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i mean, a banality by definition can't be an insight. and it is rather silly to suggest that our alternative is either an authentic (i.e. good [why?]) life of contemplative superstition and starving in the woods, or an entirely alienated and disconnected part in a technocratic machine that necessarily consumes your whole existence |
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i.e. i'm pretty sure existentialists have never actually interacted and empathised with people if they think they're making sense |
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the same happened to me recently after watching porns with big dicks google was giving me ads of monster dildos left and right what google didn’t know was i already have every monster dildo they advertised me |
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What are the criteria you use to determine whether something is worth your time/energy? Authentic existence is of value, because it's an existence free from illusions that derive from lack of clarity. You need to be clear about the structure of the world you inhabit. Otherwise you are like a person with impaired eyesight tumbling in the dark. And Heidegger asks more questions than metaphysicians and scientists because in addition to dealing with the questions of metaphysicians (and he has analyzed all of the great metaphysicians at great length and detail) he has the extra level of clarifying the grounds of metaphysics. .... So the strong rejection and bizarre cartoonish caricature of Heidegger might come from the fact that you really want to avoid certain important questions. ... |
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what questions are those? |
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Would you care to answer the question “What are the criteria you use to determine whether something is worth your time/energy?” first ? |
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i am interested in things that are either astute or unusual, i am not interested in vague banalities that are either obvious, derivative, or nonsense |
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also as established previously i'm mostly a kantian who doesn't believe in a distinction between the transcendental and the material if that's useful to you |
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What is it you get from Kant? Which important questions does he answer for you? ... Well yes, maybe Heidegger just doesn't wrestle the questions you're interested in and doesn't provide the types of answers you're looking for. ... But Heidegger always goes one level deeper. While Kant presupposes the normal correspondence theory of truth, Heidegger for instance goes one level deeper and explains how it's even possible to come up with truth as correspondence (answer: it's based on the more basic truth as unconcealment). So I find it a bit suspicious if a person interested in Kant is totally against Heidegger |
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I want the lamb and the lion to hug. Heidegger and Thomas Aquinas to make love to each other. I want the criminal and the victim to forgive each other and pleasure each other with sweet kisses. |
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And he’s wrestling with the question what it means *that* something exists without reducing the question what it means that something exists to the question *what* exists. I don't think the questions are so easily separable. Does being itself have properties irrespective of what in particular there is? If so, then you're asking and answering metaphysical questions again, about some*thing* ultimate that exists - God, nature, forms, mathematical objects, what have you. If not, then it's hard to see how being itself could have meaning (is meaning a property) - aside from what we project on it, or in relation to us - to what in particular is, rather than as being qua being. It also depends on what you mean by "meaning" - comprehensibility? Moral or affective significance? Purpose? A message? I realize I'm opening a barn door that you can drive anything through here... you can say "all of those, and also none of those" 🤷♂️ “what the fuck are you doing, looking at trees, [...] “what’s wrong with you thinking it’s worthwhile to play with children. The problem is not that Heidegger values lebenswelt / holism / contemplation and I don't. He's hardly the first or only person to do so. Heidegger didn't invent holism, or meditation, or being as one with all-that-is, or valuing the simple experience of being in the world. We don't stop playing with our children by eschewing Heidegger. We all enjoy simply being in the moment. The problem is that Heidegger devalues other modes of consciousness; in his ideal world he wants us all to be smooth-brained peasants. Heidegger would be totally on-board with neoreaction and the dark enlightenment. He's Julius Evola if Julius Evola had read Kant. His reaction to modernity is not "right, this is has some problems, let's move forward" but "nope, let's move backwards" - to a völkisch simplicity in which you don't want the peasants getting ideas. Again, this is why he ball-and-sockets so neatly with fascism. |
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Well, I see where you're coming from .. It strikes me that when it comes to actual philosophical positions on many points we are not that far from each other - we both agree that holism and analysis are not in opposition to each other - we both agree that naturalism/materialism/physicalism are not merely scientific theories but metaphysical theories - we both seem to agree that there's a problem with ulttimate justification of metaphysical theories --> then you seem to opt for a pragmatist approach to smoothen the problem of ultimte justification ...whearas i'm uneasy about pragmatism because it threatens to reduce truth to usefulness and that seems a bit overhasty to me ... ( and thus for instance I am interested in what Heidegger has to say about truth as unconcealment because it might open up a path that avoids pragmatism, dogmatism and skepticism ) ... regarding Heidegger as a phulosopher-person. I think those points you mention can to some extrent be found in his writing. But I think those are just not the interesting aspects in his texts. So i experience those aspects as annoying garbage you have to circumvent while reading his otherwise enlgitehnting texts and you see those parts as defining who he is.He's interesting to me when he picks up questions from Plato, Aristotle and Kant and pushes them further and further. But ultimately I don't think that determining the status of Heidegger as a philosopher-person here is not so crucial. I care about the philosophical questions more than the people associated with them. ... |
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Have you read the Dao De Jing? Heidegger seems to have read it because he has used allegories from Daoism and some central themes are similar. Anyway. The Dao De Jing also has many verses where it's recommended that the masses should live like animals, have full bellies and otherwise not think. I remember being vaguely shocked by it. Would you also clasify Daoism as having facistic tendencies? Or what are your views on Daoism? |
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I've spent years working some of my sources and I'm not about to blow them on some Internet dork forum, but if you seriously want to engage in scholarship on the the vilest, most reprehensible underbelly of the radical right I would point you towards r/The_Donald, the nucleus of postmodern, LGBTQ+ white nationalism. |
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That's a good point and yes I can see Heidegger / Dao parallels. Isn't it kind of weird to defend him by comparing him to documents from the axial age, though? And isn't it anachronistic and ahistorical to ask if axial documents are fascist? And is there anything we uncritically swallow whole from that era? But I think we expect something different from modern thinkers. We expect them to have considered the intervening thinkers. But this is just what Heidegger rejects, from Plato onwards, no? Not that he hasn't read them, of course. He just thinks they were wrong to focus on beings rather than being. IMO the Dao is especially suited to picking and choosing and interpreting because it's thought to be the work of diverse hands. Take the first verse of the Dao - it's a brilliant, highly concentrated statement of a major point in the discussion here - analytic versus holistic modes of consciousness. I don't think you'll find an earlier or more concisely stated text on this topic. It's incredible. Other parts of it give me indigestion because they seem to counsel primitivism and passivity. Maybe they're the expression of overworked imperial bureaucrats who dreamed of taking off and going fishing. Still other parts could be read several ways and I think we're justified in interpreting them as we will. For example: Heaven and earth are ruthless; They see the ten thousand things as dummies. The wise are ruthless; They see the people as dummies. Now you can read that literally as Machiavellianism, seeing people as a means to an end, or as objects, but I choose to see this as recognizing that people and their decisions and actions are results just as much as causes. You have a certain compassion for people when you recognize how their circumstances made them what they are. |
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The bit about the wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies: that's good advice IMO! Provide for people's needs, let them live their lives, and don't try to get them riled up, e.g. with nationalistic fervor and war spirit. Recall that the conventional figure of Laozi is said to have lived during the warring states period. (Nietzsche would have called these satisfied, unwarlike people "last men".) |
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(I do want to come back to pragmatism and truth as unconcealment later) |
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the masturbate thread is more interesting with 109 posts less |
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There’s more masturbating in this thread though! |
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ha-ha. thats really phisolophical and more of a spiral that those tits welt always does! thanks for showing up! |
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Thanks man! This thread is alright in truth and I like it, but I had to come back just to make that post! It seemed right :) |
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i noticed the fresh touch welt gave to his posts too its not all negative |
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must be the sun |
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Do you think the rumours are true, and welt is a vampire? I imagine him fitting quite well with the romantics at the time. Did you hang out with Byron and the Shelleys, welt? I bet you where there on the shores of lake Léman! |
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i read a line of a post of him and it kills you slowly as someone was sucking you blood |
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We like to mesure and weigh, we get satisfaction from solving, but I agree with Juliette here: Can we really say it’s the utter universal truth? When I was a young lad a friend of my dad’s told me “son, we’re (just) bags of DNA collecting data, and we fucking love it!”. That stuck. |
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"(I do want to come back to pragmatism and truth as unconcealment later)" My rough and quickly-hammerd-down reconstruction of some important points would go like this. Heidegger starts from the tradition and what's accepted normally and then digs deeper: “Normal“ level: Truth as correspondence. - In normal everyday-life and scientific activities the concept of truth as correspondence is important. - Truth then is a feature of propositions/thoughts/sentences. - Truth-criterion: A proposition is true if it corresponds to the facts (= mirrors the facts). - Technique of finding out the truth: You look at the proposition and then compare it to the facts it describes. Example: You look at the proposition „In Germany there are exactly three types of maple-trees: sycamore, field maple, Norway maple“. Then you compare the proposition to the facts by looking at all the trees in the designated area and thus determine the truth of the sentence. - Errors might occur, but you can rule them out to a large extent by repeating the technique of comparison with the facts several times Problems with this view - The technique of comparing propositions to the facts is not possible when it comes to many truth-claims people like to make. For instance it’s not clear how you can compare the propositions of metaphysics such as „The universe consists ultimately of those things our best scientific theories can observe“ or „Since every event in the universe has a prior cause, and since regress of causes ad infiituum is absurd, there must be an ultimative first cause - an unmoved mover“ to the facts. We have techniques of comparing a proposition like „Blue wales sing during mating-season“ to the facts. But we don’t have techniques of comparing these metaphysical proposition to something like metaphysical facts. |
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—> Kant opted to give up the project of making truth-claims about these areas we have no access to —> Others opted for re-defining truths in order to compensate for this impossibility. Truth could potentially be re-defined as coherence or as social consensus or in a pragmatist twist as usefulness. —> Heidegger’s response: The problem of having to compensate for the problems of the theory of truth as correspondence doesn’t even emerge if you dig deeper. One level deeper: Truth as unconcealment. - Truth-as-correspondence presupposes that there’s a world in which there are at least two sorts of objects you can compare. Propositions, which can be written down or uttered or expressed in pictures on the one hand and, on the other hand, those facts those propositions refer to. So truth as correspondence is only possible because somebody is being-there who can have both the ‚proposition-objects‘ in their view and the ‚fact-objects‘ (which the propositions are supposed to mirror) in their view. - The sheer appearance of objects - which makes it possible to compare different types of objects (sentences vs. mirrored facts) to each other - is a deeper level of truth: Objects become disclosed or unconcealed. |
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Two levels deeper: The opening of truth as unconcealment - Objects don’t merely appear, but they appear to someone who’s being-there. Being-there is thus an opening in which something gets revealed (and Being gets disclosed). - In other words: Only because there are ‚rational animals’ like human-beings can objects even appear. Three levels deeper: Being - The appearance (disclosure/unconcealment) of objects depends on the being-there of rational human animals. But humans don’t create those objects, and they don’t create themselves. - We are thrown into existence and are thus dependent on that which gives us existence - Being. The ‚breaking-down‘ of the neat hierarchical way of looking at things: Being is ‚turned‘ into itself (folded into itself). - Not only does the rational animals’s being-there depend on Being. Being also depends on the being-there of rational animals. - Being, as Heideggers, puts its „comes into its own“ if humans/rational animals experience Being. - (Similar concept: Before Heidegger some people believed that God is initially unconscious and reveals himself to himself by becoming conscious in the form of human beings.) - Being is not an transcendent object existing in a metaphysical realm, but Being is insofar as rational human animals ‚come into their own by experiencing Being‘. |
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Being is at the same time concealing and unconcealing - Being is ‚turned-in-itself‘, ‚folded-in-itself‘ in such a way that Being depends on rational animals and rational animals depend on Being —> Therefore Being can never be made fully transparent to itself - (Rough Analogy: You can only look at something by looking away from something else. You can be as a rational human animal, but thus not be as a bat) Four levels deeper: The un-ground/the abyss - Due to Being’s structure of being folded-into-itself we can never reach bed-rock. There’s no ultimate explanation of Being (there’s not the one-last-ultimate-level of Being which depends on nothing else - there are no physical elementary particles which ultimately ground the world; there’s no God who ultimately grounds the world). Being is dynamic and wild, so to speak. - Since there is no ground on which Being rests we can experience the ‚un-ground‘ of Being: the abyss of nothingness. - And an adequate response to Being thus doesn’t call for a complete scientific description of all the objects which exist (which is only an response to Being on a superficial level), but it calls for a decision to ground a new opening of a world. ——> Bottom line - Kant’s critical philosophy and his phenomenon-noumeonon distinction made it clear that we can have no scientifically justified and rationally-grounded ‚theory of everything‘ which explains the very-nature of reality - Heidegger develops this theme further by working out how Being is necessarily both unconcealing-and-concealing itself and thus can never be fully transparent - What rational human animals thus ultimately have to do is to come up with a, so to speak, free decision to ground a specific manifestation of Being which rests on the un-ground and abyss. (Sounds familiar, because guys like Sartre picked it up and defended vulgarized/simplified versions of it etc). |
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Pragmatism? - On the one hand this reconstruction of Heidegger sounds a lot like pragmatism: Being seems like a ‚force’ you have to respond to and deal with … ‚truth‘ is that what is created by our practical attempts to deal successfully with those primal forces - On the other hand: Unlike the pragmatist-stance the focus is not on (a) aims *we* happen to have and (b) how *we* can instrumentally and usefully realize those aims. It’s more like the Chinese (Confucian/Daoist/also-Buddhist) view that you have to harmonize with the forces of nature and then you’ll be fine. In other words and more clearly: The practical-response to being is seen as an absolute-task, a categorical-imperative so to speak. In other words: The pragmatist would focus on the task of realizing our *own* goals. The Heideggerian would focus on the task of realizing *Being’s/nature’s* goals. But then it gets complicated because *we are nature*, *we are being-there* (and thus Being). |
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I see myself more like a happy camper - like a worm happily plowing through the earh. I don't recall ever posting anything truly negative on this messageboard. But yes, I've been there at Lac Léman |
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I wasn’t implying you were a negative person. I just found it fun to imagine you as a creature that doesn’t die and hanged out with the romantics on lake Léman! Did you just go to geneva or did you visit the whole lake area? |
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The board now eagerly anticipating Spinanza’s response... |
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Just Geneva. I have fond memories of sitting in front of the lake and staring at the mountains behind it. |
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I'm prepared for the worst possible responses. "Ha-ha-ha, Being folded into itself, what is that supposed to mean? Pure New-Age Bullshit! Heidegger should just read Dan Dennett and take an intro class to science!" .. But I hope for the best. |
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A steampunk re-imagining of your mom. |
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Welt, I don't have any big objections to the overall thrust of what you / Heidegger are proposing here. Aside from some quibbles over terminology I think I may have already agreed with most of this, somehow?! Particularly agree with our continuity with being/nature and the blurriness between our goals and being's/nature's goals. I HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT ALL OF THIS. I'll limit myself to a couple of points so it doesn't spiral out of control and we can keep a back and forth going instead of dishing up huge flotillas of text that are hard to reply to point by point. If you're willing. Being: I tend to think of being as that-there-is-something rather than as something-regarding-itself. I mean, consciousness seems like a contingent feature. But it seems central the way Heidegger uses the term. There's something solipsistic about it, or idealistic in the Berkeleyan sense. No? Did Heidegger believe in any kind of panpsychism? Also, regarding being and metaphysics: there are some metaphysical statements that we can make that seem armchair-confirmable to me. For example, being (considered as somethingness) cannot be caused - for anything that could be thought of as a cause must itself be. So you're only creating a regress. Your "digging down under" or "undermining" correspondence, this reminds me of deflationary or performative accounts of truth. I mean, of course there's stuff underlying, no one thinks truth is an essence or thing in itself any more I guess? IMO accounts of truth and knowledge are secondary to what we're doing - knowing and deciding what's true. Truth and knowledge as human activities are not utterly dependent on the way we characterize them, in the same way that birds are not dependent on the discipline of ornithology. Don't the abyss and throwness dictate a certain pragmatism? Here we are, there's no foundations, we have to start somewhere, so let's consider our map provisional? |
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man i have conflicted feelings about dan dennett. it's like, he doesn't seem like a bad guy and i agree with most of his ideas, but it's all so philosophically uninteresting, and his fans tend to be the worst kinds of elon musks. sorry if i came across this way, i'm just french and angry about our star philosophers and their influences. |
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Regarding the first point (Being, solipsism, Berkeley, ...). ... I tried to keep it super-short. - An object always emerges as an object for someone being-there - Immediate experience: The tree besides me emerges with its green leaves and white petals for me - Mediated experience: The factual history of the solar systems, that it’s 4.6 bil years old, emerges because we pull these facts into our view, as it were, using techniques of scientific inquiry - The German word for object is ‘Gegenstand’. ‘Gegen-stand’ literally means ‘standing-against’/’pushing-against’. The German world is helpful insofar as it emphasizes that an object essentially is something which is related to someone. It’s essentially something which has an effect on the ‘subject’. - A thing-in-itself, stripped away from all connections to someone experiencing it, couldn’t even be qualified as a thing; a thing only ever appears as a thing-in-our-world (in this world, you, reading this, are in right now); a thing-in-itself is an absurdity like an ‘absolute perspective (from nowhere)’; an object that isn’t bumping into someone who’s affected by it would be as nonsensical a concept as triangular circle --> There are no objects without ‘subjects’. |
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- That doesn’t imply panpsychism: The objects wouldn’t be objects without us, but that doesn’t mean that they themselves need to have psyches. A stone is an object-for-a-subject, but not itself a subject. - That doesn’t imply Berkeleyian idealism which identifies Being and being-perceived: As said before, Heidegger understands Being as both concealing and un-concealing. Being without perception-of-Being is impossible, but Being without unperceivable-darkness is also impossible. Heidegger is really ying-yang about this and is frustrated by Western philosophy for forgetting the necessity of darkness and hates Western philosophy for interpreting Being-lying-in-the-dark as merely-unknowable-to-us-because-we-don’t-have-the-right-f things-which-are-not-yet-known or as aculties. - That doesn’t imply solipsism: ‘Being’ for H. is zerklüftet (jagged, ragged, fissured, gashed). We could go into the reasons for claiming this later. But here let’s just say that for H. Being has a fugue-like-structure. The different parts of Being are dependent on each other (Being could not be without human-beings, human-beings could not be not without Being), but they are not identical. So, since there’s a real confrontation with forces you are not identical to, H. wouldn’t affirm a ‘solipsistic’ position. --> The questions from a Heideggerian perspective to you would be: Why do you want to privilege the non-conscious aspects of the world, even though non-conscious things always only ever appear in connection with conscious agents? (Why do you want to deny one part of the ying-yang structure, so to speak?) |
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Welt, thanks for this. I'll think it over and have more to say later. I guess it makes sense that "carving nature at its joints" relies on carvers. Nietzsche makes a similar point about figure versus ground in BGE, but he emphasizes the pragmatism in all that - we conceive of the world in ways that benefit us. If there aren't figures and ground without us , if there aren't natural joints, then our conception of parts and wholes is purely instrumental, no? Where does that leave mereology? Why do you want to privilege the non-conscious aspects of the world, even though non-conscious things always only ever appear in connection with conscious agents? (Why do you want to deny one part of the ying-yang structure, so to speak?) Because I'm fallible. Because I'm not God. Because the fact that I can be partially or completely wrong in ways that pull the rug out from under me emphasizes that there's a difference between what there is and how I conceive of it. So it seems that, though there will always be a difference between world and idea of world, there's an asymptotic relationship - I can somewhat approach a better approximation, or have a less good approximation, even though it's always a model. |
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Yeah Dennett is boring! He's dull in the same way that Massimo Pigliucci, who's a big commentator on stuff like this, is dull. Too common-sensical. Centrist-normie. I was reading his book Freedom Evolves and while I don't disagree and I think he has some great points about free will and compatibilism, it was not setting me on fire and I never finished it. |
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