An extremely long-winded way to say that geometry is based on the practical techniques of tasks such as surveying? — Terrapin Station

Husserl isn't saying that geometry is just based on these activities. he's saying that such pragmatic embodied activities constitute its original meaning, and what is typically taught in textbooks is geometry as ready-made concepts.

"What sort of strange obstinacy is this, seeking to take the question of the origin of geometry back to
some undiscoverable Thales of geometry, someone not even known to legend? Geometry is available to us in its propositions, its theories. Of course we must and we can answer for this logical edifice to the last detail in terms of self-evidence. Here, to be sure, we arrive at first axioms, and from them we proceed to the original self-evidence which the fundamental concepts make possible. What is this, if not the "theory of knowledge," in this case specifically the theory of geometrical knowledge? No one
would think of tracing the epistemological problem back to such a supposed Thales. This is quite superfluous. The presently available concepts and propositions themselves contain their own
meaning, first as non-self-evident opinion, but nevertheless as true propositions with a meant but still hidden truth which we can obviously bring to light by rendering the propositions themselves self-evident."

Husserl explains the problem with this non-historical formal rendering of the meaning of geometry:

The progress of deduction follows formal-logical self-evidence; but without the actually developed capacity for reactivating the original activities contained within its fundamental concepts, i.e., without the "what" and the "how" of its prescientific materials, geometry would be a tradition empty of meaning; and if we ourselves did not have this capacity, we could never even know whether geometry had or ever did have a genuine meaning, one that could really be "cashed in." Unfortunately, however, this is our situation, and that of the whole modern age."

And what was the original meaning?

"In the life of practical needs certain particularizations of shape stood out and that a technical praxis always aimed at the production of particular preferred shapes and the improvement of them according to certain directions of gradualness. First to be singled out from the thing-shapes are surfaces—
more or less "smooth," more or less perfect surfaces; edges, more or less rough or fairly "even"; in other words, more or less pure lines, angles, more or less perfect points; then, again, among the
lines, for example, straight lines are especially preferred, and among the surfaces the even surfaces; for example, for practical purposes boards limited by even surfaces, straight lines, and
points are preferred, whereas totally or partially curved surfaces are undesirable for many kinds of practical interests. Thus the production of even surfaces and their perfection (polishing) always plays its role in praxis. So also in cases where just distribution is intended. Here the rough estimate of magnitudes is transformed into the measurement of magnitudes by counting the equal parts."

the question arises, as per the above, what is the nature of the existence of such things as natural numbers, logical principles, geometric forms, and the like? I like to say that these are real but not necessarily existent. (Of course, in practice it is quite correct to say that 'the law of the excluded middle exists', but the point I'm trying to make is that this is something which is real only for a mind capable of grasping it; it's not existent in the same sense as phenomenal objects.) — Wayfarer

I prefer Husserl's way , grounding the ideaized shapes of geometry in historical constructive intentional acts of the life-world, out of which emerged reified abstractions which maintain themselves through existential acts. Nowhere here is there room for a non-exististential plane

"Galileo was himself an heir in respect to pure geometry. The inherited geometry, the inherited manner of "intuitive" conceptualizing, proving, constructing, was no longer original geometry: in this sort of "intuitiveness" it was already empty of meaning. Even ancient geometry was, in its way, removed from the sources of truly immediate intuition and originally intuitive thinking, sources from which the so-called geometrical intuition, i.e., that which operates with idealities, has at first derived its meaning. The geometry of idealities was preceded by the practical art of surveying, which knew nothing of idealities. Yet such a pregeometrical achievement was a meaning-fundament for geometry, a fundament for the great invention of idealization; the latter encompassed the invention of the ideal world of geometry, or rather the methodology of the objectifying determination of idealities through the constructions which create "mathematical existence/'"(Crisis of European Science)

one of the dogmas of the secular view of evolution, is that it has nothing like an overall direction or purpose, and so the fact of the existence of intelligent self-aware beings has no particular significance in the overall scheme. — Wayfarer

I would like to think that it is not necessary to create a barrier between the supposed human and the animal in order to affirm the worth of humanity. Wouldn't it be better to affirm the value of all living things? More specifically, in an era in which so many supposed distinctions between human mental functioning and that of higher animals have been shown to be in error (tool-use, emotion, altruism, language, self-awareness, culture), perhaps the lesson we should take from this is the danger of exceptionalist thinking.

As far as the issue of purpose in evolution, is it necessary, or even desirable, for that directionality to be pre-determined or totalized in a Hegelian sense? Can there not be self-organizational purpose whose direction constantly shifts in ways that maintain self-consistency but do not conform to final cause? Can we not be Nietzschean value-positers, simply there to enjoy the ride? Or Heideggerian disclosers of our ownmost uncanny, mysterious possibilities of being, whithout needing to get closer to some pre-figured end?

Yes, it is an immanent process, but as Thompson would argue, at the same time that enactivism eschews metaphysical foundations, it challenges the objectivist presuppositions underlying physical causation. It does not simply reduce intentionality to mechanism

That natural selection operates in a way analogous to the the processes of experience, observation and experiment is arguably a valid way to think about evolution provided we do not fall into anthropomorphization by imputing human-like intention to the process. — Janus


I don't agree in the least, I think it's a case where biological theories or metaphors are extended well past their actual domain of applicability. Apart from anything else, it amounts to subordinating philosophy, reason, and everything else about us, to the implicit aim of propagation and survival — Wayfarer

What about approaches to evolutionary theory that don't posit survival as the end all and be all of adaptation, but consider creativity to be the defining feature of evolution? Piaget, Dewey and James, and Evan Thompson see a compatibility between the 'aims' of organic evolution and reason. Thompson goes so far as to talk about the organizational directedness of self-organizing systems as a forerunner of human cognition. Piaget would extend this self-organizing foundation further back to inorganic and finally cosmological processes, in a move that turns creative self-organization into an a priori of existence. Mark C Taylor's book 'The Moment of Complexity' sees a justification for a kind of post-religious religion(what he calls atheology) in the evolutionary behavior of complex systems in the physical , biological and human world.

"Evolution" means:

- a blind and purposeless process driven by variation plus selection plus reproduction;
- survival of the fittest ;
- the absence of morality (to be a predator or parasite is not reprehensible) ;
- no species is superior to other species (only in the tautological sense that species A spreads at the expense of species B because A has traits that make it "fitter" in a certain environment. In a different environment the roles could be reversed) — Matias

Evolutionary theory is not a static science. There have been innovations in thinking about evolution among biologists since Darwin. Jean Piaget, Steven Rose and Francisco Varela are among those who posit a self-organizing systems approach to organic as well as cultural history.
In this approach, evolution is not blind and purposeless, but rather through natural drift and organism-environment coupling the organism is predisposed to mutate in directions that are compatible with its ongoing ways of functioning in its environment. The organizational principle of adaptive self-consistency is the 'morality' and 'purpose' of an organism, rather than blind conformity with an environment. Pragmatists like John Dewy and William James , and evolutionary psychologists like Dennett, also have called themselves humanists.

The issue I always have with such statements is that “Dasein” doesn’t mean anything. Heidegger also took one section of phenomenology and ran with it. Derrida is another I find needlessly - and in his case purposefully - obtuse. — I like sushi

Here ya go: "Da-sein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Da-sein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being. And
this in tum means that Da-sein understands itself in its being in some way and with some explicitness."(12). Think of it this way. Dasein defines man in terms of his framing of the world as meaningful relative to his purposes and values.

Heidegger took the entirety of phenomenology and reinvented it as existential phenomenology. Not everyone finds Heidegger or Derrida obtuse. I suspect it has as much to do with the reader's diffilculty in absorbing complex new ideas(there likely isn't a single major philosopher who hasn't been accused of being obtuse) as it does the writer's style of exposition.

Joshs, I am done. If you go back over what I have said I think I have made clear what I think Heidegger means by discourse ... or don't. — Fooloso4

1) You give up really easily.
2)if you go back over this thread and consolidate every positive statement you have made delineating in your own words, not Heidegger's, discourse, activity, language and their relationship as it pertains to our discussion, you'll find no more than a small handful of scattered sentences.

Heidegger has been interpreted in a thousand different ways. Simply quoting him at length is profoundly inadequate at giving me a sense of how you understand him. Which of the many Heidegger is yours? You've been little more than a ghost in this discussion up till now, being very good at articulating disagreement but not presenting your own thinking in a positive vein. I dont need for us to come to agreement on Heidegger. My only goal in this discussion is being able to adequately summarize your thinking on Heideggerian discourse and 'activty', so that I can read it back to you in a way you will recognize.

Speaking on behalf of Husserl - if not Heidegger; but likely so - the point of phenomenology was to explore the subjective matter NOT to postulate objective claims of reality (that is the domain of the natural sciences). Husserl was attempting to give science a firming grounding against metaphysical ideas that bled into mystical mumbo jumbo — I like sushi

I like Husserl a lot , and think that he was enormously important to the advent of Heideggerian thinking, and through Heidegger, to Derrida's project. Husserl’s Transcendental Subjectivity seems to have provided the structural basis for Heidegger’s Dasein (and Derrida’s differance) . With Husserl, we Here we see Intentionality as the primary basis of empirical science, logic and mathematics.One could say that what Heidegger did was to take Husserl’s separate but mutually implied aspects of temporalization(retention-recollection, presencing, protention) and intentionality(ego pole, subjectively appearing entity, objectively meant object) and make them inseparable, equiprimordial modes of a single, transcendental experiential moment.

you have not been able to provide any evidence from Being and Time that activities such as mowing the lawn or baking a potato are considered by Heidegger to be forms or examples of discourse. — Fooloso4

You repeat the same sentence over and over again, disagreeing with me without offering any detailed definitions of your terms, quote Heidegger at length but never reveal how YOU understand him to mean what he says in your own words (please define discourse and activity, and how they differ from each other, without quoting Heidegger). I have no idea what you stand for philosophically unless you tell me.

by all means introduce the work of another philosopher so that those who might be interested can argue about the interpretation of not one or two or more philosophers, but I am not going to join in. — Fooloso4

You've barely joined in in arguing for your interpretation of Heidegger, so I can see why you'd be reluctant to add another thinker into the discussion.

I am simply saying that what we do and talking about what we do are not the same. — Fooloso4

Please elaborate on this. Ideally in more than one sentence. I'd be thrilled if you'd bring in support from your favorite philosophers so I can get a better sense of where youre coming from.

The only way in which representation comes into our discussion here is your misrepresentation of what I have actually said. — Fooloso4

You havent said a hell of a lot. It's almost all Heidegger without any translation into your terms.
in what way is Heideggerian discourse different from representation , in you own words? .

So far you have made the following argument:

“The issue under discussion is whether acts such as baking a potato are examples of or expressions of non-verbal discourse.”

“Discourse does not come into play in the performing of an activity.”

“It is not the act of mowing or baking that is a signification. The meaning of the activity of mowing the lawn or baking a potato is what is articulated in discourse. The activity of mowing or baking is not discourse, but is taken up in discourse as part of the totality of involvement and totality of signification.”

We can talk about ovens and baking potatoes, but that does not mean that talking about ovens and baking potatoes and lawn mowers and mowing the lawn are a priori conditions for using ovens and lawn mowers or that the activities are discursive.”

Tell me if i am getting anywhere near to your position on the relation between what you are understanding as Heidegger's notion of discourse , and the performance of an activity.

It seem to me that you are making a distinction between experiences as they are in themselves and our representations of experiences. So you read Heidegger as saying that discourse and language have to do with subjective representation of reality, as opposed to the things or activities in themselves. We can understand the idea of things as they are in themselves apart from how we articulate them in discourse. Would it be fair to assume that your thinking on language and reality is consistent with Kant's on the relationship between intuition and conceptualization?

If this is the case, it would be necessary for me to show how Heidegger's use of such terms as articulation, intelligibility , discourse and language are intended in a radically different way than what is implied by representation.

It would be necessary to present a Heideger for whom there is no reality outside of a process of the endless self-unfolding of a chain of differential signs. These signs don't represent anything outside of themselves, they transform the signs they refer back to, and this transforming-referring(disclosure) is what they are, is what Heidgerrian BEING is.. Disclosure is ta moving beyond itself, not a representing. A world is not a present reality that is represented by language, it is enacted,

Forgive me for quoting Derrida here, but this is the direction that I (and Derrida) believe Heideger was headed in:

“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center
could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that
it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of
sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the
universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything
became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the
central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside
a system of differences.”

This would be a Heidegger who is offering a postmodern construction-ism, where it becomes incoherent to talk about what anything is outside of how it is constructed and reconstructed in language in relation to our purposes. .langue is no longer a linking of a stable thing with a sign for it,or the use of a sign as a tool, but signs without signifieds as the only reality.

The suggestion in the OP is that discourse “is intended to render explicit our understanding of being in the world”, but when we’re referring to average everydayness, idle talk and other inauthentic modes of being, then we’re not talking about everything we do as intended discourse. — Possibility

Using the word "intended' is a bit confusing in relation to Heidegger's use of the word. Heidegger explains that included in Dasein's inauthentic involvement in the world is the use of tools and being-with-others. These are for him intentional modes in the sense that in the average everyday interpretive mode of handiness, which inclues language and being-with -others, one interprets the meaning of things in a relevant way in relation to one's purposes.

Heidegger says, for instance:
"The handy presence of signs in everyday associations and the conspicuousness
which belongs to signs and can be produced with varying intentions." (81)

"Letting something be relevant lies in the simplest handling of a useful thing. Relevance has an intentional character with reference to which the thing is useable or in use. Understanding the intention and context of relevance has the temporal structure of awaiting. Awaiting the intention,
taking care can at the same time come back to something like relevance" (353)

Idle talk can include scientific discourse , which is certainly intentional in a broad sense.

What distinguishes the authentic from the inauthentic mode of being is not intentionality, but a kind of intentionality that doesnt stop at the usefulness of things for our purposes in the world conventionality given to us alongside others, but always brings our purposes in the world back to a kind of meta-intentionailty, not just a conventional normative goal-orentiedness , but a disclosing one's ownmost possiblities, apart from and beyond their socially normative senses .

Are you not able to distinguish between mowing the lawn and baking a potato? Would it be all the same if you put the lawnmower in the oven? — Fooloso4

In dong so, what I am distinguishing are 2 patterns of significations, bound up within a larger totality of significations.

Point to something substantive in the text. It is not a matter of what I believe but of my trying to understand Heidegger. — Fooloso4

The Heidegger scholar Daniel Dahlstrom wrote an interesting short piece on the relation between discourse and language in Being and Time. This may be helpful.
https://www.bu.edu/philo/files/2013/09/d-powell-book.pdf

A totality of relevance and the articulation a totality of relevance are not the same. I do not see how it makes sense to say that mowing the lawn is the articulation of a totality of relevance when that articulation is about the totality. Mowing the lawn is something that occurs within that totality, not the articulation of that totality. — Fooloso4

No, they are not the same thing. And attunement and understanding are not the same thing. They are equiprimordial, though. As is discourse. IF mowing the lawn occurs within that totality it is a signification, and thus it is language, which implies and is a derived mode of discourse. So mowing the lawn is discusive by virtue the fact that it is a symbolizing. There is no such thing as a doing that is not a symbolizing, to Heidegger. You believe differently . Youre clearly more of a traditionalist about the relation between language and perception. That why you can say

I am going to end this talk about mowing the lawn, but the lawn will still get mowed, if not by me then by someone else. — Fooloso4

and not treat it as an incoherent statement. For Heidegger , it would be incorrent to distinguish an activity or experience from a system of differential signs. It's not that it would be false to say that the lawn will get cut. It would be neither true nor false until there is a Dasein to symbolize it as an assertion.

"Before there was any Da-sein, there was no truth; nor will there be any after Da-sein is no more. For in such a case truth as disclosedness, discovering, and discoveredness cannot be. Before Newton's laws were discovered, they were not "true." From this it does not follow that they were false or even that they would become false if ontically no discoveredness were possible any longer."(227)

Where there is anything for Dasein, there is a system of differential signs composing its structure, as attuned, discursive understanding. This is what Dasein IS as being in the world in involvement with things and other Daseins.

Discourse doesn’t really come into the picture until the second part of B&T. — Possibility

It comes into the picture in an important way a quarter of the way through the book as an introduction to being-with-others in average everydayness and modes of language such as idle talk. In this first part of the book , discourse is fleshed out in relation to inauthentic modes of being. In second part it is connected with authentic being and temporality.

Once again, it is through discourse that the meaning of mowing the lawn is disclosed. That does not mean that mowing the lawn is discourse. — Fooloso4

How do you know that someone is mowing the lawn? Describe the ways of knowing that a lawn is being mowed(by someone else or by you), that don't involve taikng about it.

Is a totality of relevance discourse? — Fooloso4

The articulation of a totality of relevance is discourse. "What is articulated in discoursing articulation as such, we call the totality of significations.(161)" Since all experiences are articulated in this way, all experiences are discursive(if discursive means articulating a totality of significations). If you prefer this to 'all experiences are discourse', then I'm fine with that.

Mowing the lawn can be interpreted within the totality of our involvement with the world but that does not reduce mowing the lawn to discourse. — Fooloso4

i don't know what you mean by reducing mowing the lawn to discourse. What is it you want mowing the lawn to be besides a significant meaning within a totality of relevance? How else can mowing the lawn be interpreted? Are you arguing that when we articulate the meaning of mowing the lawn as ready to hand, this interpretation of the activity is a discursive treatment added onto beings which we initially encounter ? In other words, that an initially objectively present world-stuff were "subjectively colored" in this way by discursive articulation of it? If that is your position then I can understand your objection to the idea that discursive articulation entirely captures the meaning of mowing the lawn.

Let me go back a step. I asked myself why it was necessary for Heidegger to add the mode of discourse to the equiprimordial modes of attunement and understanding. I would have initially thought the mode of understanding would allow one to have the meanings of ready to hand beings that one is involved with(like lawn mowers, grass and cutting).

But this paragraph made it clear that understanding does not serve this purpose for Heidegger.

"When with the being of Da-sein innerworldly beings are discovered, that is, have come to be understood, we say that they have meaning. But strictly speaking, what is understood is not the meaning, but beings, or being. Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself. What can be articulated in disclosure that understands we call meaning. The concept of meaning includes the formal framework of what necessarily belongs to what interpretation that understands articulates. Meaning, structured by fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception, is the upon which of the project in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something"(151)

So it was necessary for Heidegger to conceive of discourse (and its derivative mode of language) as that aspect of disclosure that gives meaning to the world (attunement and understanding do not achieve this). If Dasein is being-in-the-world, it is discourse that allows the world to appear in its meaningfulness for Dasein, Without discourse, mowing the lawn has no meaning. That is to say, it has no content, only an attuned mood and a projectively understood familiarity.

As I read him, reality is phenomenal: — Fooloso4

The traditional concept of reality for Heidegger (being in the sense of the pure, objective presence of things) is ontologically inadequate. So is the phenomenal concept of reality that Husserl advances, since it distinguishes indication from expression and posits a pure living present.

I meant to say when every activity is thought to be discourse. I am not prepared to discuss Derrida. — Fooloso4

How about Rorty or any of those who say language is prior to perception?

This discursive move will not get the grass cut. The lawnmower has to move. I can talk about it, but talking about it, disclosing its significance is not mowing the lawn. — Fooloso4

Is there for you any sense of the meaning of or existence of a lawnmower, grass and cutting apart from how they are interpreted in the context of your actual involvement at a particular point in time in the world ? Are you arguing for an Independence of things from our concepts of them? Is there a reality independent of our relevant circumspective contextual dealing in the world? Heidegger was not a realist. every place in Being and Time he mentions reality he puts it in scare quotes and explains how problematic the concept is.

I'd say that the difference between philosophy in the 19th century (and , say, the first half of the 20th too) and the situation today is that at that time philosophers used to be also public intellectuals, they opened - as philosophers - new horizons of thoughts and then fed these insights into the public debate, whereas professional philosophy has become during the last decades a rather esoteric occupation: professionals sitting in their "ivory tower" and their "bubbles" talking at each other, citing each other, debating ultra-subtle questions that have no significance for the public. — Matias

it seems to me that the ideas of the French postmodern philosophers have had a massive impact over the past 50 years on political thought, political correctness, the advent of the social justice warrior, attitudes toward gender and race, etc. Slavoj Zizek is just one example of a contemporary philosopher who is also a public celebrity.

Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility (161).

I take this to mean that the a priori structure of discourse articulates in the sense of things being phenomenally distinct, that is, particular. There can be no intelligibility without things being distinct one from the other. Thus, he says, we do not hear pure noise but a wagon or motorcycle (164). — Fooloso4

The point Heidegger is trying to make here is that in the classic understanding of perception, we experience raw stimuli, the data of sensation, and then we construct from this chaos our concepts. So in understanding language, we are presumed, according this model, to first take in bits of uninterpreted sensory information, which we then process and interpret. For Heidegger, however, Dasein never encounters a raw world of sensory data, but via projecting, fore-having understanding already sees the particulars of the world as meaningfully relevant and significant in relation to its purposes. There is no such thing for Heidegger as a pre-interpreted, pre-lingustic world.

it does not follow that mowing the lawn is discourse. There may be all kinds of things that come into play with any activity but that does not mean that the activity is those things that come into play. — Fooloso4

It 's interesting that you used the word 'is'. You said "That does not mean that the activity IS those things."

Heidegger has a lot to say about the 'is', the copula. For him , the 'is' does not act as a secondary glue sticking subject and object together. Instead, the 'is' rests at the center of his project. I talked about how temporality is key to understanding Being (and the 'is') for Heidegger. For Heidegger, any experience conforms to the structure of temporality. An event is at once a having been, a presencing and a not yet or beyond itself. The equi-primoridial modes of attunement, understanding and discourse
belong to and are always implied by this structural unity.

"Every understanding has its mood. Every attunement understands. Attuned understanding
has the characteristic of entanglement. Entangled, attuned understanding articulates itself with regard to its intelligibility in discourse. The actual temporal constitution of these phenomena always leads back to that one temporality that holds within itself the possible structural unity of understanding, attunement, entanglement, and discourse."

So lets bring this back to the activity of mowing the lawn. First, it should be pointed out that taking any concept primordially means that mowing , or any activity, is not understood in the abstract, but always my use of this word here , right now, in this context, in relation to my purposes . Given that, what is it that mowing 'is'? Its isness is its temporalizing out of a having been that presences and at the same time points beyond itself. Its 'isness' , its essence, its being, is that in my sense of its meaning for me right now, it affects me in a particular way, That is, I am attuned to it affectiively. Also, my sense of mowing the lawn right now projectively understands this concept . And finally, I articulate the intelligibility of what is disclosed to me as this mowing in discourse. Put differently, what ever sense of .mowing' I experience right now is interpreted , signified, conceptualized, This is a discursive move. Actually, the discursive move comes prior to my interpretatively signifying it as a word. So , like any and all experences, mowing IS a temporalizing . It IS an understanding. It IS attuned. It IS an entanglement and a falling prey. And it IS discourse(an articulation of intelligibility).

In an earlier post you wrote " Man talks. This essential feature of our being is lost when every activity of thought to be discourse." Does this mean you distinguish Heidegger from writers like Derrida, who says there is nothing outside the text(what he meant wasn't that there is nothing outside formal language , but that all meaning emerges within a differential, and endless relation of signs without signifieds.)?

Is man's essential feature talking or is it creating meaning out of a totality of relevance? Doesnt the latter already imply the former?

Discourse may not come in at all. That it does not come into play is not the result of being alone but of performing the activity — Fooloso4

The activity that Heidegger is calling our attention to is not whatever we do, but the doing of something specific that is, if not unique, essential to Dasein. This is why he goes through the history of logos. He wants to get back behind that development already under way in which Aristotle's claim that man alone of the animals has logos, is understood to as man is the rational animal. Man talks. This essential feature of our being is lost when every activity of thought to be discourse. — Fooloso4

There are many readings of Heidegger and I respect that yours is different than mine.
I will not claim that one is correct and the other incorrect, only that there is a loose consensus around the interpretation I've been trying to elaborate that I share with readers of Heidegger like Derrida and Hubert Drefyus. According to this reading, all of the equi-primordial dimensions that Heidegger mentions, including discourse, always come into play in every experience.

What is essential to Dasein is temporality. Temporalilty is the tripartite unity of three ecstacies: the having been ,present and future. Dasein is not a subject that experiences objects, but an in-between, a becoming. There is no subject and no object that exist in themselves first and then relate to each other. Relational involvement is primary, and this is what a self is for Heidegger. As this in-between, Dasein is alwasy already in the midst of involvement in a world that matters to it and has significance for it. Whatever we do has this character of mattering to us. The reason that man talks is that man has temporality. Temporalization means that whatever we experience is relevant for us in relation to some purpose. There is never any experience that is without relevance or outside of some purpose in relation to which it has meaning for us. Discourse for Heidegger is nothing other than the way that our having been, our present and the future all 'communicate' with each other in each temporalizing moment. This is the origin of language. In the later pages of Being and Time Heidegger show s how authentic Dasein calls us out of everydayness. He says this call, this summons is a mode of discourse. How can that be? Because discourse has to do with the way every experience communicates to us, calls us out of the previous. "The human being shows himself as a being who speaks. This does not mean that the possibility of vocal utterance belongs to him, but that this being is in the mode of discovering world and Da-sein itself."(Being and Time 166)

Mowing the lawn or baking a potato are not "notions", they are activities. There are a variety of ways in which they may be meaningful - they may serve some purpose or get taken up in discourse and shown to play a role in a totality of significations. The activities are not, however, the articulation of meaning, their meaning must be brought to light in discourse. — Fooloso4

Im referring to your notion of activity, which seems to lack Heidegger's structure of temporality.
All activities for Heidegger are part of a purposive context, and all activities play a role in a totality of significations. There is no such thing for Heidegger as an activity that is not itself part of a larger totality of significance. IT would not be an activity in the first place if it did not emerge as a relevant elaboration and articulation of such a context . That is the essential being of an activity. Note that in the section of Being and Time on handiness, all of this is delineated without mention of the role of discourse. But the in-order-to and the for-the-sake-of-which that organizes our heedful involvement with things is a form of talking for Heidegger, but not as a secondary function in relation to passively perceiving the world or being involved in an activity.

Again, discourse or talk is always about something. In this case talk about mowing or baking. It is not a second step or development. — Fooloso4

.

All experience for Heidegger is always about something, whether we 'talk' about it or not. To experience something AS something , whether it is a memory, thought, activity, perception, is a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, and at the same time takes apart what has been put together."
This act of experiencing something as something is always affectively attuned and always discursive, not in the conventional way in which you understand it but in Heidegger's sense of a being called beyond itself. "The structure of care as being-ahead-of-itself-already-being-in-a world-as being together with innerworldly beings contains the disclosedness of Da-sein. " Dasein is discovery and disclosure.

Discourse is the articulation of meaning . The meaning of the activity of mowing the lawn or baking a potato is what is articulated in discourse. The activity of mowing or baking is not discourse, but is taken up in discourse as part of the totality of involvement and totality of signification. — Fooloso4

We need to dissect this a little. A person is performing an activity alone. Where does discourse, in your view, come into play here? Do other people have to be involved in a communication for discourse to take place, or does the person performing the activity have to undergo a modification , translation, elaboration, articulation of the experience to themselves in a second step? "The activity of mowing or baking is not discourse, but is taken up in discourse as part of the totality of involvement and totality of signification." If the activity of mowing or baking is not discourse , is it something else? Does it have a meaningful existential status or is it a meaningless notion without discourse? If mowing and baking have a status without discourse, describe what this status is.

lets also examine the idea of something being 'taken up in' discourse: If it is equi-primordial with attunement , care ,understanding and temporality, then there could be no status or sense to that which which is outside of, separate or independent from the discourse in which it is being 'taken up'. Being taken up in discourse would have to be primary, just as being affected by mood, or taken into understanding . So if mowing or baking are 'taken into' discourse, this cannot be a second step or development in relation to some supposed prior being of these activities. Articulation as discourse could not 'come after' an initial experience of mowing or baking but be simultaneous with it.

Or put another way, you cannot capture the average everyday involvement of being-in-the-world without accounting for those acts typically described as non-verbal. — Arne

I agree with this. The languaged basis of non-verbal experience is a well-developed idea not only in post-structuralist philosophy but also within cognitive science, incorporating such sources as Gibsonian perception. Perceiving organisms are languaging beings prior to the capacity for formal language in that perception is an interpretive act involving a relatiing of signs.

It does not follow from the equiprimordiality of state-of-mind, understanding, and discourse that discourse must include such things as mowing the lawn and baking potatoes. Their equiprimordiality means that none of them is primary, that they do not derive one from another. Our active involvement in the world is not reducible to discourse. — Fooloso4

i disagree with this. Equi-primordiality means that all of them are equally primary, and all of them are implied in all experience. Experience is reducible to all of them. Thus, discourse must include such things as mowing the lawn and baking potatoes. These activities are experienced, and as experiences they are signifiications. They matter to us in a heedfully circumspective way, and thus are discursive.

"The loveliness of the valley and the menace of the mountain and of
the raging sea, the sublimity of the stars, the absorption of the plant and
the ensnaremcnt of the animal, the calculated speed of machines and the
severity of the historical action, the harnessed frenzy of the created work,
the cold boldness of the questioning that knows, the hardened sobriety of
labor and the discretion of the heart-all that is language; wins or loses
being only in the event of language. Language is the ruling of the world-forming
and preserving center of the historical Dasein of the Volk. Only
where temporality tcmporalizes itself, does language happen; only where
language happens, docs temporality temporalize itself." Logic as the Question of Being, sec. 29

I am not sure if you are taking issue with the claim that discourse is not about what we do, that it is not, for example, as Arne would have it, turning on the oven to bake a potato. — Fooloso4

As I understand Heidegger, Dasein is always a doing, but doing for Heidegger means a meaningful involvement with others in the world.which is at the same time a praxis, an understanding, an attunement and a discoursing. Discourse serves the same purpose for Heidegger that language does for Derrida and other post-structuralists. Rather than being a secondary phenomenon in relation to perception, it is intrinsic to all forms of experiencing.

He says nothing here about discourse being about anything other than what is said, what is talked about. — Fooloso4

I wonder. My sense is that , as equi-primoridial with temporality, understanding, Care and attunement,
discourse is indeed a primordial pre-condition for all of Dasein's experiencing. How so? Dasein implies the unconcealing disclosing of a world. For a world to be disclosed for Dasein, it must be articulated as totality of relevance. In its having significance for Dasein, the world signifies as discourse.

Woke up
Fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Went downstairs and drank a cup. . .

A Day in Life is not a day in which "language is exactly front, center, and all around." In fact, it is quite the opposite. — Arne

When we are involved in any activity, such as what is described above in McCartney's lyric, we are involved in significations. These activities only exist for us because they have relevance for us. They are meaningful in their significance, and in signifying, they are language.

1. There is being-in-the-world.
2. There is the intelligibility of being-in-the-world.
3. There is an understanding rooted in the intelligibility of being-in-the-world.
4. There is an interpretation of an understanding rooted in the intelligibility of being-in-the-world.
5. There is a rendering explicit of an interpretation of an understanding rooted in the intelligibility of being-in-the-world.
6. There is language as a method (one of several) for rendering explicit an interpretation of an understanding rooted in the intelligibility of being-in-the-world. — Arne

I would make the following modifications: Understanding is equi-primordial with being-in -the -world and thus with intelligibility. Interpetation of understanding is always a making explicit.

"Interpretation is existentially based in understanding, and not the other way around. Interpretation is not the acknowledgment of what has been understood, but rather the development of possibilities
projected in understanding. Circumspection discovers, that is, the world which has already been understood is interpreted. What is at hand comes explicitly before sight that understands."

I wouldn't say that language in its broadest sense for Heidegger is merely one of several methods of rendering explicit an interpretation of understanding. Rather , language as signification is interpretation itself in all its guises.

"For the most part, discourse expresses itself and has always already expressed itself. It is language. But then understanding and interpretation are always already contained in what is expressed. As
expression, language harbors in itself an interpretedness of the understanding of Da-sein. This interpretedness is no more merely objectively present than language is, but rather its being is itself of the character of Da-sein."

. It's in Wayfarer's interest that science remain a shitty, reductive undertaking: he feeds off it. — StreetlightX

Sounds psychoanalytic to me.

which only reinforces my primary message. it is difficult to understand Nietzsche directly. — Arne

I find that true of all the major continental philosophers, which is why there are so many competing camps of interpretation for all of them. It's helpful to use secondary literature in an initial foray into the work, but one should be careful not to rely on that interpretation. Kaufmann turns Nietzsche into a cross between Kierkegaard and Buber, but in my view misses what is most radical about Nietzsche.

K

I found it extremely useful to read Walter Kaufman's seminal assessment of Nietzsche. — Arne

Kaufmann is a good translator, but I prefer the poststructuralist readings of Nietzsche(Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida) .I think they understood the radical implications of his thought better than did Kaufmann.

So I don't see how Napoleon or Ceasar positing their own would necessarily be contrary to the idea of the overman. — ChatteringMonkey

I tend to side with post-structuralists and Heideggerian readings of Nietzsche. Deleuze, for instance, treats the overman as something very different from a chosen valuative perspective, or a a will
which wants and seeks power.

"We should not think of Nietzsche's overman as simply a raising of the stakes: he differs in nature from man, from the ego. The overman is defined by a new way of feeling: he is a different subject from man, something other than the human type. A new way of thinking. A new way of evaluating: not a change
of values, not an abstract transposition nor a dialectical reversal, but a change and reversal in the element from which the value of values derives, a "transvaluation"."

"We can thus see how the eternal return is linked,not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation. It is the moment or the eternity of becoming which eliminates all that resists it. It releases, indeed it creates, the purely active and pure affirmation. And this is the sole content of the Overman; he is the joint product of the will to power and the eternal return, Dionysus and
Ariadne. This is why Nietzsche says that the will to power is not wanting, coveting or seeking power, but only "giving" or "creating". This book sets out, primarily, to analyse what Nietzsche calls becoming."

N

Will to Power is not a conscious drive either. It's all instinctive. Like an animal responding to stimuli, the external observer could perhaps deduce rules, but there is no reason or cognition in the process for the overmind. — ernestm

Yes, as for Freud, the instinctual drives are unconscious. But the Will tp Power must imply forms of cognition, as Heidegger shows:

"Nietzsche says in a note (1887-88) what he understands by
value : "The point-of-view of 'value' is the point-of-view constituting
the preservation-enhancement conditions with respect to complex forms of relative duration of life within becoming" (Will to Power, Aph. 715) .10
"The essence of value lies in its being a point-of-view. Value means that upon which the eye is fixed. Value means that which is in view for a seeing that aims at something or that, as we say,
reckons upon something and therewith must reckon with something else. Value stands in intimate relation to a so-much, to quantity and number. Hence values are related to a "numerical
and mensural scale" (Will to Power, Aph. 710, 1888) .

"This seeing is at any given time a seeing on behalf of a view-to-life that rules completely in everything that lives. In that it posits the aims that are in view for whatever is alive, life, in its essence, proves to be value-positing (d. Will to Power, Aph.556, 1 885-86).

Within becoming, life-L e., aliveness-shapes itself into centers of the will to power particularized
in time. These centers are, accordingly, ruling configurations. Such Nietzsche understands art, the state, religion, science, society, to be. Therefore Nietzsche can also say : "Value is essentially the point-of-view for the increasing or decreasing of these dominating centers"(that is, with regard to their ruling character) (Will to Power, Aph. 715, 1887-88)."

It's hard to maintain such centers without calculative cognition, which Nietzsche doesn't deny. He just argues that they are in service of, and get their meaning from, the drives.
Nietzsche wasn't posting a psychological behaviorism)stimulus-response). His approach was in some respects compatible with Freud's understanding of the relation between ego and id.

It's not a value SYSTEM. He has ideas of good and bad, but there is no SYSTEM of them. It's just intuitive reaction. — ernestm

We may be saying the same thing. There are a priori metaphysical systems , which is a suprasensory value system. And there are post-metaphysical value structures, which have a certain schematic consistency to them, as Foucault showed. In this sense, there is still a certain systematicity to post-metaphysical perspective-taking. It's a pragmatic sort of structuration, designed to further our goals of life-enhancement.

If there has ever been an embodiment of will to power in political office, it is Trump — ernestm

I think the opposite is true. Trump is about as far removed as anyone i can imagine from realizing Will to Power.People say Trump is capricious and unpredictable. Not to his base. And why is that? Because Trump's worldview is consistent with Republicanism of the early 20th century. What makes him dangerous isn't unpredictability , it's his regressive worldview.
There's a palpable metaphysics driving the Orange One. It may be muddled in its articulation, but its there.

'

Z. had no value system of his own. He just acted intuitively. — ernestm

Everyone operates on the basis of a frame of reference, perspective, point of view. Nietzsche's Overman doesn't do away with perspective-taking and value positing, only suprasensory values.

Heidegger explains that for Nietzsche the replacement of old Christian values with new secular ones ones is an 'incomplete nihiism'.

"The now-empty authoritative realm of the suprasensory and the ideal world can still be adhered to.
What is more, the empty place demands to be occupied anew and to have the god now vanished from it replaced by something else. New ideals are set up. That happens, according to Nietzsche's conception (Will to Power, Aph. 1021, 1887), through doctrines regarding world happiness, through socialism, and equally through Wagnerian music, i.e., everywhere where "dogmatic Christendom" has "become bankrupt." Thus does "incomplete nihilism" come to prevail. Nietzsche says about the latter :
"Incomplete nihilism : its forms : we live in the midst of it. Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluing our values so far they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute" (Will to Power, Aph. 28, 1 887) ."

"Incomplete nihilism does indeed replace the former values with others, but it still posits the latter always in the old position of authority that is, as it were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal realm of the suprasensory. Completed nihilism, however, must in addition do away even with the place of value itself, with the suprasensory as a realm, and accordingly must posit and revalue values differently.
From this it becomes clear that the "revaluing of all previous values" does indeed belong to complete, consummated, and therefore classical nihilism, but the revaluing does not merely replace the old values with new. Revaluing becomes the overturning of the nature and manner of valuing. The positing of values requires a new principle, i.e., a new principle from which it may proceed and within which it may maintain itself."

For Nietzsche the essence of being is an endless becoming without ultimate direction. Valuing is mere perspective-taking, a point of view, without anchoring in ultimate truth.

Nietzsche says "The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967). Will to Power.

First generation cognitive science used the metaphor of the computer to model mental processes, But since then there has been a movement away from computationalism and the computer metaphor in favor of a a more organic model of thinking processes. Newer approaches reject computationalism and even representationalism.

I'd argue they were not merely anchored to their communities as a sort of passive receiver, but rather they transformed them into something else, based on their personal value systems. And I think one cannot really transform societal values if one is really 'bound by a creed'.

The difference in those transformation is then I think, for Nietzsche, that the one comes from weakness, idealism and a denial of the world, and the other from strength, mastery and an intimate knowledge of that world. — ChatteringMonkey

What's missing here is that that for Nietzsche the transvaluation of all values only begins as a rejection of the conventions that one received from one's cultural heritage. But it should lead to a total revaluation that ends not with the embrace of an alterantive set of values but with the rejection of the idea that there is a right or superior value system (Napoleon and Caesar can be argued to reject one set of values in favor of their preferred alternative). Will to Power expresses the notion that life in its essence is value positing for its own sake. Each value system is on the way to its own destruction the minute it is affirmed,as part of an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Attempting to hold onto any normative way of being is a weakness for Nietzsche.

Does the law of the excluded middle not count here? If not should we immediately stop saying “invent” and “discover” and instead say “disineventcover” or some such term? — I like sushi

There is a word like “disineventcover” that indicates the mutual dependence of invention and discovery. It's called 'enaction'. To enact a world as a living organism or not to adapt to an already existing world as Darwim thought, nor is it to evolve independently of ones environment, but to adapt to an environment that the organism is continually reshaping in line with its own self-organizing direction. At the level of thinking, enaction means that we neither simply discover a world that is out there independently of our aims, intents and purposes, nor do we fabricate it out of whole cloth. Instead, we discover a world that derives its intelligibility from our pre-exisitng frames of understanding(worldviews, paradigms).