I recommend QED (Quantum Electrodynamics, by Richard Feynman). The ordinary experience of light and Newtonian optics are not incompatible. But a quantum analysis is incompatible to both. Light, it turns out, is a reduction of uncountable chaotic interactions. The reduction slices the event into its component parts and recombines them mathematically so that the crazy stuff all cancels itself out, leaving conventional wisdom. But what then does light illuminate? What does the conventional perception of it reveal of the crazy stuff that goes into bringing it into "law governed" range of our ordinary experience? Doesn't it all add up to a kind of darkness? How does what's in the dark reveal itself as the light it produces? Which is more "physical?

Descartes didn't doubt enough. Egotism is no excuse for lying to yourself. What if there is no "foundation" or "ground" (as Heidegger put it)? What if there is no origin or point of departure, no coherent or comprehensive antecedent term from which to begin the reduction? No such term, that is, but conviction? In this case the final term of the reduction is the loss of the suppose originating term. Doubt undoes itself as much as everything else. Self is its own excluded middle. Unless, that is, the excluded middle is only law between conviction and its loss. What then gets included? Not the contradictory, but the contrary term. If contrariety rules as a community in contrariety to the limited lawfulness that fails to illuminate it because that contrariety, by losing itself to the reduction, is generated whatever illumination there is.

Splashing about like children in the shallows is not going to get us there.

If you now try to cover over this dilemma by claiming the reduction reveals what is real and the rest is negligible, I suggest you read The Analyst, by George Berkeley.

So which is it? If the question is whether ideas are real, is the difference between ordinary experience, poetic trope, and technical definition really the decider? Do only technicians think? Do only technicians do philosophy? Actually, I doubt most meteorologists would know what is meant by "cloudhood". I thought it might be something to do with internet storage until I finished reading the remarks. The issue it seems to me is what if anything does the word or its presumptive idea got to do with the real phenomena it is supposed to indicate or explain. Do phenomena obey the idea, or does the activity of the phenomena teach the idea how to perform its role of indicating it? Does the idea command order in the world, or does order in the world suggest the parameters of the idea? Is mind predator, parasite, or symbiosis?

If the idea is itself a member of the category it names those members cannot be used to explicate the idea. If it is not a member of its category it cannot explain that membership. This is the dilemma Russell posed to Frege, at which Frege threw in the towel, and, as far as I know, Russell never himself managed to get around. The whole analytic project becomes fatally circular. You cannot divest reason of responsibility. We no more have a right to be understood than we do to be believed. The end of reason is the moment of recognition that reaffirms that responsibility as its foundation. There is no formula that can absolve understanding of that moment that only personal recognition and responsibility can supply. We can avoid that responsibility only by arrogating a right to be understood. But "I know what I mean!" does not confer any right to be understood. More critically, it implies a conviction in a right to be believed, and that is a most profound crime against philosophy.

Is one drop rain? Is a torrential deluge? According to Plato, Achilles wanted not just to be valorous, but to be valor itself. Not a member of the class but the idea of it. The result is that to be that idea, to be worshiped by his men, he had to die. Odysseus wanted to be the idea of being one of the guys. The result is that all his men had to die for him to find his way home. In this (Lesser Hippias, I think) and elsewhere, he was twenty five hundred years ahead of Russell. When are we going to catch up? The great danger is that by opting for an end-run around the dialectical drama between understanding and recognition, giving voice and listening, we lop off the only completing term to reason that personal drama is. I understand that we fear a return to superstition, but the mission to evade it by dehumanizing reason actually has the effect of merely erecting another edifice of superstition. The superstition that you not only have right to be understood, but believed as well. And how the hell is that any better?

There are myriad tissues, each of cells of different character, and, arguably, of which each and every cell is importantly differentiated from all the others. When two cells differentiate upon division, are they differentiated as much from each other as from the cell they once were united in? If so, how the hell can the DNA, so famously identical in both, account for the difference between them? How does a system of replication engineer differentiation? Or govern the role of each cell in the process of that differentiation? Or even espouse some sort of recognition of the totality of differentiated cells as an organism able to develop the ability to walk?

Have you never witnessed a child learning to walk? It's a mammoth struggle, and your denying them credit for the effort in no way detracts from the responsibility the child takes in its own development. Other than talking around it, and not necessarily to it, there is nothing we can do to teach the child to talk. But if we do not talk around it it will not teach itself what we are going on about at all. And if we only talk to the child, and not around it, it's development will be sharply inhibited. As I said before, the autonomic systems an organism creates for itself neither limit it to an automaton nor detracts from the indispensable role its autonomous intrusions upon its autonomic systems has in their creation. Person is the stranger to the machine, and yet, its creator too. That is why person can never be obsolesced by the machine. And only the machine mind could think it could. A Turing test only works if it is strictly limited to automaton terms.

That's a horizontal plane of interaction. The vertical dimension is like this: — frank

Is reason a Ponzi scheme? Hierarchical? Or perhaps you're confusing identity with the identical? Which, of course, are opposites. One Steve and one Alice does not add up to two Alices or two Steves. Interactions of differences does not create sameness. The vertical trope of ideas is a power play, not reasoning. Identity displaces what would otherwise be identical, and certainly not the inverse. But the geometric trope on a vertical axis of ideas is meant to do violence against that displacement, and becomes the pretext for cruelty, and the assurance of ignorance in the guise of pretended wisdom.

The capacity for language is innate, as is a lion's capacity to bring down a zebra. — frank

Actually, lions have to work very hard to learn that skill. But from where do you suppose anything "innate" comes? Who are all the cells in the body taking orders from as they prepare for nativity? Doesn't each cell have a life of its own? A community in differentiation, not replication? What directs each one to be that difference creating the innate?

Well, I called Alice over the phone to ask whether she did think something about the rain or not, and she referred me to the {expletive} weather channel — Olivier5

Well, the expletive suggests a recognition of the essential role emotional terms, and so emotions, play in the life of reason and even abstraction.

What you get from Alice is a chance to alter what you are convinced rain is and "rain" means. As I said before, it is absurd to suppose we each arrive into our language somehow supplied with lexical terms and syntactic forms from some impersonal reservoir. Language is not an artifact, it is a dramatic labor constantly altered its terms through the discipline we urge each other to. And person is not a specimen on a dissecting tray. It is not explicated, it is intimated. To simply deny by fiat a phenomenon is unreal or plays no role in what you have become convinced is the issue of interest is not doing philosophy. It is dogma. We have to engage in a dialectic by which we are both transformed in the terms of our convictions to know ourselves, let alone each other.

Plato was not interested in navigating our way elsewhere, but in discovering where we are and what real departure means. Death is not is not an issue of cartography. And, therefore, neither is being where we are. He is not mapping the road to elsewhere, but creating the discipline by which we are really here at all.

Without asking Alice, the discussion is vacuous. Isn't this discussion about how to divest ourselves of responsibility to ask? To listen? And isn't that avoidance of responsibility what the written word was invented to achieve? Language is flesh and blood, not marks on stone. What is real to meaning is not the lexical and syntactic carrier signals it entails, but the flesh and blood drama and dynamic of the rigor we urge each other to in differing over that meaning. The characterology of that drama we each bring to it is the substance of it. That character of our differing convictions about what we each can mean does not unify us, but distinguishes us from each other in the privacy of reasoning. But it does unify us in the terms of that reasoning, and even that distinction. In that unity of terms, never a unity of conviction or thought or meaning, as the active part we each play in the drama of person, is the articulation of the terms of that unity and of that person we each alone are in it. Person is the articulation of that worth.

There are many autonomic systems in the body, all of which have overriding authorities, not by the mind, necessarily, but in response to needs and changes automaton processes can't direct. The brain is no exception. Also, the brain is much more than the frontal lobes. It is a network of neural fibers reaching out to every part of the body, maybe every cell. You might as well say the whole body is the mind. And every cell is more autonomous than the autonomic systems we take for granted as running it. Remember, most cells in the body have constituted their place in the body through differentiation, not just replication. And that differentiation is certainly more constitutive than replication of its role in the body, and more what mind is. That is, closer to what directs the body's autonomic systems than merely complying with their processes.

Husserl claimed the "intentional object" could not be mistaken. Not that it cannot be a mistake about it, but that we cannot be mistaken which or what is intended. I've no idea what a sugar-plum fairy is, but should I learn what it is, or am enlightened about it by others, I will all along know that of which I am discovering or learning. Or at least So says Husserl. Sartre wrote two short books on the subject, The Imaginary (L'Imaginaire) and Imagination. It is easy to misread the titles, he is not saying ideas are imaginary, but that they are images.

The mind is not the brain, as such. It certainly is not an autonomic system with the brain. It is an intrusion upon those autonomic systems the brain is constructed for itself correcting and augmenting it where it is unable to be self-correcting or to apply a more active rigor to those systems, even if that rigor takes the form of retrenching otherwise unfounded convictions. This is possible because differentiation, not replication, is the engine of the integrity of body and person. Only a community of differentiating participants can regulate an autonomic system with rigorous intrusions of issues and sense it cannot otherwise cope with adequately. It certainly does not mean that mind and person are somehow "independent" of body or its material makeup. It sure as hell does mean we are ethereal beings or souls, or some such nonsense. The real issue of this thread is rational induction or synthesis. Reason is reductive and only reductive, but requires its synthetic term to begin its reductive endeavors. Reason always begins convicted of a prior term, which can never be truth. Its "extension" of that term is therefore, at best, capable only of validity. Since there is no true or valid synthesis, the final term of that reduction can only be the nullity of the entire reduction. The end of reason is the erasure of its beginning. The only real outcome possible is the transformation of all term, and the loss of all duration, the loss of all ends to beginnings. That transformation of all terms is the least term of that reduction. This is forestalled by retrenching conviction short of that concluding term. And, no duration, no beginning complementary to its end, no space of time or thought, only moment, the moment of the transformation of all terms, not just those antecedent to that lost duration, is what is real. And that because we are more worthy of what being real is there, in that moment, than ever we are looking to endure or to find or establish duration, or "epoch" (as Husserl would put it). The characterology of that rigor bringing us to that moment is what is most worthy of us, it is the very language of worth. And, therefore, it is what person is. But it is fatuous to suppose the brain, including its constant conversation with all parts of the body down to each most differentiated cell, is not very much the locus of it. Consider Hawking's weird 'String Theory', or the crazily incalculable proto-energy that motivates this desperate attempt to resolve this final, as far as we can yet know final, term of the calculative understanding of matter, and see if you still believe matter is not a real and fertile enough venue for the possibility of life, mind, person, and the articulation of the worth of time, as moment not duration, that person is.

When you think of Steve you are thinking of the dialectical participation of Steve in the development of the terms of conviction by which you know yourself. Mind is simply the the creator of its own autonomic systems. Every brain cell and neural connection in it is your doing. We help each other achieve some of the rigor that work entails, but if that rigor is real, rather than unchallenged conviction or mere habit, it is all ours, yet in shared terms. The abstraction comes in where we depart each other in that participation, as much to free each other of our own convictions as to assure a more comprehensive lexicon. Abstraction is a process of separation, not unification. Unity comes as a mythic substitute for rigor. Unless we know everything B about A and everything C about B we are completely blind to the possible validity of A being C. Is reason blind? Comprehension can hardly be ours if it is not comprehensive. It is only where we recognize how comprehensively we do not know that the conviction that we can, let alone that we do, is more than merely a dramatic conceit meant to fend off the moment that we do recognize this.

If Alice is thinking anything it is not ours to know, only what she reports of it. How could anyone miss that? It's as if the very possibility of deception must be disposed of. But that possibility is precisely the issue driving the emergence of language in any form at all. Any language that doesn't recognize that origin is dependent for all its terms upon that very issue it does not recognize. If you want to be stupid, you have my blessing in the effort, but if you mean to erect an edifice of neglect to be imposed on the rest of us, that is a crime against philosophy, as well as humanity!

Here's some abstractions for you, logical quantifiers like some, any, at least one, not even one. If you don't know exactly, and not abstractly, how many B is A, and exactly, not abstractly, why, then A=B and B=C is not determinant, and the logical positivist system falls apart. And the "law" of the excluded middle fails. But the meaning we seek is the characterology of conviction. We share the meaning of terms, including structural terms like conjunction and dis-junction, in a dramatic engagement with each other spurring a greater intensity of discipline and rigor in the dynamic character of our convictions. Not by persuasion and striving to gain assent, but by energizing contrariety. But by clarifying that dissent reduced to its least term of becoming dissuaded of our own conviction. In this way the character of discipline we each bring to the dynamic of our convictions enjoins in a recurrent and complimentary contrariety which assures the integrity and individuality of our thought and yet, if rigor is observed, and spurred on by our engagement with the terms of discourse, we can never be unsure of those terms. But only a human being, a living person, can do this. There can be no system or mechanism which can displace it. Dehumanizing logic is not an option.

Wittgenstein opens his famous opus stating that the world is everything that is the case. Chomsky opens his with the assertion that language is the totality of all possible sentences. Wittgenstein throws his hands up in the end, in his famous phrase about passing over in silence what we cannot speak of. All utter nonsense! Where words fail us is precisely where we get talking, and can't stop talking! And that, in sum, is what it all means!

There is something in the difference between the real and the ideal circle that has a strange effect on us. These days, with sophisticated technology, we can produce something very close indeed to a perfect circle. But that same technology can reveal to us just how imperfect it is. We are easily awed by that difference and attach inappropriate and entirely unjustified meaning to it. As if the imperfectability of the real means that the ideal is somehow what realness is. Obviously, there is something in the ideal that means it cannot be what realness is. We tend to become so awed by the difference that we come to think of reality as a failure, when, quite obviously, the failure is ideal. forever and always, eternally, failing to be anything real. I put my money on imperfection! So long, that is, as it contributes to recognizableness of the difference. Not to reveal the perfection of the ideal, nor to effect pretensions to perfection in the imperfect, but to prove the failure of the perfect to be real. It's a bloody mess, yes. But it's too real not to love.

All too real. I suppose, if your goal to to develop AI to a point that the human mind is obsolesced, then the priority of the imperfectible-because-real over the perfect-but-unreal is an insurmountable impediment to that achievement. The human eye is a case in point. We cannot keep our eyes still. Transcendence would insist that this is a failure pr weakness, but it is precisely how the eye works. It.s greatest virtue. Fact is, we hardly see most of what we look at. And what our eyes actually supply the mind is extremely crude compared to this marvelously vivid and usually quite accurate sense. For instance, stereo vision, obviously not the product of the sense organs themselves, is a matter of having two perspectives. I suspect that one-eyed persons can achieve something similar simply by moving their head, and if so, this would support my explanation. That is, with two eyes slightly separated, or one kept in motion, we look behind objects, and so gauge their positions. Now, I suppose a computer could do as much. And the fact that we notice so little of what we see similarly. But the computer only notices what it is programmed to notice, or by repetition forms a new program to notice. But we are programmed to notice what we are not programmed to notice. In fact, there ought'a be a law by which the presumption of guilt always falls upon the autonomous machine. There can be no presumption of innocence for AI. But it is what alters our complacency that gets our attention. And we strive might and main to get it back. A computer, however, cannot create a meme from one distressing circumstance or perception. That emotional investment, which the computer cannot bring to its performance because it is constructed on idealist principles and applies idealist memes and methods, alters the terms antecedent to the state of complacency brought to a grinding halt by the distressing circumstance, though is quickly restored to complacency in the modified lexicon the experience inspires. It is not what we think we see, it is not the terms of our experiences, that is the engine of the human mind, it is the changes that disturb our confidence in abstracted processes and methods, and so tend to prove that abstraction inadequacy and failure, something any system, AI or human conceit in the perfection of mind it would represent if it could be as real as flesh and blood, grinds to a halt like a fine machine in a nitty-gritty environment.

Dear god! Not bullet points! What is it with these damn bullet points?! The mind cannot be mapped like this because what it gets up to alters all the terms of all the languages that can possibly respond to its utterances. Words never mean the same thing twice. You have to deny what language really is to become convicted in that conceit. The abstraction is not adequate to the real. It is a glib complacency awaiting its moment to be altered by the action of mind in response to something more real than that glib complacency and that only endures as that complacency restored under the renewed regime of inadequacy to the real in differed terms. It is a prayer that obliterates its god. and instantly replaces it with another called it to prayer, a different abstraction by the same name.

Sorry if my outburst seems not to the point. It's as if the literature since him has been reading Aristotle, or the 'Platonists' of the Christian era, instead. It's travesty, not philosophy. The human organism constructs all manner of autonomous systems, but what is real is only the rigor of correcting for its errors and inadequacies, not the system itself. But where nothing seems to disrupt our confidence in these systems, call them abstractions or generalizations if you must, they tend to convince us they are real. Platonism is, to my mind, only a distortion to be overthrown.

The TV series F-Troop had a running gag in which the main characters would join a group of marching soldiers by doing a little hopping jig to get into step. The human heart beats each pulse in response to the immediate needs of the body, but medicine feels the need to perceive it as a rhythmic system. Mess with that system as a system and the heart can be sent out of sync with its own capacity to respond to the instantaneous needs of the body, what this pulse needs to supply it, and the result is "a-rhythm". That's the danger of taking ideas as real. Not just the heart, of course, but all human affairs, bodily and conceptual. That's the danger of taking ideas as real. Not just the heart, of course, but all human affairs, bodily and conceptual. That is, we get displaced from our ability to respond to what is really real, hence “idealism”.

Slavery was abolished, it is said, in the wake of the Civil War (the Proclamation some say did so was tenuous at best, and the Thirteenth Amendment passed as the war waned, rushed through by Lincoln for fear that final victory would lead to tabling the matter forever). But what was actually outlawed was only the specific title ownership of one specific person by another specific person. But what if a system develops in which that same ownership is generalized? If one class of persons have the labor of others available to exploit as they choose, but without the particularity of title? Is that ownership "abstract"? If you think so, I wish you would try to explain this to all the folks who are forced to tolerate the same but 'abstracted' condition that is supposedly outlawed in its more concrete form!

Socrates regarded conviction as pathology, to be cured by rigorous cross-questioning. The Athenian Stranger replacing him in Plato's later work believed so too, but lacked the skill Socrates had for bringing his interlocutor to be grateful for the refutation, the cure of his conviction. To discuss Plato as if he meant to put us on a road to perfecting our convictions, rather than ridding us of them, is to completely miss the point. I suggest you check out the meaning and place of "aischron" in his work, and that you all ask yourselves why Plato chooses the most despicable characters he can find to accompany him in the dialogues in which Socrates does not appear, and so leads the interlocutor of the Stranger to a transformation of his convictions unrecognized by him? As in Laws.

What Hegel was trying to intimate to us is that time itself is personal. The only act is the discipline motivated change. Change, that is, that alters the terms of duration or continuity. Only space is continuous. That is why it is empty. It is time attenuated of change until there is nothing there at all. Anyone who would present matter as the paradigm of stability just hasn't been paying attention. Electrons can only be 'stable' by so changing that it is only stably there where it is not there at all. And if you don't believe me read some physics. That crazy instability is precisely what makes matter seem so stable!

Is being the case? Is there a case of being? Is there a case for being? Only what is most real not being the case, a case of something, can have identity. John Searle, I think it is, likes to talk about what it is 'like' to be conscious. That phrasing perverts the issue. There is absolutely nothing it is like to be a person, with identity. I am not identical. Not to you, not to a chair, not to dead matter, not to anything at all. That is the whole point. When a person departs this life only the whole history of humanity working as a totality can possibly encompass that loss. But certainly not in the clamor of a world or evolving styles or 'geist'. Something far more personal and intimate.

Why do I feel like I'm trying to release all the mice at a mousetrap symposium? The reason you want to catch the mouse is that you are afraid that time is real, and worth more than we can endure. But duration is not what is real to time, it is the attenuation of it, dehumanizing and devaluing it into something we are more able to endure. Time is the mouse you perennially try, but never can trap. It is unendurably of worth because it is not enduring at all. It is just change. The rest the attenuation of its worth

Tim,

No, I am saying that if you think time is stable duration you want forms to be eternal so as not to suffer the unendurable worth of it. I did take it for granted that others would see the folly that eternal forms impose upon our perceptions, and discussions, of what does exist and of what existing means.

JF,

As On-Mi says, in the movie Cloud Atlas, "I am not genomed to alter reality!" But then she goes on to do just that. You're thinking statically. States of being have no identity. They are quantified, but never qualifying. Only what is qualifying can be itself. And that act of qualifying is neither same nor different. Such static categories are vapid. By the way, analogy, arguably the source of all rational terms, is sameness in difference. That is, it is a comparison of two sets of differences that reveal a sameness in that difference. But identity goes well beyond this. It is differing. It is the act of being itself that alters reality, and all its terms. What is static and unchanging has no identity, because no differing of reality can come through it. This is why there can be no divine creator, because it would be itself unchanging. Whereas change, changing all the terms of reality, is what person is. It does this in the act of not being the one any static form is. And reality becomes real as a response in recognition of the worth of that omission of itself from the count. Of course, since all terms emerge analogically, as a static sameness a static difference reveals, there can never be any one that sameness is, because it is only difference. The worth of time is no 'one'. God, of course, is the universal quantifier, and so quite unreal. But something of its unity must be taken as axiomatic to the count of what would span the ends of time, if time were "one". However, since that founding oneness or unity number would be, if time were one, is contradictory to that count, then the count of time is unreal in relation to that presumed unity. God and science cannot exist in the same universe. And yet, each needs something of the other as axiomatic to its destruction or neglect of identity. Of that identity, that is, that the act of being, and identity, the differing of reality is. Identity is the act of being no one any quantifier is.

I do hope no one here is suggesting that the form of the chair is eternal! Bums on seats tells it all!

Greg,

But how do you weave a coherent pathway between iconography and iconoclasm? Nothing is eternal, nothing is sacred. Any imagined form is bound to tear upon us between shackles of the past and over-zealous expectations for the future. Coherent change is the language of our kindness to both. But it is the substance of which the chair is made that teaches us that kindness that keeps us coherent between enslaving icon and savage iconoclasm. Idealism of the Christian Era imposes a divine design upon the world that through obedience to it we are meant to translate that design into the remaking of the world. But this view proscribes our learning from the matter. The divine plan means to impose heavenly order upon the world through the human mind dedicated to that plan upon a world under the believers hand. As if the carpenter teaches the wood what it can be. That dogma has prevented us from letting the matter teach the mind, through the hand handling it, rather than the other way around. Touch the world and it teaches kindness, beat it into shape and the gods only teach us cruelty.

Greg,

Have you never hogged the good chair? It's a wonderful fact that humanity is the only creature to go about the world with it's own padding upon which to sit. What does this say of form? Doesn't it make the identity of the form the bottom atop it?

By "prime matter" is probably meant "the will of god". The lower case might give a clue what I think of that!

JF,
Thanks for that. Care to have it developed?

If the mechanical model of the universe, and of mind, is not quite as valid as we tend to presume it to be, then how would this manifest itself in our perceptions and thoughts? If even in some infinitesimal degree there is something left out of our deliberations that in some way comes back to haunt us, the continuity of our convictions would undergo changes, suffer reservations, that might build up subterranean to the explicit terms of our views, thoughts, and perceptions, that might ultimately alter all terms prior to them. If we continue to insist upon certain mechanical or mathematical models, then those transformations of terms would nonetheless infect, and perhaps perfect, the original flaws of our convictions. And if we have any influence on each other at all, that growing transformation of terms actually cuts across the isolation otherwise enforced by the conviction that number rules. In this way emotions, if even relegated to, or especially if most rigorously relegate to, the most infinitesimal term, actually rule the count. This does not mean that emotions are more real or more informative, but it does mean that the inadequacies of our systems of judgment come with an inescapable supply of prodding alterations of mood that manifest that inadequacy, and reveal the character of our discipline in thought and discourse.

Again, if my notes are right, it is shown that only the shepherd knows what makes his flock a flock, and, by implication perhaps. Only the statesman knows what makes the polity a polity. — Gary M Washburn

This should read:

Again, if my notes are right, it is shown that only the shepherd knows what makes his flock a flock, and, by implication perhaps, only the statesman knows what makes the polity a polity. — Gary M Washburn

Well, I hope I'm not putting a damper on the discussion.

Please remember that for Plato there was no established codified set of rational rules or principles. The “Law” of the “excluded middle” had not been invented, though Plato did endeavor to break the ambiguity between the example or experience and the idea. The red apple is not what redness is. But when Aristotle invented that “law” and began to codify a logic on the basis of it, he had not understood the contradiction inherent in his invention because he did not recognize the positive role the departure from or that idea or active negation of that role in identifying both. In Statesman there is a discussion of the identity of a class (somewhere around page 264 if my notes are correct). The unity of a class is traced to a reductive process. That reduction, comically, at first proceeds as a simple intuition of what names the group as a group, but then the Stranger insists the reduction should proceed by a more arduous route, by dividing the group “roughly by half”. But the result turns out, actually, to be shorter that the shortcut. It also, comically, defines humanity as a biped without feathers. This is clearly playing with our minds. Why?

Again, if my notes are right, it is shown that only the shepherd knows what makes his flock a flock, and, by implication perhaps, only the statesman knows what makes the polity a polity. But the overall point is that number does not name or identify anything. It can only count, and count as a unified whole or oneness, what some personal responsibility or engagement has identified. And without that identity there is a contradiction between the concept of class and of its membership. That engagement that gets the count going by instituting a dialectical epochal terrain around it, is the infinitesimal. The least term in the reduction not capable of being identified or included by it. But since that neglected term brackets the whole and sets the context of the count of what is within it, it is the sine qua non, the most inclusive term of all. It makes all the difference. That is, as Socrates claims in Parmenides, moment is the only ends of time. The rest, though it span forever, is just empty terms. There is no one there identifiable between which one it is and there is no 'how many' there to that otherwise presumptive oneness.

Gregory,

Take a look at "The Analyst" by George Berkeley. He accuses mathematicians of making just that error in the invention of the calculus. First, they take the infinitesimal as a small but positive value to support the integration, but then take it as zero to support the differential. That critique quite aside, the infinitesimal is a blatant attempt to reduce an irrational quantity to a rational equivalence amongst a myriad but countable values, plus a "negligible" left-over. But the neglected value is precisely what we are trying to discover and understand! Why is reality so stubbornly resistant to the mathematical model? What if the neglected value is the whole shebang?

If you really want a bellyful of "Being is...," talk, take a look at Euthydemus. It's as if Plato anticipated Heidegger and all his 'One' talk. Somewhere, maybe in the Intro to Metaphysics, Heidegger quotes Parmenides saying "Let it not be said that Being is not." Fact is, if you don't know a little something of what anything isn't you don't have a clue what it is. This goes for "Being". Does Heidegger ever speak a word of what "Being" isn't, anywhere? The Euthydemus also is a reminder that philosophers take themselves much too seriously! Socrates really and literally means it when he says that if you haven't been proven wrong in your views you don't really know them at all. Rigorous recognition of our being wrong is our only real knowledge. It's the terms of that rigor alone that is the issue of philosophy. If there is anything to be proved true it is something else, not philosophy.

Physics is dogmatically convicted in the mathematical model and hence is no place to look for methods or answers in doing philosophy. String theory and multiple universes reflect that dogmatic commitment. Some weeks ago there was a discussion here about dark matter, the whole thing orbited around a theory of ballistics, very much a terrestrial principle. A bomb on earth creates a spherical pressure wave and cloud of ejecta. But cosmologically this model does not hold. There is no center to the universe. As Steven Hawking put it, "the center of the universe is the tip of your nose!" If there is no center, if every point in space is the center, there can be no spherical cloud of mass pulling the universe apart from just outside our ability to sense it. We need to look closer to home, and take into account all the strangest behavior of matter space and time we have learned of in the past century, and stop thinking like Enlightenment Protestants.

In Gorgias, Plato explains how ideas come into view as analogy. But, of course, like everything else about him, we get this wrong too. An analogy is not a comparison of likes. It is a likening of differentiation. "The doctor is to the cook as the personal trainer is to the tailor." That is, one cures, the other merely disguises, infirmity. In Lysis, we are entertained for a while in the aspirations of a young man to be befriended by the most popular kid in class. In the end Socrates laments, in the standard translation: "we still don't know what the friend is!" But a little time spent with my Liddell and Scott reveals another possibility: "we still do not know which one is the friend!" In this, as in so many other dialogues, this is the point he is making, one we seem incapable of getting though our thick skulls, that it is not by being one there is anything at all, but by not being the one that oneness is. And even by being so quite deliberately. The friend is the friend by not being the friendship. The apple is red by not being what redness is. The wise philosopher has done all the rigor required of him only when he or she has completely proven he or she does not know. What one means is no more philosophically interesting than what "Being" is. It's what it ain't that matters! And, even, what meaning is.

A note on Polus: Socrates quite explicitly states the discussion of the state is just a trope for the character of the individual reasoner, in "letters writ large".

There is something we today have a great deal of difficulty getting our head around in the Greek idea of, well..., ideas. Is 'one' same or different? If different, how is it one? if sameness only, how is it counted as one of two or more? The idea of ideas was not Plato's at all, he was steeped in such thinking, and actually critiqued it, but with such irony we do not see this. We take the theory of forms as his notion, rather than his milieu, because we just don't, and mostly don't even try to, understand his world. Ideas, concepts, categories, were personalities, like their gods and demigods, and (for the most part) not so much a religion as a language or body of terms by which they framed their discussions of fundamental issues. In Lesser Hippias there is a fascinating comparison of Achilles and Odysseus, in which, with a little interpreting, Achilles is the wannabe extreme case and Odysseus the wannabe typical example or member of, well..., whatever the hell 'one' is. Achilles, to his dismay, discovers that he has to die to achieve his ambition of being the paradigm of his class, Odysseus, to his, that his companions have to die for him to rediscover what home, or being 'one' is. Frege discovered, to his dismay, that his concept of class did not encompass this paradox. But I wonder if Russell realized that the alternative, the typical, is problematic as the paradigm of the class if half, at least, of its members are better at being it?

I think you'll find a discussion of 'one' in book four of Polus. I seem to remember a discussion, too, of the oneness of the hand so clearly made up of disparate parts. How is this possible? Surely there is more than meets the eye to being 'one'! That discussion, I believe, is in Theatetus, I could track this down, but won't bother unless your interest is serious. I do wish others would study Plato by reading Plato and not the idiots that suppose they understand him but only cherry pick what supports their convictions, and that we would stop using contemporary notions "as a lens", as if he were an interesting but archaic version of our more sophisticated methods and norms. We haven't caught up to him yet, and there are going to be a lot of red faces if and when we do.

Gregory,

Potentiality presumes wanting to be. Isn't it fatuous to want to be anything if we don't know what being means? Socrates was pretty emphatic that we don't, and that a complete and certain proof we don't know is the only knowledge possible to us!

Do you really mean to challenge me on a simple term like that? Or are you really saying you are not familiar with the word? I find neither credible. Do you suppose Plato viewed a proposition in the same technical sense today's logicians and computer programmers do? How do you suppose Plato meant the word "category"? Kat-agora, in the manner of the market, not the tech lab.

Aristotle emerged from a lecture by Plato saying he hadn't a clue what it was all about. As soon as Plato died he was gone, to set up his own rival school. It is not a stretch to suppose, then, that he never understood Plato at all, and was not well liked at the Academy. It is also telling that none of Plato's immediate successors left a written record of their views, presumably taking Socrates at his word that writing was the murder of language, and dialectic. It was not for several centuries that we get Proclus and Plotinus, and with them "Platonism".

In his Laws, Plato's lead character seems to rationalize the design of the state into numerical proportions. On and on he goes, while his interlocutors lap it up, only to find at the very end that there is something essential that number, and numerical relations, cannot bring to the world, and that, if left out, inevitably results in chaos and discord, no matter how rational the original order. The same thing in Timaeus/Critias. In the end, the perfect state is defeated by an upstart Athens, because perfect order is eviscerating, and the dialectic of periodic bouts with natural disasters made Athens stronger. And ultimately, the gods erase themselves from being (and so the Critias ends abruptly as the gods are about to speak, but can't because their system of "perfection" ends in their never having been at all!).

It should be plain enough by now that the mathematical/logical model comes close, but does not quite close the gap through which something more, nominally ineffable, enters reality. And the thing is, how much of a deviation from the causal nexus, how much of a quantity untraceable in the calculus, how much of an ambiguity in the otherwise rigid progression of inference, is the downfall of these gods?

It's perfectly true that logical inference is the conservation of its premise, but this can only be so if a proposition is determinant rather than mere trope. But if the proposition is not a categorization, but a characterization, of the subject by the predicate, then it is not possible to assemble two propositions from a single premise in which that characterization is wholly in the same terms. But we must become convinced that terms are indeed conserved if we are to begin reasoning at all. And so, if we engage in critical reasoning together (dialectic), we can become aware of that lapse in the continuity of terms. Probably we will never individually recognize the lapse in ourselves, but, nevertheless, terms evolve, and if the reasoning throughout, on all sides, is competent and honest, then that evolution cannot be false. Certainly not as false as either one alone is bound to be. It's not that we learn what's real by hashing things out together, but that we evolve together in the terms by which that learning might become a real possibility. The remaining work is not philosophy, it's science or technology, but the fundamental issues that should consume us here is that that evolution of the terms we must become convicted of to reason is the real issue. Plato's views are not correctly understood as ontology, but as characterology. The person of the thinker is paramount. There is no quantifier that can reveal this.

Xtrix,

You may not credit this, but I actually greatly appreciate your disinterest.

What is a phenomenon? Does Heidegger use the term “phenomenology” in the same sense Hegel does in his major work? And does Heidegger's sense of it owe anything to the tradition, predating Hegel, from which it arises? Prior to the rise of the phenomenon, the powers that claimed authority over the human mind insisted, and often violently enforced, the notion that all that is real in this world must only be perceived through religious texts, canon, and myth. It was over a very arduous and dangerous road that these enforcers of dogma relented to the observations and careful analyses of those who proposed the phenomenon as a representation or manifestation of divine presence in this world. But the most pertinent reality to any phenomenon is not that it follow formal law, but that it itself exists at all. If you've read Heidegger as thoroughly as you claim, then you know the first part of B&T promises to rectify this flaw. Others before him thought they had. Leibniz came up with the monad, identified as a unique confluence of otherwise formally analyzable traits or attributes. But this is merely a numerical identification, not much more of an identifier than a serial number on an otherwise identical part off an assembly line, or the tattoo forced upon victims of the Holocaust. It is a system designed to distinguish without really identifying or in any way knowing who a person really is. Rousseau, on the other hand, argues that we are not a monad, but a member of a community, and that our being who we are is determined by our participation in that community. Doesn't Heidegger merely sort of mix these two together? The one amongst the many, similar to each but ultimately itself only so distinguished itself from them that only “Being” can save it from the aloneness of the monad and the 'them' of the world? But it's still a numbers game. As if we could address the contradiction between one and many by become obsessed with math!

This is not impertinent. Heidegger was a poor boy, with a working life looming ahead of him, so when an opportunity ('potentiality'?) comes up for a good education he jumps at it. This is where he was introduced to thinkers like Duns Scotus, and Victor Erigenus (or some such), and was steeped in the culture of piety and the Christian myth. But then he learned that he could avoid the obligation of taking holy orders (you see, he was sort of conscripted, a bit like ROTC) by switching his studies to math. That is, the Church at that time had fully swallowed the theme of the phenomenon as representation of divine order and presence in the world, and math was thought of as the embodiment of that representation. But in reality, he was just dodging the draft. Shafting his mentors was a way of life for him.

Hegel could not write explicitly, the Kaiser, his boss and a stern censor, would have taken a dim view of his claiming that human participation in the world could have any impact upon the ways in which power are imposed upon it. So he portrayed the world a personality, that developed and evolved over time. But what part the person in the midst of this evolution, and what part does its role in it play in its own identity? Is it the one isolated from the many, and so distinguished numerically from it, or its part in the many, and so indistinguishable from it?

Around the same time as Heidegger, an English thinker, C S Lewis, was grappling with his wife's terminal disease. He found he was not sufficient to solace her. From this feeling of inadequacy he derived a thesis that no individual was enough in himself, and needed a personal 'Being' to appeal to for solace from the contradiction between a numerical identifier and a mass or community identity. Heidegger is doing precisely the same in his notion of “Being”.

I mentioned my questioning my instructor in the meaning of 'ownmost', to which I received the answer “crowded”. “Ownmost potentialities for being”. What exactly does that mean? Surely it does not mean an intimate interest in each other! Even Heidegger's hints at a social life are very much of unilateral or 'ownmost' interests. 'Care and concern', 'mitsein', and the like, never tread beyond the lines drawn between the monad and 'them'. And as such he has achieved not a whit of impact upon the contradiction between one and many in losing us from our own identity, reality, and existence. It is not, therefore, an impertinence to raise the issue of uniqueness, the uniqueness that only person is, that is only the personal, that neither the isolated monad nor immersion into the world can name.

It's become impossible in such an overpopulated world, but a name is meant to be unique, even the means of recognition of the very idea of uniqueness, that no analysis can hope to explicate. And quite aside from the fact that Heidegger's later works make any claim of analytic phenomenology quite laughable, the meaning of a name, the most fundamental energy in language, is completely ignored in all his work. Because uniqueness, the uniqueness each person is, is neither its ownmost potentiality for being, nor its being in a world. It is a departure that is opportune to others. This may be nothing more than a change of tone in a philosophical discussion that does not alter each party's views, but merely recognizes a difference in mood that those views are otherwise meant to exclude from discourse. In other words, that gives us a name and welcomes the personal. The eradication of person in the life of mind has become the mission of philosophy, especially as practiced in our schools and publishing houses, and Heidegger is steeped in this mission.

Xtrix,

Unsurprisingly, you did not respond to my question. Uniqueness cannot exist in a Heideggerian world. Does an anomaly mean anything at all? Not alone, surely, but if other anomalies also tend to undermine the prevailing pattern, then either alterations emerge in that pattern as it tries to preserve itself, or they mount against it to eventually overthrow it against whatever forces are arrayed around that attempted preservation. But if each anomaly is really such, unique, then no pattern can ever emerge to sustain the changes it brings to “Being”. How, then, do anomalies to that pattern energize the production of changes in the pattern? A contrariety between unique beings as contrary to each other as to the prevailing ways “Being” presents itself is not only opportune to the recognition of the uniqueness of each, but to the continuous and revolving alterations of “Being” such that the community in contrariety against the dominance of “Being” over our perceptions becomes the language of our knowing reality. Only the trees are real, the forest is a construct, largely arbitrary, that each tree in the forest participates in generating by falsifying it. Or, again, a friendship is what it is precisely because each participant in it is actively determined itself not what that friendship is. That departure is uniqueness, the kind of uniqueness that generates all that is real. The patterns of “Being” that would be “originary” to it are a complete and utter fraud in the face of such reality. The most powerfully real “presence” is responsibility of recognition departure, the act of being not in any sense 'present', is left us with.

“Care” is arbitrary. It is not only that there is no 'why?' to it, but that in taking it up as the locus or motive of “Being” it is quite deliberately suppressed any possible recognition of the worth that is far more real, and the only possible meaning to the question.

We are a community in contrariety. You might have to explore rather more philosophy to know what that means. There is a context to Heidegger's work. If you deny all context to his words you cripple your reading of him. No author is clairvoyant. He retains meaning he is not necessarily conscious of, and derives his meaning from his wider context, not necessarily hidden, but nonetheless not presented to us in his texts. He was a student of Husserl, who had developed an updated version of Hume's patterns of perception, in a structure he called 'epochal'. I use 'intuition' to convey something of this perception, or, as I recall, 'a-perception'. It is, in my view, a necessary amalgam of reason and experience, but riddled with contradiction. Reason and perception do not operate by the same rules, and actually confute each other. Heidegger's 'presence' is a version of this epochal vision. It states that only what persist in being is, or teaches of, what “Being” is. There is no place in it for the uniqueness departure is.

Do you know any biology? An organism is comprised of vast numbers of cells. All the DNA can do is supply a pattern for the replication of proteins. The fact of the matter is that the completeness of the organism is that each cell in it is differentiated, not replicated, its place and role within it. Some cells deliberately die off. Are they being told to do so? Is there some sort of black-balling club that gangs up on them? Or is there something more worthy of them in the opportunity that departure brings to the whole? If every time a cell divides it introduces difference between it and all other cells, difference opportune of further differing for itself and all other cells, then it is not some preexisting pattern or 'originary' plan, but the capacity of each cell to respond with differentiation of its own conducive of a more worthy wholeness that makes it a life. A life most complete and worthy in departure. I could go into quantum, and show this dynamic there, and maybe even cosmology. I certainly can show its dynamic in human societies, but dogmatists like yourself generally deplore anything human in their ideas. But, as ever, the crux is the response not limited to its prior patterns of perception.

Asif,

Heidegger thought he had cracked the enigma of induction. The problem of how we achieve or receive completed thoughts and terms when mind operates entirely by reduction. That is, by taken as given a concept or term that we then derive further inferences from by slicing away what does not belong to it. The problem with the solution of “Being” is that it requires a special heritage that cannot be regained once lost. It also obligates its future to its past. That is, the only trajectory of this mode of “induction” is the revival of something “originary”. But in reality, the future must be so unbeholden to its past that emancipation from it is the only presence. This, of course, is enough in itself to refute the entire project Heidegger has undertaken. He obviously knew this, that is why he kept cropping up with new spellings. No doubt, had he lived, there would be “Byong” “Byung”, “Bying” and “Byang”! The fact is his thesis boils down to a reduction of being to the universal quantifier, 'the oneness of it all'. But reason still operates reductively, by the enumeration of that oneness into its parts. But even if “Being” is the prime enumerator, as it were, this still leaves us with the question: how many is it? How many is one? May seem an impertinent question, but it underscores the enigma between one and many that philosophy has been tripping over since Thales. And only Socrates and Plato had anything really to offer. But their solution requires us to value the personal character of our changing convictions and their terms, and philosophy, especially in the Christian Era, is dead set against this. I could go on, but I fear Xtrix would fiercely object. I will just suggest that money was invented to put an end to human investment in each other. Once the fee is paid and the transaction complete, we need pay no more heed to each other. Money does this by quantifying human effort and dehumanizing value. Prior to this people engaged in exchanges that were never complete, and so kept its participants in an endless revaluation of each other and what of value is outstanding. Put an end to that and societies inevitably diverge, segregate, and suffer disparities of valuation, disparities ratified and secured by the motive any government has to protect its currency. That is. The quantifier in exchanges makes the public sector shill to private avarice. I could go on, but it might be more appropriate to take this elsewhere. I've never opened a topic, but if you would like to just give me a heads up, I don't go online regularly.

Xtrix,

I think a lot of readers would say it was Heidegger who is from another planet. But, no, he was part of a tradition which he both parasited upon and abused. If you do not know the difference between induction and reduction you don't know enough philosophy to read any of it at all. Mind is far vaster place than you seem comfortable with. Whatever.

I gave you a statement: “Every utterance is unique.” What do you not understand in this? I must confess, I mean “unique” in the strict sense. If “Being” is as Heidegger claims, what is unique is either what “Being” is, or it is nothing at all. As Goethe claimed, you can't be hammer and anvil too. But if presence is a future emancipated from its past, then the unique is the emancipator that is the only presence. Presence, that is, because the future can only remembrance that unique act in contrariety to the stricture of its past in recognition of the value that emancipation is to it. It's a simple enough question, then, do you understand what uniqueness really is, and why it is conclusive proof Heidegger made a hash of everything he turned his mind to?

Xtrix,

Not off topic at all. Just not within the limits you arbitrarily set. Agency is the issue. And love is the discipline needed to find the answer. Good and evil and just neutral change come into the world through us. But we cannot be permitted to know this because it is not real at all unless our being departed it invests others with responsibility that what worth that departure is lost to them is recognizable. That responsibility is what love is. It cannot be unilateral. It cannot be alone, or even the one it would be if “Being” were “world historical”. But if the structure of the act of being and the response of love cannot be known or possessed, and so not received any reward for what worth that act is, this bereavement of possession of our “ownmost being in the world” (or some such) also spares us knowing what evil or mediocrity we bring to it either. And so we invent and promote ontologies and metaphysics that ratify our being spared responsibility. And so sparing ourselves that participation in the changing of the world, we erect structures promoting and sustaining the suppression of the dialectical participation between the act of being departure is and the response of the worth of time love is. That suppression is the essence of elitism. And “Being” is its most persistent and most weaponized term.

The elderly often find themselves strangers to their world. This is not because they have not kept up with technology. It goes much deeper than techno-babel ever could. It is because they have spent a lifetime taking part in the nuanced changes in all the terms of everyday life. And yet, if the language so produced, or at least re-calibrated, is to be real at all, and really intimate the meaning of our lives as much as we are able to share in this, we must be kept from knowing our part in it so that the world can be free to respond with its burden of responsibility that the loss we are to it, upon our departure, be recognizable of its worth. That is, as loss. Loss and love is the central dialectic of the real. Yup. Really. And I can prove it. But not in your feeble terms. But, you see, nostalgia for a lost greatness or purity is just a specter or shade of the only completeness time is as that dialectical dynamic between loss and love is. Heidegger is hardly original in his style of wrecking love. It has been the favored ploy of unjust elites from time-immemorial. That is, they use something like “Being” to absolve themselves of responsibility and to turn their backs on the worth of what is lost to the world that is not of their own doing.

Xtrix,

There is nothing I equate "Being" with because that would be to predicate upon the form of predication. Neither can the form or idea of predication be intransitive. It is a passive verb, or, at most, a part of a middle voice, not an active agent in the real. "Being" is not a pronoun! By 'better', I simply mean more meaningful. or even more what meaning, and worth, is. The only agency in reality is a departure that has no "da" unless what remains is burdened with a responsibility that the worth of the departed be recognized. That departure is the only act of being, and that response is what love really is. There can be no anticipating it or finding it in time, because it is not being there at all. And what does "da" mean? For one thing, it really is neither here nor there, and if context determines for us what we think it means it can hardly be objective. The plain fact of the matter is the more we map our whereabouts the less present we are there. Proximally and for the most part, if I may, all systems of navigation are quite explicitly a means of passing through and leaving, not of being there at all. And if you mean to leave you are not really there. "Da" is intrinsically vague and ambiguous, and vagueness and ambiguity is what "Being" is. The capitalization does not give it agency.

The term "Aletheia" came up at some point. Fact is, Lethe is the river all souls must drink from entering Hades, for forgetfulness. A-letheia, therefore, means, simply, the unforgotten or un-forgetfulness. Scholars are in general agreement that Heidegger's grasp of Greek is bogus. Living language is spoken, not written. As I've said, the written word is the deliberate murder of language, and poetry is its embalming fluid. Everything we utter is unique. There is no repetition possible of the meaning most intimately shared between us. Even if we simply reiterate the same, there is a difference that intimates the fullest meaning of what is said, and the written word steals this meaning from us. Moreover, there is no past to refer to to authenticate that intimation. There is no impending future to appeal to for interpreting it. Every utterance is perfectly itself or it is nothing at all. And every response burdened with responsibility that the worth of that unique intimation be recognized breaks through all the boundaries any before and after could put upon it. That is, language is only inauthentically historical. What is intimated between us is always new and unprecedented. And what comes of this is completely devoid of landmark. It is how we know ourselves and each other. What is not a whole new creation is intrinsically vague and ambiguous. And what would have a future in reference to this is not there at all.

Sorry if I'm not getting through to you, but I am quite certain the fault is not wholly mine.

i wrote the following thinking this thread was done, so if it seems anachronous now, I'm sorry, but I wrote it out and it still seems cogent to me:

Xtrix,

My instructor was a recognized expert in Heidegger who conducted well attended seminars on him, and Plato, at a major eastern university. When her class tied itself in knots trying to work out what “Being” is she would sometimes forcefully pronounce that '“Being” is better than nothing!' But is it? In fact, she drove herself insane, and ultimately to an early grave, believing that, and reiterating it ever more forcefully. But aren't there times, admittedly rare and very painful times, when nothing is better than something? When “Being” just isn't worth it? If so, it takes courage, honesty, and a great deal of discipline to recognize this. To tell me you cannot see any meaning in my responses is not an argument against me. And it bespeaks an astonishing lack of interest in what you seem to be claiming to be deeply invested in. I understand that you initiated this thread, and expect a certain control over its conduct. But if that expectation extends to dismissing strong counter-views I can only conclude your interest is not as intense as you suppose. Socrates spent his life gainsaying every assertion that he faced. He did so, perhaps, with greater discipline and grace than I am able to bring to these discussions, but he also always conducted himself with a view to bringing his respondent to recognize the worth of not thinking and believing as he had. And never is there any demonstrable evidence he ever intended to supplant the other's view for his own. He had no “teaching”. Sometimes nothing simply is better that “Being”, and as painful as that is to recognize, the changes we undergo facing each other with the truth of this realization transforms all the terms of concourse such that even though we might despair of knowing what we mean, we come to share the terms of recognizing how much more worthy of us that despair is than repeated iterations of the same unbending view. This, by the way, is the subject of Hess's impressive book, and of all the other sources I have cited, which you seem to suppose have no bearing upon the question of the meaning of “Being”. Another resource is a movie called “Cloud Atlas”, in which rebels against oppressive regimes find themselves together over great stretches of time, never really successful in their own time, but ultimately more real and worthwhile together, though never meeting, than any of them is in their own time. Something like this is how recognizing that nothingness is sometimes is better than “Being”, and that our enjoining in recognizing this is much more worthy of us than asserting it can never mean anything, as Heidegger does.

So, if the above is to the point at all, "Being" is and can only be a kind of decadence. And the world is the circumstance and language of that decadence. The quotidian is endemic to "Being". There simply is no enduring what worth is. And so, "Being" always forecloses itself against it.

Xtrix,

You're right, to Heidegger time is worthless. He is a classic proponent of inhumanism. His idea of “authenticity”: “anticipatory resoluteness”, “Being towards death”, “the unity of the totality of dasein's structural whole”, is entirely a matter of obviating the differing time is through us. We cannot be resolute in that differing because we are not in possession of its completing term. That completing term is not our resolving to be, but the worth our departure from being makes recognizable. When someone dies, we suddenly realize we cannot know our loss. There is no remembrancing it. And there is surely no anticipating even that minimal recognition by others of what worth our being brings to them even as we die. We cannot resolve to possess or even to let be what others become through us. Heidegger's “resoluteness” forecloses upon what others might otherwise become through us upon our departure. His “being towards death” isolates the “resolve” such that only some abstracted “Being” or “Bying” (or some such)—which, by the way, would be instantly recognizable to any Calvinist zealot!—could offer consolation to the human worth foreclosed upon by the structural unity of our “resolve”. That is, as I've been trying to knock some sense into you about all along, there is no structural unity to the momentousness of our participating in the dynamic growth of the terms of articulating what worth time is. Any resolve to be can only eviscerate that worth and deaden that articulation. The act of being is not resolve, but departure, and its completing term is the response, nothing of its own, in recognition of the worth of the departed. In this sense dying is the least aloneness we can ever achieve. But because we cannot prepossess the response, the completing term of our being recognition of the worth of the departed is, we cling to, or “resolve”, always to be. Is being better than nothing? What if there is something rather than nothing only because the only possible terms of articulating what worth time is is that clinging onto being that forecloses upon that worth? If so, reality is an experiment in vacuity meant to supply the setting for a recognition of an otherwise incomprehensible departure. Heidegger's “authenticity” is dedicated to that vacuity and to denying itself that worth.

You're right, not nice at all. But what bugs me is that there is no autonomous thinking applied, let alone any effort to digest what I am saying. It's a crushing bore to constantly have a third party interposed. I can't have it out with Heidegger himself, and I cannot get you to speak for yourself. I am not the one claiming to be the superior interpreter of Heidegger's words. I am trying to explain to you, not what he meant in his own terms, but why he was wrong in any terms. And to get you to speak, and think, in your own terms. It is a very dangerous thing to become a disciple to a dead text. The life of a faithful disciple, upon departure, leaves no residue.

Gurk,

I suggest you go back a bit. Sounds like you've been focusing on his later stuff, “after the Kehre”. But I would stay away from his “Introduction to Metaphysics”, and for goodness sake don't waste time on his “Rector's Address”. Maybe focus instead on his works on Parmenides and Heraclitus.

You might take a look a Herman Hesse's “Glass Bead Game”.

In the Christian myth, the material world is a corruption of the divine plan, and it is our responsibility to repent of this, to accept guilt for it, acquiesce to the suffering of this "vale of tears, and to seek "grace". Remember, Heidegger started his education in a Catholic seminary school. But he may also have been thinking of Nietzsche's 'decadence'.
Xtrix,
I guess I'm not getting the ball back. I'm not your enemy. I know what it is like to become addicted to Heidegger talk. It was like rehab getting out of it. And I was helped because I was all along pursuing a strain of thought of my own. If the book is getting in the way of thinking for yourself it's time to put the book aside.

Xtrix,
A year and a half! Wow! I may have written more than you've read. I might not be any more impressed if you said a decade and a half. But, keep reading, and keep a sharp eye on how your reading changes over a lifetime. Then maybe you'll recognize what the real question is.

When I say the thrown ball isn't hidden from you I do wish you'd see the important meaning in the image. You haven't lost the ball, you've joined the game, and you cannot make a property of that participation. You cannot anticipate your part in the play. You have to let it play out freely. People who hog the ball often lose their place on the team. Heidegger strikes me as the kid who doesn't like his role in the game and takes the ball away, expecting to be begged for his return, under his terms. I gave up on Heidegger when the Neitzsche series came out. What a hatchet job! For fifteen years I willfully avoided anything Marty, but was drawn back by the Stambaugh translation, which is much more readable. But then most new titles were just rehashed material his estate put out, presumeably to make a buck, from old class notes. Volume after volume came out all saying the same damn thing no better, or more meaningfully, than the first time. So, no, I am not going to go chapter and verse. What you keep saying is vacuous. I suggest you read Plato's Gorgias. There, Socrates keeps asking Gorgias what is it he does. The answer is always some evasion, as if the question is not understood at all. He offers vapid boast after vapid boast. But in the end even Gogias himself recognizes he has no response. So, if you cannot explain yourself except by reiterating the assertion that is at issue, then let me try.

I think it was in his Parmenides that Heidegger says, quoting Parmenides (if memory serves), "Let it not be said that "Being" isn't!". In his Introduction to Metaphysics he does go on a bit about how impossible to talk about nothing, which makes it problematic to ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It seems, "Being" is so 'Beingful' that even nothing is something, and everything that is is so devoid of nothing that what it is does not distinguish from all else that is in its being what "Being" is. But this makes it rather difficult to reason or think at all, if by thinking we mean to distinguish between beings, and between circumstances of being, to make judgments amongst them, and, indeed, about what "Being" is. No, it's not really a ballgame, or play in any sense, the stakes are too high. What is at stake is the articulation of the worth of time. That articulation only comes in sudden bursts of intensity or moment. It always leaves nothing, no term in any language, no issue in any life, unmoved and unaltered. And until this is recognizable in a way no "Being" can remembrance there is no worth in "Being" at all. This, because remembrance and duration is not what worth is. What extends in time, or in logical inference, can only attenuate and ultimately thin that worth out to negligible. This, by the way, is the flaw of science, it is dedicated to that reduction of the moment of worth to negligible. If you wish, I could explain how the invention of calculus does this, or you could read "The Analyst" by George Berkeley. But what then is moment and worth, this momentousness that "Being" hides us from? If we think of time as a continuity of duration, and moment as a break in that continuity, we would suppose moment is a nothingness between, demarking a before and an after, and nothing more. But if that nothing, nothing at all, generates a wholesale transformation of every term and circumstance in both its before and after, then it is literally more encompassing than all the expanse of time as duration and of what "Being" is there. And yet it is neither before nor after the moment of it. It is nothing. And even its unendurable intensity of worth, because there is nothing enduring moment is, is nothing but its being neither its before nor its after. But all reason and thought hovers around this nothing, attenuating its intensity to the negligible, and therefore enduring, term. Science (and Anglo-American philosophy) simply runs with the power this neglect offers it, while Heidegger simply denies that discernment can have any impact upon its "originary" term. Time, and truth, is what changes everything. The moment of that change is nothing. Neither its past nor its future. But it is precisely being neither/nor that it is what worth is. Science and Heidegger may go in opposite directions in this, but neither can suss what nothing is, and how much of worth it is. Throw the ball and you're in the game, hold it and your nothing and nowhere at all.

The act of deciding who and what "Being" is forgotten or hidden from us it is because we are trying to hold onto it. — Gary M Washburn

Should read:
The act of deciding who and what "Being" is (somehow forgotten or hidden from us) is because we are trying to hold onto it.[/quote]

Reason is said to be extension from an antecedent term. If this is incoherent, all of Anglo-American philosophy since Frege is incoherent. Are you unaware of how Heidegger sought refuge in Japanese interest in him after his Nazism became notorious? Here's another incoherent question: Which one of us is us? Which "being" is what "Being" is? The classic view of reason is that it is a reductive progression of judgment between alternatives. The flaw in this is that either/or, as the foundation of reason, is reductive to nothing. There is neither "Being" or "being" at the end of the reduction. Heidegger knew this, even if you don't. His answer was to seek some lost ancient or antecedent completeness that we can somehow revive or reinvigorate to heal the wound of reduction. Which one of us is us? Not either/or, only always neither/nor. And the enigma resolves if we recognize that neither one nor the other of us is what we are is an activity, something we do. It is an act not to be what "being" is. That act has no antecedent. No glorious forgotten origins. It goes on and is never done. It is never done because all efforts to find some concluding term in its original state shifts us to an either/or mode in which one is subordinated to the other. The act of each of us of neither being which one is us is emancipating. The act of deciding who and what "Being" is forgotten or hidden from us it is because we are trying to hold onto it. I, for one, am not allowing the mistakes of past thinkers to hand around my neck like a millstone.

I do wish I could get the world to take another look at Plato. One of the great virtues of Plato is that he deliberately avoided the reader getting caught up in terms. He explained himself in numerous different ways precisely to avoid cultist fawning. If you can't think for yourself reading philosophy, any philosophy, is not going to make you a thinker. If a poster won't let me distinguish between a cited author, my own original take of the same ideas, and his or her way of understanding anything at all, then there is no discussion. And I suppose that is how all these threads end.

How the hell can we remembrance what we never knew and what is unprecedented in being? Is "Being", before after all, what reason infers from antecedence? What remembrance the unprecedented? Later Heidegger is pandering to his last and final refuge, the ineffable interest of practitioners of Zen. That is, his later terms of "Being" are meant as a "koan". Shock and awe, not understanding.

I can argue as long as you want, but not in terms you demand. You might as well offer the slave all the work he can manage, so long as he does it under your supervision and conditions. I can justify everything I say, but you don't want to know what I mean, because that would entail admitting ways of discussing the same issues in terms not under your control, or that there are ways of doing fundamental philosophy Heidegger language cannot help you with. In any case, I cannot respect a thinker so attached to sources that nothing original speaks to them at all. That reliance is the, deliberate, suppression of thought, not its promotion encouragement. Have you read Plato's Ion? He claimed to be a genius at Homer, but not Hesiod, and looks ridiculous the trying to justify that claim.