Eh, Heidi was a provincial philosopher with a couple of interesting ideas here and there. Would give away his entire corpus for a page of Hannah Arendt. — StreetlightX

I like Arendt very much as well. Ironically, I don't think she'd give Heidegger's corpus away though.

I don't have the text in front of me, but thought I'd offer that in the beginning of BT, he gives at least one tentative definition of Being as "that which determines beings in their being," he suggests, as already noted, we already have a preontological understanding of being - ("what is being?" for example, presupposes a direction/horizon for the question and a sense of being in the "is" of the question we are asking), and from the start he repeatedly insists Being should not be thought of as 'a being,' and that Being can not be understood as 'objective presence' which is how philosophy/metaphysics has typically 'covered over/concealed' this character of Being. — Kevin

This is very well said. I wrote something similar just before reading this -- which goes to show Heidegger isn't completely unclear, after all -- even if one rejects his perspective, it's not so murky, provided one puts forth the effort (and I don't blame those who don't).

But he never said clearly what that stupidity consisted of. He never disavowed the assumptions of his philosophy that led him to that "stupidity". He never denied the political basis that led him to glorify Hitler and his party. He always abhorred the Jews, communism and democracy. — David Mo

I agree with everything except "always abhorred the Jews." Husserl and Arendt with both Jews, as you know. Maybe there's some private letters I've missed, but so far as I can tell he wasn't anti-Semitic.

Heidegger disqualifies his rivals and the entire universal philosophy for not having understood what the Being is. — David Mo

No, that's simply wrong.

I have been searching uselessly in Being and Time for an answer to that question. I consulted several qualified commentators (not believers) of his work who told me that, precisely, Heidegger never made something similar to a definition of the Being and even recognized that the Being is an indefinable concept. — David Mo

I don't know exactly why you accuse me of being a "believer" -- but that's nothing but a term of abuse.

What you stated originally was this:

But he ended up recognizing that he had been unable to give an explanation of the problem of Being. — David Mo

An "explanation of the problem of Being" is his entire work of Being and Time. That's not the same as what you're now asking for, which is a definition of being -- what being is. I could have told you, as I have here, for example, that Heidegger never defines being -- somewhat frustratingly for many. But that's completely missing the point. Being -- including human existence -- has been interpreted in various ways throughout history. We also walk around with a "pre-theoretical" (pre-conceptual/abstract), or in his words "pre-ontological" understanding of being -- and this shows up in what we do, given our time and place. Various cultures and various epochs have different understandings of being.

His thesis in Being and Time is that in the Western world, since the Greeks, "being" has been defined in terms of what's present before us, present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) -- he says at one point "presencing." This has given rise, in his view, to Western philosophy and science -- showing up as ousia in Aristotle to the res of Descartes -- a kind of substance ontology. Beings then become "objects," representations, etc.

He does indeed go through the history of this, thoroughly. But if you're looking for a definition of "being" from Heidegger himself, then yes you'll be disappointed. Better to look towards his ideas about disclosure and aletheia, which I think get closer to any kind of definition.

If you have an answer to what the Being is and you can base it on some text of Heidegger, I would be grateful if you could tell me. It will dispel the terrible suspicion that haunts me: that Heidegger did not know what he was talking about. — David Mo

See above -- I can't provide you with it. The closest he comes is saying being is "on the basis of which entities show up as entities," or something to that effect -- which isn't very helpful, I'm sure.

NOTE: A text, please, not a simple quote. — David Mo

Introduction to Metaphysics is where I'd start almost anyone. Much more clear than Being and Time.

Likewise my apologies if that label does not fit the bill. Actually there's probably a decent amount of atheists who are in-the-closet agnostic. — 3017amen

I'm neither -- just as I'm neither about ectoplasm. Until someone explains what it is, I can't be for it, against it, or agnostic about it.

But much like the far right-wing extremist/fundamentalist, the stereotypical atheist comes across as angry and bitter. But let's not derail the thread. — 3017amen

Fair enough.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water. — F.N., The Gay Science

Great quote -- also leveled at Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, etc. etc. Not to mention Nietzsche himself -- among other accusations. No need to take this, or secondary sources, seriously. At least not until you've read it yourself, done so carefully, and thought it over. If you can then demonstrate where it's wrong, great -- if you can only give quotes and list names of Heidegger's critics, I'm not interested: I already have a library card, so I can read those people myself. I'm only interested in discussing this with people who have read him -- and thus can substantiate their criticism with evidence (perhaps supplanting this with other sources). I haven't seen this demonstrated yet.

But he ended up recognizing that he had been unable to give an explanation of the problem of Being. — David Mo

An explanation about the problem? I'm not sure what that means. If you mean that he later recognized that he was unable to "reawaken" and "question" the meaning of being, then I see no evidence of that whatsoever. Although Being and Time wasn't finished, he still acknowledges how important the path he took there is in this respect.

In my modest opinion neither he nor those who followed him were able to give an explanation of the fundamental concepts of his doctrine — David Mo

Unable to give an explanation? I've tried a number of times, and I'm happy to answer any questions. It's not so difficult to do once you've gotten into his funny language.

impossible to fully understand ten pages in a row of Being and Time. — David Mo

Difficult, but hardly impossible. In my view, worth the effort.

For all his oompah oompah on "the question of the meaning of being" (or, according to Rorty, "myth of being"), Heidi's daseinanalysis is as autistic as it is solipsistic — 180 Proof

Solipsistic? This entire sentence is so vague it's baffling. How is he solipsistic? Because he focuses on human being? He emphasizes again and again the importance of other people.

And what do you mean by "autistic" in this context?

I often feel with you, 180, that your tone appears critical of Heidegger, and yet there's never anything substantial enough to learn from or push back on. To use a quote that isn't my own, "That isn't even wrong."

I have no way of, or interest in, judging him, except in how it might happen. Someone who seems so tuned into the blinkers we apply to ourselves and yet went wrong himself and then later regarded what he’d done as stupid (I can’t remember the exact words). — Brett

What he'd done -- meaning joining the Nazi party or his earlier work? Because neither is true. He infamously never apologized for being part of the Nazi party, although he once referred to it (in a letter I believe) as a "blunder."

In some ways I can see that being the grounds for people rejecting him and his work; not because he worked with the Nazis but that it blew back on the grounds for his thinking and writing. — Brett

In what way? I'm not sure exactly what you mean here.

Then why are you contributing to the thread...out of boredom? LOL — 3017amen

I confess, pretty much. It caught my eye -- posts aren't normally so almost offensively silly to me.

Since you are not able to answer the question that speaks volumes already. If I was an atheist I wouldn't even be contributing to this thread because it would be meaningless. It seems obvious that any atheist who bothers to care, has no faith in their belief system. — 3017amen

The fact that your mind automatically goes to labeling me "atheist" is yet another reason against you. If you're a teenager or young adult, then my apologies. I assume only older people post here.

My silence is because it's incredibly boring. God is a word, and an essentially meaningless one -- can mean anything you want it to. To say "he/she/it exists" is like asking if ectoplasm exists. These arguments have have been going on for nearly 2000 years, and to think we'll "solve" anything now is ludicrous. If you're new to the question, fine -- but there are more important things to discuss than the "existence" of Shiva, Ba'al, or Yahweh. Who cares?

:roll: :yawn:

HEADLINE: God's existence proven once and for all, on the PhilosophyForum.com, by a guy named "Devans".

Good grief.

I have to look that up. I've never played Final Fantasy, but that's interesting he makes an appearance there.

It intrigues me that someone like Heidegger could focus so fiercely on this idea that forms the basis of everything he thought and then either find that engaging with the Nazis was the logical consequence or live a life completely contrary to the philosophy he worked so hard at. — Brett

It intrigues many people. But I don't fully understand what you mean by "contrary to the philosophy he worked so hard at." Heidegger has no ethical philosophy, really. Later Heidegger is preoccupied with language, technology, and poetry -- but never ethics.

Personally, I don't see that he did anything wrong himself -- he never hurt anybody, so far as I gather. That he was swept up in the political goings-on of the time is no different than being swept up in Trumpian policies -- which are far more dangerous than Hitler (based on his environmental policies alone). Hitler killed millions; Trump is helping to kill off the entire species.

Both are mistakes, no doubt -- but if we have an issue with the German people for going along with Nazism, how will history judge not only our fellow Trump supporters, but also we who are against him - for not doing more?

Besides, in philosophy, science and art you can make significant contributions and yet be a complete jerk or even psychopath. We don't have to like the personality. I'm of the opinion that you can separate the two.

Elaborate please. — 180 Proof

Sure. Heidegger will say, multiple times, that the question of what it means to "be" has been forgotten, essentially since the inception of philosophy with the Greeks (ending with Aristotle). He believes being is that on the basis of which we define ourselves and everything else in the world, and that although the question has been forgotten we still walk around with a "pre-ontological understanding of being" - which has gone through many variations (creature of God, a subject with desires to satisfy, etc) but which has remained Greek through and though.

As far as it being the question of philosophy, he's consistent with that point: he sees philosophy as ontology. "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" Is the question of metaphysics, according to him.

Do I agree with it? Yes I do. It's almost a truism, though. Our concern for various domains of things in the world - all the sciences, all the arts - only happens on the background of "being," and so questioning what "it" is is indeed the core of philosophical thought.

I just thought I'd throw out there that as I recall, there is a footnote to the Stambaugh translation of BT in which Heidegger 'approves' of Nietzsche's characterization of being as a 'vapor' - I don't have a copy in front of me so can't cite the exact page/passage but thought it might be of interest. — Kevin

That's exactly right. He also "approves" of this characterization in Introduction to Metaphysics. What he's clear about is that both our "understanding of being" and the question of being itself has been completely lost, to the point where it has now become, as Nietzsche says, a "vapor" and "mistake."

But obviously, if he agreed completely, there would be no book "Being and Time," so that's worth keeping in mind as well. Being is still worthy of question, and Heidegger considers it the question of philosophy and metaphysics.

That's interesting.

I'm not a physicist - I'm a philosopher, — karl stone

You're neither, actually.

"The theory of relativity in physics does not deal with what time is but deals only with how time, in the sense of a now-sequence, can be measured. [It asks] whether there is an absolute measurement of time, or whether all measurement is necessarily relative, that is, conditioned."

Heidegger is completely wrong abut relativity in general, and space time in particular. Spacetime is a physical reality that is distorted by gravity. This is evident on earth, where two atomic clocks run differently, where one is at sea level, and the other is in plane flying 30,000 feet above. This is called 'time dilation' - and it's a scientifically proven phenomenon. — karl stone

Do you really think Heidegger wasn't aware of time dilation -- that this managed to escape him somehow? Come on. I think it's far more likely you're misunderstanding -- which is in fact the case.

Heidegger never says time dilation isn't a reality. He doesn't make a claim that physics is "wrong" because it assumes a certain conception of time as "now-points." He is simply saying that experiential time (temporality) is different from the time of physics (measured time, based on a conception of "time" as a sequence of now-points). This seems obvious from the quotations above.

Time dilation does, in fact, demonstrate that the measurement of time is conditioned by factors like speed and distance.

Can you give me the source of this please?

What I am confused about is whether, in raising this question, Heidegger is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality, or rather (merely) with the reality of the human experience/condition. That is to say, is Heidegger concerned with what reality is like, in the sense that a physicist can be said to be, or is he concerned with what it is like to be a human being, more in the sense that an existentialist can be said to be? — philosophy

The sense of "reality" itself has a long, checkered history which he discusses in Being and Time.

One thing Heidegger wants to get "beyond" is the subject/object divide, which goes back at least to Descartes' division of the world into the res cogitans (thinking substance, mind) and res extensa (extended substance, objects in space) -- the famous mind/body dualism.

It may seem frustrating, but Heidegger doesn't define "being" at all -- rather he discusses how it has been interpreted throughout Westery history from the Greeks onward. The Greeks, he claims, privileged one aspect of time when interpreting being: the present. Furthermore, time itself (which we, as "caring" beings, embody as "temporality") is also interpreted as a kind of present-at-hand being, a sequence of now-points, since Aristotle.

So to answer you question: he sees being "in general" and human being as interconnected, but mainly focuses on the latter: the temporal "there" (dasein) which understands and interprets being. Hence his "analytic of dasein" as being-in-world, care, and temporality.

Hope that helps.

Why should I keep living, if it’s all meaningless, futile, and pointless? — niki wonoto

From my point of view, you're suffering from a bought of nihilism. I've been there myself. But I have found more and more that those feelings about life's meaninglessness simply disappear when I engaged in something, when I was involved in something -- working towards a goal, especially in collaboration with others.

You mentioned changing the world. Why should that dream be dead? Why is it a pipe dream? Maybe if you mean achieving "peace on earth" in a generation, yeah that's most likely a pipe dream -- so what? You can contribute to this weird, ever-changing phenomena of which you're a part for a very limited amount of time, and help to shape it in the way that's aligned with your values, or you can shrink away from it and resign yourself to wallow in depression while others take the small, local steps that does create change.

The feeling of isolation, helplessness, and meaninglessness you feel is not relegated to you alone -- it's rampant. And it's a product of our current environment, which is encouraged in many societies to make people apathetic, obedient, isolated, and consumeristic. It takes them out of the realm of politics and power. It convinces them that the problems are too overwhelming, that there's nothing they can do about them (so why bother?), etc.

Whether there's a God or not, whether science's story is all there is, whether we go from dust to dust and there's no ultimate meaning in life -- so what? Let's say the "worst" is true. Then what? Kill yourself? Is that really what your gut tells you? How about this: meditate for a while. Feel the sensations of your body and the emotions of depression, sadness, fear that arise. Notice your thoughts AS thoughts, as just an activity -- as one more phenomenon to observe. Try not to "react" to any of it, just look at it. No judgments. When you do so, there's no nihilism, depression, nor is there craving and delusions of grandeur -- there's just whatever it is that's happening. When you reach this state, and really see it, then you realize your sadness is just a product of your thinking and your interpretation -- it's a product of your particular perspective. While it may be true, it is ALSO true that life is full of meaning and purpose, and that there's plenty of things to do indeed -- and is in fact very exciting. So why not be a part of it and view life as a playground? There's literally nothing to lose. And a byproduct is achievement, contribution to a better future, and your own personal growth and happiness.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of laziness, here is a snippet from Lingis, whose argument basically boils down to the fact that being-toward-death cannot do the job that Heidegger wants it to do, — StreetlightX

Fair enough. Heidegger's views on death and anxiety were never very striking to me, nor do i pretend to understand them very well. So if that's where your criticism lies, I wouldn't want to defend it. I will check out the links regardless.

say, with respect to the discussion of etymology more generally - it's probably a good rule of thumb not to trust philosophers with doing it 'accurately'. They all have some kind of agenda and I'd much rather trust an actual philologist or linguist whose discipline it is. — StreetlightX

Yes that's true, but that's what was surprising to me: I didn't think linguists were calling into question what they apparently are (semantic accuracy).

But it's tough with philosophy, as you know. We should be equally skeptical of linguists as well, because without a solid background in philosophical thinking, translations can easily go awry. Aletheia as "truth" (with all our modern ideas associated with it), for example, while certainly accurate, doesn't quite capture its usage 2500 years ago (of course) and so can be misleading, just as translating "episteme" as "science" can be misleading. I'm sure you agree. Regardless, your point is well taken.

think of our dualisms as useful practical tools that harden into metaphysical-strength concrete. — path

It's as if we habitualize a way of interpreting. I'm reminded of those ambiguous pictures where, once you're told what it is beforehand, that's all you can see (like a cat) without a great deal more effort, whereas it could also be interpreted as a candlestick. I think something similar to that happens with our basic preconceptions about the world. The mind-body version of dualism is a good example, particularly in the West. Descartes' influence really can't be overestimated.

Living in the moment is even on our to-do list. — path

That's great! I like that.

Anyway, I'd also like to hear what you have to say about time and about the question of being. — path

I think that time is like saying "life" - it has to be presupposed. It's the background, like light. It's no wonder every Western philosopher grapples with time (and change) in some fashion, but also the contemplatives of the East.

Heidegger's claim is that being (also a background) is opened up (or disclosed) by human being, and since human being is temporality, we interpret it on that basis. In the West, we do so by "presencing." I find that accurate.

:ok:

For me it's tricky, because I don't want to either just virtue signal self-righteously or act like his being a Nazi wasn't important. That letter I quoted is painful. — path

Yeah in retrospect that looks awful, of course. But does he ever explicitly advocate the killing of Jews, blacks, gays, the disabled, etc? Did he even know about this? He resigned his Rectorship pretty quickly. He also called his involvement his "greatest blunder," although he never apologized.

It's like the people who thought Trump was a "brilliant" man -- what if he turned out to be destroying the country systematically? I think a lot of those people would reconsider...

I've read some of Mein Kampf. It's an ugly book, and Heid was recommending it, complaining only about the boring autobiographical parts. I won't quote Hitler here, but browse for yourself. It's a thuggish document. It troubles me that anyone could recommend it in the spirit of Christ... — path

I can't say I've read Hitler, but I'm sure it's thuggish.

But yeah fucking Mitch & the gang are evil. I will hold my nose and vote for Biden, I guess, though it won't matter in my red state... — path

Well I'm in a swing state (NH), so I'll definitely be voting Biden (and also holding my nose...again).

I do what I can to follow certain scholars on the etymological issues...but I am haunted by a sense of being outside all of the languages I don't know. I feel forced to recreate some analogue that's necessarily a misreading. On the linguistics front, I have only looked in Saussure, but it was illuminating. — path

You can still learn a great deal even if you don't know the language fluently. In Heidegger's case, there's maybe 20-30 important Greek terms that are interpreted outside the mainstream that are particularly relevant.

If interested in Chomsky, Saussure is a good place to start, but ultimately one must come to wrestle with Chomsky's neurolinguistics.

with the Introduction to Metaphysics. Have you tackled that one yet?
— Xtrix

I haven't seriously studied it. I was impressed by certain passages, definitely. So far I've mostly been drawn to the early stuff, before B&T, though obviously that book has its killer lines. I guess I don't like when Heidegger gets too systematic. To me, Witt and Heid were sometimes saying the same thing in different styles. Witt could be 'too' anti-systematic while Heid was too systematic. It's a tradeoff, and I'm glad both went in different directions. And what I have in mind is the deconstruction of various linguistic/metaphysical confusions based on assuming an isolated subject, etc. — path

Well it's worth a look. Perhaps it's a bit more systematic than his other lectures/books, but I find that useful and I wish he did more of it.

I'll have to get to Wittgenstein this year, after Hegel.

To be clear, I could always read more of either or of other thinkers. I def. feel my finitude. I see so many...paths...and I can't take or be them all. — path

Likewise.

Heidi has his uses, no doubt, like many of others; but you're spot-on, Street, that, also like many others, his concerns are too narrow — 180 Proof

Yes, his concern for the question of being is too "narrow." Spot on criticism; very substantial. Not too general (since it's literally about everything), but too "narrow."

That's not, in fact, what was said. What was said was that there was a narrow conception of human experience.

Why do you continue to bother with this thread if you have nothing interesting to say? It's bizarre.

Yeah that's fair enough. Basically that Heidi offers a narrow slice of human experience passed off as a generalized phenomenology in which lots of interesting features are obscured and dropped out. I could substantiate it but I don't care enough about Heidi to spend that energy. If I had to point you in a direction, I'd say check out Alphonso Lingis's reading of Heidi in his Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility. — StreetlightX

I appreciate the sources, and both yourself, Path and 180 Proof have now provided me with a lot of reading material which I will check out, but the reason I created this thread was exactly for that reason: substantial criticism (or substantial "praise"), with the goal of understanding Heidegger even better. So if I may:

You're saying he's mistaking a narrow slice of human experience for a totality, and that he isn't justified in claiming this? What does the "in which lots of interesting features are obscured and dropped out" refer to, the "generalized phenomenology" or "the narrow slice of human experience"? It's ambiguous but relevant to clarify I think. Regardless, can you give an example? Because I'm certain he leaves many, many things out his analysis of human experience. His main concern, and he takes a while to get there, is "time," which he does consider rather obscured -- or concealed.

As for Heidi's philology, there's an interesting phD thesis by Rui de Sosa that meticulously tracks the responses by different philologists to Heidegger's reading of alethia, and concludes that the majority of them - although not all - more or less reject Heidi's reading. — StreetlightX

That's really a shocker to me. That's a major part of his entire thought, as you know. I was always under the impression that his translations, while considered outside the mainstream of scholarship, were still accurate in terms of their (several) meanings. (So while logos as a "gathering" is indeed found in Homer, for example, and so was used in that sense at one time, this still doesn't prove that this sense applies to the writing of Aristotle in any meaningful way [as Heidegger claims it does.]) If it does turn out to be "accuracy" in this sense, then I would be very surprised, but I have a hunch that it's the latter. I couldn't find a PDF initially but I'll take a look at it.

So it's still a somewhat open question, although I think it's pretty fair to remain quite suspicious of Heidi's readings as being faithful - albeit productive and philosophically entrancing. — StreetlightX

I agree. The question for me arose years ago regarding the philologic community's consensus on Heidegger's translations, and all I remember is finding something like I described above. When de Sosa states, for example, that

There seems to be a great divide between the communis opinio growing around Friedlander's thesis that in the end andent Greek alethea was fundamentally akin to the modem concept of truth and Heidegger's daims that the fundamental premisses of the Greeks are very different from our own". — StreetlightX

I wonder if the bolded part is historically probable? We know from our own experiences just how quickly words can take on new meanings, how quickly its usage changes, and even how a meaning can be created and, within a generation, can predominate (like the word "gay"). So while Heidegger may be completely wrong in his attributing meanings in the wrong contexts, I can't imagine our "modern" conception of truth being at all similar to what the ancients meant, any more than "democracy" or "justice" is. Of course there will likely often be aspects which are the same -- otherwise there would be no traceable historical evolution to a word -- but the semantics will especially be very different, since meanings shift so quickly, even philosophical terms or scientific technical notions.

On the other hand the 'honest' nihilist just drops the metaphysical pretense and chases power and money. This is 'true' sophistry. Who cares what X really is? It's standing reserve, canned whatever-we-need-it-to-be. Pretty soon we are canned whatever-we-need-us-to-be — path

I laughed at that one. There's a lot of truth to that, yes.

he was a creep. — path

Eh, I wouldn't say that myself. He never killed anyone or advocated for the holocaust. If simply being a member of a dangerous political party makes you evil, then we currently have a lot of equally evil people in the US alone- called Republicans. (In former times I'd write "Republicans and Democrats", but I can't equate the two anymore with good conscience.)



Re: Heidegger and Nietzsche. I've read nearly everything Nietzsche has written, and he remains in my view one of the most challenging and relevant thinkers of all time. But comparing the two isn't altogether fair, and I'd recommend checking out Heidegger's (4 volume) lectures on Nietzsche. Jump over the rather shallow secondary interpretations and see what you think, if you ever have the time to kill.

but I feel like Heidegger takes a very specific, over idealised conception of human experience and extrapolates it to very creative but ultimately narrow ends. — StreetlightX

I'm not sure what you mean by "idealized" here. Until that's explained, there's no way to tell if whatever conception you're referring to is narrow or not.

Who can we take wholesale? — path

No one. And I'd be very skeptical of anyone recommending such. Heidegger himself, over and over, says his work is interpretative, provisional, incomplete, and probably wrong in unforeseeable ways.

I think you've followed Heidegger's etymologies more. That's a harder path for me. — path

Oh that's a shame! I think this is exactly where Heidegger is most "useful" in a scholarly sense; the man certainly knew his Greek. I think he is still underestimated as a "philologist," or perhaps linguist.

An excellent place to get into this particular aspect is where he himself says to begin in the preface to B&T: with the Introduction to Metaphysics. Have you tackled that one yet? I would substitute 20 secondary sources and "interpreters" for this one book alone (really a series of lectures).

"The present -- as soon as we have named it by itself, we are already thinking of the past and the future, the earlier and the later as distinct from the now. But the present understood in terms of the now is not at all identical with the present in the sense in which the guests are present. We never say and we cannot say: 'The celebration took place in the now of many guests.'" Time and Being, p. 10

This helps understand a little Heidegger's distinction between "presencing" (or "presence"), which has been the mode from which "being" has been interpreted since the Greeks, and a successive sequence of "nows," which is how "time" is ordinarily understood (on the basis of presencing -- so that time itself becomes a present-at-hand fact, a kind of number line).

The entire thesis of Being and Time is that being has been interpreted on the basis of time, and a specific aspect of it: the "present." Our ordinary conception of "world time," or "clock time," comes out of our experience of the world, in the sense that we are temporally. Perhaps we could say "embedded time" or "experiential time" as someone put it, and which Heidegger calls "temporality."

This has interesting consequences for the history of philosophy (and science), and so for politics, technology, and values as well -- right to the present day. It flies in the face of 2,500 years worth of tradition, to boot. This is why I find Heidegger relevant and interesting, and at least worth taking a look at carefully.

:up:

It's a good point. I think Heidegger is insightful on our current situation. It sucks that he acted on his insights then the way that he did, but we can still raid him for parts (like Caputo does.) — path

I think Heidegger probably was thinking he would be the Third Reich's go-to philosopher, and so that was tempting. He was also apparently pretty naive politically.

One way I can approach this (which is maybe Braver's way) is to think of being as reality. Philosophers obsess over what is real. What do they mean? Some people say the physical, which is one beetle in the box. And some say the mental, which is another. If we try to determine the physical, we end up mentioning all kinds of mentalistic stuff. If we try to determine the mental, we end up talking about the worldly stuff. The whole game of reducing the whole to some X....seems doomed and confused. — path

The whole idea of "reality" and how it's traditionally thought of is misleading from the beginning. Remember Heidegger discusses this in B&T, and it's quite interesting (the concept of "reality," that is).

Also, the "mental" and the "physical," or the subject and object (or representation), seem to dominate Western thought since at least Descartes. We seem stuck in this dichotomy, which is what Heidegger tries to find a way out of, in part by calling Dasein's way of being "existence," or being-in-the-world. We start with a world -- so it's not a scandal that no one can "prove" the existence of the external world; it's a scandal that anyone is trying to.

Basically we get scientism or theology, which is maybe better expressed as scientism-theology, given that the essence of each is a forgetfulness of the question of being-meaning (taken it as a dead question that has been answered well enough, so please stop wasting everyone's time.) — path

Or perhaps scientism and "mysticism," but I take your meaning of "theology" in this sense as well. Excellent point -- I think that's what we're left with, yes. Along with one very important third position (usually embodied in science or in a reaction to the "death of God"): nihilism. Nietzsche worried about this quite a bit. Heidegger takes it up in terms of "technological nihilism." But it amounts to the same basic trend: away from God and gods, without any moral "ground" or any story (context) that gives us goals, purpose, and meaning, towards complete faith in the results of science, and mesmerized by technology (cell phones, computers, TV, cars, etc).

To add to this, I would say our current world is also dominated by propaganda, consumerism, and a variety of unsophisticated hedonism. Especially in Europe and the U.S.

Just in case you haven't seen this quote (you probably have), it seems relevant: — path

That's a great quote, and that's exactly right. Funny, I just started in on Hegel this year. I've heard for years that he's the "hardest" philosopher to read. But so far I don't find him hard at all. Schopenhauer repeatedly throws insults at Hegel, and between that and what I heard through secondary sources, I figured I would just wait. Heidegger comes down favorably on Hegel, however, and so I thought it worth while to actually read the man and see what all the fuss is about. So far I see why he was so influential. His contributions towards a history of philosophy (and the importance of interpreting history generally) are alone very important indeed.

:yawn:

The questions: does life has a meaning? What is meaning? etc only make sense if you have some backdrop sense of what 'meaning' is in order to show that it doesn't. In other words: you can only think life has no meaning, if you already know what meaning is, but you've lost it. — csalisbury

I think this is exactly right. "Backdrop sense" is well put, because it's not really a "definition" laying dormant somewhere in our heads.

Do Democrats want to lose? — Benkei

The DNC made it quite clear, after consolidating around Biden, that they'd rather lose the election than lose their party to Sanders. I'm hoping for the sake of the country that Biden still prevails, but it should become clearer and clearer what a stupid decision that was.

This helps me relate to Heidegger trying to awaken the question of being. I am still trying to figure out how the question of meaning and the question of being relate, beyond the straightforward way (what does it mean to say something is?) — path

I think they're intimately connected through "disclosure," through aletheia. Being is only vaguely understood in a pre-theoretical way and then interpreted in some fashion. Interpretation certainly involves meaning. So the human being is a "clearing," "unconcealing" beings while giving them meaning.

Good- now you know how I feel. :up:

If we're all operating with an understanding of being, then this effects everything - our politics and our culture and our future. If Heidegger is right, and our current understanding is a "technological-nihilistic" one, then we're in bad shape indeed. You can see the results all around you.

So it's not that the questioning of "being" has no relevance to the current political or social world; it does.

Worth pointing out.

Very interesting.