Seeking being qua being is an act of building a wall that hides being. And being is already right here in the seeking.
So why do we even ask? Because of things qua things, more bricks in the wall. (Someone should right a song about that, maybe even someone named Waters. Hmm)
I had a love-hate relationship with Heidegger for maybe 5 years. Now I rate him as one of the very greatest.
So I respect your honesty.
To me, though, it’s like someone not loving Alice Coltrane’s album Journey in Satchidananda. What’s wrong about that analogy however is that I loved this album right away and only got to love it more.
In the case of Heidegger, I now see that the MR translation of Being and Time is a bad place to start. The later stuff is likewise questionable as a starting place, and so far I continue to prefer the work in the 20s. What would be ideal is an anthology of potent passages from the early lectures.
But I would not argue for Heidegger more than I would argue for the greatness of Yeats as a poet.
What the quotes I shared lack is a crucial issue that first won me over, namely the historicity or temporality of “meaning.” Visual metaphors don’t do justice to the “idea” which is indeed “too simple” in one sense and infinitely rich in another.
Heidegger himself, his work, has temporal depth. The temporal depth of signs and their historically situated “radiance” is a good place to look, in my opinion, if you want the stuff to grab you.
I’d be interested to ask you: do you think the conversation about existence has already been exhausted in what’s written? Or do we still have something further to think about?
You will find here very wide definition of ‘positivism’. Apparently it’s also a spiritual movement!
I’d say that it’s infinitely rich, has an infinite temporal depth. But I also love Bakhtin. Meaning is between us right now in this fugitive flashing dialogue — in the call and response. So I am here to live in the flow of the jazz that includes but exceeds me.
What say you friend ?
I must sound to you like Blake sounded to conventional Christians.
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors:—
1. That man has two real existing principles, viz., a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body; and that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following contraries to these are true:—
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
Elsewhere you suggested that science and spirituality were not opposed. Positivism in its post-metaphysical thrust, in its strongest intention, is radically empirical. To insist on reading the term in terms of its past is to miss the temporality of being, the coming-forth from the having-been.
I’ll say that just this morning (local time) I shared this very same thought with a fellow thinker, and I find it a brilliant idea.
But since we’ve gotten around to it, there’s another question that’s bothering me about ontology. Can you articulate your position on essence? What is it, or how is it? Any suggestions are welcome.
Hey all due respect to not pasting in AI text, I spun up a very useful summary of phenomenalism just now. Reading it, I can actually see what you’re driving at with phenomenalism, although I don’t share your admiration.
Very cool. Which thought exactly ? The temporality of meaning ?
I’ve been talking about just that in the Saussure thread and in the Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine thread.
Saussure’s notion of the sound-image is IMO an ideal way to approach the ideal or the essential. In short, essence is form rather than substance. It is the belonging-together of concrete qualitative entities/events. This belonging-together is not itself anywhere in the world, but shows up “in” the concrete and qualitative in terms of “recognition.”
For instance, any concrete saying of the word mother is a heard sounding in the world that is unlike any other. But I hear that unrepeatable sound as the saying of mother. This in my view is a fundamental structure in experience.
The sound-image (which omits the issue of meaning ) is a surgically focused example for “seeing” a phenomenon that is then seen elsewhere. Norman Goodman ( as I recently learned ) expressed a similar idea of idea or essence. The metaphor “equivalence class” (if you like math) is basically another way of saying it. The equivalence class of \frac{1}{2}, \frac{2}{4}, \frac{3}{6},... —often used to define a rational number in terms of equivalent fractions — has no “true” “representative” or “name.”
Nor has it any substance beyond this open unity, beyond the “substance” (quality, chora) that it “synthesizes.” It is the mere unity of its members or moments or aspects. Hence Plato might call it " the one," while what is organized ( in existence as a whole ) is the (otherwise ineffable) qualitative continuum or “indefinite dyad.” This “chora” is sensation and emotion and so on as it “overflows” mere form. The recognized object is “far more” than the categories I can express in signs.
This is how I interpret Plato’s “one” or “principle of unity” in the unwritten doctrine. But my interpretation is a “creative misreading” in that I don’t care so much what Plato actually meant but how powerfully his signs happen to participate in the “essence” of “essence” as the belonging-together of qualitative events.
Which begs, what is time?
Being I suppose.
Personally I agree. I think we’ve all been led astray since Aristotle called metaphysics the study of being qua being. Being is simple. Children know it. (And I’m an Aristotle fan, who still looks to substance to find essence.)
Metaphysics is the study of essence qua essence, or the study of a substance being a substance.
No conversations about being ever happen without introducing some thing being some thing.
It is things being things that beg the questions, not their being. Thinghood. Thingness.
Individuated particularity - this begins the mysteries.
The only question about being is “whether”. We can ask whether something is or whether it is not. That’s all we need to know about being.
God being God is the same sense of being as poop being poop. There is only one sense of being. (If God is the source of his own existence and life, and we die and poop decays to dirt, God’s “being” has nothing to do with it - but his power, his nature, his substance, his essence - there’s where to look.)
We are so immersed in being qua being, sometimes we can’t tell the difference between God and poop anymore. But if there is a difference between them, we need to demonstrate essential distinctions and quantifications and body and form - whether any of these demonstrations exist or not doesn’t change what being is, it changes what “what” is.
See, I’m now creating obstacles to the very point I’m trying to make by making the point.
The definition of being is becoming, or, the essence of being is to “ing”.
Thinking, and being still, and doing philosophy, and becoming older and swimming are all the same ing-ing; any distinctions between these are a matter of essence, of thinghood, of embodiment, of what resists ultimate dissolution (dissolution being another essentially different thing). Being? The being of what?
And in an odd way, Heidegger agrees with some of this. Because we use the word “being” as a noun and a verb.
That rundown is not bad. Not perfect either. For instance, Mach is a not a neutral monist. Or that’s a misleading expression. This “neutrality” is not the label of a fundamental substance. Instead the same elements can play roles within many categories. So the strongest reading is that Mach is a pluralist like James.
But still pretty good. And I confess that I read phenomenalism toward its stronger expression or interpretation.
Friend, how do I give this answer three likes?
There was a long text, the idea of which can be expressed in a few simple words:
Philosophy exists only as long as we actively practice it in mutual participation, constantly redefining each other and being redefined ourselves.
But tell me, how do you manage to reconcile this?
If a thing is essentia, then it is whole, unified, and unchanging.
If it is becoming, then nothing can be anything concrete, but relational and flowing.
My OP about “What is a thing” tries to reconcile this.
A thing stands still by becoming.
Essence is always the particular emerging.
Being is the emerging, moving ing-ing.
Essence is what emerges.
They always come together when a particular thing is being a particular thing. There is no Being (capital b) without some Thing being some Thing.
It’s like a Yin/Yang reconciliation between being and essence; each causes the other in the same instant each is the effect of the other. Remember we are just talking about one thing. What is a single thing being a single thing?
Further, the way this plays out, involves many things being many things, and each reshaping each other - but that whole conversation multiplies references to whatness and essence. There never is a new conversation about what “being” is or means or does.
Further interrogation of those sources identified my particular discomfort with how phenomenalism and positivism developed. While Berkeley’s principle esse est percipe was intended to show the contradictory nature of ‘material substance’ which he said led to atheism, the later positivists did away with any hint of the spiritual. Things were henceforth aggregates of sensations, but there was no ‘in-itself’ lurking in the background. Sensations formed ideas, and ideas were connected by logic, hence Carnap’s ‘logical realism’ and Ayer’s logical positivism’. Everything could be subordinated to logic! They were explicitly opposed to any expressions which couldn’t be validated by scientific empiricism. That’s what undid them in the end, because the whole movement likewise could not be verified by scientific empiricism. Again, the Uroboros, philosophy as the ‘snake that swallowed its own tail’. The hardest part was the last bite.
Late in life, when Ayer was asked what he saw as the main defects of Logical Positivism, he candidly replied:
“Well, I suppose the most important defect was that nearly all of it was false.”
A completely different topic, but my take is, an essence is not a thing. To say that the essence is a thing, is to reify or hypostasize it. The esse is ‘is-ness’, not any thing. Which is why essence is transcendent - beyond coming and going. In Platonic philosophy, things are ephemeral, but the forms and kinds are not. Particulars themselves are not objects of real knowledge as they are transient or ephemeral whereas the form is unchanging so the proper object of knowledge.
Do you think all attempts at metaphysical speculation lead ultimately to impasse? I’m beginning to feel that way. Like I’m trying to find solid ground to stand on when there is no place to stand. Everything disappears in the fog. It brings to mind the old adage “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
Ayer is admirable in what he says. Nearly all of it was false. Indeed, this is the philosophical gesture, relevant to our topic. Socrates knows especially that he is ignorant, that he is blind. His knowing his blindness is his fundamental vision.
All seeing is also blindness. All hearing is also deafness. All truth is also falsity.
This “follows” because revelation of an entity, which has temporal depth as such, is necessarily partial. The river is not reducible to the water rushing over us now. That which is shown by the object is shown through its hiding of the rest of itself.
The sign’s radiance for me now, my hearing of it, does not exhaust the sign. My hearing is primarily a deafness to the hearings of others and to my own future hearings.
My seeing is also a blindness. To see this side of the object is to not-see the other side. To not-see what others see. To not-see what I may see later.
Much of traditional philosphy is anti-temporal or time-hating. It has demanded the full and controlled presence now of all of reality, which it can hover over and enjoy as a circumscribed conquest, as a spectacle, a feast for the eyes. O the ocular ecstasy of distance ! Early Heidegger is strongly inspired by Luther in his critique of this ocular predisposition. McCluhan also contrasts the ocular static to the sonic temporal. Saussure’s sound-image is a nice entry into this issue, in my view. Form is relatively timeless, yet it perforates time — has its life and being in time, but toward a future that never arrives — in our recognition of sameness-through-difference.
The Matrix offers us a pop-culture version of this object of desire. The green source code is the “static truth” that hovers dead and godlike over the matrix that flows in a time that is merely delusion. This “source code” is a metaphor for what mathematical platonism and physicalism have in common, a faith in the perfect static presence of the Real.
A more radical, more honest positivism is a personal or self-consciously situated dialogical positivism. It does not even pretend to offer “truth” in the form of “world-capturing signs” that are “stuffed with content.” At most it can point tentatively at the world itself.
The finger that points at a lion does not contain the lion. Or a tiny version of the lion. It does not re-present the lion. It directs the other toward a lion in the world they share. So the typical conception of truth as accurate representation enacts a blind comportment toward signs that is also a seeing. The seeing of the representational effect or mode of signs is legitimate — all seeing is truth ---- but we tend to fall asleep in a particular seeing and forget the blindness. The forgetfulness of being is a forgetting of being as time as never possessed or dominated, never spread out before one now. ( I am no exception, just to be clear. )
This is not a truth but a risky offering to others. Do these signs, my signs now, represent ?
I am sympathetic to Derrida’s
reading of Heidegger. Derrida based his notion of differance on Heidegger’s Being. There are important differences between these two concepts, but what I think they have in common is that neither opposes the hidden and concealed to the unconcealed, and then declares something like Being to be what is hidden. Existence for Heidegger is both concealing and unconcealing at the same time, in the same moment. Being is the strife between concealment and unconcealment. The ‘is’ transits, it is not a resting-in-itself to be contrasted with non-being. This is why Being and time are indissociable.
Yes, I agree. But I would say that essences are not perfectly atemporal. I grant that the basic essences or forms in math are impressively resistant to the mutilations of time. Hence the attachment of positivists to a mathematical conception of linguistic meaning, which was superstitious in retrospect. Poetry ( poesis ) is not math. In the world there is genuine novelty in the radiance of signs.
I like your way of putting it, and I agree. The moment is not punctiform but ongoing strife as revelation-in-progress.