that kind of talk isn't productive for the initiated or the uninitiated — fdrake

Are you saying ‘that kind of talk’ represents a failure on Heidegger’s part to express himself clearly?

The unitary structure of the three ecstasies, future-present-having been, determines the ‘is’, the essence, the Being of being as this structure of transit.
— Joshs

Now the first statement can and should be explained simply and clearly. The second does not do that, and no attempt to clarify it is made — Fooloso4

Your definition of ‘simply and clearly’ is circular. If you can understand it, it is simple and clear. If you can’t , it is the fault of the messenger rather than the ability of you as the receiver to comprehend the message. The problem is not fundamentally with how Heidegger’s articulation of temporality is worded, but with the inherent difficulty of the concept he is attempting to convey. It took me not only reading B & T multiple times, but numerous other works of his before I could grasp what temporality was all about. And this wasn’t because Heidegger failed to condense the idea down to a 140 Twitter characters.

Clearly, you're mistaken, Joshs. Foucault, Nietzsche & Deleuze have much to say about ethics (re: "care of the self", "master / slave morality & revaluation of all values" and "anti-oedipal desiring-production", respectively). — 180 Proof

If you look at how Deleuze translates Nietzsche’s Eternal
Return via his desiring-production model, the ensuing ethical imperative ( using the revolutionary potential of philosophy, art and science to free ourselves of fascist social productions) is quite compatible with Heidegger’s embrace of Nietzschean becoming.

I don't see anything in his discussion of care that applies to ethics. Or the concern for human life except with regard to the question of Being. The second is how we are to understand es gibt. — Fooloso4

i suspect you aren’t too crazy about Foucault , Rorty, social constructionism, Derrida, Deleuze, Nietzsche or Husserl either when it comes to ethics. You would likely consider their approaches , like Heidegger’s, as ‘lacking’ an ethics, as if the ossified old school notion of respectable philosophy requires it to check off all the usual categories such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetic and logic. The fact is none of these writers is lacking an ethical impetus in their work in the most fundamental sense of the term. On the contrary, their work is profoundly ethical i. this sense. What they reject is reducing the concept of ethics to a normative or prescriptive category of thought or behavior, which is what happens when we separate ought from is, feeling from thought, value from fact. I suspect that the kind of treatment of the ethical you are looking for can be argued, from the perspective of these writers, to be profoundly unethical. Welcome to the postmodern

One could care very much about being a good Nazi — Arne

If I were a Nazi, I would want to be the best Nazi possible. Otherwise, why bother?

Not humans or even sentient beings but entities. Man seems to be of concern only in so far as he is the ventriloquist dummy of Being — Fooloso4

As far as I’m concerned, the very heart of human relations is the connection between feeling and thinking, affect and cognition, mood and intention.
And there is no philosopher I know of other than Derrida who understood the exquisitely intimate, intricate , contextually changing affective workings of human psychological functioning better than Heidegger , which is why many of today’s most advanced theoretical models of emotion, mood and affect in its relation to cognition rely on Heidegger’s analyses of Befindlichkeit. Who do you rely on for your understanding of these crucial aspects of human functioning?

Yes, indeed. And many can mouth the words 'justice' and 'truth' without caring much for — plaque flag

I suspect this who believe in such concepts
most zealously are the most dangerous.

↪Joshs

Is there a concern for the human things in this more originary thinking? Where do we see it? — Fooloso4

The basis of Dasien’s being-in-the-world is care. By care, Heidegger does not mean sentimental concern. He means that our connection with other people and things ( the things we experienced are understood by reference to their relevance to our human relationships) is one of pragmatic involvement. The world of human affairs always matters to us in a certain way, affectivity as well as cognitively. there is very much an ethic running though his work, which tries to teach us to notice the always intricate way in which our concepts and values maintain their health by refreshing themselves in an open-ended way. Ironically, his political
weakness was his failure to appreciate the capabilities of groups less familiar to him than his own to adopt this ethics of creative becoming.

The Socratic philosopher's concern is first and foremost the human things, the inquiry into the just, the beautiful or noble, and the good.

Heidegger's concern is first and foremost Being. — Fooloso4

Heidegger’s concern is to uncover the presuppositions underlying concepts like ‘human’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘good’, and to ground them in a more originary thinking.

What does it mean for time to be the preliminary name for the truth of Being? — Fooloso4

The unitary structure of the three ecstasies, future-present-having been, determines the ‘is’, the essence, the Being of being as this structure of transit.

Sorta-kinda.
— Joshs

Nossir, exactly. "Dasein is time, time is temporal." — plaque flag

We must be careful in attributing exactitude to Heidegger’s discussion of time at this preliminary point in his career, and in the specific context of your quote. The introduction to Concept of Time notes that in Chapter 3, “Heidegger warns against the 'misunderstanding' that would summarize his view as: 'Dasein is in each case time'. Heidegger was always far more nuanced than many of his critics acknowledge. The review article is best understood as 'preliminary notice' of his own research, as Heidegger states in the Introduction to this work. As such it is an important way station, not a fixed doctrine.”

Given that this is the first draft of Being and Time, let’s see what Heidegger says about Dasein and time in his magnum opus. Heidegger begins Being and Time saying his aim is to answer the question of the meaning of being in general. Alas, by the end of BT, he leaves us with only questions and a promise for answers in a division III which was never produced.

He does define Dasein's kind of being as the ontological difference , the in-between , happening , occurrence , the ‘as' structure , projection.

“ Something like "being" has been disclosed in the understanding of being that belongs to existing Da-sein as a way in which it understands.”

“The ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is temporality itself.”(Basic Problems, 1927)

“In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”(What is Metaphysics)

But he leaves us with the following questions:

“The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Da-sein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?

'Don't nazis suck' is just too easy to say. Of course they suck. It's the most banal self-flattery that I can think of. If you think even Heidegger's early work is contaminated, make a case. Or just air a petty prejudice as if you are paying alms. The world is running low on reasons not to read, not to think. Let's burn some books for Jesus and Apple Pie, boys ! — plaque flag

I think a case was made, which goes something like this:

‘It’s not really Heidegger I’m all hot under the collar about. The Nazi connection is just a convenient post-hoc justification. The truth is he’s just a symbol for an entire culture of thinkers in philosophy, the arts and social sciences whose ideas are alien to the way I look at the world.’

Dasein is time.
— plaque flag

Does he say that? Why not Being and Dasein? I would have to read it in context before saying more. — Fooloso4

Sorta-kinda. What he actually says is that Being is time. Being is disclosed to Dasein in its way of understanding.

“In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”(What is Metaphysics)

The author thinks that Heidi himself believed such scribblings to be part of his oeuvre, and that his previously published work was "sanitized" in some cases by fans — Ciceronianus

Richard Wolin is not considered by most Heidegger scholars to be an authority on Heidegger’s philosophy. This has less to do with ‘fandom’ than with rigorous scholarship. Even if Heidegger was a bigger Nazi than Hitler, this doesn't change the fact that Wolin is out of his depth philosophically.

Can you explain this in your own words? — Fooloso4

For Heidegger, the past, present and future don't operate as sequential modes which mark distinct states of objects. They interpenetrate each other so completely that they together form a single unitary event of occurrence.
A prior object is already changed (affected) by what it interacts with before it can simply inhere in itself as cause. Whereas for traditional notions of time it is only later, that the difference made to other objects can in turn affect “it"”, the fact of its being already affected in serving as the past of that present object with which it interacts deprives both past and present poles of the interaction a separate identity. Rather than there being first one element followed by its effect on a second element (‘caused' by the first), there is only a single event of crossing simultaneously determining past and present in their interaction. Past and present function as already cross-affected by the other. Each is determined by, and also determines the other.

To ‘be’ is to be a crossing or intersection between past and present.
— Joshs
:up:
Perhaps comment on the future too here ? — plaque flag

I’ll let Heidegger have at it.

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Being and Time)

I don't see how the thought of being in something is not dualistic. The thought of simply being is not dualistic, but when it 'in-the-world' is posited it becomes so. — Janus

The history of philosophy has offered a variety of ways to think about subjects, objects and their relation. Traditional approaches posited a unitary a priori subject with self-identically persisting faculties of mind surveying external objects across a divide. More modern perspectives
de-transcendentalize the subject but still retain from older thinking the assumption that the being of a subject or object is the being of an inherence, an in-itself, an identity, even if this is only a temporary identity that is continually modified by its interaction with other things in the world. Things are beings-in-themselves that appear before a subject. The dualism in this way of thinking is that between the inside and the outside, the self- inherence of being vs its becoming, alterity and identity, feeling and intention, state and transition. For Heidegger subjects and objects don’t inhere in themselves, have no internality or subsistence. To ‘be’ is to be a crossing or intersection between past and present. Being is one part memory and one part present. It is between these two as a becoming , a transit , a difference. Dasein, as Being-in-the-World, is a worlding’, not the appearing of things before a subject but an enacting of world in which to be is to be displaced into what discloses itself.

Did he with the Being stuff generalize Kierkegaard into a more glamorously negative cryptotheology ? For me the key stuff is human historicity in language, which Gadamer ran with, along with lifeworld centrality and the unbreakable unit of world-self-language-others that makes philosophy possible. — plaque flag

Exactly. We can thank Dreyfus , and to a certain extent Gadamer, for a god-awful misreading of Heidegger that turns him into a Kierkegaardian existentialist.

I'm listening to Heidegger in Ruins. It's interesting to learn that he's become something of a hero among far-right groups in Europe — Ciceronianus

Nietzsche has played that role for decades. Apart from the political aspect, the question is, is there any evidence
that such readings get the philosophy right?

Karl Jaspers or P.W. Zapffe ... thinkers who have much more cogent things to say about "the nature of being" than Herr Rektor-Führer. :eyes: — 180 Proof

Gadamer’s conversation with Ricardo Dottori:

D.: Hence the analytic of Dasein in Heidegger. Is this the same thing as the illumination of existence of which Jaspers speaks?

G.: Insofar as Jaspers even thought conceptually at all, one could an­swer this question very harshly. On the other hand, it is a very elegant expression — the illumination of existence — an expression that one understands immediately, but not one, in any case, that suggests a fundamental critique of the history of being in the West.

…these days, all of a sudden, I find Jaspers wrongly being
considered important. He wasn't really all that important.

D.: To what extent is he now considered important?

G.: One detects it everywhere. One notices it in every corner. When­ever we don't want to read Heidegger any more, we read Jaspers.”

In the metaphor, the icon represent the objects we see and the bits represent the deeper reality.
So, the bits are not an icon but reality (or, at least, a deeper reality — Art48

But of course the bits are themselves bits of language (mathematics belongs to language) just as the Word icon is. The Word icon can ‘mean’ a program, it can mean the bits, or it can mean anything else that use of language associates it with. The same is true of the concept of a bit. Is there a deeper, truer reality these bits of language anchor themselves to? Or is language self-refential all the way down, not a system of signs hovering over the ‘really real’ but expressing pragmatically how social relationships construct and change a world and what passes for true or false, real or imaginary within it.

The icon for a Word document is really on the screen but it is not the Word document itself, so in that sense is somewhat unreal. The reality of the Word document is computer bits. Janus and Wayfarer make a similar point — Art48

And what are computer bits an icon for?

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

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

Is this problematic of cultural history not also that of natural history? When scientists delve into the earliest and oldest origins of life or of physical or chemical history, don’t we understand the earliest and oldest via the latest and most empirical models? Doesn’t that mean that our past is always ahead of us? When we spin out a history , we are creating and then following a trajectory leading into fresh territory of thinking, going back and forth between our new rendering of the ancient past and the way this revisionism alters our vantage on the present. It is from this new vista that we make our comparisons between what was , what is and what may be. We always know what previous cultures thought. But the purpose of our knowing, just as in the case of our knowledge of empirical past of nature, is forward looking. We know the past only by producing a new pragmatic set of relations with others in our present.

It is not history that is cancelled in this way of thinking , it is historicism , the metaphysical assumption that a history is a causal chain on a timeline. It is historicism that conceals the actual dynamics of history.

I see this as the condition and starting point, not the jumping off point. How an author comes across to me, my perspective, is not fixed, it can change as I learn from him, and must change if I am to learn from him — Fooloso4

But you are not just learning from him. The reason you have a perspective in the first place is that your thinking is situated within an intersubjective matrix that delimits and informs what is relevant for you and how it is relevant. It is in this way that authors go in and out of fashion. Your nietzsche is filtered through your perspective, which is itself a discursive element of a larger cultural perspective. There is continuous change in these dynamics , but also a robustness that relativizes what we learn , and how we change, to our partially shared cultural perspectives. The framework and concepts of his work itself, in its own situatedness, is also inextricable from Nietzsche’s situstedness within his own discursive milieu. We glimpse that milieu from within the terms of our own milieu.

Here we see a fundamental hermeneutical difference. On the one hand, the attempt to understand an author on his own terms, on the other, the attempt to find one's own interests in an author. The former requires a kind of humility and the idea that certain authors are worthy of being read because they have something to teach us that is not easy to understand — Fooloso4

The former requires a trick of hememeutic acrobatics that runs counter to the historically perspectival nature of authorial interpretation. The only way to truly understand the author on their own terms is to be that author, and even then , ‘their’ own terms change from writing to writing. We have to make do with filtering the author’s ‘own’ terms through our own times and our own philosophical frame of reference. If our philosophical framework is postmodernist , we are likely to recognize Nietzsche’s work as postmodern, but if we don’t grasp postmodern concepts, we will
never see these ideas in his work no matter how closely we try to hew to the author’s own terms. This is what I meant by the relevance to interpretation of what we would like to read an author as saying. The reader’s perspective isn’t superior to the author’s , but it is inextricable from how an author’s work comes across to us.

For Husserl the retention-protention -scheme was a formal description of time i.e. it was not anything psychological or empirical. I think that Heidegger is differing here from — waarala

Heidegger’s model of temporality differs from Husserl’s by getting rid of the transcendental ego, among other things. But like Husserl’s, it is neither psychological nor empirical.

There's clearly something like retention, but did he really limit it to the just prior note ? I'd think there would be no 'natural' or obvious place to draw the line. — green flag

There isn’t a line, but a horizon of retentions of retentions trailing off into the receding past. It quickly gets really complicated.

How about the continuity of our experience? You can't be conscious of change or novelty if you don't have a "feel" of sameness in the experience — waarala

Husserl’s solution ( which was also William James’) was to argue that the present moment is ‘specious’. That is , it includes retentions and protentions (expectations). One could not hear a melody as a melody if all that one was aware of was individual notes in an isolated and punctual ‘now’. Husserl asserted that the just prior note is retained alongside the now itself. This provides us with the sense of continuity. In addition, the new always shades an element of similarity with what preceded it.

“Even the physical things of this world that are unknown to us are, to speak generally, known in respect of their type. We have already seen like things before, though not precisely this thing here. Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer.“ (Cartesian Meditations, p.111)

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

I’m not seeing what Heidegger and Deleuze are providing as constituting a metaphysical ground. I agree that the above authors are forming a whole out of Nietzsche’s fragments, but I read his fragments as constituting the outline of a system that is consistent with their interpetation of it, at least with regard to Eternal return. For me it boils down to the fact that Nietzsche, contrary to the claims of Brian Leiter and other ‘existentialist’ interpreters, is neither a realist nor an anti-realist.

In any discussion of a philosopher’s work, what is just as important as what they ‘actually’ said is what we would like them to mean. I wouldn’t like Nietzsche to be a realist in the mold of Leiter. That would make him profoundly uninteresting to me.

This persistent presence could be understood to be dependent on consciousness, on the perceiver, or it could be taken, as it is with materialist metaphysics, to be prior to consciousness. a persistent presence that is "there" regardless of whether it is being perceived or not — Janus

The way I read Heidegger, the experience of persisting presence is a kind of illusion , or better yet, distortion, flattening, closing off of the what happens when we experience something as something. Experiencing the world is not accomplished by a subject directing itself toward objects. Dasein is not a consciousness but an in-between. Heidegger traces the modern idea of being as persisting presence to Descartes:

“Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being.”

“Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated.

It is therefore not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”(Heidegger 2010)


Heidegger explains that in taking something to be the case in a propositional judgement (for instance, S is P) , we are taking something as something within a wider context of pragmatic relevance.(The ‘as' structure designates the peculiar ‘between-ness' of Dasein that Heidegger also describes as the ontological difference between Being and beings). Making sense of something is an act that always has the ‘as' structure, as Heidegger tells us, but this structure of relevanting is covered over and flattened down in causal models.

“The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure. Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood. I repeat: The [primary] as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like.

Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from.” (Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122).

I’ve always taken “presence” to be connected with presence-at-hand — i.e., the mode of being we’re in when contemplating things, when things break down. Something like the centipede effect. It’s something derivative and emerges out of a more basic human state, the ready-to-hand — the realm of habit, skill, automaticity, “second nature” actions, etc. — Mikie

Yes, Heidegger’s account of presence-at-hand and Being as persisting presence are closely related.

See, I would say that his description of the mechanistic world as contiguous with our own desires and passions is exactly what Schopenhauer was saying. Am I wrong? — frank

I guess you’re right in the general sense that both assimilate the being of the mechanistic world to the will. Of course the devil is in the details. Nietzsche deconstructs the metaphysical presuppositions underlying Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the will.

Deleuze has an interesting take on cosmology and eternal return.

“First Aspect of the Eternal Return: as cosmological and physical doctrine:

Nietzsche's account of the eternal return presupposes a critique of the terminal or equilibrium state. Nietzsche says that if the universe had an equilibrium position, if becoming had an end or final state, it would already have been attained. But the present moment, as the passing moment, proves that it is not attained and therefore that an equilibrium of forces is not possible.”

Scientists will insist methodologically that the natural world is quite apart from the "human world." This is the distinction surrounding the question of whether Nietzsche meant you to take the Eternal Return as a feature of a scientific view (cosmology) or not. — frank

The interpreters of Nietzsche that I am allied with argue that he offered a critique of the assumptions guiding Western science , the main one he formulated in terms of will to truth, which is a subordinate to will to power and exemplifies the ascetic ideal. This critique turns against realism and the Kantian split between noumenon and phenomenon. Nietzsche does not propound a metaphysics of the world as thing in itself.

“Both of them, science and the ascetic ideal, are still on the same foundation – I have already explained –; that is to say, both overestimate truth (more correctly: they share the same faith that truth cannot be assessed or criticized), and this makes them both necessarily allies, – so that, if they must be fought, they can only be fought and called into question together. A depreciation of the value of the ascetic ideal inevitably brings about a depreciation of the value of science…”

Nietzsche aimed to include the so-called natural
world within the will to power, and given the inseparable relation between will to power and eternal return, the latter must encompass any cosmological view of time.

“Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect…”

Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else. –

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

The second one.

The big picture is that I embrace something akin perhaps to 'will to power', with God or the gods as an image of what we'd like to be. In Hobbes, kings cannot stop conquering, even when sated, because their satiety must be made secure. The will wills itself, more power and freedom, but for what ? An indestructible orgy of narcissism ? — green flag

This sounds like more of a traditional notion of power than a Nierzschean one. As Foucault conceives it, “power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, some­thing that one holds on to or allows to slip away”. It is instead something that flows though subjects in a community. Power is not possessed by a dominant agent, nor located in that agent’s relations to those dominated, but is instead distributed throughout complex social net­works.”

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

Could you elaborate on that point a bit more?

I think we have to make sure that our structure of becoming is truly self-reflexive.
— Joshs

I agree, but why ? What drives us this way ? Is it connected to the causi sui project ? the "thus-I-willed-it" project ? the nobody's fool project ? the history-as-a-nightmare-from-which-I'm-trying-to-awake project ? — green flag

What drives us this way. As opposed to being driven any other way. An arbitrary foundation. The preferring of one drive, desire , willed outcome over all the alternatives. I am nobody’s fool because I have chose truth over falsity, the good over the bad, the visible over the invisible, the dialectical unity that overcomes lack and negation.

The idea that we are driven in just ‘this way’ by the needs of a proper metaphysical grounding results from interpreting self-reflexivity as subjective idealism , the endless returning to itself of an arbitrary meaning, an arbitrary qualitative content (the good, the true, the self-identical, the unified) . What I had in mind was the self-reflexivity of becoming as difference rather than identity. What returns to itself is always an utterly new and different meaning. There is nothing evolutionary or cumulative in this self-reflexive unfolding, no aim or goal. The self is remade in every repetition.

Your starting point seems to be the autonomous individual
subject, who decides from their own vantage of free will what to agree or disagree with. But aren’t most of our agreements and disagreements features of shared conventions and norms of thinking that bind us together within the communities that we are immersed in? Note that the political polarization you refer to pits one community against another, rather than isolated individuals. One conclusion we can perhaps reach is that individuation in never absolute. Even in our polarized times there is some basis for partial mutual understanding, given the multiple threads of economic and cultural interdependence among subgroups.

Just as we don’t want to separate person and world, neither should we separate valuing from doing.
— Jamal

I guess I just think that values come first. Values tell us what we need and want. Based on that, we go and do stuff. — T Clark

So far in this discussion, whether it is considered as more primordial than or secondary to objective aspects of the world, value has been treated independently of fact. Talk about the value of money or paintings is consideration of value in strictly quantitative terms, while ignoring or keeping constant the qualitative meaning of what it is that goes up or down in price. Banno distinguishes between the value of a shelter in terms of our attitudes toward it, our needs and desires , and the objective existence of the roof.
But what is a roof? Doesn’t it depend on our account or stance towards it? If we are photographing or drawing it for artistic purposes, what the roof is will be a function of what we are creating in the experience of it. Isnt the roof something else when we shift from an engineering to an aesthetic to a climbing stance? Aren’t all of those accounts and stances themselves values? And if so , is there any meaning , any perceptual experience of any aspect of the world which is not fundamentally valuative in the sense of representing a constructed , goal oriented point of view?

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

I suppose the following, in which Nietzsche equate eternal return with will to power, is more consistent with the direction of those readings:

And do you know what 'the world' is to me? Shall I show you it in my mirror? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a fixed, iron quantity of force which grows neither larger nor smaller, which doesn't exhaust but only transforms itself, as a whole unchanging in size, an economy without expenditure and losses, but equally without increase, without income, enclosed by 'nothingness' as by a boundary, not something blurred, squandered, not something infinitely extended; instead, as a determinate force set into a determinate space, and not into a space that is anywhere 'empty' but as force everywhere, as a play of forces and force-waves simultaneously one and 'many', accumulating here while diminishing there, an ocean of forces storming and flooding within themselves, eternally changing, eternally rushing back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms, shooting out from the simplest into the most multifarious, from the stillest, coldest, most rigid into the most fiery, wild, self-contradictory, and then coming home from abundance to simplicity, from the play of contradiction back to the pleasure of harmony, affirming itself even in this sameness of its courses and years, blessing itself as what must eternally return, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no surfeit, no fatigue - this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery world of dual delights, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, unless there is a goal in the happiness of the circle, without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself - do you want a name for this world? A solution to all its riddles? A light for you too, for you, the most secret, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly? - This world is the will to power - and nothing besides! And you yourselves too are this will to power - and nothing besides!” (Writings from the Late Notebooks, 38[12])