The glue is inside, not above. The entanglement itself. Read my “What they are all faces of” as : the same shared world that each face is a face of.
Within the context of understanding the relational structure of that mode of being we call existence, an understanding of the relational structure of the present-to-hand mode of being is an obstacle to be overcome.
You might consider setting it aside.
Here is a question for you. How are the abstract existences such as God or ideas thought of, in Heidegger?
Are they also being-in-the-world? Or are they something-else-in-the-world? Are they still in-the-world? Or are they being-in-the-mind? Or are they being at all?
Dasein faces constant anxiety from the end of existence i.e. possibility of death.
Thanks. Me too. You too.
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Perhaps we agree but are finding an intermediate language. For me being-in-the-world is not a talking ape and not the image of some “external” world in the “mind” of that talking ape. It is the world from the point of view of that ape, which includes that ape.
It’s something like “the total stream of experience of that ape,” but this experience is not “in the ape’s head” but the streaming world itself, from that ape’s point of view.
This is what I am suggesting also. The world is a “system of faces” or “ideal synthesis of aspects.” Each aspect is “a dasein.” But, including the ontological difference, we might prefer to say that dasein is the “presence” or “being” of this world-face.
Can you verify the existence of monads? I am not sure what to make of monads. Maybe you could explain in detail about it?
To me “monads” would be explication rather than explication. The “theory” of monads, as intended here, is not an empirical theory that helps us predict and control the perceptual world.
It’s an attempt to “get a grip” on the fundamental concepts of science.
From my POV, here’s part of what needs explicating:
- We have to share a world and a language, or science doesn’t make sense.
- On the other hand, there is something “mine” or “personal” about “experience.”
- So science is empirical science both through this “personal experience” ( like perceiving a thermometer ) and also, just as important, sharing one and the same world, with the help of “meaningful” language.
The dominant explication is that an “aperspectival true reality” is “external.” Then “my experience” is created by my brain to “mediate” this true reality. So we have many “bubbles of consciousness stuff,” one for each person, that “hover over” a “true substrate reality.” Note that this explication assumes two kinds of “primal stuff.” The first is “true reality physical stuff” and the second is an emergent “psychical stuff.” For this explication, there is “the hard problem of consciousness.”
Heidegger’s approach ( according to my eccentric reading anyway) is that consciousness is not a stuff at all but just the “presence” or “quality” of world-from-perspective. There is no “true world.” The world is just the “system” of “perspectives on it,” which we might call faces.
This second approach does away with a substrate reality. But it also thinks of the “bubbles” as just reality-itself-but-from-a-point-of-view.
We might call this “ontological perspectivism.” In my view, there are many versions of it, from Vedanta to positivism to phenomenalism to phenomenology.
If this sounds at all intriguing, then maybe check out the thread on Fasching.
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Great post, thanks. I had never read Leibniz, but did some light reading on Heidegger in the past. Time to do some reading on them suppose.
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This is for anyone interested, but with @Andy especially in mind. I found Buddhist Logic by chance. Great stuff all through it !
One reason I quote it is because I read Mach and Mill as “Buddhistic” in their dissolution of the self into “elements.” So it’s nice to see other thinkers compare the traditions and see the same relation.
There is perhaps no other Buddhist doctrine which has been so utterly misunderstood and upon which such a wealth of unfounded guesses and fanciful philosophizing has been spent…The reason for this partly lies in the circumstance that it seemed highly improbable, too improbable beside sheer logical possibility, that the Indians should have had at so early a date in the history of human thought a doctrine of Causation so entirely modern, the same in principle as the one accepted in the most advanced modern sciences.
The framer of this theory in Europe E. Mach went through a course of reasoning somewhat similar to the Buddhistic one. When speculation is no more interested in the existence of an Ego, when the Ego is denied, nothing remains instead of it, said he, than the causal laws, the laws of functional interdependence, in the mathematical sense, of the separate elements of existence. Buddhism has pushed the separateness of these elements to its extreme limit, to the mathematical point-instants, but the formula of interdependence is always the same-«this being that appears».
Since the Buddhist theory of Causation is conditioned by its denial of the objective reality of the category of substance, it naturally must coincide, to a certain extent, with all those European theories which shared in the same denial. The objective reality of substance has been denied in Europe, e. g., by J. S. Mill, for whom substance is nothing but «a permanent possibility of (impermanent, i. e., momentary) sensation»; by Kant, for whom substance is but a mental Category; in our days by Bertrand Russel, for whom substances are not «permanent bits of matter», but «brief events», however possessing qualities and relations. For the Buddhist, we have seen, they are instantaneous events without qualities and relations in them.
Against the Kantian idea that substance is a category forced upon us by the general nature of our reason and constructed by the reason on the basis of a "manifold of sensibility» - against this the Buddhist would have probably nothing to object, since it implies the acceptance of a double reality, the ultimate reality of the things by themselves and the constructed reality (i. e., unreality) of empirical things. Empirical causation, but not the transcendental one, is a category.
The standpoint of J. S. Mill would probably have been shared, in the main, by the early Buddhists, since their moments are impermanent sense-data, sensible qualities without any substance. Stability and duration are for the Buddhist nothing but "chains of moments» following one another without intervals. The notion of a "chain of moments» corresponds very nearly to the modern notion of a «string of events».
The Buddhists contended that such definitions are useless, since the «essences» do not exist. For them the characteristic feature of all our conceptual knowledge and of language, of all namable things and of all names, is that they are dialectical. Every word or every conception is correlative with its counterpart and that is the ouny definition that can be given. Therefore all our definitions are concealed classifications, taken from some special point of view.¹ The thing defined is characterized negatively. What the colour «blue» is, e. g., we cannot tell, but we may divide all colours in blue and non-blue. The non-blue in its turn may be divided in many varieties of colour, according to the same dichotomizing principle. The definition of blue will be that it is not non-blue and, vice versa, the definition of non-blue that it is not the blue.
What knowledge is in itself we never will know, it is a mystery. But we may divide it in direct and indirect. The direct will be the not indirect and the indirect will be not the direct. We may take a view of knowledge which reduces it to physiological reflexes, we nevertheless will have a division into reflexes direct and indirect, simple and conditioned,’ i. e., reflexes and non-reflexes. The whole science of epistemology is built up on this foundation of a difference in principle between a direct and an indirect knowledge. We may call the direct source of knowledge sensibility and the indirect one-intellect or understanding, but the meaning of these terms will be that sensibility is not the understanding and that understanding is not sensibility.
A single moment, just as an absolute particular, is not something representable in an image, it cannot «be reached, by our knowledge», that is to say, it is not something empirically real. But it is the element which imparts reality to all the others. It is the indispensable condition of all real and consistent knowledge. It is transempirical, but it is not metaphysical, it is not a «flower in the sky». It is not a metaphysical entity like the God of the Naiyāyiks, the Matter of the Sānkhyas, the Universals and the Inherence of the Vaišeşikas, or the Soul of all these systems. Dharmakīrti proposes to prove its reality by an experiment in the way of introspection. The metaphysical entities are metaphysical just because they are pure imagination, just because there is no point of reality, no moment of pure sensation to which they could be attached. They are "unattainable as to place, time and sensible quality». But this point and this sensation are present, directly or indirectly, in every act of empirical reality and empirical cognition.
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Good questions.
There are no abstract existences. Instead, existence is Dasein’s mode of being. And Dasein is the only entity whose mode of being is existence. Only Dasein exists.
The mode of being of all entities not having the characteristics of Dasein is either present-to-hand or ready-to-hand.
Modes of being:
Existence
Present-to-hand
Ready-to-hand
Dasein IS being-in-the-world. Dasein is the only entity IN the world of being-in-the-world. All entities not having the characteristics of Dasein are WITHIN the world that Dasein is in. Ideas are entities WITHIN the world that Dasein is in.
Being(s)-in-the-world:
Dasein IS being-in-the-world
You ARE being-in-the-world
I AM being-in-the-world
If you wake up every morning and remind yourself that you are being-in-the-world, you will begin to change forever the way you look at the world.
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Was Heidegger an atheist? Or was his God material (physical) existence? What was his idea on God?
Heidegger was not an atheist. He was raised Catholic and his father was the sexton of the local Catholic church. The Catholic church paid for most of much of his college education with the expectation that he would become a priest.
He converted to Protestantism shortly before the birth of his first child. Near the end of his life was becoming more of a Pantheist.
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I would like to add to this interesting discussion that there is nothing in the world we know, exists without relations. There is no such a particle that could possibly exist completely independent from other particles. For example, the existence of a proton requires the existence of other particles. If there were no electrons, the repulsive forces between protons would tear apart all matter in the Universe, since these forces are much stronger than gravity. The same is valid for other particles. Even neutrinos can be caught that is to say even they have certain relations with other particles. Not to mention bigger and more complex objects.
So, my answer to the question above would be no, it is not possible. Everything exists within relations with other things.
Relations are product of human psychology. There is no such a thing called relation existing in the world. But human mind projects relations to the objects they see.
As soon as one reads above and sees the world again with rational mind, all the relations imagined disappears.
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I gave the post a thumbs up for its clarity, but I don’t think it’s that simple.
A Hegel-influenced thinker might point out that our distance from reality is simply assumed, but only tacitly !
So what is the premise in the background here ? That experience is other than the world.
Why is this premise taken for granted ? It is part of our heritage. But why did those who came before install this “automatic premise” ?
Perhaps because we tend to imagine that our keys are on the desk and then perceive that they are not. So we have the contrast of imagination and reality.
We also recognize that what is perceived is causally related to the position and state of our sense organs.
Why are relations unreal ? Is it because you assume that speech has an “immaterial meaning” that includes relations ? Is the world “automatically” outside of this “meaning” ?
But isn’t “the external world” part of this “meaning ?”
Note that I’m a pluralist, not a dualist or idealist or physicalist.
Fair enough. Thank you for your clarification. 
I assume Hegel is making sense there tacitly or explicitly.
I was trying to locate any object called relations in the world, because we must base our perceptual judgement from our perceptual evidence in the world.
There is nothing which is “relations” or even resembles it.
Relations are purely ideas in our mind without matching impressions borrowing Hume’s idiolect.
Why do we project “relations” to the object we see in the world, when there is nothing related to “relations”? Because we always try to see more than what there is.
Hence it seems clear that true reality is the world without human interpretation, meaning or perception.
Can meaning on the world distort the actual reality? Possibly. Could it be the reason why Husserl recommended to “epoché” for true knowledge of the world?
OK. That is a tempting definition. But my take is that this approach is a exaggeration of something more cautious and legitimate.
I suggest that reality is better understood as more of an intersubjective thing.
An “experience of a object” is a “perception” rather than a “hallucination” because others report that they too can see the object.
To me the point of emphasizing “relationality” is that you can’t say what a mouse is without talking about its food and its predators and so on. To know anything is to know about relationships. Scientific laws predict relationships. Reports of “red” are correlated with measurements of wavelength, etc. Doses of some drug are correlated with reduction of (measurements of ) cholesterol in a particular body.
You may say that “knowledge” is something that “floats above reality.” Fair enough. But then “reality” becomes a less useful term, basically a decorative metaphysical term, even faintly theological. Reality becomes an X without meaning, or only has its meaning through the negation of any property that suggests relationship.
Do we not experience a shared world largely “through” our knowledge ? I think we might choose to use “reality” for the stuff we primarily care about. But we need not assume that it’s some definite settled state of affairs. More like a negotiated belief that we feel confident enough to act on for now.
Oh now that’s a deep question. Lots of disagreement about it. But one approach is that we can put aside our usual philosophical anxiety about what is “real” and what is “illusion” and just carefully investigate how the world is given to us. For instance, if you switch off your practical investment in objects, you can consider the way that spatial objects are only given to visually in profiles, aspects, or adumbrations. The description cares about “how” what is there is there, and doesn’t get distracted by figuring out what to call “real”.
I am simply saying that we don’t perceive any object called “relations” in the world. Only things we see are the obejcts.
Let’s assume that there are no humans in the world. Only the rocks and soils like in Mars.
Where is relation? Relation is the product of human psychology. We build more and more complicated ideas about the world and objects inventing some relations between them.
But from the objects existing in the world, they don’t care anything about relations. They just happen to exist happily.
Can objects be thought of without relation? Yes they can. Via epoche.
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OK. I hear you. I think many will agree at least that relations aren’t perceivable like rocks and trees.
I also share the sense that such objects don’t care what I think or believe about them.
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