I found that video pretty moving. It's a hatred of cliche, or sentimentality. 'Wisdom' can be a sickening word. For me this is part of the inability of particular words to stay put. One generation's sexiest words are just mom-and-dad-talk for the next. And I also like the implicit embrace of being a sinner and a fool. Posing as wise may be a fool's errand in the first place.

I love Zizek for being so damned real. He's a maniac. He can't control his own creativity. Those mannerisms are of course unforgettable too. It would be very hard to write your own Zizek. His comic exterior would be easy enough, but the genius that rides such a ridiculous vehicle not at all.

I siad that poetry cannot become science. To say that poetry cannot become science is to say that the metaphorical cannot become determinate, propositional. I am aware of the ancient
meaning of "poesis" as 'making'; but I don't see what this has to do with the point at issue. — Janus

Sorry if I didn't read you charitably. I just don't see why metaphor isn't a mode of knowing. Must science be determinate? Can all objects be grasped determinately? I don't think so. Life is full of ambiguity and rounded corners. Metaphors are the right kind of model for that.

Certainly it's obvious that Heidegger does not aspire to produce science in the 'present at hand' sense; but I think he does aim (in his pre-turn work) at producing a science (in the broadest sense of 'a determinate knowing'). And this aim does necessarily, and ironically, involve looking at the vorhanden dimension of human experience in a zuhanden way, try however you might to evade it. — Janus

I'd say that indeed he's a theorist of the pre-theoretical. Formal indication is offered as one more microscope. And we can even accuse him of pragmatism. It's of the James variety, but still just about using words to improve life with a rarefied vision of utility at hand.

If philosophy aims to be "love of wisdom" does this not necessarily entail knowing what wisdom is? Of course it would not be wise to live estranged from the world ( if that were possible) but any account of how to live, that apsires to extend itself beyond mere metaphor, is always already "de-worlded', or so it seems to me. Such account are always abstract; that is they are always abstracted from their living context. Of course this doesn't mean that we cannot have 'living' reactions to such accounts, or to science itself, for that matter. I don't beleive there is any real, living, as opposed to merely abstractly conpetual separation between the zuhanden and the vorhanden. — Janus

Fair points. As to the deworlded subject, I thinks that's a fair description of science. It is about a public criterion. It seduces us ultimately with technology, with some old-timey theological absolute objective truth for the truth's sake. And I am down with that. Some of my favorite personal acts of creativity were 'machines' (algorithms.) (They were crypto systems.) I am down with the a-historical formal subject as the condition of possibility for an ideal language in which one can still write a poetry of pure form. Admittedly I've been experimenting with a certain perspective, but I would like to stress that I am not so captured by the perspectives I inhabit for the pleasure of working them through.

Water which one knows in the savoring and in the drinking, berries which one gathers and which melt in one' s mouth as one walks through the meadow do not catch our eye as refurbishments for our cells and muscles and means for our projects; they are substances in which sensuality glows and fades away. The materiality of things is not just there as the materialization of the dynamic form we grasp; once grasped and brought under one's eyes and in -one's home, the instrumental forms of things dissolve into the density of their substance. — Lingis

Great quote.

And the impossible in turn speaks to the recalcitrance of things to 'worldhood', their opacity and irreducibility to intelligibility. — StreetlightX

I like this point very much. Sensuality. Not the pre-theoretical but the non-theoretical. This reminds me of Feuerbach's joyful materialism. You have any thoughts on him? He has the blind spots pointed out by Marx, but he's just a good dude. Some philosophers just shine through their work.

While I think there's a rich and laudable tradition of philosophy that links it with 'life', I'd be very careful about the over-determination of philosophy by the concerns of 'life'. Philosophy can be richer than even that. — StreetlightX

I quite agree. I get absorbed in very formal questions at times. So much fascinating math can be done around the set of infinite sequences of 1s and 0s. But it's not just math but also an interpretation of what is going on that is not subject to its epistemology. What does one make of the situation that the computable numbers have measure zero? I know I have used it as a metaphor in a life-philosophy context, but the issue has its own life. To me this bit-model of the continuum brings it to consciousness in a new way. The continuum as the set of infinitely long, in-compressible 'files,' yet dotted with those that can be collapsed to pre-loaded Turing machines. I believe you've put some time in with math. I wonder if any of this has caught your attention? And have you given much thought to neural networks?

"Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. ... Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter." (Nihil Unbound). — StreetlightX

Ah yes, I like him. And I like that harsh attitude. But that's also part of what I like about Heidegger. Late Heidegger is a gloomy hippy waiting for a god to save him. I'm too Nietzschean for that in some moods, though I get that the rose is without reason and that my cat in her groundlessness is a miracle. Give me in other moods Hendrix's screaming guitar on 'Machine Gun.' I'd say part of us loves to destroy meaning and boundary. Even this seems conceptually in Heidegger, despite his often unbearable seriousness. I very much get how annoying his tone can be. In some ways he's one more turtle to smash open for its eggs. 'The spirit is a stomach.' But back to Ray. I like that he really knows some math and writes about it.

Fair enough. I'm a big fan of pluralist approaches to things, and my worry is generally always the over-determination of philosophy by one aspect over others; I want richness, always. — StreetlightX

I couldn't agree more with you. My process is usually to just grab a personality and really inhabit that personality without truly being dominated. I at least got better at not being captured with age. Nietzsche, for instance, is a mess. Grabbing that personality with the hot blood of one's 20s was going to be a bumpy ride. For me there's just no last word, except maybe a bias for this world in all its sensual brute presence that I've never been able to shake. I love Hegel, but I can't agree that grasping the 'absolute' feelingly or intuitively is bogus. And really who needs the 'absolute.' I tend to use the 'highest' in a sloppy way, it occurred to me. Peak experiences come in all shapes and sizes. There is no single high thing.

For me this passage highlights the schizoid nature of philosophy: poetry aspiring to become what it can never be: a science — Janus

I agree that there was some kind of quasi-scientific quest involved, but there is also a rejection of this. What struck my mind was the word comportment. As far as poetry not being science, that is trivially true in once sense and far from obvious in another. Poetry is poesis, creation. Even Popper (who respected metaphysics) had to give the creative element its due. Science is only a filter or criterion. And then of course Heidegger doesn't have physical science in mind but something closer to a praxis-centered linguistic pre-science of life. What we have here is something closer to the actual human situation: an individual exists in the midst of incompatible language games, forced to interpret this total situation not as a professional or a technician but as a living, loving, fearing, mortal individual. The demand that philosophy be science is already questionably, since this presupposes that man's highest function is to be a de-worlded, a-historical 'transparent' subject grasping a public object to maximize public utility.
(Everyone loves this of course, but no one in particular perhaps. ) Or it leaves the 'highest' outside of philosophy altogether. No doubt this 'highest' varies and science largely makes such pursuits possible, but I remain skeptical of the implication/assumption that philosophers ought to be scientists. They are just as easily described as poets who work mostly with grand abstractions.

Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did. — frank

I've been dwelling on this question more. I think he implied something like that. I haven't read much of the later Heidegger, but I have read secondary sources like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Mystical-Element-Heideggers-Thought/dp/0823211533

I am quite curious about how Heidegger reads in German. I hope he's a great prose poet. I expect that he would be, at least when he wanted to be.

'The rose exists without a reason.'

As I understand it, Heidegger understood (in this context) grasping for grounds to be switching into subject-versus-object mode, obscuring the genuine 'thing in itself,' a being which just shines forth without a why. From this angle, metaphysics looks like a power play that obscures the very object it wants to name. I think Heidegger might save said not that we should be silent but that we should listen to the poets on these matters. They approach what is hidden from the greedy subject's objectifying ground-sniffing.

...embodying a strange mystical pantheism drawn mainly from the writings of Jakob Böhme and his followers. Silesius delighted specially in the subtle paradoxes of mysticism. The essence of God, for instance, he held to be love; God, he said, can love nothing inferior to himself; but he cannot be an object of love to himself without going out, so to speak, of himself, without manifesting his infinity in a finite form; in other words, by becoming man. God and man are therefore essentially one.[9] — Wiki

The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself. — Hegel

The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realised and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself. — Hegel

God bless you, macrosoft. You said it, bub! — Noah Te Stroete

Thanks!

What would you say that you're trying to accomplish in all of that? What is/what are the end goal(s)? — Terrapin Station

For me the point is to move on to more exciting philosophy, more suspicious and literary stuff. I know I'm not doing science via philosophy. It's not that I'm not after truth of some kind. It's just that I don't think the kind of truth I'm after is the output of a traditional kind of argument. The philosophers I like offer visions of human existence as a whole. While these visions need some plausibility and coherence to have worth for me, their value is concentrated in this or that individual proposition. They have their power as entire personalities. Call it poetry, sophistry, religion, nonsense, dada, mysticism. Call it the genre of creative writing that is never done figuring out what it is. All of that's fine. But let it be (for me anyway) more life relevant. It doesn't have to change my flat tire, but it should make me feel something and inform my sense of who I want to be.

If you ask me why do I nevertheless argue the point? It give me an opportunity to find metaphors like little ships in a bottle. I get to elaborate and sharpen a critique of traditional epistemology learned from others. This critique is not on its own the point. It is integrated in wider visions (Hegelian dialectic, Nietzsche's portrait of Christ in the The Antichrist, Wittgenstein's grasp of the inexplicability of the world as a whole). I'd rather be talking about Hegel's big ideas , for instance. But the negative-critical mode (as I'm sure you can relate) has its charms. I do want to stress that no offense is intended.

If you're claiming that everything is mentally mediated, it's a game you're playing, isn't it? — Terrapin Station

I said that that's what idealists have really meant.

You are missing the big picture. This game is endless and artificial. The pragmatist critique put it to bed long ago. I was arguing that everyone knows very well in a mostly inexplicit way that we live in a shared world which is mediated by our body and personality. Because we don't really doubt this and because those with 'different' theories live the same way, this approach reduces philosophy to a shallow game, a sport of arguing about trivialities that grasps itself as a science of science.

Removed from the context of practice (or a world that resists and others who can literally bomb us into 'agreement') the whole endeavor has an unworldly pallor. I've been trying to unmask 'realist' talk as every bit as 'theological' and 'silly' as 'idealism.' The game itself is dust. This is why looking at ordinary and pre-theoretical life/consciousness is valuable. It makes the functioning, actual ground imperfectly but sufficiently visible to make a nit-picking theory of knowledge look like the construction of tiny ships in a bottle that will never sail.

Deliberate obfuscation is a crime. — Devans99

Sometimes the point is that it is not quite a crime.

From your comments about this, we have to conclude that you believe that there are things external to yourself such as road signs, glasses, and so on. You believe that you can observe them, that you can know something about them, something about what they're really like, how they really "behave," where that can be contra to your experience of them. Why would you believe this, how could you possibly know any of it if you can't observe the world as it is, if you can only observe your own mind per se? — Terrapin Station

Of course I believe in the external world. As for the rest, I've already chanted aporia, aporia, aporia. This old subject-object realist-idealist game is a dead end. It is grounded in a false picture of language. As I've mentioned, all I've been trying to do is to pick the position on one side to bring out the complexity and futility of the language game. The phenomena of world and truth defy explicit capture. Indeed, explicit capture uses or even lives these phenomena without even realizing it. People debate endlessly in a performative contradiction. If they didn't already believe in one another and that there was some kind of shared truth (shared meaning), they wouldn't bother.

I think lots of early readers of H really liked the death and authenticity stuff, for the same reason Sartre was liked. One can find an atheist ethics there, though Heidegger claimed that he was just describing a basic structure, not preaching some new abstract ethic. Given his thorough and detailed critique of Kant in the lectures on logic right before writing B&T, it's clear that he had a great passion at one time for describing the structure of the subject correctly. He felt he also had to explain why the subject had not been grasped correctly. So he traces an idea from the early Greeks all the way through Descartes to Kant. Among other things, he was a meticulous theorist of the subject. He used 'dasein' to try to get beyond the baggage and presuppositions he was dismantling or deconstructing. In his view, facing death as constant possibility opened up the priority of the future and possibility over the present and the actual.

A claim that people constantly think about it? — Terrapin Station

On the contrary, 'Anyone' always sees it as far off and considers it morbid to talk about or at least not worth the waste of time. The idea is that certain moods can throw us into this awareness. Some choose to keep this awareness close, 'resolute' in an embrace of mortal freedom. Wanting to have a 'conscience,' where 'conscience' is interpreted as being personally responsible for one's decisions. But no explicit ethic is or can be offered here. That would be more flight into some eternal, universal principle --more hiding from death in its fullness.

People debate this stuff. It's not an easy part of Heidegger. He thinks facing death this way opens a vision of man's utter immersion in time (as a futural being in his own or authentic mode.)

I take it that's all talking about the contemplation of death, and not death per se? — Terrapin Station

As I understand it, death is intended as a constant possibility. It allows us to grasp the phenomenon of the world from the outside, as a whole, from the perspective of no longer being there. This vision of ourselves as no longer there can snap us out of our usual Anyone mode. IMV, there is an implicit denial of afterlife in play. A big theme is that no one can do our dying for us. Like no other possibility, the possibility that all possibilities cease singularizes or grabs us by the personal throat, not Anyone's throat.

A person who knows that they are mortal experiences time as finite and his own existence as a story with an undecided closure (but still a closure, which allows existence to grasp itself as a whole.)

Feuerbach also talked about the finitude of time. We can't take every path, can't realize every possibility. Decisions matter. Unless we consent to sleepwalking through life and doing what anyone has planned for us, we are forced to decide without the help of anything eternal. I'd say Heidegger is a philosopher for atheists or at least those who only believe in this world (allowing for some radical Christianity, etc.)

For me at least, the importance of this term lies in how its frequency demonstrates just how formalist and ossified the whole analytic of Dasein is in B&T. — StreetlightX

I agree that it is quite formalist. Really I don't like that book, despite liking the ideas in it. I get impatient. I prefer to zoom in from the big picture (hence my preference for some of the preceding texts). But I do like his attempt to find a universal structure in existence (an update of Kant.)

This is one of the reasons why I much prefer - following Arendt - to emphasize not death but natality - beginnings and births, not ends - as a far more interesting philosophical theme. The broodiness of Heidegger is not accidental but in fact very much in keeping with his philosophy. So, to bring this all back to the OP, I'm not drawing a distinction between the 'intoxicating', 'exhausting' efforts of capital-P Philosophy qua dark, introspective discipline and 'everyday life', but rather, looking at ways to inject the (sometimes) aerialities and lightness of the latter into the former. It's a question of philosophy all the way through. Speculative thought doesn't have to be the world turned upside down. It can instead be - to quote Elizabeth Grosz - an effort to "enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. [To be] among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought".

Philosophy augments, extends, and edifies. It is not pale imitation and inadequate 'proximating'. — StreetlightX

Actually I agree with most of that, but inadequate proximating doesn't have to be read in a gloomy sense. As I understood Kisiel's rendition, the point of all of this proximating is to live more fully and openly. I think the heavy style obscures what is finally aimed at (openness to the depths of life) . And of course avoiding the world turned upside down seems central here. In Ontology:Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger writes some beautiful paragraphs about a table in his home, skis in his garage. As we go back we have factic life at the center. Switching to the language of being gives the project a different feel.

I would like to emphasize the H's vision circa 1919 is not at all for me an exhaustive description of what philosophy is or ought to be. I did find it stirring. It's one more direction, one more persona even. I'd say that I experience philosophy as a gallery of vivid personalities. None of them get it right. Most of them offer something, often an excess that needs the others as a complement/supplement.

I quote Lingis but this point has long been made by others, including and especially by Blanchot, who has often riffed on the impersonality of death, and its disoreinting and de-temporalizing power: death as what interrupts, and not (only) what orients. The upshot of this, to link it back to my hesitation about holism, is to 'fragment' death so it is not longer just some single, distant point toward which Dasein is oriented, but something pluralized and dispersed in a way which enables multiple and even clashing orientations and possibly disorientations. To de-idealize and de-singularize death such that we occupy not a single, coherent and unified current of 'timing' (a verb, as you put it), but multiple, overlapping, confusing, timings (and untimings, even). Death in Heidegger plays far too much of a role in 'smoothing over' the tumult that more properly characterizes the trajectory or trajectories which characterize Dasein. — StreetlightX

I like what you've written, but I think I've interpreted death differently (perhaps a misreading.) If death (as possibility at every moment and not some future event) opens the genuine future, it rips open the timeline and shreds it into a welter of possibilities. For me this would be like clashing orientations and associated disorientations. To experience a stable orientation would be to make the future present in the form of waiting for its already determinate form. As I read him, death reveals us as essentially possibility in a dizzying way. The 'pastness' theme seems important too. We can already image ourselves dead in a way that allows us to grasp our lives as a completed story. And we can author that story within the constraints of our thrown-ness.

All it's really saying is that you don't always have the distinction in mind. Well, duh! Who would have thoguht that anyone was saying that we did always have the distinction in mind? — Terrapin Station

You'll just have to look into more with sincere open-ness or pat yourself on the back for not being taken in. AFIK, you also think Nietzsche sucks. I'm pretty sure you think Hegel sucks, too. This is like being asked to prove that Jimi Hendrix was a good guitarist without being aloud to play the music. I must have used ye old Hegel line 4 times by now. The result without its becoming is always empty. The atomic/analytic approach is locked into doing math with words, assuming that some proposition out of context can beam them up to instant comprehension.

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Heidegger thought that anyone was saying that humans weren't "being there," weren't "in the world"? He thought that anyone was saying that we were in some "sealed-off compartment"? He thought that anyone was saying that there's only a theoretical mode to being/to consciousness? He thought that noting that we can make decisions about our lives was some sort of insight?

It's difficult to believe that he would have thought any of that. — Terrapin Station

No, Anyone is immersed in practical life. He did think metaphysicians were trapped in Cartesian presuppositions. We can think of this as a kind of professionalized Anyone (the concepts are related via 'idle talk') (If I had online texts of his early stuff, I'd give you more quotes.)

What would be evidence of that? (Rather than just being something like a straw man claim, a severe misunderstanding of what anyoen is doing, etc.) — Terrapin Station

That is what you can find in Heidegger. If you contemplate ready-to-hand-ness (we become the hammering), that already shows that the strict subject/object distinction is a fiction. But my primary answer would be to actually read the first draft of Being and Time (100 pages.) Or Richard Polt's book is written in a style I think you'll like.

This reminds me of you asking for a summary of Hegel as I understood him.

Something I wrote in another thread:

No, I'm not saying that. It's like my 14 year old nihilist example. (I talked about how the merely conscious rejection of presuppositions was trivial.) Anything explicitly conscious is still on the level of theory. It's the stuff that dominates in the background that matters. It's the water we swim in that we can't see. This water-we-can't-see is the 'living' past (one aspect of it.) It is the way you reach for your instrument, your way and not someone else's, informed by years of experience. It's the way you read these words right now, the way you unconsciously interpret them, the way that you (like all of us) are trapped in certain habits of interpretation, ultimately learned not only from your personal past but that which you inherited as a child and even further back in the creation of the English language. It's all of this stuff functioning invisibly as you dream up a future and act toward it in the 'present;. [The thrown-ness that you know about consciously is the least important kind, let's say.]

Heidegger is a 'depth' meta-physician. He is trying to get 'under' things that can be argued about to see what makes them visible or invisible as things to argue about. For instance, to the degree that this is making sense to you I am 'opening' new things for us to talk about --hopefully pointing to things already in the background of your consciousness, covered over by louder explicit theory that gets in the way.

Have you read "What is Metaphysics?" I read it recently and loved it. — frank

Yes, I love it too.

If that is the case then why didn’t Heidegger just say so? I’ve asked MANY people to show me where he says this explicitly - no one has managed to do so to date. — I like sushi

This entity which each of us is himself…we shall denote by the term “Dasein”" (Heidegger, trans. 1927/1962, p.27).[4]

The concept of Dasein
For Heidegger, the human subject had to be reconceived in an altogether new way, as “being-in-the-world.” Because this notion represented the very opposite of the Cartesian “thing that thinks,” the idea of consciousness as representing the mind’s internal awareness of its own states had to be dropped. With it went the assumption that specific mental states were needed to mediate the relation of the mind to everything outside it. The human subject was not a mind that was capable only of representing the world to itself and whose linkage with its body was merely a contingent one. According to Heidegger, human being should instead be conceived as Dasein, a common German word usually translated in English as “existence” but which also literally means “being there.” By using it as a replacement for “consciousness” and “mind,” Heidegger intended to suggest that a human being is in the world in the mode of “uncovering” and is thus disclosing other entities as well as itself. Dasein is, in other words, the “there”—or the locus—of being and thus the metaphorical place where entities “show themselves” as what they are. Instead of being sealed off within a specially designed compartment within a human being, the functions that have been misdescribed as “mental” now become the defining characteristics of human existence. — Enc Brit

The foregoing considerations bring an important question to the fore: what, according to Heidegger, is so special about human beings as such? Here there are broadly speaking two routes that one might take through the text of Being and Time. The first unfolds as follows. If we look around at beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be (e.g., in moments of anxiety in which the world can appear meaning-less, more on which later). More specifically, it is human beings alone who (a) operate in their everyday activities with an understanding of Being (although, as we shall see, one which is pre-ontological, in that it is implicit and vague) and (b) are able to reflect upon what it means to be. This gives us a way of understanding statements such as “Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Being and Time 4: 32). Mulhall, who tends to pursue this way of characterizing Dasein, develops the idea by explaining that while inanimate objects merely persist through time and while plants and non-human animals have their lives determined entirely by the demands of survival and reproduction, human beings lead their lives (Mulhall 2005, 15). In terms of its deep ontological structure, although not typically in terms of how it presents itself to the individual in consciousness, each moment in a human life constitutes a kind of branch-point at which a person ‘chooses’ a kind of life, a possible way to be. It is crucial to emphasize that one may, in the relevant sense, ‘choose’ an existing path simply by continuing unthinkingly along it, since in principle at least, and within certain limits, one always had, and still has, the capacity to take a different path. (This gives us a sense of human freedom, one that will be unpacked more carefully below.) This can all sound terribly inward-looking, but that is not Heidegger's intention. In a way that is about to become clearer, Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways in which other entities may become intelligible. Moreover, terms such as ‘lead’ and ‘choose’ must be interpreted in the light of Heidegger's account of care as the Being of Dasein (see later), an account that blunts any temptation to hear these terms in a manner that suggests inner deliberation or planning on the part of a reflective subject. (So perhaps Mulhall's point that human beings are distinctive in that they lead their lives would be better expressed as the observation that human beings are the nuclei of lives laying themselves out.)

The second route to an understanding of Dasein, and thus of what is special about human beings as such, emphasizes the link with the taking-as structure highlighted earlier. Sheehan (2001) develops just such a line of exegesis by combining two insights. The first is that the ‘Da’ of Da-sein may be profitably translated not as ‘there’ but as ‘open’. This openness is in turn to be understood as ‘the possibility of taking-as’ and thus as a preintellectual openness to Being that is necessary for us to encounter beings as beings in particular ways (e.g., practically, theoretically, aesthetically). Whether or not the standard translation of ‘Da’ as ‘there’ is incapable of doing justice to this idea is moot—one might express the same view by saying that to be Dasein is to be there, in the midst of entities making sense a certain way. Nevertheless, the term ‘openness’ does seem to provide a nicely graphic expression of the phenomenon in question. Sheehan's second insight, driven by a comment of Heidegger's in the Zollikon seminars to the effect that the verbal emphasis in ‘Da-sein’ is to be placed on the second syllable, is that the ‘sein’ of ‘Da-sein’ should be heard as ‘having-to-be’, in contrast with ‘occasionally or contingently is’. These dual insights lead to a characterization of Dasein as the having-to-be-open. In other words, Dasein (and so human beings as such) cannot but be open: it is a necessary characteristic of human beings (an a priori structure of our existential constitution, not an exercise of our wills) that we operate with the sense-making capacity to take-other-beings-as. — SEP

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If we wanted to focus on the "pre-theoretical," we certainly wouldn't (need to) read Heidegger. — Terrapin Station

I think you are missing the point. The theoretical mind has taken itself for consciousness itself, despite being a derivative mode. Heidegger is himself in the theoretical mode as he brings the pre-theoretical mode to explicit consciousness.

Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did. — frank

I don't know. Accordingly Rorty, Heidegger was trying to leave the power play of metaphysics behind in his later work. I've mostly studied his 1920s stuff. It looks like he's doing a Kantian-type thing in Being and Time. I just got his Logic (last lecture series before B & T), and this (translated by in a friendly English by Sheehan) is a detailed examination of Kant and others. He tries to show where Kant was there and yet held back by Cartesian presuppositions. At this point he was still doing 'pre-science' and aiming at a universal truth about human experience. Kisiel suggests that he abandoned this project as still too metaphysical and returned to KNS 1919 ideas (more along what you are talking about --life cannot be finally grasped.)

There is also the dictionary problem. One word is defined in terms of others. And these others are still defined in terms of others. All a dictionary can do is aid someone who is already partially 'inside' a language. Correct usage is tested against how people treat us in response. There is no obvious connection to pure meaning. I do not in the least doubt the consciousness of meaning, but I think it is more of a flow with feedback and projection. The meaning is like electrons running through a string of words as their wire. Individual words just stared at do have some meaning. Or we can quickly fish for some by coming up with typical uses. But every serious thinking is immensely complex in the way that meaning rushes through it with memory and expectation. The very complexity involved in our background linguistic know-how outstrips the complexity of the thoughts so delivered. Explicit systems are sad little shadows of that which makes them possible in terms of sophistication.

I speculate that our phonetic alphabet and the spaces between words are misleading. Our dominant visual sense (which takes static objects as its ideal object) encourages us to 'visualize' thinking and meaning, despite their more plausible connection to the temporality of music/hearing.

Another motive that holds atomic meaning fast (as a default semi-automatic approach to be dismantled) is the common project of making a knock-down argument --often for the projection of authority. We need atomic meaning, as stable as possible, to do 'math' with words and build explicit metaphysical/epistemological systems. So our fear of groundlessness (or of just relying on the inexplicit ground we started with) also encourages an ignorance of a semantic holism that might otherwise be obvious.

That would be the temporal aspect. I think we naturally have this notion of instantaneous meaning. We see the sentence in our visual field all at once. It is a point on the continuum of clock time, physics time. But really there is a forward movement of expectation and a backward movement of memory or trace. The meaning of the individual words is not even constant during our reading of a single sentence. They are temporally entangled. Atomic meaning is an idealizing abstraction, useful at times, but misleading.

If the real is the constantly present, then we ourselves are not real. There is no time for thinking in eternity, no room for a single living thought. If language is what is fundamentally human, then humans are fundamentally in time and cannot be eternal. This can be read as the ineluctable mortality of meaning. It lives its death as future.

Semantic holism...

Explain a bit?

Insert pleading hands... — creativesoul

I'll give you an example. Just track your own reading below. Try to watch the flow of concept.

Of this sentence the meaning you expect.

Its end is known, finally, to refer to its beginning

It seems that there may be a bit of indirect perception bubbling forth... that is to conflate physiological sensory perception and thought/belief by virtue of talking about perception as if it is informed by language. — creativesoul

Is there a strict boundary? I'm not so sure there is. Given semantic holism as I understand, none of our supposed-to-be explicit categories cut very sharply. This is examined by Braver. We inherited the notion (at least from Kant) of some kind of automatic unifying of pure concept and pure sensation. But this is just a model. It sounds nice and clean, but...

This is one of the more gripping and convincing insights in Heidegger, I think. All he does is notice and describe. Its truth (or not) is up to you to check against your memory.

Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in form. Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).

Heidegger, then, denies that the categories of subject and object characterize our most basic way of encountering entities. He maintains, however, that they apply to a derivative kind of encounter. When Dasein engages in, for example, the practices of natural science, when sensing takes place purely in the service of reflective or philosophical contemplation, or when philosophers claim to have identified certain context-free metaphysical building blocks of the universe (e.g., points of pure extension, monads), the entities under study are phenomenologically removed from the settings of everyday equipmental practice and are thereby revealed as fully fledged independent objects, that is, as the bearers of certain context-general determinate or measurable properties (size in metres, weight in kilos etc.). Heidegger calls this mode of Being presence-at-hand, and he sometimes refers to present-at-hand entities as ‘Things’. With this phenomenological transformation in the mode of Being of entities comes a corresponding transformation in the mode of Being of Dasein. Dasein becomes a subject, one whose project is to explain and predict the behaviour of an independent, objective universe. Encounters with the present-at-hand are thus fundamentally subject-object in structure. — SEP

So I'm thinking we tend to while in the theoretical mode take this occasional mode as an image of thinking in general. As philosophers, we learn to operated intensely in this mode and to speak to others intensely in this mode. Everything is known and nothing is known. With thinkers like Heidegger, we remember and then know that we also know.

Yes. I would credit Heiddy with the very same thing that I credit Witt for... how's that for a surprising grouping? — creativesoul

I might be more surprised, but they are Lee Braver's favorite philosophers, and he wrote a first-rate book about what they had in common. Highly recommended.

Knowing is acting with automatic faith, with a sort of basic animal know-how and trust. Our bright and shiny theoretical edifice of explicit propositions is a candle floating on an ocean. The ground is obscure. Our artificial/theoretical grounds constantly appeal to this obscure ground, mostly without knowing it. We speak what is with a sense that what is is not only for us. We can speak about private feelings, but we still speak as if these feelings are located in some hidden way in the same world with the listener.

Looking for propositional content as the basis of all thought/belief is looking through the clouded lens of an utterly inadequate criterion. — creativesoul

I can't comment much on OC yet, but I do agree with the statement above. Hinge propositions are too conscious, too explicit.

After finishing Groundless Grounds, I have the impression of WIttgenstein realizing that language is a system. It stands or falls as a system. He speaks of holding a set of propositions up to reality, and not any single proposition. This too is still too explicit. I have been contemplating knowledge, which I associate with Witt and Heid. When I reach for my coffee, I don't know that I have hands. I know it.

Exactly. The self at the centre of things is merely the sum of all that is found to be not part of the world. It is a fluid development built on a process of othering. The self is just the other "other" that arises in opposition to "the world" (and thus - against dualism - is wholly dependent on that "world"). — apokrisis

Maybe I can zero-in my question on this. Is the self above the model or idea of the self for another self that is pure consciousness? Are we thinking of an organism with a body evolving its notion of itself, it 'you are here' on the map of the world it uses as a tool to thrive?

but the working hypothesis that there is a world of objects that broadly matches our model of it is justified by the fact that it is by far the most economical explanation for our perceptions. — Herg

In short, your 'reality' is just the virtual entities that are economical. And that also suggests (seems to me) some kind of Platonism. What are electromagnetic waves? Your models are equations structured or organized by virtual entities. I've taken a few physics classes. This came up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation

My point is that science to be experimental relies on publicly accepted measurements. Public measurements seem to depend on individual human sense organs, networked by language. We model our measurements, one might say, if trying to minimize addition to the facts. These are quantitative measurements. For falsifiable accuracy we need rational numbers. In practice, floating points numbers are used for speed --a finite set of numbers on a finite state machine. (Turing machines don't exist except in human intuition, seems to me.)

AFIK, numbers are just part of human cognition. They aren't 'out there.' You say that the world 'broadly' matches your economic models. I say very broadly. Those models in some strange way mediate what's out there. I agree. But so does my grokking of furniture, also economical, in that it keeps my ankles un-bruised.

Peel the onion. I do not in the least dispute modern science. I do think the metaphysical interpretation of that science is non-trivial. My gripe is that we don't have a non-controversial grasp on what numbers even are. And yet scoffing 'realists' just toss off the idea that the world is 'really' broadly like those dear, familiar ghosts--the real numbers. The dominant epistemology in human affairs as far as I can tell is practical power. Taking our models as more than implements is inherently 'theological' and 'metaphysical,' concerned as it is with a truth-beyond-economy. And it's even an old Greek theology of number, Pythogoreanism of some sort. I'm laying it on thick, I confess. Don't mean to be rude.

One more, which is especially to the point.

Semantic holism, simply put, is the idea that words have no meaning apart from the context, or sentences, in which they are used. This can, perhaps, be better understood by looking at the meaning of holism, and contrasting it with another view of meaning, atomism.

Holism is the idea that something can be more than the sum of its parts; more specifically holism usually refers to reality. It contends that one must understand reality as a whole; that one can't start by examining the parts of reality and end up with an accurate picture. This is more easily seen if we look at biological holism. For example, a duck is more than simply a collection of "duck parts", and thus we can not break a duck down into "duck parts" and end up with an accurate picture of a duck.

Holism can be contrasted with atomism, which is the idea that everything can be broken down into smaller parts. Applied to biology one would argue that one can obtain an accurate picture of a duck by breaking down the duck into fundamental "duck parts".

Apply holism to language and we get semantic holism. The idea behind semantic holism is that every word has meaning only in relation to other words, sentences, or the language (as a whole) in which it is used. For example, semantic holists would argue that the word "tree" does not always refer to the same object for everyone. More specifically, if I say "All trees have green leaves" and you say "No trees have green leaves", there is not necessarily a disagreement. Both of us could simply be referring to different concepts of a tree. Atomism, on the other hand, would claim that one of us is wrong. Either my statement "all trees have green leaves" is false, or your statement "No trees have green leaves" is false.

There are a few criticisms of holism, which may help shed light on exactly what it is. The first one being that there is no sentence which can be thrown out as incomprehensible or irrational, unless you are the speaker. This is a consequence of semantic holism because you, as a listener, most likely don't subscribe to every assumption that the speaker is making. This leads to a second criticisim; that is, since our concepts are in a constant state of flux, and since the meaning of every word is determined by its relation to every other belief you have, you can't "translate" what you meant by a previous statement. (See indeterminacy of translation). — internet...accidentally closed the window

I'd say that we have a slow semantic drift. Revolutionary philosophers shake the tree closer to the trunk.

In case you or others haven't looked into it:

For instance, meaning holism seems to result from radical use-theories[4] that attempt to identify meaning with some aspects of our use. Examples of this could be:

Theories that identify a sentence's meaning with its method of verification. Verificationism, combined with some plausible assumptions about the holism of confirmation (Hempel 1950; Quine 1951), would seem to lead to meaning holism.

Theories that identify a word's meaning with its inferential role. Which inferences one endorses with a word depends on what one means by one's other words, and so (when combined with a rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction—see below) the web quickly spreads to the entire language. (Block 1986, 1995; Brandom 1994; Field 1977; Harman 1973, 1993; Sellars 1954, 1974)

Theories that take what a person means by a word to be a functional property of that person, and assume that functional properties are individuated holistically. (Block 1998; Churchland 1979, 1986)
Theories that identify what a person means by a word with all of the beliefs that they would express using that word. (Bilgrami 1992, 1998)

Identifying meaning with the beliefs associated with a word or its inferential/functional role leads quickly to a type of meaning holism because of the way that the connections between such beliefs and inferences spread through a language. For instance, a word like “squirrel” might be inferentially connected to, say, “animal” which is in turn connected to “Koala” which is connected to “Australia”, and through similar chains, every word will be related inferentially to (and thus semantically entangled with) every other term in the language (especially when one considers connections like that between, say, “is a squirrel” and “is not a building” or any other thing we take squirrels not to be). Changing the meaning of one word thus changes the content of at least some of the inferences and beliefs that constitute the meaning of other terms in the language, and so a change in the meaning of one term quickly leads to a change in the meaning of the rest. — SEP

Okay, but I'm saying that the idea of shared meaning is wrong. It gets wrong what meaning is, and if the observable phenomena are posited as shared meaning, then it follows that when we set up, say, computer systems to mimic the observables, or set up robots to do something like the Chinese Room, we have to say that they are doing meaning. There's a problem with that, however. We're clearly doing things that computers and robots are not doing--which also goes into why they're not persons, why they're not due the same moral considerations as persons, and so on. — Terrapin Station

I'll meet you half-way here. A random sentence generator could send out an email to 6 billion human beings. Maybe some of those emails would be convincingly human. We can say that readers of such messages would not 'actually' be sharing meaning. But what I have in mind is the first-person sense of existing in a meaning field. As these random emails are being read, the reader is 'transparently' 'there' with what is being said.

Maybe this will help. In some sense, meaning is absolutely trapped in skulls. Perhaps I should have emphasized that I really do get that. But I take that from-the-outside-view for granted. I'm not attracted to the supernatural, etc. Never have been. And I'm a hard-core atheist in the ordinary sense of the word. I also was very steeped in pragmatism and instrumentalism. And I've studied the 'evil' thinkers, the egoists with seriousness. So, despite appearances, I am NOT (in my book) coming from some kind of New Age angle in the least. I am describing subjectivity. Part of this description involves the sense of not being merely subjective. From an atoms-and-void perspective (shorthand for whatever the latest physics is, as I vaguely understand it), this is an illusion thrown up by the brain. Sure. I agree. On the other hand (here comes the mobius strip), all of our mumbo jumbo is nevertheless occuring 'there' in that 'illusion' of shared meaning --hence the aporia. Would I not be actually crazy if I didn't think there was a real Mr. Station on the other side of this conversation? I suppose it's 'really' my brain controlling my fingers to send symbols for your eyes which take them to your brain. Of course. But all of this is so transparent for us. It disappears like the hammer in the hammering. My gripe is that the trapped-in-brains thing is not wrong but almost a place from which to start, not stop. Now that we are here in this illusion, I'm taking a look around.

Your support for "Our cognition mediates or distorts the object" is that you don't drive without your contact lenses in? How is that a support for "Our cognition mediates or distorts the object"? — Terrapin Station

I can't read the road-signs without my corrective lenses. When I put them in, I can. Did the signs change? Or just my mediation? (I was trying to give you a break from my longwindedness.)

I've stressed many times that it's important not to conflate to ideas and what they're ideas of. Just like it's important to not conflate a painting and what it's a painting of. Ideas, concepts, etc. are like paintings. They're not identical to what they're a painting of. And visual artists can only make paintings, but it's not the case that they can only experience or know-by-acquaintance paintings. You should probably ask them if they're confusing their painting for the thing that they're painting. — Terrapin Station

I've tried to raise the same point several times. It's an old point. The thing we talk about is so wrapped up in meaning that when we try to talk about the thing itself we are peeling an onion.

I agree that stuff is out there. My point is that a naive view ignores the problems with explicit accounts of the situation. It doesn't even see the problem. On the one hand it appeals to common sense, a basic sense of our shared reality. Only fools think everything is mind! Well, sure. But those 'fools' were motivated by equally naive versions of the thing in itself. All that such naive understandings of this thing in itself have on their side is common sense. But show me the idealists who didn't share this same common sense. Hence they were looking at the complexities of mediation, including the vanishing-for-explicit-theory of those mysterious noumena.

My position is aporia.

'In philosophy, an aporia is a philosophical puzzle or a seemingly insoluble impasse in an inquiry, often arising as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises (i.e. a paradox).'
...
In Pyrrhonism aporia is intentionally induced as a means of producing ataraxia. — wiki

Pyrrho fascinates me as a dialectician who (I speculate) was wily enough to work through all the usual moves and see the futility of explicit accounts. Who know? Maybe the brother was down with semantic holism.

I'm very confused about how you're using the term "atomic," too. I wouldn't say that I'm talking about "atomic" anything. You'd have to explain what you're reading that way/how you're using that term. — Terrapin Station

I think semantic holism gets it right(-er). The 'atomic approach' understands words to be charged with significant independent meaning. In short, the atomic approach downplays context and ambiguity. The holistic approach emphasizes that language functions as a soft machine, a nexus of dynamic meanings. What's appealing about the atomic approach is that it makes arguments more possible, more believable. One can do 'word-math' with relatively stable meanings. Sans those atomic meanings, one is thrown into a bottomless pit of interpretation. But one is also able to let go of any particular jargon. (And maybe I'll change mine up soon, since 'shared meaning' blah blah isn't cutting through the noise.)

If we're talking about building models per se, it would just depend on what one is modeling. For example, if you're modeling the sun, you're not going to be concerned with modeling organisms, because there are no organisms on/in the sun. If you're modeling bacteria, most of your model is going to be focused on organisms. It's probably best to model what you're modeling, and not what you're not modeling. — Terrapin Station

As I mentioned, what was being modeled was existence --human or 'first-person' existence as a whole. I like philosophy that aspires to make sense of all experience without remainder, which includes perhaps especially a making sense of its own sense-making. This part is maybe the hard and central part for philosophy --yet it all hangs together.

Yes. And my account of meaning, understanding, communication etc. does not at all have shared meaning, yet it very easily accounts for this. So that's not an example of shared meaning. — Terrapin Station

I am trying to point at a primary sense we have in ordinary life of being intelligible to one another. Our language functions transparently for us most of the time. This general idea is discussed below. My claim is that while using language we experience a pre-theoretical sense of shared meaning. This include reading. I'm not saying your theory is wrong. This isn't about explicit theory versus explicit theory. It is perhaps about the dependence of explicit theory on an in-explicit primary situation. BTW, this is one of the ideas that made me realize that Heidegger wasn't just smoke in mirrors. To me it's 'obvious' in retrospect, but it never occurred to theoretical me that objects really do show themselves in different modes.

Heidegger argues that we ordinarily encounter entities as (what he calls) equipment, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks (cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on). Indeed we achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner. Entities so encountered have their own distinctive kind of Being that Heidegger famously calls readiness-to-hand. Thus:

The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’. (Being and Time 15: 98)

Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them.

Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in form. Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).
— SEP

Your theory is sophisticated. I have nothing against it. But it tries to capture something larger than itself, the very thing that makes it possible.

This is not in the direct spirit of the thread though, so I'll not expand. — creativesoul

Expand. We are already all over the place, and thatis appropriate, IMV.

The driving force, if I may use a bit of poetic license, was that they both realized that meaning was attributed in far more ways than had been accounted for. — creativesoul

Well said. That does square with my perception.

Witt, as much as I like him for a number of ways, was himself the fly in the bottle when it came to thought/belief. — creativesoul

I've got On Certainty. I haven't reread it for years, but I had the impression that he was more sophisticated than that. We use the word 'know' in 23,456,123,456,789 ways. Semantic holism vanquishes so many of the old problems, reducing them perhaps to a greater problem --the mystery of intelligibility itself. And even this Wittgenstein seemed to see in some way in the TLP. The world (what is the case) is just there, a limited whole, unexplained =groundless.

On my view, and I've argued it many times over, true belief is prior to language... thus, either true belief does not require truth or that which makes belief true is prior to language. Only correspondence theory gets close. Although I reject it in it's details, I have supplanted it with my own version. — creativesoul

I'm excited that someone gets it. It's early to say we get it in the same way, but I think this is very fascinating. As far as I can tell, all speaking presupposes both others and a shared space of meaning in an IN-explicit way. Theories of truth try to make this space explicit, forced to work all the time in this same primordial and elusive space or sense of shared/shareable meaning. Argumentive epistemologists ask me to prove it. They use it to do so. I can only point, dismantle, point, dismantle. An inexplicit ground is a direct threat to the project of the perfect system, which would like to be its own explicit ground. Uncomfortably, the operating system is quietly functioning, out of reach for the most part, big and soft (hence 'macrosoft'.) We look through like glass until we catch it by the glitch.

To me this is a holistic meaning field, a open space of meaningfully being-with-others-in-a-world.
Everything is caught up in futurity. Static being is a useful fiction, not only for the outer world but also as a model of the inner world.

It's my version of the Apo's vagueness. I woke up here. I reached for explicit formulations. They always crashed and burned, collided with one another.

If we switch into a third person mode that thinks of evolved brains, we can reduce it to some weird feature of what it is like to be a functioning brain in a its natural environment among other brains. Human beings are profoundly social. Anti-social beings perhaps especially so! They want to be left alone by actual company the better to enjoy virtual company.

We can also just do descriptive phenomenology. That's maybe what is most potent in Heidegger for me. We can try to grip with concepts a blurry-automatic-experience-structuring. The taken-for-granted method that needs to be (and has been) questioned is that only explicitness counts. Phenomena aren't like that, and yet they can be grasped or pointed at via formal indication and dismantling. For me semantic holism is grasped in the same way. Bennington's book on Derrida woke me up to this. If we just really look at the way meaning flows through sentences like a current, it becomes obvious that meaning is a fugitive, distributed ghost.

When I see a red light at a crossroads, I see a place where I should stop. There is danger in continuing. The danger is real. But the sign is psychological you would say. And if I see a dark cloud, I know to read that as a feature of the world promising rain. The conceptual essence of there being a cloud for me is this meaning. And then we can quarrel forever about the reality of "a cloud" as some actual object or entity that would deserve being named and taken as a habitual sign of anything in particular.

But if you want to continue on - like Peirce - then everything would only "exist" to the extent it forms a sign or mark that can be read by the world in some sense. So everything that could count as an actual event - something definitely happening, something that is a positive fork in a developing history - would be semiotic. It would be information. A fact. Meaningful in terms of a context that "observes". — apokrisis

This nears the question I am getting at. Who is it that reads the sign? What makes sense to me (in a speculative mode) is that there is no 'I' and no 'world' but just the signs. The 'I' and the 'world' are just two frequent signs that refer to still other signs. There is no viewer. 'Consciousness' would just be the name of something that certain signs have in common (connected the sign for a person alive and awake.)

I understand that if we think of living organisms surviving that we need some kind of subject. This to me is one of the rough edges. What is consciousness? Or is consciousness just a sign that meaningfully exists 'directly.' And what are these individual organisms if not also signs? There is a tension between what we know in non-speculative terms and where we might want to go speculatively. I have followed these lines of thinking before and usually am turned back by linguistic entanglements.

Your 'context that observes' sounds like a 'thrown open space' for interpretation.

In a way I do think holism is 'inescapable'; much though, in the same way that the fridge light is inescapable: it not on when you look, its on because you're looking. — StreetlightX

I think I see what you mean and agree. In ordinary life we just largely bounce off significations, responding to the signs as individual signs and not the sign-as-node. In philosophical life, for me anyway, semantic holism is switched on in certain kinds of arguments. If both people are sincerely just grasping the other's idea as a whole without having to be reminded to, then there's no reason to sing the song of holism, holism, holism. It does seem largely therapeutic, something like an immune system. I know you like Wittgenstein. That to me is the important holist realization.

But it's important to attend to the asymmetry of our relationship to the world which, for its own part, is largely indifferent to what one can even call our 'primordial comportment' to it, if you like. — StreetlightX

I agree, and I'd extend this critique to most of philosophy. Sometimes what is needed is the ability to change a flat tire on the highway. From this ordinary life perspective, Heidegger's grandiosity, for instance, is a rubber bullet. 'Speculative' thought is the world turned upside down. What sometimes amuses me (in the midst of my doing it anyway) is that the idea of ordinary life and the non-theoretical can become a fetish for theory. I have a similar feeling about the 'great outdoors' of Meillassoux. Philosophers (myself included) often adore words that point beyond words --perhaps more than whatever is actually not word, at least while gripped by the theoretical-poetical drive.

Moreover - and this is something the French reception to Heidegger understood very well, perhaps because of their interest in Nietzsche - meangfulness can be asphixiating. Heidegger got something of this in his speaking of our 'throwness', but perhaps didn't draw the full concequences from it. To makes one's way in a world loaded with inescapable meaning can be incredibly oppressive, and one of the things we happen to be very good at ignoring much of it and, and it were, playing with reality. The almost fanatical thematics of 'appropriation' in Heidegger - speaking also to his conception of philosophy outlined in the OP - strikes me being insensitive to to precisely the liberatory power of disappropriation, of the anonymous and of Das Man that Heidi consistantly disparages. — StreetlightX

I completely agree here. But maybe his politics was a way he lived an escape from that. To melt into the nation, etc. To melt into a group. This echoes Sartre's 'condemned to be free.' Except really we are mostly immersed. I can say that sometimes philosophy becomes a little intoxicating and exhausting at the same time for me. It's like stimulants wearing off. One gets tired of talking, explaining, defending, evangelizing, making distinctions. I just watched TV for the first time in a few days (the Coen Brother's new Western). It was great to sink into fiction again and take a break from finding words, decoding other people's abstractions...