cryptic young Heidegger

Fitche said idealism is the first reality, than the dogmatism of the world. I get the sense that for him we go from a pure set of nothing to infinite reality. Heidegger seems to say we go from being to infinite nothingness. They were politically similar though

Reply to Gregory
In case you find it useful, I think B&T Heidegger is not so young. We can go back much farther. He started as a Catholic philosopher. But eventually Luther was one on his heroes. I thought you might like this quote:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/moth.12447

link:
For Heidegger, despite Husserl’s methodological breakthrough, Husserl’s fundamental (i.e., ‘prefigured’) connection to both ‘Cartesian psychology’ and ‘Kantian epistemology’ gives to transcendental phenomenology a ‘fatal determination.’ Whatever (presumptively) one takes religious experience to be, Heidegger does not accept a call ‘to the things themselves’ if den Sachen here means entities ‘encountered as characteristic of a possible region for science’, which, of course, presupposes a theoretical approach to the phenomena under examination, theoretical ‘knowing.’ If Heidegger is correct, this approach to the phenomena of religious life leads to distortion [Verdrehen]. Heidegger claims: ‘Knowing’s manner of being as care about certainty resides in a particular remoteness from being, that is to say, in a position that does not let this knowing, so characterized, come near its own being, but instead interrogates every entity with respect to its character of possibly being certain.’ Hence, within the onto?theo?logical tradition of Western metaphysics, theology—as the science of God in quest of the certainty that belongs to knowing—already has its remoteness from the being taken to be the supreme being among beings.
...
The philosophy of religion articulated as Christian theology, whether Roman Catholic patristic tradition or later Protestant theology, of course, has a long history of rationalist efforts to arrive at ‘deductive certitude’ and empiricist attempts to garner ‘inductive adequacy’ concerning the existence of God, thereby to secure a proper relation of faith and understanding. These endeavors have relied upon the presumed, manifest, or demonstrated capacity of the faculty of reason, the faculty of sensibility, or the two in combination, all engaged in a theoretical comportment of ‘knowing.’

I like this seeing of the obsession with certainty from the outside. The theoretical mode prioritizes certainty. At what cost? Before long intelligent people earnestly argue that there really is a world and that they are really in it. Such a strange game makes sense to them. It is even virtuous. 'I know less than you, and that's a good thing, because my standards for what for it certain are higher.'

The defensible version of this (the 'real' version or just the version I actually like) is 'negative capability' as described by Keats. But that's 'existential' or 'literary' and not a bloodless game of artificial doubt. It's instead a game of agony and ecstasy that involves never quite knowing who one is.

Keats:
I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Keats-NegativeCapability.html

I'm probably adding to Keats, but what I have in mind is the ability to endure not having a justification. Life is experienced as a risk, an experiment. Not just empirically (I don't know what will happen) but theoretically and morally (I'm not even sure what should happen. It's not clear who the hero is. I could be terribly wrong. I could be the villain or the fool of the piece. )

The end of this article is sad and disturbing as it yanks the teeth out of the concept it's supposed to explore. https://qz.com/938847/john-keats-theory-of-negative-capability-can-help-you-cultivate-a-creative-mindset/

It's a good example of the endless banalization of what is essentially creepy/numinous/exciting.

Reply to jjAmEs

Great stuff man! It seems to me we need a "remoteness from being" in order to appreciate it, if only latter. I am one of those people who are always asking questions. I just get worried there won't be enough questions to ask. My stats say it's infinite, at least relative to a human, but ye I am a "doubting Thomas". Thomas is actually my middle name. After Aquinas. He had strong religious faith since a very young age. I went to Thomas Aquinas College for three quarters in 2004-2005. Now I find philosophy like a puzzle, and I don't like the cut and try scholastic method were they demand you accept premises that seem obvious to them

Reply to Gregory

I'm glad you liked it. I like sharing fascinating quotes.

This part stands out for me, despite its arguably awkward English translation.

link:‘Knowing’s manner of being as care about certainty resides in a particular remoteness from being, that is to say, in a position that does not let this knowing, so characterized, come near its own being, but instead interrogates every entity with respect to its character of possibly being certain.

The theoretical mode can take itself for granted. One thing I like about Heidegger (and this is already in Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity, far more enjoyable readable than B&T) is the theme of how much we tend to take for granted in an inquiry. We think we are starting from the beginning, being neutral. But really we are loaded and stinking with the spirit of the time, the gossip of our generation, which is to say all that is 'obvious' in our form of life. It's so obvious that it's not even a conscious assumption. It's the prejudice that we don't even know we have. It's the water that we swim in. Gadamer developed some of these ideas with a likable clarity and patience in Truth and Method.

Some quotes!

link:
In Heidegger’s early thinking, particularly the lectures from the early 1920s (‘The Hermeneutics of Facticity’), hermeneutics is presented as that by means of which the investigation of the basic structures of factical existence is to be pursued—not as that which constitutes a ‘theory’ of textual interpretation nor a method of ‘scientific’ understanding, but rather as that which allows the self-disclosure of the structure of understanding as such. The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic thinking, and that had been viewed in terms of the interpretative interdependence, within any meaningful structure, between the parts of that structure and the whole, was transformed by Heidegger, so that it was now seen as expressing the way in which all understanding was ‘always already’ given over to that which is to be understood (to ‘the things themselves’—‘die Sachen selbst’). Thus, to take a simple example, if we wish to understand some particular artwork, we already need to have some prior understanding of that work (even if only as a set of paint marks on canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to be understood. To put the point more generally, and in more basic ontological terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must already find ourselves ‘in’ the world ‘along with’ that which is to be understood. All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in a prior ‘ontological’ understanding—a prior hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be understood as the attempt to ‘make explicit’ the structure of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the explication of this situatedness—of this basic ontological mode of understanding—is essentially a matter of exhibiting or ‘laying-bare’ a structure with which we are already familiar (the structure that is present in every event of understanding), and, in this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger’s thinking, as just such a ‘laying bare’.

In the context of what I wrote above, we don't pretend to be neutral blank slates. We 'lay bare' our starting point. We excavate the standpoint we already have. We dig our biases which are always already there. We are only fully human by being acculturated, which is to say biased, trained. We are blinded by our own eyes, since culture makes thinking possible in the first place.


One might respond to Gadamer’s emphasis on our prior hermeneutic involvement, whether in the experience of art or elsewhere, that such involvement cannot but remain subjective simply on the grounds that it is always determined by our particular dispositions to experience things in certain ways rather than others—our involvement, one might say, is thus always based on subjective prejudice. Such an objection can be seen as a simple reiteration of the basic tendency towards subjectivism that Gadamer rejects, but Gadamer also takes issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to what is to be understood. In this way Gadamer can be seen as attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German Vorurteil) that goes back to the meaning of the term as literally a pre-judgment (from the Latin prae-judicium) that was lost during the Renaissance. In Truth and Method, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular fashion in Heidegger’s Being and Time (first published in 1927) in terms of the ‘fore-structures’ of understanding, that is, in terms of the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.

Gadamer’s positive conception of prejudice as pre-judgment is connected with several ideas in his approach to hermeneutics. The way in which our prejudgments open us up to the matter at issue in such a way that those prejudgments are themselves capable of being revised exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of prejudgment, and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a version of the hermeneutic circle.


I'll stop there, but I hope you find this interesting too.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/

Reply to jjAmEs

Nice! Good stuff. "[T]he understanding self-projection of Being upon a potentiality-for-being toward a possibility to be... for the sake of which Being is, has the mode of being OF being-in-the-world. Accordingly, the relation to innerworldly beings lies in it ontologically." Heidegger

Again, balance between subjectivism and objectivism