The mind is simply the fact of the process of interpretation. — apokrisis

For what it's worth, I agree. 'Interpretation' is a good stab at a synonym for human existence. The "mind" is a token within or derived from the interpretative process. Interpretation itself is interpretations 'self'-image or model of itself within the "world" as a whole. The world is just "what is," where the 'is' here remains unstable or itself endlessly re-interpretable.

And the resident interpretations don’t welcome the threatened intrusions. — apokrisis

Indeed. And these interpretations exist systematically. A fundamental interpretation of existence (what am I here for? What is virtue?) "radiates" outward. If a scientific thesis threatens my fundamental interpretation of existence, so much the worse for science. But that goes for religion and metaphysics, too. That's where "Romanticism" comes in, which thinks in terms of these fundamental interpretations. It's "pre-science" or "pre-metaphysics" in that it thinks the conditions of possibility for metaphysical, scientific, and religious frameworks. On the other hand, it is itself such a framework, self-consciously holding itself at a distance from (other) particular commitments.

But is the tree mental when we actually perceive one (see, smell, touch, hear it fall in the woods, etc)? — Marchesk

I'd approach this in terms of different language games. I don't think there is a game-indepedent truth of the matter. The mental-physical distinction is useful in certain contexts but not perfect or absolute. IMV, most metaphysical questions along these lines are 'confusions' that assume unquestioningly that imperfect but useful dichotomies (mental versus non-mental, for instance) are sufficiently precise and stable enough for the question at hand to seem important and answerable in the first place.

Employers gain a subservience filter, albeit of a higher functioning sort at higher education level They also have a similar lower status one for all younger school attenders of course. And universities gain easy business, while students gain a spell of social adventure and an opportunity to be a higher paid drone. Social adventure at the higher drone level apart, it ain't pretty that's for sure. — Jake Tarragon

You make some great points. That's the dark side, which is there. But let's acknowledge that the highest level drones are no longer drones at all. Or can we think of leading scholars, scientists, and engineers as drones? If I am not already rich, then I can settle for the jobs I already qualify for (themselves likely tedious) or embrace a different tedium that has the potential of opening a less or non-tedious way of making a living.

One could argue that dwelling on the faults of institutions is a way to rationalize settling. I have been the rebellious idealist. But in worldly terms that meant working a menial job and living with extreme frugality so that I didn't have to spend much time on that menial job. A young healthy person can get away perhaps with having no health insurance. But it's not a very sustainable situation. Finally, the tedium of formal education comes with a positive of being forced to prove one's supposed ability. I was an autodidact. I knew lots of things, but (in retrospect) I was a fairly disorganized and untested ball of knowledge, more promise than performance. Even a liberal arts degree at least requires the writing of papers, and that's perhaps what's really important: being forced to present and defend one's thinking.

Best worldy option? To what ends? — Jake Tarragon

That is indeed the question. To be clear, I think it's a personal matter. For me it looks to be the best path. What is life about as a whole? What is the big or final purpose? For me the point is to live 'heroically' in the dissonance. Death waits at or as the end. Something like style is my religion. It is more beautiful or noble in a primary and ultimately 'irrational' way to live with a certain force or ambition.

In someone else's case, this may have nothing to do with school. I was, however, intensely unwordly and rebellious in my 20s, so the respectable world was still open as a new frontier. A person who has always been respectable and safe may just as heroically charge into the frontier-for-him of the margins, of a certain 'authentic' riskiness. I suppose I'm describing Jungian individuation. We become rounder and richer personalities by marching into whatever the frontier happens to be for us.

Furthermore, we can prove that a container is not essential to information because we can imagine information being acquired directly through telepathy. The fact that we can imagine a thing proves that it is logically possible. And if logically possible, then a container is not an essential property of information. — Samuel Lacrampe

For me the issue is that language itself is a "container" -- at least to the degree that we believe in translation. Do we think in words? In my experience, we do, with maybe a little wiggle room for some kind of spatial-temporal reasoning. Can we generally strip meaning from its body? It's not so clear. The distinction of information/container strikes me as an ideal distinction like spirit versus flesh. It founds or institutes a continuum. But the poles don't make much sense. They are limits at infinity.

I was wondering if there is a term for the philosophical point of view I have? I thought it was solipsism for a while until I realized I don’t know if my mind exists either, as weird and nonsensical as that may sound. — Mariojinx

From my perspective you are playing a kind of game. It's the game of radical but merely theoretical doubt. It has its charms. But I don't know if it's been given a game, precisely because it can't be taken seriously. Solipsism, which you mention, also strikes me as a "toy" position. Have you ever looked into conceptual art? I like it. It plays with ideas. A little of it is earnest, political, heavy. But most of it is self-referential, detached, clever.

To be a little more fair and helpful, I think you might like later Wittgenstein and earlier Heidegger. Wittgenstein is good on the slipperiness of language. Heidegger demolishes "your" Cartesian, exaggerated skepticism.

According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual clues are removed. He describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice: where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language, all philosophical problems can be solved without the muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, precisely because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no work at all.[209] Wittgenstein argues that philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the "rough ground" of ordinary language in use. Much of the Investigations consists of examples of how the first false steps can be avoided, so that philosophical problems are dissolved, rather than solved: "the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear."[210]

=====

Thus Husserl's understanding that all consciousness is "intentional" (in the sense that it is always intended toward something, and is always "about" something) is transformed in Heidegger's philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in "care". This is the basis of Heidegger's "existential analytic", as he develops it in Being and Time. Heidegger argues that describing experience properly entails finding the being for whom such a description might matter. Heidegger thus conducts his description of experience with reference to "Dasein", the being for whom Being is a question.[45]

In Being and Time, Heidegger criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or subject. Dasein, then, is not intended as a way of conducting a philosophical anthropology, but is rather understood by Heidegger to be the condition of possibility for anything like a philosophical anthropology.[46] Dasein, according to Heidegger, is care.[47]
— Wiki

If you disbelieve in your mind/self as an entity, you might like this:http://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1020/Hume4.pdf

Kant and others reacted to this. But you remind me a little of Hume at his most extreme. Hume did have the sense to mention the difference between his thoughts in his study and his thoughts when he lived in the world with the rest of us.

Think about premise (1). If atheism is true, then how can morality be objective? That's the question. — cincPhil

Another question: how does a God make morality objective? Is it just His power to punish? But the state has power to punish. Does creation of conscious entity automatically entail the institution of an objective morality?

Let's imagine that there is a God. Let's further assume that everyone knows or believes this. Still further, he tells us what he would like us to do. Perhaps he threatens us only with finite punishment, not eternal flames but only a certain duration and intensity of pure pain varying with the violation.

Do we not still have our terrible freedom? Would we not make the same calculations? All believing in God, we could still debate the legitimacy of his moral authority. If we throw infinite punishments into the mix, then we arguably just have a fearsome tyrant. Moral action would only be "objective" in this case by being undeniably and even immeasurably prudent.

The sense I can make of the lack of an objective morality involves the questionableness of every candidate for this role. Our ability to question and doubt what others forbid and demand seems to be the real issue. Since we are mortal, all punishment and reward is finite. It makes sense that some have wanted to believe and wanted others to believe that authority could reach beyond the grave. This raw ability to question, doubt, and disobey is eerie. Notions of "objective" morality and eternal truths that aren't tautologies are perhaps attempts to get an absolute-permanent-rustproof handle on a fragile and ambiguous situation.

So, do any other members feel somewhat alienated by delving into philosophy? My alienation is mostly from just feeling somewhat different than other people who enjoy making money, spending time with friends drinking or just interacting, and such. I also think most people aren't interested in 'truth', 'wisdom', or positive human traits and virtues like honor, honesty, pride, and non-deceitfulness. It just seems to me that when a person is motivated by some things like 'truth' then their whole personality changes, and there's a focus on virtue and ethics. — Posty McPostface

I largely sympathize, but philosophy has "cured" me of thinking of myself as one the good guys. I mean that I see a gap between the "knowledge hero" and the good guy. I'm pretty liberal, for instance, but I think I annoy or scare off my liberal peers by always trying to see the other side and by insisting on the "monster" in each of us. I am interested in truth, but seeking the truth about truth itself problematizes this interest. Is the truth not also about superiority? A nice seat on the mountain? But who says its bad to want a seat on the mountain if not someone seeking a seat on the mountain.

This game of self-description in which one always comes out on top is what especially fascinates me. So I have to argue a little bit with your suggestion that most aren't interested in truth, virtue, wisdom. Indeed, I think we are all quite interested. We just have different basic notions of these things. For some not thinking too much is itself wisdom. You and me probably seem sickly to some in our constant readiness to analyze and demystify. They're not wrong. There's a violence in critical thought, a peeling of scabs, a trespass. If philosophy at its most revolutionary is abnormal discourse, then it is also thoughtcrime that only every once in a while becomes the new law. I think Schop had it right. Irritability, aggression. That's largely what philosophers are made of.

But I do feel a certain alienation. On the other hand this is also transcendence. People can be boring where a diffuse and manageable sexual desire (or lifesytle-sustaining business) is not involved. Smalltalk and chitchat. It's content-poor. There's not enough for the mind to chew on. (Note the aggression in this chewing, I say, as I reach for a piece of nicotine gum). There is also the ocean of cliche that the philosophy-exposed always-thinking person recognizes as such. On the bright side, a well told story has never lost its charm for me.

Because nobody would understand what the time was otherwise haha. But I think Blattner/Heidegger argue that originary temporality is more or less the framework that makes sense of, or structures, world time — bloodninja

Right. But this orginary time seems to be quite un-time-like, except for its ability to explain time as we (vaguely) conceive it. So the "future" and "past" and "present" of originary time (as I'm understanding Blattner) only get their misleading names this way. The idea of existence as "pure act" comes to mind. The original future, present, and past are just aspects of a unity. That's what I'm picking up. What is the structure of this unity? of this "how"?

So world time, I think, or perhaps the temporality of circumspective concern, is the "making present" within the non-successive, finite future/past of originary temporality. — bloodninja

Do you mean the making present of entities? That makes sense to me. We have a making present of meaningful beings, understood against the background or horizon of time in its various modes. Is the pressing forward of future just a spin on this presencing? A spin on the meaning of the entity disclosed? This "spin" is most basically explained by the for-the-sake-which of self-understanding? That seems plausible to me.

Doesn't the ideal in the sense you are using it imply a conscious awareness of it? I'm not so sure that is the level at which Heidegger is doing his phenomenology. I'm not denying that we don't all have ideals. — bloodninja

I didn't mean to suggest that such ideals must be conscious. Of course I realize that Heidegger is largely significant by digging much deeper than (self-)consciousness. I think Dreyfus even stresses that the 'for-sake-of-which' terminology was invoked to avoid an interpretation in terms of conscious motive.

I suggest that what I'd call ironism is a phenomenology of motive. It digs up or unveils what mostly functions as an invisible framework. As I see it, this "bringing-to-light" of a framework is simultaneously a distancing from or negation of the framework. The "necessary" becomes contingent and therefore optional. We could define freedom in terms of this "corrosion" of merely-apparent-in-retrospect necessity. If Blattner is right and I understand him correctly, then Heidegger is (among other things) doing "ironism" on a deeper level. But he's more interested in being, so it's only a station on the way for him. If philosophy is or should be fundamental ontology, then (as I understand it) he's doing a "pre-science" of the most fundamental framework. Nevertheless, giving the primordial future a key position in his theory does suggest a somewhat neglected connection to The Irony.

This, in turn, forces us to recognize that the possible ways to be Dasein are not possible as potentially actualizable, that Dasein presses ahead into a future that never can become present. — Blattner

This connects to Sartre, too. It reminds me of the (impossible) desire of the for-itself to have substantial being without losing its freedom.

The point is that modern set theory is the search for new axioms that are plausible and seem natural for the world of sets we have in our minds. In our intuition. Yes, it's ultimately driven by intuition. By our intuition about what the Platonic sets must be. Even if we're formalists in the end we must be part Platonist. — fishfry

I agree with there's a Platonist or intuitionist motive involved. I suppose I experience it in terms of a virtue intersubjective reality. I don't know or even care much how sets or numbers may exist apart from human cognition. It's the aesthetic experience of exact imagination that does it for me. So indeed I'm not just writing symbols down at the end of a proof. The theorem is a revealed truth about a potentially shared world.

I would say that the infinite is what makes math interesting! Otherwise it's just combinatorics. Balls in bins. Finite sets are boring. Also you need infinity to come up with a satisfactory theory of the real numbers. Which themselves are a philosophical mystery. — fishfry

You have a point, but you may be underselling the charms of the finite. I especially like Turing machines and other models of computation. This theorem really moved me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook–Levin_theorem Of course lots of models allow for infinite tape or memory, but in practice computation is utterly finite. I love the cold, perfect mechanization. It's an engineering-scultpure in a material that never rusts or bends ('imaginary titanium').

The reals are beautiful but troubling. "Almost all" of them are incomputable, utterly untouchable. They are elusive ideal entities. We stuff geometrical intuitions into a formal system that seems to work. Perhaps the passionate analysts are Platonist of the continuum and they just use the symbols as part of a "normal" discourse or to discipline their intuition. I've heard an analyst say that for analysts the world is continuous (metaphysically he meant).

Something that I find interesting is that even though we have all these crazy theories about humongous infinite sets; all of our reasoning is finitistic. Proofs are finite strings. The axioms and theorems are finite strings. The rules of inference are described with finite strings. You could program a computer to check if a proof is valid. This is a huge area of active research these days, they're doing amazing things.

So all we're really doing is playing around with finite strings of symbols. We tell ourselves it's "about infinity," but it really isn't. We are only pretending to be able to deal with infinity. That's one way to look at things. — fishfry

Yes, these "finite stings" are what especially interest me. But we do indeed handle them in terms of an intuition of the infinite. It reminds me of Heidegger. There's a framework that "opens" the meaning of the strings for us, but we can't put this dimly visible framework itself in a string. I liked Kleene's book on logic. I know what you mean about proofs being finite strings. Getting Turing machines to search through the countable set of all strings for proofs is a pretty great idea.

I'd say that not all of our reasoning is finitistic. On the other hand, the non-finitistic stuff is therefore problematic. It's a fuzziness that may be the condition of possibility for what is crystal clear.

The next question is, if formal systems can't get at the truth, what can? I don't know anything about what philosophers think about that. — fishfry

Wouldn't it have to be something like intuition? Or perhaps, on the other hand, new formalizations that are truer to intuition?

For me the finite and the computational are just nakedly "real" or "true." They are more persuasive than the philosophy that might try to ground them. You'll probably agree that it's the infinite that gives us trouble. Tentatively this trouble seems to involve the gap between a fuzzy, linguistic concept and a mechanizable concept. There are limits to mechanization (halting problem, for instance), and yet mechanization is as Platonic as it gets?

We live in strange times. What does it all mean? We are atomized rats. I keep myself open to the massive cognitive dissonance, seduced by the heroic image of the philosopher. So maybe it's harder for me (and you perhaps). Men are perhaps more likely to be disagreeable, rebellious, questioning. Or philosophers (as a personality type) tend to be that way. There's a little part of me that says "ah f*ck it, let's go be a poor artist-writer-musician again," but I don't think that voice is going to win out. Another voice reminds me that a certain amount of money will buy me peace and quiet, relative security.

In short, I can see that the structure is 50% bullsh*t. But I can also see that it's still arguably the best actual worldly option. Of course life remains ambiguous. I don't know which path is best. I am forced to act on an always evolving image of the ways of things. If that's not difficult enough, I for one am still figuring out what I want in a worldly sense (beyond the obvious advantage of more money). So not even motive is stable.

Good points, BC. I feel like a wolf in a cage after 6 years. Soon I'll be able to more or less choose what I study. But six years is a long time to wait.

Goals, at the very highest level, are irrational - I think we are agreeing on that. Rationality has to serve irrationality, Irrationality stops the recursive buck from being passed further - that's how I see it. — Jake Tarragon

Yes, we agree. So I was just pointing originally at the kind of conversation that can shape or influence the "irrational" foundation or institution of a particular notion of rationality. It has to be "rhetoric" or "sophistry" or "abnormal discourse," precisely because it challenges a particular "institution" of the rational or a particular "understanding of being," where this "understanding of being" is the taken-for-granted framework through which entities are "pre-interpreted."

It is a "nonsense" ('crime') that can become the very definition of sense (new 'law').

I wouldn’t expect humanlike-ness or intelligibility. — Michael Ossipoff

What would your expectation mean here? Why would you bother to expect something other than what you could comprehend? That expectation looks to me like an empty negation.

Entirely beyond our understanding. — Michael Ossipoff

What is the content of this phrase? It's just negation. I'm not saying it's wrong or right, just trying to point out what's beyond our understanding doesn't exist for us. We are slapping a word with a certain emotional charge (gathered from a history of actual human-like "fatherly" content) on what is more or less the metaphysical concept of nothingness/negation. What is at all still godlike about this conceptual shell?

Basically, scientific evidence is "taken on faith" for the average citizen in the West, in the same way that theological conundrums were taken on faith by the average person for centuries. Rather than having ditched religion, the West has transferred the religious need to another sphere of inquiry; or more accurately, to another perspective from which to view "reality". — Noble Dust

You make an important point. I'd call it expert culture. But even participants in this expert culture (scientists or engineers in one field among many) are themselves in this situation. There is just too much knowledge. Becoming proficient in a single field is the work of many years. No one sees the machine as a whole anymore. It's impossible.

But I think it's politics that has absorbed much of the interest that religion proper has lost. Wasn't the lost traditional religion largely political to begin with? One could argue that only the operant "theology" has changed --in the direction of individual liberty. My interpretation of scripture, my sex life, my dietary choices, etc., are mine. This freedom comes at the cost of angst. I can't rest in the certainty of the government-enforced one-right-way to worship-obey the official god as officially conceived by experts. I have to stand in a "field" of disagreement. Others may laugh at me, mock what I hold most sacred.

I personally embrace this burden. I speculate that frustration with our "godless" world (a frustration that refuses to see just how full of belief we really are, even if the beliefs modulate) is a desire to escape this burden blended with a desire to impose one's own vision on others. These desires are deeply and perhaps inescapably human.

Cioran: "Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence." — antinatalautist

This is a dark and profound quote. Suicide is arguably important as an option. It allows us the sense of having chosen to persevere. I sometimes think of Hunter S. Thompson. A sick old man has (as I see it) every right to choose his moment. Rights are a funny concept here. But I think suicide can be beautiful and noble in some contexts. Inoperable brain cancer that threatens to destroy the personality is just about the perfect reason. But any unfixable condition that humiliates human dignity is defensible, as I see it. Cioran himself, however, is over the top. Though I have enjoyed the terrible freedom in a few of his books. That's the hard stuff, the questionable stuff. It's a product on the market. What does that say about us? I'm not against it. It just speaks to how atomized we really are. The individual has lots of rope to hang himself with.

But for me the problem is that this itself is an assertion about God. What do you understand about God that suggests that people in general overestimate their understanding? I like your insect analogy, but I've used something similar to support my own point. If we are insects in relation to some God, then what can that God ever be for us that won't fit into an insects mind? God-for-us (the only God we could by definition ever hope to talk about sensibly) "must" be human-like to the degree that God is intelligible at all. This is the theological version of the problem with the thing-in-itself, except that some would have us worship the symbol we use to represent our inability to know. (I don't really mind, to be clear, how others worship God or give content to the word if they respect my freedom to do the same.)

The first lesson I take from this is that people understood the world in different ways at different times. I don't know what the Greek saw, felt, understood when he saw a house. Or the Roman. But I accept the possibility it differs from my experience of these things.

To what end? What exactly is Heidegger getting at? My guesses aren't worth the mention. But at least so far no mysticism at all. — tim wood

Just to be clear, I wasn't accusing you of mysticism. I was just explaining my dislike of the capitalization. I read Steiner's book on Heidegger with pleasure, yet I didn't come away with a clear conceptual picture of what Heidegger was getting at. I knew that language and being were important, that the being-question was important. But I don't remember getting anything like what Blattner and others provided. Now I've switched to the Stambough translation and like it much better. So I'm feeling my way in to a [conceptual] thinker who seems quite different to me than the fuzzy picture in Steiner's book. But I may just finally be getting at just how deep and meaningful the question was to begin with. Dreyfus helped. I started to think in terms of understandings of being, of mostly invisible "frameworks" that disclose entities in the first place so that "normal" science can begin.


I also agree with your main point. I was first exposed to Heidegger via Rorty and Kojeve. Rorty stressed the idea in your quote. I suppose that "finitude" added to that notion would include the denial that there is a final or right or eternal way of understanding being. In another lingo, we can't see outside of our own form of life. Or perhaps we can't see very clearly out of our own form of life. We'd have to be able to see a little outside this form of life or inherited pre-interpretation of being to believe that others understood being differently.

Just a thought... Maybe death just is this existential unattainability? — bloodninja

It could indeed be. Or maybe death reveals or clarifies this unattainability?

death and anxiety reveal important structures of Dasein’s being. That Dasein can find itself unable to understand itself and project forth into a way of life, that it can find itself equally indifferent to all human possibilities, shows that it is capable of living as nothing, as a question without even a provisional answer. This, in turn, forces us to recognize that the possible ways to be Dasein are not possible as potentially actualizable, that Dasein presses ahead into a future that never can become present. The latter implies, finally, that originary temporality is not successive. — B

I don't think the metaphor of a train will really work. This is because the train metaphor and the Donnie Darko tubes imply a temporal succession and primordial temporality is not successive. — bloodninja

I agree. I chose a bad metaphor. What I was thinking about is the tension between the "future" and "pastness" within a "present" structure. But now Kojeve comes to mind. The "how" is mostly inherited from the genuine past, so maybe "pastness" is the content of the how. I picked up Carol White's book recently and (as you may remember in the paper), she wrote of marginal practices or understandings of being brought to centrality. So perhaps the "unity" involves not a tension or opposite but something more like form versus content (though I'm not happy with that either.) In any case, Blattner's "un-attainability thesis" seems quite important if true.

The ahead-of-itself is grounded in the future. Already-being-in
... announces in itself beenness — B

Is pastness or beenness just the announcement of being-in? Is this just a stressing of always alreayd being in the middle of things? I seem to recall Heidegger insisting that the how is never the how-in-itself. Is it like a rose in steel dust? Is it the way that being-in is shaped by ahead-of-itself?

I was thinking about the 'how' issue you raised above. I would disagree that the 'how' is anything ideal, it is rather existential. Perhaps one way to think about it is that normal successive time is characterised as a 'what', whereas non-successive primordial temporality is characterised by the 'how'. Or rather, perhaps non-successive primordial temporality and the 'how' are the same thing. Perhaps in that early lecture he was still grasping for his original conception of primordial temporality, and the 'how' was a temporary placeholder for it? In the Concept of Time he says:

"...the fundamental character of this entity is its 'how'." (pg. 13) Or in other words, Dasein is primordial temporality, in B&T language. — bloodninja

That's a good point. Perhaps the "how" is the whole of non-successive primordial temporality. I do find it hard to ignore something like the "ideal" having a deep place in Dasein. What I have in mind is the role that one is identified with, the "for-the-sake-of." Why, for instance, are we interpreting Heidegger? How does that fit into our big plan for ourselves or into our individual understandings of being?

Existence is that aspect of Dasein’s being that it always is what it understands itself to be. — B

It "just is" good. We can find reasons if asked, but even there we already find it good to be able to find reasons. In my view, this "how" of being able to find reasons would be necessarily self-subverting. It gives birth to philosophy.

In other words, Dasein’s possibilities are not the sorts of items that can be actualized in the present. I never can have become a musician, even though I am now pressing ahead into being one. I call this claim the Unattainability Thesis (Blattner 1999). What does it mean to say that I cannot have become a musician? The point is not that there are conditions on being a musician that I cannot satisfy (say, I have no rhythm). The point is rather that understanding myself as a musician is not attempting to bring about some possible, future state of myself. The possibility of being a musician is not an end-state at which I aim; it is not something that I “sometime will be” (Heidegger 1979: 325). Being a musician is always futural with respect to what I am doing now.
....
This world-time now-structure is, however, embedded in originary temporality as merely
one of the latter’s ecstases.

We wield equipment in order to tackle tasks only because we understand ourselves the way we do: I apply contact cement to my disintegrating formica countertop, because I understand myself as a homeowner. In Heidegger-speak, the in-which of involvement “goes back to” (zurückgehen) the for-the-sake-of-which of self-understanding. — Blattner

This for-the-sake-of-which is the "fundamental pose" or self-interpretation. So the for-sake-of-which explains the in-order-to which explains nature time and world time?

Conceiving the future as a what in the container of non-primordial time obscures this how? Is the self-obscuring of the how? The revelation of the how is only a possibility for Dasein. Heidegger himself is one understanding that existence can have of itself?

If Blattner is right, then originary temporality is not time-like. It only "earns" the time-like metaphor-system from its ability to explain "degenerative" or less primordial time (time proper in the sense of ordinary understanding.) Does this make sense to you?

Why do humans bother to structure time as they do? Our use of time as a sequence of nows is part of a how that is more primordial than these nows. Not it from bit, but now from how?

There's a big gap from God being limited to the human form, and God making no sense to us. It's not a black and white issue. — Agustino

What does it mean for God to make sense to us, though? He has to be (in that sense) "within" our human reason exactly to the degree that we understand him. What do humans value? Human virtue. What can we mean by saying that God is good if not that God has a virtuous essentially human character? He is disembodied virtue. He has more love, power, and knowledge than other humans, but this love, this power, this knowledge....are they not basic human desires? We want to love and be loved. We want to understand. And we want the power to shape reality into paradise and to protect ourselves from others.

I hope I'm not ranting; but, school has become a soul-crushing experience in my opinion. I have no idea how one can change that in any way. I'm wary of returning back to school having a cat-like mind along with an above normal intellect. — Posty McPostface

To be fair to school, I must emphasize that I learned my specialized subject (math) in a way that I wouldn't have otherwise. First and foremost it was learning a skill. Calculus is something I can do. (That's an entry level skill for a math major.) Similarly programming and statistics classes were just pure value. No real filler to speak of. So my only complaint about these content-rich skill-based classes is the time-stretch.

So the regurgitation metaphor has its limits. But I do think it applies (or did apply) to lots of my humanities classes. So I'd advise the ambivalent consumer of school to get better value and learn skills (major in something skill-like) from those who can also certify those skills. Then do philosophy-literature in one's free time, completely free to think and write what one thinks and feels.

Paradoxically, it was Jesus and Socrates who believed in absolute truth, and those who killed them who didn't. — Agustino

Really? I thought that Socrates knew that he didn't know? He didn't even write down the absolute truth. What a bum! We could have used that. As far as Jesus goes, I find Nietzsche's interpretation of "I am the truth" more convincing and profound than most.

This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory. — N

I don't think you see where I'm coming from. I'm trying to point out an "invisible" assumption on your part (and on the part of many others) that religion is a form of knowledge. I'm suggesting that looking at religion as a set of propositions (or even as a set of practices) is not the only way to look at religion and perhaps not even the best way.

In terms of the "image of virtue" this gives priority to man-the-knower. The "virtuous" man is from this investment's perspective) an earnest and accurate "meta-physicist." So religion is reduced to a matter of being correct, or asserting propositions that correspond to some non-propositional reality. But that makes religion into a "science" of the divine. It thereby reduces the divine to an object for a subject. "Righteousness" is conflated with rightness. It's religion from the perspective of a "know-it-all" personality. This is "theology as theorem." This is not the incarnate, living God but only the book as God.

I'm not at all suggesting that "spirituality" should be non-conceptual. Nor am I really trying to impose some universal should. Just as I question theology-as-theorem, I also question the one-size-fits-all paradigm. To suggest that religion need not be universal truth is to suggest both that it need not be truth (knowledge) and that it need not be universal (a transpersonal and finally political imposition of disavowed individual will ).

You speak of corruption. I will certainly agree that school has not been ideal from my perspective (I'm in grad school now). I can imagine a better way, or at least a better-for-me way. But that kind of imagination has haunted my entire life. For instance, the way that time is structured in formal education disturbs me. Instead of being given a series of tasks to complete, one has a long sequence of homework deadlines and test days. Why not a battery of tests that can be taken as the individual feels ready? Why not a fixed set of papers to be written ? Then passing those tests, completing those papers satisfactorily could result in the degree. Maybe one hardly needs lectures, prefers to learn from books. Maybe one would like to focus on English first, pass all of those tests, and then move on to the next subject. Instead one is forced to distribute one's self over lots of subjects at once, show up at certain times, deal with idiosyncratic and constantly changing standards. One learns to show up on no sleep, deal with this eccentricity and that eccentricity. One "reads" the professor, adapts to an initially ambiguous "manager" who will formally judge one's performance. One carefully constructs a semester's schedule for hard and easy classes. Maybe half or even more of one's energy is spent not on the message (the stuff to be learned) but the medium (figuring out the criterion, and the "inauthentic" or counter-intuitive lifestyle that makes satisfying this criterion possible).

Returning to the "hardiness" points, that "waste" of energy is not completely a waste. It filters out those who "want it less." If this is an accidental byproduct, it still serves as a sorting mechanism. Arguably the "market" needs this psychological hardiness. Does the world suck? Is the world corrupt? Give me superpowers and I'll change the shape of it. But otherwise it's the world you and I have to adapt to. The sufficiently heroic soul may be able to succeed without this frustrating compromise, but that only means meeting the market directly, right? Selling oneself without credentials. It can and has been done, and it's impressive. But not every career choice is possible without credentials. One can also just accept a less glamorous job and practice one's passion in one's free time. I did that before I decided to return to school. But getting older changed the appeal of that. It's annoying to be well-read and interested in intellectual things and work a relatively unskilled job. I personally think it's worth the hassle to earn those credentials.


But I haven't got that good job yet (still in school). So maybe I'm wrong? Job or not, I have in my own view become far more worldly and mature by wrestling with the "medium." It's painful but illuminating to see just how many smart, disciplined people are out there. I think I see the world far more accurately now. I've also had the experience of living an entirely intellectual life for more than 5 years now. My "job" is learning and (just as importantly) proving that I have learned. Enduring being up against other people's standards like that is itself quite an experience. It takes nerve and it proves nerve. Lucky for me, I've done well. So the scooby snacks I've been tossed in the form of grades have only encouraged or substantiated my otherwise untested faith that I could hack it like the others. If I meet others who did well as undergrads, I therefore know quite a bit about them. I know what they've successfully wrestled with. I can assume important social skills and a general reliability.

Yes, in the sense that the nature of Justice does not depend on what X or Y think about it (only sophists would say otherwise). That's exactly what Plato, Jesus, Socrates, etc. argued for and proved. — Agustino

That's just a bare assurance. As far as the famous names are concerned, clearly your own interpretation is involved. Indeed, if such a thing has been proved, then why do we still not have consensus? And was Jesus one to argue like a philosopher, even as possibly only a character in the gospels?

What I do find plausible is a more or less "hardwired" fuzzy foundation of what is expressed in fact in a multitude of ways. There is rough agreement about the basics, but massive disagreement on the level of detail.

So if man does the measuring, how does it follow that man would be the measure of all things? It's entirely unrelated. I can do the measurement with reference to an external standard - in that case, I wouldn't be the measure of all things, even though I am the measurer. — Agustino

What is the external standard of virtue? Your opinion? The opinion of thinkers that you prefer as opposed to the opinion of thinkers that you do not prefer? IMV you are ignoring the palpable fact of disagreement. You can assert and believe that your notion of virtue is "true" or "accurate" or transpersonal, but you'd just be joining a crowd of others who assert the same about their own, differing notions of virtue. I'm more interested understanding this variety itself.

Even if everyone considers X to be a vice, for example, they could be wrong. This fact alone shows us that what people think doesn't determine what is a virtue or a vice, for if it did, then it would be inconceivable that they are wrong. — Agustino

Could be wrong from whose perspective? This just seems to reframe the disagreement about what virtue is as some kind of "proof" of "objective" virtue. "Because we disagree and consider others wrong, someone must be right." I'd suggest that only our faith in a particular image allows us to understand others as wrong.

So this image of the ideal human is just given? Or how is it established? — Agustino

I suggest that the basic structure is given. We are born with a "virtue-shaped hole" that is "filled" or given content (at first) by our parents and community. If this notion of virtue includes critical thinking and individualism, however, it is self-subverting. A philosopher or artist can re-conceive virtue. He or she may "seduce" or persuade others to adopt this modified image of virtue. Is it not a fact that we've all experienced that our notion of virtue evolves as we live our lives? On a larger scale entire cultures can modify a dominant image of virtue or understanding of being. Humanism can replace the sense of a duty to some alien God. More specifically the scientist can replace the theologian as the one who really knows what's going on.

For me this "image of virtue" is both persons and cultures is the fundamental issue. I posit that it functions not only conceptually but also in terms of images and feeling-tones. Not everyone is eloquent enough to be explicit about their understanding of virtue. Examine their heroes. Are they thinkers, athletes, musicians, actors, activists, saints, prophets, mothers, soldiers, ordinary hard-working guys, the proletariat, etc.? These embodied images guide individuals and cultures, as I see it. Who do I aspire to be? In creative types the anxiety of influence clearly plays a role, because creative heroes only exist as distinct personalities. (Note that the greatest scientists are creative. They bring new paradigms. )

I agree. From my point of view, you just described what I'd call an image of the virtue. Can one "rationally" demonstrate that such an image is "true"? Or does such an image structure and make possible discourse in the first place? More concretely: I love Popper. Is his theory of science as self-consciously falsifiable itself falsifiable? I don't think so. It is the "irrational" foundation of the rational. The criterion cannot justify itself. The greatest "crime" is the foundation of the law itself, metaphorically speaking. But this use of "crime" as a metaphor is not meant to suggest that it is bad to lay foundations. We have no choice. I'm just trying to point at deep structures that are easily taken for granted. They are the water we swim in, mostly invisible.

I did look into Voeglin, though not that paper. I like him. It's possible that you've mistaken me for a Kojevian of some stripe, but I'm far more apolitical than utopian. I'm just willing to learn from those who were and are intensely political. My notion of the "transcendence" is edgy to the degree that it is edgy precisely in its distance from the respectability of civic virtue. It is open to being an "idiot" or "private person." It is open in the sense of not assuming that "idiocy" is "bad."

I'm not sure why the formatting of the quotes below is off. I tried to fix it. Couldn't. But at least you have some samples of the paper I linked to.

In other words, the possibility of being a musician is futural, not because it is merely
possible, rather than actual. Instead, it is a possibility that can never be actual, a future that can
never be present...Temporalizing does not mean a “succession” [“Nacheinander”] of the ecstases. The future is notlater than beenness, and this is not earlier than the present [Gegenwart]. (Heidegger 1979: 350)In other words, Dasein’s possibilities are not the sorts of items that can be actualized in thepresent. I never can have become a musician, even though I am now pressing ahead into being one. I call this claim the Unattainability Thesis (Blattner 1999). What does it mean to say that I cannot have become a musician? The point is not that
there are conditions on being a musician that I cannot satisfy (say, I have no rhythm). The point
is rather that understanding myself as a musician is not attempting to bring about some possible, future state of myself. The possibility of being a musician is not an end-state at which I aim; it is not something that I “sometime will be” (Heidegger 1979: 325). Being a musician is alwaysfutural with respect to what I am doing now. Of course, one can have attained the social statusof being a musician: the prerogatives, obligations, and expectations that devolve upon a personin virtue of occupying a certain station, role, career, or occupation in life. A social status,
however, is not the same as an existential possibility, what Heidegger calls an ability-to-be
(Seinkönnen). An existential possibility is a manner of self-understanding with which one is
identified in virtue of pressing ahead into it.
— Blattner

This touches on one of my favorite themes (and in fact on Stirner). To be futural is to "incarnate" a role. To be futural is the "how." My future does not approach me "from" the future, sliding at me as I stand in the present. It is the ideal how, the "hero myth," or "the fundamental pose." It is the "statue" of my ideal self that I want to "maintain." I never achieve it. It is a pose that must be continually reaffirmed. Blattner's reading reminds me of Sartre. In order to maintain this pose (true artist, good father, profound philosopher) I have to act and react in the present in a certain way. If Blattner is right, then "future" is a somewhat deceptive or confusing term. But if you read the whole paper, you'll see IMV why is is finally justified. What gives continuity to our lives? As Rorty says, we want to be able to describe our past as a story of progress or ascension. "Personal" time is primordial. It involves the "basic pose" or "ownmost" understanding of existence. Then there's "world time" and "nature time," both of which are derivative in a certain sense from personal time. Or perhaps personal time and world time are equiprimordial, and this is the tension between authentic and inauthentic modes. We "sink" into world-time away from our ownmost pose or mission, but we buoyantly return to personal time.

Just as the “ahead” in “being-ahead-of-itself” describes a future that can never come to be
present, so Heidegger argues that the “already” in “being-already in a world” picks out a past
that never was present. Dasein’s originary past is, recall, its attunements, the way things already
matter to it. I am always already “thrown” into the world and into my life, because I am always
attuned to the way it matters to me. These attunements are the “drag” that situates and
concretizes the “thrust” of my projection. These attunements, however, are not past events.
They do not belong to the sequential past, as the various episodes of my life-history do. In
Heidegger’s language, they are not “bygone” (vergangen). They belong, rather, to the existential
or originary past, to my “beenness” (Gewesenheit). My attunements were not at one time
present, after which they slipped into the past. Rather, at every moment that an attunement
characterizes me, even at its first moment, I am already thrown into it; it is already past. — Blattner

I like "drag" in the above description. One might think also of inertia or momentum. If existence is what it understands itself to be and it understands itself to be an ideal how or "future," then the other part of this structure is the "rest of the train." The future or the how is the "head" of the snake, the cutting edge. Remember the tubes in Donnie Darko?

come to be present and a past that never was present.
But Why Call It “Time?”
At this point one might certainly suspect that something has gone wrong. One might
argue that if Dasein’s possibilities are the sorts of things that cannot come to be present, then
they are not futural either, and if not futural, then not distinctively temporal. In other words, one
might urge that if the argument above holds, the sense of “ahead” in “being-ahead-of-itself” is
only metaphorically temporal. Heidegger acknowledges the force of this consideration, when he
concedes that his interpretation of Dasein “does violence” to the everyday understanding of
human existence (Heidegger 1979: 311). Still, he believes that his interpretation is required by
the phenomena.

Heidegger answers that originary temporality explains time, and for that reason it
deserves the title originary time. So, when we have shown that the “time” that is accessible to Dasein’s intelligibility is not originary and, what is more, that it arises out of authentic temporality, then we are justified, in accordance with the proposition, a potiori fit denominatio, in labeling temporality, which has just been exhibited, originary time. (Heidegger 1979: 329)
Time as we encounter it in our everyday experience is not originary. How do we encounter time
in our everyday experience? Heidegger distinguishes, in fact, two sorts of everyday time, worldtime and time as ordinarily conceived. Time as we ordinarily conceive it (der vulgäre
Zeitbegriff) is time as the pure container of events. Heidegger may well build the term
“conceive” into its name, because he wants to emphasize that when we disengage from our
ordinary experience and talk about and contemplate time as such, we typically interpret time as
such a pure container, as the continuous medium of natural change. — Blattner

If Blattner is right, that explains why B&T is so confusing.

This goes back to the original issue of what living one's death makes possible. I think it makes the fundamental pose or originary time visible. From a Stirnerian/ironist perspective, I'd say that it is too painful or foreclosed to see this structure from the outside as long as one is invested in a particular myth. Because seeing the structure unveils the contingency of that pose. In other words, to understand the "the sacred" in most general terms is to (at the same time, as the same "action" or insight) demystify every particular pose. One "dies" into ironism. But one can still come back into the world and invest in it without completely losing that terrible distance glimpsed via angst. One foot in the grave, the other at the very center of life.

The prospect of resigning one’s self-understanding points toward an ominous threat that
Heidegger believes looms constantly before Dasein, what he calls “death,” but which is not
exactly what we normally call “death.” In II.1 Heidegger defines death as the “possibility of the
impossibility of existence” and characterizes it as a “way to be Dasein.” Heideggerian death is a
way to be Dasein and, therefore, not non-existence per se. The latter, the end or ending of a
human life, Heidegger calls “demise” (Ableben), in contrast with death (Tod). For clarity’s sake,
I will call Heideggerian death “existential death.” Existential death is the condition in which
Dasein is not able to be or exist, in the sense that it cannot understand itself, press ahead into any possibilities of being. Existential death is a peculiar sort of living nullity, death in the midst of
life, nothingness. What would it be like to suffer existential death? To be unable to understand
oneself is not for one’s life to cease to matter altogether. As Heidegger says early on in Being
and Time, Dasein’s being is necessarily at issue for it. The issue, Who am I?, How shall I lead
my life?, matters to me, but when existentially dead no possible answer matters. All answers to
these questions are equally uninteresting. This is what Heidegger calls anxiety, although on its
face it sounds more like what we today call depression: the total insignificance of the world,
including the entire matrix of possible answers to the question, Who am I? Anxiety and
existential death are two sides of the same coin: global indifference that undercuts any impetus
to lead one sort of life or another.To tie all this together, Heidegger accords the phenomenon of existential death ontological importance, because it signals something about the very nature of humanpossibilities. If existential death looms constantly as a threat to who I am, then who I am, my possibilities, can never characterize me in any settled way. If they did, then I could never find
myself unable to be them. Hence, my originary future is not the sort of thing that can be present,
not a property that can positively characterize me in the way in which a determinate height or
hair color, or even a determinate social status, can characterize me. It is a future that is not later
than, that does not succeed, the present. — Blattner

.

By 'the possible no-longer-there' I take him to mean no longer 'in' the world. As he says in B&T being-in is largely determined by our moods/disposedness/attunements (or 'state-of-mind' in the M&R translation). The attunement in which one is no longer there in the world, and where the world becomes backgrounded, is angst. Is the past in the sense that he is getting at simply angst? — bloodninja

I was trying to figure out "pastness" also. I think your theory is plausible. Something I recently found illuminating is relevant here, I think. Attunement seems to be on the right track. Blattner seems to think of it in terms of what we are already interested in.
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/topics/docs/temporality.pdf

On the "Being" versus "being" issue, I think I can clarify a little. I'm not against mysticism, but I like my mysticism to be mysticism and my "labor of the concept" to be the "labor of the concept." By capitalizing the word being in English, a translator IMV encourages a mystical interpretation of this word.

The issue is only further complicated by Wittgenstein's notion that it is not how but that the world is that is "the mystical." I agree. The "brute fact" that there is a there there is mystical, lyrical, eerie. So the word "being" does connect to a "rational" mysticism, especially if one believes as I currently do that we are thrown into (at least epistemic) brute fact as we are thrown into our human cognition itself. Intelligibility itself remains mysterious. But as I currently understand Heidegger, he's trying to do conceptual work. He wants to make intelligibility itself as intelligible as possible. The "originary temporality of Dasein" is a clarification or simplification of this issue, a reduction to simplest terms. I'm still digesting B&T, so that's where I'm at so far. This seems pretty good: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/topics/docs/temporality.pdf

I also like Dreyfus. Anyway, I think of an understanding of being as a basic framework for understanding entities or beings in general. These basic frameworks tend to be invisible. Phenomenology can unveil these frameworks to some degree. But we already always have some framework, and this is what makes the attempt to unveil this framework possible. I like dragging McLuhan into this. Beings are the message. The dominant understanding of being is the medium. The medium is more effective and more invisible the more we focus on the message. If philosophy is "really" or most properly ontology, then it aims to unveil the most general medium. An understanding of being is contingent, but it tends to function invisibly as necessary. So philosophy can be conceived as the revelation of the contingency of (apparent) necessity. But maybe this is "anti-philosophy," since a "theological" philosophy arguably operates in the reverse direction. "Time and chance" are reinterpreted as providence. This is the "best of all possible worlds," etc.

*I'm blending my other concerns with an in-progress digesting of B&T. So all of this is humbly offered. Maybe it lays the ground for further conversation.

The world loses the chance to determine being-in in terms of what it deals with in its everyday concerns. By itself the world can no longer endow Dasein with being. What provides Dasein with a secure footing as distance and difference from others --who are there in the with-world and as the public realm --dissappears when the world fades into the background. The world recedes, as it were, from the contexts in which it is encountered in terms of its significance and becomes merely present-at-hand. — Heidegger

This suggests to my that Dasein found its being in the world. It was alienated from its being, but this alienation is seductive in that it offers a secure footing as "distance and difference" from others. To be against the abyss is have all of this distancing and differing torn away. We are stark naked in the storm, and so, really, are all those expert voices. They can say what they want to the dying man. They'll be around to change their minds in the morning, possibility intact.

Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. — King Lear

To bring in a little Stirner here (and I am only speculating or offering a possible interpretation) , the distancing and differencing (from others) is derived from one's projected being in the world of the they, the great stage of fools from beside the abyss. This projected is a crystallization of ego in terms of the day, which is a 'world-historical' ego. Dasein in everydayness is a respectable object with certain duties and privileges, anything but uncanny. Living the death of this world-historical or projected ego opens up the absolute "I" which is never an it and cannot be further specified. That's because it is freedom with a past, or a vivid set of determinate and specific possiblities "over" a determinate and specific null basis or past.

This interpretation of the conscience passes itself off as recognizing the call in the sense of a voice which is 'universally' binding, and which speaks in a way that is 'not just subjective.' Furthermore, the universal conscience becomes exalted to a 'world-conscience,' which still has its phenomenal character of an 'it' and 'nobody', yet which speaks --there in the individual 'subject'- as this indefinite something.

But this public conscience --what else is it but the voice of the "they"? — Heidegger

Also:

What is it that so radically deprives Dasein of any possibility of misunderstanding itself by any sort of alibi and failing to recognize itself if not the forsakenness with which it has been abandoned? — Heidegger

In my translation (M&R), there is only one bold-typed phrase. Is this true in the German? I don't know. But that phrase is freedom towards death.

Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death --a freedom with has been released from the Illusions of the 'they', and which is factical, certain of itself, an anxious. — Heidegger

Is this not "dark," subversive?

Compare and contrast?

The unique should only be the last, dying expression (attribute) of you and me, the expression that turns into a view: an expression that is no longer such, that falls silent, that is mute.

The ideal “Man” is realized when the Christian apprehension turns about and becomes the proposition, “I, this unique one, am man.” The conceptual question, “what is man?” — has then changed into the personal question, “who is man?” With “what” the concept was sought for, in order to realize it; with “who” it is no longer any question at all, but the answer is personally on hand at once in the asker: the question answers itself. — Stirner

We wish to repeat temporally the question of what time is. Time is the 'how'. If we inquire into what time is, then one may not cling prematurely to an answer (time is such and such), for this always means a 'what'.

Let us disregard the answer and repeat the question. What happened to the question? It has transformed itself. What is time? became the question: Who is the time? More closely: are we ourselves time? Or closer still: am I my time? In this way I come closest to it, and if I understand the question, it is then taken completely seriously. Such questioning is thus the most appropriate manner of access to and of dealing with time as in each case mine. Then Dasein would be: being questionable. — Heidegger

Ah. Very nice explanation.

Intelligence: is reality mind or matter or X or Y or what?

Wisdom: why am I asking this? and is this question likely to lead to that goal? is it the only path?

I thought you'd give wisdom the better role. Seems like intelligence is just faster wisdom in that scenario?

In my experience, wisdom means giving something up - release, surrender. — T Clark

I relate. For me it's connected to letting go of some of what one felt one needed to control, needed to be true, needed to be.

If rationality is weighing evidence and the definition of rationality involves no weighing of evidence, then rationality is itself defined irrationally, arbitrarily. Of course I know that we all inherit a fuzzy notion of the rational, so I'm really stressing this fuzziness. Pragmatism is one attempt to control this fuzziness, but there are lots of different attempts.

I think you and I have had this conversation before. As envisioned by Lao Tzu et. al., It is we humans who bring the universe into being out of non-being. In my view, that makes the universe half human. — T Clark

I agree. Even the "non-human" is a human thought that exists for human purposes.