I think the 1920s stuff of Heidegger is great on this.
The “return to the origin” is just theory finally “seeing” the existence it tends to flee and obscure.
In this context, the “physical” object becomes mystified, divorced from its ordinary qualitative manifestation. Likewise “consciousness” is understood to refer to a “stuff” that is next to other objects in the world.
This return is not a grand ethical accomplishments. Sort of as a joke, I say fuck ethical accomplishments. And fuck saving the world with a theory. I make this joke not because I hate the world but out of love for a minor art form that often gets buried in political-ethical posturing.
I see the early work of Heidegger as a theoretical achievement would might be described as theory finally acknowledging its basis or context. Naive theory has followed its own power cord into the wall. I connect this with “my” Hegel/Kojeve also. Our inquiry is not safely hovering over the object. The world is fundamentally a forum, if there is foolosophy.
This is also part of what I like about Brandom, who can be too dry and expansive for my taste at times. What am I trying to do in this particular social situation ? Is that really outside of the inquiry ? Being “is” ontology. This aphorism might offend those who need the purity of a truthmaker that cannot be soiled by rough hands. “Wouldn’t it be nice if inquiry was just a little game that didn’t fuck with the object ?” Curiosity, spectacle, a pleasant dream on a screen that is also a wall.
I hear you, but to me its my use of “wild” and “wacky.” I make some weird art and what others might call strange claims. I choose these words strategically. I see some of the dominant assumptions of philosophy to have lost their strangeness. It’s a wild thesis — basically idealism — to scrape off the quality of objects and put them inside some internal image space. The scientistic understanding of the manifestation of objects as icons within an internal user interface is daring to the point of absurdity. That’s not the problem. The “problem” is that the audacity of this view is not even seen. The view, for many, is “obvious.” The “educated person” knows of course that experience is a epiphenomenon — and pities the savages who can’t grasp the “case” for indirect realism.
And I see this problem to have been solved long ago, by thinkers who are largely just forgotten.
This is frustrating and funny and of no great importance. These are toy beliefs, to be brought out only when playing a game that is more fun when you take it seriously. They are merely costume verbal beliefs.
My rejection is largely aesthetic. I like the challenge of constraining my ontological claims by how I live when I am not playing with such claims.
I totally agree. I might say that we act on a sense of fact or — given the pressure and tempo of life — fact-enough-because-I’m-out-of-time. But this sense of fact can be revised. The “fact” turns out to have been “fiction.”
I am happy to grant “the truth arrives” in some cases. I might stress that acting in total confidence demonstrates the sensed arrival of truth.
I’m with you on that. I think there is genuine love and social feeling in people, but also all of that other stuff you mentioned. Inquiry can be relatively pure.
Right. It’s not apathy. Is it humility ? I at least confess to a sense of futility when it comes to certain issues. I might joke about a “vision of Moloch” that connects to the vision at the center of Schopenhauer’s work, if you dig for the emotional core. The “good stuff” in Nietzsche can be read as an alternative response to this same vision. While I think that sometimes Nietzsche was just manic and raving, I take some of his aggressive rhetoric to be an attempt at dangerous honesty. The blissfully naive theorist implicitly believes that “if only everyone were like me, O what a wonderful world.” Politicians behind podiums tend to flatter the self-righteousness of the mob, pointing out this or that scapegoat. The devil is over there, on the outside of the group, not snug at its center, entangled with its genuine virtues.
But my critique becomes false as soon as I wield it like a podium man. The “content” is only “falsely isolated” from its situated expression.
I’m always happy to share stuff on Gadamer. His Truth and Method is a safe bet. Bloomsbury has a great new translation with glasses on the pink cover.
The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’ — it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
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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’ve also shared one of my favorite passages from T&M before — and I see that you liked it — but perhaps now is a worthy moment to share it again, if only to remind you of the lucidity of Gadamer’s style.
Thus the historical nature of man essentially implies a fundamental negativity that emerges in the relation between experience and insight. Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we called experience in the proper sense. Insight is something we come to. It too is ultimately part of the vocation of man—i.e., to be discerning and insightful.
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If we want to quote another witness for this third element in the nature of experience, the best is Aeschylus. He found the formula—or, rather, recognized its metaphysical significance as expressing the inner historicality of experience—of “learning though suffering” (pathei mathos). This phrase does not mean only that we become wise through suffering and that our knowledge of things must first be corrected through deception and undeception.
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Understood in this way, the formula is probably as old as human experience itself. But Aeschylus means more than this. He refers to the reason why this is so. What a man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity, into the absoluteness of the barrier that separates man from the divine. It is ultimately a religious insight — the kind of insight that gave birth to Greek tragedy. Thus experience is experience of human finitude.
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The truly experienced person is one who has taken this to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future. The experienced man knows that all foresight is limited and all plans uncertain. In him is realized the truth value of experience. If it is characteristic of every phase of the process of experience that the experienced person acquires a new openness to new experiences, this is certainly true of the idea of being perfectly experienced. It does not mean that experience has ceased and a higher form of knowledge is reached (Hegel), but that for the first time experience fully and truly is. In it all dogmatism, which proceeds from the soaring desires of the human heart, reaches an absolute barrier. Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. The genuine result of experience, then—as of all desire to know—is to know what is. But “what is,” here, is not this or that thing, but “what cannot be destroyed” (Ranke).
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Real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness. In it are discovered the limits of the power and the self-knowledge of his planning reason. The idea that everything can be reversed, that there is always time for everything and that everything somehow returns, proves to be an illusion. Rather, the person who is situated and acts in history continually experiences the fact that nothing returns.
Ok good point. But isn’t Being-in-the-world implying your physical bodily placement in the world? Dasein can only be what it is because it is a being in the world with biological body, having born (thrown) into the world, growing old, and facing possible bodily death?
I am not sure if Heidegger talks a lot about consciousness or mental side of dasein under the concept of “being” in B&Z. Perhaps you could enlighten me on this point.
You cannot point at something nonphysical or transcendental.
You can be conscious of things external to you, but also your own mental state, dreams, thoughts and ideas which cannot be pointed at?
Can you be conscious of your consciousness itself?
Initial moment of facing the art, it would be just an object or entity external to me. But as I get closer to the art repeatedly, it becomes part of my consciousness. Then later on, I would try to regenerate the art which is part of my consciousness in the form of recollection into my own creation via imitation. That is how I try to approach art.
If I see an art, and it is just momentary perception which disappears into the thin air, then perhaps I wouldn’t put much value to arts.
But the fact that arts remain in my consciousness through time like some physical object, and feel as if it is part of my consciousness, which can be regenerated to other interesting activities, ideas for imitated creations in the future, motives for will to power, wisdom and life, gives me the belief that art is significant element in life.
In other words, enjoying arts is not an one night stand encounter, but enduring and long lasting mental and physical affair in me through repeated intimations with them, if that makes sense, which is not possible if it wasn’t part of my consciousness.
It is also the case, my consciousness is the only source for the perception of durations and temporality.
We still keep returning to our favorite original arts to refresh the memories of them, compare them with the arts which are now part of our consciousness and see how different they are (repetition and difference), because after all what is our consciousness is a copy of the real piece of the art in the world.
We approach everything under the sun in different way to suit our own preference, and I accept that, and also try to see if there are aspects of the others’ approaches which I can adapt and improve from the discussions. And it is one of the meaningful things to do too.
Dasein/existence is “discoverture” or “disclosure.” Basically my total existence is the presence of the streaming world from the POV of my body and the culture that has been trained into that body.
Heidegger talks about this in S&Z, but he doesn’t like the word “consciousness” because he shrewdly saw how hard it is to get people to look at the issue with fresh eyes. So he used different words.
It’s late for me, so I can only offer a paraphrase before I turn in.
Your entire “stream of experience” — is the streaming of the world from the perspective as you as an organism. This streaming of the world is “there.” We might call being “presence” because the perceptual is so important. What I perceive is here and now. What I perceive is “present.” Perhaps a hammer is present. The presence of that hammer is not itself another thing that is present. Likewise my “consciousness” of the world is not a thing in the world but simply the presence of the world.
But people have tended to associate the word “reality” with a kind of “video game overview” of the world. The “real” or “true” physical object is vaguely imagined as code ( the meaning of math ) that “causes” perceptions. Typically the perceptions are discussed as if “inside” of people and made of a stuff called “consciousness.”
But this approach has nothing to do with the way we live. I talk with a friend about a hot cup of good coffee. We are both there at the coffee shop. I am telling him that the coffee is good here. I am of course talking about the familiar coffee in my hand that I can taste. This “qualitative” object is the genuinely physical object. I see it from my POV, and he from his. But we both trust that both of us can see it. We both trust that we are talking about the same cup of coffee, the ordinary stuff that has a smell and a taste and that is hot to the touch.
My larger point is that early Heidegger is the complete opposite of someone offering strange theories. His difficult language is just an attempt to get around layers and layers of inherited prejudices.
He wants people to wake up and smell the coffee. The “real” coffee is the kind you can taste and smell. My “consciousness” is the being or quality of that quality. Consciousness is not a stuff but just the presence or quality of the ten million kinds of stuff you can find in the world. The “there-ness” of the world is not something in the world.
But wasn’t Heidegger’s starting point all about criticising the idea of being as “presence”, which was the ancient tradition of understanding and describing being? Wouldn’t he have had objected calling being as “presence”?
Heidegger’s being seems to have had been being as “becoming”, not presence, thrown into the world, coping with the “everyday-ness” of the mundane world, and with “other beings”, feeling anxiety from the limitation of life - which is inevitable possibility of death?
Agreed. But I feel one of the cool aspect of Heidegger is his language uses and unique concepts he invented, which describe the abstract features of being and time and the world well.
Interpretations on any philosophy can be different depending on what angle we are looking from. However, as long as the interpretations make sense and have good arguments for the points trying to make, and in understanding the system, I feel it is worthwhile activity and endeavor.
I find his invented concepts very useful to regenerate and build my own ideas on being, the world, time and consciousness. I know I can never be a Heidegger or any other thinkers, but my own self.
But being able to borrow the invented concepts by the historical philosophers in explaining my own ideas would be my purpose of trying to read Heidegger or any other philosophers.
In my copy of S&Z, 114#, Heidegger asks what is Dasein. He immediately answers, “Dasein is an entity which is, in each case I myself;; Its Being is in each case mine.”
I was reading between the lines, that he also meant to mean Dasein is also “my consciousness-towards-time”, and “I am conscious of-the-world”.
Because without my consciousness, Dasein wouldn’t be able to be aware of the world, time and “being-there”. Consciousness is the precondition of Dasein, not mere quality of it. Maybe this is not what Heidegger wrote or meant, but if not, I would still put it forward as a suggestion.
I understand your concern. It’s not about decontextualized words. We aren’t doing word math. The same word used differently becomes illuminating rather than obscuring. In short, being is not present but presence or presence-ing. Being is time is consciousness is the ongoing revelation of world.
“Being is presence,” writes Heidegger. This “decisive experience of my path of thinking cannot be remembered often enough” (GA 98: 278). But on its own, the assertion that “being is presence” leaves us in the dark. What does “being” mean? What does “presence” mean?
Later we get:
The narrower the sense of presence becomes, the more provocative the claim “being is presence”—but also the less plausible. The narrowest sense of presence would be bounded, uniform, necessary being in an eternal “now.” A line from Parmenides’ Fragment 8 offers the classic statement of this vision of being: “neither was it nor will it be, for it is now, all together, one, continuous.” We can call this the Eleatic sense of presence.
If this is what “presence” means, the phenomenological claim “being is presence” seems to be obviously false; the Eleatic vision is precisely a rejection of the phenomena. As a historical claim about the philosophical tradition, “being is presence” would be provocative, aggressive, critical—and again, seemingly false. One can even doubt whether Parmenides himself embraced the views that he puts into the mouth of a goddess; and surely, very few later thinkers have joined in the Eleatic rejection of all so-called nonbeing. The atomists claim that nonbeing is (as void). Plato’s Sophist defends nonbeing as difference. Aristotle’s Metaphysics defends nonbeing as potency and change. Nietzsche celebrates becoming more radically. And we could go on.
The broadest sense of presence, then, would include all these non-Eleatic phenomena: emptiness, otherness, potential, becoming, and so on. All these phenomena are “present” in the sense that they show up in some way, they make a difference to us. Absence itself can be vividly present: just think of the question, “Where’s my phone?” If these phenomena weren’t present at all, we couldn’t even refer to them.
Now the claim “being is presence” is far more flexible and plausible. But the problem is that it’s so plausible that it seems trivial. How could this triviality be a “decisive experience” for Heidegger? What would be its critical edge?
I’m surprised by the perhaps rhetorical question at the end. The critical edge is obvious to me. But perhaps Polt doesn’t find what I find here, an escape from a set of pseudo-problems that result from a reification of consciousness.
Here’s Heidegger.
Being means [heißt] presencing [Anwesen]. This easily enunciated fundamental trait of being, presencing, now becomes mysterious, however, in the moment that we awaken and attend [not to] what we call presence [Anwesenheit] [but] to that to which our thinking refers [it].
It speaks of Being necessarily and hence continually. But metaphysics does not induce Being itself to speak, for metaphysics does not recall Being in its truth, nor does it recall truth as unconcealedness, nor does it recall the nature of unconcealedness. To metaphysics the nature of truth always appears only in the derivative form of the truth of knowledge and the truth of propositions which formulate our knowledge. Unconcealedness, however, might be prior to all truth in the sense of veritas. Alitheia might be the word that offers a hitherto unnoticed hint concerning the nature of esse which has not yet been recalled. If this should be so, then the representational thinking of metaphysics could certainly never reach this nature of truth, however zealously it might devote itself to historical studies of pre-Socratic philosophy; for what is at stake here is not some renaissance of pre-Socratic thinking: any such attempt would be vain and absurd. What is wanted is rather some regard for the arrival of the hitherto unexpressed nature of unconcealedness, for it is in this form that Being has announced itself. Meanwhile the truth of Being has remained concealed from metaphysics during its long history from Anaximander to Nietzsche. Who does metaphysics not recall it? Is the failure to recall it merely a function of some kinds of metaphysical thinking? Or is it an essential feature of the fate of metaphysics that it own ground eludes it because in the rise of unconcealedness, its very core, namely concealedness, stays away in favour of the unconcealed which appears in the form of beings?
“Truth” in the sense of unconcealment or exposure is not a property of statements but a sign that points at the ongoing revelation of the world. Time shows the world by hiding ( most of it ). This side of the coin is given rather than the other side. But the coin is “transcendent,” more than what it can show here and now.
The “metaphysics of presence” ( as a bad thing ) is an attitude that hopes to squeeze all of reality into the here and now. It wants a world without shadows, a world without a genuine future.
From its beginning to its completion, the propositions of metaphysics have been strangely involved in a persistent confusion of beings and Being…
Thus Time points to unconcealedness, i. e., the truth of Being. But the Time of which we should think here is not experienced through the changeful career of beings. Time is evidently of an altogether different nature which neither has been recalled by way of the time concept of metaphysics nor ever can be recalled in this way. Thus Time becomes the first name, which is yet to be heeded, of the truth of Being, which is yet to be experienced.
A concealed hint of Time speaks not only out of the earliest metaphysical names of Being but also out of its last name, which is “the eternal recurrence of the same events.” Through the entire epoch of metaphysics, Time is decisively present in the history of Being, without being recognised or thought about.
In Being and Time, Being is not something other than Time: “Time” is called the first name of the truth of Being, and this truth is the presence of Being and thus Being itself. But why “Time” and “Being”?
I should emphasize that I don’t not think we should just assent to these claims. They are pointers. Heidegger has no authority. I quote him here as part of explaining what is finally my own sense of consciousness/being. Elsewhere I quote Fasching, who uses a different lingo to make what I take to be the same point or pointing.
Right. This is why “time” is a good name for being.
I connect this to Plato’s unwritten doctrine and Heraclitus. How does a river river ? How does the world world ? It is in progress. It continues to show more of itself. The world never finishes arriving. The meaning of a text never finishes arriving. The great work of art is never exhausted.
The world “gives itself” to a creature who cares about things. The world is “there for me” primarily as the “environment” in which I solve problems. I bring things to completion, in that I finish washing the dishes. I keep an eye on the public clock so that I am not late for work, so that I can keep my promises.
I tend to call something “real” rather than an hallucination or a dream because of its expansive temporal relevance. If I break my leg in a dream., that’s unpleasant. But I can wake up and go to work. The leg is only briefly broken and so not “really” broken. In the dream, I couldn’t walk. But this disabled state was very temporary. In my dream, I won the lottery. The money was “real” in the passing dream. But I wake up and I cannot spend the money.
Note that “life is a dream” because even relatively enduring things are temporary. As humans, we can lust for immortality, for an escape from the regime in which all things must pass away. The poetry in philosophy gives us a hint of this. And philosophy tries to sink its teeth into the eternal. This way the dying philosopher can live some moments of his or her existence in contact with what can never die. The gnosis is (approximately) repeatable. The philosopher remembers the future.
The “real” is what is relatively enduring, because existence is structured by care, and care is fundamentally a time structure, the “shape” of the revelation of world.
I agree with you very much on this point. So would Heidegger, as I read him. Phenomenology is just superstition if it isn’t about a personal investigation of one’s own existence. But there is a social desire in this investigation. But I am interested in where my own existence overlaps with the existence of others.
Dasein is there-being or being-there. Being-there also the being of the there for the person who exists. I find myself thrown into a world that I share with others. I pre-theoretically enact a faith that others perceive the objects that I perceive, that others can more or less hear and understand the words I speak. That is “all” that consciousness is. The world is there for me, so I am “conscious.” The world is there for others, so they are “conscious.”
When I speak to the other, the consciousness of the other is, for instance, the being or quality of my words for the other.
As I type this out, I anticipate that little black shapes ( letters) will be “there” for you when you next log on to this forum. For me, you are “conscious” because the words I type can be “there” for you. They “are” for you.
As I see it, lots of confusion in philosophy comes from yakking about the “physical” in a strange way that forgets that the physical is “there” for this or that perceiver.
Consciousness is the presence of the physical. Consciousness is the being of the physical. But I do not mean that matter is made of mind. Consciousness does not exist, is not a mindstuff. And the physical is not “other than” its qualitative manifestation. It’s just that every object “never finally arrives.” It is an ongoing possibility of further manifestation.
To me this is the simple great realization in the work of Heraclitus and others. The rock is a river. It may stream and fluctuate less obviously, but everything flows. Yet we live in a world of things that can be predicted and controlled, not in a senseless continuum.
The rock is “looks bigger” when it’s close to the eye. It’s invisible even there when there’s no light, etc. But it is tracked and treated as that same rock not only in conversation but more importantly in costly non-verbal behaviors that take its relatively stable properties for granted. For instance, millions of dollars are spent on bridges that millions of drivers trust with their lives, not even worried enough to notice this trust in most cases.
I think we might trace those teleological notions to a more distant past. It suffices to consider “the second coming” and the way time is structured for those who envision a creator who will return as judge.
Contrast this with a cyclical understanding of the world as an eternal pattern, a spinning Finnegans Wake. Schopenhauer is a great example of an anti-historical philosopher in this ancient sense, and this helps us make sense of his irrational hatred for Hegel.
But I think your reading of pomo as an abandonment of the usual teleology makes sense. The classic phrase is “suspicion of grand narratives.” We might read some pomo thinkers as accepting neither the incline nor the wheel as their symbol. Instead reality drifts “lawlessly.” Or at least unpredictably. Note that this is strangely still a prediction, a constraint on the future. But the alternative is silence. Philosophy “is” this grabbing at fixed form, even if only at its resistance to being fixed.
I can relate this to Brouwer’s “intuitionistic” logic. For some thinkers, the future is real. The future, in other words, is not implicitly present now.
I was really just using QM as a metaphor. I like to read Heidegger and Derrida as “realistic” in the informal or pre-theoretical sense. Likewise Bakhtin is very down to earth and plugged in on the issue of language. Even Schopenhauer, if you filter out the Kantian bluster, is speaking from the weeds of actual earthly existence. Hobbes in the first chapter of Leviathan is great on human existence. J. S. Mill slices through the usual theological confusion about physical objects.
So Heidegger and Derrida aren’t that revolutionary, aren’t QM relative to the paltry “Newtonian” philosophy of Mill or Mach. Their progress is substantial and genuine, but there’s no great break in the project. It becomes gradually more sophisticated, as later thinkers capitalize on the demystifications of those who preceded them.
I use “the seminary” as a metaphor for the tendency of philosophy to forget life, typically for some ideological payload that is cashed out in politics/religion. Indeed, this is all that “pomo” signifies for some. It’s either vaguely pejorative or — despite the teleological discussion above — being on the right side of history.
As I see it, there is always at least self-assertion is praising X or blaming Y. So there is always at least a blurry personal teleology toward being less deceived or maybe only being a sexier mother fucker than yesterday, etc.
As far as philosophy of science goes, I guess I’m with Feyerabend and Gadamer. I can’t get worked up about “the true method” that makes a project “scientific.”
I think we are both skeptical about grand ethical theories. For me it’s the same with science. We navigate the world “in the concrete.” I’m not against general maxims, but I definitely don’t think anyone can get by on them.
“Power is knowledge.” This is an intentionally crude expression of my attitude. I feel the need to be crude to cut through the usual piety, because the word “science” is sentimentalized and politicized and theologized. I connect this to the “physical” objects of the metaphysician, which have been mystified and projected as scrolling green source code. My complain is Seinfeldian, because this mystification doesn’t matter, doesn’t have any legs outside of a strange little game.
I appreciate everyone who has participated in this thread. It continues to inspire me to find better words.
I want to distance myself from the word philosophy, because the project isn’t about a love of wisdom. Everyone loves wisdom, and wisdom is important. But dialogical positivism more specialized than that.
I am always looking for less misleading names.
One candidate is situation research. Another is orientation research.
Situation research is approximately philosophy of science. But there’s an anti-academic component. Or rather a post-academic attitude. Situation research acknowledges the reality of the smell of piss.
To me it make sense to move from scientism toward phenomenology. I mean that the secular pro-science motive is good. But this secular motive is often ruined by a piety toward science, which is like piety toward a machine gun in the trenches of WWI. Scientism sermonizes. The “materialism” of Lenin contra Mach is the barf of state religion.
I agree w/ early Heidegger that the project is a pre-science. What we don’t want is the usual pseudo-science. Metaphysics in one of its modes is armchair “science” or untethered speculation. The point is not that speculation is bad. Or that religion is bad. The point is to specify a project.
Pre-science elucidates the basic situation that we are already mostly blinding enacting. What do we already “mean” by words like “physical” and “consciousness” ? How do these signs already function in life as a whole ?
Metaphysics in its bad mode is alienated from life as a whole. Within this alienated game, players pretend to believe this or that, while outside of the game they enact “the perceptual faith” and a deep presupposition of “the forum.”
I see situation research as trying to avoid the usual lies of metaphysics. Honesty is not telling the “truth.” Honesty is sharing one’s actual ( lived ) beliefs.
I suppose this involves self-knowledge and something like theory catching up with practice.
Sure, I see your point. However, the concept “presence” seems to have been based on the concept of “absence” in its origin from the era of Parmenides and the tradition must have handed down to Plato and all the way to Heidegger, and he was aware of it.
This means, all presence was absence originally in the past, and it has manifested into presence for “now”. Hence only the beings which were absent can be categorised into presence via some form of manifestation such as perception or imagination.
The beings manifested into presence has no future promise for its existence. I may see the presence of a tree now, but it wasn’t here before, and it may not be here tomorrow. When I close my eyes, the presence disappears.
For Heidegger, that was not acceptable for the ground of Being-in-the-world, who is always becoming, and heading towards the future.
“Zeit” in Being-in-the-world cannot be reduced into “now” (presence), because it is the “zeit” towards the future.
Hence it is not about word math, but rather, trying to focus and be faithful to the tradition of the concepts handed down in the history.
The way I’m reading you here, there is a way we are always already engaged with and embedded in the world, and we can come to explicitly become aware of this way, and articulate it verbally, conceptually or at least point to it. But we can fail to achieve this overt understanding or awareness of what is already the case. So we have a contrast between the good way and the bad way, the proper and the improper. You also use the contrast of authentic vs alienated, real vs pretend, honest sharing vs lies.
When you meet a philosopher who rattles on about metaphysical truth , or the scientist who praises a physicalistic model of reality, you will see them as having taken the bad, improper, alienated turn of thinking. In arriving at this judgement, you are not using as your criterion of alienation the pragmatic usefulness and value of the other person’s way of thinking for them, from their perspective.
Instead, you are using criteria which exceeds that person’s own assessment of the goodness of their way. Or perhaps the split isn’t between what the other person confesses to believe and what is considers actual from a vantage outside that person’s perspective, but a split within the person themselves, perhaps between conscious belief and pre-conscious or unconscious or implicit awareness.
There is an oft used expression ‘science doesn’t care about your feelings ‘. Perhaps in your view we could modify that to ‘you actual belief doesn’t care about your explicitly articulated belief’. But let me offer an alternative way to look at the genesis and nature of beliefs like metaphysical truth, physicalism and a supernatural God. My approach abolishes the split within the person or between the person and the world regarding what is actual or authentic and what is alienated or pretend.
All beliefs are equally authentic, honest and actual, because all beliefs are pragmatic ways of making sense of things from one’s own vantage, informed by one’s exposure to the outlooks of others. The beleif one currenty makes use of is an achievement and constitutes a betterment with respect to one’s prior beliefs, but not in the sense of being more honest or actual or authentic. Rather, a new belief may improve upon the old by organizing experience in a way that anticipates new events more intimately, fluidly, and intricately than the old , even though it presents the world in a qualitatively different way.
From this vantage , I can never be in a position to judge someone else’s belief in metaphysical truth or theory or ghosts or ufo’s or physicalism as bad or dishonest or alienating. Only they can make this judgement of themselves. I can help them explore alternative to their present thinking, but my input will only be useful to them if I have done my due diligence and glimpsed the world from their vantage such that I know longer need to see their approach as a deviation from or falling short of what’s actually the case for them.
When I feel the impulse to do this, it is because their worldview appears alienating to me , from my vantage. But that’s only because I have moved on from a belief in physicalism and metaphysical truth. My world is not their world and it is useless to attempt to impose mine onto theirs if they are not already receptive to embracing it.
It’s not a question of my needing to indulge their ‘bad’ or alienated thinking but recognizing that whatever belief they are relying on is the best and most authentic way they have of making sense of their world at the moment. The only way I can know if they are receptive to my alternative is to see whether they respond to my invitation with interest and excitement or with rejection. If they are utterly unreceptive, then it is likely that the best way for them to move forward in their thinking is through that very approach (physicalism , ghosts, gods or metaphysical truth) we reject for ourselves.
In his later work, Heidegger says something similar about metaphysics. He calls the first 2000 years of philosophy, which brought the establishment of traditional metaphysics, the ‘first beginning’. The “other beginning” which his work inaugurates, is not a return to a point before the first beginning, nor is it a simple correction of it The first beginning is historically necessary. Heidegger does not think Western metaphysics was an accidental detour.
Yes. As an organism in the world, I give a damn. I like “good” music rather than “bad” music, “real” friends rather than “phony” friends. Of course. I find any flight from this awareness of one’s being thrown into preference more of that alienation that I critique as empty talk, fumes from the seminary. I’m a mortal ape over here. I don’t have time to fuck around, etc.
I mentioned elsewhere that I think it makes sense to read Protagoras as an ontological perspectivist. This makes him a “relativist” in an important sense. I don’t in the least read relativism as the tedious and hopeless pretense of apathy or neutrality.
Right. And I am explicit about this split, so I take you to be paraphrasing me here. For some it’s a point of honor to make their words match their deeds.
I like this, but it more than familiar to me, and it’s basically a version of pragmatism.
I think your ship runs aground here on some kind of performative contradiction. I think we’d both agree on the importance of tolerance and dialogue. But you seem to be “pushing down” the tendency of philosophers or any kind of cultural critic to “push down” what they find inferior.
As far as I can make out, the only way to avoid performative contradiction here is remain silent. Or perhaps to remain inconsistent and ambiguous to the point of obscurity.
I agree with you on the bolded part. The ideal situation is that some angel of the lord personally delivers one’s work only to those who might be able to appropriate it.
But let’s explore this Utopia further. In this land of milk and honey, no experiment ever fails. Every social interaction leads to greater mutual understanding. No social interaction leads to a sense of the futility of further interaction.
To me the world is not like that. If I end up with a sense of work that has value for some people, perhaps a tiny minority, then I may decide to expose that work to what is dominantly misunderstanding. An insect may lay thousands of eggs, most of them eaten by predators, because their DNA encodes the success-so-far of the many-egg strategy.
Finally there’s the proof of the personality associated with the work through conflict. If we abandon the pretense that “pure conceptuality” shines above worldly affairs, then we might want to see how the so-and-so who claims X behaves in a world that is primarily blind and deaf to verbal product of so-and-so.
Sure. I’m with you on this. This point is in Nietzsche, where he criticizes the obnoxious tendency in philosophers to fantasize that the world would be better if everyone was like them.
I don’t mind hearing this from you, but I find it strange that you think that I need to be reminded of this, given my explicit endorsement of ontoperspectivism and my explicit rejection of “truth” as a mirroring of objective reality.
From my POV, I expose myself to misunderstanding if I am too discrete and understated. And I expose myself to misunderstanding if I am too crude. Basically I’m fucked, as we all are, if the other lacks a genuine curiosity. And I don’t believe that anyone owes anyone else this basic curiosity.
The arrogant, cynical painter might drag his canvases to where other painters gather. He doesn’t expect everyone to understand his work. He doesn’t expect to like much of the work by others. But he goes there because sometimes there’s a canvas that surprises him, from which he learns something. And his work is now out there, subject to misunderstanding but only through that risk also available for appropriation. Such appropriation will almost always be greedy, just as our painter’s appropriation of influences has been greedy. By “greed” I mean that “painters” take what they can use from others and weave it into a pattern that they can sign. It’s in our interest, shall we say, to conceal what we have stolen from others. But this can backfire. And we might instead trust being valued as reliable secondary sources, for this task is nothing shameful, offering sufficient opportunity for creativity. Indeed, we can’t avoid creativity even if we try, if we paraphrase at all. And the failure to paraphrase is the failure to be even a secondary source.
