Research with animals reveals an ability to manipulate behavior on a masculine to feminine scale.

Rationality is a kind of obedience also. Scientific rationality has more in common than one might think to obedience to religious authority. To be rational is to be in conformity with a grounding principle of rationality. This ground itself is generally not questioned by those who see truth in terms of rationality. Thus they don't recognize their obedience to this ground. In the age of Reason,the authority of religious faith was replaced by the authority of scientific rationality, via truth as correspondence. But obedience to the rational has come under question in philosophy in the past 100 years(Dewey, James, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc)..

The biological component of gender produces not only differences on body shape, physiology and genitalia dictated by chromosomes, but also differences in brain physiology , likely mediated by hormones in the womb. This hormonal effect on 'brain wiring' produces differences along a spectrum of masculinity-femininity. Unlike the binary bodily effects of sex chromosomes, which allow for the most part a neat division of male vs female in the population , gender-based brain wiring produces a much more varied distribution of behavioral gender traits among populations. Apart from the LGBT spectrum , there is a wide, although less noticeable, spectrum within the so-called heterosexual population in terms of masculinity-femininity .
But because of the inseparable interplay of biology ans culture, what constitutes masculinity and femininity slowly changes over time in terms of social roles.
I think there will always be a way to point to a masculine-feminine spectrum in society, but it would be foolish to try to nail down for all time how to define its attributes.

I think the most crucial concept in these nature-nurture gender discussions, and the hardest for traditionalists to grasp, is the somewhat threatening idea that biology can shape brain function in such a way as to produce in each of us a particular gender-based style of perceptual engagement with the world. And furthermore, that there is no such thing as a biological body outside of behavior. Behavior is embodied and the body , designed as it is to behave, to move , to interact in a world, can only fully be understood in the way that it is animated. If the body cannot be properly understood as a slab of meat disconnected from behavior, then it is meaningless to point to a strict two category definition of the biological body in terms of male vs female chromosomes. Behavior dictates the gender of the body in terms of how we move it, how we walk and talk, etc. that means that two heterosexual males are differently gendered, bodily as well as psychologically by subtle differences between them in masculinity-femininity.

You wrote: "Das Man pertains to all of Dasein's encounters and situations" . It pertains in the sense that it belongs to a mode that is equiprimordial with Being-in-the-world. But it is of a different kind than ready to hand or present to hand things and isnt encountered directly through those modes of interpretation. That is to say, it is not thematically encountered.

"All of the structures of being of Da-sein, thus also the phenomenon that answers to
this question of who, are modes of its being." Thus the answer to the question of the 'who' is a mode of being.

"By investigating in the direction of the phenomenon which allows us to answer the question of the
who, we are led to structures of Da-sein which are equiprimordial with
being-in-the-world: being-with and Mitda-sein. In this kind of being, the
mode of everyday being a self is grounded whose explication makes visible
what we might call the " subject" of everydayness, the they .

"The "description" of the surrounding world nearest to us, for example,
the work-world of the handworker, showed that together with the useful things found in work, others are "also encountered" for whom the "work" is to be done."
"In our previous analysis, the scope of what is encountered
in the world was initially narrowed down to useful things at hand,
or nature objectively present, thus to beings of a character unlike Da-sein.
This restriction was not only necessary for the purpose of simplifying
the explication; but, above all, because the kind of being of the existence
of the others encountered within the surrounding world is distinct from
handiness and objective presence."

"Da-sein understands itself, initially and for the most part, in terms
of its world, and the Mitda-sein of others is frequently encountered from
innerworldly things at hand. But when the others become, so to speak,
thematic in their Da-sein, they are not encountered as objectively present
thing-persons, but we meet them "at work," that is, primarily in their
being-in-the-world."

"Taking care of things is a character of being which
being-with cannot have as its own, although this kind of being is a being
toward beings encountered in the world, as is taking care of things. The
being to which Da-sein is related as being-with does not, however, have
the kind of being of useful things at hand; it is itself Da-sein. This being
is not taken care of, but is a matter of concern."

"The others" does not mean everybody else but me-those from
whom the I distinguishes itself. They are, rather, those from whom one
mostly does not distinguish oneself, those among whom one is, too."

I'm thinking Das man pertains directly to being-with -others and not also to the being-at-hand or present-at-handness of things, even if those things have to do with human concerns(and most things do).

By impersonal expressive agency I meant a meaning that could assimilated as more or less the same by multiple participants in a social enterprise. Gallagher's concept of distributed cognition captures this idea.

"In regard to planning out a long-term project or short-term joint action, prospective
deliberation or reflective thinking (e.g., in the context of forming D-intentions or planning
out how to do things) can be a social process, as in the case of my wife and I deliberating
about buying a new car. We can reflect together via communicative actions, about what we
want to do, or about how we should go about doing it. What my initial individual intention
might have been can change through this communicative process into an intention that is
not reducible to just my or your individual intention. There’s no problem here of speaking
about a collectively formed intention. But we can ask, “where” does a collectively formed
intention reside? In our individual minds? Or in what can be called a socially extended
mind, or institution (Gallagher 2013), or what Alessandro Duranti (2015) calls a socially
distributed cognition (Duranti 2015: 219). Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive
processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established
institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve
problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies,
environments, institutional structures, etc."

"Distributed cognition(originated by cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins) means the
distribution of knowledge throughout environments—instructions, instruments, other
people, etc., Gibsonian affordances; Goodwin’s semiotic resources; Searle’s “Background”;
Bourdieu’s habitus. Yes to all of this, but I want to add, narratives too."

"Narrative can work as part of distributed cognition, or in contexts of collective intentionality and group agency."
"Narrative practices can lead to a collective sense of joint agency (in ways that go beyond simply the
sharing of individual mental events); they can help to shape group identity; they can solve problems of
stability of intentions and projects across time; they can provide resources for problem solving; and
provide ways to track progress toward a goal."

"To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends
those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group
members or the group as a whole. Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy)
of their own and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual
members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and
practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they
can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us
to other possibilities."

Ok, your post was a lot funnier than mine.

You could turn the question around and ask, why does it come up that we determine someone's standards with respect to an interest of theirs to be an obsession? Does the issue lie in their thinking or in our assessment of their thinking a extreme or obsessive or perfectionist?
There are a lot of ways we could construe the situation with the vase that would not necessitate the label of perfectionism or obsession. for instance, the nature of collecting is that one becomes immersed in knowledge surrounding a collectable, be it stamps, coins, records or art. The more knowledgeable about the subject matter one becomes, the more one appreciates the most subtle details concerning the collectable object. So what would be a trivial detail to someone else is a big deal to the collector. This is simply an issue of specialization, not necessarily obsession.

I can't help you here. I haven t read McDowell in 10 years. I'm more of a Rorty guy as far as the analytic post-analytic side of things is concerned. mainly my interests are continental philosophy and enactive embodied cognitive science. i find McDowell to be a bit backward retative to these perspectives.

I don't know if this will help.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/analytic-philosophy-and-the-return-of-hegelian-thought/

The interpenetration of fact an value means that in order to cope with, adapt to and anticipate new situations, we have to construct schemes of interpretation. Such schemes imply ways in which situations matter to us, are significant to us, are relevant for us. So you see, one cannot change one's interpretive framework without also altering how we e-valuate the world, Altering one's construals is at the same time shifting ones value-structure, not profoundly but in subtle ways. There needs to be some relative self-consistency in our values fro one day to the next. If events forced us to completely abandon one set of value principles this would be period of emotional crisis, and something to try to avoid unless absolutely necessary. Incremental shifts reflect a healthier and more adaptive engagement with the world..

Imaginations and success at construing a better world are measured not by repeating the same experience over and over the same way, but by our ability to re conceptualize it which is both a 'pragmatic' and valuative shift to an extent. Changes in scientific worldviews are also valuative transformations.

"Will the ideal pragmatist select values which are in his estimation pragmatic or try to determine goals based on his values and strive towards those accomplishments in a pragmatic fashion?"

I dont know what an ideal pragmatist is. All I can tell you is that the philosophers who founded the school of American pragmatism(Dewey, James, Mead) didn't believe that we can simply choose our values from scratch any more than we can choose how we are shaped by our culture. We already find ourselves in within a value perspective which is how the world makes sense to us. We can experiment within that perspective to find modes of interaction with the world which are more optimally adaptive, and we can modify to an extent our value structures if more fine-tuned adjustment within our current perspective is not helping us to cope.

Use and form interpenetrate each other, They cannot be separated, any more than scheme and content, or fact and value. Every fact is organized within a valuative scheme, which in turn is shaped by encounter with the world.

Husserl says what we perceive primordially are the things themselves, but this means that we perceive perspectival variations and modifications , that is, aspects of a scene cosntantly changing via our interaction with it. Constituted objects have to be constructed , abstracted, from this activity in a further step.

Here's a taste of fact-value entanglement:

"To be objective, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be
designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length: If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or
a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is.
And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core."

With "objects don't exist in nature, they are our constructions of nature" I had in mind Kant , Husserl, current theory in perceptual and cognitive science.

"The ultimate criterion for judging the rationality, or irrationality, of the attitudes human beings have toward Nothing (pre- or post) would be determined by the actual nature of Nothing itself."

How are you understanding rationality? As a hierarchy? If determining the actual nature of something qualifies as the highest level of rationality, are there lower levels of rationality?

If I say that Sauron is someone to be feared but Gandalf is not(unless you are evil), is that a rational statement even though its facts are fictional facts rather than directly observed ?

By the way, are you familiar with the entanglement of the fact-value distinction in analytic philosophy(Putnam, Rorty, Goodman, Quine)? It argues that directly observed facts are never independent of an account interpreting the meaning of the fact.

"I still find it impossible to experience that which would be required to provide a definitive answer to my original question."

Of course you can't find a definitive answer. What your premise comes down to is this:
There are directly observed experiences, which are open to empirical verification(your notion of definitive answer), and there are imagined or hypothesized experiences, which are not open to empirical verification(although much of today's physics rests on models which are not directly experienced, but empirically testable).
The concept of the nothing before or after my existence is a hypothesized event and therefore is not empirically testable, and not open to definitive answer.

"Emotion is usually about a personal relationship with another person, not about a concept."

Or about the fear that a live grenade will explode near me . If I dont have the concept of an object (objects dont exist in nature, they are our constructions of nature), i wont have the fear that the object will explode near me. Our emotions are appraisals of situations dependent on how we conceptualize those situations. That there is such a thing as a grenade, that grenades explode and that there is such a thing as a live grenade are all conceptualizations.

"To the contrary, I might be saying that seeing the nothing after my death as threatening is irrational, since I see the nothing before my birth as non-threatening. The assumption being, of course, that we are dealing with the same nothing. But, unfortunately, neither of us can verify this assumption."

So you're saying that whether my thinking about this issue is rational or irrational depends on how I'm conceptualizing the nothing before and the nothing after my death? If my understanding of before-birth nothing is very different from my notion of after-death nothing, then based on that originating premise, I could be making a rational hypothesis? If that's what you're saying I agree with that. We make hypotheses all the time without reference to direct experience, and form attitudes and affective judgements based on those hypotheses. We generally realize that our conclusions are not definitive or
empirically verifiable, but that does not make our hypotheses irrational, just imprecise and undefined.

If on the other hand you can't fathom how any indefinite, imprecise, impressionistic hypothetical conceptualization of pre-birth and after-death nothingness could possibly be rational, I disagree.

By that reasoning, mathematics is irrational since it rest on proofs that can't ground themselves in a final proof.

Succumbing to Das Man may be a temptation, but it doesn't work. That is to say,
evefn when we try our hardest to conform, we are applying norms that we automatically re-interpret. the illusion is that of following the crowd. The reality is that each follower follows in a different way.
IT has always been an easy temptation to accuse others of conformity, but the real issue is the opposite. The most difficult thing is to discern how others' perspectives differ form our own, often in ways subtle enough that they appear to be moving in lockstep with a group.
It's no accident that we are less likely to accuse followers of our preferred politics as brainwashed sheeple than we will the supporters of a despised political platform. Das Man is the accusation, but
its basis is the opposite, our failure to step inside the other's thinking.

You defined pragmatism only as a means to an end. That's an accurate reading of the common definition of the pragmatic. My only point was that it is not an accurate definition of philosophical pragmatism(Dewey, James) for whom the 'pairing ' IS what pragmatism means. In other words, not one side of the equation(even if we don' t assume primacy) with valuation on the other side, but both sides at once.

" I, therefore, cannot explain empirically why the latter circumstance should generate fear, while the former does not. All other conceptual explanations, no matter how interesting or complex they may appear to be, remain empirically unverified conjecture. "

What does empiricism have to do with a response of fear? Empiricism determines the objectivity of concepts. Emotion determines one's attitude toward a meaning. Emotion is about our personal relationship with a concept,not its objective determination. Objective concepts are empty of affective valence. There is always an answer to what makes us afraid, bu it is not empirical in the sense of locating a universally agreed definition of a concept.. Fear is threat of harm or loss. IF we fear the nothing, it is because we are understanding the nothing in a particular way that makes it a threat. Are you trying to argue that not seeing the nothing before our birth as threatening is irrational? But if you can agree that there is a logical chain of appraisal and definition involved in the assessment that pre-birth nothing is not threatening, then the problem must center on how we arrive at the particular definition of pre-birth nothing that allows us to arrive at the conclusion that it is not threatening. The chain of reasoning that begins with a subjective definition of what pre-birth nothing is, is itself empirically verifiable in the sense that we can find out from for everyone what their own chain of reasoning is and why it is justified for them on the basis of their starting definition of pre-birth nothing(that is to say, we can come up with an empirical method of connecting the experience of fear with a specific pattern of cognitive appraisal ).

It occurs to me that it may be irrelevant whether we can nail down an empirical understanding of pre-birth and -after-death nothingness. This would not justify fear 'empirically'. Since all affective responses are subjective, no matter what direct experience we start with, we still cannot justify or explain our affective reaction to that direct experience in empirical terms. Affectivty is not about direct experience understood in objective, empirical third personal terms. It is subjective meaning associated with experience, whether direct or not. So in order to answer your question of why some respond to a meaning with fear, we always have to start from the same starting point. We have to ask how the starting concept is being interpreted by that person, in relation to their past and their present circumstances as well as their goals. This is just as true with empirically determined direct experience as it is with imagined experience.

The larger lesson is that so-called direct experience is itself mediated, interpreted and differs from person to person even we decide to encapsulate it as an objective fact.
Your dilemma is only a dilemma because of the presupposition you are starting from ,that of pure objectivity and direct realism.IF you start from there, then subjective affective attitude becomes something that has to be explained. The problem vanishes if you abandon the empiricist 'view from nowhere' and instead begin from each individual's actual ways of construing meaning, fro t eir own perspective. The answer is right in front of you if you s=just ask people how they construe pre-birth nothingness. That should be all the answer you need. At any rate, it is a truer answer than assuming the idea of uninterpreted , non perspectivid pure, direct truth .

"We're grounded in the other, and a part of us will always think as "they" do. "

But I think the point Heidegger was making is that neither pure autonomous freedom nor social conditioning is what makes us tick. Even when we think that we are just normative products of our culture, the underlying basis of our meaning-making goes beyond behavioral conditioning .

Keep in mind that for Heidegger Das Man isn't simply being-with, it's a particular way of thinking about Being-with, a way which presupposes that communication is factual, that misunderstanding means inaccuracy, that 'fake news' implies 'true news'. One doesn't have to retreat to a cave to avoid this. In fact, Heidegger would argue that such isolation does not undo Being-with, which is primordial for us whether we are alone or with a group. Simply recognizing the particularity of meaning interpretation in using language gets us past Das Man as generic, factual, objectification.

We don't fear nothing as a pure concept . We don't even think nothing as a pure concept. Meanings are comparisons, contrasts. Notice that the word itself embodies a contrast. It has 'no' and 'thing' put together, the negation of a thing. So the question is , what is the difference between the contrast 'before-thing'(before we were born) and 'after-thing'(after we die)?

Let's use the musical note as a comparison. A note 'middle C' in-itself doesn't reliably invoke any particular feeling. It all depends on what notes precede it. Prior context is what determines whether the note C is heard as consonant or dissonant, joyful or sad. It's the same thing with the concept 'nothing'.
Moving from absence to presence, from darkness to light, is associated with the reverse affects from moving from light to darkness, or presence to absence. We don't know what darkness is except as the deprivation of light. When we 'adjust' ourselves to the darkness, we cease comparing it to the light that has been lost, and at this point it loses its meaning as darkness.
It also depends on how we interpret what is present and what is absent. A suffering person may perceive moving from painful existence to the nothingness of death as relief of suffering and therefore a move from deprivation to rescue.
Or a person could find a disturbing philosophical dilemma in the idea that they weren't always existing.
In this case the nothingness is disturbing because it comes AFTER the notion of the person's existence, in the sense of gong back to the 'goodness' of existence, making reference to it .

“Even if we had a perfect way of observing exactly what a brain was doing, we would never be able to understand how it made us have the kinds of experiences we do. The experiences just aren't happening inside our skulls. Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of its engine. It's bad philosophy masquerading as science.”
“But the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn't just misleading and wrong, it's ugly. In that view, each of us is trapped in the caverns of his own skull and the world is just a sort of shared figment. Everything is made interior, private, rational and computational. That may not pose a practical danger, but it presents a kind of spiritual danger.”
Alva Noe

https://www.salon.com/2009/03/25/alva_noe/

You're not making your pragmatism self-reflexive. Philosophical pragmatism is not just the means to an end. It also recognizes that the ends (values, goals) are contingent. They cahnge as they become means to different goals. So means and ends change places all the time. .

"Simply, the formula of this transcendence is to say that something neither x nor not-x, because it is beyond both. Derrida adopted this formula and it is grounded his notion of differance."

This is not what differance is about. Derrida's famous phrase 'there is nothing outside the text, means nothing outside context. When Derrida says that differance is neither presence nor absence he does not mean that it is BEYOND them, that it transcends them .
Rather , it is presupposed by them; it is WITHIN them. Why? Because we don't realize that what we think of as the simple presence of a name, a concept , an absence(because simple absence or negation is also thought of as a presence-to-itself) , an entity, a thing, a singularity, is already a transit, even before we pair it with something else. It is already split within itself in order to be itself as transit, already ahead of itself as itself, already an event, a plurality, as an entity Parasitism precedes identity.


Derrida writes, "...an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces"(P29). He adds:

"The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself(P26)"

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this
identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual
"element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or
fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

"One recognizes that all past experiences are caused by unconsciously taking part in a variety of machinic assemblages. Therefore, to avoid a mechanical reiteration caused by being trapped by the past, one needs to practice becoming, openness toward other machines."

You're operating from a particular understanding of temporality. I discuss that here:


"The primordial ‘unit’ of experience is not a form that is transformed by contact with another entity, not a presence that is changed by a separate encounter with another presence, but an experience already other, more than itself in the very moment of being itself, not a form, presence or shining OCCUPYING space but already a self-exceeding, a transit, a being-otherwise. What I am suggesting is that there are no such things as discrete entities.

The irreducible basis of experience is the EVENT (many events can unfold within the supposed space of a single so-called entity). Events do not follow one another in time (or in parallel) as hermetically sealed links of a chain. Each event does not only bear the mark of influence of previous events, but carries them within it even as it transforms them. An event is a synthetic unity, a dynamic structure devoid of simply identity. In making this claim, I am contributing to an already rich philosophical discussion on the phenomenal experience of time. This conversation has recently been joined by a number of psychologists (See Gallagher(1998) , Van Gelder(1996) and Varela(1999b)), who support the idea of the nowness of the present as differentiated within itself. They recognize that the present is not properly understood as an isolated ‘now’ point; it involves not just the current event but also the prior context framing the new entity. We don’t hear sequences of notes in a piece of music as isolated tones but recognize them as elements of an unfolding context. As James(1978) wrote:”...earlier and later are present to each other in an experience that feels either only on condition of feeling both together” ( p.77).

The key question is how this ‘both together’ is to be construed. Is the basis of change within a bodily organization, interpersonal interaction, and even the phenomenal experience of time itself, the function of a collision between a separately constituted context and present entities? Or does my dynamic ‘now’ consist of a very different form of intentionality, a strange coupling of a past and present already changed by each other, radically interbled or interaffected such that it can no longer be said that they have any separable aspects at all? I contend that, even taking into account a significant diversity of views within the contemporary scene concerning the nature of time-consciousness, including critiques of James’ and Husserl’s perspectives, current psychologies conceive the ‘both-together’ of the pairing of past and present as a conjunction of separate, adjacent phases or aspects: the past which conditions the present entity or event, and the present object which supplements that past. I am not suggesting that these phases are considered as unrelated, only that they each are presumed to carve out their own temporary identities.

For instance, Zahavi(1999), following Husserl, views the internally differentiated structure of ‘now’ awareness as consisting of a retentional, primal impressional, and protentional phase. While he denies that these phases are “different and separate elements”(p.90), claiming them instead as an immediately given, ecstatic unity, their status as opposing identities is suggested by his depiction of the association between past and present as a fracturing, “... namely, the fracture between Self and Other, between immanence and transcendence”(p.134).

This Husserlian thematic, rendering past and present as an indissociable-but-fractured interaction between subject and object, inside and outside, reappears within a varied host of naturalized psychological approaches that link self-affection to an embodied neural organization of reciprocally causal relations among non-decoupleable parts or subprocesses. While these components interact constantly (Varela(1996b) says “...in brain and behavior there is never a stopping or dwelling cognitive state, but only permanent change punctuated by transient [stabilities] underlying a momentary act”(p.291) , it doesn’t seem as if one could go so far as to claim that the very SENSE of each participant in a neural organization is intrinsically and immediately dependent on the meanings of the others. I suggest it would be more accurate to claim that each affects and is affected by the others as a temporary homunculus (little man) or self perceives an object. Varela(1999a) offers "...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"(p.52 ). The bare existence of each of these agents may be said to PRECEDE its interaction with other agents, in that each agent occupies and inheres in its own state, presenting its own instantaneous properties for a moment, apart from, even as it is considered conjoined to, the context which conditions it and the future which is conditioned by it.

Perhaps I am misreading Varela and other enactivist proponents . Am I saying that these contemporary accounts necessarily disagree with Merleau-Ponty’s(1968) critique of the idea of the object-in-itself?

...the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores(p.162).

On the contrary, as different as Merleau-Ponty’s and various enactivist accounts may be in other respects, it seems to me that they share a rejection of the idea of a constituted subjectivity encountering and representing an independent in-itself. Mark C. Taylor(2001) characterizes the enactivist ethos thusly; “Contrary to popular opinion and many philosophical epistemologies, knowledge does not involve the union or synthesis of an already existing subject and an independent object”( p.208). In a very general sense, what is articulated by Varela, Gallagher and others as the reciprocal, nondecoupleable interconnections within a dynamical system functions for Merleau-Ponty as the ‘flesh’ of the world; the site of reciprocal intertwining between an In Itself and a For Itself, subject and object, consciousness and the pre-noetic, activity and passivity, the sensible and the sentient, the touching and the touched. My point is that current accounts may also have in common with Merleau-Ponty the belief that subjective context and objective sense reciprocally determine each other as an oppositional relation or communication (Merleau-Ponty calls it an abyss, thickness or chiasm) between discrete contents. “...that difference without contradiction, that divergence between the within and without ... is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication(Merleau-Ponty 1968 ,p.135).”

By contrast, I assert that the ‘now’ structure of an event is not an intertwining relation between contingent, non-decoupleable identities, states, phases, but an odd kind of intersecting implicating perhaps a new understanding of intentionality; intentional object and background context are not adjacent regions(a within and a without) in space or time; they have already been contaminated by each other such that they are inseparably co-implied as a single edge (Try to imagine separating the ‘parts’ of an edge. Attempting to do so only conjures a new edge). Time itself must be seen in this way as immediately both real and ideal. Events don’t speak with their surrounds. They ARE their surrounds; the current context of an event is not a system of relations but an indivisible gesture of passage.
(FOOTNOTE: This gesture cannot be reduced to either a subjective mechanism of consciousness or to objective relations between particles. Like the idea of the inter-penetration of fact and value informing phenomenological philosophical perspectives, this is a quasi-transcendental(simultaneously subjective and empirical) claim concerning the irreducible nature of reality and time itself, and operates both as a pre-condition and a re-envisioning of subjective consciousness and empirical bodies.)

Gendlin(1997b), in his groundbreaking book 'A Process Model', offers an account of the nature of psychological organization which I consider in many respects closely compatible with my own. He explains:

In the old model something (say a particle or a body) exists, defined as filling space and time. Then it also goes through some process. Or it does not. It is defined as "it" regardless of the process "it" goes through. "It" is separate from a system of changes and relationships that are "possible" for "it."(p.50)...’In the old model one assumes that there must first be "it" as one unit, separate from how its effects in turn affect it...In the process we are looking at there is no separate "it," no linear cause-effect sequence with "it" coming before its effects determine what happens. So there is something odd here, about the time sequence. How can "it" be already affected by affecting something, if it did not do the affecting before it is in turn affected?...With the old assumption of fixed units that retain their identity, one assumes a division between it, and its effects on others. (This "it" might be a part, a process, or a difference made.) In the old model it is only later, that the difference made to other units can in turn affect "it."(p.40)
If one assumes separate events, processes, or systems, one must then add their co-ordinations as one finds them, as if unexpectedly...“Inter-affecting" and "coordination" are words that bring the old assumption of a simple multiplicity, things that exist as themselves and are only then also related. So we need a phrase that does not make sense in that old way. Let us call the pattern we have been formulating "original inter-affecting". This makes sense only if one grasps that "they" inter-affect each other before they are a they(p.22).

Gendlin’s account somewhat resembles embodied cognitive and dynamical systems approaches in its rejection of symbolic representationalism and decoupleability, but I believe there are crucial differences. For instance, in current models, interaction spreads in a reciprocally causal fashion from point to point, whereas for Gendlin, each point somehow implies each other point; each part of a meaning organization somehow “knows about”, belongs to and depends intrinsically on each other part. And this happens before a part can simply be said to exist in itself(even if just for an instant). What kind of odd understanding concerning the interface between identity and relation could justify Gendlin's insistence that the inter-affection between parts of a psychological organization precedes the existence of individual entities? Allow me to creatively interweave Gendlin’s text with my own, and suggest that an ‘entity’ can never be understood as OCCUPYING a present state, even for a moment. Its very identity is differential not simply because its relevance is defined by its relation to its context (embodied cognitive notions of the subject-object relation), but because the essence of the event IS this intersection. What is other than, more than an event (its just-past) is built into its own center in such a way that the relation between events is never an arbitrary conditioning the way it seems to be allowed to be in current accounts( as I will discuss in more detail later). That is why an event is better conceived as a transit than a state.

The most important implication of this way of thinking about the organization of meaning and intention is that the interaction between events can be seen as maintaining a radical continuity and mutual dependency of implication. To say that an event exceeds itself , in the same moment and the same space, as both past and present, is not simply to think the now as immediately a differential between the new and a prior context. It is to envision a new event and the context out of which it arises as BELONGING to, PART OF each other’s senses in a radical way, rather than just as externally cobbled together spatially or temporally as a mutual grafting, mapping, mirroring, conditioning between little bodies. This duality within the event is not to be understood as a fracture, opposition or chiasm between an already composed past carried over from previous experience, and an arbitrary element of novelty related to this past across a divide of thickness.

As Gendlin(1997b) argues, ‘The continuity of time cannot first be made by things next to each other, because such a continuity is passive; each bit IS alone, and must depend on some other continuity to relate it to what is next to it...”(p.71). For instance, fresh intentional experience does not simply sit alongside a prior context; it explicates the immediate past ( Gendlin characterizes this past as an an implicatory whole):

...explication is not a representation of what “was” implicit; rather explication carries the implying with it and carries it forward. An explication does not replace what it explicates. If one divided them, one could try to divide between what is new and what is from before. Then one part of the explication would be representational, and the other part would be arbitrary. An occurring that carries forward is an explicating. It is neither the same nor just different. What is the same cannot be divided from what is different (p.71).

What does it mean to say that what is the same can’t be divided from what is different? I would like to suggest that the very being of an event of meaning already is composed partly of that which it is not, that which it is no longer. The role which this ’no-longer’ plays isn’t just as a duplication of ‘what it was’ . It is a fresh, never before experienced version of my past which forms part of the essence of a new event for me. What do I mean by this? Not only does a fresh event belong to, carry forward, imply the immediate context which it transforms, but this inter-contamination between past and present operates at the same time in the opposite direction. The carried-forward past which, as I have said, inseparably belongs to a new event, is already affected by this fresh present. What does this imply? Gendlin(1997b) explains, “When the past functions to "interpret" the present, the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37 ).

It is not as if other accounts do not recognize the transformative character of recollection. It would be pointed out by any psychologist who had digested Merleau-Ponty's lessons concerning reflection that the attempt to return repeatedly to an object of attention in order to preserve its identity hopelessly contaminates the purity of that identity with the sediments of new context.
(FOOTNOTE:Mark C. Taylor writes:”Neither complete nor finished, the past is repeatedly recast by a future that can never be anticipated in a present that cannot be fixed. Anticipation re-figures recollection as much as recollection shapes expectation.”(The Moment of Complexity,2001,p.198)).

My claim is not, however, that the past is partially or eventually affected by the present, but that its modification is globally and immediately implied by present experience. The past is inseparable from the future which is framed by it. Because all meanings are referential, they don't appear out of thin air but from a prior context. On the other hand, the past in its entirety is at the same time implied and transformed in present context. There is no past available to us to retrieve as an archive of presumably temporarily or partially preserved events of meaning.


"The inside, the essential grounding structure (as you understand it) is the result of the constitutive exterior forces. The machines came to you when you were a child or a student. Your first meaningful utterances were formed by invisible social presuppositions,
they got you involved in a variety of particular social relations."

Here's a snippet from a paper of mine:

My Norms Are Not Your Norms:

Once the radically self-transformational, already fully ‘social’ character of so-called solitary self-reflection is recognized, it becomes clear that my experiences of direct interaction with other persons are but (categorically indistinct) extensions of this primary intersubjectivity. Thus, just as in my private experience, in interacting with others in the world I do not rely on detached internal schemes, in the form of a canned ‘folk psychology’(Dennett) or theory of mind (Baron-Cohen), in order to make the actions of others intelligible to me. Instead, interpersonal understanding, like solitary reflection, is an on-the-fly, non-autonomous, contextually created process. A number of cognitive researchers( Bruner, Gallagher, Ratcliffe, etc) may claim that their own critiques of folk psychology and theory of mind approaches, guided by their advocacy of socially embedded models of psychological processes, demonstrate their having moved beyond the essentialistic tendencies I have cited in this paper .

Gallagher writes:” a set of cultural norms is learned through practice such that these become second nature. By this means common expectations that are meant to apply to all, equally, are established. By learning how I ought to behave in such and such a circumstance, I learn how you ought to behave as well. And this supplies a ready guide to your behavior in so far as you do not behave abnormally. Such learning does not take the form of internalizing explicit rules (at least not as a set of theoretical propositions), nor does it depend on applying ones that are somehow built-in sub-personally. It involves becoming accustomed to local norms, coming to embody them, as it were, through habit and practice. “ Ratcliffe(2007) suggests that “many thoughts, interpretations and viewpoints ...belong to nobody in particular and are shared products of interaction”(Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation, Palgrave Macmillan, p..175).

Notice that the claim by Gallagher and others that individual behavior in social situations is guided by narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints implies the belief that essentially the same social signs are available to all who interrelate within a particular community, that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency . This is not to say that these accounts deny any role to individual psychological history in the reception of social signs, only that such accounts allow for a sort of cobbling , mapping, mirroring or co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints’ of such interactive bodily-mental and social practices are treated as pre-metaphorical objects-in-themselves. That social interaction for these writers depends on a grafting of one content onto another is suggested by the argument(Gallagher and Hutto(in press), Ratcliffe(2007), Gopnick and Mettzoff(1997)) that linguistic-cultural intersubjectivity is derived from a more primary intersubjectivity , an innately structured ‘intermodal tie’ between one’s proprioceptive bodily feedback and one’s perception of another that is supposedly direct and unmediated. Gallagher cites mirror neuron studies in support of the view that “we innately map the visually perceived motions of others onto our own kinesthetic sensations”(Gopnick and Metzoff ,1997,p.129).

I maintain that what is implicated for me in an interpersonal social situation is not `the' social forms as shared homunculi, based on what Gallagher calls a ‘common body intentionality’ between perceived and perceiver, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which one could say are unique to the implicative thrust of my own construing, belonging to me in a fashion that exceeds my own calculative grasp even as it transcends strictly shared social normativity.

For even the most apparently trivial cultural routine (getting on a plane, ordering in a restaurant), what I perceive as socially `permitted', ‘constrained’, ’regulated’ or ‘normed’ behavior and understanding of signs is already qualitatively distinctive in relation to what other participants recognize. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history(which is itself reshaped by its participation in these situations) , even when they believe that their interpersonal interactions are guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their language community.

Is this resistance of my thinking to would-be interpersonal norms a retreat from a model of full social embeddedness into a person-centered solipsistic essentialism of rule-based mental modules? On the contrary, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner, producing every moment a global reshaping of my sense of myself and others outpacing the transformative impetus realized via a narrative conception of socialization. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located intersubjectively 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-objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies or between-person conditionings."

"Essence precedes Being"

From Wiki:

"The proposition that existence precedes essence (French: l'existence précède l'essence) is a central claim of existentialism."

Heidegger didnt consider himself an existentialist, and critiqued Sartre's position.
Derrida, who I consider the closest writer to Heidegger, and the one who understood him best, wrote this about Sartre(which I agree with);

"there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications(in Satre's work), which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger." "Sartre was not a rigorous enough reader."
"But it is a fact that Sartre's thought obscured in quite a powerful way what was happening elsewhere in German philosophy, even in the philosophy that he himself pretended to be introducing in France. To say nothing of Marx and to say nothing of Freud and to say nothing of Nietzsche, whom he, in a way, never really read. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted "
"What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood
so many theoretical and literary events of his time, let's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated
incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl,
could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming
a great popular figure?" "So, in short, you see in Sartre the perfect example of what an
intellectual should not be."

Do you think you could elaborate on this? What writers do you find more consonant with your own thinking?

"To overcome a pure positivistic –behavioristic approach to a human as a cluster of subjectivities, we can apply the Deleuze-Guattari thought. Before becoming a cluster of behavioral patterns, an individual has been grasped by “the faciality machine,” from “inside” as well as from “outside.”"

I want to come back to something you said earlier. "If all my past experiences are present in my current “content”, doesn’t it mean that I am still enclosed in the totality of my mind? Even my intention to say something is no more than a simple repetition of the similar past intention."

Derrida has said:

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

What do you suppose this means?

Every time I talk to you about an intention, being, self that transforms itself in order to be itself, you say it is Cartesian, subjectivism, transcendentalism. Thta's because you are starting from presencing in your thinking. If we start from that basis, then it would seem that we would have to add a gesture of change, transformation, subversion, from the outside. That is to say, in a separate step. This is what the faciality machine implies, it is also what conditionings of various sorts imply.
What Derrida is getting at is that unity, 'itness', the mark, the 'is', being, the self, are already double in the 'instant' of their being a singularity. How can this be so? Because it is impossible to think of a singularity that is not a 'from this to that'. This differential is not first what was and what is. It IS as both absencing and presencing. Both together are the one, the 'it', the 'I.

Thinking in this way leads to a very different way of following any history. It may on the surface look like a Nietzschean-Deleuzian geneology.

You think that Heidegger is talking about what belongs to 'me' when he constructs his temporality.
But what does 'me' mean for him? What is me, mine, self, ipsiety? What is it for Derrida?
It implies same, reflection, coming back to itself. Can there be a self that doesnt come back to itself in order to know that it is the same? What if I were to tell you that for Derrida and Heidegger there is no such thing as 'the same' in the way that it has traditionally been thought?
No identity. Now, if this is so, would it not be impossible to ever talk about recognition, plurality, scheme, continuity, meaning? Can you imagine if it were the case that there was no possibility to gather, to be similar, to recall? There would be no possibility of a world. Does Deleuze posit such a philosophy? OF course not. He allows for plurality, continuity, pattern. That is why he uses a word like machine, rhizome, which implies pattern. But how do Derrida and Heidegger explain pattern and gathering if they argue what I am claiming about identity? They say memory is simply past, past is simply the past right now, the past right now is a new past. But it isnt a thing. It never is by itself. It is only ever together with a present. The present doesnt mean or say anything without this past , and the past doesnt mean or say anything without this present. Neither is an entity, scheme, horizon, thing, being, self. They are only poles of a singularity. The most irreducible thing we can imagine, that can exist, is a singularity, an entity, an 'it'. And as such, an entity, an 'it' IS these two poles. The 'what was that is now'.
The 'what was that is now' should not be thought as a sequence, because then we're splitting it into two entities. The most important thing to understand is that these two poles that comprise a singularity, an 'it', give the the origin of stability and change, of identity and alteration, of presence and absence, of form and content, of the transcendental and the empirical. And yet we can't say that we have either of these two oppositional conceptual domains. All we have is the suggestion of both domains within a singularity, within an 'it', an entity. How does a world appear at all from this starting point, which is of course only a 'point' if we remember that something as seemingly unitary as a point is already the two poles. A point is 'what was that is now' , a hinge, a bifurcation, a transit, a presencing and a subversion at the same time? (In fact this is the only meaning of temporality). The world is nothing but the repetition of differance as the hinged, bipolar unity. This is how Derrida and Heidegger get to call this an 'itself' . I again need to remind you to do the work and instead of falling back on old thinking that tempts you to call out Cartesianism!, Transcendental! whenever you hear the word 'itself', recognize how an 'itself' as the hinged differance repeats no identity back. We can call 'it' an 'it', knowing that an 'it' is two poles. So 'it' , itself' , self' , 'I', means two poles, means presence-absence, means transit, means "a differential structure escaping the logic of presence" as Derrida says. Can you see how such a determination of singularity, entityness, unity, immanence, comes before Deleuze's starting point, by already splitting apart and seeing as multiple what Deleuze renders as a simple 'it' ? Do you also see that the 'it', 'entity' ,self' is always already other than itself, because past-present as the indissociable, irreducible unity of singularity means two things at the same time? So the starting point for Derrida and Heidegger is being other as the singularity, and temporality is the repetition of being other(in always a new way. that's why it is temporal). Now comes the most difficult and important idea to understand. We cannot say that the singularity as being other is an opposition, a contradiction, a difference between.
That is the old way of thinking. only entities thought of a simple presences in themselves can be in opposition, contradiction, difference. Only when a thing is given the force of simple presence do we need to posit conditioning, shaping, intervention, subversion as the basis of relationality and change.
Only that which was never quite a presence to begin with never quite be subverted. IF there was no power of same, there is no force of alienation. There is instead a more insubstantial play .

This leads to the strange, paradoxical situation of deconstruction and Heideggerian destructuring.
There is never any gathering of the order of a self-consistency of a machinic or rhizomatic dynamic, but at the same time Derrida says "there is a way of not collecting oneself that is consistently recognizable, what used to be called a 'style'". One will always be able to trace a thread, within any history, as geneology, of what seems almost , close to, like a continuity, a 'thematics', and changes of thematics will themselves seem to be close to, almost like a change that is itself authorized in relation to a thematics. The appearance of an ongoing thematics is an artifact of the intimacy of the repetition of differance. A thematics never simply affirms or upholds without the basis of the upholding being contaminated as it is upheld.

None of this so far gives you the pragmatic examples you want, but it is necessary as a starting point
You can't start with 'what works' without having a basis for understanding what 'working' could mean.

“Live objects do not necessarily have a finite number of outputs","the live dog will necessarily take a larger number of actions over a long enough duration of time."

You completely missed my point. My point was that capacity for novel action by itself is not how humans perceive value. Valuative meaning has to do not with pure novelty and ideal randomness but with a particular kind of non-randomness, a certain kind of organized patterning that we perceive within an object's behavior that connects with our ongoing interest and understanding. Value is a matter of meshing of patterns of thought is the human and patterns of behavior in the object(patterns of thought in the dog).
Pure randomness or capacity for novelty in a dog is by itself useless to us.


"Every point in space can be represented in an infinite number of ways, and none of those ways are objectively correct, or incorrect. That said, I don't see how this argument in any way contradicts mine."

" All non-quantum software is reducible to binary operations, and all binary operations can be reduced to uses of hardware."

The point is different ways of describing things tell you different, often incompatible things.
In talking about software vs hardware I'm talking about different languages of description. Software is a code, an alphabet. If I show you a written language you've never learned you may or may not be able to come up with the following range of descriptions, depending on the circumstances:
I recognize that it is in fact a language, but that's all I can say.
it is a language and has individual letters
it also has individual words composed of strings of letters.
It has English letters and familiar words but the words seem to be used in unfamiliar ways such that the sentences are incoherent to me.

On the other hand, you might only end up with this description:

To you it looks lie a random pattern of squiggles that you can describe in terms of shape, chemical composition, etc.

These are all descriptions of the same object(the string of writing) but they mean different things and the value of the object is a function not of the number of possible states of the object but of a narrowing down of its possibilities. Intelligible reading depends on each letter narrowing down possibilities for what the following letter could be, and each word narrowing down the possibilities for what the following word could mean, etc. This contextual narrowing down is what makes language language instead of just random patterns. It CAN say anything in principle, but it is not meaningful language until it actually says something, and that requires
that it instantiate a very specific range of possibilities at a given point. All objects that we perceive are languages to us and thus your model has to be a model of language comprehension. Pattern recognition software used to understand speech takes into account the need for a machine to be able to accommodate new arrangements of symbols and at the same time recognize context, organize and disambiguate.
You may argue that what you're after is value, not comprehension, but I don't think we can get to one without the other.

We could describe human motivation in terms of stimulus-response. That's one type of 'code'.
Or we could model drives in terms of internal intentional states. That's another kind of code.
Or we could track the patterns of firings of neurons in the brains.
These are all true representations , but they are incompatible with each other in terms of their
predictive abilities.
Is your model another code to add to these? Since the cognitive-intentional level of description of valuation is the most sophisticated psychological account today, that would be the one to compare to yours. We would have to ask what advantages your account has, perhaps in the process delving into the history of cognitive science, including what it has absorbed along the way from various fields, including Shannon's information theory, linguistics, cybernetics, etc.

"My entire argument is, in fact, that the value of an object is relative. For example, a life jacket is much more valuable to a drowning person than it is to a person on land, because without the life jacket zero actions will be possible for the drowning person in the future."

IF that is so, then how do we assess in the object itself its value? Of 10 people choosing to buy a dog,
how do we assess what it is in the dog itself that makes it valuable to those 10 people , give that each is looking for different personality attributes in the dog. How do we translate "friendly', 'frisky', 'quiet, 'loyal', 'smart' into number of possible states without having to determine how the dog's capacities and each of the 10 persons' capacities mesh? i mean, we could just hand wave and say 'friendly' reduces to number of possible states relative to a particular person's disposition, needs, background knowledge, etc, but isn't that just an overwrought way of saying we like what we like?

And if we do create a 'code' in terms of number of possible actions that takes all this relativity into account, have we really added anything useful to the descriptions we already have? Do we end up with something like a software programming language , which uses quantitative language to express qualitative features? (Note that this does not 'reduce' the qualitative to the quantitative, any more than writing a Shakespeare sonnet in binary does).
Is that what you're after here, a variation on a programming language?
If you're trying to contribute something original to basic understanding of what it means for humans to value something, the only way you can know if you're on to something rather than reinventing the wheel (or an unusable wheel) is by familiarizing yourself with the current conversation within cognitive science, philosophy of mind and a.i.

" nature still unfolds (also for Heidegger) even if there are no clocks or clock-time."
What do you think 'nature' means for Heidegger? What on earth is 'natural temporality'? Don't you think he wants it in scare quotes the way he puts 'reality' in scare quotes? That is to say, the notion of 'nature' as something that has any meaning or coherence outside of the structure of temporality seems to me to be something that Heidegger would argue against.

"Is it really more true to say of Dasein that it is anxious than that it is constantly being influenced by others? How could being-with work without normativity?" There are conditioning inter-subjective models of influence. Then there is Heidegger's (and Derrida's) in which the ways another influences me is always interpreted by me via fore-structuring. It lends a certain self-consistency to my engagements with those I am lnfluenced by.

"Heidegger is hell bent on finding something that is is as the meaning of time. But time is anything but what is." Heidegger doesn't construe time as a static meaning. He understands it as temporality: not a thing but transit and transformation itself.

Temporality is 'simultaneously' of 3 ecstacies. The past as 'having been', the presencing, and future. Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general."
"Only because Da-sein in general IS as I AM-having-been, can it come futurally toward itself in
such a way that it comes-back." Thus, "Having been arises from the future".

"We are hard put to concede our unjustified commitment to find being something that is, rather than the dynamic between departure and recognition. But that dynamic is a logic of contrariety, not contradiction."

Heidegger articulated the self-differing of temporality as the being-together of Overwhelming and Arrival. Overwhelming is the surprise of overtaking.

"We're shaped by others in the account, through discourse and das-man, and this capacity to be shaped by others is a fundamental moving part in the account of Being and Time."

The question is what does it mean to be 'shaped by others'. The characteristic of of inauthentic being-with as average everydayness (das man, curiosity, idle talk, etc) is that one thinks of oneself as being shaped in the sense of falling prey to the world. Idle talk is generic, one 'means the same thing'.
But there's a difference between how one understands oneself inauthentically and the primordial existential basis of average everydayness. Similarly, in the mode of the present-to-hand , one asserts logical propositions which most on this forum(Karl Stone, for example) think of as 'objectivity,and don't realize derive from a more primordial mode of understanding.In other words, what we think were doing (inauthentic comportment) and what we're actually doing(in a primordial sense) are two different things.
We think that we are simply conditioned and shaped by our social environment, but we miss the underlying circumspectival basis of our being-in-the-world. Normativity is an assumption based in inauthentic being-in-the-world, but deconstructs itself ontologically.

"The shift in emphasis changes the subject of interpretation from a socially/culturally/experientially conditioned understanding of being distinct from nature to one where human being spans social/cultural/experiential structures and patterns extrinsic to human being which nevertheless can constrain us and our experiences - what was extrinsic can become embedded"
Not sure I follow this. I don't see Heidegger allowing for a conditioning model of social shaping in his earlier work.

Maybe you should take up the issue with Lee Smolen , who recognizes the dependence of physics on its own worldview(Heisenberg recognized this too), and argues that the presuppositions that have dominated the field concerning the understanding of time are holding it back.
His argument for giving time a core postilion in physics as it has has in evolutionary biology sounds a bit like Heidegger.

Heidegger will give you some:

""Of course, the question of "being-in-
time" is exciting, but it was also raised prematurely. The question is
exciting specifically with regard to natural science, especially with the
advent of Einstein's theory of relativity, which established the opinion
that traditional philosophical doctrine concerning time has been shaken
to the core through the theory of physics. However, this widely held
opinion is fundamentally wrong. The theory of relativity in physics does
not deal with what time is but deals only with how time, in the sense of
a now-sequence, can be measured. [It asks] whether there is an absolute
measurement of time, or whether all measurement is necessarily relative,
that is, conditioned.* The question of the theory of relativity could not
be discussed at all unless the supposition of time as the succession of
a sequence of nows were presupposed beforehand. If the doctrine of
time, held since Aristotle, were to become untenable, then the very
possibility of physics would be ruled out. [The fact that] physics, with
its horizon of measuring time, deals not only with irreversible events,
but also with reversible ones and that the direction of time is reversible
attests specifically to the fact that in physics time is nothing else than the
succession of a sequence of nows. This is maintained in such a decisive
manner that even the sense of direction in the sequence can become
a matter of indifference."

"If you ask a physicist, he
will tell you that the pure now-sequence is the authentic, true time. What
we call datability and significance are regarded as subjective vagueness,
if not sentimentalism. He says this because time measured physically can
be calculated "objectively" at any time. This calculation is "objectively"
binding. (Here, "objective" merely means "for anyone," and indeed only
for anyone who can submit himself to the physicist's way of representing
nature. For an African tribesman, such time would be absolute nonsense.)
The presupposition or supposition of such an assertion by a physicist
is that physics as a science is the authoritative form of knowledge and
that only through the knowledge of physics can one gain a rigorous,
scientific knowledge. Hidden behind [this presupposition] is a specific interpretation
of science along with the science's claim that a specific form
of viewing nature should be authoritative for every kind of knowledge.
[The scientist has not asked] what this idea of science itself is founded
upon nor what it presupposes. For instance, if we talk about time with
a physicist sworn in favor of his science, there is no basis whatsoever to
talk about these phenomena in an unbiased way. The physicist refuses to


"In physics, a theory is proposed and then tested by experiments to see
whether their results agree with the theory. The only thing demonstrated
is the correspondence of the experimental results to the theory. It is
not demonstrated that the theory is simply the knowledge of nature.
The experiment and the result of the experiment do not extend beyond
the framework of the theory. They remain within the area delineated
by the theory. The experiment is not considered in regard to its correspondence
to nature, but to what was posited by the theory. What is
posited by the theory is the projection of nature according to scientific
representations, for instance, those of Galileo.
Yet today even pioneers in physics are trying to clarify the inherent
limitations of physics. It is still questionable whether physics, as a matter
of principle, will ever succeed in doing this."

"The projection of nature in natural science was enacted by human beings.
This makes it [a result of] human comportment. Question: What aspect
of the human being appears in the projection of things moving through
space and time in law-governed fashion? What character does Galileo's
projection of nature have? For instance, in the case of the falling apple,
Galileo's interest was neither in the apple, nor in the tree from which
it fell, but only in the measurable distance of the fall. He, therefore,
supposed a homogeneous space in which a point of mass moves and falls
in conformity to law.
What then does Galileo accept in his supposition? He accepts without question:
space, motion, time, and causality.
What does it mean to say—I accept something like space? I accept that
there is something like space and, even more, that I have a relationship
to space and time. This acceptio* is not arbitrary, but contains necessary
relationships to space, time, and causality in which I stand. Otherwise I
could not reach for a glass on the table. No one can experiment with
these [a priori] assumptions. That there is space is not a proposition of
physics. What kind of proposition is it? What does it indicate about the
human being that such suppositions are possible for him? It indicates
that he finds himself comported to space, time, and causality from the
beginning. We stand before phenomena, which require us to become
aware of them and to receive-perceive them in an appropriate manner.

"It is no longer up to the physicist, but only to the philosopher to say
something about what is accepted in this way. These assumptions are out
of reach for the natural sciences, but at the same time they are the very
foundation for the very possibility of the natural sciences themselves."

"At the beginning of our last seminar our question was: What does
"nature" mean to modern natural science? We called upon Kant for
its determination. He gave us the definition: Nature is the conformity
to the law of phenomena. This is a strange proposition. Why have we
bothered to ask about "nature" in the natural sciences at all? Because
natural science does not expressly think about this determination of
nature. Galileo developed this projection of nature for the first time. In
doing so, did he simply make a "presupposition" ? What
kind of presupposition would it be? It is a supposition .
What is the difference between a presupposition made to reach logical
conclusions and a supposition? The difference is that we can derive
something else from logical presuppositions through inferences—that
a logical relationship exists between presupposition and conclusion. In
contrast, in a supposition, the scientific approach to a specific domain
is grounded in what is supposed. Here we are not dealing with a logical
relationship, but with an ontological relationship.
To what does modern natural science make its supposition? As a
natural scientific observer, Galileo disregarded the tree, the apple, and
the ground in observing the fall of the apple. He saw only a point of
mass falling from one location in space to another location in space in
law-governed fashion. In the sense of natural science, "nature" is the
supposition for the tree, the apple, and the meadow. According to this
supposition, nature is understood only as the law-governed movement
of points of mass, that is, as changes in location within a homogeneous
space and within the sequence of a homogeneous time. This is natural
science's supposition.
In this supposition, that is, in this assumption of "nature" determined
accordingly, there lies simultaneously an acceptio. In such a supposition,
the existence of space, motion, causality, and time is always already accepted
as an unquestionable fact. Here accepting and taking mean immediate
receiving-perceiving. What is accepted in natural science's supposition
is a homogeneous space."

"social sciences have all a normative element." So do the natural sciences. They are founded on presuppositions that they are not equipped to recognize by the very nature of their identification as 'objective'.Once upon a time physics was considered the queen of the sciences. Now it lags behind the leading edge of thinking in the social sciences in terms of its awareness of the normative basis of science in general.

Seems to me Marxism has a normative and a descriptive element. Dialectical materialism is a non-normative model of the historical mechanisms of economic change. Is it subject to empirical test?Not easily, as is true of Freudian psychology, But the there are many kinds of sciences with their own criteria of validation. It is a long-standing prejudice that the natural sciences should stand as the model of scientific precision and rigor. At any rate Popper would not be my go-to guy for defining the nature of scientific inquiry. I agree with Thomas Kuhn's rejection of falsification as the driver of scientific change.

Hiedegger rejects both objectivism and subjectivism. He's not saying the world is a construction of mind. He unravels the traditional notion of the subject, the ego, consciousness ans well as the empirical object.

"One can accept the physicists' account of space-time and accept Heidegger's account of how human beings experience time. But this is nevertheless to concede that there is a scientific view of the world and an ''existentialist'' view (I use quotation marks there as I am aware that Heidegger rejected that label) concerned with human experience."

Heidegger doesn't say a scientific account of time, or anything else, is wrong. He says it rests on presuppositions(I'm not just talking about specific mathematics models but fundamental metaphysical presuppositions) that physicists ,a t least till recently, aren't aware underlie their understanding of the pre-conditions of objective description. You , for example, are talking about reality here as something 'out there' independent of accounts of it, and thus scientific truth is aimed at a correspondence or mirroring of what is out there with our constructions of it.
This is called the correspondence theory of truth. It is a older explanatory worldview of what science does. More recent interpretations of science view empirical truth not ass correspondence but as pragamtic interaction. Science doesnt match some supposed reality sitting out there independent of us, it interacts with it in ways that are useful to us. In this account knowledge isnt correspondence, it is transformation.


Some quotes from Heidegger:

"Of course, the question of "being-in-
time" is exciting, but it was also raised prematurely. The question is
exciting specifically with regard to natural science, especially with the
advent of Einstein's theory of relativity, which established the opinion
that traditional philosophical doctrine concerning time has been shaken
to the core through the theory of physics. However, this widely held
opinion is fundamentally wrong. The theory of relativity in physics does
not deal with what time is but deals only with how time, in the sense of
a now-sequence, can be measured. [It asks] whether there is an absolute
measurement of time, or whether all measurement is necessarily relative,
that is, conditioned.* The question of the theory of relativity could not
be discussed at all unless the supposition of time as the succession of
a sequence of nows were presupposed beforehand. If the doctrine of
time, held since Aristotle, were to become untenable, then the very
possibility of physics would be ruled out. [The fact that] physics, with
its horizon of measuring time, deals not only with irreversible events,
but also with reversible ones and that the direction of time is reversible
attests specifically to the fact that in physics time is nothing else than the
succession of a sequence of nows. This is maintained in such a decisive
manner that even the sense of direction in the sequence can become
a matter of indifference."

"If you ask a physicist, he
will tell you that the pure now-sequence is the authentic, true time. What
we call datability and significance are regarded as subjective vagueness,
if not sentimentalism. He says this because time measured physically can
be calculated "objectively" at any time. This calculation is "objectively"
binding. (Here, "objective" merely means "for anyone," and indeed only
for anyone who can submit himself to the physicist's way of representing
nature. For an African tribesman, such time would be absolute nonsense.)
The presupposition or supposition of such an assertion by a physicist
is that physics as a science is the authoritative form of knowledge and
that only through the knowledge of physics can one gain a rigorous,
scientific knowledge. Hidden behind [this presupposition] is a specific interpretation
of science along with the science's claim that a specific form
of viewing nature should be authoritative for every kind of knowledge.
[The scientist has not asked] what this idea of science itself is founded
upon nor what it presupposes. For instance, if we talk about time with
a physicist sworn in favor of his science, there is no basis whatsoever to
talk about these phenomena in an unbiased way. The physicist refuses to


"In physics, a theory is proposed and then tested by experiments to see
whether their results agree with the theory. The only thing demonstrated
is the correspondence of the experimental results to the theory. It is
not demonstrated that the theory is simply the knowledge of nature.
The experiment and the result of the experiment do not extend beyond
the framework of the theory. They remain within the area delineated
by the theory. The experiment is not considered in regard to its correspondence
to nature, but to what was posited by the theory. What is
posited by the theory is the projection of nature according to scientific
representations, for instance, those of Galileo.
Yet today even pioneers in physics are trying to clarify the inherent
limitations of physics. It is still questionable whether physics, as a matter
of principle, will ever succeed in doing this."

"The projection of nature in natural science was enacted by human beings.
This makes it [a result of] human comportment. Question: What aspect
of the human being appears in the projection of things moving through
space and time in law-governed fashion? What character does Galileo's
projection of nature have? For instance, in the case of the falling apple,
Galileo's interest was neither in the apple, nor in the tree from which
it fell, but only in the measurable distance of the fall. He, therefore,
supposed a homogeneous space in which a point of mass moves and falls
in conformity to law.
What then does Galileo accept in his supposition? He accepts without question:
space, motion, time, and causality.
What does it mean to say—I accept something like space? I accept that
there is something like space and, even more, that I have a relationship
to space and time. This acceptio* is not arbitrary, but contains necessary
relationships to space, time, and causality in which I stand. Otherwise I
could not reach for a glass on the table. No one can experiment with
these [a priori] assumptions. That there is space is not a proposition of
physics. What kind of proposition is it? What does it indicate about the
human being that such suppositions are possible for him? It indicates
that he finds himself comported to space, time, and causality from the
beginning. We stand before phenomena, which require us to become
aware of them and to receive-perceive them in an appropriate manner.

"It is no longer up to the physicist, but only to the philosopher to say
something about what is accepted in this way. These assumptions are out
of reach for the natural sciences, but at the same time they are the very
foundation for the very possibility of the natural sciences themselves."

"At the beginning of our last seminar our question was: What does
"nature" mean to modern natural science? We called upon Kant for
its determination. He gave us the definition: Nature is the conformity
to the law of phenomena. This is a strange proposition. Why have we
bothered to ask about "nature" in the natural sciences at all? Because
natural science does not expressly think about this determination of
nature. Galileo developed this projection of nature for the first time. In
doing so, did he simply make a "presupposition" ? What
kind of presupposition would it be? It is a supposition .
What is the difference between a presupposition made to reach logical
conclusions and a supposition? The difference is that we can derive
something else from logical presuppositions through inferences—that
a logical relationship exists between presupposition and conclusion. In
contrast, in a supposition, the scientific approach to a specific domain
is grounded in what is supposed. Here we are not dealing with a logical
relationship, but with an ontological relationship.
To what does modern natural science make its supposition? As a
natural scientific observer, Galileo disregarded the tree, the apple, and
the ground in observing the fall of the apple. He saw only a point of
mass falling from one location in space to another location in space in
law-governed fashion. In the sense of natural science, "nature" is the
supposition for the tree, the apple, and the meadow. According to this
supposition, nature is understood only as the law-governed movement
of points of mass, that is, as changes in location within a homogeneous
space and within the sequence of a homogeneous time. This is natural
science's supposition.
In this supposition, that is, in this assumption of "nature" determined
accordingly, there lies simultaneously an acceptio. In such a supposition,
the existence of space, motion, causality, and time is always already accepted
as an unquestionable fact. Here accepting and taking mean immediate
receiving-perceiving. What is accepted in natural science's supposition
is a homogeneous space."

" It seems, then, that whilst Heidegger can tell us a lot about what it is like to be a human being, he cannot tell us what reality itself is like?"
Heidegger argues that precisely because science derives from the way of being-in-the-world of humans, the question of what reality is like in itself is incoherent. That is why he always puts the word reality in square quotes. For me the most interesting part of Being and Time is the way Heidegger derives the kind of thinking that founded the basis of modern science in logical causality and objectivity.
He shows how objectivity derives from propositional sentences, and this type of assertion is a modification of a more primordial form of thinking. The problem is that for so long people have mistaken objectivity as the primordial access to truth, and thus miss what is essential about understanding, truth, meaning, being., which is that objectivity is only a modified derivative of our relating to the world in terms of the way it always has significance for, matters to, is relevant for us, in actual contexts of interaction with it.