I've posted quite a bit, but this is fascinating...

In "Heidegger and Hegel: Exploring the Hidden Hegelianism of Being and Time" Schwartz Wentzer picks up similar themes in arguing that Heidegger's hermeneutics of facticity is motivated by a revision of Hegelianism. He suggests that there is a parallel between the development of spirit in Hegel and Heidegger's view that philosophy arises in factical life as an understanding or interpretation of that factical life. In both cases, the insight is drawn from the claim that self-consciousness occurs in and through the development of history. Self-understanding not only occurs in history but takes a historical form. Thus, interpretation is subject to historical determination, and Dasein's self-understanding is always historically articulated. Schwartz Wentzer argues that Heidegger modifies Hegel by exchanging the Hegelian logic of a teleological dialectics for the method of hermeneutic destruction and the principle of subjectivity for the concept of facticity (144). — link

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/hermeneutical-heidegger/

Was Heidegger a belated left Hegelian?

Last point is how this passage from Nietzsche resonates with Heidegger:

This faith does not formulate itself--it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae....
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.

I think that some people, the so-called holistic thinkers among them, have a difficult time accepting that what happens, what we observe, is not generated by some underlying, hidden, mechanism. — Magnus Anderson

I agree. Though I understand the practical and emotional reasons for seeking this mechanism. What is conceptual thinking is inherently 'mechanistic' ? It seems that we automatically model the world in the sense that we notice violations of our otherwise unconscious expectations. These expectations can become professional/scientific and hardened into 'laws.'

if they think the universe unfolds according to some sort of hidden mechanism, as every metaphysician and ontologist does, they are still ontological reductionists. — Magnus Anderson

In my view, they would be ontological reductionists only by denying the reality of what wasn't the mechanism itself. Or if they closed their minds to other structures in experience. I suspect that we are all reductionists whether we like or not, but I like philosophy that strives against our tendency to clamp down on a particular mechanism.

Oh. Ok. But I agree with andrew that it's hard to imagine such a demonstration being the actual cause of belief. Not long ago I read After Finitude. It's creative and exciting, but Q.M. himself admits that his reasoning is just a hair away from sophistry. He also believes that a God could begin to exist. Anything is possible except that something should be impossible. A God may spring into being and resurrect the dead. This is the only way that a God could justify our world, in his view. But it's all presented very logically, not convincingly but carefully, deductively. I bring it up because I find it so strange, in the same way that I find it strange that such proofs are taken seriously as proofs. There's an 'emotional' sense that seems to missing attended by an unrealistic picture of why we believe what we believe.

*I think I've put my finger on it. Reaching for a proof suggests a lack of visceral experience of the divine on the one hand or a banalization of this experience on the other. If God is intensely there, then one might expect a person to drop the theoretical pretense and have the courage describe this experience poetically, musically, etc. Or maybe remain silent. In any case, such proofs strike me a desiccated, artificial, vaguely false.

So for example here, I would counter that experience can't simply exist. It requires someone that it exists for. — apokrisis

What comes to my mind is our ability to get absorbed in a task. We become the task. We forget that we are 'subjects.' This is admittedly complicated. In some sense consciousness is being itself, so that the 'pure subject' is name for being. But we can just as easily talk about a pure object that includes the empirical ego in its nexus.

On the other hand, the 'freeze frame' understanding of this loses the dynamism of being there. It's an old theme, the problem of the concept system trying to grasp continuity.

So as an epistemic basic, I agree with the idealists that we can't transcend the conditions of experience. We don't get to peek at the Kantian thing-in-itself in any direct perceptual fashion. — apokrisis

Right. In a worldly epistemic mode I'm a quasi-Kantian, too. But I would stress that the interpretative scheme is far more fluid. Maybe there is a 'hard' core that isn't subject to historical evolution (biologically determined), but for the most part the 'lens' through which we see the 'thing-in-itself' is liquid, which is to say linguistic. It's not just linguistic, though, but perhaps even involves the way we get around in the world. We navigate the concrete jungle. We stand a certain distance from others. To live in a culture largely requires a kind of know-how that may be the dark foundation of our consciously theoretical mode.

When I see the red of the post box or smell the perfume of a rose, these are just habitual signs that anchor my interpretations of the world. They form my "umwelt". — apokrisis

I like this, but I think lots of our seeing is peripheral. I'd also argue that perhaps the situation is more holistically understood in our non-theoretical mode. We have learned to isolate objects, to rip them out of context. By imaging these rip out objects in the same 'box' of experience, we don't recover the original unity. The 'deep' unwelt would (in my view) involve this original unity and the dynamic sense of time. The pre-theoretical object is perhaps act rather than object. 'The world worlds.'

The theory predicts that I will discover my instruments will show certain numbers if I take a look.

All the bogus stuff about "seeing the thing-in-itself" is completely abandoned. There is no pretence, like there still is with talking about seeing red or tasting sweetness. Science deals directly in full-on signage. It says this is how nature works. And that's true because these are the numbers you will read when you make a measurement. — apokrisis

I like this conception of 'full-on signage,' but I don't see how this negates sensation. After all, we have to see the sign, read the number. And we only care about the number because we interpret in terms of the expected presence of something that is not just a sign. The practice of science utterly depends on the basic knowhow of living in a group. Our sloppy ordinary language is still the receding background in what the sharp abstractions can function and be learned in the first place. This doesn't degrade science but only situates it in human reality as a whole.

Yes, it is highly abstract. And folk still want to have their intuitive mental pictures. They want to imagine atoms bouncing about or forces pulling or whatever. They want a biological level of feeling - or sign.

But still, science reduces reality to a pattern of numerical signs. And we know that really works. Functionally, it has been immensely productive.

Again the protest will come, but what about experience, what about feeling, what about actually awareness of the world as it really is? However there is good reason to privilege the mathematical representation of existence. — apokrisis

There are strong practical reasons to privilege the mathematical representation of existence in the appropriate sphere. But I personally don't see why philosophy should present its rump to any fixed understanding of existence. We aren't just practical. We are the 'animals' who can and do kill ourselves, and in that sense we aren't just animals. Humans are uncanny. We think of our own deaths which are likely decades away. In cold blood we can calculate the sacrifice of our own lives and of murder. Don't get me wrong. I like philosophy of science. But whether we call it philosophy or not, I think it's deeply and maybe essentially human to ask radical questions, dream up daring understandings of the human situation, etc.

Hence this OP. There must be a reason why physics has turned information theoretic. Counting is actually physically meaningful. We might as well admit that reality is a pattern of bits, a set of numbers, as far as we can tell. That is certainly a more accurate ontology than thinking of it in terms of a realm of "medium-sized dry goods", as is the usual "realist" case. — apokrisis

I have to disagree. The medium sized dry goods as we make and buy and use them have a certain priority to patterns of bits. But really I'd say that it's all real. Reality is medium sized dry goods and patterns of bits. And it's debates about whether reality is dry goods or bits. No doubt certain purposes suggest an exclusion of this or that aspect of experience.

The historical process was not so much about atomism, although that plays a role. The key development was the ascension of nominalism, which means that ‘types’ or ‘Forms’ are no longer considered real; they’re simply names we give to objects that have something in common. — Wayfarer

Ah, I think you misunderstand me. I don't mean atomism. I mean the tendency to understand the truly existent as that which is fully present as a clear and distinct intelligible unity --something like a form.

In my view, physics offers its own version of this. But these forms that are understood to govern the flux of experience are experienced as inhuman necessity (as amoral). So the idea is that we humans are alone in the machine of nature. So for me it's really a change which forms we regard.

In the older view, because things have a final cause - a ‘telos’ - then the world is naturally intelligible, it is suffused with purpose. — Wayfarer

This is perhaps the central issue. Is there purpose beyond the individual and/or his culture? Are humans responsible to or informed by a purpose beyond their own concerns?

It's not my central issue, but to seems to set the feel of a culture. I think we'd agree that the intellectual mainstream understands us to be on our own. Personally, I don't know --but I live as if we are alone down here. Of course I strive for virtue and value the Christian heritage especially.

...due to the ‘flattening’ of ontology since the victory of nominalism at the end of medieval times... — Wayfarer

It occurred to me to add the pointification or atomization of the object in a hypostatization of or within ontology. We tend to call real what stands still for us to stare at. So the dynamic becoming that we ourselves are is unreal not only to the physicist but also to a certain kind of abstract theologian.

Everything mortal and passing is unreal from such a perspective, unworthy of contemplation even, since it can't be the foundation of the perfect knowledge which is itself understood as a static object. Yet our most intimate experience is unique, passing, mortal. If we aren't actually mortal, few of us live with certainty of this immortality. And in any case the moments themselves are mortal and not-to-be-repeated.

There's nothing 'wrong' with the depersonalized theoretical mode, but on could argue that shifting into this mode forecloses access to this or that aspect of the total human experience. (We perhaps assume that what is 'there' for us is independent of our mood/mode/motive.)

But it's still God. — darthbarracuda

Is it, though? What 'nice' attributes of God are included in the package? Do we get a pleasant afterlife and cosmic justice? Do we get a loving Father or Mother who feels our pain and sees our struggle from within our very souls?

'God' gets content (seems to me) from the predicates we attach. I can't see into your motives, but I imagine that most 'logical' proofs of God are there to support belief in a far more anthropomorphic and 'irrational' God. Unless all the desirable anthropomorphic attributes are also somehow proved, though, it seems that only a vague philosopher's god-object is established (at best.)

That's what I'm saying. — apokrisis

Yes, I thought so. But I'm between your position and Janus's. I think Janus was just trying to point at the that-it-exists of experience. It's all too natural to phrase this in terms of the subject, overlooking the entanglement of the 'subject' and the 'object' in the lived non-instantaneous moment. But I agree with Janus's general point about what is excluded by the scientific method. We have a tendency to privilege the publicly quantifiable as the 'really' real.

What is philosophy for? Is it a higher science 'devoid' of value? A value-neutral tool? Or is it an expression of the spiritual? I don't expect one-answer-for-all here. I'm just suggesting that half-conscious answers to these most general questions shape everything from the get-go.

Red just "is" because we haven't got something we can compare it to as what might be "other", given the same observable "psychological machinery". — apokrisis

I wonder if you are understanding 'just is' as I intend it. I don't mean that it's mysterious (though maybe it is). I just mean the bare fact of color. We live in a world of color. Any talk about this color is not the color itself as unthematized color. One might say that redness is not a 'thing' apart from concept, but what this concept grasps is there for those (literally) with eyes to see.

So yes. Ultimately our models of cognition run out of counterfactuals to sustain the explanatory assault on "experience" — apokrisis

What also interests me is description that reveals. Are we sometimes so eager to explain what we already have grasp that we stop feeling around for what we haven't noticed? It's not just about explaining. It's also about paying attention in a new way, seeing around inherited preconceptions. We might even think of un-explaining what has been badly explained.

Hope you not talking about me. I give very good reasons for deflating the inflated notions of "consciousness" and "meaning" that folk routinely trot out. :) — apokrisis

I wasn't talking about you. I had that Nagel quote in mind. The total denial of what-it-is-like strikes me as absurd. I remember reading BF Skinner as a teen. I see the attraction of ignoring consciousness (as a theme of the investigation) methodologically in this or that context, but that's a local context.

I also like questioning the notions of consciousness and meaning. We use these 'pieces' in discussions all too often without really thinking about what we could mean by them. We get stuck on the surface that way.

I like the Nagel quote quite a bit. I agree that there is a flattening, a pretty ghastly flattening. There is in my view a spiritual element here. Why should a doctrine of being be neutral? Can a doctrine of being be neutral? Is philosophy just cold impersonal super-science? Or is it a deep expression of the spiritual? For me it's the latter. And those who choose the former are still perhaps expressing their spirituality nevertheless in such a choice. We reveal what we revere in our choices.

But I also plead guilty to equivocating 'meaning' and 'information', which, even though there's an overlap, have many different connotations. — Wayfarer

I think that's the heart of this issue. Isn't what you really have in mind the idea of the non-physical? the idea of the idea? Does the OP ask (essentially) whether anything non-physical exists?

Yes indeed, Kant is involved here. Of course I am playfully serious. It's what we leave unquestioned and take for granted that leaves us trapped. That's the danger in calculative-mechanical reasoning. It treats the material and the method as given. It doesn't ask after the calculative-mechanical approach itself and how such an approach might determine what can show up as 'material.'

With respect to the OP, I suggest that information in the sense of meaning is prior to the physical/non-physical distinction.

You make some nice points here form an unusual perspective, and I find nothing to disagree with in what you say. — Janus

Thanks!

I say that this metaphor and allusion (the arts) is an alternative discourse to the so-called scientific understanding, and of at least equal importance. In fact I would say it is primary and that scientific understanding is secondary and derivative. — Janus

Absolutely. Science (for all its glory) is parasitic upon a basic ability to be in the ordinary world among others as a 'who.' Much of what we 'know' is gut-level or background or un-thematized. We don't see it. We are it. The how of our taking the world is obscured by the what that is taken. The interpretative framework functions like our liver or pancreas. We don't even here it whirring away. Yet we completely rely on it. The big revolutions in thought are, arguably, related to changes in this receding framework. An apparently necessary assumption (a pre-conceptional 'assumption' as unthought 'how') can constrain the human conversation for centuries. Then someone 'sees' this constraint, thematizes it, and can thereby think around or behind it. The conversation's field of possibility is thereby opened. --but this doesn't mean it can't be closed back down and the revealing words lose their force in our tendency to lose ourselves in the what.

The raw feels only seem to come into view because we have stepped back far enough as a distanced “self” - some idealised notion of a disinterested viewer. — apokrisis

I'd suggest (and I think you'll agree) that the usual conception of 'raw feels' is already too theoretical. That's because 'raw' experience is already meaningful. We start from an immersion in a shared world with shared language. The self is for the most part deeply entangled in what it is doing and the others it is doing things with. It meets the object in its network of social meanings, in its possibility for use (as tool or resource). The others are there with us as we make our decisions in terms of what they will think and do in response.

The cold, staring ego is a late development, created in the pursuit of ideal certainty. But really this ideal certainty was itself pursued as an act of imposing an understanding of existence on the culture. Methodological skepticism is a rhetorical ploy.

But let's be fair. There is something like a raw feel. Redness just 'is,' in a certain sense, even if it's only revealed by a sophisticated way of looking at things, by peeling it off of the apple. So there does seem to be a stubborn or dogmatic stupidity in any position that ignores 'consciousness' and 'meaning.' This is not to say that we can't or shouldn't point out the theory-laden-ness of these raw feels --but such theory-ladeness supports the idea that significance is 'primordial.' The idea that the subject 'pastes' meaning/concept on raw sensation is fascinating but misleading. It might justify itself in terms of prediction/control (haven't looked in to this)l, but it's not phenomenologically accurate.

I am talking about reporting how experience seems to us in its 'first person' immediacy, not its objective contents but its subjective quality. I believe this is something we all know; we know what it is, subjectively speaking, to experience ourselves in relation to a world of others, not as some objectivist description about it, but as subjective immediacy. — Janus

I'm with you on this project. In my view, the subject-object paradigm does become destabilized as we look closely at what is going on. For the most part, the subject is unthematized. It 'is' what it concerns itself with. In its dealing with others (participating in conversations), it 'is' the shared revelation of the shared world through language. This is an older and deeper concept of world. But this older, deeper concept ('phenomenon') is covered over by physics taken as metaphysics. This is not in the least to say that physics isn't true as physics. It only looks toward the ground of physics, which a basic sense of being in a shared world with others and an ability to navigate that world.

The how tends to be concealed by the what. In other words, the background from which theories emerge operates or exists for the most part invisibly. This gives metaphysics a certain shallowness. It neglects its own ground in our facticity. It gives rise to misleading preconceptions of language that generate 'pseudo-problems.' It involves a tossing around of concepts that are treated as crystals rather than blurs ripped out of a continuum. One could speculate that there's the desire to escape the always-becoming self-world we are into some kind of eternal completion of having-become.

Lots of these debates are 'really about' feelings. They are cultural criticism masked as metaphysics. The idea is to ground cultural criticism in the super-science of metaphysics. Epistemology therefore becomes the obsession. Things are 'proven' in a pseudo-mathematics of words understood as time and context independent essences. What those apparently opposed agree on is the unthematized how of their establishing their views as authoritative. They turn the crank of the same machine and somehow get different results. But the machine itself is not questioned. Only the other's operation of the machine is questioned. For me, this machine/method/approach/medium is itself a more fascinating target of questioning than the 'what' or the output of the machine. In my view, there is often a gut-level doubt about this machine-like approach that nevertheless wants to use the machine to subvert the machine. But this implicitly recognizes the machine as truly authoritative, so we have only reform rather than revolution. It is insufficiently radical, one might say. That we can't have 'pure' revolution but only more radical reform is how I understand our finitude. We can't get completely behind our past, where this past is the inherited 'how' of our approach in the present. [Forgive the long post. I'm feeling particularly inspired and longwinded.]

He seems to be interpreting pastness from an understanding of time as an endless succession of nows yet to come when he says: "at some point one's dasein will be over, a thing of the past. But of course its past status is yet to come. It lies in the future so to speak."

In the text itself, the sentences following endnote 29 read: "[In anticipating death...] There is no remaining in the world of concerned engagement.... [others] disappear when the world fades into the background." And in the next paragraph he writes: "So being-in is directed to a state in which it finds that 'nothing whatsoever' can affect it, that is, its being before nothing. This nothing, as that which dasein is faced with, throws dasein's being back solely on to itself. This ownmost 'in-itself' will no longer be 'there' in the world. This 'pastness', which is in each case one's own, pulls dasein back from its lostness in the 'one'."

From what I've quoted above, Heidegger seems to be talking about attunement/being-in. And he seems to be more or less equating this with pastness, to me. Do you read him differently? — bloodninja

I speculate that 'pastness' is not really about an endless succession of nows but just a fancy way of talking about the possibility death. If death is intended as a first-person experience, then of course we can only intend death as possibility. How I do experience death as a possibility? For one thing, I imagine the world going on without me. I have become a part of the past. I can't do anything anymore. I am neutralized, thrown away.

Even though our actual death as demise is in the future, it exists (authentically) as vivid possibility in the present. The more vivid this possibility, the less inauthentic the timing of this death. The time 'between' now and my demise 'shrinks' to nothing. What does the ordinary measuring of time mean compared to the unmeasurable possibility of my death? The clocks melt. The covering-over of idle talk is blown away like dead leaves in the cold wind from an abyss become here-and-now. There's an ecstasy in this shattering-against along with the terror.

I think you're right about attunement being central here. The being-in as being-with is lost. Dasein is no longer 'there' in the world because he has 'surfaced' from the usual immersion. Or rather this is two ways of saying the same thing. Death as vivid possibility exists via an eerie attunement in which Dasein experiences its wholeness/separateness as an individual Dasein. I think this also makes the 'how' of the they visible or seeable-from-outside. We can't look at the bottom of the foot we are standing on --that's holding us up. My solitary death also allows me to view my culture from the outside --to some degree. The seeing-of-the-how is critical, non-neutral. So conformity (immersion in its benefits and safety) is a big part of the cover of the how. For me it's hard to ignore the old theme of facing death heroically here. The phenomenologist is a kind of warrior. 'Real' philosophy takes courage. It risks its own sanity, in a certain sense. It ventures into the untamed frontier alone. But this frontier is largely behind us in our dark origins or beneath us in the dark foundations of our lighting-things-up.

Please forgive me if I'm coming off as too sure of myself. All of this is provisional. If I state it forcefully it's just because I want to get it down with the feel and excitement of it for me. I often look back and decide that I was wrong, but I think it's valuable to paraphrase, paraphrase, paraphrase. To me this is a digging beneath the surface of phrases that can become routine and lose their force. I speculate that 'deconstruction' has lost its force. I have enjoyed some of Derrida, but I now see that the 'spiritual' motive of deconstruction was covered over by an excessive cleverness. And the cliche about pomo is that it is some cheap relativism. Since epistemology is so often assumed to be the essence of philosophy, this is to be expected.
Deconstruction must (from the outside) somehow be about doubt as opposed to revelation. Nevermind that such a shallow understanding of philosophy's potential is what deconstruction (destruction) destroys as a sort of heart-shrinking bondage.

A theme that's starting to come into focus for me in the early Heidegger:

The How tends to be concealed by the What. The medium, in other words, tends to be concealed by the message. Our comportment toward things tends to go unnoticed , precisely because the thing dominates.

The past that lives (the primordial past) is exactly this un-thematized How or pre-grasping. This pre-grasping includes pre-conception. Phenenomological destruction or deconstruction draws this pre-conception out and makes it explicit. Only this way can it 'go backward' and recover the force of the elemental words and/or experience anew the choices (as choices) that shaped this usually unthematized and quietly dominant How.

Heidegger (as I understand it) only allowed Kant the possibility of having glimpsed primordial time (which involves an understanding of the primordial past as the 'how'.)

Perhaps it is no accident that Kant determined the fundamental principle of his ethics in such a way that we call it formal. He perhaps knew from a familiarity with Dasein itself that it is its 'how. It was left to contemporary prophets to organize Dasein in such a way that the 'how' is covered up. — Heidegger

This reminds me of 'formal indication,' which Kisiel emphasizes in The Genesis of Being and Time.

On another, related them, I think 'authentic Dasein' is something like a personification of radical phenomenology. Just as tarrying with the negative leads to the Hegelian standpoint, living the death of concerned immersion in the What of the present in personal death as possibility makes visible the how. The how of the day, the shared living past of the they, is simultaneously made visible and contingent.
This how or pre-grasping is (as I understand it) the medium through which entities are understood in there that-they-are and what-they-are, which is to say being.

Since the how 'evolves,' so does being. Being, the deepest framework, is apparently unstable. The individual human being can attain clarity about his own temporality and understand the temporality of the they --world-historical temporality.

In doing so it is not that one has become 'tired' of previous philosophy and would now set about thinking up a new system and try out whether it not be possible, for a change, in this way. It is not decisive whether that which is to be obtained is shockingly new or whether it is old, or whether from out of this a system is really to be built or not. Something else is at stake, namely to lead philosophy from out of its alienation back to itself (phenomenological destruction). (The genuine is always new because the old has always in some sense necessarily become un-genuine for us. ) — Heidegger

from Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression.

As I read him, this overcoming of alienation involves a union of the 'spiritual' and the scientific. That the scientific at its most radical could exist apart from the 'spiritual' perhaps the superstition of a half-dead 'science.' Of course I have the pre-science or ur-science of radical phenomenology in mind. I'm thinking of spirit as Geist as living time. The 'infinite' standpoint (a fantasy the depends upon a covering up of the temporality of being) is a desiccating aim. And yet it may be the unavoidable and proper aim, in some sense. Our thrust against finitude is maybe the essence of philosophy, and unveiling the how (the living past or 'being' functioning as the framework disclosing entities) is itself an attempt to grab the unchanging formal structure. For me this feels like a radicalization of Kant and Hegel. It's formal like Kant, but the interpretative framework is dynamic as in Hegel. But it's more visceral. It moves in the twilight of the pre-theoretical. It aims at the dark origins of the theoretical.

So there must be a minimum time taken for us to realize that now has changed, or the instant has changed. — guptanishank

Yes, I agree. But I don't have in mind a minimum of physicist time. I mean a minimum of 'primordial' time (which makes physicist time possible.) Since this primordial time is not well known (it's a concept from Heidegger), it's good enough to leave it a minimum of ordinary or physics time.

Mathematics fails to capture the full essence of some phenomenon, especially if the phenomenon is qualitative. — guptanishank

Yes, that was actually my central point. The normal understanding of time is taken from physics. But physics uses real numbers to model continuous quantities. These real numbers arguably don't capture the phenomenon or direct intuition of continuity. Most will agree that time is qualitatively continuous, but this continuity is only the beginning. This is still a depersonalized notion of time, even if it gets the flow right.

I apologize if the reply seemed meagre. It was all I could think of at the time. — guptanishank

No problem.

The now simply changes and we notice it. At all times. — guptanishank

From my point of view, we always live the change of the now. And sometimes we live the change of the now by noticing the change in the now. For the most part the how is concealed by the what. We are immersed in our doings, in taking care of things. We don't notice the time pass as we talk to the pretty girl (as in that quote.) We notice the girl. But if we text her after a date to feel out how the date went, we sure notice the time it takes her to reply. Time stretches, becomes 'visible.' Or we who are time stretch.

The other moments are lost in the past. — guptanishank

I know what you mean. There's a basic truth in this. But would you not agree that the past also 'haunts' the now? We see the present in a way that is shaped by the past. We see the future in a way that is shaped by the past. In a sense we are the stretch or movement of time between the past and the future, sometimes mundanely just the stretch between the hot unfolded towel from the dryer and the not quite as hot folded towel added to the stack. Or as I mentioned in my first post: consider the experience of reading these sentences. Is this not a movement of meaning that includes suspense?
To be clear, I'm still agreeing that time is the change in the now, but we could also identity the now with this change, this movement. The now is deeply dynamic and elusive. Metaphysics tends to cover up this dynamic, elusive now. It wants to grab it and staple it down and make it a thing for theory. It (metaphysics) doesn't want to be sucked in to the flow of time. It doesn't want to be one more human past trying to leap beyond itself. It wants to sit outside of this movement like god. But even I am playing the game (and so are you) when we try to describe the unchanging structure of the now as pure change, pure movement.

Regarding your earlier reply, where you point out that now could be a real number.
I think your approach is correct, but we are looking for continuity there. What way is there to know if indeed time is continuous, at all points, if all we can do is observe the now, and some data from the past? — guptanishank

My suggestion is that physics already understands time as a real number (with possible exceptions for the higher level physics I haven't studied). In my view, this involves a imperfect projection of the intuitive continuum. For me this is a derivative form of time. The time that I consider most real is the time that you and I are. We live that time, so we have direct access to it. If we ignore this direct access, it's because we are fascinated by the possibility of some theoretical, metaphysical time. We assume unquestioningly that time is conceptual. But another view understands time to be the 'there' in which concepts exist --which is to say within the embodied world-entangled dynamic fields of passionate meaning that we always already are.

This is just a way of looking at things that I find fascinating. This more or less a paraphrase of my interpretation of Heidegger (a difficult but extremely fascinating philosopher.) If any of this sounds good, I recommend his 80 page book The Concept of Time.

What is left unmentioned is that this is just a philosopher's god. It might as well be a bishop and knight checkmate or a game of Sudoko.

What is the right view then? Agnosticism? — TheMadFool

For me, it's the paradigm of the 'right view' itself that deserves looking in to. Is there one right view? Does any view stay fixed? Should it stay fixed?

Also, are these "-isms" really that useful? Can they function as more than the barest introduction? For instance, I can find my most profound realizations mirrored in religious myth and imagery from my believing childhood. The radical image at the centre of Christianity (God in the flesh dying as a criminal by public execution) is covered over or ignored really by understanding religion yet again to be the same kind of religion that had Christ crucified in the first place. In the basic Christian myth is that religion kills God (with a little help from the state).

Yet Christianity eventually became the state religion of that same state. In short, this stuff is (IMV, upon close examination) complex and profound. For instance, one might say that Christ himself was an 'atheist' in a peculiar sense. For me, he's a character who may or may not have actually existed. This idea of Christ exists in an important sense, though, just like the idea of rationality. Human beings live in terms of passionate ideas. So an atheist might be a theist and the reverse depending on how existence in interpreted. But that's what's wrong with these oversimplifying terms. They are just title pages, indeterminate until the book is read. We have to really talk with others to get a sense of what they deeply value.

It occurs to me that philosophers tend to the sense of themselves as possessing at least an approximation of the truth-for-all. They'll settle for having the right method for discovering this truth, so that being rational is good enough, even at the cost of not really knowing anything but the correct method. In any case, philosophy-as-metaphysics looks at times like a religion of truth, a religion of reasonableness.

For this reason, they may, in general, as philosophers, obsess over correctness. That means religion must be understood in terms of propositions, because the only thing sacred is the objective truth ---if you ask a metaphysician. This applies to the forum theist as well as the forum atheist. It's all nails for the hammer. Since they are both invested in the same functioning religion (possessing/presenting the truth), this shared investment is invisible. It doesn't become conspicuous within the disgreement. It is the how concealed in the what. The point is that both can walk away still understanding religion as sub- or super- science respectively.

Do you not see how meagre such a reply is? I sketched for you a theory of time (Heidegger's, roughly) and you balk at 'paradoxical' even though I was essentially agreeing with you.

What I had in mind was the problem with the instantaneous now. As you may know, the invention of calculus involved reinvigorated Zeno's paradoxes. What is an instant? Can we really think of time this way? If time is a continuum, then it's far from trivial. We open an old can of words, the problem of capturing the continuum in a logic that is made of discrete symbols. This is not a practical problem, but then we use floating point numbers in our computers. So the continuum is only a guiding, intuitive idea or phenomenon.

But let's say that we can make this idea clear. Then a new problem arises. There is no time for change in an instant. Let f(t) be the state of object. If we understand change as the non-equality of f(x) and f(y) at two times x and y, then clearly we can't put x and y in the same instant unless x = y. But then f(x) = f(y) and we don't have change.

In short, the now only makes sense as a mini-continuum, a piece of the flow. We can try to describe how humans experience time 'originally' by (with difficultly) looking non-theoretically or rather less-theoretically at our own intimate experience. The foundation of this experience is (arguably) care. We give a damn. We try to make some things happen and avoid other things. We notice change. We seek change. We await change. The invention of abstract, scientific time comes fairly late in the game. We had to institute this time. But we didn't start from nothing. As social beings, we already knew how to institute cues like church bells or to respond to cues like the sunrise. Before electric light, the light of the day was an important resource that we took into account as we arranged our efforts. 'Get up. Get moving. We're burning daylight.'

The strategy here is to trace the concept back to something that is more or less irreducible, which is to say our primary pre-theoretical experience. What makes this difficult is our immersion in useful artificialities that hide the 'how' of our own lives from us behind the 'what' of educated but stultified common sense.

For atheists, existence means something physical - that which can be perceived through the senses and if you want to go the whole nine yards, something measurable. — TheMadFool

Respectfully, I think this is a narrow conception of the atheist. Admittedly there is an assembly line scientistic atheist, and these may even be in the majority. A more radical atheism expands its critique to include the idea of the physical. Of course there's a world out there, but as rule we look at it through the theoretical goggles of educated common sense --the 'superstitions' of the day. The assembly line scientistic atheist has a less embarrassingly obsolete pair of goggles than the amateur theologian who already capitulates to scientism by understanding religion as belief in a set of propositions. What I'm hinting at as an 'atheistic' position who finds the same kind of dullness in both assembly atheism and theism that unwittingly understands itself scientistically. Both ignore the experience that is closest to them. Both cover-over the life they actually live with a 'dead' universal truth.

The atheist POV is reasonable because rationally speaking it's a mistake to go beyond the evidence. Our senses can't perceive x and so it is reasonable to believe x doesn't exist. Note however that such a view limits us to physical existence only. — TheMadFool

Of course I care about evidence, but what's left unquestioned here is the source and foundation of this understanding of the reasonable. I suggest that it's not at all just about evidence. It's about the sense we can make (or not) of various assertions in context. For instance, my objection to most (but not all) theisms is largely about the vacuity of the idea of God in these theisms. The content is not there in the first place. The word is slapped on a vague mess of feelings and half-thoughts. They can't say what they mean because they don't know exactly what they mean.

On the other hand, what I call scientism is a more or less uncritical conformity to respectable educated common sense. The roots or foundations of science are left unexamined. The idea of explanation is left unexamined. The massive gap between the way we experience the world un-theoretically and the highly mathematical scientific image is hardly acknowledged. 'Metaphysical' positions are unwittingly conflated with scientific hypotheses. For instance, 'physical existence' is already an abstract. Scientific observation is theory-laden. It is a highly useful way of looking at and thinking about the world, but this undeniable utility seduces us (in my view) into a kind of stupidity. Finally, how many non-scientists are ultimately just believing what they are told by an expert culture with gadgets? No doubt this trust has a certain pragmatic justification, but does it not suggest an inaccurate outsider's view of science?

Surely there are those who sneer at the theist in the name of science who don't know what a differential equation is or how to construct a simple hypothesis test in statistics. So they believe the personalities on TV. They take on the beliefs of those who tend to be successful. I'm not against those beliefs in their proper realm. I'm just pointing out that mostly thoughtless conformity exists on both sides. Many of our 'reasonable' atheists would be 'reasonable' theists if theism happened to be the view of the experts on TV.

But naturalism, to theists, is too narrow a worldview. It fails to consider possibilities that seem to multiply the further you get from Earth. I mean how are we so certain that in a distant galaxy God hasn't given proof of his existence (physically or other wise)?

Also, radio waves can't be perceived with the our senses. We need instruments to detect them. So, it isn't that outlandish to think of things that can't be detected with our current instruments but do, in fact, exist. — TheMadFool

These things that possibly exist invisible to our instruments are not something that we could revere, though. Why couldn't a atheistic scientist acknowledge undiscovered entities? It's not the entities that happen to be already discovered, as I see it, but rather the framework that bestows 'official' or metaphysical existence in terms of these instruments and the theories that guide their use.

Metaphysical naturalism, also called "ontological naturalism" and "philosophical naturalism", is a philosophical worldview and belief system that holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences, i.e., those required to understand our physical environment by mathematical modeling. — wiki

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that metaphysical naturalism doesn't exist on its own terms. It's so stupid and extreme that it only makes sense as a countermovement against an equally crude theology. It denies its own ground (a rich history of the doing and living and thinking of human beings), unless one is really to believe that all of this living and doing is 'just' or 'really' [updated 'atoms and void'].

What is the attraction here? An obsession with the unchanging. A living man is born. He lives and learns and speaks and then he dies. He exists in 'real' or 'human' or 'meaningful' time, a time in which meanings and feelings and sensations move. But these are hard to catch and fix and be absolutely certain about, precisely because they are alive. Since the same atoms and the same void are always there, they are the really real, never mind their empty stupidity. Whereas the field of meaning in which Democritus (for instance) could invent or enrich atomism is unreal in its mortal elusiveness. In short, an obsession with being right, or with possessing a deathless truth, tempts us to call our most intimate experience of reality an illusion. This 'deathless truth' or proposition-as-god is the 'theism' of the assembly line atheist.

Metaphysical naturalism is a perverse fantasy that lives parasitically on successful engineering. Note that the success of engineering plugs us back in to human desire and the reality of our embodied, future-driven situation.

So, here I am, torn between being open to possibilities (theism) and being rational (shaping my world view with reason).

What should I do? — TheMadFool

I'd suggest searching out both better atheist and better theist thinkers. I like negative theology (theism), for instance, and anti-scientistic philosophers like Heidegger (atheism). What I find interesting is how the atheist/theist distinction breaks down in the limit. Old religious myths come back to new life in the midst of sophisticated self-critical 'atheist' critique, etc.

A last line: what are we to make of 'the kingdom of God is within you'? How does religion start to understand itself as a truth factory? How does it start to turn away from intimate, lived experience of 'God' to understanding itself as metaphysics?

What is time?
What is “now”?
I define Time as “change in now”. Now is the moment we are experiencing constantly. — guptanishank

I generally agree with your (paradoxical) formulation of time as the 'change in now,' but I'd like to put a different spin on it. In my view we have to get behind the scientific concept of time. This scientific concept is arguably derivative. Why?

What is it to be there? What is it to read this sentence? It is a movement toward completion. The meaning gathers itself up toward the period. Time is most intimately a feeling-tinted engagement that waits for or moves toward a desired future. The future exists now as the how of the now. But this how of the now is also the past. What we want from the future and how we move toward it is a function of the past. 'We' are time, in a certain sense.

Something that might help here is this quote (falsely?) attributed to Einstein:

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity. — not sure, really

This hints at our more direct experience of time. We want something to arrive. We work at something, trying to finish it. As social creatures, however, we had to institute certain signals. We all meet for this or that task at sunrise or when our shadows are of a certain length. So already we find our more personal tasks (and more personal sense of time) interrupted by what we have to do, what one has to do. This is social time or the time of we. This social time is still mixed in with the local culture, maybe the bell of a particular church, or Kant on his stroll. Social time is still connected to purpose or care. It is still human, though depersonalized.

Science completes this depersonalization. It gives us the image of a de-humanized flow of nows. This flow of nows is questionable, however. The famous ontological crisis in mathematics was largely about the tension between logic and our intuition of continuity. The pure now is (roughly) a real number, to the degree that we can be strict about an instantaneous now. But I think this infinitely thin theoretical now is a bad approach to time. It's a useful fiction that covers over our genuine experience of time.

In short, we tend to assume without questioning that physics time is metaphysical time. But metaphysical time is perhaps misleading, because it may be that metaphysics 'betrayed' the 'realest' or 'truest' form of time long ago in its obsession with eternal objects.

[erased ironic post]

"for now, you're you" is a construct of language that creates a reification of all the ways to frame sets of phenomena that is interpreted socially, culturally, digitally, biologically, etc. as an entity or being. — Uneducated Pleb

May I jump in here? It does seem that language reveals or shapes entities. On the other hand, the very notion of language apart from the language user is already itself a 'construct of language.' But then that language user too is yanked out from the world entire by language, one might say. I think you'd agree, too, that 'construct of language' itself a reification, a construct of language.

What's interesting for me about the words 'being' and 'entity' is that they suggest indeterminate unities, or the 'atom' as such. It's as if we have 'digital' tendencies when it comes to interpreting It (the world, experience, being there, time, consciousness,phenomena, etc.) while also wanting to speak of continuous flow and the vagueness of mood. (I really like that you used the word 'digitally.' ) Of course we also try to name the thing itself 'before' it is 'distorted' by framework-laden language. It's like hunting for snow that has never been stepped on. But we step on this snow by talking about it. We can only be understood in a language that is already there in its 'guilt' and 'impurity.'

Now, I'm beginning to ramble and I assume some of you are starting to roll your eyes so here's my general thesis: unless we are talking about history, we should preferably stop using terms like "Western philosophy", "German idealism", "British analytic philosophy", "American pragmatism", "continental philosophy" and the like, because they inevitably harbor ethnocentrism, as well as narrow-minded thinking in general. Philosophy is supposed to study truth, and using these regional and ethnic terms actually taints what it's supposed to be studying: truth now becomes German truth, or British truth. — darthbarracuda

I do understand your point, but do you not also see the humility implicit in this localization of truth? One might argue that the most intense ethnocentrism is that of experiencing one's own culture as the universal culture, the trans-cultural culture ('the transcendental pretense').

Modern philosophy, particularly the modern philosophy of the self, for all its variations, may be summarized as an exposition and extrapolation of what Robert Solomon calls the "transcendental pretense." Solomon writes, "The leading theme of [the story of Continental philosophy after 1750] is the rise and fall of an extraordinary concept of the self. The self in question is no ordinary self, no individual personality, nor even one of the many heroic or mock-heroic personalities of the early nineteenth century. The self that becomes the star performer in modern European philosophy is the transcendental self, or transcendental ego, whose nature and ambitions were unprecedentedly arrogant, presumptuously cosmic, and consequently mysterious. The transcendental self was the self - timeless, universal, and in each one of us around the globe and throughout history. Distinguished from our individual idiosyncracies, this was the self we shared. In modest and ordinary terms it was called 'human nature.' In must less modest, extraordinary terminology, the transcendental self was nothing less than God, the Absolute Self, the World Soul. By about 1805 the self was no longer the mere individual human being, standing with others against a hostile world, but had become all-encompassing. The status of the world and even of God became, if not problematic, no more than aspects of human existence.

Underlying Kant's philosophy was the presumption that in all essential matters every person everywhere is the same. When Kant's self reflected on itself, it came to know not only itself, but all selves, as well as the structure of any and every possible self. The transcendental pretense evident in Kant's philosophy helped produce "the white philosopher's burden." Kant's presumption that all selves resemble each other led some philosophers to conclude that they should be able to construct a universal human nature. Even thinkers (like Kant) who never left their hometowns should be able to make authoritative pronouncements on human nature and morality. — Waving or Drowning

Waving or Drowning?: March 2004 Archives

Along the same lines, one might argue that there's something 'imperial' in this desire for a truth that is above any particular culture, let alone beyond every particular individual. Presumably you want a truth that is authoritative for those who don't speak English, and for those not born for another few centuries. I find such truth desirable myself. But what is this desire for truth? Is this 'just' or also a desire for beauty? For authority? It's clearly not only about utility in the mundane sense.

Really, I think it comes whether or not it's justifiable, or recommended, that we use traditions the way we do in philosophy, and how this reflects our conception of philosophy and how it should be done. It's hard to study philosophy, let alone do philosophy, without feeling compelled from around and within to associate oneself with some tradition, or start one yourself. These names for the truth are just clothes, the truth as it is naked, by itself, is nameless. — darthbarracuda

What comes to my mind is that we ourselves as individuals are 'traditions,' embedded of course in traditions proper. I understand the desire to get behind or around our own past or tradition. Indeed, this seems to be what deconstruction was originally about. Can we go back and make a different decision than we did the first time? Can we recover that choice? I think we can try, but I'd guess that there are limits to this sort of thing. I am my past in its leaping away from itself to transcend itself. I can only transcend my past in terms of the past, by playing some of what I already have from my past against the rest of it. Or is there a 'mystical' or unrecognized 'leap' possible? Am I trapped by a tradition that understands its self-transcendence in this particular, optional way? Ah, but that's exactly the kind of questioning I've been learning from books lately.

Those books also include something like naked, nameless truth. Maybe we can and do live a sort of naked, nameless truth. We can even settle for naming it only by negation and metaphor. How long, though, till we have a rich tradition of such negations and metaphors? And what if this naked, nameless truth is the cornerstone of our own tradition in some sense?

'[It] is'

How do you know what you claim to know? How do you know you are not being deceived? Descartes threw away all of his beliefs in order to peel away the deceptions and arrived at the very bedrock of his web of beliefs. The basic belief that he exists as a thinking being which cannot be doubted, for in order to doubt it there must be a thinking being that exists in order to doubt. — Uneducated Pleb

What's fascinating here is D's motive. In his quest for certainty, he interpreted his being as thinking. But what then of the motive itself? He felt the need for certainty. He wanted certainty. Note that he also liberated/created a radically free ego-thing, and that's another emotional charge. His thinking more or less casts off all authority.

If we rest assured that "I think, therefore I am" then our base is once again knocked out from underneath us as we have uncovered, thanks to the Buddha and Eubulides, that within that statement lies a hidden premise which appears to be false - that there is in fact an "I" that thinks. "I" is a shortened description of the collection of elements (whose relations constantly shift and change and come into and go out of existence as time passes) which is then represented with "I". Thinking is only one element of what is considered "I". Can my thinking happen without my form? Can my thinking happen without a perception or sensation or referent to start the thought? — Uneducated Pleb

These are great points, but I amplify the dependence of the philosophical 'I' on a more ordinary understanding of the use of 'I.' Descartes was a toddler once, learning to speak by interacting with humans and objects. 'I' am something I learnt to take responsibility for. 'I' am something that who experiences pride and shame. Descartes could only unveil the radically alone doubting thing after having learned a language. Of course I agree that thinking depends also on perception and sensation. To be sure, I'd also stress that we know objects first. Only much later can we theorize our own thinking as an organization of pure sensation by concepts. What's fascinating in this general theoretical trend is the tendency to deny/transcend the past. There seems to be an urge to get behind our inheritance, and yet (fascinatingly) we have to use this same inheritance against itself. In a move toward an ideal future we use the past against the past. Or, put another way, we are the past trying to leap beyond itself, sometimes by leaping further backward to an older, better past. This makes sense. What materials are on hand to build that ideal future with? This is not to deny the possibility of novelty, but to suggest that we are largely inspired by what has come before.

Second, if one is asking the question to someone else outright, one has not realized the first part, and one is clinging to the idea of "self" as a single reified construct or inherent essence. The nuance of how "self" is seen to exist is not yet realized or otherwise beyond the set of the practitioners current capability. To answer outright for that type of questioner would be to hinder their (in this case Vacchagotta's) eventual release from the clinging to the reified-construct-as-self. From the point of view of the one who realizes "no self", the questioner is asking from a place where the self is a concrete thing, which either exists or it doesn't. — Uneducated Pleb

I relate to this quite a bit. Our questions tend to be blindly front-loaded. We don't see how we are already constraining the field of meaning in the very 'shape' of our question. On the other hand, this front-loaded 'framework' is what makes the question possible in the first place. We must ask from the 'field of meaning' that we already have or even are. In my view we can extend this 'reified construct' thinking even further, as something that haunts the ordinary understanding of language. I might frame this in terms of meaning atomism versus meaning holism. The 'atomist' thinks he is employing rigid 'plates' of meaning. We arrange these stable concepts in patterns and, thanks to their stability, get an equally stable compound meaning.

But is this how we really operate? Or is it just as theoretically/artificial as the doubting object? In my view, we need only really look with fresh eyes at the way we experience meaning. Can we say exactly what it means to mean? What is like to move in the field of meaning? How does meaning flow? How does meaning leap ahead and look behind as we read a sentence or listen to a poem? How do the words 'melt' together? Do we cling to atomistic sense of language as something that offers a certain safety from ambiguity? Are we disgusted by its excess? by its tendency to say more than we intended? By its 'corporality' and only partial translatability? Does holistic meaning threaten our hope to gather ourselves up into a atom, a delineated thing?How can I partake in God if God is eternal and fixed and I can only name myself with unstable fields of meaning? (One answer might be to 'unfix' God so that s/he 'is' an emotionally ideal field of meaning --and this finally stresses what I should have stressed earlier, that meaning is passionate.)

In my opinion, this supports my interpretation given above. This is the foreward of a 1923 course (Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity). Note that everyday Dasein is already 'here' in this course. Significant and famous B&T themes are already well developed (some of them).

Putting forth questions --questions are not happenstance thoughts, nor are questions the common 'problems' of today which 'one' picks up from hearsay and book learning and decks out with a gesture of profundity. Questions grow out of a confrontation with 'subject matter.' And subject matter is there only where eyes are.

It is in this manner that a number of questions will have to be 'posed' in this course, and all the more so considering that questioning has today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of 'problems.' Here one is in fact secretly at work abolishing questioning altogether and intent on cultivating a modesty of blind faith. One declares the sacrum [sacred] to be an essential law and is thereby taken seriously by one's age, which in its frailty and impotence has need for such a thing. One stands up for nothing more than the trouble-free running of the 'industry'! Having become ripe for the organization of mendacity, philosophy interprets its corruption as 'the resurrection of metaphysics.'

Companions in my searching were the young Luther and the paragon Aristotle, whom Luther hated. Impulses were given by Kierkegaard, and Husserl opened my eyes. This for those who 'understand' something only when they reckon it up in terms of historical influences, the pseudo-understanding of an industrious curiosity, i.e., diversion from what is solely at issue in this course and what it all comes to. One should make their 'tendency of understanding' as easy as possible for them so that they will perish of themselves. Nothing is to be expected of them. They care only about the pseudo. — Heidegger

Is Heidegger...King Slender? Because he's about to break the pseudos on daddy's knee. The primordial must reached by the penetration of its covering-over by a real man, a long-schlonged thinker of the first-most water.
(I intend this in a neutral tone, neither praising nor blaming.)

A footnote indicates:

The "Forward' was not delivered in this course. — editor

Here's a little more. First we need 'guilt.'

The certainty of this possibility [of death] is seized when every other possible can-be of mine is set apart from it, that is, when the resoluteness toward itself is such that it is the source of the possibility of this or that action. If Dasein in forerunnning can bring itself into such an absolute resoluteness, it means that in this running forward toward its death Dasein can make itself responsible in an absolute sense. It 'can' choose the presupposition of being of itself, that is, it can choose itself. What is chosen in this choice is nothing other than willing to have a conscience. ...Forerunning is the choice of willing to have a conscience.
...
As an active being-with with others and as such, Dasein is eo ipso guilty, even when --and precisely when --it does not know that it is unjuring another or destroying him in his Dasein. With the choice of being willing to have a conscience, I have at the same time chosen to have become guilty. The genuine kind of being of Dasein corresponding to its utmost and ownmost possibility (the ownmost being-ahead-of-itself enacted by itself) is what we have characterized as the forerunning of willing to have a conscience, which at the same time means choosing the essential guilt of Dasein itself, insofar as it is. — Heidegger

So what do we have here? Somehow making the possibility of death vivid as possibility is also a choosing of 'the essential guilt of Dasein itself.' How can we make sense of this? If the 'one' is the largely unwritten Law, then personality as such is 'sin.' One of life's horrors for a sensitive heart is that what one does actually matters. I can hurt others, intentionally or not. I can do that which cannot be undone. Terrible crime is possible along with just accidentally running over someone's dog. Is this not 'original sin'?

But we also have this choosing of one's self, of taking personal responsibility. We don't speak from the anyone and everyone. We don't speak in a way that hides from our own speaking. We speak as agents who know our own guilt in this same speaking. In my view, 'authenticity' is correctly understood as an 'ego ideal' or virtue, despite protestations to the contrary. Or rather it describes a mode that Heidegger strove to remain in, a mode that made Heidegger as original and daring philosopher possible. Note in the underlined part that resoluteness makes (new) actions possible. Real resoluteness opens possibilities that are not just idle fantasies but even revolutions. In my view, we have a theory of the 'great' human here, liberated from the groundlessness and conformity of the they by a vision of death that nullifies their authority --which is only the not-yet-great human's fleeing from his own death-guilt. Ontological death is guilt in that the I is guilt and that the I is death as possibility --or most intensely I-like in the light of this vivid possibility.




It's the last section of this beautiful book (translated by Kisiel).

36. Time as the being in which Dasein can be its totality

But forerunning into my ownmost possiblity of being is nothing but the being of my ownmost coming to be being. Being guilty, which is posited in and with it, is the being of my ownmost having been. This being of having-been is the past, such that in such a being I am nothing but the future of Dasein and with it its past. The being, in which Dasein can be its wholeness authentically as being-ahead-of-itself, is time.

Not 'time is' but "Dasein qua time temporalizes it being." Time is not something which is found outside somewhere as a framework for world events. Time is even less something which whites away inside in consciousness. It is rather that which makes possible the being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in, that is, which makes possible the being of care.

The time which we know everyday and which we take into account is, more accurately viewed, nothing but the Everyone to which Dasein in its everydayness has fallen. The being in being-with-one-another in the world, and that also means in discovering with one another the one world in which we are, is being in the Everyone and a particular kind of temporality.
— Heidegger

The underlined part suggests that the authentic 'I' is born from death as possibility. Or the I 'is' (again) the possibility of death. Is this not Hegelian?

The presentation of itself, however, as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as a pure negation of its objective form, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and is not tied up with life...And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment — that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. — Hegel

As I read it, the authentic person is 'alone' in his own time. He has time. Time (the everyone) does not have him. He is not caught in the hurriedness, the gossip, the pre-interpretedness. His nakedness before the vividness of the possibility of death allows for a destruction of that which covers over his singular and guilty being-ahead-of-himself-in-already-being-involved. He is revealed to himself as a singular, guilty, dying uniqueness that cannot get behind itself to start fresh or flee to the irresponsible timeless universal.

Throughout the death chapter he constantly refers to dasein's 'wholeness'. So this obviously key to any interpretation of death, and I think it's also a key to what he means by originary temporality. — bloodninja

May I cheat and quote from The History of the Concept of Time? I realize that this is a slightly earlier work, but I find that the lectures are (as might be expected) clearer.

By suicide I surrender the possibility precisely as possibility....The possibility is however just what it is only when it is left standing, that is, when it is left standing before us as impending. A relationship of being to it must be such that I am precisely the possibility itself...The being must run forward toward the possibility, which has to remain what it is. I come as it were into the nearest nearness to it. But as I approach it in this way, the possibility does not become a world, say, but becomes more and more a possibility and more authentically only a possibility.

In dying, the world is only that which has nothing more to say to my own being. In dying,...the world is that upon which Dasein is no longer dependent...

[Dasein is thereby] purely and simply thrown back upon itself, so absolutely that even being-with in its concretion of 'to be with others' becomes irrelevant...[The] being is now transposed authentically directly to the 'I am.' Only in dying can I to some extent say absolutely, 'I am.'
— Heidegger

How about this interpretation? I am the possibility of my death because death is that which can 'carve out' the I from the world it is usually immersed in. It is the vividness of this possibility that 'liberates' the 'I am' from the 'we are.'

From Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity:

The everydayness of Dasein has its Dasein there for itself and seeks it on the path of heeding what the others say about it, what its pursuits look like to the others, how the other others in advance come to appearance within it pursuits.
— Heidegger

This reminds me of Kundera's Immortality, which features a dying Goethe experience a new authenticity in his freedom from his own fame, his own legacy. A seductive young woman positions herself as a sort of parasite on his legacy, endearing herself to him and (once he becomes wary) his mother. This disturbs him until the possibility of death becomes so vivid that he sees that this legacy means nothing to him. He lets it go. His vanity shatters against the vividness of the looming abyss, which lights up the world in a new way as...a great stage of drowsy fools?willfully blind to the abyss and their own ragged nakedness before that darkness? Is this darkness not the inmost core of the I in its the way? I am truly I myself 'only' as this possibility nears as such. Or perhaps I am in general possibility. I experience myself as possibility. Death is the greatest and most terrible possibility, one might say. So I experience myself as myself precisely here --at least at my most 'whole' or separate.

In my opinion, there is also the possibility of taboo sex and violence lurking in Heidegger's words. We are largely constrained by a commitment to the future. This is not to say that we would be monster in general without such an investment. I suggest rather that we would cease tolerating some situations in the name of an intact future.. A mundane example: we show up for work on 3 hours of sleep or no sleep. But we wouldn't do this if we had only a week to live. A less mundane example: a married man or woman is fairly happy, happy enough. It's an uncertain venture to start again, etc. But then this man or woman almost dies and (maybe) decides to no longer compromise and take the risk for something ideal rather than OK. Or an aging man for whom death becomes realer if not imminent dates a girl 'too young' for him in his friends' eyes. Or a man dying of cancer 'allows' himself to lose his temper at an insult. He is already 'going down,' so he is no longer motivated to swallow his outrage and be a respectable citizen. Professor Heidegger doesn't go into this, but he does go on to join the militaristic Nazi party.