Heideggers Downfall
Heideggers Downfall
A review by Jeffrey Herf of Richard Wolin's Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
I think folk hereabouts will find it interesting. Heidegger has more than some few followers hereabouts, from all sides of the political divide. it's now long enough after the publication of the Black Notebooks for good academic evaluations to be available, and hence time for a reconsideration of the place of Nazism in his thinking. I'm certainly not a fan of Heidegger, so I'll probably not comment further. But I'm interested to see what folk think of these recent developments.
What do folk make of these recent developments?
A review by Jeffrey Herf of Richard Wolin's Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
I think folk hereabouts will find it interesting. Heidegger has more than some few followers hereabouts, from all sides of the political divide. it's now long enough after the publication of the Black Notebooks for good academic evaluations to be available, and hence time for a reconsideration of the place of Nazism in his thinking. I'm certainly not a fan of Heidegger, so I'll probably not comment further. But I'm interested to see what folk think of these recent developments.
Jeffrey Herf:The fact that so many volumes needed corrections confirms the criticism of the original volumes voiced by Richard Wolin and other historians I mentioned in this essay. Faculty assigning works by Martin Heidegger at universities and colleges around the world should read Heidegger in Ruins, and other recent critical scholarship, before carefully scrutinizing the editions they are assigning in their courses. Students should not be misled by the earlier efforts to obscure or falsify the record of his Nazi era writings.
What do folk make of these recent developments?
Comments (456)
Not that I find it the least cause for joy. More for dissappointment.
https://jacobin.com/2023/03/martin-heidegger-nazism-payen-wolin-book-review/
We'd like a thesis and commitment to follow-up for serious OPs. Potentially interesting topic but not enough effort here to justify as philosophical, so I've moved it to the lounge.
I don't think it discounts Being and Time at least, though. Mostly because of Levinas. I figure if Levinas can see value in the philosophy and make use of it then I can. (though Levinas is still critical of Heidegger -- like philosophers ought be towards one another)
I am not a good reader of a lot of the text because so much of it strikes me as a three-card monte game: Let's switch the value of this to that and move it around a bit.
I have tried to understand how Heidegger understood Nietzsche and here I am on firmer ground. Those lectures are spectacularly incorrect, turning Nietzsche's ideas into something a believer of 'Germanness' could embrace. I don't know if that is a betrayal or not, but it is difficult for me to accept that Heidegger was not aware of all those times Nietzsche pissed on his idea.
A quote from Heidegger cited in the article:
Heidegger's quote is a telling variation of Plato's " the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good".
Another quote from the article:
In a 1955-56 lecture course published as "The Principle of Reason", Heidegger discussed the leap of thinking, the leap of reason:
In place of Plato's Good Heidegger puts Reason.
In 1969 Stanley Rosen published "Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay". It can be described as Plato against Heidegger. Rosen said:
:clap: :fire:
It's a nice quote but I'm not sure I fully get it. Can you expand?
That being said, its become clearer that Heidegger was an asshole and a nazi. But I figured most knew that already. Doesnt undermine his analysis, in my view.
Only if you read the text out of context. Otherwise, SuZ is anti-modernist, pre/ir-rationalist ("blood"), agrarian ("soil"), totalizing & oracular. Fascism was in ascendancy in post-WWI Europe and fascist parties like the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparte (NSDAP) were very active in Weimar Germany several years before Heidegger published in 1927. Historical context matters, Mikie. As an academic ambitious to make his mark, Heidi addressed his contemporaries intellectual, and ideological, Mitläufer according to the Zeitgeist of that era. As a matter of hermeneutic scruple, SuZ should be read in that cultural-ideological context; I don't think my characterization above is hyperbolic or uncharitable considering the Völkische Bewegung milieu.
Quoting 180 Proof
:brow:
[quote=Herbert Marcuse, August 28th, 1947] Iand very many othershave admired you as a philosopher; from you we have learned an infinite amount. But we cannot make the separation between Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man, for it contradicts your own philosophy. A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot be deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jewsmerely because they were Jewsthat made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the idea of spirit, freedom, and truth into its bloody opposite. A regime that in every respect imaginable was the deadly caricature of the Western tradition that you yourself so forcefully explicated and justified. And if that regime was not the caricature of that tradition but its actual culminationin this case too, there could be no deception, for then you would have to indict and disavow this entire tradition.[/quote]
This is a fallacy called reductio ad Hitlerum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hönigswald
"On April 16, 1933, as a Jew by birth, he had to leave the university due to the National Socialist Aryanization measures. Colleagues and friends, e.g. Karl Vossler and Giovanni Gentile stood up for him. Nevertheless, on September 1, 1933, forced retirement and retirement took place. A defamatory report by Martin Heidegger also contributed to this; he wrote to dr. Einhauser, a senior councilor in the Bavarian Ministry of Education, on June 25, 1933 [at this time the newly elected rector Heidegger was still an official Nazi]:
"Dear Mr. Einhauser! I am happy to comply with your request and will give you my verdict below. Hönigswald comes from the school of neo-Kantianism, which represented a philosophy that was tailored to liberalism. The essence of the human being was then dissolved into a free-floating consciousness in general and this was finally diluted into a generally logical world reason. On this path, under apparently strictly scientific and philosophical justification, the view was diverted from the human being in its historical roots and in its popular tradition of its origin from soil and blood. This went hand in hand with a conscious suppression of all metaphysical questioning, and man was only regarded as the servant of an indifferent, general world culture. Hönigwald's writings grew out of this basic attitude. But there is also the fact that Hönigswald defends the ideas of neo-Kantianism with a particularly dangerous acumen and a dialectic that runs empty. The main danger is that this hustle and bustle gives the impression of being extremely objective and strictly scientific and has already deceived and misled many young people. I still have to describe the appointment of this man to the University of Munich as a scandal, which can only be explained by the fact that the Catholic system prefers people who are apparently indifferent in terms of their ideology, because they are not dangerous to their own efforts and are 'objectively liberal' in the well-known way. I am always at your disposal to answer any further questions. With excellent appreciation! Hail Hitler! Your very devoted Heidegger
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_H%C3%B6nigswald (translated with the Google Translate)
The main problem here with the Jew Höningswald seems to be neo-Kantianism and Catholicism?! Heidegger was extremely critical towards Catholicism in those days. So, catholic faith represents a threat to "soil and blood"? It could be noted that Heidegger saw Descartes' "speculative" abstract subjectivism to be influenced by the medieval catholic philosophy which had interpreted Aristotle in a misleading way. Medieval philosophy and the following modern development was not "rooted" in a genuine or adequate manner in the antique Greek philosophy. And not to be "rooted" means that the "humanly" important basic philosophical problematics was not understood in its "inner tendency" and thus couldn't be developed in a new situation accordingly or adequately. "Horizont" as the phenomenological concept is here an important reference.
Non sequitur.
Nazism was itself the product of a complex historical chain of ideological and political developments. Just because it went horribly awry in the hands of the reigning psychopaths one cannot for that reason alone condemn and convict all of its historical antecedents. Likewise, as a contemporary, Heidegger certainly could not help but be a product of the same historical milieu. Perhaps he was a sympathetic exponent of a version of the system that actually came to into being, perhaps he was even cast in the role as an apologist for that system by its ideologues. But that doesn't make him culpable for the worst of its failings, or incriminate him as one of its architects. He was an intellectual existing in an unfortunate milieu.
To this extent I'd agree with your characterization of the fallacy. Hitler was responsible for what Hitler did; history was responsible for creating the conditions that made Hitler possible.
I disagree. Heideggers main thesis about Nietzsche was that he was the last metaphysician, upholding a certain subjectivism in the guise of the will to eternal return. I thinks thats spot-on.
There are lots of contexts in which to read it. Those of us who find Heidegger to be many things, a Nazi in political affiliation, someone who expressed anti-semitic views, and one of the most brilliant philosophers of our era, have to reconcile ourselves with these contradictions.
Quoting Fooloso4
Rosens article can better be described as Plato against postmodernism. We already know youre not a postmodernist so your support of Rosens formulation is no surprise.
:up:
No, I dont think its uncharitable. You make interesting points.
I just dont see much in the text itself you mentioned blood and soil, but where in the text does it mention either to any significant degree? I think the anti-modernist claim is also wrong I see why people would think it, given the focus on simple tool use and simple, average ways of interacting with the everyday world but hes not anti-technology or anti-modernity, in my reading.
Anyway if it was all an elaborate system created to justify deeply held antisemitic and German nationalist sentiments, then why is there so little evidence in the text for it?
Quoting Mikie
Is this the claim that is being made in the reviews or in the book itself? Or in this thread, even?
Basic to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is the desire for and pursuit of the good. This must be understood at the most ordinary level, not as a theory but simply as what we want both for ourselves and those we care about. It is not only basic to their philosophy but basic to their understanding of who we are as human beings.
Phronesis, often translated as practical wisdom, is not simply a matter of reasoning toward
achieving ends, but of deliberation about good ends.
For Heidegger consideration of the good is replaced with the call of conscience. The call of conscience is not about what is good or bad, it is the call for authenticity. Its primary concern is not oneself or others but Being. He sees Plato's elevation of the Good above being, that is, as the source of both being and being known, as a move away from, a forgetting of Being.
In more general terms, how severing reason from the good is nihilism can be seen in the ideal of objectivity and the sequestering of "value judgments". Political philosophy, for example, is shunned in favor of political science. The question of how best to live has no place in a science of politics whose concerns are structural and deal with power differentials.
Thanks for the reference.
As for Heidi, I have only this to say, or rather say again:
Notorious Nazi Heidegger
(Whom Hitler had made all-a-quiver)
Tried hard to be hailed
Nazi-Plato, but failed
Then denied he had tried with great vigor.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Ok, even though I disagree with you about the value of Heidis philosophy, I gotta give you credit for originality.
Heidegger's discussion of others in BT reads differently once one is aware of Heidegger's antisemitism:
Who are those from whom he does and does not distinguish himself? It is the Volk (the Folk) from whom he does not distinguish himself. Or, as @180 Proof put it Blood and Soil
It is good that the case against Heidegger has been made persuasively, but his Nazi sympathies and antisemitism have been known for a long time. It is, however, now more difficult for his apologists to separate the man from his philosophy.
"But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick] . This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein's fateful destiny in and with its 'generation' goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein." (385, 436 in English translation.)
But again, Heidegger's standpoint here is phenomenologically "formal" which means that the "destiny" doesn't have any specific ontical (or "existentiell" i.e. empirically concrete) meaning. It can be related to various kinds of historically "thrown" "collective Beings". It, or the whole discussion around it, c a n be interpreted as the ontology of Nazism or any other, in Heidegger's sense, historically "genuine" collective experience.
Cited passage is preceded by this:
"Dasein can be reached by the blows of fate only because in the depths of its Being Dasein is fate in the sense we have described. Existing fatefully in the resoluteness which hands itself down, Dasein has been disclosed as Being-in-the-world both for the 'fortunate' circumstances which 'come its way' and for the cruelty of accidents. Fate doesn't first arise from the clashing together of events and circumstances. Even one who is irresolute gets driven about by these-more so than one who has chosen ; and yet he can 'have' no fate(1)."
Translators comment:
"(1) This statement may well puzzle the English-speaking reader, who would perhaps be less troubled if he were to read that the irresolute man can have no 'destiny'. As we shall see in the next paragraph, Heidegger has chosen to differentiate sharply between the words 'Schicksal' and 'Geschick', which are ordinarily synonyms. Thus 'Schicksal' (our 'fate') might be described as the 'destiny' of the resolute individual ; 'Geschick' (our 'destiny') is rather the 'destiny' of a larger group, or of Dasein as a member of such a group. This usage of 'Geschick' is probably to be distinguished from that which we have met on H. 16, 19, and perhaps even 379, where we have preferred to translate it by 'vicissitude'. The suggestion of an etymological connection between 'Schicksal' and 'Geschick' on the one hand and 'Geschichte' (our 'history') and 'Geschehen' (our 'historizing') on the other, which is exploited in the next paragraph, is of course lost in translation."
One could just as well argue that ones understanding of Heideggers antisemitism will be shaped by how one reads his passages on Others in BT. In the passage you quoted, the others he does not distinguish himself from constitute the there of the being-there of Dasein, its always already finding itself in a world of relevant concerns and useful things.
The others who are "encountered" in the context of useful things in the surrounding world at hand are not somehow added on in thought to an initially merely objectively present thing, but these "things" are encountered from the world in which they are at hand for the others.
Not that exact wording, but something like it yes. If not, who cares? Plenty of thinkers and artists, and scientists were fairly nasty people. If the point is to shed some light on that, cool. Not sure what it has to do with questions or arguments though.
But you said that he didnt. At least not in your quote. I read it as conforming to an ambiguous they.
Heidegger's view of Nietzsche as metaphysician requires accepting the following as the only way to understand the 'natural' and the role of 'eternal recurrence in The Gay Science:
Quoting Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol II, page 94
Enter the Dasein, stage left:
Nietzsche and Heidegger shared many disenchantments with their cultural milieus. Both admired orders of rank and looked down upon democracy. But this agency Heidegger is putting forward runs afoul of a central observation in Nietzsche's Will to Power:
Right, he does not say. I filled in the blank.
Heidegger is using the terms 'they', 'those', and 'others' as terms of inclusion rather than exclusion.
If we look at The Self-Assertion of the German University address from a few years after the publication of BT I think it is clear who it is that is being included and excluded.
So imagine substituting jews for they in B&T. Would that make any sense whatsoever? No. Itd be completely incoherent.
I think its worthwhile to go back and look to see if there are any connections, given what we know now. Im just not yet convinced of any.
Also @Mikie.
You can certainly read it that way. The interesting question, at least for me, is whether you have to. You can also read it as something like "those with whom you have a sense of community", "those you have assumed social relations with". We know how that went for Heidegger. But there is a gap between being able to read him like that (and you should) and being only able to read the ideas like that. Those two things are being conflated.
Absolutely read him like a Nazi. Does that mean a phenomenological "sense of community", as Heidegger's described it, is a Nazi concept? Remains to be seen.
Its not a sense of community. The they can be thought as something like Freuds superego the sense of what they think and they believe. The masses, the mainstream, the general culture, this vague sense of what one does.
Youre all really stretching this if youre arguing the they or one or das man is somehow referring to the Jews or anyone non-German. It may seem right on the surface, but I really cant see how it makes sense to anyone whos spent any considerable time reading Heidegger.
So yes, read him as a Nazi. Read Schopenhauer as an asshole. Read Wittgenstein as an abuser of children. Read Descartes as someone who justified cruelty to animals. Etc. But lets be careful in making connections that arent there and really dont make sense in context if they were.
Quoting Paine
Do you mean that Heidegger is positing the overman as agency? For Heidegger the overman is a willing, and even though the will for Nietzsche is a complex system of drives it draws from the tradition the notion of a being present at hand , and this notion is inextricable from a metaphysical notion of time. Heidegger claims in What is Thinking that Nietzsche defines the Being of beings as Will to Power. He says that Nietzsche locates revenge as motivated by revulsion against the passing away of time.
The bridge to the overman leads to the deliverance from revenge, because the overman frees itself from time.
will is primal being only when it is eternal as will. And it is that when, as will, it eternally wills the eternity of willing. The will that is eternal in this sense no longer follows and depends on the temporal in what it wills, or in its willing. It is independent of time. And so it can no longer be affronted by time.
The important point for Heidegger is that Nietzsche conceives time metaphysically as a succession of punctual
nows.
The point he is making in BT concerns the fact that who we are as Da Seins is a function of our dealings with the things of our world. Furthermore , all of the objects we deal with in our world get their sense from our actual pragmatic use of them, and this use includes other people with and for whom we are using these objects. Thus, who we are does not come before our dealings with things and other daseins. Rather, we are in the world with others in a fundamental way before we are simply who we are part from others. The solipsist self is a derivative form of being with others. This runs complete counter to your analysis of the relevant passages in terms of our choosing one group of others for inclusion over another group. Being with others as he means it here is not the product of a choice.
Not without profoundly distorting the sense of this line of thought in BT. There are other writings of Heidegger where he specifically singles out the German volk, but this in not at all the point of these passages in BT. The relation between my Dasein and other Daseins here has nothing to do with choosing one group over another, but of how the intelligibility and sense of my engagement with the world moment to moment is guided by a pre-existing context of relevance.
I suppose it depends on who you put in the postmodern camp. On the conservative side, there are those who read him in close proximity to Kierkegaard , Levinas and Wittgenstein. Some associate him with critical theory types like Adorno, and then there are the poststructuralist readings which I favor ( Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida).
Aye we both know what it is. I emphasised the normative belonging aspect, you emphasised the normative imposition aspect.
Quoting 180 Proof
If someone's right about what it means to be a human being, it should apply to everyone - so a concept like Dasein should apply to people regardless of the ideology they believe in. We don't have any similar problems with the idea of "subjectivity" being Hitler-compatible, Mao-compatible or whatever. Though I do think it would be a massive coincidence if Heidegger wrote what he did without having the Nazis in mind.
Quoting 180 Proof
I agree that it should be read in that context, do you believe the ideas he had should only be read in that context? I've in mind Dreyfus. I don't think it would be fair at all to call his attack on representationalism in AI using Heidegger's ideas a "Nazi attack on representationalism" or "an attack on representationalism using Nazi ideology". Would you agree with that? That the ideas can be put to use at a distance from their birthplace?
Yes. I am writing for people who have not read the book. No one who does not already understand Heidegger would understand a word of what you wrote.
Right, because "jews" are not included in Heidegger's 'they', 'those', and 'others'. These terms all mean 'us', those who are like Heidegger. It makes no sense if we think in terms of the dichotomy 'us vs. them'. The way he phrases it fuels the accusations of his deliberate concealment.
Quoting Mikie
Tom Rockmore's On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy (pdf) came out in 1991, but the book only lends support to what was already well known.
Thank you. That's what I was wondering. My understanding is that Dreyfus' reading is now considered somewhat limited, is that your view? Would you class him as a conservative?
As an aside, is there any particular reason to use poststructuralist over postmodern? Is it the role of language based theory over the broader philosophical exigencies (of the latter)?
Yes, Dreyfus approach was linked to his interest in Kierkegaard. He founded what became known as the West Coast school of Heidegger interpretation, which exerted a strong influence on readings of Heidegger in English-speaking countries for many years, but is no longer the dominant approach.
Quoting Tom Storm
One reason to do so is that, like relativism , the meaning of postmodernism is hard to pin down. Poststructuralism at least points one in the direction of those philosophers who were influenced by structuralism in linguistics and anthropology, as well as phenomenology. Poststructuralists
dont reject structuralism, they are concerned with the genesis of structures, how to link structure and genesis.
It could be argued that Heidegger underwent some kind of transformation between the publication of TB and the Rectorate Address, but it seem more like that when he says in BT:
He is not talking about mankind but rather those with whom he is one, his people, the Volksgemeinschaft. Heidegger's antisemitism is not simply a personal bias or dislike, it is for him of world historical significance.
At least to the extent it brings about the underlined portion of the quote:
Your references are well in line with what is put forward in the Lectures. I disagree with the interpretation for reasons that require their own discussion. But even if one were to accept the 'metaphysic' Heidegger derives from Nietzsche, the observation about time still has Heidegger at variance with other ideas about revenge, such as the one I quoted from Nietzsche's Notebook. The dynamic there is to show how belief systems provide a sense of value from punishing others. So, how can the idea of change from that form of exchange include a blatant example of it?
And if there is going to be an appeal to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, let it include:
Heidegger was a philosopher, not an ideologue or pampleteer. Being and Time isn't a derivative treatise of Mein Kampf; it is, however, like the Nazi bible (which Heidegger wholly endorsed and recommended in an extant letter to his own brother) as I described previouslyQuoting 180 Proof
He did not find his "thinking" compatible with that of most modern thinkers during inter-war years Europe but Heidegger enthusiastically embraced Hitler's "ideas" as compatible with his own, and enough so that he promptly jumped on the Nazi bandwagon after 'the Reichstag fire' and subsequent Enabling Act decree when most other notable, modern, (non-Jewish) German philisophers (e.g. Jaspers, Gadamer, Carnap) had not.
Of course, taken out of context, you have a point about a statement like my saying "Dasein is Hitler-compatible". Consider (scroll down):
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/658391 "der F?hrerprinzip"-compatible? :chin:
Quoting fdrake
No. The historical-cultural-political context is, however, the most relevant context to the question of the degree to which Heidegger's political affilitation and activity are reflected in his major philosophical work which he had so recently published. Other contextual readings, in this case, may provide nuances which supplement our understanding of the text but they are too ancillary to exculpate SuZ of its ideological affordances.
But when you have a guy who influenced SO many philosophers, of different strands too, from Sartre to Marleau-Ponty, Dreyfus to Gadamer, Rorty to Foucault, Arendt to Zizek, then I'm sorry, there is interesting material in (at least) some of his works. For me, Being and Time is quite special.
I know others have read it and think it total gibberish and mysticism. Fine. Don't call it philosophy if you like. But BT, if not other lectures of his, are important. Nazism surely didn't influence all who followed him...
And this is coming from someone who thinks less of his work than I used to. But, I cannot deny it has value, just like people here get massive amounts of value from Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or Husserl, Ayer, etc. And we all can make arguments for why any of these figures here shouldn't be as influential.
It is what it is.
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting Manuel
Its easier to dismiss his entire ouvre as a colossally irrelevant and dangerous anti-modernist, pre/ir-rationalist ("blood"), agrarian ("soil"), totalizing & oracular polemic if you dont relate to any of the names mentioned above.
Seems fair enough to me. It strikes me as disingenuous to "rescue" Heidegger's philosophy from Naziism, by invoking its ability to be used to other ends. And for similar reasons, disingenuous to refute other uses of his ideas on that basis.
Needs a "universality of reason" and imperialism treatment I guess.
Aye! I imagine we agree.
I am curious about you putting it that way. Isn't the cat already out of the bag?
Different thinkers made what they will of the text. Grouping them or not grouping them on that basis has played a part in many observations. But what was said is just what was said, available to those interested to read it.
As Heidegger made his own Nietzsche, others have made their own Heidegger. That element can be investigated without burning any books.
:up:
My feeling as well.
Which I can understand to an extent. Even though the same must be true of, say, Hegel, I currently cannot assign much value to him, but he must have something, given he influenced many.
I don't quite follow. Yes, of course, people use Heidegger in ways they find useful.
Guessing a bit, the point in many of these threads, so far as I can see, is that Heidegger is not only, say, unintelligible or hard to understand, but also that because he was a Nazi, he is not worth reading.
If it's not something like that, then why so much insistence on him being a Nazi? If the point is an ethical one, yeah, he was not a good person.
But if it goes on to suggest that Being and Time, and other lectures are just disguised Nazism, then that too is "appropriating him" for particular ends.
This is, incidentally, not denying that some of his work show Nazi sympathy, like Introduction to Metaphysics and others.
Each work should be valued for its merits and flaws.
Says who? Ive read it several times, and I see no relation to the nazi Bible, even if Heidegger liked Hitlers writings.
I think its exactly that. Especially among people who already thought he was a charlatan or too obscure. Now they can dismiss it all easily. One of my heroes, Chomsky, does exactly this incidentally.
Understandable, but not very persuasive. Being and Time is still amazing, in my view. Im open to being shown that it isnt but no one has done that yet.
Yeah, as you know, Chomsky is by far my biggest influence, and even if he actually read Being and Time (he didn't, he read Intro to Metaphysics), I don't think that type of thinking would be persuasive to him.
Doesn't matter. We complement what we may find wanting, or may want to develop independently of those we most respect.
I look at it as a unity of authorship. If an author says x,y, and z are connected, then they are asking me, the reader, to connect them. The 'disguising' part (in so far as Heidegger tried to minimize that part of his life) is not something that is being done to him. It is not an ethical judgement to look at those different parts separately when he did place them together.
Making it all about choosing between apology or denial is not an earnest attempt to understand what is being said. If the crappy part is connected to the worthwhile part, then that is something to be wrestled with.
I entirely agree.
What bothers me, is that these threads don't even try to engage in any positive or interesting parts Heidegger may have said. In fact, just by looking at the title of these topics, you already know who dislikes him already.
I don't have any problems acknowledging his Nazism nor noting his antisemitic stances. He was not an ethical person, by and large- maybe a bit of leeway with technology, but also ugly remarks in that aspect too.
I don't think BT has those problems, nor his lectures about Kant. And even his most obscure and famous book after BT, his Contributions to Philosophy, show signs of Nazism that I can see. Other works surely do, as does his personal correspondence and observed behavior.
I don't look at it that way. It is not about finding "naziism" in everything he wrote or not.
I agree with many things he points to in the Lecture I linked to. But I object to other statements because I think they are incorrect, not because of his character.
As my previous behavior might have suggested, I am more interested in ancient texts than recent ones. I cannot explain why exactly but that is the case. The heart wants what the heart wants.
So, Heidegger was an important part of the discussion and kinds of study that developed in academy and elsewhere regarding such texts that is happening as we speak. It is a matter of much dispute,
There is a whole world of responses regarding political philosophy that he influenced that I will leave to my political sisters and brothers to opine upon.
He was a Nazi. No need to insist on it. Why is it important? I think his address,The Self-Assertion of the German University, linked to earlier, makes it abundantly clear. His understanding of being and time, of history unfolding, cannot be separated from what he claimed had come to be in that here and now, of what the call of conscience, what authenticity resolutely demanded of this people and only this people who were to follow the Fuhrer (literally the leader) and play a central role in world history and the truth of Being.
I too was drawn to Heidegger. Like many, I sensed that he had something mysterious and important to disclose. That thinking plays an essential role in to bringing being to presence. In time I came to think that pursuit of the question of "Being" is like chasing the wind. An oracular prophet without a revelation.
This is not to deny his influence or the value of reading him. He is certainly seductive, but it is for this reason that we must be most critical. The idea of harkening to being, of an openness to what is to be, is not, as he would have it, being responsive to being, but an abdication of responsibility. We all know what came to be in the 20th century.
Yes it can. Simply asserting it doesnt make it true.
Yes, it has obviously this connotation but it means also the "subject" of the language or the everyday understanding as such. Orienting towards language mean orienting towards "average meanings" that every one understands. Within "they" is discussed about "tables" etc and every one already understands what table is. Functional communication means that every one is "they". There has to be always common ground for the understanding and communication. However, the more this "commonness" itself is pursued the more the discussion about the matter itself becomes "mere" conversation or conventional behavior. Normally, in our every day understanding the intentions remain more or less empty i.e. we are orienting towards vague indications.
It is not simply a matter of his character, or attitude, as if it just personal. It is not just a matter of how poorly Heidegger treated his Jewish students.
Heidegger's understanding of history is guided by notions of providence, fate, and destiny:
(II 5, 436 Macquarrie & Robinson, 384)
[Added: I see that @waarala already cited this passage].
(II,5, 438, 386)
As summarized in the SEP:
Heidegger SEP
Quoting waarala
Good points. In What is Thinking, Heidegger says that at first we tend to orient ourselves to what words seem to be, mere expressions of pre-existing thoughts. This misapprehension leads to the commonness of everyday communication.
Yes it is. The title of the book Being and Time expresses this. First , Being is linked with Dasein , the being there of the human being. To be a dasein is to already be in the midst of being with others in a world.Destiny is always going to be the destiny of a people rather than an individual.
Second, Time for Heidegger always comes from the future.
So destiny and fate for Heidegger are presupposed by his understand of Dasein and Temporality. The Nazi dog whistles youre looking for in Heideggers texts, if they are to be found, are in places where he particularizes the German volk as the worthy inheritors of the Greek heritage of philosophical thought, not in Being and Time , which can just as easily point to the the destiny and fate of a communist or liberal democratic volk as to a fascist one.
And Nazism had considerable popularity in Europe and the US, along with their own variants of Fascism. The roots are deep in the Colonial attitudes of racial superiority that still run as an undercurrent through all our cultures. Therefore, send not to ask at whom the finger wags, it wags at thee. It would be pleasant to distance ourselves from all that horror, but such indulgence is dangerous.
By all means look for the nazi in Heidegger, but look closer to home also. Do you also worship power?
Yes, that's the sense I now get of Heidegger, of being an oracle teasing of things to come, without giving a full revelation. But the journey is still quite interesting.
Sure - connect those parts of his works to Nazism if you like, or if you find it interesting. Not many of those whom he influenced became Nazis though - so the extra context - which he managed to hide for many years, does clarify his involvement with Nazism. Again, in BT and his lectures on Kant, I don't see much relevance.
To be clear, as mentioned by others here, it is well and good to point out his Nazism - it is important to be aware of this.
But let's not then pretend that Hume, Kant and Hegel were not racists, or that followers of Descartes treated animals like garbage, that Althusser murdered his wife, that Schopenhauer made a woman invalid for the rest of her life, that Camus supported France's massacre in Algeria, that the Ancient Greeks were pedophiles and slave owners, and on and on.
Alternatively, people who already dislike Heidegger, can continue calling him a crap human being and an obscurantist gibberish producer. Ok.
Right, and so, we need to take our noses out of the book and consider what it means to be in the world with others on the level of our everyday experience of being with others, how we and others treat each other.
Quoting Joshs
Right again. And again, we must consider what this means apart from the text. What responsibility do we have for what happens? What is the gift of Heidegger's "es gibt" (it gives)? As with the notion of God's will, we have no way of determining whether to stand with or against what will happen. It seems clear that the future will bring increased threats that imperil our existence. Do we welcome global warming as what the future brings? What does it mean to "hearken to Being"? Isn't the question of the good of essential importance with regard to what will happen? Isn't it our responsibility to say yes or no? Why is Heidegger silent on this?
That may be but some notable Jewish students he influenced,including Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Jacob Klein, turned against him, at least initially, because he was a Nazi. But this is not to say their thinking moved passed Heidegger because Heidegger was a Nazi.
Quoting Manuel
Quite the opposite. These things should be brought into the conversation, but that is not to say they should be "cancelled".
Before the civil rights movement in the US I suspect that the prevalence of Nazism diminished mostly because Hitler and Germany became the enemy in WW ll.
Quoting unenlightened
Power? It has its attraction, but for many it is more a matter of counteracting power. And, of course, power comes in many forms.
More to the point of the topic, we all have our prejudices, and no doubt the future will see us differently than we see ourselves. Remove the beam from you own eye and all that, but don't blind yourself in the process.
They did - and it makes sense too, given the recent experience of the war at the time. I believe Arendt eventually forgave him - I don't think she was aware of the extent of his involvement with Nazism though. We know much more of it now.
Quoting Fooloso4
I don't care much for the topic. I read these figures because I'm interested in what they say about epistemology or metaphysics.
I don't focus on ethics in philosophy. Not that ethics isn't important, it obviously is, but I prefer to speak about current events instead of frequently abstract discussions of right and wrong.
It's useful to know how much progress we've made in ethical matters, but to focus on what Descartes, Locke or Schopenhauer believed in that we now take to be reprehensible is kind of "so what?" We have burning issues now, what's the point in judging people with standards they did not have, but we take for granted?
It's not at all clear to me that most of us wouldn't have been racists or sexists or imperialists back then, to think otherwise is potentially misleading.
Of course, Heidegger, Camus and others are recent figures, so it makes some sense to discuss this.
And absolutely, I agree with no cancellation.
Heidegger isnt silent on the question of the good. On the contrary, he is giving us a way to think differently about the justification and grounding of ethical decision-making. But in order to understand this we need to take our noses out of Enlightenment -era books on ethics and ask ourselves how we might think pragmatically, contextually about the good rather than trying to essentialize and universalize it beyond the contingency of the actual relations and situations we find ourselves in.
Heideggers refusal to adopt a standpoint of epistemic or political sovereignty does not disable our capacities to reason, to criticize or justify statements or actions in ways that are not arbitrary or ungrounded.
As Foucault writes, political criticism is not arbitrary if it can be historically situated as an intelligible response to specific institutions and practices: The theoretical and practical experience that we have of our [historical] limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again. But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency.
Rather, it means that such work must always be reflective about its historical limits and experimental in spirit.
Joseph Rouse says that Robert Brandom joins Foucault and Heidegger in rejecting a standpoint of sovereignty outside of ongoing contested practices of reasoning from which to assess their outcome:
Brandom writes:
Sorting out who should be counted as correct, whose claims and applications of concepts should be treated as authoritative, is a messy retail business of assessing the comparative authority of competing evidential and inferential claims. ... That issue is adjudicated differently from different points of view, and although these are not all of equal worth, there is no birds-eye view above the fray of competing claims from which those that deserve to prevail
can be identified, nor from which even necessary and sufficient conditions for such deserts can be formulated. The status of any such principles as probative is always itself at issue in the same way as the status of any particular
factual claim.
Their relationship raises many questions. What she might have known and whether she looked the other way is not something I will attempt to decide.
Quoting Manuel
I don't see it as matter of judging but of understanding what is said in terms of the situatedness of thinking, in the sense of not being able to fully escape the perspectives of one's time, and of context, of what a term like 'man' and what conditions are put on it.
What does he say?
In BT there is a distinction made between authentic and inauthentic modes of thinking. When we are in the inauthentic mode , we always have in front of us differentiations between what is more or less fitting or appropriate , what is more or less intelligible, more or less workable, more or less true, more or less familiar. But these distinctions take place in reference to a frame of intelligibility that is ultimately oppressive and conformist, leading to the justification of violence in pursuit of the ethical status quo. Only on those occasions when we think authentically are we able to replace the frame as a whole with a new ground. The ethical good , then, is aligned with keeping this process of creative reframing in motion and not getting stuck in the various forms of universalization (sovereignty, representation, the good will), that typify most ethical discourses.
How do you see [this] answering the question about what the future brings and how we are to respond, how we are to distinguish between what is to be accepted and rejected, how we are to act toward the future?
That much is sensible. Especially when it reaches to the level of metaphysics and epistemology, knowing a bit of the science of the time really helps understand why they argued things that, absent that context, sound bizarre.
For ethical issues, maybe there's something there.
I suppose this is a matter of personal preference to a large extent.
Regarding ethics, it is interesting that Heidegger started out as a Catholic theology scholar. The anti-modern ethos he espoused in various fashions throughout his life began in the context of those conservative movements that resisted change to what was seen as the proper order.
His views on Christianity obviously changed but his objections to 'scientism' and technology have some connection to the religious expression he encountered early in his career.
He speaks in terms of losing something once experienced and looking forward to something that is closer to that than what we have now but new and different at the same time.
That I do see rather clearly (in so far as anything he writes can belled "clear"), his conservative stance in terms of being rooted to nature and following a certain tradition rooted in quite worldly affairs.
As I have read him in the past, through Dreyfus' lenses, and latter, through Tallis' eyes, I do think his mentioning of science as one way of the various ways we have to analyze and understand the world is valuable.
He seems to me to gain back some strong quasi-religious dimensions in his Contributions, which is really, really obscure - almost unreadable.
In general though, he would not be the best person for ethics I'd think. But frankly, I know very little of it because it's not my area. So, I'll take your word for it.
Please don't take my word for it. I see that you have encountered some measure of the matter in your reading.
Your two questions are excellent. I will take a stab at the first one.
One way to look at it is that Nietzsche saw himself as past metaphysics, abandoning 'explanation' as performed in the style of his predecessors.
Heidegger comes along and says that there is a system where the system has not been competed yet. Nietzsche would have produced it if he had lived long enough. All of those ideas by H are laid out in the Lectures I linked to.
These are at least two different ways of reading the text.
That's a tantalizing notion. Thanks for the context. Do you agree with Heidegger?
I am not sure if I have presented two possible propositions where one can be confirmed and the other denied.
Not at all. My strong preferences are not the same as impartial justice.
A short question that requires a long answer. But I will try to keep it short. All quotes are from the text linked to by Paine, "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same". We must begin with what he means by metaphysics:
He calls this the guiding question. In distinction from this is the grounding question:
The guiding question of metaphysics, what is being? has reached its end with Nietzsche. With its completion the grounding question, the question of the essence of Being, can once again be taken up by Heidegger.
That is a much more helpful response than mine.
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting Wikipedia
Does the guiding question not imply a search for the essence of being? I don't suppose anyone thinks it seeks after the surface or periphery of being.
No. He says the grounding question:
The guiding question is about beings, things that are. The grounding question is not about any particular being or all beings, it is about Being, the wonder that there is anything at all. Heidegger's claim is that the grounding question of Being became lost as the focus was narrowed and guided by the question of beings.
Heidgger put it this way:
Quoting Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e
I think it would be more accurate if he said that this is how he thinks they thought that thought. But I think he would think that I am not thinking historically:
Great, thank you. I note you said this earlier:
Quoting Fooloso4
Is this your view about the question "what is being?" more generally, or is it your view of the Heideggerian approach?
Is this question still pursued or relevant in philosophy? I note Derrida's early interest in Heidegger and his formulation of being as presence.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Fooloso4
This is clear. Now I understand the distinction.
Quoting Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e
Thanks for supplying this quote; it increases my interest in Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Curiously, I'm catching a hint of conflation of a particular being or all beings with Being.
My evidence is the above Heidegger quote. Paraphrasing him, he says: Nietzsche thinks and meditates on Being, that is, on will to power as eternal recurrence. So, by my understanding, Being as will to power as eternal recurrence = the now that bends back into itself.
To me this sounds like a description of a being, a reflexive being. And, moreover, this particular being is time.
That is exactly why Heidegger argues that Nietzsches thinking of Being remains within metaphysics. The tradition has always treated being as a persisting presence.
Present to who, though? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say being has mostly been thought as persisting existence or simply persistence, rather than persisting presence? Unless you mean presence to denote simply a general "thereness", rather than something perceived, or even merely perceptible in prinicple.
Wiki has it like this, although I am unsure of the reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics_of_presence
Aristotle asks about "being qua being", what it means to be, if there is one thing that all things have in common. Some think he found a theological answer in the activity of intellect. Others, however, think he did not find an answer. That his answer is we do not know. That we cannot but begin with what is. The latter is my understanding. The theological answer is given because most are not philosophers. They need answers and one that they cannot understand is better than no answer. And one that has the appearance of intelligibility and is the work of a god is even better.
I think Heidegger was attempting to evoke a sense of wonder that there is anything at all, but it seems like mystification. , but for him Being cannot be thought separate from Time. The question or more precisely the questioning prevails, but it is the questioning that grounds, guides, and moves thinking.
Heidegger seems to put Heraclitus in this role. Cycles of Becoming repeating without beginning or end.
Interesting, that's a different slant again: I was thinking more of the idea that all moments exist eternally and that there is no privileged present moment in anything but a relative (to us) sense.
That is a different slant for me; Will have to ponder.
It does seem different than Heidegger saying we posit persistence rather than find it.
That made me laugh.
Quoting Fooloso4
:fire: Interestingly the words of progressive theological thinker David Bentley Hart frequently come back to the 'wonder of being' or the 'surprise that there is anything at all'.
Coming outside of philosophy, I find the notion of being fairly uninteresting. No doubt there is rigorous and serious scholarship behind Heidegger's work, but it often sounds like high end bong talk. :wink:
I'll add to that:
Heidegger's philosophy is meta-metaphysics or he questions what is metaphysics in itself? General metaphysics is ontology i.e. it tries to define the ultimate Being of beings. It describes the basic structures of various beings. Heidegger now argues that all previous metaphysics has been pursued "naively" i.e. philosophers has commenced to think ontology without being aware of their own basic situation. It is overlooked that ontology arises out of a already functional world which already has its understanding of being. There is a basic substrate within which all thinking already operates, which it always presumes and which can't be ignored or abstracted. Heidegger calls his meta-metaphysics or meta-ontology fundamental ontology and which investigates the basic, already and always existing, "ontology" as the prevailing understanding of Being. This means that there is always already an understanding of Being prior any conceptual explications or constructions of ontologies. Heidegger will explicate the already existing ontology (of our understanding of being) instead of constructing a new ontology from his head, so to speak. Heidegger's explication leads him to find temporality as the "sense" of the Being in our basic understanding of Being. Being of the beings means how the beings are related or structured so that they can appear to us a s something. It is apriori structure. On the other hand, the sense of the Being is the peculiar temporal "regard" with regard to which the structuration or Being happens. The building or formation of Being-structures can be guided by, for example, "presencing" (e.g. logical world view) or "historicizing" which mean that they have different senses, they structurize or build the world differently. It could be said that there is two levels of "with regard to" (in relation to, in terms of): beings or concrete entities are understood with regard to their Being and Being is understood with regard to its temporal sense.
Heidegger explicates the metaphysics of our understanding of Being or metaphysics of Dasein/existence (first level) and within which the temporal character of metaphysics as such becomes visible i.e. the critique of former trad. metaphysics becomes possible (second level). I think this, as a rough exposition, is the very basic framework of Heidegger's philosophy.
All the above shows that the connections of Heidegger's philosophy with the Nazism are extremely weak!
I don't understand what Heidegger means by going beyond Metaphysics but the following is how he describes its beginning and Nietzsche as the end:
Quoting ibid. page 200
Quoting Paine
Quoting waarala
There are those, such as Derrida, who argued that Heidegger hadnt managed to go beyond traditional metaphysics with his approach, but Heidegger himself believed that what he was doing with his fundamental ontology no longer fell within the category of traditional metaphysics but instead inquired into the very ground of metaphysics itself. In What is Thinking, he wrote:
all metaphysics leaves something essential unthought: its own ground and foundation. This is the ground on which we have to say that we are not yet truly thinking as long as we think only metaphysically.
The question *Being and Time" points to what is unthought in all metaphysics. Metaphysics consists of this unthought matter; what is unthought in metaphysics is therefore not a defect of metaphysics. Still less may we declare metaphysics to be false, or even reject it as a wrong turn, a mistake, on the grounds that it rests upon this unthought matter.
Heidegger's influence on progressive theology is strong. Tillich and God as the ground of being is an obvious example.
Hart's "surprise" seems contrived.
Heideggers influence on atheists has been equally strong, which has led to constant battles between theological and atheistic interpretations of his work. Concerning Harts surprise that there is anything at all, it is echoed by Heidegger in What is Metaphysics. We must allow ourselves to be surprised and astonished by beings.
Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. For this insertion it is of decisive importance, first, that we allow space for beings as a whole; second, that we release ourselves into the nothing, which is to say, that we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which he is wont to go cringing; and finally, that we let the sweep of our suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing.(WIM)
Transposed into the possible, man must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing. (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)
Given your involvement with psychotherapy, you may be interested in how Heideggers work is being applied in cognitive approaches to affectivity. There is no contemporary philosopher who has delved into the nature of affect, feeling, mood and emotion more deeply than Heidegger. Check out this paper from Matthew Ratcliffe:
or this:
Quoting Joshs
Heidegger of BT agreed with Kant that we can't avoid metaphysics. Human beings or their thinking/world view is inescapably metaphysical. What is required is a new, critical metaphysics. For Derrida metaphysics is much more negative phenomenon in its strict oppositions etc. We have to be much more cautious with regard to all possible metaphysical features that occupy our thinking and behavior. Derrida is also skeptical towards all "eidetic reductions" etc. found in phenomenological method. For Heidegger it seems to be much more natural to seek and speak about what something really is i.e. about "essences" (Wesen in German and which has not the connotation of "essentia").
Quoting waarala
I like the way the I.E.P. explains Heideggers relation to metaphysics:
Metaphysics cannot be rejected, canceled or denied, but it can be overcome by demonstrating its nihilism. In Heideggers use of the term, nihilism has a very specific meaning. It refers to the forgetfulness of being. What remains unquestioned and forgotten in metaphysics is Being; hence, it is nihilistic.
By not understanding, I mean specifically the questioning that Heidegger says is most difficult. In the passage I quoted above:
Quoting Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e
The limit of metaphysics is found by going past where Nietzsche could go no further. Heidegger is tasking the reader with grasping that end. Otherwise, taking the limit as a given would be to repeat:
Heidegger has to have Nietzsche's metaphysics (or the latest development of metaphysics) here in mind, he never referred to Aristotle or Hegel as nihilists.
It seems that the questioning in that direction is over for Heidegger.
Has a scholar who did much to pull apart the veil of Scholastic interpretation of Greek thinkers hidden them behind another?
Good question. Heidegger combines an insightful and penetrating commentary with a presentation of earlier thinkers that is as much a misrepresentation as it is a re-presentation. Take his claim that Plato and Aristotle conceive Being as ousia (presence).
In The Word of Nietzsche, Heidegger says that the thinking of Being as a value is what characterizes Western metaphysics from Aristotle through Nietzsche.
Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker preserves a closeness to Aristotle.
if the thinking that thinks everything in terms of values is
nihilism when thought in relation to Being itself, then even
Nietzsche's own experience of nihilism, i.e., that it is the devaluing of the highest values, is after all a nihilistic one.
Hes far from the only contemporary philosopher who believes Plato led Western thinking on the path of truth as objective representation.
Ousia does not mean presence, presence does not mean objective representation, and objective presentation does not mean ousia.
I'll check it out and thanks but I suspect it will be too impenetrable for me. :up:
Quoting ucarr
The question of Being first proceeds by way of beings - "the Being of beings". But even when the question is guided by a focus on a particular being, there is beneath it the question of what it is to be, what it means to say something is.
Quoting Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e is not to think of Being as something in time.
Later there is a shift from beings, from what is present to presencing, to Being as the event of coming into and enduring of what comes to presence in time. The will to power and the eternal return are not beings, but that through which and by which what comes to be comes to be.
They are still beings in Heideggers reading of Nietzsche. Will to power is a value-positing being. The Being of the eternal return is in time rather than temporal in Heideggers sense.
Answering this question leads to: extrapolation from members of a set to an axiom of the set?
Quoting Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e
Quoting Fooloso4
Being is a blood brother to moebius-strip_time-loop?
Time alone penetrates presence, albeit reflexively towards the complex surface of Sein und Zeit? (The complex surface of Sein und Zeit ? Arthur C. Clarkes obelisk?) Sein und Zeit is the gravity well that sources our phenomenal-empirical universe and answers the question: Why is there not nothing? with Why there is not nothing?
Quoting Fooloso4
Genesis and the moebius-strip_time-loop are not beings but, instead, metaphysical mediums?
Quoting Fooloso4
Temporality is an essential medium of dimensional extension.
Reflexivity is an essential medium of presence_consciousness (as contrasted with position_existence)?
[Edit; I misread this as "there are still beings". They are not still beings.]
Quoting Joshs
Will to power is a force. It is not a being that resides in beings.
Quoting Joshs
Heidegger does not say the Being of the eternal return, he says:
(20)
Thinking Being as eternal return is not to think the Being of the eternal return.
He says "as time" not in time.
The eternal return is not in time, what is in time is what eternally returns.
Have you by chance looked into Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death ? Its core is an 'existentialized' psychoanalysis (Rank and Kierkegaard most explicitly.) The terror of being a dying animal is foregrounded, along with various responses to that terror. While Heidegger is only mentioned in passing, it's hard not to think of a certain version of Heidegger in which facing death heroically is at the center.
Deathbed interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtmD9og3ZTQ
Relevant to Heidegger and death: "What bothered me was I was living by delegated powers."
Do you think this terror is ubiquitous?
I think most of us don't feel this terror very often. I do find it plausible though that 'growing up' is, among other things, a taming of this terror. Is childhood a largely forgotten magical world full of monsters and goddesses? I sort of remember it that way.
For Heidegger, will to power, whether you want to call it a force , value-positing or that which makes beings possible, is that which persists as presence.
Since long ago, that which is present has been regarded as what is. To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will.
In other words , for modern metaphysics, including Nietzsches will to power, will is that which is present to itself as what is.
Since in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing "now."
Among the long established predicates of primal being are "eternity and independence of time. Eternal will does not mean only a will that lasts eternally: it says that will is primal being only when it is eternal as will .The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.
Quoting Fooloso4
Thats true. What is in time is what recurs in the eternal return. Only because Nietzsche thinks of time in terms of the traditional metaphysical notion of in-timeless, the sequence of present nows, can he posit the eternal return as the endless presence ( Being) of the willing of itself.
the answer Aristotle gave to the question of the
essential nature of time still governs Nietzsche's idea of
time. What is the situation in regard to time? In being,
present in time at the given moment is only that narrow
ridge of the momentary fugitive "now," rising out of the
"not yet now'' and falling away into the "no longer now."
Yes, it seems absent amongst my social groups and me personally. Of course people might 'cheat' and say that it's an unconscious fear that animates all aspects of our lives, etc.
Quoting green flag
Could be.
Beings are not members of a set "Being".
Quoting ucarr
I think it best to try and understand a philosopher on his own terms. See the chapter in in Nietzsche's Zarathustra "The Riddle and the Vision".
I decided to start a new thread.
Right. I think Becker's book is brilliant on the whole, but it lacks a sense of humor. I do think that humans tend to seek contact with some form of immortality. In other words, transcending the 'dying' (vulnerable) animal body is something like a general description of culture. On a very simple level, this is learning not to soil yourself at school. On higher levels, it's getting something world-historical named after you.
In my view, there is no genuine escape from the flames of time, and perhaps we've evolved to seek status in our own generation, which might involve an anticipated future value calculation, etc.
Here we confront the problem
I mentioned earlier, as to when Heidegger is representing the thoughts of someone else and when he is misrepresenting or going beyond.
Quoting Joshs
I assume you are quoting Heidegger. The question is: is this true? Does modern metaphysics even address the Being of beings? What, for example, does Hegel say about will that can be regarded as meaning the Being of beings?
Thats Heidegger in What is Thinking.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, thats Heidegger again from WIT. The Being of beings is the question of the essence or ground of beings. We can find attempts to answer the question of the ground of all that is by all the major philosophers. What unites all these attempts as metaphysical is their defining of this ultimate ground as some sort of abiding presence.
I find it unreadable so I can't comment, but I am interested to obtain a general understanding of his themes and subjects. An awareness of different readings and interpretations is engaging in itself.
Is there any humor in Heidegger?
The problem is we cannot find a single agreed upon definition of what metaphysics is.
The 'Dilthey review' version of The Concept of Time is exceptionally readable 100 pages. It's excellent on how existence is primordially enworlded, bodily (tool use), social, and linguistic -- basically the opposite of the fantasized boy in the bubble. It is still a bit foggy on the role of death, which is arguably glued on as a spiritual extra, but I think that's because it's not so easy to articulate how facing my death liberates me from the culture I was thrown into. There's a hint that we are already looking back on our lives as if we are dead and our story is being told. Do we want to be conformist creatures not worth remembering ? This is never stated so bluntly. But it seems that something (the void perhaps) gives us distance and therefore leverage against the otherwise semi-automatic conformity.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sometimes. He could be savagely sarcastic.
Perhaps Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard in this. In his journal (I paraphrase), he criticizes the fantasy of presuppositionless philosophy by emphasizing that the medium, language, is already there, as a kind of inescapable presupposition. This is one of my favorite themes in Heidegger. This inherited medium is the sediment of the living thought of previous generations. We are thrown into ways of thinking, a cage of concepts that can only be question from within, using those very concepts.*
*This sounds more gloomy than I meant it to be. The tone is supposed to be neutral.
If we are thrown into a language with a history and a baked-in interpretation of life that can only be questioned within that unchosen language, then perhaps we 'are' metaphysics. Philosophy dreams of escaping itself, catching its own tail, being its own father. Becker, in The Denial of Death, stresses the project of becoming self-caused, becoming god, becoming unthrown...and even reinterprets the Oedipus complex as this Sartrean project.
What crystal castles we construct, when first we see that we are fucked.
Is it not also plausible that philosophy seeks rhetorical leverage ? In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined. (Szasz)
Quoting Joshs
Is it plausible that abiding presence is a metaphor for immortality?
Is there not a limit to that idea in so far that it could not be expressed without a shared language.?
If I was convinced of existence as a solipsist, what would be the point of proving it to other people?
I wouldnt say that Heidegger considered language as a mere medium, tool or presupposition that intermediates between thought and expression. What we are thrown into isnt already packaged concepts, but language that reveals itself anew, that remakes its past in our use of it. Language isnt the sedimented past, it is the transformation of this past in the disclosure of the world.
What I'm gesturing toward is our culture (centered here on language, but applicable to physical technology also) as a Neurathian vessel which can only be modified at sea.
In case it helps, I reject solipsism as self-dissolving. It's crucial, in my view, to understand thrown-ness as essentially social-shared, even if each child does get a customized version of the software.
I'd say it's both sediment and transformative disclosure. See page 270, for instance, of the lecture version of The Concept of Time, which can be summarized as "the Anyone has in idle talk its true form of being." And "what one [the Anyone] says is really what controls the various possibilities of the being of Dasein." And sure enough here we are talking about Heidegger, working from within the conceivable and genuine possibilities he helped install, himself enable by Kierkegaard and Luther and ...
Idle talk doesnt illustrate the sedimented nature of language, as if we directly introject verbal meanings from the culture. On the contrary, idle talk is a failure of meaning, its impoverishment. For Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance.
In that same section of Concept of Time you mentioned , Heidegger says What is talked about in idle talk is meant only in an indeterminate emptiness, which is why discourse about it is disoriented.
Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.
What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said. Publicness does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.
Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Having the quotes on idle talk around is useful. Now I respond (all can be prefaced with the tedious 'in my view.') Quotes are from The Concept of Time again.
Introjection is your word, though, not mine. My metaphor would be joining a dance already in progress. Heidegger's work is itself a focal point, something we both find already available in our creations of ourselves. Idle talk about Heidegger would be the place where every One is forced to start. It's what one knows of course, that he was a nazi, that he was an existentialist, that he was a mystic or a charlatan (if one came up in a community where that was the default to accept or rebel against), that he was a secret king of thought, that he climbed on top of Hannah.
What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially.. Note that this is not the absence of sense but just a diminished form of it, 'chugging along in language.' One, [the Anyone], is a lazy chatbot, barfing up the gossip of a curiosity which is never serious. "Idle talk becomes...the mode of being of the Anyone", which is to say the who of everyday Dasein. Our human default is falling immersion that does not pause to appropriate originally. Note also that "Language itself has Dasein's kind of being," and that "every language is historical in its very being." This is why phenomenology had to become interpretative. "Language is an organ of perception" (can't remember the source.) And interpretative means historical, given the character of language. The beginning lies before us on our way to the future.
Discourse... has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings.
This is what is meant by the metaphor of sedimentation. We start in invisible-to-us prejudice and unnoticed ambiguity and do what we can to improve the situation, running around that familiar racetrack, the hermeneutic circle, never getting final clarity.
Idle talkers "pass along what they have read and heard about the matter without any sensitivity for the distinction of whether or not that opinion or their own is actually relevant to the matter. Their care in discovering does not apply to the matter but to the discourse." To me this hints at both curiosity in the negative sense and the grasping of the phenomenon with help from merely formal indications. Also I trust we can both agree that point of talking about Heidegger is to talk about reality, which includes talking about Heidegger because reality is fundamentally social and historical (and includes a way of looking at it that methodically ignores this or that aspect as much as possible.)
The basic idea is actually almost directly from Dilthey, which you already mentioned, and for whom the "life" was a central concept as the ultimate "transcendental" ground of all human acts. Life not merely as biological concept but rather as a human life i.e. as something spiritual (geistig) i.e. cultural-historical. And this human environment is at its base a language-like, differentiated-articulated whole. With his phenomenological approach Heidegger's aim is to treat this "life context", as ontology of "Dasein", more systematically and strictly than Dilthey . Heidegger's Kierkegaardian existentialism adds to this a radical individualistic and subjectivist moment (subject here can be whole life form, not just individual person). And the result is the tension between authentic and inauthentic.
Husserlian strive for intuiting the subject matter itself behind or under the existing conventional disourse is strong influence here.
Quoting waarala
I dont see Heidegger as a Kierkegaardian existentialist. His philosophy moved quite a distance from Kierkegaard, despite the surface similarities.
In Being and Time he says In the nineteenth century S. Kierkegaard explicitly grasped and thought through the problem of existence as existentiell in a penetrating way. But the existential problematic is so foreign to him that in an ontological regard he is completely under the influence of Hegel and his view of ancient philosophy.
In What is Called Thinking, Heidegger writes: By way of Hegelian metaphysics, Kierkegaard remains everywhere philosophically entangled, on the one hand in a dogmatic Aristotelianism that is completely on a par with medieval scholasticism, and on the other in the subjectivity of German Idealism. In 1958 he writes: Marx and Kierkegaard are the greatest of Hegelians.
As far as Heideggers relation to Dilthey, he moves beyond the latters historical structuralism by freeing history from the relativity and skepticism of Diltheys project.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Fooloso4
How can "beings" as signifier have meaning if it doesn't signify common attributes of things, thereby gathering these things together into a set?
I do not think it helpful to look at this in terms of sets and axioms. The question is: what does it mean to be? Being is not an common attribute of things that are. It is tautological to say that what all things that are have in common is that they are.
Thanks ! I haven't got around to reading Dilthey himself.
Quoting waarala
This sounds correct. As far as I can tell, this is also a description of zeitgeist or 'the spirit of the times.' Or, to quote Shakespeare's Edmund, 'men as as the times are.' Do you find Heidegger plausible as a modification of Hegel ? It's as if there are a stream of German thinkers who take cultural-historical 'spirit' (software) seriously, giving the social a kind of priority to the personal. As you stress, Heidegger adds the radically subjective moment, which is a bit tricky to connect with the rest (which is not to say impossible.) Anyway, what do you think about Hegel influencing Heidegger ? And what do you make of the significance of death in Heidegger ?
I'm not sure we should trust Heidegger when it comes to Kierkegaard. I'm reading K's journals at the moment and the strong influence is clear. As I mentioned above, Heidegger himself seems influenced by Hegel, even if he rips out this or that module, for which he indeed deserves credit.
Yes, Heidegger has not abandoned the Husserlian epoche
You might want to google 'existence is not a predicate' for the argument toward that conclusion. I do not mean to imply that the story stops there or anywhere.
In one sense, all poststructuralist and phenomenological thinking is indebted to Hegel and shows his influence, thanks in part to Kojeves interpretation of him. The question is how Hegels thinking, even as it influences their work, is critiqued and transformed by writers like Heidegger.
I dont think its a question of ripping out, in isolated fashion, this or that particular component of Hegelian thought, but of a wholesale revision of its grounding presuppositions. What do you think is preserved of the Hegelian dialectic in Heidegger ( or Nietzsche, for that matter)? Why has the dialectic become a dirty word for postmodern readings of Nietzsche?
You can always hold onto a Kierkegaardian interpretation of Heidegger by sticking with Dreyfus , Sheehan or any of the other theologically oriented readers of him. But many have rejected those readings.
Big picture, we can understand the sequence of philosophers as spirit/'software' becoming more and more aware of itself, making its nature more explicit, thereby increasing its distance from itself and its 'turning radius.' This might be described as communal self-knowledge.
For context, I claim (with some irony) that there is only one philosopher. This philosopher is a computation on the 'cloud' of linguistically-and-otherwise networked human brains. This 'philosopher' is generative and adversarial, arguing with itself like Hamlet, sedimenting a larger and larger model which can only be relevant, given the finite hardware, if sufficiently compressed. In this connectionist tale, it's therefore the task to find the best connections between the dots and not simply as many dots as possible. Is this why it's almost silly to pretend to start from scratch and do philosophy without allusion to those who came before ? That'd be the waste of immense inherited wealth, and suggest a low level of insight about the historicity of spirit.
This is where Heidegger's thinking of death becomes applicable to itself. Folks do of course have all kinds of biases and preferences. We all enter the game through a different entrance and hold more or less tightly to this or that contingent assimilation of the other as self. We might talk of transference as choosing some hero as an avatar.
I'm an atheist, so I like Heidegger's atheistical transformation of Kierkegaard. In fact, my own work (more novel than paper) is focused on philosophy itself (not just writing) as pharmakon (poison/cure). The 'toxic masculinity' in Heidegger and Hamlet is more explicit than that in Jesus and Socrates, who walk into their deaths. Of course Heidegger 'walked into his death' (only) virtually. What I'm getting at in my blurry way is the risk and glory of standing alone. If we do as strong philosophers do and not as they say, then we interpret them violently, with an eye toward an unborn future and not toward the past with the sleepy eye of a historian who is satisfied with mere correctness (like Nietzsche's men of science as smooth mirrors unable to create.)
I'm suspicious of your deep suspicion, at least in its abstract form. We figure out how well we understand philosophers in the first place by discussing them. Life is terribly finite. It will not do to wait for a perfect clarity that may never come before one embraces the risk of an experiment. You seem to suggest that philosophy not be done -- or only done elsewhere in order to be shown off as a completed product here.
Im getting hints of a complexity theory, dynamical
systems-type model here. I do think one can draw all
sorts of parallels between Hegelian dialectic and such models. But if one agrees with Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault , Deleuze and other pomo types that the past arrives already changed by the present that occurs into it , these realist models become incoherent. It no longer makes sense to build structures that progressively unify themselves as better and better , closer and closer, more and more aware. These substitutes for god simply reinstantiate theology in a different form.
Perhaps, but maybe philosophy is the generalization or update of theology. Atheism makes a god of humanity. I guess I'm a structuralist of some variety, so I'd say look behind the signifiers at the role they play in the system. To what do we aspire and appeal?
Quoting Joshs
The changing of the past is part of what the self-updating philosophy software does. What happened is a function of what ought to happen. (To be sure, there's an important sub-game that tries to think what is most invariant in the past, perhaps in terms of physical science.). Philosophy is the Inner Party, but in this version they are the good guys or at least antiheroes.
I just want to point out that you are criticizing my theory that theory is directed toward greater and greater coherence in terms of its supposed incoherence. You also invoke strong thinkers with which my own theory 'ought' to cohere. (I'd define a strong thinker in terms of that norm, or as one whose work deserves being woven into the story the storyteller tells about itself.)
Sure, but discussing a philosopher and bringing in other philosophers is not the same.
Quoting green flag
That may be how it seems to you, but it is quite far from what I am saying. We never have "perfect clarity". If we think we do that is a good sign that we don't.
Comparisons can be interesting and informative, but a poor understanding of one philosopher is not improved by comparison with a poor understanding of another. But much depends on what one wants to do. If one wants to discuss ideas, it may not matter whether this is or is not what a particular philosopher means.
Heidegger is definitely a post-Hegelian philosopher. He basically agrees with Husserl that Hegel represents constructive metaphysics in a bad sense. He doesn't ignore Hegel though. On the contrary, he highly respect him (Being and Time's final chapters treat Hegel). Hegel was the apex of the traditional metaphysics. Somewhere Heidegger remarks that for Hegel everything becomes ontology, referring here to Hegel's absolute or objective idealism.
I read the chapters on death in BT as metaphors. Death means ultimate nothingness or the end of the being-in the-world. On the other hand, the theme of death could be Heidegger's semi-materialistic credo. He frequently uses the term "finiteness" (Endlichkeit) to designate the basic character of human metaphysics (for Hegel, on the other hand, the infinity was an important notion).
Thank you for the clarification. I still think you ought to just come out with concrete objections. Respectfully, it's hard to see how you are not just hinting at your own superior wisdom. As I see it, if you know better than me on this or that topic, make a case. I am willing to be corrected.
This is the familiar anti-pomo argument. As Derrida put it Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly?
The answer is that points of view can cohere more or less closely relative to local, contingent normative contexts, but these contexts themselves are always changing, and with them the criteria of coherence , truth, etc. One cannot appeal, as dialectics does, to a criterion of coherence that transcends and grounds all contingent historical contexts.
Thank you!
Also, @Joshs, you might like this.
Here's a very Heideggerian moment in Hegel's famous preface, which I postulate was influential.
[i]What is familiarly known is not properly known, just for the reason that it is familiar. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did in fact consist in nothing else than doing away with its character of familiarity. To break up an idea into its ultimate elements means returning upon its moments, which at least do not have the form of the given idea when found, but are the immediate property of the self. Doubtless this analysis only arrives at thoughts which are themselves familiar elements, fixed inert determinations.[/i]
These 'inert determinations' are what I'd call inherited sediment. They are decisions made in the past which can only be questioned once a certain kind of deconstructive digging recovers them for awareness. What we took for necessary is revealed to be contingent, so that we are freer than before.
I think you are misunderstanding me ? I love Derrida.
Quoting Joshs
OK. Here is where maybe we clash. Your quote above seems to speak about something fundamental, towards something which 'transcends and grounds' everything else. You say that one cannot, I mean, hinting at some eternal-dominating structure. In my view, philosophy can't help doing something like this. There 'must' be some limiting of play, some center. The game is often enough seeing just how little we need in that center. What's the minimum we can get away with ? But if we claim to destroy the center or the universal vantage point (or whatever plays the Role), then we've sacrificed exactly the leverage that such a claim needs in order to be taken seriously.
I'm not antipomo, but I do think that pomo sometimes crosses a line into self-cancellation , without always noticing this crossing.
Quoting green flag
Yes indeed. That is the tricky part. So if we make time and becoming the irreducible center and ground, how do we do it in a way that doesnt end up allowing static universals to slip back in? I think we have to make sure that our structure of becoming is truly self-reflexive. If Hegelian dialectics attempts to undergird the becoming of history via a schematics which organizes evolution but doesnt itself change its nature over the course of historical becoming, then it doesnt seem to be truly self-reflexive.
If instead we focus of the structure of becoming that is common to each moment of time, the way that the present anticipates beyond itself while retaining the just past moment, and how via this synthetic structure , we constitute a world of objects and people, we have a phenomenological method which never has to stray from this thick here and now in order to talk about historical becoming.
I have been saying the same thing for years. I have said so on this forum long before you became a member three days ago. It is a general comment about how to read texts. It is not about you. There is not one correct or "superior" way to read a text or texts. As I said, much depends on what we want to do.
No doubt reading Heidegger opened the door to reading Aristotle in a way that had been occluded by Scholasticism. Reading Heidegger to get at Plato, however, is not as helpful. But in order to see that we must read Plato. Plato's concerns do not align with Heidegger's.
We can gain perspective, when possible, for example, when reading Aristotle's discussion of previous philosophers, if we know what they said apart from what Aristotle says.
As previously commented, it is difficult to determine when Heidegger is explicating Nietzsche and when he is making use of him for his own purposes.
There is, however, value in reading philosophy as a dialectic between philosophers.
On the other hand, there is a practice that is all too common even within academia, of relying on the opinions of someone else instead of a careful and detailed reading of an author. Misrepresentations and misunderstanding have been perpetuated from generation to generation in this way.
I agree, but why ? What drives us this way ? Is it connected to the causi sui project ? the "thus-I-willed-it" project ? the nobody's fool project ? the history-as-a-nightmare-from-which-I'm-trying-to-awake project ?
I've also been reading Bourdieu's Distinction lately, which is basically about taste and hierarchy. Bourdieu discusses the distance that the bourgeoisie can take from a world, made possible by their position in the (material) economy, which thereby becomes spectacle. The lower class person can't afford the requisite aesthetic training, which is something like a sublimated form of Veblen's conspicuous consumption. Anyway, I was immediately interested in Bourdieu's own position in this hierarchy as a sociologist looking down and enjoying (and presenting for my enjoyment) this spectacle of the bourgeoisie looking down and enjoying the world as a spectacle.
But is wealth necessary for this wicked enjoyment ? What if a human being stops trying to survive at all costs ? Or more mildly lives with just one foot in the grave ? What if a heretic abandons wife and child and lives the woods to contemplate the world as spectacle ? What do we make of the early martyrs ? Do you know that speech in Braveheart where the soldiers are encouraged to fight and not face regret on their deathbed for the missed opportunity for a genuine appropriation of their time ? If one questions to the very end, it's not clear that longevity even ought to be the goal. 'He who seeks to keep his life shall lose it.' How does Heidegger's interest in death connect to all of this ? I'm also interested in a Hamlet/Socrates connection. Why do we fear death? "Since no man knows aught of all he leaves behind, what is it to leave betimes?" Does the kindly schoolmaster have an answer that isn't just what one says in 'the impostume of peace' ? When philosophy questions the rationality or legitimacy of the fear of death, it becomes an undecidable poison/cure. 'Take up your [s]cross[/s] hemlock and walk with me."
I agree that it's important to go to the original texts. The main thing I'd add to what you've written is that philosophy is (it seems to me) most essentially about the matter itself (reality) and only indirectly about the various approaches to that matter. Since (human) reality is historical, this indirectness or mediation is necessary, but maybe it's fitting to remember the reason for all the talk about talk about talk.
Quoting Fooloso4
Although a tautology does not advance the narrative of discovery, that doesn't mean it's false.
To say, all things that are have in common that they are is an analytically true statement. As yet, Im not aware of why its not also an existentially true statement.
I make this trivial argument because it leads into a more serious examination:
Quoting Fooloso4
Proceeding from the premise that anything beings included can be a member of a set, the claim that
Quoting Fooloso4
motivates me to investigate the volume of its truth content. Speaking in generality, I think a sound observation can be made to the effect of saying, All sets exemplify beings being members of a set, including even the empty set.
The upshot of the above claim is that being is an insuperable medium, even with regard to nothingness.
From here Im contemplating advancing to the claim, There is not nothing because there cannot be nothing.*
*Language, as demonstrated above by the infinitive to be, doesnt allow me to articulate authentic nothingness.
What does it mean to say that something exists ? that something is ?
The point is that this is not what Heidegger is investigating.
It's blurry, but I read him to mean especially our own experience as mortals of the looming possibility of this nothingness. Each of us has our own death out there somewhere waiting for us. The point seems to be that this individualizes us in a way that nothing else can match. I imagine a man climbing a mountain alone, with death as some transfiguration and yet annihilation at the peak. A soldier before the battle, hoping he'll be brave enough, also comes to mind, along with Julien Sorel hoping to keep his cool as he walks to the guillotine.
Firstly, it entails the existential fact of my existence and, moreover, it entails my acknowledgement of my own existence.
Existence of things is an essential and abiding issue for the self.
I think in making our examination of Nietzsche and Heidegger, we are investigating, along with other things, whether or not being is an insuperable medium.
True. But what I was getting at (and it's not so easy) is what is meant by saying that something is ?
I mean what is that person trying to say ?
Quoting Fooloso4
Okay. That's an appropriate restriction for me to obey.
Quoting Fooloso4
When you make claims, as above, are you not straying from what Heidegger is investigating?
If not, then I think you need to explain why the use of set theory is not an appropriate tool of interpretation for endeavoring to understand Heidegger. I further think that such an explanation should expose how, more generally, set theory is not applicable to terms such as being-in-general.
I don't think so. You introduced attributes, I don't think they have a place.
Quoting ucarr
I already did.
Ah! I now understand you better.
At the risk of being tiresome, I feel like I want to repeat the statement you quoted. I say this because my approach to elucidating what is meant by saying something is necessarily entails a sentient self detecting another existence via the complex inter-weave of the object-subject duality.
As we all know, the object-subject duality deserves its own encyclopedia for expression of a narrative resembling an exhaustive examination.
Getting back to Heidegger, I think the object-subject entanglement is the motivator for his being-in-the world with other beings ready-to-hand theme. From this center we get his proto-existentialist theme: authenticity and his extensions-of-human technology theme.
Being as insuperable medium with resultant entanglement of individualized beings is a good pivot into investigation of general being-ness.
What drives us this way. As opposed to being driven any other way. An arbitrary foundation. The preferring of one drive, desire , willed outcome over all the alternatives. I am nobodys fool because I have chose truth over falsity, the good over the bad, the visible over the invisible, the dialectical unity that overcomes lack and negation.
The idea that we are driven in just this way by the needs of a proper metaphysical grounding results from interpreting self-reflexivity as subjective idealism , the endless returning to itself of an arbitrary meaning, an arbitrary qualitative content (the good, the true, the self-identical, the unified) . What I had in mind was the self-reflexivity of becoming as difference rather than identity. What returns to itself is always an utterly new and different meaning. There is nothing evolutionary or cumulative in this self-reflexive unfolding, no aim or goal. The self is remade in every repetition.
If Sein und Zeit is an investigation of being and if
at·trib·ute
noun | ?atr??byo?ot |
1 a quality or feature regarded as a characteristic or inherent part of someone or something: flexibility and mobility are the key attributes of our army.
is a definition pertinent to Heidegger's objective, then I need help understanding how attributes gathering members into a super-ordinating set is irrelevant to investigation of being or, for that matter, to any other generalizable attribute.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Fooloso4
I understand you're making a distinction between identity and equivalence, and that you think Heidegger concerned with the latter.
By applying the concept of set to Dasein, I conclude from Sein und Zeit that being is an insuperable medium.
Quoting Fooloso4
This is a claim. Where's your supporting argument? I think you need to cite quotations from Heidegger that invalidate the method that lead to my conclusion or, in lieu of quotations, your own inferences drawn from Heidegger that effect the invalidation.
For better or worse, I take Darwinian evolution seriously. I don't see us as blank slates. For me there's an animal foundation. A person might suggest that the fear of death is an evolved piece of irrationality, but there's also an advantage to be had in conquest, which 'justifies' (game theoretically? economically?) a complementary death-risking aggression that might make 'genuine' philosophy possible in the first place. I'm casting genuineness in terms of questioning tribal norms here. The personal courage which helps the tribe when the monsters come has a secondary effect of generating internal monsters.
The big picture is that I embrace something akin perhaps to 'will to power', with God or the gods as an image of what we'd like to be. In Hobbes, kings cannot stop conquering, even when sated, because their satiety must be made secure. The will wills itself, more power and freedom, but for what ? An indestructible orgy of narcissism ? A flight from looming merely animal senescence and death symbolized by shit ? Personally I think Becker is basically right. Culture or spirit is an 'immortal' flame that leaps from melting candle to melting candle. To put it playfully, it's a (necessary) group delusion that we don't shit ourselves and die. 'Truths are lies without which we can't make it.' (Taken without irony, it becomes self-cancelling ?) On the other hand, I maintain that the self is not the body, though it depends on it. It's a differentiated piece of the tribal software, a snowflake experimental version, a candidate update.
What are the attributes of everything that is that they have in common?
But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself....
'Tarrying with the negative' is a necessary 'detour' to an impossible positive ?
'existence is not a predicate' = '"is existing" is not a predicate'?
Everything that is possesses the common attribute of being-ness.
To deny that being-ness populates a set is, in my opinion, to deny a promising attack on the knarly issue of Origin Boundary Ontology. Maybe, somehow, the insuperability of being-ness-the-set gets us out of the infinite-regress puzzle. To elaborate a bit, this problem involves the perplexity of quantum leaping from the analytical to the axiomatic.
It's been argued that existence is not a predicate. I'm not so sure what to make of the meaning of being myself (or of the meaning of meaning.) I think Heidegger found a strange question. That philosophy is fundamental ontology is maybe even tautological, and perhaps it's a good thing that this tautology throws us into the hermeneutic circle. Anyway, he knew that it would sound like nonsense or confusion to many other philosophers. For me, Heidegger has been more valuable for his analysis of human existence (his early stuff, starting well before B&T, as explored in Van Buren, for instance.) The fundamental concept, in my view, is historicity. We are (language is, being is) 'historical' in a certain way.
Consider a beautiful paragraph on 41 of the MR translation which ends:
Dasein has grown up into a traditional way of interpreting itself...by this understanding the possibilities of its being are regulated. Its own past -- and this always means the past of its 'generation' -- is not something that follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it.
The past goes ahead of us, constricting our interpretation, mostly without us realizing it. This is why Heidegger has to go back to previous ontological decisions that have calcified into 'common sense' that we mostly cannot question, because we mostly do not see the water we swim in.
Since the above clause has "existence" functioning as a noun, the meaning conveyed is true but trivial.
If we say, "I am existing." is a false statement per the true nature of existence, then we're facing the need to work out the meaning of existence outside of subject-predicate grammar. Even so, saying, "I am existing." can scarcely be denied by anyone, including Heidegger.
Do Heidegger's neo-logismic contortions -- such as this one -- really connect to statements understood to be logical?
In order not to repeat myself over and over, I will say it one more time and move on. Being or "beingess" is not an attribute of what is. Something must be in order to have attributes.
Heidegger is one of those valuable philosophers who destabilize our complacent sense that we know what we are talking about when we babble on about being and logic and truth quasimechanically. The point is a rethinking of what we take for granted. It therefore makes sense that Heidegger is offensive, just as a psychoanalytic theory is offensive. Offensiveness proves nothing in itself of course. As I see it, people would like to dismiss Heidegger, but some of them can't stop licking the cold sore*. I couldn't. And I finally got 'it' well enough to be glad I didn't flee the cognitive dissonance. On the other hand, maybe Emerson or someone I haven't heard of it just as good. (Emerson is truly great. )
*Turns out that what I had in mind is a "mouth ulcer."
Well said. As you probably know, Kojeve's Hegel was more influential in a certain context than Hegel's Hegel might have been. Often the great names are used as avatars or masks, sometimes for laudable reasons perhaps (modesty?) but sometimes in what might be called a transference. To me some kind of rhetorical battle for status is at the center, but I think there's also something noble and genuine at the center. It's not just ego. In the same way, I think natural scientists sometimes forget themselves in their work, even if they also often enjoy the fantasy of a certain kind of recognition.
What may surprise some is that Leo Strauss sent some of his best students to study with Kojeve. They are very different but found common ground.
Sometimes names are used to give weight and authority to arguments that won't stand on their own
I see and accept the truth of what you say above. I don't oppose Heidegger; that fresh thinking requires neologisms is also something I accept without complaint.
However, if someone pushes beyond the scope of the common grammar, they should be at pains to surround the new expression with an explanatory text that clarifies the new meaning.
A blunt declaration to the effect: "existence is not a predicate" stops short of doing the work of necessary persuasion from conventional wisdom to new understanding. On the other hand, legitimate participation in this conversation presupposes adequate grounding in the pertinent fundamentals. It now seems apparent my grounding is deficient.
:up:
Also, I think Kojeve is great.
I agree. That's why I suggested googling the phrase, thinking you'd find this:
[i]Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of something which is added to the conception of some other thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations in it. ...
A hundred real dollars contain no more than a hundred possible dollars. For, as the latter indicate the conception, and the former the object, on the supposition that the content of the former was greater than that of the latter, my conception would not be an expression of the whole object, and would consequently be an inadequate conception of it. But in reckoning my wealth there may be said to be more in a hundred real dollars than in a hundred possible dollarsthat is, in the mere conception of them... [/i]
https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/articles/kantexistence-a.pdf
Note that that's Kant, not Heidegger. We have arrived relatively late to this conversation about existence. In case it's not clear, I don't personally take Kant or Heidegger or anyone as an authority on the matter. I do think Heidegger writes thousands of words to explain himself. Personally I think his early writing on death is unclear, possibly because he wasn't exactly sure just how it connected to his other central ideas.
That kind of humility is laudable and rare. As I see it, we have to take the risk and talk it out.
This sounds like more of a traditional notion of power than a Nierzschean one. As Foucault conceives it, power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away. It is instead something that flows though subjects in a community. Power is not possessed by a dominant agent, nor located in that agents relations to those dominated, but is instead distributed throughout complex social networks.
Perhaps. But I'm digging for the biological roots of this theological power talk. The king who must expand is a metaphor for a dialectic that must neutralize and absorb its critics as mere stages along the way to the birth of the god (or of the god's self-recognition.) In other words, Hegel must ingest (or convince himself and others that he can ingest) Schlegelian irony. A system is a crystal castle. It's perhaps a avatar of the self that hopes to survive the fate of all meat. [These days, the 'single philosopher' or culture system faces the heat death as the closing of this partial escape hatch -- and perhaps as a relief in terms of a welcome lightness of being.]
"...on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3
One can imagine an ironical-mystical-joking artist creating Hegel as a character in a play, but one can imagine the reverse, too.
I don't mean narcissism pejoratively but neutrally. There are many pleasures, among which there is the sweet sense of being at or near the center or on the peak. In short, distinction and difference and distance.
And, proceeding from that welcome note of optimism and generosity, let me ask you, regarding,
Quoting Immanuel Kant
https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/articles/kantexistence-a.pdf
As I see it, he begins by claiming a predicate is an elaboration of a truth pertaining to something whereas a claim of the "being" of something is merely a supposition in abstraction.
A predicate elaborates additional dimensionality to an actually existing thing. A declaration affirming the existence of a thing does not elaborate its dimensionality beyond its already established phenomenal_empirical attributes.
I don't see how correctly denying the phenomenal_empirical reality of existence claims - on the basis of no additional elaboration of dimensionality - leads to correctly denying the "being" of things verified by phenomenal_empirical observation.
I think we can have fun examining some ramifications of Kant's claim predication of existence of a thing adds nothing to its established attributes.. That general being has a { }, viz., empty set relationship with individual beings shows promise of being interesting. For example, we can start with the concomitant claim that being-ness as an empty set is a member of the individual set of every existing thing.
Does this lead to claiming that we can use the John von Neumann technique for propagating all numbers from the empty set in a parallel that propagates all existing things from being-ness-as-the-empty set? That infinite recursion generates conceptually all existing things from being-ness-as-the-empty set feels right.
Maybe that's what Nietzsche's getting at with his infinite return.
It's hard to reply to your individual questions when for me the issue (not yours but ours as humans) is semantic. One might be tempted to say that the imaginary money lacks a being which is 'physical.' One might claim that to 'really' exist is to 'physically' exist. But for me this strategy remains unwittingly semantically challenged.
Before I talk about Saussure's structuralism, here's the mathematical version, which might especially speak to you:
"Benacerraf argues, in particular, that the natural numbers should not be identified with any set-theoretic objects; in fact, they should not be taken to be objects at all. Instead, numbers should be treated as positions in structures, e.g., in the natural number structure, the real number structure, etc. All that matters about such positions are their structural properties, i.e., those stem[ming] from the relations they bear to one another in virtue of being arranged in a progression (1965: 70), as opposed to further set-theoretic properties of the von Neumann ordinals, Dedekind cuts, etc. What we study and try to characterize in modern mathematics, along such lines, are the corresponding abstract structures. It is in this sense that Benacerraf suggests a structuralist position concerning mathematics." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structuralism-mathematics/
In other words, '2' doesn't refer to anything, unless it be a role in a system of relationships. In non-math context, I'm interested in the structural(-ist) limitations on the reduction of ambiguity. I think Saussure is basically right that our language is a system of differences without positive terms. 'Physical' is not some label on an immediately available concept which is given to each human soul directly, as if every human had an 'inner eye' that gazed on the same gleaming eternal Form. It's different from 'non-physical.' We don't know exactly what we mean by either term, but we know that you use one or the other, not both (it's like 1 bit of resolution or information or distinction and that's all, though this metaphor has its limits.)
Here's Aristotle: "Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images." http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/interpretation.1.1.html
Wittgenstein's 'beetle in the box' example demonstrates the confusion in this otherwise appealing and familiar conception of our situation. Although wrong, it's so 'obvious' that no case is made for the assumption.
So that's some background thats meant to gesture at the difficultly of knowing what we are talking about. A second approach is a metaphor. Being is the light that makes beings visible. That's not my invention. It's that things are rather than how they are. Tautological ? Maybe. Is the point to feel the terror and wonder of a tautology ? There are passages in Wittgenstein that suggest this sort of thing. If one tries to say it, it's as if one is saying nothing, merely uttering a whimper or a sigh.
In case it helps understands where I'm coming from, anyway, here are some de Saussure quotes:
****************
The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.
All I get from this assertion is a desire to say "speak for yourself".
How about the continuity of our experience? You can't be conscious of change or novelty if you don't have a "feel" of sameness in the experience. If the experience is an aggregate or a series of exclusively "new" moments it resembles more like a constant series of separate shocks following each other. Aren't there any inner tendencies, formations in our experience? I mean if we are already "embedded" in relatively static "objective" structures which form our experiences (these are there given like a grammar). Within these structures there appear various possibilities or directions which we can try to decide to follow.
My own experience of thinking seems to show me that thought without language is not a shapeless and indistinct mass. Could I be wrong about that? Maybe, but how could that be demonstrated and what could it even mean for me to wrong about that?
I'm convinced that humans are diverse in any case and that blanket statements about the relation between thought and language are misbegotten. But, as you say, that's just my opinion, right?
Quoting waarala
Memory is always in play. Perhaps the sense of "continuity" in our experience is on account of a story we are constantly telling ourselves, choosing the aspects of experience that we can make coherent and consistent with what we remember from previous experience.
If some experience cannot be rendered consonant then we have cognitive dissonance. The other unifying aspect seems to be the basic feeling of embodiment.
Spatial thinking supports this. From geometry, to rearranging the furniture, to packing the car, to getting from one place to another.
(Wittgenstein, Zettel 461)
Husserls solution ( which was also William James) was to argue that the present moment is specious. That is , it includes retentions and protentions (expectations). One could not hear a melody as a melody if all that one was aware of was individual notes in an isolated and punctual now. Husserl asserted that the just prior note is retained alongside the now itself. This provides us with the sense of continuity. In addition, the new always shades an element of similarity with what preceded it.
Even the physical things of this world that are unknown to us are, to speak generally, known in respect of their type. We have already seen like things before, though not precisely this thing here. Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer. (Cartesian Meditations, p.111)
I think the way to understand Saussure is not to compare thinking-without-speaking to speaking now that you already have the sign system. Instead you should imagine a baby assimilating a sign system, expanding its vocabulary. (Not much can be said or proven, I agree, about "in my head" stuff, and that itself is "structuralist." The role of a certain kind of mentalistic language is inferential in just this way (as the kind of thing that 'only I can see.')
Does a baby understand the concept of a hermeneutic circle and merely need to learn the convention sign attached to this unmediated biologically hardwired or telepathically accessed Form ? Or does the world indeed become more conceptually complex and differentiated as it learns how to use more and more signs ? Does the entire tribe become more sophisticated as it extends its vocabulary to include more and more metacognitive terms ?
FWIW, I agree that there's some kind of thinking without language.
But is this the ideal response to the invocation of structuralism ? Roy Harris wrote a book about how Wittgenstein and Saussure complement one another, both speaking against the default notion that words are merely labels for pre-given independent immaterial concepts common to all humans. I'd say that 'of course' Saussure exaggerates here or simplifies there, but need it really be said that such is the fate of all theory ? The original context of the invocation of structuralism was the discussion of what meaning, if any, could be given to what it means to be or exist. If structuralism is largely correct, then there is something like a limit to the reduction of ambiguity, because we are not selecting this or that shard from the chandelier of the divine and eternal logos.
:up:
There's clearly something like retention, but did he really limit it to the just prior note ? I'd think there would be no 'natural' or obvious place to draw the line.
There isnt a line, but a horizon of retentions of retentions trailing off into the receding past. It quickly gets really complicated.
Sounds like it. I was looking more into Husserl lately, and I got the impression that his massive output is tangled indeed. There are lots of concepts that I have grasped from it and find valuable. Then some of the later lifeworld stuff seems Heidegger-influenced or an attempt to cover the same ground in a more Husserlian way.
Quite so, but I got the impression that your thoughts represented something else than this Husserlian-Jamesian view. You are probably specifically emphasizing the differences. Or: that the most basic identity is actually merely the formal identity of temporal experience. For Husserl the retention-protention -scheme was a formal description of time i.e. it was not anything psychological or empirical. I think that Heidegger is differing here from Husserl.
Heideggers model of temporality differs from Husserls by getting rid of the transcendental ego, among other things. But like Husserls, it is neither psychological nor empirical.
Quoting green flag
You imply, as per the Kant quote, being-in-general, because it further elaborates no dimensionality of beings-specific, has no countable being and thus, weirdly, being-in-general has no being.*
*Beyond being a tautology, this is a paradox. Many think paradox a theorem killer.
I dispute this logic by claiming being-in-general, like the empty set, is a member of every being-specific and, moreover, being-in-general, like the empty set, is countable via unbounded recursion to all beings-specific and thus being-in-general, beyond being a countable attribute of every being-specific, stands existentially as the countable attribute of general-beingness, an insuperable medium.
It is the insuperability of general-beingness that makes it appear as if it adds no further elaboration to beings-specific and is thus uncountable. The problem here is confusing uncountable with insuperable such that insuperable appears as nothingness. On the contrary, because being-in-general always encompasses the totality of every being-specific, in the effort to add it as a countable attribute, it appears as a nothing because counting being-in-general presupposes the totality of a being-specific due to its insuperability as a medium for the expression of the specific beingness of the specific being.
In short, the totality of being-in-general added to being-specific is a false nothingness.
Yes, but we can't explain the continuity with the mechanism of our personal memory alone (if at all). We move or act in various already as coherent understood situations which engender us to "see" or recognize its different aspects. We can't produce the world from our inner memory.
Hi. I don't think you are grasping my point. Definition is a blurry-go-round. Look up a word in the dictionary and all you get is more words, which are themselves defined in terms of yet more words. There is nothing that staples this system of references to something outside it. I'm not saying that we can't intend the spoon in the bowl but I am saying that explaining this intending is itself caught up in the same blurry-go-round, a matter of offering yet more signs.
The system of signs that can only mean their differences from one another floats rootless above an abyss. So saying something like 'being is countable' or 'being is time' is just leaping from stone to stone. If I say that being is the light that discloses beings, then I'm offering poetry which at least has the virtue of being obviously poetry, as opposed to a more typical and tempting 'white mythology' (Derrida) --- which pretends to a divine / transcendent literality offers finally the otherwise secret name of God.
Quoting green flag
It's not clear to me what you are saying here. My point was only that it is possible to think without symbolic language but in images, and that such thinking is not a "shapeless and indistinct mass".
Every new observation and imagination increases the complexity of the experience and understanding of the human world. Of course I am not denying that the young are inducted into this human world in part at least by symbolic language.
Quoting waarala
Without recognition there would be no continuity of experience. Without memory there could be no recognition. The condition known as "anterograde amnesia" attests to this.So memory is necessary, if not sufficient it seems; which leaves me wondering what are the other factors you have in mind. The world itself, with its similarities and differences?
Quite a few but this thread is not the place to get into it, but has to do with thinking and seeing and saying.
I don't think Saussure would deny those kind of images, but I do think it's worth only a footnote in the actual context of his course. He's a linguist battling against the prejudices of his generation and his students. No one can say it all and address every possible objection. If someone is too neurotic, too careful, they become unreadable. The point is to grasp the insight, perhaps indeed presented hyperbolically to cut through the noise, and then refine one's possession of it.
From time to time I think about starting a thread, but keeping it short while ranging over a wide terrain is difficult.
Right. And I'm saying that part of that is an expanding vocabulary. I can make more and more distinctions, more and more combinations.
To be clear, I think music and animation are both great and 'meaningful.' So this is not about the worship of conceptuality but only about (actually) the limits of its precision, in the context of a structuralist semantics.
:up: I don't deny that language enriches experience. Poetry is my first love after all!
I mean a footnote in the context of Saussure's point within his lectures. He's clearing the ground of certain prejudices, such as the one that the thoughts already exist in some immaterial space and sit there gleaming, graspable by some spiritual eye, and waiting only labels.
That's a deep issue. I can at least agree that I can't make sense of a language developing apart on flesh (symbolizing desire, instinct, motive) in a world that is promising and threatening. Giving a damn seems to be fundamental. We need not, as far as I can see, insist on something 'internal,' for its language that gives us this distinction in the first place.
The latest chatbots have basically ingested the entire internet using a structural approach, working strictly with tokens in 'temporal' (linear chain) relationships. I think this feat is parasitic on human embodiment and millions of years of bio-evolution, but it's worth considering how much of us is 'out there' in the mere order of our tokens. The way chatbots learn may mirror or suggest part of how children learn.
For me it seems more plausible that there would be a pre-linguistic bodily-based sense of inner and outer. Of course I cannot demonstrate that with empirical evidence.
I appreciate your persistence with me as I work to understand subtleties of language and meaning you're trying to communicate.
I hope I can claim a measure of legitimacy in my persistence in debating the subtleties based on my always presenting supporting arguments for my counters to your narratives. I think the issue for you is persuading me to understand my arguments are fallacious whereas the issue for me is gradually understanding that: either my arguments are indeed fallacious or, that my arguments, through hardening of tempering by examination, are indeed verifiable.
Quoting green flag
I dont argue against this claim. No doubt language has limitations and yet, as you show in your opening line to me, you place a measure of trust and hope in language to successfully communicate. I regard myself as having honored your trust, hope and persistence by always supplying supporting arguments for my obstinacy.
I understand the business of debate to be closely reasoned examination of minute details of intricate cognitive filigree populating sincere and considered belief.
That language is limited is now virtually a banality as no one is seriously considering abandoning language wholesale nor even abandoning linguistic examination of abstruse phenomena physical and mental. If I'm mistaken, then we're wasting our time posting to this website. Attacking from another angle, if anyone took Wittgenstein's apotheosis of silence seriously, philosophy would've ended some time during the twentieth century.
Language, both verbal and mathematical, is undergirded by logic and from its use we see profound differences between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. I cite this difference as evidence that rebuts your claim:
Quoting green flag
Quoting green flag
Whoever publishes narratives making this claim, in so doing, self-refutes said claim. If semiotics is hopelessly self-referential, thus leading inevitably to empty word-games, then why is no one shutting down the global publishing industry? Also, why do you continue reading books, especially the ones making such claims?
Quoting green flag
No. Not
Quoting green flag
That's what the average monkey is still spending a lot of time doing, instead of boarding jet planes to various continents thereafter entering elevators to offices in celestial climes.
Kant makes a powerful argument that being-ness is empty in its function as a predicate.
Here's my argument against claiming futility in manipulating conceptually being-ness vis-a-vis sets:
[math]?\Rightarrow?[/math] because [math] ?\Rightarrow ((n^n))[/math]
P.S. Do you have a refutation of my claim: being-ness is an insuperable medium. It's the lynchpin of my application of sets. Its refutation might be the kill shot.
To be clear, I am not saying that communication is impossible. That would be self-cancelling. I am saying that a certain tempting conception of how this communication is possible is wrong.
I embrace the hermeneutic circle. Our terms of interdependent, but that doesn't mean we can't clarify (within limits) their connections.
Quoting ucarr
There is of course some kind of relationship between sign systems and the world. But let us consider the man who explains what 'being' means by pointing randomly. Can you point at the meaning of justice or rationality ? Does the existence of these iterable tokens guarantee some referent ?
How does language refer ?
Same here.
In case it's helpful, I don't personally think philosophy is very much like math. I agree with Lakoff and others that humans think and therefore live in metaphors. I view understanding this or that philosopher in terms of an endless coming-into-focus.
To me the beauty of this is that we only really get to know ourselves by trying to know others. Our prejudices are invisible to us for the most part. It's only when we catch them leading us astray that we can grab and question them.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre
This question invokes the realm of Aristotle's {Intelligibility [math]\leftrightarrow[/math]Agent Intellect}. I've been dialoging with dfPolis in his conversation: The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Standard Abstraction
Here's where we are presently in our dialogue:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/790900
The duet of intelligibility-meets-comprehending-sentience suggests to me something intriguing along the lines of entanglement, with language playing a central role in the mix. You touch on this in the following:
Quoting green flag
Firstly, do you embrace or refute Descartes' ghost-in-the-machine substance duality, with its bifurcation of mind/body? Language signification is deeply embedded within this interweave, I believe.
I'm not ready to make comprehensive declarations just now, however, language-as-mind-games-hovering-over-an-abyss sounds to me like thinking rooted in Descartes' substance duality.
No, I reject Cartesianism. Wishes and neutrons and commitments and toothaches are all in the same lifeworld, on the same 'plane.' There is not really an 'inner' and 'outer.' These spatial metaphors are useful here and there but tend to be taken as absolutes, as the given itself and what hides outside or behind it somehow.
I presented the structuralist insight crudely because too much qualification might have obscured the main point. For the most part, signs depend for their meaning on (their relationships with) other signs which depend for their meaning on still others signs. If I define 'justice' or 'beauty,' I have to drag in other undefined words, and so on. All of these words are defined in terms of one another. And definition is artificial in the first place. It's a creative attempt to sketch the common roles of words in actual conversation. As I see it, it is not like math where definitions essentially create their objects. Formal systems are so nice because we escape from our own complexity when we play with them.
The "abyss" represents a nothingness where we've been taught to expect a foundation. If there is a foundation that makes sense, it's probably a set of nonlinguistic coping skills.
That sounds (maybe) like the space of reasons.
To me it's not bad or wrong to leap from stone to stone. The point for me is to grasp something about the nature of meaning. I won't say it's only structural, but this aspect seems especially important to me when it comes to making sense of abstract terms like 'being' and 'justice.' Are we to think that being and justice are already out there in perfect determinateness before we ourselves have got a better and better handle of these terms ? Is 'being' a label ? Or is the lifeworld in its deepest character inseparable from we who live in it symbolically ? Physics works with a 'deworlded,' desiccated, methodically reduced 'skeleton' of the lifeworld. This is justified practically, but it can cause confusion philosophically. To explain electrons, one must explain scientific norms. To explain scientific norms, one must explain electrons. I mean that an exhaustive explanation of one will lead to that of the other. An exhaustive understanding of either term will include that of the other. One nexus.
I can't be sure what you mean, but I was once tempted to say that there is only presence. But in the context (Derrida), I was missing the point. It can still be asserted that there is only presence, but this is launched from a framework in which the statement is a tautology. It's strangely easy to mistake a tautology for a hypothesis in philosophy, probably because of the ambiguity that's not so easily reduced.
Memory is an interesting phenomenon. I was referring to something that could be called an objective memory or external memory. This consists in various indications or traces that has been left in the "outer" world. Through these indications we can try to re-member, so to speak, various structural wholes and "adapt" ourselves into them. It can happen that we recognize ourselves in these already existing signs and their structures!
Do you think that when we drive over a bridge spanning a body of water, say, The Golden Gate Bridge, we're trusting an application of math language that is an attempt to define numbers within empirical experience?
Sidebar - Your capsule surveys of current thinking on various topics are proving very helpful to me. They're providing ways forward for me in my reading and subsequent reflection. This work by you on my behalf is a very valuable service and I'm now thanking you for it. More power to you in your interactions with others.
Are you referring to significant places or objects that may evoke strong associations and potent meanings due to their having being integral to important life events, or something else?
I'm not quite clear on what you mean here. Hopefully this is related. I claim that pure math (the proving of theorems) is not the practical or 'genuine' foundation of applied math (of technology). We trust what works like monkeys. Psychologically we do as 'one' does, conform to the current engineering standards. The civil war in the philosophy of mathematics (intuitionism versus formalism versus logicism versus and so on) is not, to my knowledge, on the curriculum for engineers. Yet real numbers are eerie upon close examination. Mainstream math says that the set of computable numbers has a measure of zero. This means that practically all real numbers do not even have finite 'names.' Keep in mind that familiar transcendental numbers like [math] \pi [/math] do have a finite 'name' in the sense of a program of finite length that computes and therefore compresses them. But most real numbers contain a countable infinity of bits of information (can't remember if one is technically allowed to say infinite, but it's informally the case, if I remember correctly.) To be sure, our computers use floating point numbers, but algorithms are justified in textbooks using real analysis (a science of elusive, theoretical entities). The big point here is that real analysis is a beautiful, hairy mess, but the world is mostly unaware of all this. We drive over that bridge because 'everyone' drives over that bridge and we didn't just see a disaster on the news.
That's very kind! Thank you for taking the time to be so kind. And it's nice to hear that my writing is doing what I want it to, which is spread/inspire beautiful ideas.
I am rather referring to something that is "learnable", to something that we can possibly identify with or make our "own". This means that we in a sense remember it when we become conscious of it. These can be existing historical structures e.g. "discourses" or practices and possibly even their intelligible, apriori structures.
[quote=Emerson]
A man's genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes.
He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his being able to say why, remain, because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. They are symbols of value to him, as they can interpret parts of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the conventional images of books and other minds. What attracts my attention shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons, as worthy, go by it, to
whom I give no regard.
...
No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser, the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.
[/quote]
https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/Spiritual-Laws.pdf
To squeeze the Heidegger out of this, we need to imagine the man as the personification of his generation. A generation's genius hardens into anyone's idle-talk with the arrival of the next. A man is a method. If there is no object apart from this subject (if this division is confusion), the being itself is significant ('conceptual','linguistic') and historical (sedimented with interpretedness.)
The second passage seemingly describes grasping or uncovering a phenomenon. The difficulty of interpretation is emphasized. I can pour the correct words in your ear, and you in mine, with no result. For we are not just our generation but also, of course, individuals. We run local snowflake-unique modifications of the tribal software.
I'm listening to Heidegger in Ruins. It's interesting to learn that he's become something of a hero among far-right groups in Europe.
There are many reasons one should be careful in "assigning" anything by Heidegger with his horrid political views and questionable ethics foremost among them.
That being said, Being and Time should be read by all serious students of philosophy and is worthy of being course subject matter.
Nietzsche has played that role for decades. Apart from the political aspect, the question is, is there any evidence
that such readings get the philosophy right?
I agree. Heidegger was not a good person for many reasons with his Nazism foremost among them. It is sad that anyone wastes time trying to apologize for him.
When it comes to Heidegger, I prefer to spend my time understanding the ontological structure articulated in Being and Time. Fascinating stuff.
Well, one must read or listen. It seems that the author believes that to be the case. Thus far, the focus has been on Heidi's weird obsession with Volk, Blut und Boden, which seems a peculiarity of German Romanticism, and his belief in the superiority of Germans and the inferior status of everyone else, but especially Jews. Those views are, from what I can gather, more pronounced in the Black Notebooks and his efforts at licking Hitler's boots while Rector at Freiburg, and in letters to various and sundry, but we shall see. The author thinks that Heidi himself believed such scribblings to be part of his oeuvre, and that his previously published work was "sanitized" in some cases by fans.
Richard Wolin is not considered by most Heidegger scholars to be an authority on Heideggers philosophy. This has less to do with fandom than with rigorous scholarship. Even if Heidegger was a bigger Nazi than Hitler, this doesn't change the fact that Wolin is out of his depth philosophically.
As I see it, at least some of Heidegger's work is as good as philosophy gets. I won't burn Pound's Cantos for his political stupidity, and I won't burn Heidegger's The Concept of Time. I can and do think antisemitism is stupid. Perhaps I ought to understand how otherwise smart people found it alluring.
I suspect that antisemites project repressed parts of themselves on a scapegoat. They are rootless mandarins who are therefore afflicted by an impossible nostalgia. 'If only if only that alien corrosive modern egoistic 'worldless' moneygrabbing subject would go away, all could be Pure again, and I could truly appropriate the soil again like a tree with roots as deep as a grave.
There is a direct connection between his concept of time and his acceptance of Nazism and its atrocities. He called it "hearkening to Being".
Oh all kinds of interpretations are possible of course. To some people there's a nazi in every crevice, and not just at the library. But I try to tell people to go back and read the earlier stuff. Find me some Hitler in the Dilthey draft.
Is there a connection between temporality and the Nazisms? Is it not what the future brought forth? Is it not something es gibt?
I think this was located in Arbeit macht frei.
This charming slogan, which also graced the gate into Auschwitz (part of what Heidi called the "self-annihilation of the Jews" when referring to the Holocaust), is mentioned in the book.
Frankly, I find this kind of thing childish. I don't mind it personally, but it's weirdly just the kind of evasive gossip that Heidegger wrote about.
Quoting Fooloso4
:fire:
Quoting Arne
Agreed, as I advocated on an old thread ...
Quoting 180 Proof
Certainly in Freddy Zarathustra's sense, "serious students of philosophy" ought to study intellectual diseases (e.g. Heidi, p0m0, woo-woo, etc) in order to learn how to, like surgeons (Rosset), incisively diagnose and excise cultural illness (e.g. decadence, resentment, nationalism, antisemitism, historicism / utopianism / eschatology, etc). :mask:
Quoting plaque flag
I think a case was made, which goes something like this:
Its not really Heidegger Im all hot under the collar about. The Nazi connection is just a convenient post-hoc justification. The truth is hes just a symbol for an entire culture of thinkers in philosophy, the arts and social sciences whose ideas are alien to the way I look at the world.
In some cases that seems to be it. Nietzsche is often on that list too, and he's every bit as indulgent, it seems to me, a veritable mystic buffoon at times. But I fucking love Nietzsche...and my crazy boy Heidegger before he went rotten. And that windbag Hegel. And...
An evasive response. All this was discussed earlier. I won't repeat it. Heidegger sings a siren song, the dark side of Doris Day, Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be. It is the acceptance of a future that was ours to see.
Dude was an actual strong poet, same way Cantor was, inspiring the same crankish resistance to his offensive originality. To me you sound on this issue like an old maid at a church picnic gossiping about the hot young thing that got herself knocked up. The work doesn't need me to defend it though, so have at it. I think it'll outlast you.
And that is fortunate. If it did it would not outlast us.
A critical reading of Heidegger is not a rejection of Heidegger. It is not an argument to not read Heidegger. Just the opposite, to read him and read him closely and carefully. It is not to sweep under the rug what is not understood as metaphor.
It was not made here. Let's put aside the problem of Nazism for a moment. The issue is his treatment of history, of es gibt, of an uncritical acceptance of "what is given to thought", and his identification of Dasein with the Volk, the Blut und Boden, the blood and soil, as well as the special place of the language of the German people.
Exactly. Even his greatest critics have read him.
When I taught Introduction to Philosophy I would sometimes use Time and Being. What did not change from semester to semester was the use of primary texts and a degree of close reading appropriate to introductory level courses. I did not bring up his Nazi affiliation.
Do you have to be a good person to be a good philosopher?
Do you have to be a good person to be a good Doctor, lawyer, teacher, mathematician, writer, president, scientist. . ., etc.
That depends on what you take the practice of philosophy to be about.
We need to look not only as what is said but at what isn't said, that is, what is neglected.
The Socratic philosopher's concern is first and foremost the human things, the inquiry into the just, the beautiful or noble, and the good.
Heidegger's concern is first and foremost Being.
Heideggers concern is to uncover the presuppositions underlying concepts like human, beautiful and good, and to ground them in a more originary thinking.
Is there a concern for the human things in this more originary thinking? Where do we see it?
Are you suggesting that there are definitions of philosophy the practice of which would require one to be a good person? And is a focus upon being somehow outside the realm of the "Socratics?" Certainly Plato had his ontology.
Would one have to be just in order to inquire in to "justice?" I suspect many who condemned Socrates to death sincerely considered themselves just and were considered by many fellow Athenians to be so.
I try to avoid definitions of philosophy.
Quoting Arne
Rather than a requirement, a practice that aims at being good and living well.
Quoting Arne
I am not sure I understand the question. As I see it, Plato was a Socratic philosopher. A concern for the human things does not preclude ontology. Concerns for knowledge are not separate from concerns for the knower. The centrality of the question of the good is not about claims such as this is the best possible world, but rather about how the mind, in accord with the hypothesis of the Forms, orders and makes sense of things.
Quoting Arne
No. Sophists then and now do this.
Quoting Arne
Good point, but they were not inquiring into the question of justice. They had their opinions about it and felt it was a threat to question them.
The basis of Dasiens being-in-the-world is care. By care, Heidegger does not mean sentimental concern. He means that our connection with other people and things ( the things we experienced are understood by reference to their relevance to our human relationships) is one of pragmatic involvement. The world of human affairs always matters to us in a certain way, affectivity as well as cognitively. there is very much an ethic running though his work, which tries to teach us to notice the always intricate way in which our concepts and values maintain their health by refreshing themselves in an open-ended way. Ironically, his political
weakness was his failure to appreciate the capabilities of groups less familiar to him than his own to adopt this ethics of creative becoming.
:up:
Wittgenstein did this, offering a hint of what he was doing in passing. Heidegger not only did this but made his approach itself explicit. Philosophy is time, time is temporal.
:up:
Yes, indeed. And many can mouth the words 'justice' and 'truth' without caring much for either.
I suspect this who believe in such concepts
most zealously are the most dangerous.
the worst are full of passionate intensity...
To me this speaks to one kind of sentimental populist reaction to offensive creativity:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
...when instinctive philosophy follows the more secure course prescribed by healthy common sense, it treats us to a rhetorical mélange of commonplace truths. When it is charged with the triviality of what it offers, it assures us, in reply, that the fullness and richness of its meaning lie deep down in its own heart, and that others must feel this too, since with such phrases as the hearts natural innocence, purity of conscience, and so on, it supposes it has expressed things that are ultimate and final, to which no one can take exception, and about which nothing further can be required. But the very problem in hand was just that the best must not be left behind hidden away in secret, but be brought out of the depths and set forth in the light of day. It could quite well from the start have spared itself the trouble of bringing forward ultimate and final truths of that sort; they were long since to be found, say, in the Catechism, in popular proverbs, etc. It is an easy matter to grasp such truths in their indefinite and crooked inaccurate form, and in many cases to point out that the mind convinced of them is conscious of the very opposite truths. When it struggles to get itself out of the mental embarrassment thereby produced, it will tumble into further confusion, and possibly burst out with the assertion that in short and in fine the matter is settled, the truth is so and so, and anything else is mere sophistry a password used by plain common sense against cultivated critical reason, like the phrase visionary dreaming, by which those ignorant of philosophy sum up its character once for all. Since the man of common sense appeals to his feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is done with any one who does not agree. He has just to explain that he has no more to say to any one who does not find and feel the same as himself. In other words, he tramples the roots of humanity underfoot. For the nature of humanity is to impel men to agree with one another, and its very existence lies simply in the explicit realisation of a community of conscious life. What is anti-human, the condition of mere animals, consists in keeping within the sphere of feeling pure and simple, and in being able to communicate only by way of feeling-states...
One might assume that with the term 'care' (Sorge) Heidegger has human well being first and foremost in mind. That is not the case.
The analytic of Dasein, which is proceeding towards the phenomenon of care, is to prepare the way for the problematic of fundamental ontology the question of the meaning of Being in general. (227)
His concern with human being is with regard to Dasein as the being that discloses Being. His concern is not the human condition, as the term is commonly used, but the question of Being.
Not humans or even sentient beings but entities. Man seems to be of concern only in so far as he is the ventriloquist dummy of Being.
In Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, he puts the matter this way:
The above would seem to place us on the verge of a kind of quietism but this is shown not to be the case shortly afterwards:
The benefit of grace and the suffering of a compulsion to malignancy seems to be a "human" thing but Heidegger says we will not benefit from knowing about this condition until we reach one not yet experienced:
It can be a long time between trains.
One [ das Man ] may well assume such a thing, assuming also that B&T is trying to do the same kind of thing as Chicken Soup for the Soul. That is not the case.
Quoting Fooloso4
So says one such ventriloquist dummy telling us how it is ?
We find in our struggle to talk about what is (including what 'is' is) that we must talk about that which wants and is able to talk about what is. We must appropriate the hermeneutic situation. Phenomenology sees the 'how' of our seeing, sees that seeing itself --- but soon discovers that 'language is an organ of perception,' that a sediment of interpretedness (stinky quilt of grandpa certainties) obstructs what might otherwise be (what we assumed was possible in our having been thrown into this contingent metaphysical tradition) a simple unbiased gazing at the world.
One stab at it: Dasein 'is' interpretation 'is' prejudice-confronting-itself 'is' time.
Historicity of interpretation, that's the ticket.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre
*********
[i]Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior hermeneutical situatedness ... 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 completenessit 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.
...
In this respect, all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily prejudgmental in the sense that it is always oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue.
...
The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are necessarily involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue (and there is, it should be added, an essential alterity that obtains even in those cases where our engagement is primarily textual). In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.[/i]
Thrown as prejudice, thrown as projection.
A ponderous way of saying he's lost.
Quoting Paine
Waiting for Begot.
And one might assume the former without the latter. Why reduce the concern for human things to a nostrum?
Quoting plaque flag
I make no grandiose claims about Being.
Quoting plaque flag
What's the point? Are you making excuses for not being able to explain Heidegger? Or anything at all? Are you attempting to free yourself for
Quoting plaque flag?
Spinning dross is not an adequate substitute for not paying attention to what is said and struggling to understand it.
It is often difficult for some (especially those whose native tongue is English) to get a grasp on Heidegger's concept of care. One could care very much about being a good Nazi.
Isn't that the problem? Heidegger's 'care' does not answer the question raised:
Quoting Fooloso4
Is care about being a good Nazi compatible with caring about human beings?
Yes, I can see how the gap between evaluations involves the experience of being lost. I brought up the gap, however, in order to address this challenge in regard to the politics involved:
Quoting Joshs
Whatever Heidegger hoped for or feared in his political actions, the interim between the point of departure and the true "abode" provides no register for taking responsibility for any 'compulsion to malignancy' he may have participated in.
That gap is there in the things he said, not merely an interpretation of what he meant.
No. That is not the problem. I raised the question and the question was not being asked of Heidegger. There seems to be an unstated and essentially unargued claim that philosophical works may be dismissed if their authors fail to meet a heightened standard of morality.
Heidegger was not a good person for many reasons with his Nazism foremost among those reasons. But that does not render invalid everything he has to say about the meaning of being anymore than Nazism renders invalid every significant cinematic idea of Leni Riefenstahl or engineering principle of SS Officer Wernher von Braun.
I suspect that Being and Time was fated to be a major philosophical work regardless of the fortunes of the Nazis.
I agree.
I don't know if he was just unable to admit he was wrong and take responsibility or if he thought he did nothing wrong either because he thought what he did was right or if he thought he was answering the call of Being and thus acting resolutely.
It was unstated and not argued because that is not my position. I have read Heidegger. I have used his work when teaching. I think he should be read if for no other reason than his considerable influence.
Quoting Arne
I agree and have said nothing to the contrary. As I suggested in another post, we can put his involvement with the Nazis aside for a moment and look at two related issues. The first is what his contribution to ethics might be. I don't see anything in his discussion of care that applies to ethics. Or the concern for human life except with regard to the question of Being. The second is how we are to understand es gibt.
This post on the question of the good and values and this on history and es gibt, what comes to be and the call to hearken to Being.
I did not mean to suggest otherwise. I was speaking about the the thread in general.
Quoting Fooloso4
I agree. I am unaware of any significant contribution to ethics on the part of Heidegger.
My primary interest in Heidegger is Division One of Being and Time. I am far more interested in the nature of being than I am in either prosecuting or defending Heidegger.
As far as Im concerned, the very heart of human relations is the connection between feeling and thinking, affect and cognition, mood and intention.
And there is no philosopher I know of other than Derrida who understood the exquisitely intimate, intricate , contextually changing affective workings of human psychological functioning better than Heidegger , which is why many of todays most advanced theoretical models of emotion, mood and affect in its relation to cognition rely on Heideggers analyses of Befindlichkeit. Who do you rely on for your understanding of these crucial aspects of human functioning?
Quoting Arne
If I were a Nazi, I would want to be the best Nazi possible. Otherwise, why bother?
Quoting Fooloso4
:fire: :100:
My own less learned supplement to your wise précis, Fooloso4:
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting Fooloso4
i suspect you arent too crazy about Foucault , Rorty, social constructionism, Derrida, Deleuze, Nietzsche or Husserl either when it comes to ethics. You would likely consider their approaches , like Heideggers, as lacking an ethics, as if the ossified old school notion of respectable philosophy requires it to check off all the usual categories such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetic and logic. The fact is none of these writers is lacking an ethical impetus in their work in the most fundamental sense of the term. On the contrary, their work is profoundly ethical i. this sense. What they reject is reducing the concept of ethics to a normative or prescriptive category of thought or behavior, which is what happens when we separate ought from is, feeling from thought, value from fact. I suspect that the kind of treatment of the ethical you are looking for can be argued, from the perspective of these writers, to be profoundly unethical. Welcome to the postmodern
How does this relate to the social? The political? The ethical?
Is there a recognition of responsibility to and for others?
Name dropping does not answer the question.
Quoting Joshs
None of this has anything to do with what I have said or with what or how I think.
Quoting Joshs
That's nice, but I am asking about Heidegger.
:up:
...which is to say in the matter itself and not the gossip around it and an excuse to do something easier, something routine, like attack or defend (as I have) obscurity.
Ive almost never been impressed by attempts to explain Heideggers notions of conscience or authenticity, and this is no exception. To determine if its even approaching truth would require some clear quotations from the texts and a lot of analysis. Probably not worth it.
But statements like [The call of conscience]s primary concern is not oneself or others but being has absolutely no meaning to me. It may be said that thinkers (in the sense of philosophers) think being, or are primarily concerned with existence itself. I see that. But as for what being is? Heidegger, as far as Ive seen, never really says. Thats worth remembering before we go on making connections between being and conscience or authenticity.
Clearly, you're mistaken, Joshs. Foucault, Nietzsche & Deleuze have much to say about ethics (re: "care of the self", "master / slave morality & revaluation of all values" and "anti-oedipal desiring-production", respectively).
I do appreciate a dark sense of humor.
:up:
That's maybe the murkiest stuff in B&T.
Not something you are likely to see Heidegger fans here doing.
Quoting Mikie
I don't think he ever is honest enough to come out and say it. Being is God. The problem is, on the one hand, the layers of meaning that have piled on, and, on the other, what he is actually saying looses its aura of profundity and mystery. He does, however, give us some clues in his references to the gods in Heraclitus and Parmenides.
"Being [is] that upon the basis of which entities are already understood." Being and Time, pp. 25-26.
As for the "meaning" of being, William Blattner argues that Heidegger is after the "structure" of being. And Heidegger most definitely has something to say about that.
Yes, Im very familiar with that one line. Once context is put back, its not necessarily Heideggers claim. And it would be very odd indeed if this casual sentence is the final word on it.
I dont see that. Hes pretty clearly un-Christian. He says in a number of places that god as uncreated substance is simply more substance ontology, and that Christians cant do philosophy almost by definition.
But who knows.
Quoting 180 Proof
If you look at how Deleuze translates Nietzsches Eternal
Return via his desiring-production model, the ensuing ethical imperative ( using the revolutionary potential of philosophy, art and science to free ourselves of fascist social productions) is quite compatible with Heideggers embrace of Nietzschean becoming.
This is what I was referring to as "layers of meaning". He can't use the term without the association with some concept and meaning being attached to it.
Quoting Mikie
Right. The term has a lot of baggage, including the idea of God as a being. Tillich picks up on this. Rather than a supreme being he says that God is the ground of being.
I think that Heidegger remained open to and accepting of what comes to be because he retained belief in the notion of providence.
:up:
... à la "the holy ghost" or dao, no?
I disagree.
First, I do not understand what you mean when you say it is not necessarily Heidegger's claim. Whose claim is it?
And second and most important of all, since the project of which Being and Time is a part is laying out the structure of being rather than defining being, Heidegger's definition of being is hardly the final word on the structure of being.
I dont recall Heidegger ever talking about, let alone believing in, the notion of providence.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes Tillich does. Not Heidegger. So Im still not sure why youre convinced he sees being as God.
I think the closest we can say about Heideggers view of being is that it is very much related to time (in the sense of temporality) and aletheia. But thats not saying much, of course. So it goes.
Ugh, youre gonna make me pull out B/T arent you? :lol:
The prior paragraph hes talking about how being is prevalently understood, and how its therefore not totally unfamiliar to us. Its the vague average understanding of being. He also says that we cant yet give a clarification of the meaning of being just yet.
In this context, when he refers to being as that which determines entities as entities, he may be referring to this average understanding which we are all familiar with. Hes also trying to make clear that being is itself not an entity, although we have to interrogate an entity (us) to learn about it.
In this context, I think its much more likely that this sentence wasnt meant as a serious definition. That would be quite weird, given the entire book is about it. To answer it with a casual aside is unlikely.
Quoting Arne
I dont buy this idea of structure. Hes quite clear that the question is the meaning of being. Says it over and over again. Im not sure where he says anything about the structure of being.
Because Im not able to get at an online version right now, Ill leave you with this photo from my book as evidence:
Hermeneutically, a philosopher's pedagogical biography and the cultural context of his or her 'thinking' matter, no? :chin:
Quoting Mikie
Aka "revelation" (just as authenticity loosely corresponds to "grace" or "piety").
:halo:
Regardless of manifest expressions or lack thereof in the post-Husserlian writings leading up to and including (at least) SuZ, the 'structure' (language-speaking) of H's (early?) reflections on 'being', it's reasonable to assume, was markedly influenced though of course not exclusively determined by his (early) Jesuit education, studying neo-Thomist theology before switching to neo-Kantian philosophy and writing a habilitation thesis (i.e. PhD dissertation) on the Scholastic theologian-philosopher Dun Scotus. Not long after, H would make a considerable study of 'biblical hermeneutics' (e.g. Dilthey & theologian Schleiermacher) which, reformulated, plays a centrol role in SuZ.
:pray:
Over three decades ago I recall first reading SuZ (on my own) it was several years after my own dozen years of Jesuit schooling and altar boy upbringing and, despite my subsequently studied and committed atheism, I could not help reading Catholic, even biblical, concepts in between the lines of the text and connotated by H's use of (undefined, cryptic) terms like "being" "authenticity" "ownmost" "resoluteness" "the they" "dasein" "being-towards-death" "forgetting of being" "temporality" etc.
I don't either. It was meant to be suggestive. It is not something I have looked into.
Quoting Mikie
I am not convinced. In fact when I wrote it I considered adding that I would not insist that this is correct. This paper might be of interest. In addition, there is the Der Spiegel interview:
Whether you consider it a "serious" definition is beside the point.
And as I already stated, it is William Blattner (not I) who argues that by "meaning" Heidegger is getting at "structure."
And I do not see why it would be such a big deal to offer an introductory definition of the term whose "meaning" he wishes to articulate. After all, "definition" and "meaning" are not necessarily synonymous.
How serious you choose to take the definition is up to you. But the definition is consistent with all that follows.
:up:
I agree. He is twisting his inheritance. Falling immersion is a state of [ original, necessary ] sin.
Felix culpa !
I find strange tendrils running between Joyce and Heidegger. (But then Vico and Heidegger are comparable.)
Indeed!
I have stated on many occasions that Heidegger is not a good person for many reasons with his Nazism being foremost among them.
And this is an example of what is number 2 on the list, intellectual dishonesty. Heidegger would go out of his way to interpret the most fragmented and obscure text in such way as to support his ontology and in such a way as to suggest that the pre-Socratics agreed with him and he was just returning philosophy to its roots. Simply put, his intellectual honesty is suspect.
Quoting 180 Proof
There's bound to be some influence. But how that translates to the text and its question is what I'm interested in. So far no one has presented anything very convincing. Likewise for the post hoc Nazi analyses.
As for reading Catholicism into the text -- what can I say? Seems like that's projection. Heidegger's language takes a lot of time to get used to, and requires serious study. He acknowledges the awkwardness of his writings, incidentally. So it's very easy to read anything you want into the text, if so inclined. I could probably come up with an elaborate explanation of the text as being related to Star Wars somehow -- being = the force, the Jedi are authentic humans, etc. etc.
Quoting Fooloso4
:up:
I always interpreted this in the context of what Heidegger writes about the Greeks and their gods. So yes, in a way I largely agree: I think our entire culture has to change, right down to our religious beliefs. The Greeks "religion" was tied up with Homeric stories, involving lots of gods and heroes, and they had a pretty healthy culture (for a while). I'm with Nietzsche (and Heidegger) on this one: perhaps we need to develop better gods. Perhaps even bringing some of the older ones back.
But that's my interpretation. I can see how one may reasonably think it's a reflection of Heidegger's remaining (subconscious) Catholicism or something like that.
Quoting Arne
It's exactly the point. You present this one infamous line as evidence that he does indeed define being. It's extremely weak, for the reasons given above.
Quoting Arne
Yeah, that's true. Like the water to the fish or the light in the room: something in the background, something that gets ignored, overlooked, hidden, "concealed."
It's not that it isn't consistent, it just seems unlikely that this is what Heidegger wants to say about it rather than describing the common (albeit tacit) understanding -- which has its importance as well. Heidegger talks much more about time, presence-at-hand, and aletheia in the writings that follow.
No need, in my view, to discuss his character again. I dig what he did with his inheritance. I was raised Catholic myself.
:up:
Fair enough. Personally I don't mind creative interpretations. But one should be upfront about it.
Among members of the long-running Heidegger Circle, there is an endless debate between theologically-oriented Heideggerians and atheist Heideggerians concerning his relation to God:
Heres some quotes to chew on:
Heidegger on God:
Heidegger, GA 73.2: 1000
13. Being and God
The pressing question of the relation of being and God should better restrain its fervor, and instead of demanding answers from me, one should ask themselves how far one is at peace with the esse to say nothing of God and its comprehensibility.
But this prudence of thoughtful reflection is just what I've already insisted upon time and again for nearly a quarter century, in order to awaken this reflection.
Moreover my thinking does not at all require this I would be very happy to receive an exposition on this issue that people so easily and seriously propose as an objection against me; thereby we turn the assignment and order of responsibilities and paths around!
14. The Relation of Seyn and God
1. how being? As being of beings or beyng? Or beyng?
2. what is God? Which God? The God of the bible? Or the God of fundamental-theology the natural God?
Heidegger, GA 73.2: 991
2. Of Being
The lightest of the slight is beyng.
The most entity-like of entities is God.
In beyng, the distinction between beings and being (in the sense of beingness) comes into its own.
Being means: presence.
Seyn never lets itself be identified with God. It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity.
As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.
To me it's an influence among others. Why can't it make the work better ?
Quoting Joshs
Negative theology. Which ain't necessarily a bad thing.
me too.
Cool.
For context, I'm an atheist who still finds theology interesting (as implicit anthropology, or something like that.)
Again, you are the one who is making this in to something bigger than it is and I can only guess as to why, i.e., you seem to think that definition and meaning are synonymous. They are not. For example, the "definition" of a cross as "a mark, object, or figure formed by two short intersecting lines or pieces" is insignificant compared to its "meaning" for some religions.
Similarly, there is no doubt that the the "definition" of being Heidegger offers is insignificant compared to the "meaning" of being that Heidegger intends to and does articulate.
With all due respect, it is only in your head that the offering of an introductory definition must be considered significant.
I think it is a good definition and gives little away.
I am done now.
when asked if I believe in God, I usually (and honestly) say "sometimes."
As with the question of Being, he strives to keep the questioning going. I suspect that if asked what he believes he would deflect and say that what is important is not his beliefs but thinking.
Given his claim that philosophy is occidental then not dao. Or at least not until he cloaked it in a chiton.
Das Heilige Geist via Hegel and Holderlin is on target.
Thanks for those. :up:
Quoting Arne
True, definition and meaning aren't necessarily the same thing. But this started with:
Quoting Mikie
I never said anything about definition or meaning. So if you're going to now make a sharp distinction between "definition" and "meaning," and claim that the one well-known sentence in the introduction counts as "definition" but says nothing about "meaning," it seems rather odd -- given that I didn't necessarily ask for a definition. I asked what it is.
But OK -- I'm willing to be done with this too. Seems moot now.
:up:
:cool:
He critiques onto-theology, but perhaps that is a screen (for himself and others).
I am unable to discern what Heidegger thinks about god from those references.
Quoting Joshs
I can't tell if this is describing god as extant or god as the idea is understood.
Pretty sure it's this. If God is just the most glorious thing, the cause and the ground of all other things even, it or he is still not nearly as rad as beyng [ the true God in impenetrable darkness and mist ? to be fair it's pretty god as theology goos... ]
ways not works
Why must it be a deflection ? If he said 'Being is God,' he'd just further confuse people who are already confused and eager to project.
Idle talk, gossip, chugging along in language, grasping the typical superficiality, falling immersion into hackneyed responses, curiosisties self-flattering delusions that not it's caught the butterfly, the problem of meaning, the reaching for with concepts, the agony and ecstasy of poesis....
H's. later few, extremely strange and out of context, references to Jews in the late 30' meant that H. consciously couples himself with the official Germany's, or to his so dear "fatherland's", fate. That is, H. consciously victimizes himself, takes responsibility, as part of the Germany's possible future reputation with regard to its horrendously criminal treatment of the Jew population ("Jew" as a mystified notion). With those comments he makes sure that when Germany is later accused of its deeds he is also there on the side of the accused.
Then why did you spend so much time arguing that the definition given didn't count?
Perhaps I misinterpreted. Either way, we had an excellent discussion and we seem to be in agreement that the ontology thesis presented in Being and Time is worthy of being studied as an ontology thesis regardless of significant moral shortcomings on the part of the author.
I re-read all of your posts on this thread and they are good.
:up:
I like this. Well said.
As I've said, I'm listening to the book mentioned in the OP. There's a good deal left to listen to. I think its persuasively makes a case that there is a relation between H's political/social ideology and his philosophical works. The author professes to admire H for his efforts to provide the philosophical foundation for an alternative to nihilism and angst which, it appears, was rampant in European philosophy before Being in Time.
[Have patience with me here, if you will. I've never understood why angst and nihilism were supposedly prevalent in 19th and 20th century Europe, and elsewhere to a lesser extent, and am inclined to attribute it to an overreaction to the perceived failure of Christianity, which resulted in people being deprived of the solace of its busybody, "Big Daddy" God, giving meaning to life and setting rules. So, I'm not inclined to think there was some kind of need H tried to satisfy, if there was one. I may not be accurately describing the author's views, or H's for that matter in this respect]
Assuming the author accurately describes what H wrote, however, he wrote a great deal about [i]Volk, Blut und Boden, Arbeit macht frei[/i]. The author thinks this wacky (to me) glorification of Germany, Germans, the German language and culture and corresponding denigration of all other people and nations (especially Jews) is consistent with the entirety of his work and that this would be clearer still if his philosophical works rendered into English, including portions of Being and Time, had not been modified by sympathetic translators.
I haven't read Being and Time; certainly not in its entirety. I've read some of his other, shorter works such as The Question Concerning Technology and it seems to me that it can be inferred from them that he was something of a mystic and romantic. Perhaps that in addition to his rampant Germanophilia accounts for his reference to the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism, even in the 1953 publication of An Introduction to Metaphysics.
I think some of the anxiety came from the revolutions of 1848 where institutions accepted some democratic reforms in exchange for protecting the status quo. The anti-liberal reaction to the revolutions became the grounds for the ultra-nationalist movements that followed.
Nietzsche tried a few lines of this when he was young. His rejection of Wagner signaled the end of that party. To my knowledge, Heidegger never addressed that part of Nietzsche's teachings despite the considerable effort to interpret other parts.
[quote=Hannah Arendt (1950ish)]Heidegger lies notoriously always and everywhere and wherever he can.[/quote]
[quote=Emmanuel Levinas, 1974]One can forgive many Germans but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger.[/quote]
Quoting Ciceronianus
Is this an answer to my question above? A form of elevated Volksgesinnung?
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/790451
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/790632
You might find this youtube interesting ...
Elevated, schmelevated. It's difficult for me to think of his silly rhapsodies regarding the German Volk without picturing him as one of the performers of Springtime for Hitler.
I finished Wolin's book, and even I, unrivaled as I think I am in my loathing for Heidegger, was astonished by the scope of his odiousness.
Yes, we are all too quick to criticize those who supported Hitler and the Nazi regime and referred to the Holocaust as the "self-annihilation of the Jews." The "wrong side of a socio-historic movement," forsooth.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I dont know if it is any more improper to refer to supporters of Hitler as being on the wrong side of a sociologist-historic movement than it is to characterize Trump supporters that way.
On Sunday evening, just as Rosh Hashanah was coming to a close, Trump posted a meme on his social-media platform, Truth Social, excoriating liberal Jews who had voted to destroy America.(Atlantic Magazine)
I think this sums up whatever substantive merit the OP contains: should we allow situational moral issues to to dictate philosophical interpretation. Do people frequently fail to embody their own ideals? Forsooth.
It's always easier to moralize than it is to be moral.
It is a grave mistake to assume that the two are separate. "Situational ethics" trivializes the extermination of groups of people. Central to Heidegger's "philosophical interpretation" is the preeminent place and role of human beings.That some human beings, the German Volk, are to play an important world historical role and others are not simply to be ignored or excluded but round up and put in death camps, is evidence of the troubling failure of his philosophical interpretation.
I would never assume that. However philosophy, by its very nature, is a kind of intellectual idealization. If the philosophy is explicitly a philosophy of how best to live life (e.g. Stoicism) then attempting this kind of analysis might have merit. I would definitely see Heidegger within the context of the historical events, and as symptomatic of a global malaise. However there are people walking around today committing atrocities that would make Hitler blush. We demonize in order to ignore. Let's focus on the living crises of human conduct that we at least have some hope of addressing.
That may be one way in which it is practiced but intellectual idealization is not what philosophy is by its very nature. I think Heidegger would reject that claim.
Quoting Pantagruel
To acknowledge and face the problem is to neither demonize nor ignore him nor to deny his importance.
Exactly what "problem"? Is Heidegger culpable for something, or of something?
And I didn't mean we demonize to ignore Heidegger. We demonize one thing in order to ignore other instances of that thing that are still going on. Atrocities are perpetrated daily in the name of economics. I'd as soon excoriate those responsible for that as Heidegger. And those guilty of standing by and letting that happen.
There's a kind of magnificence in your extravagant, blithe dismissal of Heidegger's support for attempted genocide and a Germanic master race. If you read or listen to Wolin's book, by the way, you'll find that these positions have their basis in his philosophical musings (primarily in the Black Notebooks and his letters to his brother). As for his philosophy, such as it is, it seems to me that Dewey's alleged observation that Heidegger "reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me" describes whatever is of worth in it, by my understanding, if we subtract H's mysticism and Romanticism.
Ah. Now we learn Hitler wasn't that bad a fellow, after all. Loved dogs, they say.
Non sequitur. Because someone is worse doesn't mean someone else isn't bad.
His support of Nazism.
Quoting Pantagruel
Read his Rectoral Address
On a more individual basis there is his treatment of Jewish students.
Quoting Pantagruel
We do not have to pick one or the other.
The question is whether his philosophy and his Nazism are two different and unrelated things.
Yes, which is what I said. I've read Being and Time five times and never found it suggestive of any kind of antisemitism or fascism. To those who dismiss it, no skin off my nose. Your loss.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Coming from you , thats a compliment, given the brilliance of Dewey.
The alleged brilliance of Dewey. I'd love to know the alleged source of the alleged allegation. But nothing like a good ad hominem to brighten up the day.
Two centuries ago slavery was a social norm widely embraced and even more widely tolerated. So whom from that time period should we exempt from moral censure? Anyone today who espoused slavery would be rightly seen as a monster. Social contexts create themselves as norms. Sometimes extremely dubious things get realized as social contexts, it's the nature of the beast. Man can be a very ugly animal. As unpleasant a fact as social reality is, it is a reality. You downplay your awareness of the exigency of the social context at your own risk. Your outrage is far more of a social than an intellectual response, anyone can see that. If it were intellectual, then it would only be a matter of letting Heidegger's writings speak for themselves, wouldn't it?
Good points. If Heideggers mistake was cultural essentialism, the eclipsing of individual difference in favor of the social whole, Ciceronianuss mistake is subjective individualism, which downplays the social shaping of individual subjectivity. Both tendencies are formed within discursive traditions, and both can lead to potentially dangerous ethical myopia.
There were plenty of Germans in Heidegger's time who did not fall for the Nazi foolishness, and if Heidegger is to be held up as a paragon of human brilliance I don't think this argument holds water.
I don't have much of an opinion on this matter, not being overly familiar with Heidegger. There are caricatures on both sides. I don't think there is a simple answer to be had, but given Heidegger's stature, his strong support of the Nazi regime casts a indelible shadow on him.
Quoting Leontiskos
It had better hold water, or else the concept of human brilliance needs to be done away with.
Making the decision to abandon or accept Nazism certainly is a moral choice, not an intellectual one. Nicolai Hartmann even defied Nazism actively as a prominent professor who refused to allow Nazi pledges at the start of class. So should those who fled not have stayed and stood their ground with Hartmann?
So Heidegger certainly can be morally evaluated for that one decision. As we all can. Werner von Braun the father of modern rocketry doesn't seem to have problems with his good name.
I wonder if anyone has ever made a comment to someone about someone else couched in intimate terms the meaning of which was not meant for general translation?
That's because rocketry and philosophy are not the same thing. You seem to be implicitly admitting that Heidegger's work is like rocketry, and has no moral worth, no?
I suppose it could be. Unless, of course, we find H's "Dewey Notebooks" establishing he shamelessly plagiarized Dewey's work. That's intended as a joke, by the way.
That's a complete leap.
However he certainly isn't an ethicist and doesn't pretend to be I think. And arguably, rocketry is one whole hell of a lot more ethically important than philosophy. So, whichever direction you wanted to go with that, ok.
But that's just what the Nazis said, "Look at this brilliant man who strongly approves of our project! Surely our project is worthwhile given his approval."
Disentangling the two is not as easy as Heidegger's students would wish.
You should listen to Tom Lehrer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
Certainly nobody who actively argued in its defense, like John Calhoun. Or does the "intellectual" nature of his speeches/writings in support of slavery preclude criticism of him, as it seems Heidegger's speeches and writings in support of Nazism precludes criticism of him?
The Nazi death camps is not something that occurred two centuries ago and was not a widely embraced social norm. However reprehensible slavery was, to be a slave was not to be put to death. The rejection of slavery as a social norm was an acceptance of the inherent value of human life.
Quoting Pantagruel
I reject this kind of intellectualist nihilistic historical relativism that separates thinking from being. We are not talking about abstract entities but human beings. There are always those who are not intellectually imprisoned by social norms, those who look beyond what is to what ought to be. Heidegger was not one of them. But even this is to grant Heidegger too much. Any decent person at that time could see that what the Nazis were doing was wrong.
Quoting Leontiskos.
Lets be clear about what are entangled here. On one side are the public record of Heideggers political actions, and his collected comments concerning his views about National Socialism and the Jews. On the other side are dozens of philosophical works spanning 6 decades and comprising tens of thousands of pages.
If as responsible readers we are charged with the task of using the public record and scattered diary fragments to illuminate the meaning of his published work, and vice versa, which of these two sides of Heideggers life do you think deserves the most attention in clarifying the true intentions of as careful and complex a thinker as Heidegger?
I think its no coincidence that those, like Wolin, who are most inclined to treat Heideggers political activities and non-published comments as a proxy for actually mastering his published work are the ones who want to dismiss his philosophy entirely.
Did you know Joe Margolis? He was my thesis advisor. Margolis, a self-professed relativist who stressed the importance of cultural and historical situatedness, would not accept the kind of Heidegger apologetic we see here.
So, Heidegger was only following orders of a sort--social orders, as it were? In that sense, so were they all, one would think.
I didn't know him. You were fortunate.
But your presupposition is that the two bodies of work are in conflict, and that we therefore must choose either one or the other. Why think that? On my (admittedly limited) view, the two are not in conflict.
When attempts to excuse Heidegger on the basis that he was an intellectual and not a moralist, he seems to implicitly commit himself to the view that Heidegger's academic work is largely non-moral, and is therefore not contrary (nor favorable) to the moral evils of Nazism. This approach also does not see the two bodies of work as conflicting.
Quoting Fooloso4
Margoliss relativism seems to go only so far. He appears to embrace Foucault but his critiques of Husserl, Ricouer, Heidegger, Rorty and various postmodern writers seems to indicate his inability to make the phenomenological (and beyond that, deconstructive) move into a thoroughly relational model of being. Instead, he insists on maintaining a split between the methods of human and natural science, based on his belief in a certain notion of an objective' physical reality. He says cultural time is reversible but physical time is irreversible:.
No, my presupposition is that the two bodies of work are two aspects of the same thinking, and that we must use each side to better understand the other. But one side is profoundly richer, deeper , more fully elaborated than the other. Without a thoroughgoing scholarly immersion in that side, one ends misreading Heideggers philosophical use of the word destruction for the conventional meaning, as Richard Wolin does. This is one of innumerable misreadings he makes in his diatribe against H.
Quoting Leontiskos
I would disagree that Heideggers work doesnt imply an ethics. It does. Both Derrida and Levinas have connected the limits of the ethicial implications of his thought with his political mistakes.
As long as I am name dropping I read Heidegger with William Richardson. This was before the current attention focusing on Heidegger's affiliation with the Nazi, but even back then there were those who made the connection.
I asked Richardson about it. He was visibly troubled and admitted that he was not able to reconcile it. But we continued to read Heidegger and I continued to read him after that and read him with some of my students after that.
I agree Being and Time should be studied as an ontology thesis To what extent that thesis is inherently apolitical is a reasonable inquiry that doesn't make the text equivalent to Mein Kampf by default.
After reviewing the range of literature concerned with the political, the interpretations range from seeing his work as a culmination of Heidegger's rejection of 'modern society' developed over a long time or as a conflict in his own thinking. The latter consideration is more interesting as a problem for philosophy. But that does not make it apolitical.
What do you mean by inability?
That's interesting, because most people in your position seem to try to use Heidegger's academic work to explain away the writings, beliefs, and decisions of Heidegger's which are unappealing.
In any case, I don't see how the problem goes away unless one argues that Heidegger's academic work is inherently contrary to the unappealing aspects, and that he simply failed to recognize the way in which his philosophy precludes antisemitism, or Nazism, etc. A tall task.
Yes, I would like to see more of that inherent contradiction.
I hope this helps:
Eugene Gendlin was a Viennese Jew who , at age 13 , just barely made it out of Austria alive in 1939. As a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Chicago, he avoided reading Heidegger for years because of his political activities.After finally reading and embracing aspects of his philosophy, Gendlin wrote a remarkable analysis of the historical context of Heideggers actions. He didnt excuse Heidegger or explain away what he did , but , like another famous Jewish philosopher who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Emmanuel Levinas, he showed Heideggers faults to be symptomatic of a weakness endemic to European thinking. Rather than conveniently indulging in a pose of moral superiority, patting himself on the back for his righteousness, he looked beyond the individual to a climate of thinking common not just to the Nazis but to those who opposed them.
Heres the first part of Gendlins article , plus the last paragraph:
Interesting, thanks. I can see how this reflects your view that "the two bodies of work are two aspects of the same thinking," while yet providing room for a correction, and also providing a way of preserving the philosophy. Overall, this seems like a reasonable approach. I would like to read the entire article.
People should read Heidegger all they like. I don't seek to ban his books. I myself am inclined to avoid whenever possible those who, inter alia, think and are determined to tell everyone that certain groups of people (including themselves) are distinctive in spirit, or have a special place in the world, are especially a part of or have a unique understanding of "Being" or who knows what else is said to qualify as the kind of mystical-religious-philosophical locus of ultimate reality some of us need to manufacture, which in any case cannot be defined or understood through the use of reason; who think reason itself is detrimental to attaining what's true or real, and believe that it should be replaced by something or other like dancing, or marching, exercising, working (because it makes us "free") or running about the mountains in lederhosen pretending to be a peasant. Particularly when they are, also, unrepentant Nazis.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Wolin gets Heidegger half right in this respect. Heidegger did indeed reserve a special place for his own parochial culture over others. In his mind rural culture was better suited to grasping Being urban culture, the German volk grounded in blood and soil were better suited to this thinking than rootless jews or other foreigners. What Wolin doesnt get is that the thinking of Being itself is a thinking of pragmatic engagement that in its particularities clashes with the structures of totalitarian political institutions. Wolin believes that at the heart of Heideggers concept of being is nothing but right wing fascist philosophy dressed up in mystic poetic terminology. But his philosophy is profoundly different from the sorts of conservative philosophies that were fashionable at the time, and still appear today. So Heideggers thinking appears as something new and radical but tied to the vestiges of parochial nationalism.
Yeah, but....
I'd say it's Heidegger that has the plank in his eye. He didn't fail to embody his own ideals. What he ultimately deemed as authentic living was just a bad ideal that he successfully lived up to.
But, as @Joshs has already pointed out -- Levinas and Derrida have more right to condemn Heidegger than me, and they both use his philosophy. So, for better or worse, I think he's worth reading. (as a Marxist, that's damning praise, but praise all the same)
I'm glad you have such a fine-grained sense of absolute moral right and wrong. You are to be congratulated.
As I said, debating some particular moral decision of Heidegger's, ok. Otherwise, I let the man's work speak for what it is, which is what it is designed to do. I've read my fair share of Heidegger, I don't feel like I've been morally polluted by any suspect ideologies. I do feel like the man has some valuable insights. Your mileage may vary. Perhaps he was transformed by the experience. Lots of saints started out as sinners. The study of saints (hagiography) recognizes the conversion to the opposite as a common theme, what Jung called enantiodromia. Who is to say? The human experience is complex.
Does one's sense of right and wrong have to be fine grained and absolute to know that the extermination of human beings was wrong in the twentieth century?
Quoting Pantagruel
I agree.
Quoting Pantagruel
Saint Martin Heidegger?
Nope. And Martin Heidegger wasn't personally culpable for that. The people who were were tried, convicted, and punished. And there have been (and continue to be) lots of other modern genocides resulting in millions of deaths. For context.
He supported it though. The Fuhrer and the extermination of Jews and others was, in line with his Protestant provincialism, fated. It is the sending or giving of Being, to which the authentic Dasein must hearken. The German people are Heidegger's chosen people, doing God's work on Earth.
Yes, your use of the term "support" is sufficiently vague to endorse what I've been saying. I don't doubt he was a representative of a certain set of ideologies alive at that time. I have not seen any damning citations that implicate him as a sinister architect, nor any indication that his philosophy is polluted, which is the real issue.
Reading his Rectoral Address should give you some idea of what support means.
Quoting Pantagruel
His philosophy is amoral. No distinction is made in order to distinguish between what Being gives, which is to be accepted and supported, and what is to be rejected. He does, however, make use of the distinction for example in his criticism of technology.
It is as if he were to criticize the death camps because of their efficiency.
:up:
Does that mean you agree with the statement or that you approve of philosophical nihilism?
Again, I think it depends on whether Heidegger's philosophy implicates the moral sphere. For an ethicist to produce a work of great import and then choose actions which are deeply flawed is incongruous. For a philosopher whose work implicates the moral sphere the incongruity is not as great, but it is still present. For someone whose work has no relation to the moral sphere, there is no incongruity.
And then this gets into 's point about "philosophical nihilism." It is easy to swallow the idea that a logician, for instance, can produce work unrelated to the moral sphere. But Heidegger is doing and purporting to do something much more fundamental ("metaphysics"), and there is much more at stake in considering whether that fundamental sphere is amoral.
The problem is evident in the Introduction to Being and Time. Heidegger claims that the question of the meaning of Being is the fundamental question, the human question. H. says that we must make the inquirer, Dasein, transparent in his own Being. To ignore the ethical dimension of human being is to make what he intends to make transparent opaque. We are not only social animals, we are ethical animals, even if we do not always speak or act that way.
From an earlier post in this thread, quoting from Heidegger's The Beginning of Western Thinking: Heraclitus. Quoted by Wolin:
Quoting Fooloso4
The absence of the Just should be noted. Heidegger replaces it with the True. Was the substitution intentional? An indication of Heidegger's disregard for man as anything more than a mouthpiece for Being?
Quoting Fooloso4
Quoting Pantagruel
Because of the centrality of Dasein, in this case it does.
I totally agree with this assessment. However, at best we can call this neglect. I don't believe it invalidates his thinking, however it certainly is a major flaw. One should definitely read Heidegger with an awareness of this caveat. Sometimes people are most blind to what they most need to see. Often.
Heidegger doesnt ignore the ethical dimension of Being, any more than Focault, Deleuze and Guattari ignore ethics in their work. One cannot properly think responsibility and justice without an understanding of Being. The question of Being is in its essence an ethical question. This is a central idea in Derrida. I think youre looking for a prescriptive ethics and, not finding it , infer the total
absence of an ethical dimension.
Many authors have taken such as stance. For instance, Todd May writes:
Quoting Leontiskos
Im sure your actions, from the vantage of a century or so hence, will come to be construed as deeply ethically flawed.
But how many times does this poor argument need to be unmasked? Here are some places where it has already been done:
(Conflating cases where "a century or so" is required with cases where "a century or so" is not required is inadmissible.)
Lovely. I highly recommend Jean Luc Nancys The Banality of Heidegger for an antidote to Wolins book. To summarize, Heidegger absorbs the anti-semitic tropes from his culture, but not without reinterpreting them. For instance, he rejects the biological, racialized concept of jewry. Jewry represents for him a mode of thinking, a technicized, logicized instrumentalism that he traces back to Plato and Aristotle and which Jews co-opted from the Greeks and spread to Christianity and which reaches its apex with Enlightenement science. He considered Nazism to be the ultimate expression of this technicized thinking. Nancy argues that the ethical tools Heidegger provides in
his thinking can be used to insulate against the very essentialism that Heidegger succumbs to.
It should be noted that Levinas, who was strongly influenced by Heidegger but who offered a philosophical critique of his work, essentializes the jews in a different direction. He argues that we can discern two currents or styles of thinking in Western philosophy since its origins, the Greek and the Jewish. The Greek current focuses on neutral truth and the Jewish deems the ethical as fundamental.
Without determining whether Heidegger offers an ethics, and, if he does, without defining the nature of this ethics, it seems to me we cant counter the implication of the OP, which is based on Wolins book Heidegger in Ruins. That is, the question is, is Heideggers reputation really in ruins? Wolin wants us to conclude that the ethical implications of Heideggers work, its most important feature, are dangerous and deserve to be left in ruins. I agree with the many who have been influenced by his philosophy that the method of grounding ethics his work offers is relevant and important.
This requires an explanation. What is the connection between Being and ethics? Rather than address this you invoke the names of Focault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Derrida, but still no defense or explanation of your claim.
Quoting Joshs
No, not at all.
I don't hold to a view that because someone may be problematic that this bleeds into all their activities. But this is for a different thread.
Quoting Fooloso4
The essence of a thing, including an ethical value, is to be found in the contextual particularity of our involvement with it. This precludes universalizing ethics.
What does this mean? Is absorbs another word for accepts? Does his reinterpreting them liberate him from these prejudices? Or does his thinking not rise above the pedestrian?
Quoting Joshs
Yes, if only they would act less like Jews.
Quoting Joshs
And how does an understanding of Being relate to the contextual particularity of our involvement?
Greek ethical notions such as phronesis and areti are in opposition to universalizing ethics, and manage quite well without embracing Heidegger's destining of Being.
The essence of a thing is not the meaning of Being. Our involvement with it can take many forms, including building extermination camps.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, Greek culture was a paragon of ethical humanism. They didnt have the technology for concentration camps, but they were able to manage the technology of slavery quite well.
You did not address the questions I asked.
If you do so I will address your criticism of the Greeks. I will say this much. I do not mean Greek culture but the Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle.
I don't think anyone in the thread has proposed such a view.
At least not in its recent revival. I wasn't a member when the thread began six months ago. Again, if Heidegger were a logician it would be different (link), because it is plausible that logic and ethics have no interrelation. The crux of this issue is illustrated by the difference between and .
Yes, but the argument you give is not the only one by which someone could reach such a conclusion: "because someone may be problematic [therefore] this bleeds into all their activities."
Interesting, thanks. I will be visiting my parents soon and will have to dig some of my Heidegger books out of storage.