I do agree with your point about whether or not one makes a living out of being a philosopher being an important marker. — Jack Cummins

Neither Nietzsche nor Spinoza or Kierkegaard made their living in philosophy or were part of academia during most or all of their writing careers.

BTW, since you live in the London area, have you tried these philosophy groups?

https://www.meetup.com/topics/philosophy/gb/17/london/

Are you making a case against the general consensus amongst analytic philosophers who differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive statements based on the reasons I have thus far offered? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I notice there is no mention in your treatment of analytic philosophy’s view of the fact/ value distinction of writers like Quine, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Putnam, McDowell
or Rorty. Do you find any of them useful to your understanding of the fact-value distinction?

what does it mean to say that one is a philosopher, and who are the 'real' philosophers? — Jack Cummins

Only the real philosophers know the secret handshake.

I don’t have any work to show, Just wanted your quick take on the subject, which doesn’t have to be done on this thread.

I understand that, but I’m asking because I was impressed with Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche and am curious as to whether you think Deleuze might have departed from Nietzsche’s view of science.

Wouldn’t Deleuze side with Nietzsche on science? I thought you agreed with his philosophy.

quote="StreetlightX;515183"]If it cannot, in principle, be proven wrong by further observation, that's not science, that's religion.[/quote]

Nietzsche would beg to differ. Even Popper’s neo-Kantian inspired ‘falsifiability’ , to the extent that it maintains a role for truth , would be considered by him to be an expression of the religiosity of the ascetic ideal.

“Some science will just never be correct.”

Ah, the ascetic ideal rears its ugly head.

If that is what you mean, then there is no meaning in calling a perspective “one's own perspective” rather than “someone else's perspective”, since it couldn't be any other way. — Amalac

Of course, I can still make a distinction between my perspective and someone else’s , but only as filtered though my vantage on their outlook.

Why do moral relativists bother trying to suggest that others should act differently then, if everyone, without exception, acts according to their own perspective? There is no point for the moral relativist to say anything about moral relativism then, since so interpreted it's just trivial. — Amalac

I’m not a moral relativist. I side with those philosophers who don’t find concepts like morality and ethics to be coherent or useful. As I see it, the moral is supposed to pertain to matters of will and deliberate intent , of values, goals and subjective inclinations.

I reject the idea that there is such as thing as bad or immoral intent or evil will, only problems having to with ineffective interpersonal understanding.

As I understand it, moral relativists , and there are many on this site, do believe that intent can be distorted , subverted or corrupted, but they don’t believe that any universal rule or principle of the mora can ever be located, not Kant’s imperative or the golden rule. Kierkegaard and liberal theologians like him are compatible with certain forms of moral relativism, offering that though faith and action one can affirm that some transcendent idea of the good is at work, but not one that can ever be reduced to a rule or concept.

Does the moral relativist claim that we should not trust someone else (A moralist, for example) who says that the moral relativist is wrong?

If so, how do they know that that is a better way of acting than its opposite? — Amalac

I can’t answer this for moral relativists , but for myself and like-minded philosophers I will say that I don’t view theories, worldviews , values and other forms of knowledge as either right or wrong in any absolute way.
For me , all value systems are right in that they are useful to a community or individual in making of sense of and guiding their relationship with others. But as I mentioned , I believe that value systems like science , evolves. I believe that newer approaches mostly subsume older ones rather than simply proving them ‘wrong’. So if I ‘reject’ moral realism it s not that I think it is ‘wrong, but that I believe my ‘immoral’ approach enriches and transforms moral thinking. So am I ‘right’, and what would that mean? I think there are three possibilities with respect to any claim I make to having come upon a ‘better’ way. 1) My approach subsumes previous systems and so may be invisible and subject to misinterpretation by those who are not ready to assimilate its concepts.
2)My approach is just a re-invention of the wheel. It is just a variation on perspectives that are already out there.
3) My ideas are internally inconsistent and so don’t make sense to others.

If my approach indeed subsumes other approaches and goes beyond them in some way, I should be able to demonstrate this to myself , if not to others, by demonstrating to them that I fully understand their position and can see the world in a way that closely approximates their thinking. This is up to them , not me, to confirm. So what I’ve done is shown myself that I have options of acting that they don’t. I can see the world in the way they do, as a place that is amenable to moral determinations, but also via my enriched perspective, which sees what they see but also a lot more. [

quote="Amalac;514580"]How do you know that you are not implicitly claiming that you know that what you say is morally preferable?[/quote]

How do you know that you are not claiming implicitly that I should believe you?

How do you know that you are not implicitly claiming that you know that what you say is morally preferable? — Amalac

It’s a matter of my lifting up a rock and asking you what you see. You describe a few insects and other things. I can see what you see but also much more. I know you can’t see what I can see although I try to point those items out. Why can’t you see them? Is it simply an empirical or sensory question? It gets complicated here because we have to get into issues of philosophy of science, materialism vs idealism vs phenomenology.

I don’t find concepts of truth and falsity with respect to issues of empirical fact to be any more useful than with respect to values, Since I follow those who recognize the value-laden ness of facts.

What we strive for in ‘moral’ and empirical truth is not corresponding our ideas and values to an independently existing world , but co-constructing a world that is in a continual state of becoming, so facts
and values are creations that don’t mirror , but transformingly develop a world. We can invent any old world we want , but some of those construals will speak back to us more usefully than others.

How does the moral relativist know that it is better (morally) to trust his own ethical perspective rather than someone else's? If he is consistent, It would seem that he'll have to say that he also doesn't know that.

But in that case, his decision to prefer his own perspective rather than other people's perspective is arbitrary, and therefore the moralist may retort that he has no right to say that that is “needed”. — Amalac

You and I have no choice but to trust our own perspective because that is the only perspective that we have. Even when we trust someone else’s , we still have to interpret the other’s view though our own perspective , so there’s no getting around a personalistic vantage.

Even when an entire culture assumes they are all following the same normative values , each is viewing it from their own vantage and interpretation, which is often invisible to them. Inevitably, and to their astonishment , they or someone else in their community is accused of straying from those values, and it never occurs to anyone that the issue is one of interpretation rather than deliberate deviation from the supposed true path.

The problem is the assumption of the idea of a true or universal or objective path. That is the source immorality, the positing of a true path in the fist place , rather than the straying from it.

What I am suggesting is not a strict enforcement of moral codes, as I see fit. Because how do I know that I am right? What i am suggesting is that it is possible for me to be wrong — Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Whehther you are right or wrong is entirely relative to your own interpretation of the world for your purposes and whether your moral hypotheses continue to validate
themselves ( appear useful and predictive ) over time
relative to your outlook , regardless of what others in your culture may think is true or false. I don’t think your mora philosophy should be a matter or social consensus , even if , practically speaking, the political realization must involve consensus. Of course, it is important that you use others in your cultural as sources of evidence and validation for your view as much as possible. it this is different than assuming there is a ‘true’ or ‘false’ of moral valuation in some universal objective sense.

My question for Nietzsche would be: Why should we embrace his view? If moral judgments are mere imaginings then by what criteria does he judge that we should abandon them. Surely if this were the case it would make no difference whether we embraced or abandoned them. — Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Make sure you understand what you are embracing in embracing Nietzsche’s ‘view’ , because it is less a ‘view’ that it is a description of change and becoming itself.
His ‘view’ is the principle of will to power. What that means is that humans are value posting creatures. He doesn’t mean we churn out value systems until we find the right one. There is no right or wrong value system. What matters is the movement from one system to the next, not the content of any particular system. His ‘view’, then, is split within itself as both the embrace of each value system as we fall into it or posit it , and the unraveling of that system and its replacement by another.
We are all both creators and destroyers, but not ‘deliberately’ so. Regardless of what moral values we will, we find ourselves constantly overcoming ourselves , and our previous values. So its not a question of choosing his values over moral realism, but of recognizing that all value systems pre-suppose what Nietzsche is telling us. He doesn’t condemn us if we don’t get it , he is just saying that he thinks we would be healthier humans if we did recognize this. You can think of his approach as a kind of genealogical analysis of the history of morality. He’s offering us what he thinks is a clarifying way of looking at the very idea of morality. It is ‘true’ for everyone, but in a different way for each , and in the way that endless self-transformation is ‘true’

how can an anthropologist defending these views say that they are better than their opposites, without resorting to the same universal guidelines that they claim to deny?

Simple, one can argue that from one’s own perspective one set of beliefs is preferable to another , without assuming that this perspective must be shoved down the throat of those who don’t see things in the same way. Put differently , one can assume that each of us is a sense-making being aiming to anticipate events, that what is in our best interest is understanding and assimilating the world. We only reject others to the extent that we are unable to understand their ways of thinking and acting. The issue of ‘evil’, then, is not one of ‘bad’ intent but of a failure of comprehension.

The mistake of moralists is to assume that those on the opposite sides of moral or political debates can be grasping the ‘facts’ identically and yet reach different ethical conclusions based on ‘selfishness’ or some other unctuous accusation that we make of those whose thinking is inscrutable to us.

What is needed is to attempt to help other to see, from their own perspective , what we find to be more insightful in dealing with people, rather than resorting to condemnation and moralistic blame. This rejects the concept of ‘universal guidelines’ because it assumes
there are an infinity of ways of construing reality, and the usefulness of an particular way of dealing with others must be validated relative to each individual’s perspective. I think we can talk of a cultural
progress in empathy , but as a personalistic pragmatic evolution and not a ‘universal principle’.

“ My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely-an-interpretation of certain phenomena:more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking; thus "truth," at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call "imaginings." Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity.

Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity-an idiosyncrasy of degenerates which has caused immeasurable harm. We others, we immoralists, have, conversely, made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending, and approving. We do not easily negate; We make it a point of honor to be affirmers.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

In reading your current op as well as previous threads, I notice that, while you reference writers like Jackson, Block and Chalmers , there seems to be no engagement with phenomenological philosophy and those researchers of consciousness who have been strongly influenced by it( Zahavi, Varela and Thompson), or writers coming from the radical constructivist tradition ( Von Glasersfeld, Maturana, Piaget) or embodied enactivist perspectives( Gallagher, Fuchs).

Instead I see formulations reminiscent of 1st generation cognitivism and representationalism , with the accompanying metaphor of mind as computer ( the mind inputs i interpreted sense dat and processes into output) with a bit of ‘subjective 1st person coloration sprinkled over it. For instance , you write “ Sensations are the raw, uninterpreted experiences, like the seeing of a color, or the hearing of a pitch.” That a classic dualistic move.

It seems to me this way of modeling conscious activity misses the fundamentally normative( an organism’s ‘is’ is anticipative in that it’s world matters to it in particular ways in relation to it’s functioning , and it evinces an inherently prescriptive , purposive and holistic character of experiencing at all levels.

Philosophy isn't religion, nor is it art, or so I think. We shouldn't look to philosophy or philosophers for any deep insights into life or the world or ourselves — Ciceronianus the White

If we shouldnt look to philosophy for deep insights then we shouldnt look to religion or art either. First of all, it’s impossible to tease out where the philosophical or the religious or the artistic or the scientific begins and ends , because all these fields of cultural are helplessly entangled in each other. Secondly, shifts in religious thinking owe a great debt to the philosophical innovations of their time , as well as of previous eras. It’s hard to imagine reading Aquinas or Maimonides without noting the direct influence of Aristotle in their work, or the effect of Kant on Buber, Tillich and Niebuhr, or the influence of Levinas, Heidegger and Kierkegaard on a current generation of theologians.

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.