I think I've become cultural relativist.

Isn't there something inside of us that just says no to that sort of thing? — MountainDwarf

I think there is too. However I'm having a real hard time seeing how this inside something is separate from, or different to, cultural norms...

That is a good answer. I understand what conscience is. Nevertheless I suspect that babies are not born with a conscience, and that it is something they develop the more they grow and become socialised. If this is true does this imply that ethics is contingent upon the society or world that we are raised in?

you say duty drives the ethical. What drives the duty?

Hmm, I don't think 'nature' would be the right word to use. I'm not opposing reason and nature. What I'm opposing reason to is that before we stop to rationally reflect about values we always already find ourselves in a world that matters to us. By that I mean certain things confront us as significant, while we find ourselves completely indifferent to other things (indifference is still a way of mattering). My view is that this mattering is basic.

what role does reason play in our lives? Is it simply a tool to achieve and acquire values determined by our nature? — TheMadFool

Reason is very important in a lot of different ways, but I don't think it's as fundamental to human nature as the mattering of simply being drawn into the significance of things.

these norms must have a rational basis... How would we answer these reasoned questions about the worthiness of our norms? — TheMadFool

Good question! I think our norms are completely groundless! As far as I'm concerned deontology and utilitarianism are artificial creations. Aristotelian Virtue Ethics gets it right because it describes the norms as norms. I don't think Aristotle would go so far to say that norms are groundless, but he is almost there I think. Phronesis (practical wisdom, the crown virtue), for example, seems to me to be groundless, ultimately.

I totally agree. I think Truth, however we define it, is integral to our being. I think there are always background meaningful self interpretations going on that guide our activity. However I would shy away from calling this 'reasoning' even though we are rational animals. I think our everyday activity is more of a background flow than a foreground deliberation, though there is occasionally this too. You could call what I'm getting at a value I suppose. For example, being a father guides your daily behaviour only if this is how you understand yourself, and only if being a father matters to you. Fatherhood in this sense would be a value, not an arbitrary value, but an existential value. I am extremely dubious about the possibity of rationally choosing values.

Ethics can't be explained from your perspective. — TheMadFool

I'm not too sure what you mean? I'm not really talking about our animal instincts as such, but about conformism in general. I have been thinking lately that our feelings of morality are simply an expression of this conformity. In other words that we are deeply structured by norms and feel uncomfortable when anybody deviates from norms. Do you not think so?

What else is there to disclose but the truth? — TheMadFool

I think the idea behind Aletheia is that in unconcealing or disclosing being, you are simultaneously concealing or covering up being. An example might be different epochs of thought. E.g. the scientific revolution disclosed the world in a fundamentally different way simultaneously covering up or making impossible the way it was understood before. Therefore the disclosure changed the object (the world) that scientists could have knowledge of. The mystical world became concealed by the unconcealed scientific world governed by laws. I don't know if this is making any sense... It's hard to describe the ontology...

Why do something if you don't value it? — TheMadFool

I don't think people do things because they value them. For the most part people just do what one does because it's what one does. It sounds odd to say that people value conformity, it's more true that they/we are conformity. What does it even mean to say we value something?

1. Is truth only as valuable to the extent it helps us achieve happiness?

2. If yes, why do we search so hard for the truth, given that some truths are painful?

3. If no, what is this other value of truth? — TheMadFool

1. No.
2. See 1 above.
3. It seems that you're really asking a question about human nature here. Perhaps truth is human nature? But what does truth even mean? Is truth a correspondence between subject and object or is this correspondence not derived from something more basic? What would this more basic truth look like? The Ancients had a concept of Aletheia. It has been translated as truth, uncoverdness, disclosure, unconcealment, etc. If human nature was truth, it would not be so as a correspondence truth but as truth as this notion of Aletheia or disclosure.

Yet, there are some who value truth above happiness. For example, pessimism, which is based on the fact that suffering exceeds happiness, values truth above happiness. Pessimists are unhappy but this is grounded in truths about our world. — TheMadFool

If we interpret truth as Aletheia, the pessimist is disclosing the world to be in a certain way. The pessimist is not necessarily staying true to the facts and the optimist in not necessarily closing their eyes to the reality. They are both disclosing the world in different ways according to how they find themselves to be disposed in the facticity of their situation. They are both in the truth, not because they value truth, but because they are, as human, essentially this disclosing activity. Truth.

What is Truth?
Whoops I was on a different page... way behind... ha

To summarise my position:
1. The being of the hammer, its existence, is as a physical object. It has physical properties which are intrinsic to it.
2. The hammerness of the hammer, its being a hammer as opposed to its merely being, is an extrinsic property which is added to the hammer by us. — Herg

Maybe we should agree to disagree. To modify your quote above, I would summarize my position as:

1. The being of the object-Thing as an occurrent physical object, has physical properties.
2. The being of the hammer, as ready-to-hand equipment, is of a different ontological mode than (1).

For your interest, below I have copied and pasted a very small excerpt of Heidegger's description of the phenomenology of equipment in section 15 of Being and Time.

"Taken strictly, there 'is' no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is. Equipment is essentially 'something in-order-to...' A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the 'in-order-to', such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability."

"In the 'in-order-to' as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something... Equipment-in accordance with its equipmentality-always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These 'Things' never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves, so as to add up to a sum of realia and fill up a room. What we encounter as closest to us (though not as something taken as a theme) is the room; and we encounter it not as something 'between four walls' in a geometrical spatial sense, but as equipment for residing. Out of this the 'arrangement' emerges, and it is in this that any 'individual' item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered."

"Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example) ; but in such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occurring Thing, nor is the equipment-structure known as such even in the using. The hammering does not simply have knowledge about the hammer's character as equipment, but it has appropriated this equipment in a way which could not possibly be more suitable. In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the "in-order-to" which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time ; the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is-as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific 'manipulability' of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call "readiness-to-hand". Only because equipment has this 'Being-in-itself' and does not merely occur, is it manipulable in the broadest sense and at our disposal. No matter how sharply we just look at the 'outward appearance' of Things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at Things just 'theoretically', we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character. Dealings with equipment subordinate themselves to the manifold assignments of the 'in-order-to'. And the sight with which they thus accommodate themselves is circumspection."

"....The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work-that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered."

from your description Parmenides is asking an ontological question and not an epistemological one. I was simply suggesting that our culture's conceptions of the ontological and the epistemological aren't always clear cut. And that maybe this unclarity began with Descartes?

For me that question "what does it mean to exist?" only makes sense as an existential question.

Humans and physical/mental objects are in entirely different ways.

I think exist can be an ambiguous term. It means different things to different philosophers.

It it a typically modern phenomenon? -- this preoccupation with how we can know what really exists? I think it might be? Starting with Descartes. I could be wrong. I'm not very familiar with Greek philosophy aside from Aristotle and Virtue ethics.

It seems you're not making much effort to come to terms with my position, only to disagree with it. I'm not saying that the hammer lacks any physical properties, only that the being, or the hammer-ness of the hammer, is not its physical properties. Moreover, its being is not some mysterious property added onto it extrinsically. The being of the hammer, as ready to hand equipment, is always already determined by the referential whole (the world). I can give you more examples if you like? The key point, however, is that this kind of being is not a property, as hard as that might be to understand.

Regarding your dog example.

The hammer is not equipment as far as my dog is concerned, so if it were only equipment and not an object, he would not be able to interact with it at all, which clearly he can. — Herg

Here you seem to be making an implicitly metaphysical claim that the physical stuff the hammer is made out of is actually real, and therefore, because it’s actually real, the dog can actually play with it. This is not the same as saying that the hammer is (also) an object. Please note that, for the dog, the hammer is neither ontologically ready-to-hand equipment nor an ontologically present-at-hand object. I think it’s safe to say that dogs aren’t ontological, and for that reason the dog has no understanding of the being of the hammer as either a hammer or an object. For the dog it is a curious play-thing. Therefore that the dog can play with the hammer does not prove that the hammer is also an object. Ontologically speaking, the dog is just irrelevant.

If you unmuddy your conceptions of ontology and metaphysics and see ontology as a theoretical articulation of our understanding of being, you will clearly see how it is a misunderstanding to regard the hammer as having the same intelligibility as a physical object. A rock has this intelligibility. The hammer driving in the nail in wood in order to..., the door knob you don't notice but that you nevertheless turn to open the door in order to enter the room in order to..., the keyboard beneath your fingers that you type on in order to express the meaning of the sentence in order to..., the sidewalk at your feet while rushing to the train in order to not be late to work... have in the first instance the intelligibility of readiness-to-hand, there is no awareness of anything like an object. Moreover, properties do not belong to the ready-to-hand. Properties only belong to present-at-hand ontology. Therefore it only a confusion to talk about a hammer's intrinsic/extrinsic properties. To do so is to regard the hammer as a present-at-hand object.

I believe that there are different ontologies, do you think there is only one?

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll keep that in mind when I go back to Deleuze.

What book do you most rate by Deleuze? I have tried to read Anti-oedipus but at the time, a few years back, I think it was too complicated for me to follow. Maybe if I tried again now I could understand it. It would be a big undertaking though.

The object that we use as a hammer is physical, and being physical is an intrinsic property of the object, i.e. a property that the object has in and of itself. Being used as a hammer, by contrast, is an extrinsic property, i.e. a property arising from the object’s interaction with the rest of the world (or some part of it). — Herg

It may be an intrinsic property of the object, but not of the hammer. The hammer is not an object, it is equipment. As such it belongs to a different ontological order than the subject/object (or mental/physical) ontology that this discussion has been grounded in.

What determines the hammer as a hammer is the background contextual significance of equipmental relationships within the world. What you are calling the hammer’s extrinsic properties (when looked at as a deworlded thing, i.e. not as a hammer) are in fact its primordial, background relationships and uses as equipment and as a hammer.

I built a fence last summer. When I needed to nail a pailing on the rails I didn't have to look for a physical object that resembled the intrinsic properties of a hammer and then mysteriously project mental thoughts onto it about the extrinsic ways I could use the physical object to get the job done. I never once explicitly though about the hammer, only about the task to be done. This is because we are primordially in the world encountering equipment as equipment and only later experience ourselves as deworlded subjects abstractly thinking about objects and properties and whether hammers exist and what nothing is.

If all the humans in the world suddenly vanished, so that there was no-one who could think of a hammer as being a hammer, the hammer itself would be completely unchanged. — Herg

The material stuff the hammer is made out of would be unchanged, I don't disagree with that. However there would be no hammer. Because hammer-ness, as such, depends on humans existingly making hammers intelligible; not by thinking, but by using, and using in order to fulfill appropriate tasks in appropriate ways.

If aliens visited earth and took a hammer from our culture home with them as a souvenir. Would the thing be a hammer to them? Not if they had a hammer-less culture that lacked the cultural background of significance that makes hammers as equipment possible (e.g. carpenters, houses, timber, nails etc etc). No matter how hard they thought about the thing, it would not be a hammer because the intelligibility of hammers, hammer-ness, depends on use not on thought.

By that reasoning, a hammer is NOTHING. — TheMadFool

This sound absurd doesn't it, that a hammer is NOTHING. So either there is something wrong with my argument or there is something wrong with your ontology of the mental and the physical. I don't think there is anything wrong with my argument. It's not actually my argument, but Martin Heidegger's argument in Being and Time. I would kindly suggest that your ontology needs to be either displaced or supplemented.

Something neither mental nor physical? That seems impossible. Can you clarify. — TheMadFool

To give a simple example. A hammer is neither a physical phenomenon nor a mental phenomenon. Sure it is made from physical stuff but it's being as equipment, in other worlds its intelligibility, is only possible upon a background of shared practices. This background is neither mental nor physical. To reduce it to either would be to completely misunderstand the phenomenon.

Your third world - circumspection - is unwarranted because everything in it resides in the mental world. This makes it redundant, at least for the meaning of nothing. — TheMadFool

But ìt doesn't reside in the mental world. That is the point. I think you are being a little dogmatic here.

There are only two worlds that I know of:
1. Mental world (M)
2. Physical world (P) — TheMadFool

I would like to politely disagree with this claim. There is a third world. The world of significance, of involved coping activity, in a word, of circumspection. Circumspection cannot plausibly be described as merely mental nor merely physical. Nor as the combination of both. It is in fact phenomenally and ontologically prior to both, and has it's own conditions of possibility, one of which is the nothing. In order of primordiality:

1. World of significance (W)
2. Mental world (M)
3. Physical world (P)

The intelligibility of M and P are derived from W. N cannot be made ontologically intelligible without W.

In what other way can we make sense of N? — TheMadFool

Heidegger had a lot to say on this topic. Currently I am only really familiar with Being and Time and haven't yet read What is Metaphysics? where he explicitly discusses the nothing, but I intend to do so in the near future.

It's a very interesting topic. I'm not so sure that zero is the quantitative property of nothing. I think my issue with some of your interesting suggestions above is that (regarding zero) you're putting the cart before the horse so to speak. To reverse your reasoning, zero has a quantitative property due to it's having numerical meaning/significance. The same is true of all numbers, they all have quantitative properties. Having said that, it seems obvious to me that this property has nothing to do with the nothing. In other words, it is not the case that the nothing has the quantitative property of zero, zero is rather a numerical manifestation of the nothing. And there are various other interesting manifestations of the nothing besides, some of which you mention above.

Does this make sense? It's a great topic! All I'm basically saying is that nothing is primordial, and more primordial than zero, which in turn is only a representation/manifestation of nothing/the nothing or what ever you want to call it. In other words, I am denying that quantity is ontologically primordial. From what I've picked up over the years, Heidegger is saying exactly this, that the nothing is ontologically basic.

Zero is the quantitative property of NOTHING — TheMadFool

What other properties of N are there? — TheMadFool

Why would nothing have properties? What kind of ontology are you situating nothing in?

Maybe you should try reading Heidegger. I think you might have a taste for it, it's a completely different way of thinking about things/the world.

I also think the democratic government's main function is to maintain the dominant capitalist power relations.

Are there any anarchists on here? Can anyone please point me to a piece of good contemporary anarchist writing?

That's cool sorry if I came across as attacking you...

Regarding the first quotation from the secondary literature I think William Connolly is right that Heidegger’s Being and Time presumes

a close alignment between the identity the self seeks to realize and socially available possibilities of self-formation — StreetlightX

how else, for example, could one be a Father if Fathers were not a socially available possibility. However, Connolly is wrong to further claim that Heidegger presumes that we have

a shared sense of confidence in the world we are building, a confidence that links the present to the future through effort and anticipation at one time and memory and appreciation at another. — StreetlightX

Nothing Heidegger says in Being and Time suggests anything like this. On the contrary, Heidegger describes the world as something we are thrown into, not something we are building. The world is structured by angst, not appreciation. Connolly goes on to describe Heidegger's phenomenology as

the serene phenomenology of freedom... — StreetlightX

This statement is blatantly false and misleading. I find it hard to believe that the author was actually referring to Heidegger when they were writing this because Heidegger was not interested in freedom at all.

Regarding the second quotation from the secondary literature I think Alphonso Lingis also misses the mark. You quote him as stating that Heidegger suggests that

the sense of the irreversible propulsion of a life toward its end precedes and makes possible every unilateral array of means toward particular ends and every determinate action. But can death, which has no front lines and no dimensions, assign a determinate direction to one's life, and thereby impart a unilateral direction to the connections in the instrumental field? — StreetlightX

Heidegger does suggest something like this of an authentic being toward death, but only something like this. It is not anything like a condition of possibility as the quotation implies. Moreover, I doubt Lingis even understands what Heidegger is getting at when he ontologises death. It seems to me that Lingis understands death in its everyday sense, which for Heidegger is denoted by the term demise, not death. Heidegger is not ontologising demise. Lingis is therefore misinformed.

Lingis further seems to attempt to critique Heidegger by arguing that Water and Berries are not tools. Well of course not. This, quite simply, is not a critique of Heidegger's thought.

If you're interested in reading a really good unpacking/discussion of Heidegger's above preliminary definition of being I would very highly recommend read the introduction to William Blattner's Heidegger's Temporal Idealism. He discusses this in great depth.

Wouldn't mind hearing a good "digested" interpretation apart from the lingo. — n0 0ne

Okay well "that which determines entities as entities and that on the basis of which entities have always been understood no matter how they are discussed" seems to me to be the world. I read somewhere that Heidegger viewed his greatest philosophical accomplishment as his articulation of world. The claim is that Philosophy prior to him lacked any articulation of world/worldhood,etc.

So the question becomes, what is world? That is rather complicated. I think I might stop while I'm ahead and let someone else speak. But quickly, and leaving the lingo aside, the world is basically the shared background practices that we take for granted. Why are they taken for granted. Because they are background practices, they have to be for the most part. As phenomenologically backgrounded what the practices "determine" to be in the phenomenological foreground are entities and as the entities they are, e.g., hammers, nails, carpenters, etc. So the foreground is made sense of on the basis of the background world (being).

Do you and/or Heidegger have a general definition of "(B/b)eing" that can be used as a starting point for conceptual development, and how does that relate to the historical "Categories of Being" proposed by Aristotle, Kant, Peirce, and others

The formal definition Heidegger uses as a starting point is that "being is that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities have always been understood no matter how they are discussed." (pg 6 in German text)

In Being and Time Heidegger analysis three modes of being. In the order of primordility there's Existence, the being of dasein; the available, the being of equipment; and lastly there's occurrantness, the being of objects. How does this relate to Aristotle, Kant, Descartes? Well the claim is that their discussions of being are limited to the being of occurrantness, and for that reason they lack primordiality and constantly find themselves stuck in pseudo philosophical problems. E.g. the problem of the existence of the external world.

("Tell me what those words mean to you, so I know you're not unwittingly a fashion victim...") — 0af

I think in really simple terms, For Heidegger, death relates closely to authenticity/mineness. What turns out to be authentic (or owned) are ways of existing (possibilities) that disclose the mineness aspect that is basically characteristic of every dasein. Whereas what turns out to be inauthentic (or unowned) are ways of living that disclose the conformism aspect that is equally basic of every dasein. So for example, any of your possibilities that involve making the world intelligible in a unique and original way are authentic. Whereas, all of your ways of making the world intelligible by falling back upon the everyday meanings circulating within everyday public life, are by default inauthentic.

It seems pretty clear to me that the anticipation of ontological death is only an extreme case and development of this mineness mentioned in the opening pages of Being and Time. The anticipation of ontological death, as the impossible possibility (note that for Heidegger possibility means a way of existing), is a way of living that is open to new ways of being; is open to making the world(s) intelligible in unique ways.

The phenomenon of inauthentic being toward death, by contrast, is a turning away from this authentic ontological death and its angst; it is a becoming attuned, either by way of escape or ignorance, into what he calls a cowardly fear of demise.

An example of an authentic being toward death might be 0af in their posts above, but a good example of an inauthentic being toward death is szardosszemagad:

It may be completely true what he says about death, but I already have a concept of that, and I don't need to learn what Heidegger means by hinges, by division one, by division two, and by dasein. All these are noise, complicated amplified noise, without which existence was simple and acceptable, and the new concepts overcomplicate things to the extent that their own mother would not recognize them. — szardosszemagad

I think the pure genius of Wittgenstein and Heidegger in the early 20th century resulted in metaphysics and epistomology no longer being able to be taken seriously within culture as a whole. This in turn resulted in postmodernism. This is just my interpretation however. Don't take my word on it. But Heidegger simply and ontologically destroyed the modern cartesian approach to philosophy. E.g. without Heidegger's ontological destruction of modern philosophy many postmodern thinkers would not have been possible: Foucault. Derrida. Deleuze. Their ideas are merely a take on heidegger's.

I don't think I understand your distinction. The distinction between the real and the imaginary is not the same as the distinction between materialism and idealism. You are conflating meanings.

If kettles only exist with respect to an experiencing self, then what is the ontological status of other selves? — dukkha

Dear dukkha,

Exist is an ontological term that has the very specific meaning in Being and Time of taking a stand on your being. Kettles don't take a stand on their being and so don't exist in Heidegger's terminology. You seem to be using exist with the meaning it excludes in B&T, namely the ex-tantness of something objectively present.

I think he thinks the problem of other minds is purely uninteresting. This is because the question of whether there actually are others out there in the objective world apart from my inner subjective experience of them is a problem only if you presuppose the derived/founded cartesian subject-object position as your ontological starting point. Once you take this derived starting point what you exclude are all the foundational and shared existential phenomena that Heidegger is articulating. One of the main points Heidegger is making is that we are primarily and usually not isolated minds as such; dasein is neither mind nor consciousness nor subject. Nor is dasein somehow inner and the world outer. In the basic average everyday level of phenomena that Heidegger is articulating, the "self" is not really distinct from the other. The everyday self is other, and dasein is the world existingly. This is not solipsism, far from it. It might be solipsism if Heidegger was making a metaphysical or epistemological claim, but he is not. He is making a phenomenological claim about intelligibility.