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])

There 'must' be some limiting of play, some center. The game is often enough seeing just how little we need in that center. What's the minimum we can get away with ? But if we claim to destroy the center or the universal vantage point (or whatever plays the Role), then we've sacrificed exactly the leverage that such a claim needs in order to be taken seriously. — green flag

Yes indeed. That is the tricky part. So if we make time and becoming the irreducible ‘center’ and ground, how do we do it in a way that doesn’t end up allowing static universals to slip back in? I think we have to make sure that our structure of becoming is truly self-reflexive. If Hegelian dialectics attempts to undergird the becoming of history via a schematics which organizes evolution but doesnt itself change its nature over the course of historical becoming, then it doesn’t seem to be truly self-reflexive.
If instead we focus of the structure of becoming that is common to each moment of time, the way that the present anticipates beyond itself while retaining the just past moment, and how via this synthetic structure , we constitute a world of objects and people, we have a phenomenological method which never has to stray from this thick ‘here and now’ in order to talk about historical becoming.

I just want to point out that you are criticizing my theory that theory is directed toward greater and greater coherence in terms of its supposed incoherence. You also invoke strong thinkers with which my own theory 'ought' to cohere. (I'd define a strong thinker in terms of that norm, or as one whose work deserves being woven into the story the storyteller tells about itself.) — green flag

This is the familiar anti-pomo argument. As Derrida put it “Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly?”

The answer is that points of view can cohere more or less closely relative to local, contingent normative contexts, but these contexts themselves are always changing, and with them the criteria of coherence , truth, etc. One cannot appeal, as dialectics does, to a criterion of coherence that transcends and grounds all contingent historical contexts.

If all that will happen has happened before over and over what is the starting and end point of what happens?

Between the two roads is the gateway "this moment". But it is always this moment. This moment is neither the past or the future, and so in what sense is there a return? — Fooloso4

It’s interesting that almost all ‘postmodern’ readings of eternal return depict it as the return of the same absolutely new difference, rather than the literal return of the same experience. The return is each time a new throw of the dice.

“When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances.” (Deleuze)

There is a return because there is never just this moment in isolation . Simultaneous with the appearance of the ‘now’ is the passing away of the former ‘now’.

Big picture, we can understand the sequence of philosophers as spirit/'software' becoming more and more aware of itself, making its nature more explicit, thereby increasing its distance from itself and its 'turning radius.' This might be described as communal self-knowledge — green flag

I’m getting hints of a complexity theory, dynamical
systems-type model here. I do think one can draw all
sorts of parallels between Hegelian dialectic and such models. But if one agrees with Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault , Deleuze and other pomo types that the past arrives already changed by the present that occurs into it , these realist models become incoherent. It no longer makes sense to build structures that progressively unify themselves as ‘better and better’ , ‘closer and ‘closer’, ‘more and more aware’. These substitutes for god simply reinstantiate theology in a different form.

Joshs
I'm not sure we should trust Heidegger when it comes to Kierkegaard. I'm reading K's journals at the moment and the strong influence is clear. As I mentioned above, Heidegger himself seems influenced by Hegel, even if he rips out this or that module, for which he indeed deserves credit. — green flag

In one sense, all poststructuralist and phenomenological thinking is indebted to Hegel and shows his influence, thanks in part to Kojeve’s interpretation of him. The question is how Hegel’s thinking, even as it influences their work, is critiqued and transformed by writers like Heidegger.
I don’t think it’s a question of ripping out, in isolated fashion, this or that particular component of Hegelian thought, but of a wholesale revision of its grounding presuppositions. What do you think is preserved of the Hegelian dialectic in Heidegger ( or Nietzsche, for that matter)? Why has the dialectic become a dirty word for postmodern readings of Nietzsche?
You can always hold onto a Kierkegaardian interpretation of Heidegger by sticking with Dreyfus , Sheehan or any of the other theologically oriented readers of him. But many have rejected those readings.

Husserlian strive for intuiting the subject matter itself behind or under the existing conventional disourse is strong influence here — waarala

Yes, Heidegger has not abandoned the Husserlian epoche

Various flavours of nihilism. Ought to inspire one to seek mokṣa — Wayfarer

Moksa is a classic form of nihilism in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. “For Nietzsche nihilism is not in any way simply a phenomenon of decay; rather nihilism is, as the fundamental event of Western history, simultaneously and above all the intrinsic law of that history.”(Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche)

With his phenomenological approach Heidegger's aim is to treat this "life context", as ontology of "Dasein", more systematically and strictly than Dilthey . Heidegger's Kierkegaardian existentialism — waarala

I don’t see Heidegger as a Kierkegaardian existentialist. His philosophy moved quite a distance from Kierkegaard, despite the surface similarities.

In Being and Time he says “In the nineteenth century S. Kierkegaard explicitly grasped and thought through the problem of existence as existentiell in a penetrating way. But the existential problematic is so foreign to him that in an ontological regard he is completely under the influence of Hegel and his view of ancient philosophy.”

In What is Called Thinking, Heidegger writes: “By way of Hegelian metaphysics, Kierkegaard remains everywhere philosophically entangled, on the one hand in a dogmatic Aristotelianism that is completely on a par with medieval scholasticism, and on the other in the subjectivity of German Idealism.” In 1958 he writes: “Marx and Kierkegaard are the greatest of Hegelians.”

As far as Heidegger’s relation to Dilthey, he moves beyond the latter’s historical structuralism by freeing history from the relativity and skepticism of Dilthey’s project.

Language isnt the sedimented past, it is the transformation of this past in the disclosure of the world.
— Joshs

I'd say it's both sediment and transformative disclosure. See page 270, for instance, of the lecture version of The Concept of Time, which can be summarized as "the Anyone has in idle talk its true form of being." And "what one [the Anyone] says is really what controls the various possibilities of the being of Dasein — green flag

Idle talk doesn’t illustrate the sedimented nature of language, as if we directly introject verbal meanings from the culture. On the contrary, idle talk is a failure of meaning, its impoverishment. For Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance.

In that same section of Concept of Time you mentioned , Heidegger says “What is talked about in idle talk is meant only in an indeterminate emptiness, which is why discourse about it is disoriented.”

Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.

“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”

“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. “ “ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”

the medium, language, is already there, as a kind of inescapable presupposition. This is one of my favorite themes in Heidegger. This inherited medium is the sediment of the living thought of previous generations. We are thrown into ways of thinking, a cage of concepts that can only be question from within, using those very concepts — green flag

I wouldnt say that Heidegger considered language as a mere medium, tool or presupposition that intermediates between thought and expression. What we are thrown into isn’t already packaged concepts, but language that reveals itself anew, that remakes its past in our ‘use’ of it. Language isnt the sedimented past, it is the transformation of this past in the disclosure of the world.

“Since long ago, that which is present has been regarded as what is.”
— Joshs

Who are you quoting and from where? It is always helpful to discuss things in context. — Fooloso4

That’s Heidegger in What is Thinking.

“To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will.”
— Joshs

I assume you are quoting Heidegger. The question is: is this true? Does modern metaphysics even address the Being of beings? What, for example, does Hegel say about will that can be regarded as meaning the Being of beings? — Fooloso4

Yes, that’s Heidegger again from WIT. The Being of beings is the question of the essence or ground of beings. We can find attempts to answer the question of the ground of all that is by all the major philosophers. What unites all these attempts as metaphysical is their defining of this ultimate ground as some sort of abiding presence.

Will to power is a force. It is not a being that resides in beings — Fooloso4

For Heidegger, will to power, whether you want to call it a force , value-positing or that which makes beings possible, is that which persists as presence.

“Since long ago, that which is present has been regarded as what is.” “To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will.”

In other words , for modern metaphysics, including Nietzsche’s will to power, will is that which is present to itself as what is.

“Since in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing "now."
“Among the long established predicates of primal being are "eternity and independence of time. Eternal will does not mean only a will that lasts eternally: it says that will is primal being only when it is eternal as will….The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.”

Thinking Being as eternal return is not to think the Being of the eternal return.

He says "as time" not in time.

The eternal return is not in time, what is in time is what eternally returns. — Fooloso4

That’s true. What is in time is what recurs in the eternal return. Only because Nietzsche thinks of time in terms of the traditional metaphysical notion of ‘in-timeless’, the sequence of present nows, can he posit the eternal return as the endless presence ( Being) of the willing of itself.

“…the answer Aristotle gave to the question of the
essential nature of time still governs Nietzsche's idea of
time. What is the situation in regard to time? In being,
present in time at the given moment is only that narrow
ridge of the momentary fugitive "now," rising out of the
"not yet now'' and falling away into the "no longer now."

. The will to power and the eternal return are not beings, but that through which and by which what comes to be comes to be — Fooloso4

They are still beings in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. Will to power is a value-positing being. The Being of the eternal return is ‘in time’ rather than temporal in Heidegger’s sense.

. Heidegger combines an insightful and penetrating commentary with a presentation of earlier thinkers that is as much a misrepresentation as it is a re-presentation. Take his claim that Plato and Aristotle conceive Being as ousia (presence). — Fooloso4

He’s far from the only contemporary philosopher who believes Plato led Western thinking on the path of truth as objective representation.

Heidegger has to have Nietzsche's metaphysics (or the latest development of metaphysics) here in mind, he never referred to Aristotle or Hegel as nihilists. — waarala

In ‘The Word of Nietzsche’, Heidegger says that the thinking of Being as a value is what characterizes Western metaphysics from Aristotle through Nietzsche.

“Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker preserves a closeness to Aristotle.

“…if the thinking that thinks everything in terms of values is
nihilism when thought in relation to Being itself, then even
Nietzsche's own experience of nihilism, i.e., that it is the devalu­ing of the highest values, is after all a nihilistic one.”

Heidegger of BT agreed with Kant that we can't avoid metaphysics. Human beings or their thinking/world view is inescapably metaphysical. What is required is a new, critical metaphysics — waarala

I like the way the I.E.P. explains Heidegger’s relation to metaphysics:

“Metaphysics cannot be rejected, canceled or denied, but it can be overcome by demonstrating its nihilism. In Heidegger’s use of the term, “nihilism” has a very specific meaning. It refers to the forgetfulness of being. What remains unquestioned and forgotten in metaphysics is Being; hence, it is nihilistic.”

Coming outside of philosophy, I find the notion of being fairly uninteresting. No doubt there is rigorous and serious scholarship behind Heidegger's work, but it often sounds like high end bong talk — Tom Storm

Given your involvement with psychotherapy, you may be interested in how Heidegger’s work is being applied in cognitive approaches to affectivity. There is no contemporary philosopher who has delved into the nature of affect, feeling, mood and emotion more deeply than Heidegger. Check out this paper from Matthew Ratcliffe:

https://www.academia.edu/458222/Heideggers_Attunement_and_the_Neuropsychology_of_Emotion

or this:

https://www.academia.edu/458309/Why_Mood_Matters

↪Tom Storm

Heidegger's influence on progressive theology is strong. Tillich and God as the ground of being is an obvious example.

Hart's "surprise" seems contrived. — Fooloso4

Heidegger’s influence on atheists has been equally strong, which has led to constant battles between theological and atheistic interpretations of his work. Concerning Hart’s surprise that there is anything at all, it is echoed by Heidegger in What is Metaphysics. We must allow ourselves to be surprised and astonished by beings.

“Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. For this insertion it is of decisive importance, first, that we allow space for beings as a whole; second, that we release ourselves into the nothing, which is to say, that we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which he is wont to go cringing; and finally, that we let the sweep of our suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing.”(WIM)

“Transposed into the possible, man must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.” (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)

↪Janus
I don't understand what Heidegger means by going beyond Metaphysics — Paine

Heidegger explicates the metaphysics of our understanding of Being or metaphysics of Dasein/existence (first level) and within which the temporal character of metaphysics as such becomes visible i.e. the critique of former trad. metaphysics becomes possible (second level). I think this, as a rough exposition, is the very basic framework of Heidegger's philosophy — waarala

There are those, such as Derrida, who argued that Heidegger hadn’t managed to go beyond traditional metaphysics with his approach, but Heidegger himself believed that what he was doing with his fundamental ontology no longer fell within the category of traditional metaphysics but instead inquired into the very ground of metaphysics itself. In What is Thinking, he wrote:

“… all metaphysics leaves something essential unthought: its own ground and foundation. This is the ground on which we have to say that we are not yet truly thinking as long as we think only metaphysically.
The question *Being and Time" points to what is unthought in all metaphysics. Metaphysics consists of this unthought matter; what is unthought in metaphysics is therefore not a defect of metaphysics. Still less may we declare metaphysics to be false, or even reject it as a wrong turn, a mistake, on the grounds that it rests upon this unthought matter.”

My evidence is the above Heidegger quote. Paraphrasing him, he says: Nietzsche thinks and meditates on Being, that is, on will to power as eternal recurrence. So, by my understanding, Being as will to power as eternal recurrence = the now that bends back into itself.

To me this sounds like a description of a being, a reflexive being. And, moreover, this particular being is time — ucarr

That is exactly why Heidegger argues that Nietzsche’s thinking of Being remains within metaphysics. The tradition has always treated being as a persisting presence.

Heidegger isn’t silent on the question of the good.
— Joshs

What does he say? — Fooloso4

In BT there is a distinction made between authentic and inauthentic modes of thinking. When we are in the inauthentic mode , we always have in front of us differentiations between what is more or less fitting or appropriate , what is more or less intelligible, more or less workable, more or less true, more or less familiar. But these distinctions take place in reference to a frame of intelligibility that is ultimately oppressive and conformist, leading to the justification of violence in pursuit of the ethical status quo. Only on those occasions when we think authentically are we able to replace the frame as a whole with a new ground. The ethical good , then, is aligned with keeping this process of creative reframing in motion and not getting stuck in the various forms of universalization (sovereignty, representation, the ‘good will’), that typify most ethical discourses.

we need to take our noses out of the book and consider what it means to be in the world with others on the level of our everyday experience of being with others, how we and others treat each other. What does it mean to "hearken to Being"? Isn't the question of the good of essential importance with regard to what will happen? Isn't it our responsibility to say yes or no? Why is Heidegger silent on this? — Fooloso4

Heidegger isn’t silent on the question of the good. On the contrary, he is giving us a way to think differently about the justification and grounding of ethical decision-making. But in order to understand this we need to take our noses out of Enlightenment -era books on ethics and ask ourselves how we might think pragmatically, contextually about the good rather than trying to essentialize and universalize it beyond the contingency of the actual relations and situations we find ourselves in.

Heidegger’s refusal to adopt a standpoint of epistemic or po­litical sovereignty does not disable our capacities to reason, to crit­icize or justify statements or actions in ways that are not arbitrary or “ungrounded”.

As Foucault writes, “political criticism is not arbitrary if it can be historically situated as an intelligible response to specific institutions and practices: The theoretical and practical experience that we have of our [historical] limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again. But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency.
Rather, it means that such work must always be reflective about its historical limits and experimental in spirit.”

Joseph Rouse says that Robert Brandom joins Foucault and Heidegger in “rejecting a standpoint of sovereignty outside of ongoing contested practices of reasoning from which to assess their outcome:

Brandom writes:

“Sorting out who should be counted as correct, whose claims and applications of concepts should be treated as authoritative, is a messy retail business of assessing the comparative authority of competing evidential and inferential claims. ... That issue is adjudicated differently from different points of view, and although these are not all of equal worth, there is no bird’s-eye view above the fray of competing claims from which those that deserve to prevail
can be identified, nor from which even necessary and sufficient conditions for such deserts can be formulated. The status of any such principles as pro­bative is always itself at issue in the same way as the status of any particular
factual claim.”

It is not simply a matter of his character, or attitude, as if it just personal. It is not just a matter of how poorly Heidegger treated his Jewish students.

Heidegger's understanding of history is guided by notions of providence, fate, and destiny: — Fooloso4

Yes it is. The title of the book Being and Time expresses this. First , Being is linked with Dasein , the being there of the human being. To be a dasein is to already be in the midst of being with others in a world.Destiny is always going to be the destiny of a people rather than an individual.

“Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with” “Being-with existentially determines Da-sein even when an other is not factically present and perceived. The being-alone of Da-sein, too, is being-with in the world. The other can be lacking only in and for a being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, its possibility is a proof for the latter.” When one feels alone in a crowd, “Their Mitda-sein is encountered in the mode of indifference and being alien. Lacking and "being away" are modes of Mitda-sein...[Being-with-others]”. (Being and Time, p.113.” “…an "innerworldly" being has being-in-the-world in
such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its "destiny" with the being of those beings which it encounters within its own world.”

Second, Time for Heidegger always comes from the future.

“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.” “ The existence of the Moment temporalizes itself as fatefully whole…” (BT)

So destiny and fate for Heidegger are presupposed by his understand of Dasein and Temporality. The Nazi dog whistles you’re looking for in Heidegger’s texts, if they are to be found, are in places where he particularizes the German volk as the worthy inheritors of the Greek heritage of philosophical thought, not in Being and Time , which can just as easily point to the the destiny and fate of a communist or liberal democratic volk as to a fascist one.

Orienting towards language mean orienting towards "average meanings" that every one understands. Within "they" is discussed about "tables" etc and every one already understands what table is. Functional communication means that every one is "they". There has to be always common ground for the understanding and communication. However, the more this "commonness" itself is pursued the more the discussion about the matter itself becomes "mere" conversation or conventional behavior. Normally, in our every day understanding the intentions remain more or less empty i.e. we are orienting towards vague indications. — waarala

Good points. In What is Thinking, Heidegger says that at first we tend to orient ourselves to what words seem to be, mere expressions of pre-existing thoughts. This misapprehension leads to the commonness of everyday communication.

“Words are not terms, and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop a content that is there. Words are wellsprings that are found and dug up in the telling, well-springs that must be found and dug up again and again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected. If we do not go to the spring again and again, the buckets and kegs stay empty, or their content stays stale. To pay heed to what the words say is different in essence from what it first seems to be, a mere preoccupation with terms. Besides, to pay heed to what the words say is particularly difficult for us moderns, because we find it hard to detach ourselves from the "at first"" of what is common; and if we succeed for once, we relapse all too easily.”

What a word first seems to be “satisfies the demands of common speech in usual communication. Such communication does not want to lose time tarrying over the sense of individual words. Instead, words are constantly thrown around on the cheap, and in the process are worn out. There is a curious advantage in that. With a worn-out language everybody can talk about everything.”

But when you have a guy who influenced SO many philosophers, of different strands too, from Sartre to Marleau-Ponty, Dreyfus to Gadamer, Rorty to Foucault, Arendt to Zizek, then I'm sorry, there is interesting material in (at least) some of his works. For me, Being and Time is quite special. — Manuel

It’s easier to dismiss his entire ouvre as a colossally irrelevant and dangerous “anti-modernist, pre/ir-rationalist ("blood"), agrarian ("soil"), totalizing & oracular” polemic if you dont relate to any of the names mentioned above.

Thank you. That's what I was wondering. My understanding is that Dreyfus' reading is now considered somewhat limited, is that your view? Would you class him as a conservative? — Tom Storm

Yes, Dreyfus’ approach was linked to his interest in Kierkegaard. He founded what became known as the West Coast school of Heidegger interpretation, which exerted a strong influence on readings of Heidegger in English-speaking countries for many years, but is no longer the dominant approach.

As an aside, is there any particular reason to use poststructuralist over postmodern? Is it the role of language based theory over the broader philosophical exigencies (of the latter)? — Tom Storm

One reason to do so is that, like relativism , the meaning of postmodernism is hard to pin down. Poststructuralism at least points one in the direction of those philosophers who were influenced by structuralism in linguistics and anthropology, as well as phenomenology. Poststructuralists
don’t reject structuralism, they are concerned with the genesis of structures, how to link structure and genesis.

↪Joshs Is post modernism a critical aspect in obtaining a better reading of Heidegger? — Tom Storm

I suppose it depends on who you put in the postmodern camp. On the conservative side, there are those who read him in close proximity to Kierkegaard , Levinas and Wittgenstein. Some associate him with critical theory types like Adorno, and then there are the poststructuralist readings which I favor ( Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida).

You can certainly read it that way. The interesting question, at least for me, is whether you have to. You can also read it as something like "those with whom you have a sense of community", "those you stand in assumed relation with". — fdrake

Not without profoundly distorting the sense of this line of thought in BT. There are other writings of Heidegger where he specifically singles out the German volk, but this in not at all the point of these passages in BT. The relation between my Dasein and other Daseins here has nothing to do with choosing one group over another, but of how the intelligibility and sense of my engagement with the world moment to moment is guided by a pre-existing context of relevance.

Heidegger is using the terms 'they', 'those', and 'others' as terms of inclusion rather than exclusion.

If we look at The Self-Assertion of the German University address from a few years after the publication of BT I think it is clear who it is that is being included and excluded. — Fooloso4

The point he is making in BT concerns the fact that who we are as Da Seins is a function of our dealings with the things of our world. Furthermore , all of the objects we deal with in our world get their sense from our actual pragmatic use of them, and this use includes other people with and for whom we are using these objects. Thus, who we are does not come before our dealings with things and other daseins. Rather, we are in the world with others in a fundamental way before we are simply who we are part from others. The solipsist self is a derivative form of being with others. This runs complete counter to your analysis of the relevant passages in terms of our choosing one group of others for inclusion over another group. Being with others as he means it here is not the product of a choice.

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

The ruler, that is, the designated unity of knower, creator, and lover, is in his own proper grounds altogether an other. — ibid. page 127

Do you mean that Heidegger is positing the overman as agency? For Heidegger the overman is a willing, and even though the will for Nietzsche is a complex system of drives it draws from the tradition the notion of a being present at hand , and this notion is inextricable from a metaphysical notion of time. Heidegger claims in What is Thinking that Nietzsche defines the Being of beings as Will to Power. He says that Nietzsche locates revenge as motivated by revulsion against the passing away of time.

“The revulsion arising in the will is then the will against everything that passes-everything, that is, which comes to be out of a coming-to-be, and endures. Hence the will is the sphere of representational ideas which basically pursue and set upon everything that comes and goes and exists, in order to depose, reduce it in its stature and ultimately decompose it. This revulsion within the will itself, according to Nietzsche, is the essential nature of revenge.
"This, yes, this alone is revenge itself : the will's revulsion against time and its It was'." (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On Deliverance)

The bridge to the overman leads to the deliverance from revenge, because the overman frees itself from time.

“…will is primal being only when it is eternal as will. And it is that when, as will, it eternally wills the eternity of willing. The will that is eternal in this sense no longer follows and depends on the temporal in what it wills, or in its willing. It is independent of time. And so it can no longer be affronted by time.”

The important point for Heidegger is that Nietzsche conceives time metaphysically as a succession of punctual
‘nows’.

“This passing away is conceived more precisely as the successive flowing away of the "now" out of the "not yet now" into the "no longer now."… Time persists, consists in passing. It is, in that it constantly is not. This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of time' which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West…. in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing "now."

“The will is delivered from revulsion when it wills the constant recurrence of the same. Then the will wills the eternity of what is willed. The will wills its own eternity. Will is primal being. The highest product of primal being is eternity. The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.”

Heidegger's discussion of others in BT reads differently once one is aware of Heidegger's antisemitism:

To avoid this misunderstanding we must notice in what sense we are talking about 'the Others'. By 'Others' we do not mean everyone else but me-those over against whom the "I" stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself-those among whom one is too. This Being-there-too [Auch-dasein] with them does not have the ontological character of a Being-present at-hand-along-'with' them within a world. (BT 1.4, Macquarrie & Robinson translation, 154 German 118)

Who are those from whom he does and does not distinguish himself? It is the Volk (the Folk) from whom he does not distinguish himself. Or, as 180 Proof put it Blood and Soil — Fooloso4

One could just as well argue that one’s understanding of Heidegger’s antisemitism will be shaped by how one reads his passages on ‘Others’ in BT. In the passage you quoted, the others he does not distinguish himself from constitute the ‘there’ of the being-there of Dasein, its always already finding itself in a world of relevant concerns and useful things.

“The others who are "encountered" in the context of useful things in the surrounding world at hand are not somehow added on in thought to an initially merely objec­tively present thing, but these "things" are encountered from the world in which they are at hand for the others.”

Notorious Nazi Heidegger
(Whom Hitler had made all-a-quiver)
Tried hard to be hailed
Nazi-Plato, but failed
Then denied he had tried with great vigor — Ciceronianus

Ok, even though I disagree with you about the value of Heidi’s philosophy, I gotta give you credit for originality.

In 1969 Stanley Rosen published "Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay". It can be described as Plato against Heidegger. Rosen said:

"Nihilism is the concept of reason separated from the concept of the good." — Fooloso4

Rosen’s article can better be described as Plato against postmodernism. We already know you’re not a postmodernist so your support of Rosen’s formulation is no surprise.

Being and Time was published in 1927, well before Nazis came to power. There’s nothing in there about Nazism.
— Mikie
Only if you read the text out of context — 180 Proof

There are lots of contexts in which to read it. Those of us who find Heidegger to be many things, a Nazi in political affiliation, someone who expressed anti-semitic views, and one of the most brilliant philosophers of our era, have to reconcile ourselves with these contradictions.

hose lectures are spectacularly incorrect, turning Nietzsche's ideas into something a believer of 'Germanness' could embrace — Paine

I disagree. Heidegger’s main thesis about Nietzsche was that he was the last metaphysician, upholding a certain subjectivism in the guise of the will to eternal return. I thinks that’s spot-on.

You write as if handing in an undergraduate essay. I'm not particularly interested in how well you've understood the sources, I'm not grading you. I want to know why you find those positions persuasive (or not).

All you've given me above is that some sources say X and that you agree. I get nothing from that. — Isaac

Im interested in how well you’ve understood the sources. If you don’t follow them, I can make it a high school essay. I thought i explained why I find the enactivist sources persuasive, and why I prefer them to Prinz and Haidt. Do you agree with Prinz and Haidt or the enactivist critique of them ?

Philosophy was in a different place then. Philosophical treatises contained musings on what would now be called everything from fundamental physics, to psychology, to social science. Any 'Philosopher' engaged in such discourse nowadays is just mouthing off without bothering to do the actual research sufficient to back up their claims and so very few are taken seriously. That leaves modern Philosophy very much engaged with far more niche subject matter than the deeply political issues of church, state and the fundamental nature of society that they used to be expounding on. — Isaac

Speaking of just mouthing off without bothering to do the actual research sufficient to back up their claims, I recommend not just using Alan Sokal as your source, but actually reading Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and so many other modern contemporaries who never abandoned the larger questions of philosophy, and who have the rigor to back it up.

The worldviews we erect to organize our sense-making define the nature and boundaries of what is ethically permissible or unjust.
— Joshs

I think that's nonsense, and quite evidently so. Ethical judgements tend to involve quite different parts of the brain than might be involved in sense-making, and most precede any such activity by many years developmentally, and by many milliseconds in processing terms. I just don't see any evidence whatsoever to back up such a theory. — Isaac

Jesse Prinz argues that ethical values are derived from emotional dispositions that precede rational reflection. He divides the realm of subjective emotional sentiment from rational objectivity, supporting an “evaluatively neutral” empirical naturalism at the same time that he claims to maintain a relativistic stance on moral values. The resulting position is a mixture of objective rationalism and subjective relativism. According to Prinz, even though moral values are dependent on subjectively relative emotional dispositions, it is possible to determine one moral position as being objectively better than another on the basis of non-moral meta-empirical values such as consistency, universalizability and effects on well-being. Jonathan Haidt agrees with Prinz that ethical values originate in pre-cognitive emotional dispositions. For Haidt these inherited dispositions are present in all human beings but in different proportions. His moral foundations theory lists 5 innate moral foundations:

Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation

Enactivist approaches tend to deny the split between rational problem-solving and emotion-based ethical values that Prinz and Haidt support.

Matthew Ratcliffe writes:

“The inextricability of feeling and world-experience is not adequately acknowledged by philosophical approaches that impose, from the outset, a crisp distinction between bodily feeling and world-directed intentionality. Most philosophers admit that emotions incorporate both world-directedness and bodily feeling but they construe the two as separate ingredients. Some have argued that feelings can be world-directed. But, in so doing, they still retain the internal– external contrast and so fail, to some degree at least, to respect the relevant phenomenology. For example, Prinz (2004) argues that feelings can be about things other than the body but he adopts a non-phenomenological conception of intentionality and continues to assume that the phenomenology of feeling is internal in character.”

Evan Thompson says:

“At the neural level, brain systems traditionally seen as subserving separate functions of appraisal and emotion are inextricably interconnected. Hence ‘appraisal’ and ‘emotion’ cannot be mapped onto separate brain systems.” Pessoa (2008) provides extensive evidence from neuroscience that supports this view of the neural underpinnings of emotion and cognition. He presents three converging lines of evidence:

(1) brain regions previously viewed as ‘affective’ are also involved in cognition; (2) brain regions previously
viewed as ‘cognitive’ are also involved in emotion; and (3) the neural processes subserving
emotion and cognition are integrated and thus non-modular.”

”Sense-making comprises emotion as much as cognition. The enactive approach does not view cognition and emotion as separate systems, but treats them as thoroughly integrated at biological, psychological, and phenomenological levels. The spatial containment language of internal/external or inside/outside (which frames the internalist/externalist debate) is inappropriate and misleading for understanding the peculiar sort of relationality belonging to intentionality, the lived body, or
being-in-the-world. As Heidegger says, a living being is ‘in’ its world in a completely different sense from that of water being in a glass (Heidegger 1995, pp. 165–166)
“...appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psychological and neural
levels (see also Colombetti and Thompson 2005). At the psychological level, one is not a mere means to the other (as in the idea that an appraisal is a means to the having of an emotion, and vice-versa); rather, they form an integrated and self-organizing emotion-appraisal state, an ‘emotional interpretation.’(Thompson 2009)

The point is that sense-making only makes ‘sense’ in relation to an overarching valuative-affective ethical scheme, which is inextricably rational and affective. This is as true of scientific metatheory as it is of specifically labeled ethical stances. One could say its rationality is made intelligible in the way it matters , is significant , is relevant to the pragmatic purposes of the individual. If a particular scientific experiment is deemed unethical, the system of ethical values that is being applied to make this determination is already inextricably intertwined with the metatheorerical assumptions grounding the scientific theory within whose bounds the unethical experiment is generated.

Power doesn’t stand outside of knowledge as a self-contained distorting influence on it. Rather, differential forces comprise the very structure of knowledge.

Big question: what does the following look like in action -
Progress in cultural problem solving is about anticipating the actions and motives of others (and ourselves) in ways that transcend concepts like evil or selfish intent. — Tom Storm

I’m going to be lazy and use my reply to Moliere:

Are there Sadists or are there people who cause pain in others on the basis of a diverse variety of motives that we ignore when we slap the label of sadist on them? Do you remember when you were a kid there were a few kids who enjoyed torturing animals? Do you remember anything else about them, like what their family lives were like, whether they seemed to harbor a lot of anger towards the world, for instance? That is an example of a motive the label of sadist hides from view. When we believe we have been unfairly treated by those closest to us, we can manifest it as anger against the world. We believe the world has treated us badly and it deserves to suffer. We justify our actions as making things right. Our ‘sadism’ isn’t so much an enjoyment of the pain we inflict as the satisfaction we get from correcting an imbalance in the cosmos.