter because they are plugged into others, because they are open to difference, assimilating it and shattering one narrower self-conception after another. This world, in which we have bodies, is already the world for us. It could always use some work (giving something real to do), but a healthy body in healthy relationships with necessities met is already almost in paradise--if the mind is right. With philosophy (Feuerbach's vision), even death can be made sense of. As narrow individuals, we are already dead to the degree that we are not lit up where we should be. The threat of bodily death (ego death) encourages us to push beyond our petty self-attachments and grasp something like Feuerbach's philosophy in the first place.

The narrow world is widened. We think of the billions that come and go, the billions living equally meaningful lives, some of them always more meaningful, wiser and bright. Others get this or that righter than we do as we get something else righter than they do. Thanks to language and matter (the stuff with a kind of memory that resists being engraved), we inherit the work of others. Our work is passed on to 'reincarnated' versions of ourselves. For Feuerbach something like reincarnation seems metaphorically true. If we find the best part of ourselves in others, including those not yet born, then we don't exactly die. We feel and not only think ourselves the flame and not the melting candle.

This points to some important considerations...

The fact that meaning transcends individual people via language use.
The fact that thought/belief begins simply and grows in it's complexity.
The fact that thought/belief is self-contained, and it takes an other to show us a mistake in ours.
The fact that there is no sense of self-worth without others.

It does seem to presuppose something like mind/body dualism. I cannot accept that.

Quoting macrosoft

Philosophy is from this perspective necessarily personal, and yet it is personal in a way that seeks the living impersonal.

Quoting macrosoft

The last fantasy is that insincere or emotionally closed conversations are the way to do things. This fits the image of philosophy as turning the crank on the argument machine.

Some refreshing positivity here. :)

I agree that existence constantly strikes me as a marvel. The universe feels so alive when you can see it through the eyes of process philosophy and systems science. We should bury ourselves deep in nature.

But then I like a good argument, a good machine, as well. Nature has its pattern. Rational artifice has its pattern too. What's not to like in the end?

Quoting macrosoft

I wonder if you are pointing at thought independent of language/words?

My pointing is not independent of words. What I'm pointing at is. Thought/belief that consists of correlations drawn between different things, none of which are language.

There is a limit to what can be explicitly said about pre and/or non-lingual thought/belief. That limit is determined by the pre-lingual creatures' capability to drawn correlations. The content of such correlations is determined by what the creature is capable of perceiving. If thought/belief begins simply and grows in it's complexity, then the capability is - in part - innate. We need not 'turn on' our physiological sensory perception. We need not 'turn on' instinctual fear and hunger. We need not 'turn on' the drive to reproduce. We need not 'turn on' a sense of familiarity that comes with repeatedly drawing correlations between some thing and other things.

None of this is existentially dependent upon language aside from the report/account itself. What I'm accounting for is not existentially dependent upon my account.

My drakes and hens have physiological sensory perception. They have innate fear and hunger. They have the sense of familiarity.

They have drawn correlations between their own hunger and our behaviour, between their own hunger and the food bin... the treat bin...

They have attributed meaning. Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content. The have no ability to doubt whether or not they are really hearing... really seeing... really smelling... really fearful... really hungry...

This is the water you say we see through...

Creativesoul and Macrosoft -

It is interesting listening to your exchange. The main point of interest for me being what either of you mean by “language.” It isn’t clear to me where either of you are sketching (have sketched) out a starting point from which to continue.

There a few things we know about language and a few ways the term “language” is used. From evidence it does appear that language is not learnt but rather an innate capacity. We also know that people without a “language” (in the everyday “wordy” sense of the term) can and do communicate. Examples of feral children show what appears to be a lack of a “language instinct” at first glance, but with a further investigation we learn that this is more to do with familiarity with humans in a social capacity than exposure to some “language” - evidence coming from deaf people with no language coming to aquire language very late on in life.

The trunk from which communicable language branches serves our world orientation.

The problem we’re always going to have here is delineating what we mean by one sense of “language” and another. For example it is acceptable for linguists to call bee dances “language” yet we know perfectly well we’re not talking about a complex grammatical structure or anything like this “language” I am writing in now.

There is also the fact that spoken language is constantly shifting. We cannot insist upon what people say and what terms and phraseology falls in and out of fashion (although some speakers do try and keep a baseline standard in order to keep a more precise universal communciation an approachable idea eve if we understand that we’ll never truly arrive at a moment of complete understanding.

Anyway, now I’ve got that aired we have a bigger problem annouced above in the previous but one post...

What is “pre-lingual” thought? This is quite easy to understand for me at least. It is basically our “imagination.” I don’t need words to think about visual imagery, nor about a piano concerto. The deaf people mentioned above don’t share a common symbolic form of representing what they wish to convey. What they do is pantomime what happened to them that day; they’re able to act out and convey some story, to joke, to laugh, to comprehend what each other is conveying with some basic gestures and use of facial expressions - this is due to empathy and mirror neurons. We understand sadness in someone else’s face without havnig to ever see our own face when sad. The muscle pattern is replicated and we understand that that particular facial expression suggests this or that mood. The deaf people understand basic gestures like eating or drinking nd perfectly understand waves, winks, and many other bodily gesturing all without the use of props (which are imagined without worded grammatical “language.”)

If we’re going to talk of “thought without language or words” then we’re defining “language” in a preset manner. To make any reasonable ground in this area it is unwise to hold a view of “language” that conflicts with many other academic views of “language” - as mentioned above MANY linguistics would not say grammar or words are necessarily “language.” What is going on is much more than mere symbolic representation. We have a huge array of conveying these differences with adjectives, nouns, subjects, abstractions, etc.,.

We also know from various brain lesions that very particular parts of perceptions and language (worded/written) use become jumbled and are even eradicated. There are alos set developmental stages of human perception and languge acquisition.

Quoting macrosoft

I'm suggesting something like a pre-human 'bottom' of our mind/language. Some things are just so automatic that we live rather than see them. With difficultly we can get a vague sense of them, by looking at certain problems in attempts at explicit accounts.

Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc.---they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.

Does a child believe that milk exists?

Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical things comes very late or very early?

This is good. The 'bottom' of our mind/belief. Witt's questions are apt for showing that belief about existence is not primary/foundational.

Quoting I like sushi

Creativesoul and Macrosoft -

It is interesting listening to your exchange. The main point of interest for me being what either of you mean by “language.” It isn’t clear to me where either of you are sketching (have sketched) out a starting point from which to continue.

Thanks. Your bit in the PI reading thread is appreciated. I'm hesitant on joining in just yet. I've yet to look for and find my copy of the PI(Anscombe's).

I don't want to speak for macro. I do believe that we share an understanding - a minimalist criterion - for what counts as language:Shared meaning, whereas all meaning is attributed
by virtue of something to become sign/symbol, something to become significant/symbolized, and a creature capable of drawing correlations between these(different things). Shared meaning is a plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations.




Quoting I like sushi

There a few things we know about language and a few ways the term “language” is used. From evidence it does appear that language is not learnt but rather an innate capacity.

Seems to me that language is learned, and all users have an innate capacity that facilitates language use. The nuance is that one need not think about the fact that they're learning language, in order to do so.

Calling language "an innate capacity" is to conflate language itself(what it is) with part of what language is existentially dependent upon(with part of what it requires... at a bare minimum).




Quoting I like sushi

We also know that people without a “language” (in the everyday “wordy” sense of the term) can and do communicate. Examples of feral children show what appears to be a lack of a “language instinct” at first glance, but with a further investigation we learn that this is more to do with familiarity with humans in a social capacity than exposure to some “language” - evidence coming from deaf people with no language coming to aquire language very late on in life.

I would put this a bit differently, although I agree...

If we know that creatures without conventional "wordy" language can and do communicate, then it only follows that conventional "wordy" language is not necessary for communication.

Communication is existentially dependent upon shared meaning(as previously explained). On my view, that is language. So, rather than conclude that communication does not require language, it seems to me that neither communication nor language requires words.




Quoting I like sushi

The problem we’re always going to have here is delineating what we mean by one sense of “language” and another. For example it is acceptable for linguists to call bee dances “language” yet we know perfectly well we’re not talking about a complex grammatical structure or anything like this “language” I am writing in now.

The importance of one's conceptual framework comes to the fore...

If there is nothing in common between dancing bees and talking people, if bee dances are not anything like this language that we're writing in now, then calling bee dances "language" adds nothing more than unnecessary confusion(incoherency). There is no justification for calling bee dances "language" if bee dances have nothing at all in common with the language we're using.

That would be an incoherent position to hold, and/or argue for. The evidence for that is equivocating the term "language", which is inherent self-contradiction. That kind of inconsistency of terminological use adds nothing to our understanding of that which existed in it's entirety prior to our naming it.

The bee dance is sign/symbol, the location of pollen is signified/symbolized, and the bees learn to interpret the meaning of the dance from the other bees that already knew what it meant. The meaning of that rudimentary language transcends the individual bee. So, it is the case that bee dances have something in common with the language we're using. More importantly, it is the case that bee dances share the same set of elemental constituents that all other language shares.

Knowledge of that set of elemental constituents is the strongest justificatory ground possible for claiming that this or that constitutes being a case of language(or not). What counts as language and it's use is not something that we determine by virtue of how we use it. Rather, language is something that exists in it's entirety prior to our taking an account of it. These are things that we can get wrong.




Quoting I like sushi

There is also the fact that spoken language is constantly shifting. We cannot insist upon what people say and what terms and phraseology falls in and out of fashion (although some speakers do try and keep a baseline standard in order to keep a more precise universal communciation an approachable idea eve if we understand that we’ll never truly arrive at a moment of complete understanding.

While we cannot insist upon what people say and what terms and phraseology falls in and out of fashion, we can use language as a means to acquire knowledge of that which exists in it's entirety prior to our knowledge(account). Some language and some thought/belief are just such things. We can use our knowledge of that which exists in it's entirety as a standard of measure by which to analyze and/or consider other language uses...

Quoting I like sushi

What is “pre-lingual” thought? This is quite easy to understand for me at least. It is basically our “imagination.” I don’t need words to think about visual imagery, nor about a piano concerto.

Yeah...

I would certainly question the basis/ground of the above. First of all, our imagination is effected/affected by language. Secondly, a piano concerto is itself existentially dependent upon language. Thirdly, language does not require words.

I would ask you to put forth a minimalist criterion for what counts as thought, such that each and every example thereof satisfies this criterion, and every example that satisfies the criterion counts as being a case of thought.




Quoting I like sushi

The deaf people mentioned above don’t share a common symbolic form of representing what they wish to convey. What they do is pantomime what happened to them that day; they’re able to act out and convey some story, to joke, to laugh, to comprehend what each other is conveying with some basic gestures and use of facial expressions - this is due to empathy and mirror neurons.

A sign/symbol does not require written language. Pantomiming, gesturing, and facial expressions are what becomes sign/symbol, the events they are reporting upon(including their own emotions at the time) are what becomes signified/symbolized by virtue of the other drawing the correlations between the behaviours and the events being recounted. Sure, empathy and mirror neurons play a role in the capacity. They are not adequate for shared meaning.




Quoting I like sushi

If we’re going to talk of “thought without language or words” then we’re defining “language” in a preset manner. To make any reasonable ground in this area it is unwise to hold a view of “language” that conflicts with many other academic views of “language” - as mentioned above MANY linguistics would not say grammar or words are necessarily “language.” What is going on is much more than mere symbolic representation. We have a huge array of conveying these differences with adjectives, nouns, subjects, abstractions, etc.,.

We also know from various brain lesions that very particular parts of perceptions and language (worded/written) use become jumbled and are even eradicated. There are alos set developmental stages of human perception and languge acquisition.

What gives you the idea that anything in the above applies to what I've been arguing?

I was just curious what you both mean by “language.” If you have different concepts then you’re both needlessly talking past each other.

The confusion of the term is usually clarified by scientists in any given field in the papers they write. Personally I don’t tend to class bee dances as “language” merely a communication; I am happy to of course, but “grammar” is something I use as a marker in defining differences.

Monkey’s have calls for “go up the tree” and “go down the tree” when a predator is nearby. You could class these as “words” but they’re not part of a “language” in the sense I just mentioned regarding grammar.

The best thing of Heidegger is for me, is his metaphysics.
He denied existence of number zero(0).
Zero does not exist.
Why?
Let say x=0.
You said it is something, so is not nothing.
And also in nature zero number, does not exist.
Everywhere we have something.
Even in vacuum we find some electron.

Reply to One here

Try getting that past a mathematician! They’d just laugh and walk away shaking their head.

Quoting One here

He denied existence of number zero(0).

Citation pls.

I is not only a word.
Check book "Introduction to Meaphysics of Heidegger, chapter No-thing."

Reply to One here I've read the Intro to Metaphysics and at no point does Heidi mention, let alone discuss, the number zero.

Well I understand it that way.
?Metaphysics:
By saying, this is nothing, you already said it is something, so it is not nothing.
Well done. By saying this is nothing, you are creating new things from nothing!
This is my quotation.
I am a physicist and you will never find zero in universe.
Some my say i will be zero, not there, not here, but it doesn't go.
You must put yourself on the right or lef, up or down.
Of course we won't change anything, but we should get Nobel price for that.
I is funny how i get to this. Bible says, that God puts wisdow to pnes who are humiliated in the eyes of the world. And the ones who are in high positions, don't get this knowledge.
I am one here, so I litle jerk, this is why i have this wisdow.
If you say:
x=0
We say ix is egual to zero.
We use the word is.
If it is=something.
I am from Slovenia, funny, we say this is not zero.
Language like this.
I think, zero was discovered by the devil, so people would think, that they have nothing.
This goes even to wars, depresion, murders and so one.
regards

Reply to One here

I don’t believe you’re a physicist. Zero is a fundamental part of physics/mathematics.

Also, what does the “devil” have to do with this?

Something very important is being lost in the translation or you’ve made a horrible error.

Haven't read B&T but seems Heidegger mixes-up ontology with existentialism which to me is an big mistake. In that case here's a better title: 'Being and Being More'

Reply to VMF How?

Quoting I like sushi

I don’t believe you’re a physicist

And what was your assessment of the "little jerk" part?

Reply to One here Is that you slumming it and playing littler games down here, Slavoj? :joke:

Reply to Terrapin Station

No idea what you’re talking about.

Reply to I like sushi

He said he was a little jerk.

Reply to bloodninja big difference between being in the world and an object's specific state of being. The latter can inform the former, but Heidegger views the two as interchangeable imo. Again, I haven't read Being and Time but have viewed multiple lectures on it.

With regard to zero, I do not know what Heidegger actually said or what they context was, but he may be referring to the Greek concept of aristmos. Jacob Klein, who was a student of Heidegger, did an important work on this: Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra”. For the Greeks the first number is two. One is the unit of the count, the thing that is being counted. Without an identifiable one or unit we cannot say how many. Zero was introduced to the West by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci along with the rest of the Arabic numerals.

The Greek concept of number has ontological significance including the problem of the One and the many, atomism, and Plato’s Forms.

Quoting VMF

big difference between being in the world and an object's specific state of being. The latter can inform the former, but Heidegger views the two as interchangeable imo. Again, I haven't read Being and Time but have viewed multiple lectures on it.

I take you to mean by "an object's specific state of being" to be referring to an ontology of some kind. Being in the world has its ontology also, but a different kind, an existential ontology rather than an objective ontology. Heidegger is not reducing the latter to the former or the former to the latter. They are distinct.

Reply to bloodninja Dasein is da (there) and sein (being), fused in same word. I'm in the Husserlian camp that consciousness and being are inexplicably linked, and ontology has to be an reductive endeavor, if possible at all (Kant's noema). Heidegger muddies already muddy waters by introducing anthropological/existential concepts like "utility" and "authenticity", wrapping manifolds rather than unbinding them. Though MH is right that human ontology is The critical question of philosophy. Curious of your background/interest in this.

Reply to VMF No Heidegger was simply saying something different, something that couldn't be reduced to Kantian/Husserlian "present-at-hand" ontology. Heidegger does not muddy present-at-hand ontology with existential concepts. You must understand this before you argue against him. His existential concepts have absolutely NOTHING to do with Kantian/Husserlian ontology!

Reply to bloodninja

It is interesting question though how the Heideggerian ontological existentials would "correspond" to Kantian epistemological categories. In some sense H. transforms Kant's epistemological transcendental subject into ontological being. So, Heidegger's project is from epistemology to ontology. Ontology (of dynamics (of "life")) with subject though (cf. early Husserl's intentionality + Dilthey's Life context (Lebenszusammenhang), Scheler's parallel project, Aristotle?) . Theoretically knowing subject becomes lived experience in the world. Husserl is hermeneutized and Dilthey ontologized (which results in "Existence" (Kierkegaard - Jaspers)). Existentials form the experience not to primarily produce "abstract" objects but significations or meaningful encounters in general. And everything happens or is "constituted" from "inside perspective" like in Kantian transcendental subject. Nothing is "created" here (idealism), there is always something already out there. This, which is out there encountered, becomes "interiorized" into a will driven world (Heidegger) not into a consciousness (Kant).

Quoting StreetlightX

\As fantastic as he was a philosopher, it always feels he aimed to ultimately 'submit' philosophy to some kind of other (higher?) calling, and it comes off as though weighing down - like a weight attached to the ankle, as it were - the real and clearly discernable drive of philosophical creativity and vibrancy that courses through all of Heidegger. Heidegger makes philosophy feel like it ought to serve another master, than to buoy in its own autonomous beatitude. I find it a disquieting and ugly feeling.

Heidegger the closet theologian? It's something I've been thinking about recently. There seems to be some theological work happening in the background of B&T.

I'm not sure he considered philosophy as the handmaiden to theology, something of the reversal of the Scholastic elevation of philosophy to revealed theology. He did see both as mortal enemies.

Whatever "higher calling" he had in mind, certainly has a mystical element to it. I can certainly see why there would be hostility to this because there seems to be some religious trappings around the sort of "secular mysticsm" of Heidegger's philosophy.

Heidegger was the goth kid who got philosophical.

Quoting StreetlightX

One of the more devastating charges against Heidegger's whole project was Levinas's, for whom "Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry"

I'm not sure I understand Levinas' criticism here. Hunger would be an ontical affair, and not something ontological. I'm not sure why an ontology of Dasein would have to account for being hungry.

Macrosoft
Try this !

https://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Philosophy/Philosophers/Heidegger-Podcast/24272

I found it excellent.
(Skip the intro ...40mins or so....about the course literature and attendence. Lecture 1)