We glimpse that milieu from within the terms of our own milieu. — Joshs

This brings into question what the 'historical' view provides against the background of what does not change (or not at the same rate or for unrelated reasons). When Nietzsche and Heidegger, for example, present how ancient people thought and felt differently than 'we' do, the idea is not presented as an independently experienced fact because that is impossible. The past and present people share a condition that places them in contrast to each other. The proposal can only be interesting if it introduces a new way to look at what is being experienced presently.

That dynamic is missing in a world where our "situatedness" is a horizon that never lets us know what other people thought. That could be the basis for cancelling the 'historical' as a category. Accepting that limit as self-evident also cancels the history of why the contrast became interesting.

Apart from arguments about what is 'metaphysics' any longer, it is fruitful to read 354 and 355 of The Gay Science because it directly addresses what is often discussed in "post modernism."

My observation does require accepting a common language capable of such a comparison.

Heidegger specifically claimed that Nietzsche "closed the circle of Western metaphysics but did not think beyond it. What is at issue is to what degree Nietzsche intended the system others filled out for him.

In any discussion of a philosopher’s work, what is just as important as what they ‘actually’ said is what we would like them to mean. — Joshs

How is my presentation not an effort in that regard? I was not arguing about how to classify Nietzsche in relation to other thinkers but to wrestle with what is meant by the author. Every reader has to decide what is being said for themselves. "Liking them to mean" something has to be tied to more than a wish for it to mean something.

Nietzsche directly addresses what science is when he asks these questions in The Gay Science:

Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in terms of a pure. newly discovered, newly redeemed nature? — ibid. 109

This brings a fundamental tension into the investigation because a ground is not being invoked where the two uses of science are clearly distinguished. That tension is evident in the next section where the human condition is put forward as the combination of two errors:

Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power-until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: — Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110, translated by Walter Kaufman

The "life-preserving power", through which these conditions are introduced, cannot be called upon to settle the case here because what is to be counted as a fact is under investigation. In regard to the recent discussion about truth upthread, these set of conditions Nietzsche puts forward has 'truth' as a component of the creature in question.

Passing from one kind of nature to another will be tricky. Nietzsche speaks differently (sometimes contradictorily) of how one is going away from the old or toward the new in different contexts. The preference for a genealogy of ancestors over a chain of causes can be seen in this light. As The Gay Science nears the end, the "combination" of errors in 110 is explained in a different way:

My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, "to know ourselves," each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but "'average." Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness, by the "genius of the species" that commands it--and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique. and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be.

This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities. and generalization. Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and anyone who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease.

You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: This distinction I leave to the epistemologists who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of "thing-in-itself" and appearance; for we do not "know" nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction. We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for "truth": we "know" (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "utility" is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day. — ibid. halfway through 354

The question about science asked in 109 is no longer a tug-of-war between motivations but has its benefits and defects collected together:

Even the most cautious among them suppose that what is familiar is at least more easily knowable than what is strange, and that, for example, sound method demands that we start from the "inner world, from the "facts of consciousness"... because this world is more familiar to us. Error of errors! What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to "know" - that is. to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as "outside us." The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness-one might almost say, with the unnatural sciences - is due precisely to the fact that they choose for their object what is strange, while it is almost contradictory and absurd to even try to choose for an object what is not-strange. — ibid. half of 355

The passengers on the little boat are not only seasick but cold and hungry too. If this is the primary condition, what happened to the perspective of the individual and the choices they make? The difference
Nietzsche sees in embracing the return for the benefit of becoming who one is happens where the elements favor a different outcome. That is why I ask:

Are "metaphysicians" such as Heidegger and Deleuze providing a ground that Nietzsche does not?

Pardon me if that was more elaboration than you were asking for.

I can but it would help if you gave a point of departure from the argument I put forward making the proposition.

Are you saying that what I said is not intelligible as it stands? Or are you saying it makes some kind of sense but you are not sure what?

This description of the 'world' does fit better with later thinkers of 'cosmology' concerned with stating the conditions of our existence. How that search for elements relates to personal experience is critical to many of the disputes, Jamal referred to. The "thought experiment" presses the acceptance of the condition to be either a cruel punishment or an unanticipated release. If this is amor fati, there can be no hedging of bets.

This places a tension between attempts to explain the world and questioning what those explanations are. The section 110 from Gay Science I quoted upthread puts the problem in sharp relief. The role of explanation is being explained against a background of circumstances that no Organon of Aristotle could support.

In the horizon of the infinite.-- We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now. little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom and there is no longer any "land." — ibid. 124

In the face of this, it seems fair for me to ask if Heidegger and Deleuze are asking for more "land' than Nietzsche was willing to put on the market.

Sounds like you have fun with Nietzsche ahead of you. — frank

That was a contemptuous reply. I sense an underlying animus is underway.

Perhaps you were thinking of the following:

Origin of knowledge.- Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith* which were continually inherited. until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species. include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late that truth emerged-as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions. sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those basic errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial. Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which "true and "untrue,. were determined down to the most remote regions of logic. Thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any real fight. but denial and doubt were simply considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics. who nevertheless posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors believed that it was possible to live in accordance with these opposites: they invented the sage as the man who was unchangeable and impersonal, the man of the universality of intuition who was One and All at the same time, with a special capacity for his inverted knowledge: they had the faith that their knowledge was also the principle of life. But in order to claim all of this, they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration; they had to misapprehend the nature of the knower; they had to deny the role of the impulses in knowledge; and quite generally they had to conceive of reason: as a completely free and spontaneous activity. They shut their eyes to the fact that they. too, had arrived at their propositions through opposition to common sense. or owing to a desire for tranquility, for sole possession. or for dominion. The subtler development of honesty and skepticism eventually made these people. too, impossible; their ways of living and judging were seen to be also dependent upon the primeval impulses and basic errors of all sentient existence.
This subtler honesty and skepticism came into being wherever two contradictory sentences appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors. and it was therefore possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life; also wherever new propositions. though not useful for life, were also evidently not harmful to life: in such cases there was room for the expression of an intellectual play impulse, and honest~ and skepticism were imminent and happy like all play. Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgments and convictions. and a ferment, struggle, and 'lust for power' developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about "truths". The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified-and eventually knowledge and the striving for the: truths" found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all "evil" instincts were subordinated to knowledge, employed in her service, and acquired the splendor of what is permitted, honored, and useful and eventually even the eye and innocence of the good.
Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power-until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation?
That is the question; that is the experiment. — Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110, translated by Walter Kaufman

Describing it as a thought experiment is too detached. It is without the struggle: — Fooloso4

Note that the end of the quoted passage shows that we are the "thought" experiment. Pretty darn attached.

Heidegger says something similar in his Lectures on Nietzsche. Both readings are difficult to square with the specificity of Nietzsche's actual words:

‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live again, and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it; but rather every pain and joy, every thought and sigh, and all the unutterably trivial or great things in your life will have to happen to you again, with everything in the same series and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’ — The Gay Science, §341

We are thrown into ways of thinking, a cage of concepts that can only be question from within, using those very concepts. — green flag

Is there not a limit to that idea in so far that it could not be expressed without a shared language.?

If I was convinced of existence as a solipsist, what would be the point of proving it to other people?

I think it would be more accurate if he said that this is how he thinks they thought that thought. But I think he would think that I am not thinking historically:

...until philosophy is forced to think historically-in a still more essential and original sense of that word-taking its own most grounding question as its point of departure. (186) — Fooloso4

It seems that the questioning in that direction is over for Heidegger.

Has a scholar who did much to pull apart the veil of Scholastic interpretation of Greek thinkers hidden them behind another?

By not understanding, I mean specifically the questioning that Heidegger says is most difficult. In the passage I quoted above:

Thinking Being, will to power, as eternal return, thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy, means thinking Being as Time. Nietzsche thinks that thought but does not think it as the question of Being and Time. Plato and Aristotle also think that thought when they conceive Being as ousia (presence), but just as little as Nietzsche do they think it as a question.
If we do ask the question, we do not mean to suggest that we are cleverer than both Nietzsche and Western philosophy, which Nietzsche "only" thinks to its end. We know that the most difficult thought of philosophy has only become more difficult, that the peak of the meditation has not yet been conquered and perhaps not yet even discovered at all. — Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e

The limit of metaphysics is found by going past where Nietzsche could go no further. Heidegger is tasking the reader with grasping that end. Otherwise, taking the limit as a given would be to repeat:

Plato and Aristotle also think that thought when they conceive Being as ousia (presence), but just as little as Nietzsche do they think it as a question.

I don't understand what Heidegger means by going beyond Metaphysics but the following is how he describes its beginning and Nietzsche as the end:

What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement (of Greek thought)? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the as yet undeveloped guiding question, the question as to what being is?

The one answer-roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides-tells us that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of is and Being - permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present.

The other answer-roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus-tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming, its self-unfolding and eventual dissolution.

To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being in such a way that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent; and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet being is both of these, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, in order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has Being only in creative transfiguration. What is and what becomes are fused in the fundamental thought that what becomes is inasmuch as in creation it becomes being and is becoming. But such becoming-a-being becomes a being that comes-to-be, and does so in the perpetual transformation of what has become firmly fixed and intractable to something made firm in a liberating transfiguration. — ibid. page 200

That is a different slant for me; Will have to ponder.

It does seem different than Heidegger saying we posit persistence rather than find it.

It would interesting to see where and when the idea of Eternalism originated. — Janus

Heidegger seems to put Heraclitus in this role. Cycles of Becoming repeating without beginning or end.

Heidgger put it this way:

In the popular view, and according to the common notion, Nietzsche is the revolutionary figure who negated, destroyed, and prophesied. To be sure, all that belongs to the image we have of him. Nor is it merely a role that he played, but an innermost necessity of his time. But what is essential in the revolutionary is not that he overturns as such; it is rather that in overturning he brings to light what is decisive and essential. In philosophy that happens always when those few momentous questions are raised. When he thinks "the most difficult thought" at the "peak of the meditation," Nietzsche thinks and meditates on Being, that is, on will to power as eternal recurrence. What does that mean, taken quite broadly and essentially? Eternity, not as a static "now," nor as a sequence of "nows" rolling off into the infinite, but as the "now" that bends back into itself: what is that if not the concealed essence of Time? Thinking Being, will to power, as eternal return, thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy, means thinking Being as Time. Nietzsche thinks that thought but does not think it as the question of Being and Time. Plato and Aristotle also think that thought when they conceive Being as ousia (presence), but just as little as Nietzsche do they think it as a question.
If we do ask the question, we do not mean to suggest that we are cleverer than both Nietzsche and Western philosophy, which Nietzsche "only" thinks to its end. We know that the most difficult thought of philosophy has only become more difficult, that the peak of the meditation has not yet been conquered and perhaps not yet even discovered at all. — Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e

That is a much more helpful response than mine.

Not at all. My strong preferences are not the same as impartial justice.

I am not sure if I have presented two possible propositions where one can be confirmed and the other denied.

Your two questions are excellent. I will take a stab at the first one.

One way to look at it is that Nietzsche saw himself as past metaphysics, abandoning 'explanation' as performed in the style of his predecessors.

Heidegger comes along and says that there is a system where the system has not been competed yet. Nietzsche would have produced it if he had lived long enough. All of those ideas by H are laid out in the Lectures I linked to.

These are at least two different ways of reading the text.

Please don't take my word for it. I see that you have encountered some measure of the matter in your reading.

Regarding ethics, it is interesting that Heidegger started out as a Catholic theology scholar. The anti-modern ethos he espoused in various fashions throughout his life began in the context of those conservative movements that resisted change to what was seen as the proper order.

His views on Christianity obviously changed but his objections to 'scientism' and technology have some connection to the religious expression he encountered early in his career.

He speaks in terms of losing something once experienced and looking forward to something that is closer to that than what we have now but new and different at the same time.

Dumb question but is Heidegger an important figure in philosophy? — Tom Storm

As my previous behavior might have suggested, I am more interested in ancient texts than recent ones. I cannot explain why exactly but that is the case. The heart wants what the heart wants.

So, Heidegger was an important part of the discussion and kinds of study that developed in academy and elsewhere regarding such texts that is happening as we speak. It is a matter of much dispute,

There is a whole world of responses regarding political philosophy that he influenced that I will leave to my political sisters and brothers to opine upon.

I don't look at it that way. It is not about finding "naziism" in everything he wrote or not.

I agree with many things he points to in the Lecture I linked to. But I object to other statements because I think they are incorrect, not because of his character.

I look at it as a unity of authorship. If an author says x,y, and z are connected, then they are asking me, the reader, to connect them. The 'disguising' part (in so far as Heidegger tried to minimize that part of his life) is not something that is being done to him. It is not an ethical judgement to look at those different parts separately when he did place them together.

Making it all about choosing between apology or denial is not an earnest attempt to understand what is being said. If the crappy part is connected to the worthwhile part, then that is something to be wrestled with.

And we all can make arguments for why any of these figures here shouldn't be as influential. — Manuel

I am curious about you putting it that way. Isn't the cat already out of the bag?

Different thinkers made what they will of the text. Grouping them or not grouping them on that basis has played a part in many observations. But what was said is just what was said, available to those interested to read it.

As Heidegger made his own Nietzsche, others have made their own Heidegger. That element can be investigated without burning any books.

Do you mean that Heidegger is positing the overman as agency? — Joshs

At least to the extent it brings about the underlined portion of the quote:

This human being of the future is the proper ruler, the one who has become master of the last man,indeed in such a way that the last man disappears. His disappearance indicates that the ruler is no longer defined in opposition to the last man-which is what always happens as long as future humanity, spawned by what has gone before, has to grasp itself as over-man, — ibid. page 127

Your references are well in line with what is put forward in the Lectures. I disagree with the interpretation for reasons that require their own discussion. But even if one were to accept the 'metaphysic' Heidegger derives from Nietzsche, the observation about time still has Heidegger at variance with other ideas about revenge, such as the one I quoted from Nietzsche's Notebook. The dynamic there is to show how belief systems provide a sense of value from punishing others. So, how can the idea of change from that form of exchange include a blatant example of it?

And if there is going to be an appeal to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, let it include:

For 'punishment' is what revenge calls itself; with a hypocritical lie it creates a good conscience for itself.....

Has he unlearned the spirit of revenge and all gnashing of teeth? And who taught him reconciliation with time and something higher than any reconciliation? For that will which is the will to power must will something higher than any reconciliation; but how shall this be brought about? Who could teach him also to will backwards? — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On Redemption, translated by Walter Kaufman

Heidegger's view of Nietzsche as metaphysician requires accepting the following as the only way to understand the 'natural' and the role of 'eternal recurrence in The Gay Science:

Meanwhile we want to heed the fact that at the time when the thought of eternal return of the same arises Nietzsche is striving most decisively in his thought to dehumanize and de-deify being as a whole. His striving is not a mere echo, as one might suppose, of an ostensible "positivistic period" now in abeyance. It has its own, more profound origin. Only in this way is it possible for Nietzsche to be driven directly from such striving to its apparently incongruous opposite, when in his doctrine of will to power he demands the supreme humanization of beings — Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol II, page 94

Enter the Dasein, stage left:

If we follow Nietzsche's lead and substitute "the philosopher" for "the knower," "the artist" for "the creator," and "the saint" for "the lover," then the phrase we introduced a moment ago tells us that the philosopher, artist, and saint are one. However, it is not Nietzsche's purpose here to concoct an amalgam that would consist of all the things these words used to mean. On the contrary, he is seeking the figure of a human being who exists simultaneously in the transformed unity of that threefold metamorphosis-the knower, the creator, the giver. This human being of the future is the proper ruler, the one who has become master of the last man, indeed in such a way that the last man disappears. His disappearance indicates that the ruler is no longer defined in opposition to the last man-which is what always happens as long as future humanity, spawned by what has gone before, has to grasp itself as over-man, that is to say, as a transition. The ruler, that is, the designated unity of knower, creator, and lover, is in his own proper grounds altogether an other. — ibid. page 127

Nietzsche and Heidegger shared many disenchantments with their cultural milieus. Both admired orders of rank and looked down upon democracy. But this agency Heidegger is putting forward runs afoul of a central observation in Nietzsche's Will to Power:

Morality as a means of seduction--- "Nature is good, for a wise and good God is its cause. Who, then, is responsible for the 'corruption of mankind'? It tyrants and seducers, the ruling orders---they must be destroyed"---: Rousseau's logic (compare Pascal's logic, which lays the responsibility on original sin).
Compare the related logic of Luther. In both cases a pretext is sought to introduce an insatiable thirst for revenge as a moral-religious duty. Hatred for the ruling order seeks to sanctify itself---(the "sinfulness of Israel": foundation of the power of the priest),
Compare the related logic of Paul. It is always God's cause in which these reactions come forth, the cause of right, of humanity, etc. In the case of Christ, the rejoicing of the people appears as the cause of his execution; an anti-priestly movement from the first. Even in the case of the anti-Semites it is the same artifice: to visit condemnatory judgments upon one's enemies opponent and to reserve to oneself the role of retributive justice. — Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 347, translated by Walter Kaufman

Well, this is where we part ways. I read Aristotle to complicate the clear distinctions you embrace.

But I appreciate the aspect where we see sensation from a similar point of view.

This is a great resource.
I read a number of passages I was familiar with and found the translations very rigorous.
It is great to have such a consistent method apply to all the texts.

Do you know where Aristotle expresses this 'direct action' as clearly as that?

It seems to me that this is one of the most difficult parts of the text to decipher.

The discussion of phantisia in DA 3 is ample evidence of that.

I take the general point from Physics regarding affecting and being affected. When looking at the movement from perception to 'intellection', the discussion becomes more difficult. Thus, all the arguments about what is an 'appearance' or an 'image' in Book 3 of De Anima. What is accepted for what it is and what is susceptible to error.

Those calculations make sense but whether Russia can really find a work around to the sanctions is the big strategic question.

I follow the general idea that time is not on Ukraine's side.

No, I am calling the event "actually sensing" and explicitly saying it is the action of the sensible object and the passion of the sense. Aristotle is quite clear in De Anima, that the sense organ changes in sensation. Being changed is undergoing passion. — Dfpolis

I agree that it takes two to tango. Aristotle, however, speaks of two concurrent activities on this matter rather than of one thing simply changing another:

The activity of the perceptible object, however, and of the perceptual capacity is one and the same (although the being for them is not the same). I mean, for example, the active sound and the active hearing. For it is possible to have hearing and not to hear, and what has a sound is not always making a sound. But when what can hear is active and what can make a sound is making a sound, then |425b30| the active hearing comes about at the same time as the active sound, and we might say that the one is an act of hearing and the other a making of a sound. — De Anima, 425b20, translated by CDC Reeve.

But this shared proximity happens within a 'goldilocks' zone.

Since, though, the activity of the perceptible object and of the perceptual part are one, although the being is not the same, it is necessary for hearing and sound that are said to be such in this [active] way to be destroyed and to be preserved together, and so also with flavor and tasting, and similarly with the others. But when these are said to be such potentially this is not necessary. The earlier physicists, however, did not speak well about this, since they thought that there was neither white nor black without seeing, nor flavor without tasting. For though in one way they spoke correctly, in another way incorrectly. For since perception and the perceptible object are spoken of in a twofold way, on the one hand as potential and on the other as active, what they said holds of the latter but not of the former. They, though, spoke in a simple way about things that are not spoken of in a simple way. But if voice is a sort of consonance, and voice and hearing are in a way one (while in another way not one and the same), and if consonance is a ratio, then hearing must also be a sort of ratio. And that is why each sort of excess, whether high or low pitch, destroys hearing, and similarly excesses in flavor destroy taste, and in colors the intensely bright and dark destroy sight, and in smell the strong odors, whether sweet or bitter, since the perceptual capacity is a sort of ratio. That is also why things—for example, the sharp, sweet, or salty—are pleasant when, being pure and unmixed, they are brought into the ratio, since they are pleasant then. And in general a mixture, |a consonance, is more pleasant than either high or low pitch, and for touch what can be [further] heated or cooled. The perceptual capacity is a ratio, and excessive things dissolve or destroy it. — ibid. 426a10

This relates to how touch is said to be the simplest form of perception. A being either touches another or not. If the encounter stops you from being what you are, that is not an act of perception any longer.

The question of the 'passive' does enter into the discussion of appearances and images but does not seem equivalent to the above discussion of 'material' near other 'material'. The use of 'ratio' (logos) in this description is an interesting observation about the natural world.

The guy was a catalyst for reconsidering Ancient Greek texts in a time where scholars were very pleased with themselves. Some bitter enemies recognize that while keeping with the hating.

I am not a good reader of a lot of the text because so much of it strikes me as a three-card monte game: Let's switch the value of this to that and move it around a bit.

I have tried to understand how Heidegger understood Nietzsche and here I am on firmer ground. Those lectures are spectacularly incorrect, turning Nietzsche's ideas into something a believer of 'Germanness' could embrace. I don't know if that is a betrayal or not, but it is difficult for me to accept that Heidegger was not aware of all those times Nietzsche pissed on his idea.

Thanks for the link to the essay.
A quarter of the way in, I see that it is a serious challenge to established scholars.
I will study more before trying to comment.

Since intelligibility is a precondition of knowledge, intelligible properties are prior to, and independent of, the act of knowing — Dfpolis

The language of 'independent' has an interesting role in your account. I agree with your approach that what can be known is a connection to our experienced world rather a visit from an alien planet. That is expressed clearly in this account (emphasis mine)"

For something is said to be a substance, as we mentioned, in three ways, as form, as matter, and as what is composed of both. And of these, the matter is potentiality, the form is actuality. And since what is composed of the two is an animate thing, the body is not the actualization of the soul, but rather the soul is the actualization of a certain sort of body. And that is why those people take things correctly who believe that the soul neither exists without a body nor is a body of some sort. For it is not a body, but it belongs to a body, and for this reason is present in a body, and in a body of such-and-such a sort, rather than as our predecessors supposed, when they inserted it into a body without first determining in which and in what sort, even though it appears that not just any random thing is receptive of any random thing. In our way of looking at it, by contrast, it comes about quite reasonably. For the actualization of each thing naturally comes about in what it already belongs to potentially, that is, the appropriate matter. That the soul, then, is a certain sort of actualization and account of what has the potentiality to be of this sort, is evident from these things. — De Anima, 414a15, translated by C.D.C. Reeve

This obviously does not fit with the Cartesian models you have criticized. But Aristotle says they do not fit with what came before him. The idea of the completely random is in a wrestling match with some kind of order.

It would be a monkey brain thing to map out what stop chattering meant. You can't be quiet and say what it is.

There are different practices that approach this in a disciplined fashion. I am no kind of guru to chatter about that.

I have seen the benefits of slowing reactions down. When one does not say the first, second, or third thing that pops into your head, you are in a different country, unsure of what surrounds you. People will recognize you are making an effort at that point.

In this thread, you haven't really indicated what it is I am saying which doesn't make sense to you. — Metaphysician Undercover

I did so here in response to:

There is nothing to indicate that the world might be eternal. and everything indicates that there is potentiality and actuality. So that possibility, that the world is eternal and there no potentiality or actuality is easily excluded as unreal. — Metaphysician Undercover

This does not make sense of much of what Aristotle has said. I am getting off the merry-go-round now. You do not recognize my efforts as efforts. I will make no more of them.

I hate this piecemeal sort of reply.
If a comment is not worth a separate effort, then it is just an idea you see amongst other ideas.
I get enough of that at work.

How about Aristotle's De Anima?

Or is that an overgrown lot filled with irreconcilable weeds?

You like to make objections against my interpretation without any real support, like pointing to what exactly is wrong with my interpretation. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is not a fair accounting. I have quoted Aristotle extensively where I think he does not support your thesis.

I did wrestle with your thesis itself more strenuously in the past but stopped when I realized that I did not understand it enough to disagree with. That is still the case.

I am no expert in the matter. It is obvious that we both have read a lot of primary text. I appreciate anyone who has made that effort. I am not making accusations but saying why your view does not make sense to me.

I am curious if you have a collection of like-minded thinkers who see the role of bodies the way you do. I have read enough secondary text to get the hang of some of the contemporary academic debate regarding these questions. Is there anybody from that world who reads Aristotle the way you do?