I'm afraid I do believe there is something transcendental about our being here. Wittgenstein insisted such things are nonsense, but then, he wrote, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics." This, in 1929, the same year of his Lecture on Ethics, in which put ethics in the nonsense bin. What was he talking about? It was the "presence" of ethics as an absolute. He knew it all rested with ethics and aesthetics, and he was right, AND wrong: one could not speak what ethics is, what value is, but one can speak in its vicinity. this is what Marion does. And Eugen Fink and Michel Henry. — Constance

I take transcendence the way that Heidegger and Husserl do, not as a divine beyond this world but as an otherness immanent in being in the world.
But I think you’re on the right track putting Wittgenstein in the company of Henry, Levinas and Marion. He was a devoutly religious person even though he did not identify with organized forms of religious practice. That is why he admired Kierkegaard and St Augustine so much.

His biographer Ray Monk wrote:

“ “To Waismann and Schlick he repeated the general lines of his lecture on ethics: ethics is an attempt to say something that cannot be said, a running up against the limits of language. 'I think it' is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics - whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable.' On the hand, it is equally important to see that something was indicated by the inclination to talk nonsense. He could imagine, he said, what Heidegger, for example, means by anxiety and being (in such statements as: 'That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such'), and he sympathized too with Kierkegaard's talk of 'this unknown something with which the Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion'.
St Augustine, Heidegger, Kierkegaard - these are not names one expects to hear mentioned in conversations with the Vienna Circle - except as targets of abuse.”

What sense of “dualism” do you mean, and what are the blind spots you speak of? — Pfhorrest

This is my suggested route to transcending dualistic tendencies:

Rather than distinguishing between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’, recognize with Putnam, Rorty and others the inseparability of fact and value, description and prescription

Recognize that affectivity( the hedonic) is not separable from rationality but forms the core of intentional meaning.

Understand that both subjectivity and objectivity are constructed through intersubjective processes. Instead of the computer-based metaphor of the subjective agent receiving inputs from objective sense data and transforming this into behavioral output, see the organism-environment relation as a single system of of mutual transformation. Another way of saying this is that our propositions do not meet up with an independent nature but only with other propositions( ‘nature’ filtered though our purpose -driven interpretations of it).

But it is not pragmatic engagement all the way down. Sure, when you turn the key and the car doesn't start, you don't have an existential crisis, but turn quickly to alternatives that hover near by. But the problem of one's whole Being has no ready to hand. When there is distance between the intending agent and the world qua world, one stands apart from all possibilities, and they are suspended. — Constance

But there is no “problem of one’s whole being” as something outside of heedful circumspective relationality with one’s world for Heidegger , or a ‘whole being’ outside of noetic-noematic activity for Husserl. This only becomes a problem when you create an artificial “distance between the intending agent and the world qua world”. Only then does it appear that you “stand apart from all possibilities”, rather than always BEING IN particular possibilities.

This is a well articulated description of a dualist-based model of moral reasoning, replete with a separation of the affective-hedonic, the cognitive-rational and the conative aspects of human functioning, along with a split between the subjective and objective, and the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’.
The usual blind spots in making sense of human behavior are to be expected from such a traditional model.

The hammer is ready to hand, but when the head flies off the hammer, the nail is missed, something goes awry, the ready to hand yields to an openness as to what to do. — Constance

But even during the breakdown of the hammering, the being drawn to the broken hammer still belongs to and gets its sense from the totality of relevance of the pragmatic activity of hammering. So this openness is constrained by the larger purposes of which it is a part. And the successful and uncomplicated hammering activity itself is not devoid of freedom of decision. It is a more primordial engagement with things in the form of taking care of them. This engagement with the work rather than staring at the broken hammer represents a greater openness to the world via our pragmatic engagement with it.

On the matter of numbers, it looks like Wittgenstein is N/A. The meaning of numbers is confined to mathematics i.e. for a number, say 2, there are no other contexts in which 2 has a meaning. In short, the meaning of 2 isn't a use thing. — TheMadFool

“The concern with grammatical propositions was central to Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics because he wanted to show that the 'inexorability' of mathematics does not consist in certain knowledge of mathematical truths, but rather in the fact that mathematical propositions are grammatical. The certainty of'2 + 2 = 4' consists in the fact that we do not use it as a description but as a rule.” Ray Monk

Even if lucid dreaming may an exception , I like your idea that to know you’re in a particular state of mind requires a second order reflection from the vantage of another state of mind. Do we know we’re daydreaming, or remembering , or visualizing while we’re doing it? Not really, because we’re busy being immersed in the details belonging to that state of mind. We can pop in and out of these states of mind , and note that we have been daydreaming or remembering, but true issue isn’t relevant to what we are attending to while we’ re busy performing these states. I could be totally engrossed in a movie and forget that I’m watching a movie foe most the time that I’m watching it.

It’s intrinsic to the style of experiencing of dreams that they are non self-reflective, so asking someone if they know when they are dreaming is kind of like asking them if they tend to be self-reflective when they are involved in non-reflective type of thinking. Dreaming is like being totally engrossed in a very long movie. Dreaming is about the opposite style of thinking from carefulself-reflection; it’s about impressionistic, sketchy , feeling-based visceral being. By contrast, asking me if I know whether I’m awake is akin to asking me if I can now perform a series of thoroughgoing acts of self-reflection.

Only the awake can declare the dream to have been a dream. — unenlightened

Except I suppose in the case of lucid dreaming , where one supposedly is aware that one is dreaming.

Webmd:

“ Lucid dreams are when you know that you're dreaming while you're asleep. You're aware that the events flashing through your brain aren't really happening. But the dream feels vivid and real. You may even be able to control how the action unfolds, as if you're directing a movie in your sleep.”

when I think, I can bring question to the thought (question, the piety of thought, says Heidegger), or when I simply observe the thought as it is being thought, and thereby, I no longer identify with the thought, but stand apart from it. — Constance

But Heidegger would never say that the ‘I’ stands apart from the thought , and neither would Husserl, so your transcendental ego is not the ego of phenomenology but of Kant.

But see Davidson's "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme" for an excellent critique of Kuhn — Banno

I in turn could direct you to Rorty for an excellent critique of Davidson, starting here: https://youtu.be/e6PitPJiN5c

I think Davidson wants to hold onto some remnant of empirical realism and so misreads Kuhn’s intent.
No one , including Derrida and Rorty , embraces the label of relativist because within cultural and scientific paradigms one can speak of right or wrong in a normative pragmatic sense, but not between. This complements Wittgenstein’s description of normativity operating within but not between language games.

In science you change the theory to match what you see in the world. You are able to triangulate your beliefs with mine and with the world around us. — Banno

Not according to Kuhn or cultural theories of science. You may change the theory ‘to march what you see in the world, but what you see i the world is already theory and thus value- laden, which makes science the cousin of ethics and politics. The world around us only appears to us through ideology.

That's quite right - no mechanism, no algorithm. you decide the truth of ethical propositions. — Banno

Sounds like the understanding of scientific theories.

think I was largely socialised to believe that suffering is wrong — Tom Storm

Sounds like a truism. Kind of like being socialized to believe that pain is unpleasant. You might say ‘of course I believe MY pain is unpleasant , but I may not necessarily believe someone else’s is unpleasant’, or at least. not unpleasant for me. Unless of course I identify with that other person. Hmm, perhaps the ability to relate to and empathize with the Other is the key to whether we believe their suffering is wrong. Is that empathy a matter of socialization, or is the ability to understand other persons
and groups from their own vantage and moral justifications more akin to the grasping g of a scientific paradigm? Or is the understanding of a scientific theory a matter of socialization?

You can't convey the subjective character of "how it looks/feels to me" in language (such that others can know, e.g., how red looks to you), so there's no point in trying. Does this make the concept of qualia useless? It apparently finds its use in philosophical discussions. — Luke

My first observation is that qualia is only useful
for certain philosophers, but it seems to me that for those philosophers most closely involved in the latest research in visual perception ( J.J.Gibson, Noe and O, Reagan) it is not a useful concept.

As far as conveying subjective experience in language, I’m i. the camp that esther than constituting some ineffable and mysterious content added to objective experience, the subjective ‘feel’ has to do with organizational aspects of experience that can and are languaged in some sense. For instance, do you know what color is? It’s a black shape either emerging out of
or receding into a dark background. You can demonstrate this yourself. Cut out a white cardboard circle, paint one half black , and then drawn a series of black lines following the curvature of the circle on either side of the disk emerging from the r black half. Then attach it to a fan and watch the appearance of red and blue.

This explains why red is a metaphor for anger and aggression, and blue represents calm and coldness.
Red is literally a shape popping out at us and blue is a shape receding from us, even as these are just feature of a motionless surface.
So our language, through its metaphors , is in fact describing organizational characteristics ( agrees or approach vs passive receding) of the supposedly ‘private’ feel of color. But is this any different situation than the communicability of affectivity in general? Are all affects moments of engagement with others?

I'm a bit surprised to see you agree here, Joshs.

Given that it makes no nevermind, why not just say that there isn't a how-the-colour-red-looks-to-Luke? — Banno

I was only agreeing that all supposed shared ’we’ experiences conceal a gap between my experience ce and your experience. I did t mean to
suggest that my experience of the color red is a persisting datum that can be returned to as
identical.

You can say all that publicly, like you just did. But I still don't know how the colour red looks to you. — Luke

I agree you don’t know how it looks to me, but if we are talking about the usefulness of the concept of qualia, the relevant question here is whether I know how it looks to me. That is, whether there is a such a thing as an interpretation and context-independent fact of privately felt sensation, such that when I say I know what red feels like to me, I can demonstrate for myself that it is the ‘same’ felt experience of red as the previous and the time before that. I adhere to constructivist , enactivist, phenomenological and Gibsonian ecological models of perception, that link private sensation to a self-organizing but constantly changing body-environment interaction. Sensations like color are always a new constructive achievement of the whole organism in interaction with its environment .

Maybe, but I'm sure you could pick out a red object if required. — Luke

Yes, and I’m sure I could spell the word ‘book’ when asked, but that doesn’t tell us very much about what the word means for me, how I’m using it, whether the color red is smooth or textured, whether it feels warm or hot or neutral, what shape or tone or saturation it appears within, whether it is still my favorite color. That I continue to recognize a word doesn’t say anything about how my sense of the pragmatic meaning of the word changes from context to context.

just because this character or quality "drops out of consideration as irrelevant" to the language game, this does not mean that there is no character or quality of how red looks to each of us. — Luke

Yes, but perception is itself a kind of ‘private’ language game. That is to say , what you want to call the felt sensation of red is not a stable primitive of experiencing but a bodily mediated interpretation. One can no more isolate a reproducible scenario of red that one can duplicate an expression of emotion. In both cases you have a complex interpretive activity that is context-dependent. How something looks or tastes in any instant of time cannot be separated from a larger whole of attitudes, perceptions and conceptions which are always transforming themselves. The upshot foe the OP is that you must reject the concept of qualia if you take embodied subjectivity seriously.

Merleau-Ponty had a problem with the concept of individual quale, which was that for him, the quale defined as the elementary unit of sensation is not really what perception is made of. One because perception is holistic, it goes from the general to the particular, two because what really matters in perception is not the positive, objective, elementary color 'red' here or there in the picture but the differences and relationships between colors. — Olivier5

He would have had a problem with the concept of plural qualia too. You’re right that for Merleau-Ponty what counts in perception is differences and relationships between colors , but he would also argue that colors , and all other perceptions, only emerge as as expressions of the body’s actions in the world. Perception is interpretive all the way down, which means that the concept of qualia is no more coherent than that of sense data.

I just finished Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, which did much to clarify my reading of his Philosophical Investigations. Maybe someone on this forum familiar with Witt can confirm my contention that the whole way the issue of moral responsibility is being presented in the op in relation to the concepts of free will and determinism constitutes what he would call a confusion of language, and the issue as formulated is not one to be resolved but to be dissolved.

I meant Dasein. It can't fuck. It can't even fuck its wife! — fdrake

I think it fucks. But it doesnt do any embodied fucking. Heidegger’s only elaboration of the role of the body was in the zollikon seminars, where he talked about ‘bodying forth’. Unfortunately he didn’t live long enough to offer any courses on how to fuck that way.

Idiosyncrasy poses a problem for conventional accounts of meaning but also phenomenology based on a bodiless and morose every-man. The latter requires analysing the conceptual structure of "mental furniture" and its behaviour - like a logical psychology or anthropology - the former requires attending to individual intentions and states. Both projects get royally undermined by human heterogeneity in bodies and frames. — fdrake

I like your comparisons between Witt and Heidi.
Maybe you could explain this last point a bit better. I assume by ‘phenomenology based on a bodiless and morose every-man, you mean Das Man? If so, I read Das Man and idle talk not as a founding feature of Dasein but as one of its derivative modalities, and an inadequate one at that. Das man is a kind of illusion , a mistaken belief that one is talking about the same things, shares the same sense of meanings as others one is engaged with in the ‘language games ‘ of normative discourse. This illusion of being on the same page with others in discourse covers over the underlying particularity and individuality of personal understanding.

Heidegger's simplifications in an attempt to hue close to context are politically+religiously coloured and romantic, — fdrake

Could you say more about what you see as simplifications? As far as politics-religious inspiration , the imprint of an intense, devout religiosity is imbedded in Witt’s work.

One difference between them that is important to me is that while Witt was in thrall to Freudian theory, Heidegger effectively critiqued it. Also, implied in Hedeigger’s view of religious faith is his assimilation of Nietzsche’s critique of religion, which Witt was unable to grasp.

Heidegger makes a different between the ontic and the ontological and I do not see that difference. This duality emerges because Heidegger has some sort of primordial idea of Dasein who for itself has a world. First and foremost Dasein is a self relation. I think there is Dasein is created by the world in that our self understanding is not primordial but a product of our relation to the world and how this is conceptualised. There is no authenticity, there is no primordial relation, there is just a relation and there is acting and what not. — Tobias

For Heidegger the ontic-ontological difference is not the Kantian difference between things in themselves and
my presentation of them, which it sounds like you’re reading him as saying, but transit, a primordial between, which defines identity as relation to something other.
Dasein isn’t an ‘itself’ that happens to have a world. Dasein is not a ‘self-relation’ if you’re understanding that term as referring to a relation that can be in any way distinguished from , separate from , before or outside of relation to a world. For Heidegger self-relation means nothing other than relation to a world.
“That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between," in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other."(Identity and Difference.p.64)

“I think there is Dasein is created by the world in that our self understanding is not primordial but a product of our relation to the world.”

Our self understanding IS primordial because self IS nothing but relation to a world. But this doesn’t mean Dasein is ‘created’ by the world, and it doesnt mean the world is created by Dasein. It means Dasein is the in-between, not between an already present self and existing world but prior to either of these concepts.

Wittgenstein thought that...philosophy being particularly unmoored and thus occlusive. Philosophy as a dead, beached whale, mourn and then forget.

In contrast, Heidegger thought ...philosophy being particularly moored on ossified, unnoticed framing devices and thus occlusive. Philosophy as a still living, beached whale, and gotta save that whale. — fdrake

Put another way, both Witt and Heidegger thought traditional philosophy failed to understand meaning as emerging out of contexts of social engagement
Witt associated all philosophy with traditional
metaphysics and did not know how to articulate his thinking as a kind of post-metaphysical
philosophy, having been unable to learn from Nietzsche’s approach. Heidegger, on the other hand , claimed to locate a way of doing philosophy that moved beyond metaphysics.He may very well have located Witt’s work within a religious metaphysics akin to Kierkegaard.

In order to conflict, or to force, or any kind of violence, 'care' is presupposed. conflict and violence indicate that there is something that 'matters', that rejects me and that I feel something about. The world inescapably matters to me and that is why I might conflict with it. — Tobias

This sounds like you may be understanding care in a conventional sense. Tell me how you understand Heidegger’s notion of care in relation to his concept of temporality, because this ‘ equiprimordial’ relation between care, understanding, attunement and understanding is crucial to my treatment of ‘care’.

More specifically , the way the my ‘now’ projects my past into my future possibilities means that any ‘object’ in the world I experience is partially build out of my past. This is a crucial point , because it gives all my experiences the sense of a radical belonging to my past, at the same time that the ‘now’ contributes an element of absolute novelty. In this respect , Heidegger inherited Husserl’s formulation of the intentional act as a constitution built on a dimension similarity between previous history and what is encountered.

, Husserl's notion of the foreign must be understood in different terms than that of corporeal otherness. We have seen this difference manifested in the way that for Husserl I maintain an ongoing thread of subjective continuity within my participation in an intersubjective world. I want now to further explore the nature and philosophical justification for the internal integrity of the temporal stream of consciousness . My claim is that Husserl's articulation of the transcendentally reduced sphere of consciousness in terms (mineness, unitary, synthetic, continuous) that risk implying a solipsism closed off to the otherness of the world and history wasn't simply an unfortunate choice of terminology.

In Husserl there is a primordial motivational principle-anticipatory assimilation dominates the foreignness of the noematic object pole. We see the centrality of similarity manifest itself at all levels of constitution, in the subjective achievement of synthetic unities, analogical apperceptive pairing, associative relationality, correlations, harmonious fulfillments, subjective ‘mineness', variations, flowing multiplicities, congruities, nexuses, coherences, etc. Even in difference, negation, senselessness, irrationality, alienation there is no experience in consciousness that is not in an overarching way variation on a thematics (which are already assocative syntheses of variations on variations) for Husserl , a similarity-in-difference.
Now, it is true that Heidegger deconstructed Husserl’s notion of egoic consciousness, but his own work retains this idea of similarity in difference.

It is there also in Derrida’s interlocked concepts of ‘trace’, gramme and differance. The odd verbal construction ‘differance’ indicates
that for Derrida the irreducible primitive of experience, the trace, borrows from my immediate last in forming what differs from me. That is, any ‘object’ of my experience is parasitic in what it opposes itself
to. Therefore, my world cannot be something that ‘rejects’ me or conflicts with me except as
that rejection or conflict pre-supposes a more
fundamental belonging of what opposes itself
to me to my current concerns. It is only because I am already involved with something in a certain way and in relation to ongoing concerns that I can perceive it as conflicting or opposing or rejecting. So the
rejecting of me’ by an object I encounter , always takes place, is possible at all, only as a subordinate to a totality of relevance to which the ‘rejection’ belongs. Put differently , all the various ways in which what I experience affects me(surprising, rejecting, conflicting, agreeing) can do so only within a larger totality of relevance, Superodia to belong of what I encounter to my present understanding, which is why what I find conflictual is never the same as what you find conflictual.

Herein lies the problem I have with Heidegger. There is something like a 'true being with others', opposed to what, an untrue being with others? But if I am with others I am with others, there is no true or false. Just like Sorge, care, is not a self relation, it is a relation towards the other. that is what I mean with I as constituted by the world. It is not a self relation that lights a seinsverstehen, it is the other way around. I see that I care about things and realise that there is something like an I. — Tobias

It sounds like you’re situating an I over here and a world
over there and then putting them together, or choosing one as dominant over the other, the world as dominant over my self-reflexivity. But Heidegger isn’t starting from self and world in some kind of relation. Self-relation IS relation to world. What you need to do is look at the self that you have depicted and split it within itself. Split it so that instead of an entity or a reflexivity or a presence , it ‘is’ a change from past to
present, a differential. Forget about the ‘outside’ world that you think you know and see this world as already inherent in the split in the now. You’re starting from
presences ( Self and world ) and trying to create a difference from our of that binary. it you need to put difference BEFORE presencing.


Authentic being with others isn’t ‘true’ and
inauthentic ‘false’. Inauthentic being with
others is a derivative mode of mit-dasein, just as the present-to-hand is a derivative mode of
interpretation.

Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused 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.”

To say that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of
being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself, is to say that Dasein explicitly
experiences itself as a constituted self, introjecting norms from other selves , but this awareness
pre-supposes and is grounded in an implicit mineness.

Heidegger says average everydayness alienates Dasein from itself, but without Dasein’s therefore being merely conditioned by others.
“However, alienation cannot mean that Da-sein is factically torn away from itself....this alienation, which closes off to Da-sein its authenticity and possibility, even if only that of genuinely getting stranded, still does not surrender it to beings which it itself is not, but
forces it into its inauthenticity, into a possible kind of being of itself.”

Evidence that the heedful relevance and mineness of Care undergirds the normativity of average
everydayness, preventing it from being a mere introjection from world to self, come not only
from Heidegger’s treatment of idle talk and average everydayness, but also from his analysis of
the propositional statement. Here we see him using similar adjectives to describe what he calls an
‘extreme’ mode of present-to-handness : veiled, cut-off, levelled down.

In the present-to-hand propositional statement, “The as-structure of interpretation has undergone
a modification. The "as" no longer reaches out into a totality of relevance in its function of appropriating what is understood. It is cut off with regard to its possibilities of the articulation of referential relations of significance which constitute the character of the surrounding world.”

So the wider experience of a totality of relevance is that out of which something like a present-to- hand thing emerges. But it cuts itself off from , and thus conceals this contextual richness of significance and meaningfulness that it depends on and implies, and as a result it is impoverished of meaningful significance, intelligiblity, relevance. It is a ‘dwindling down’ relative to heedfully circumspective modes of experience.

Average everydayness of Das man and idle talk shares with the present to hand in general the features of being derivative modes of the ‘as’ structure of heedful circumspective significance, functioning as a contextually rich totality of relevance. They also share the feature of being a ‘dwindling down’ of that wider experience. Of central import here is that primary intersubjective models such as those of Gallagher and Merleau-Ponty and social constructionisms assume that, as Zahavi writes, “we take over from others (and make our own) a language, roles, attitudes and
norms” and that these culturally normed practices that we internalize represent forms of meaning no less robust in significance and relevance to our lives than those which we generate.

In contrast, for Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance. The publicness of Das Man and the present to handness of things are modes of Dasein representing a deprivation and trivialization of intelligibility, significance and relevance, and thus a reduction of meaningfulness. Dasein becomes alienated from itself not by being taken over by an outside but by encountering itself (its ownmost world of possibilities) as almost devoid of sense. Alienation as senselessness rather than internalization of an other.

Deviation is dependent on there being an established use. — Banno

I think that, instead, established or normative use is just an abstraction from individual ‘deviations’(interpretations). This is what Heidegger is arguing.

The Philosophical Investigations by any other name. It's even got the bit about engines running in idle and form-of-life. Practically indistinguishable. — StreetlightX

What would Witt make of Heidegger’s treating language interchange as idle talk and das man, as impoverished forms of Being’s self-understanding? Why does Gadamer say:

Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got
behind. Indeed, evenas he was developing the idea, his wasn't really talking about the other
at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for
granted. I must say that conscience — having a conscience — no, that wasn't terribly convincing.
"Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-
sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic
"being-interested-in-him."”(A Century of Philosophy. Hans-Georg Gadamer in Conversation
with Riccardo Dottori)

I don’t agree with Gadamer , but not because Heidegger is simply echoing Witt, it because Mitt-Dasein for Heidegger is a true being-with-others that is not simply a Witt-style sharing of language.

I do not get it Banno. Why the idea you need to know someone to appreciate his/her philosophy? — Tobias

Although I have to admit Witt’s profound but conventional religiosity through the 1930’s influences my reading of his work, and I contrast it with Heidegger’s complex
destabilizing of theology.

I... It seems he does not like the idea of the self being construed by the world in which it finds itself. He seems to hang on to some kernel of authenticity. Why cannot the self reflection and the relation to being not be established by the 'object' by a lack of a better word the world itself. I never understood what was won by the Heideggerian move to keep somekind of existential notion together with his beautiful analysis of enframing. No there is no authentic I, and no, there is no purely publically defined I. I am simply a unique constellation of forces through which other impulses (words, concepts) are iterated but never in exactly the same way. there is nothing authentic about it, just small 'corruptions' , which occur gradually. — Tobias

Very interesting. Let me address the way you characterize my experiencing of a world and see how it might differ from what I see Heidegger doing.


You talk about the self being construed by the world , Being as established by the object, my self as constellation of forces, corruptions.
So there is an interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. You perhaps would concur if I said these are just poles or aspects of an indissociable interaction between self and world.

But let me observe that the adjectives you use to describe this interaction defines the poles in a certain way. To be more specific, they flesh out the poles as inhering in a certain violence of polarization and arbitrariness. Corruption, force, impulse.( I would also add a host of other terms that various writers on intersubjectivity attribute to Being in the world, like introjection, conditioning , intersection of flows of power) These descriptors are intrinsic to how intersubjectivity creates and recreates subjects in many overlapping approaches in philosophy today ( Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology , social constructionism , post-structuralism , critical theory).

But let me now suggest that such terms of polarizing arbitrariness are only necessary because they assume as certain substantiality the the subjective and objective poles of experiencing a world. The has to be an element of resistantance and force-power implied in each pole in order for change to be a wrenching dislocation, a ‘corruption’.

But what if we give too much power, too much substance to these poles? What if,hidden within what we assume to be the irreducible pre-conditions for being in the world as a play of forces , there is a more intimate, more intricate because more insignificant and insubstantial binary at work in every moment of experiencing? This would be on the order of variations of variations rather than a colliding of impulses. These would be variations of variations with no originating subject or generating power.
Rather than ‘Heideggerian authenticity’ being an attempt to rescue the remnants of the idealist subject from its fragmentation, it would be the opposite , an attempt to show how, functioning beneath the abstractions of ‘fat’ power relations , there is a movement that is at the same time more incessant and radically self-transformational , and more seemingly self-consistent and integral. But this thematic integrity would have to be understood
as not the work of some ghost in the machine, as you and others accuse Heidegger of , the return of idealist solipsism, but the compete opposite. The ongoing ‘self-belonging ‘ of my experience would have to be understood as what is left of moment to moment experiencing when all the abstractive baggage of ‘forceful’ interactive polarity has new deconstructed.
The problem with a Wittgensteinian or Foucualtian model, then, is that it has not gone far enough to unravel idealist assumptions.

Well I dunno you just spat out an unsubstantiated one liner so I figured I'd be authorized to do the same.

Just so happens that I'm right. — StreetlightX

You are always right. And you know why? Because you’re a god.

Whereas Wittgenstein begins from intersubjectivity in his grounding of meaning
— Joshs

No he doesn't. — StreetlightX

Welll, you sure told me. Although I don’t know what you told me. It was more like a drive-by refuting. I know you want to get in on this. I can tell. Yeah, you want it , don’t you?

Congratulations on a most erudite article. You assume the primacy of the subjective but then seem to think you have demonstrated it. I was unable to follow you notion of embodiment. — Banno

Thanks for reading it. I kind of hate to use the term ‘subjective’ to describe what I’m after, and what Heidegger was after. I don’t see that there’s a subject anywhere in our approaches. Every single mention of subjective in Being and Time is in scare quotes for a reason. Dasein is ‘being there’, not a subjectivity. Yes, Heidegger uses terms like self and mineness, but these don’t refer to the relain between a subject and an objective world. All a ‘self’ is is a split , a hinge, a differential between memory, past, history on the one hand , and what is new, other, alien, on the other. This hinge or differential is the ‘now’ moment of experience. In the next moment it will be a changed history,past, memory that meets with a new otherness. Where do you find a subject here? There is no ‘me’ that stands behind or underneath or alongside or around this flow of changing nows. No homonculus or controller or spirit or categorical framer or mind. Nothing but a new past together with a new otherness forming an always new ‘now’ of experience. So why does Heidegger call this ‘mine’? Who or what is this ‘me’? It is nothing but the intimate and intricate way the new present occurs into a past which is changed by that present. It presents the ‘illusion’ of an ongoing flow of self-similarity. So ‘ self’ is nothing but an index of the relationality of one moment to the next of experience.

In a frivolous mood I pasted the first 1000-odd words of B&T and PI into prowritingaid.com — bongo fury

I wonder how Shakespeare and Joyce stack up. It would probably love Hemmingway.

Hopefully this link may give you a feel for how an increasing number of researchers on cognition and emotion are benefitting from Heidegger.

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

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290089652_Why_Mood_Matters

Wittgenstein's sympathies towards Heidegger demonstrate that he did not believe the most important types of meaning to be inter-subjectively decided. Only inter-subjective meaning is inter-subjectively decided. — sime

I know that there are many , often opposed readings of Witt. An example of what I would call a
conservative reading is that of Peter Hacker. At the other end of the spectrum are writers like Dreyfus, Lyotard, and Rorty. Where do you see yourself on this left-right continuum of Witt interpretations?
I want to add that there seems to be a converging consensus among philosophers and psychologists influenced by phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, social constructionism and poat-structuralisms like Foucault that intersubjectivity is the primary way that all personal meanings are shaped.

Not Spinoza, not Hume, not Kierkegaard, not Schopenhauer, not Nietzsche, not Zapffe, not Sartre, not Merleau-Ponty, not ... but Heidi?! C'mon. :roll: — 180 Proof

I said , AMONG the first. I would not include Spinoza, Hume or Schopenhauer among this group. They maintain a clear separation between what they call
emotion and what they consider as the rational, the intentional, the cognitive. If you’d like to summarize for me your understanding of how Spinoza integrates emotion and rational thought I’ll show you how it differs from Heidegger.


. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were directly influenced by Heidegger , but even so we don’t find affectivity, as Befindlichkeit , being give the central importance it has for Heidegger.

If you like - for Witti the within-person dynamic is either going to be pubic, and hence a part of the between-person dynamic; or private, and hence outside of the discussion.

What do you make of that? — Banno

I agree that this would be his argument. My response is that every moment my experience is public in the sense that it is exposed to an outside that changes its sense and meaning in a subtle but complete way which makes me other than what I am every new moment in time. but this ‘public for me’ is unique to my past history . It is not the same ‘public’ for you or anyone else . There can be no shared public , no joint action or ‘we’ , only , ‘my’ version of we and your version of we in each interchange.
There are two language games proceeding , from my ‘we’ and from your ‘we’. It is not that what I mean to say is not altered and influenced by your response. nBut that change in me, or I should say change OF me is a variation of my thematics and the change of you is a variation of your thematics. There is never a shared thematics, but ther can be enough similarity between your understanding and mine to make it appear as though the understanding is shared.

I know it’s hard to swallow but I want to to the paradox of my referring to my moment to moment experience as at the same time resistant to shared normativity of language games and not a subjectivity or enclosure. I am not resistant to the ‘we’ because i am an interiority , but because I am already a a fully social unfolding , and the ‘weness’ of language games is an abstraction derived from that primary sociality.

Here’s a paper I wrote about this:


https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social — Joshs

what little of it that I can comprehend is misguided: "There’s no room for each participant to form slightly different interpretations of the same rules for everyone...". — Banno

Couldnt you humor me and say it’s ‘differently guided’?
Would probably be helpful if you elaborated on why it’s misguided, although I know the rhetoric well: Witt and olp teach us that such formulations of language as ‘personal interpretation’ are problematic.
If you think the above is obscure you’ll love this:

“let's not misunderstand what I mean by making this distinction between a WITHIN-person and a BETWEEN-person dynamic. The within-person dynamic is already a between in that it is a thoroughgoing exposure to an outside, an alterity, an otherness. For Heidegger, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located publically as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I' or interpersonal ‘we', there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective and objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies, between-person conditionings or public language games.”

Imagine if all your experiences amounted to variations on a thematics which was itself constantly changing its sense, but slowly. Thus you could say that all your experience of meaning was ‘public’ in that who you are and what you think and what your world means to you is in subtle transformation every minute, as it is constantly exposed to new context. But in relation to every other that you engage with, your experience is in a real sense ‘private’ , or at least there is an unbridgeable gap between you and the another person’s experience , even in a ‘langauge game’.

Here’s a paper I wrote about this:


https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social

Subjectivity is critiqued in PI; so suggesting the primacy of intersubjectivity strikes me as problematic.

So I wonder if there is anything in Heidi that talks of following rules. For Witti, this is a public activity. — Banno

Exactly. No subjectivity for Witt, and what’s the only alternative he offers? The structure of publicness. joint engagement , rule following , language games. There’s no room for each participant to form slightly different interpretations of the same rules for everyone, because the notion of participant and individual interpretation of a language game are problematic ,
as they should be. But what Heidegger is on about is not the social as a subjective , a solipsistic self ,an ‘I’. That’s his whole point. The ‘self’ is always already an in-between that transcends ‘ itself’ every minute of time. That’s what a moment of time is, my past that is defined by my present that comes from my future. Past, present , future are not separate structures but one indissociable whole in each ‘now’. Each ‘now’ that ‘I’ experience is both my past as a totality and a remaking of that past as utterly néw. The entire structure of the social, the Other, the alien and the world originates in each ‘now’ prior to any language game. In a sense that is the fundamental language game , the way my ‘now’ remakes my past. Other persons, voices, gestures are not the basis of this exposure to otherness, and I don’t simply absorb and become shaped by what I engage with in language with others, precisely because I am already other to myself and my relation with other persons is a secondary otherness.

As Derrida asks: How do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without
this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I’ without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I’, that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I’ and
nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I’.

Do you suppose the increased interest in Heidi over the last few years is related to the rise of autocratic thinking? To the acceptance of obscure bullshit? — Banno

A big part of the increased interest in him is coming from theorists in cognition and emotion, who find his analysis of affect indispensable. Heidegger was among the first to recognize the inseparable interpenetration of emotion, mood, feeling, and intention.

IIRC, this 'solipsistic stance' is Heidi's ethical (Levinas, Adorno) failing compared to Witty's more 'cultural-pragmatic stance'. — 180 Proof

Yes, this is a common criticism of Heidegger. For instance, Shaun Gallagher writes:

“ In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

Gadamer seems to concur:

“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed even as he was developing the idea, his wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted. I must say that conscience — having a conscience — no, that wasn't terribly convincing.
"Care" is always a concernfulness about one's own being, and Mit- sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him.”

But matters are not so simple. Dan Zahavi makes the opposite critique.Zahavi interprets Heidegger’s account of the primordiality of being-with as consonant with the approach of Hans Bernhard Schmid.

“In Schmid’s recent work, we can find a position that is partly inspired by Heidegger...”
“...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication (Schmid 2005, 138, 145, )

I think Gadamer , you and Zahavi are both right and both wrong. You are right that Heidegger makes Witt’s notion of primary intersubjectivty a derivative modification of the primary self-understanding of Dasein. You are wrong to interpret Dasein’s self-understanding as prior to sociality. Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as
a referential differential inside-outside.There is no solipsistic inside for Heidegger, because self -relation is already relation with an outside. We find similar arguments in Derrida:

“Derrida says all speech is writing , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social.
“...it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other.”
“When he writes himself to himself, he writes himself to the other who is infinitely far away and who is supposed to send his signature back to him. He has no relation to himself that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other...”

In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public’: , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation’ : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with
Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public.

For Derrida, like Heidegger it is not the other person, but time itself that separates me from myself, and when I do engage in language with others I never simply introject normative meanings but interpret them in relation to my own background.