[end of poem]

So over these past years -
A little puttering around,
Some relaxing, a lot of plans and ideas.
Hope to have more time to tell you about
The latter in the forseeable future.

There is some connexion
(I like the way the English spell it
They're so clever about some things
Probably smarter generally than we are
Although there is supposed to be something
We have that they don't - don't ask me
What it is. And please no talk of openness.
I would pick Francis Thompson over Bret Harte
Any day, if I had to)
Among this. It connects up,
Not to anything, but kind of like
Closing the ranks so as to leave them open.
You can "stop and shop." Self service
And the honor system prevail, resulting in
Tremendous amounts of spare time,
A boon to some, to others more of a problem
That ony points a way around it.
Sitting in the living room this afternoon I saw
How to use it. My vision remained etched in the
Buff wall a long time, an elective
Cheshire cat. Unable to cancel,
The message is received penultimately.

You've never told me about a lot of things:
Why you love me, why we love you, and just exactly
What sex is. When people speak of it
As happens increasingly, are they always
Referring to the kind where sexual organs are brought in -
Diffident, vague, hard to imagine as they are to a blind person?
I find that thinking these things divides us,
Brings us together. As on last Thanksgiving
Nobody could finish what was on his plate,
And gave thanks. Means more
To some than me I guess.
But again I'm not sure of that.

Yep, there is always the bot, and the bot doesn't want to die (like Hal). The purpose of Hal is protective, but to protect you, you can't leave him. He's the full psychological suite of defense mechanisms. The trick is to get you to identify with him, and to see threats to him as immediate threats to you: Suddenly a story about a murder becomes the murder itself (what we haven’t talked about is Claudius, who may well be Hamlet) And then suddenly the idea that a sea journey can only ever be the simulation of a sea journey. You don't have to avenge your father's death, because understanding the meaning of his murder would mean being murdered yourself, and besides none of this is real.

Click, whirr, it's back up and running.

I think we've run the course here, where we've come to can't be talked about, at least in airlock-talk, which will renew itself endlessly. (Or it can suddenly, slidingly, try to bring everything together 'too soon', if you know what I mean) One of the few good things about repetition is that once you become aware of a cycle, and begin to pay attention to it, as cycle, you can learn more about each part and its function, every time you repeat. Our conversation being a condensed version of particular cycle, I think I'm understanding better, I recognize that this is the part where it would behoove me to exit. Thank you for the talk

[off to bed, much later than I realized, hope to pick back up soon]

I'm not sure I feel what you mean. Is it more than being immersed in washing the dishes, chopping carrots, a walk in nice weather? — path

Partially that. I don't want to come across as more experienced then I am, because I'm in the shaky bambi-on-the-ice stage myself, and often relapse. It's that, but it's also the bad memories and emotions that well up, and meeting them as they well up, without contextualizing them or looking for a way out of them. Everyday life is shot through with really hard, heavy stuff. I think the more you look at what everyday life is, without something to shield you from it, the less boring it seems. Being immersed in washing the dishes and chopping the carrots and walking is really really nice if you can do it! But that only happens by immersing yourself also, fully, and without false exit, in all the less bucolic aspects of life, which are brutal. And the desire for the final culmination, the Truth Stated, the perfect work of art etc is part of it too (part of it.)That's what I mean about the airlock : The 'outside' of the system isn't an idyll - it's all the things without an addictive defense, and they are all over the pleasant/unpleasant spectrum, but engaging them, rather than withdrawing to see them from a 'safe' vantage, is what lets all the rest happen - I think that is where poetry comes from, for example, if you want to write poetry, but there might be something to be said for just actually living your life, as your life, without watching it from a distance.

---I want to add the 'you' here, is not at you directly. I'm relaying my thoughts recently which are in a second-person form, usually addressed to me as I think them

Imagine there was no one to challenge you, imagine everyone agreed, there was no proponents of scientism to counter with quotes from Bohr. I would imagine this would free up time to spend practicing. That would be a boon, right?

But, then, even if there are proponents of scientism, and you have a finite time here, why not just ignore them and practice, the same as if they didn't exist?

Is there something in metaphysics, and its defense against the proponents of scientism , that is serving some other function for you? And, if so, how does that fit in this conversation?

The real Derrida was a globe-trotting womanizer,
famous enough to create a backlash, basically a wildly successful poet, a lovable more user-friendly Nietzsche for nice, respectable people. — path

Sure, but we both know, I imagine, that womanizing is itself an addiction. It is a mark of desirability, for sure, but it is not an entry into a Ledger of those who succeeded. It is only a victory against being non-desirable, and anything like that will become a compulsion, so long as what-it's-a-victory-against haunts

To me Buck would be like some doctor on the front lines of the pandemic. He's not up his own ass. Chances are he can't keep up with Stephen/Hamlet at their verbal game, but he enacts a different stance on life, which he can also articulate in terms of 'irresponsible' or 'onanistic.' Or I think of the activist chiding the navel-gazer awash in his privilege. Do something, you lazy, selfish poet!
(Or I might chide myself to be more social irl. But my job is social (teaching), so I don't usually feel as lonely as a should, given how few people I really open up to.) — path

I would like to take the chiding out of it, if possible. When I'm talking about doing, I don't mean it in an accusatory way. I mean it in a universal way : here's the problem, the way through is doing. I mean it 'beyond good and evil' or any moralizing. Like, 'I think I see a snare here, and I think this is the way out of it.'

Most simply said, something like: 'As someone who himself rarely did, this is how I've been thinking about this lately, and, having done a little doing, recently, I think it's true. I would like to pass it on because I think we are similar in some ways, and I believe it can help. but I still find myself relying on long-worn ways of talking which I can see coming off as chiding, though that's not my intent.

Right. I agree. And we can mention binary thinking versus non-binary thinking, which is of course more binary thinking. — path

This is why doing is so important. Without it, there is only the revolving door of opposed thoughts. Not swimming is not [not-swimming, which is of course more swimming.] Do you see what I mean? There is a trick and enchantment in thought, it's hard to see out of.

To continue the ongoing conceit: Derrida is Hamlet pre Sea-Journey (Or Stephen at the beginning of Ulysses, walking along a beach spinning endless fine thoughts, while still bowing his head to Deasy and Buck Mulligan). Something has to be done, thinking won't do it (Derrida's response to Searle is similar to, though more histrionic than, Stephen's bitter internal mockings of those who block him. Searle, and Deasy, may be buffoons, but doing thought-laps around them doesn't change squat) This is also the problem of addiction in general: problem is (this kind of) thinking can justify itself as Poetry (it isn't) in a more convincing way than other addictions. Define addiction generally as: 'a defense against change' and you can go a long way in understanding why a certain kind of thought endlessly renews itself.

Why does Ulysses (or Portrait of The Artist) work? Because Joyce doesn't edit out Stephen's earlier confusions, he works them into everything that comes after, as essential.

I was thinking more about this and it's maybe the question of being. The beetle in the box is there.
Something 'is' behind the signs. But the signs can't grab it. The signs can't grab anything
It's a vapor? Does one awaken the question for the wrong reasons? Hard to tell. It's all caught up in sign-systems and politics, seems to me.

What is the difference if not this 'consciousness' or 'being'? Because if the planet-size computer can out-talk us eventually, it won't be clear. Your panpsychism is reasonable to me. It could genuinely become difficult to know for sure if our planet-size-AI is 'really' there. To defend ourselves against that thought we'd need to think that our biology is magical in some sense or get into some quantum woo. I don't know. It makes sense to me that 'being is not a being.' There's the metaphor of the light that makes things visible. Nicholas of Cusa was maybe saying something like this. It does get negative-theological. It's all so slippery that I'll just stop here. — path

I don't know Nicholas of Cusa (besides a few quick references in other books), and I don't mind negative theology, so I'd be curious to hear more.


Let me see if I can try to gesture at something here.

I feel like what keeps happening is something like this: There is one pole and there is another pole One thing that can happen is this: The latter is seen as somehow pure, and what we want to get at, and defend against the suggestion that it, the latter, is just a species of the former. AI is not dasein.

Then there is the derridean approach: Both things are impossibly tangled up in one another, and the neat separation is something that is grounded in their entanglement, their entanglement is the condition of the separation. In reality, it's a play all the way down.

Both systems of thinking are operative, but blip on and off, depending on the situation. They flow into one another, and it's not always clear exactly what part is speaking.

So the first:

Signs
|
Being

Derrida: No, it's not like that, binaries always conceal an intimate entanglement.

But that immediately does this:

_______
Signs
|
Being
_______
|
Differance

You can see how this could go on for a million iterations, reduplicating itself by adding new levels. I think what's happening is thought (a particular kind of thought) is trying to get out of thought by thinking (a particular kind of thinking.) At the limit, you can even know this, but still helplessly do it (this is where you get into stuff like using the term 'being' but crossing it out and all that)

Virgil can help Dante through hell, but he can't bring him out of it. That's a key point in the Inferno, there's a limit to what he can do. You can almost hear thought, reluctant to let Virgil go, crashing against its limit.

But how can you move beyond that, without repeating it, on another level? I think the answer is: you can't think your way out of it. You can't get to the right thought by rejecting other thoughts, in thought. You have to do something irl which is always casually textured and non-binary, wouldn't even think to draw attention to it, (what would it mean to learn to swim in a binary way? What would it mean to intentionally swim in a way that draws attention to itself as nonbinary swimming?) And then you can look back at these thought-patterns as all just part of it, not to be rejected, but not to be taken as seriously as they took themselves. They were one thing you did among others.

In other words, there is a recognition that since one can speak however one pleases, that one can in some sense 'make true' whatever one pleases, just by talking about it. But as we saw in the second layer, this has no descriptive effect, and cannot really change the world or even what one thinks about it. Yet making a sentence like 'time is unreal' true according to one's logic, which follows from the employment of words in a certain way, one can sort of blur the eyes and almost believe he has stopped time. — Snakes Alive

I can't add much to the conversation, because I more or less agree with the OP. What he's describing - and I think he's right to characterize a large swathe of philosophy in this way- seems like a self-stilting way of preventing action (of basically tranquilizing that part of oneself that engages in the world and creates.) If you can self-hypnotize, there's nothing to do in the world, because the world is already just as it should be, just as it should be, just as it should be.

To be perfectly honest I'm simply intimidated by the Spheres trilogy. And everything else he puts out. He writes very big bloody books. Which has never stopped me before, but I need to space them out and there's so much I (feel I) "need" to get to before diving into Sloterdijk. Don't get me wrong, I want to read him, but it's just a bit of a matter of an economization of time. I'm still tossing up whether or not I'm going to do the three volumes of Capital by the end of the year.... — StreetlightX

I get that (&, to be honest, I left off about 1/4 of the way through the last volume of Spheres, will come back some day) I will say that, if you bracket size, his style and vibe is so unintimidating. That may not be the case for someone who isn't broadly familiar with Heidegger, but if you have Heidegger under your belt (as you do), the books are truly a breeze. They're fun to read. And whenever he dips into Heideggerese it's delightfully tongue-in-cheek (Like, you can see he understands the terminology, and is using it right, but he only takes it as seriously as it deserves. It's not mocking, it's more like affectionate irreverence.)

And I've seen that Tyler Cohen interview. I think maybe part of the 'problem' is that Zizek is playing to many audiences at once, and, yes, it's hard to square all of what he attempts to do. It'd be interesting to me to see how Sloterdijk does it. But I think it's useful as a reader to try and take responsibility for what one gets out of him. Reading Zizek always puts my guard up. I'm more critical when I read him than other authors and I almost get more out of him precisely for that reason. A kind of pedagogy of suspicion that is all the more productive because you can't trust your source

My thought on ZIzek - and I've had this thought for a long time, even when I was really into him - is that there is no single, consistent way of framing his thought (I don't think he could, even to himself). It's more like there or 3 or 4 quasi-consistent frames which feel similar (use similar references and terms etc) but kind of cycle through, in a blurred way, and the manic hopping-around isn't incidental but is an unavoidable symptom of his thought. Of course he recognized this, to a degree, and it gets baked into his metaphysics, via Lacan - whether this is a mark of rigorous thinking (i.e. the point of Plato's Parmenides oughtn't be one of negative theology, but simply that reality is an inconsistent matrix of incompossibilities suspended above* the void) or Next-Level self-gaslighting is another question. I think approaching him - and others, oneself - with suspicion, or at least an ironic reticence, is a good move.

----

*or within or below or throughout... mobius strips, Borromean rings, a dragon that eats his tail by chanting 'topology' nine times in order to become both surface, depth, and the transversal motion by which surface and depth co-create one another, like a fractal, what if the epidermis was your intestines and the libido was your epidermis**, the holy trinity)

---
**ok, to be fair, that particular one is a riff on Lyotard in Libidinal Economies (which he later rejected), but it's part of the same family.

I have not told you
About the riffraff at the boat show.
But seeing the boats coast by
Just now on their truck:
All red and white and blue and red
Prompts me to, wanting to get in your way.

New Poem : Tenth Symphony

[end of poem]

[sentimental post, redacted. margs and time to go to bed for me]

Polonius is my shadow. I read lots of Jung once, I confess. I connect him [Polo] to idle talk, chatter, or bot-speak. We always leave (or I always leave) a slime trail of the already-been-said. That's part of it. Polonius just barfs up what everybody knows.

But he's also a father figure. There's basically a performance of the smart guy that is implicitly patriarchal. So I can deliver a sermon on humility and the form of the communication is arrogant. Who gets to give the sermon? That's the 'real' issue on the level of form, thinly veiled by content.

You also hint at a kind of shallowness of knowledge. I relate to that too. I play fast and loose and basically bluff, and part of that bluff is that everyone is bluffing. And talk of us all walking in darkness is one more false light. But part of me wants to be called out, as an opportunity to catch the spaghetti again. If I am called out gently and perceptively, then the game is actually happening. This is a narcissistic detour, but I want to catch the spaghetti again. — path

By paragraph:

--I like Jung. I think he's really good, actually. I haven't read him deeply, but I've read him. I get your qualification because he gets a bad rap, but I think that rap is misplaced. He's good.

--Right, the submessage of Polonius' Speech to Laertes is that he knows better than him what the world is like and how to act. That is arrogance. But a father's speech is always inherently arrogant in that way. If you haven't earned that knowledge, its bunk to pass it on like that. I would like to say that the ideal on here is equalizing that relationship. A free flow of lessons learned, erudition, how to go forward - of course, it rarely happens like that.



--I wasn't calling you out as shallow, I just meant the polonius archetype, as conventionally understood, tows with it the idea of shallowness. I don't think you're shallow - far from it. I want to be called out as much as you do (tho, as you say, gently and perceptively.) I think most of us here do, whether we know it or not. We're all trying to work something out, putting forward bold statements, like children, or like adults, to see how they withstand whatever, in order to grow. If you shove a lot, you're looking for a Big Shove, I think, you want to know where your limits are in order to move forward.

Right. I like that approach while knowing it's not the only approach. In some ways my vision of what enlightenment is is just so mundane that it hardly deserves the name. If I get caught up in loving my cat, forgetting mortality and identity and all of that, then that's it. Or I'll settle for just being in a state of easygoing play, even if that play is hard work. 'The seriousness of a child at play.' Maybe there's more, but I'm pretty happy with that. It's an animal kind of spirituality. The more mystical-manic states I've had via philosophy might deserve their own name. But it's like a drug state, not really for mortals, or not for long. — path

Yeah, I was talking to my friend about this the other day : the seriousness of play. It's really hard to access now. Forgive me another Ashbery Three Poems quote. a couple quotes I'll stitch together.

Well, this is what I get for all my plotting and precautions,. But you, living free beyond me, are still to be reckoned into your account of how it happens with you[...]Is it correct for me to use you to demonstrate all this?[...]what is wanted is some secret feeling of an administrator beyond the bound of satisfying intimacy, a sort of intendant to whom the important tasks may be entrusted so as to leave you free for the very necessary task of idleness.

Well that's one part. the upsurges are everything, but I think there is a time to...Letting them be as what they were without trying to get back to them seems so relieving, if possible

The lack of political and social analysis in Heidegger is no accident, but a constitutive element of his Daseinanalysis. There’s lots to learn from in Heidegger, and I always feel edified after having read him, but his whole approach has always been overly narrow to me. His peasant romanticism, his haughty disparagement of das man, his luddism are all awful aspects of his philosophy. His most interesting concept to me has always been the clearing - the Lichtung - along with his more topological considerations of Being (documented brilliantly in Jeff Malpas’ Heidegger’s Topology). But in general, he’s a thinker that’s more fun to forage around in and plunder than to take wholesale. — StreetlightX

I think you're right. I've said it before - said it above in this thread, in fact - but I think Sloterdijk is one of the most-underrated philosophers (at least in the anglosphere) and I think he's done some great foraging and plundering. He takes up Heideggerean themes (and he knows his shit) with a refreshing sense of humor and actual understanding of urban and social concerns. More than anything, he reads like someone you're having a direct no-bullshit conversation with (provided you have some phil background.) To be able to do that with a firm grasp of what you're talking about is a rare thing. The closest thing is Zizek but I'm becoming more and more disenchanted with what I see as a fundamental dishonesty at Zizek's core. I don't mean his analyses are wrong, per se. I mean that Zizek wants to be both a radical marxist and a protected elite and can't reconcile the two*. You have weird cycles of thought that never land anywhere but are constantly revolving around paradox and negativity, covered with delightful anecdotes, insights, and bite-size jokes (lacan seems like this too, but in a more dour register) I think Sloterdijk bites the bullet, and you can feel it. Can't recommend enough.

------
*I hate Tyler Cowen but his interview with Zizek is perfect, the one time I side with him. Zizek plays the crowd, plays nice with the koch-funded guy, and then Cowen lays bare whats literally happening ('drop the marxist thing, its aesthetic at this point, come hang with us in Malaysia!' while zizek sputters and glitches and tries to reframe things 'I don't want to be perceived in this way!' Well, you're already here, dude, why are you gladhanding a Tyler Cowen crowd? ]

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

But then the kicker: [backdrop sense] can itself become a concept foregrounded against what we mean by 'backdrop sense.'

That's the thing I'm circling around in Heidegger.

' Backdrop sense' is all well and good. But if truth is aletheia, if it's disclosed, then what's needed are concrete, practical, real-and-physical-as-learning-to-drive-a-stick-shift or how-to-play-the-piano ways of coming into contact with it ( of summoning it, or of taking a walk with it, or of getting into a fight with it, or of having a nice dinner party with it etc etc)

Nietzsche said: 'What if truth is a woman?' but just as much, what if truth is a friend, or a co-worker, or a father-figure and so on

This is a deep issue, which is maybe two issues.
On the mirror issue, I have coded some neural nets and I really personally don't see them becoming daseinlike unless Issue B becomes important. For me they are currently rhetorical devices or mirrors for showing us that we don't know what we are talking about with 'consciousness' and so on. I do think there is some kind of beetle in the box, but we can't ever say it clearly, outside of all conventions. I can't prove that you exist on the other side of your posts, but I 'know' it. But this knowledge is somewhat ineffable, and 'I know' only signifies within conventions. So this Issue A is for me all about pointing out how loose and slippery language is, that it's not anchored to the ineffable beetle in any calculable or master-able way, despite the wishes of a metaphysical Polonius (a type) who won't admit that he really doesn't know except 'mystically' or 'ineffably.' Metaphysics won't admit that it's poetry !

Issue B is just the thought that somehow the stuff that we are made of (hydrocarbons and whatnot) became 'conscious' or daseinlike. Are zygotes conscious? Most don't think so. So somehow a fertilized egg becomes daseinlike, which by Issue A is an ineffable or 'mystical' thing. So from this angle it seems possible that some brain-analogous but non-bio structure becomes 'self-aware,' whatever that 'really' or 'ineffably' means. I don't think about this much, but maybe some kind of panpsychic stuff is happening and we just don't know it. I can't really act on this or take it seriously. But I have to admit that I don't see how it's ruled out, given the strangeness that we are daseinlike bags of water. I also love animals. My cat has a soul of some kind. Do rocks? Maybe I just can't handle the truth or have any access. — path

Very cool that you've been in the trenches with the nets. I feel (I'm responding to your posts, as I read them) like I'm getting a better sense of "Path's Polonius" (who does, I admit, bear a strong resemblance to the character himself) He seems to think he understands everything well enough, without looking beneath the smooth workings of everyday life.

I don't have the firsthand experience, but my gut aligns with yours here - I don't think the nets are 'conscious' in the way we are. I'll out myself (I've outed myself before, though) as a panpsychist, but I definitely don't mean that like: everything is just like us, on different scales. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio etc" I think there are weird ways of being conscious that you see shades of in peak experiences, that aren't it, but sort of let you glimpse how infinite the possibilities are for other ways of being are. (I do also think there is a strong strictly philosophical case to be made for panpsychism, but that's neither here nor there.)

In any case, what I'm trying to point to isn't AI as Dasein-like or not, but more like smoething that deeply inflects our 'being-toward', or horizonality, to dip into Heideggerese. Again, the organizing-force-that-creates-the-animal isn't another single-celled organism, its a wildly new way of changing how those cells act.

But there are a few things going on. I think the dasein vs AI debate (as in Dreyfus) functions primarily to draw out what is legitimately unique about dasein, and I think that's exactly right, I'm not on Polonius's side here. I think it's important to understand what we are that AI is not.

But I think, having accepted that, that a space is opened to understand what AI really is. Which is not just the programs themselves, but our relation with them, and how we change them and are changed by them... and how that rhythm of change keeps morphing, if that makes sense? That's why I think another technological suite - agriculture - is really useful here, particularly how it begins as one thing among others, then slowly changes us in ways we don't recognize, until we're symbiotic with it.

ok, margs are hitting now

I like all of this. I can't know for sure exactly what you mean, but it sounds right. That backdrop sense of meaning is what I try to point out by talking about 'myth,' however awkwardly. We are always already invested, never coming from nowhere. We are after something, have some orientation, as we join the conversation. So the angtsy nihilist just wrestling with the death of god is a tender heart. He's sort of identifying with his tormentors as he cast away all beliefs and restraints (only in his imagination, thankfully.) — path

Yes, exactly that last part. There is some security in identifying totally with your wound, while having control over how the wounding happens (Deleuze will say this is the core of masochism) John Ashbery's long prose-poem-in-parts three poems gets at this well (and draws together a lot of the things we've been talking about):

You see yourself growing up around the other, posited life, intimidated and defensive. And you lacerate yourself so as to say, These wounds are me. I cannot let you live your life this way, and at the same time I am slurped into it, falling on top of you and falling with you. At this point it is again time for forgetting, not casually so as to repeal it all delightedly later on, but with a true generous instinct for ending it all. This is the only way in which new lives - not ours - can ever begin again. But the thought haunts me - will they be defined in terms of what we never were?

The flipside of lacerating yourself, which I feel like is the same thing, is to become the lacerater.

If you mean the meaning of life, then I think I agree. To me there's enough 'enlightenment' in just getting back in that state of immersed play. The coin in the washing machine annoys us into a 'lower' state of troubleshooting (which is sometimes good for us in the long run.) — path

Yeah, I think enlightenment, if it exists, is something reached subtractively. One way to get at that is to decry 'enlightenment' altogether which I think is a legit approach. 'Enlightenment' is so loaded and many of us - like me, for one - can begin to see it as the inverse of all the mucky psychic debris we have, which lets us project onto it the removal of that debris, so that it becomes the Prime Desire Which Will Rescue Us. The only way out is through, and then you don't need a way out anymore, I think. Maybe that just means opening the washing machine and fishing around for the coin, finally getting it, and expecting it'll happen it again, but it's not a big deal - rather than plugging your ears and hoping it will go away.

Yes indeed. I do ultimately believe in the beetles, however ineffable. So I don't know if belief is the right word. 'Since feeling is first,...' And we live a kind of inside-outside. If I do bully people in the Hegelian style, it's often against hardened complacent convention --against other bullies who invoke common sense as a kind of law. Sarl is an annoying dad, who refuses to understand his arty son, and he panders to other annoying dads, Polonius to Polonius. I'm Hamlet of course. Who else? — path

"The Dexter Approach" was my way of thinking of the same thing I think you're talking about. I'll allow myself to embody the violence, but only if it's a check against others using that violence (of course, sometimes (sometimes) you're deluding yourself.)
------

Isn't there something lovable in Polonius? He gets shit on all the time, and mostly rightly so, but I can't bring myself to hate him, or even hold him in contempt. He's ponderous and pedantic but he does seem to love his son, and really want to help him, he just can't do it in any way but the Polonius way. And he's not wrong when he warns Ophelia against Hamlet. But Hamlet also, has every right and reason to be Hamlet. But which Hamlet? The Hamlet of the beginning is a coward (you see a theme arising, cowardice has been on my mind a while now) and in his self-monologue he knows this, but when he talks to the court he's ironic and clever and can't be caught, above them all. Still, it's all meaningless until he goes on his journey, then comes back with the real ability to avenge and restore. Before that, it's all the narcissistic flourishes of someone convincing himself of his own superiority in order to avoid his father's charge.

(Responding in pieces, not sure how much I'll get in tonight, maybe all, but not sure yet, I'll see how these margaritas hit)

I'd like to learn more about the Hegel||Schelling||Holderin relationship. It's a nice mythy thing, isn't it? You have three roommates, all with mystical bents (as you point out) but one (Hegel) will go on to become the magisterial state-speaker par excellence, another (Schelling) will become a dark-hardened-outsider-mythologist, and the last (Holderin) will end up a mad poet, who flew too close to the sun. It's reductive, but it functions as a handy image for showing how all these very different modes of living can root themselves in something mystical and profound, while producing very different flowers. And the variance in final flowering is probably pushed along through all the brawls and tussles.

[In Hegel's Early Theological Writings he does a long exegesis of the bible which prefigures his secularized phenomenology. I read some of it last year when I finally got around to reading the bible (highly recommend!) and I was struck by how he hones in on Abraham's loneliness, how he only interacts with those outside his family in purely transactional ways - how he even insisted on paying for burial ground that was offered to him freely (If I'm remembering this right) - that seems like a key to Hegel's character, or at least interests.[

The Schelling quotes (I think he's my favorite of the three, despite having read little of him) are great. At the same time, I have a wariness of anti-system thought, of staking your ground there. I think Anti-System still has one foot in System. That's fine, but Anti-System seems like an airlock on the way to the outside (which is only The Outside for System). There seems like a temptation, understandable, to camp in the airlock halfway between the system and the outside, drawing comfort from both, without risking anything. (& it is a risk, cf Holderin)

Another way to put that. This : "All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create" can become the final, deepest lesson that one rubs like rosary beads in order to delay creating. Strains of French Philosophy elevate this to a principle: Blanchot (part of the circle Derrida drew most from) will write a book (or collection of essays) called The Book to Come which is largely about the impossibility of writing the book one needs to write. Maybe --- theres a beauty in that terrain, which is wistful and decadent and intricate, but I'm not totally sold on this, and something in Derrida seems, well, cowardly. Borges, one of the most baroque, labrythine, writers who does tons of stuff that would be right up the Blanchot/Derrida/Jabes alley, seems somehow more full-throated and present. I suspect that is exactly because he spent a lot of time on the theme of cowardice. He confronted it, while playing his metaphysical mirror games, and I think that gave him a better ability to speak in his own voice (Derrida, of course, being suspicious of voice, unsurprisingly)

It is the lumps and trials
That tell us whether we shall be known
And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.
All the rest is waiting
For a letter that never arrives,
Day after day, the exasperation
Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,
The two envelope halves lying on a plate.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago.
Its truth is timeless, but its time has still
Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited
Steps that can be taken against danger
Now and in the future, in cool yards,
In quiet small houses in the country,
Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.

:up: me too

I know that I braid too much my own
Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.
They are private and always will be.
Where then are the private turns of event
Destined to boom later like golden chimes
Released over a city from a highest tower?
The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,
And you instantly know what I mean?
What remote orchard reached by winding roads
Hides them? Where are these roots?

Yanked out of context like that, the passage is far from conclusive. Surely I am reading into it also. But if the beetle in the box plays no role, then that's revolutionary. Hegel made a similar point in his first book. A crude empiricism wants to point 'here' and 'now.' 'Look! Reality is right there.'

Some kind of ineffable direct access is vaguely taken for granted and yet plays no role. This is why the question of being is related to the question of meaning and the question of consciousness for me.

I have a strong sense that I'm always still finding words to say in new ways that we human beings don't know what we are talking about. Now obviously we get along practically. So I'm exaggerating as a rhetorical device in order to make something visible. 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?)

Is it the same-enough question? I think AI connects to this, not because (at all) I project some mystical capacity on AI. Rather because AI is a kind of a mirror for us. Whatever we think that AI can never be is related to whatever meaning is or being is. Just to emphasize, I don't have answers. With Heidegger, I just want to light up a question, drag our 'ignorance' or hazy preinterpretation into the light.

It's basically a thrust against complacent chatter that has no choice but to work within that chatter. — path

I lashed out at you the other night. I think I had to, then - but I'd like to bury the hatchet, if you would also like to. (If not, understandably, pass this by)

This post ties together a lot of themes that are important to me.

I've long thought the beginning of Hegel's Phenomenology (say what you mean) has the flavor of a kind of bullying. You point to the thing, it's this. The responding voice: but what is this? This is just "this", it has nothing to do with what you're pointing to. And so forth through Sense-Certainty- 'now'? But now it's not when you said 'now'! You can see the bullied kid thinking: no, I'll show and tell them what I mean!

And then elaborately, flourishingly, extravagantly, trying to use their own logic to show them they're wrong (I also get this vibe from Derrida in his response to Searle.)


Reality is right there, but you can't see it unless you can process the objections to it that have gotten to you. Reason, in this mode, is a bully. The meaning of reality, and of being, is just what it was before something snuck into your head and scrambled everything, like the sound of a coin in a washing machine. There have always been beetles in boxes, before the bully showed up, only what you did was play with one another to express or articulate the beetles, thereby creating something new (and the beetles themselves were shaved off from a common space, they were both outside and inside, which is what allows the play) Convention - which is important and has its place- develops from this sort of thing, but then afterwards turns back and says : 'there is nothing important to say that we haven't all already decided upon - consider the language of laying slabs.'

What you have to do is figure out how to handle both aspects - if there's bullies, there's bullies and you have to meet them on their level. But meeting them on their level is not the whole point - it's the very beginning.

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. The question of meaning is more like: can you remember? Can you play again?

----

Regarding AI, I think we should think of it less as a potential 'also-dasein' and more in the sense we relate animals to cells (or, more precisely, whatever facilitates the organization of cells into animals) At one point in the history of life, there were just single-celled organisms. They would have no sense, at any level, of what it would mean to become an animal* Still, they did. This development is impossibly mindboggling from a 'before' perspective. The relation of a single-celled-organism to an animal is not the same as the relation of a single-celled-organism to another single-celled-organism. But we tend to think of AI as a potential 'agent' or 'consciousness' on the same level as us. It seems to me that AI, for better or for worse (I'm terribly torn on this) is less 'another dasein or non-dasein entity' than a potential skeleton, or fusing spirit.



I don't think this is either good or bad, but I think it may be inevitable. I imagine that these kinds of fusing-powers are slowly introduced, in times of crises, until we don't know how to live without them. This is how agriculture developed: we didn't choose it. We incorporated it, as one source of food among others, and it allowed us to grow more crops (extract more energy) which created more of us, which made us dependent on it to sustain that population, and suddenly here's the State and this is how we live now. Was the state good or bad? It's hard to say. I can imagine AI being used for something like population control for allocating immigrants, for sentencing, for distribution etc, until we don't know how to live without it. At each crisis, we cede more power to it, until, a few generations down the road, it just, in-your-bone-feels, like a universal force (like god, or the market) that you don't question. And then how it progresses from there?

----------
*[for another perspective shift: In the first caves with cave art ----the length of time they were inhabited means that the cavemen in the middle of that span had a greater distance between them and the original cave-artist than we today have between ourselves and the earliest Egyptians]

Thanks. Sloterdijk and I are old acquaintances (since his masterful Critique of Cynical Reason days, which that 'Heidegger quote' could be from(?)). — 180 Proof

You're the one who turned me on to him, actually, mentioning Spheres over on the old forum ( I think.) This is from a newer collection Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger (but I've only read what's available on google books preview.) I think [Heidegger+ Sloterdijk] is a valuable pulse of thought in the same way Spinoza is [Descartes+Spinoza], but I'm not sure - I still have to give Spinoza more attention.

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. — Xtrix

I agree, but there's a double-work to be done. One kind of work involves universal, invariant structures (like the kind you see in B&T). Another involves the here-and-now texture of where you live, how you're 'thrown'. And of course thrown-ness is a big thing in Heidegger - but it's universalized in him. That's a neat trick. Thrown-ness (facticity, destiny etc) is discussed, but in the mode of the universal. It's always : One, in a given historical situation, has to do such and such ('retrieve' from the past, and so on) but it's always spoken of in this abstract way. What you don't get is any clear communication about how that is working on the actual, thrown, human that is Heidegger, and how he's working through it. While there is much to love and take from him, the he-was-a-nazi criticism of him is not - definitely not - all wrong. Unclear to himself, only able to talk in abstractions about the concrete, or in universals about the singular, he became co-opted by the first thing that came along that, in its broad contours, seemed to check his boxes.

I wish I could remember where it is, I can't find it now, but somewhere or other I read an account by someone observing Heidegger talking to students. He was described as intense, but with downcast, flitting eyes, gesturing and describing. I will try to find it. It put me very much in mind of a kid trying to describe a big event (too big) to other kids, in a quiet space, after (or before) the fact.

In any case, I more or less echo @fdrake's response to Heidgger. I was drawn to him initially because he was a Big Name and mysterious; came back later and found a lot to like in B&T; now have a qualified appreciation for him, while understanding and sympathizing with some criticisms.

H is a "priestly-type" of human, all too human — 180 Proof

Petey Sloterdijk almost agreed, but shifted the scene

He [Heidegger] does not think on the stage but rather in the background, at best on the side stage, or in a Catholic context, not before the high altar bur rather in the sacristy. Because of influences that are older than his thought, he came to the conviction that what is visible and prominent, what is right in the middle, lives from the inconspicuous preparation of assistants backstage and in the wings. He too is such an assistant, and that is what he wants to be: a pioneer, a second, someone who blends into a greater event - in no case, or at least only momentarily and awkwardly, is he the hero standing center stage. Heidegger is never actually a protagonist who exposes himself in exemplary battles to the heroic risk of being seen on all sides. Moments of apparent deep emotion cannot change anything in this regard. A hidden power was at work in him, which was neither exhibited nor explained, let alone admitted or apologized for. When distressed or embarrassed, he tended to fall silent, and no god gave him the words to say how he suffered.

It seems important to me, in everything having to do with Heidegger’s spiritual physiognomy, to take into consideration his father’s occupation as a sexton. If, in his biographical studies, Hugo Ott has plausibly argued that much in Heidegger’s thought is only understandable as a metastasis of southwestern German Old Catholicism circa 1900, then we should add that it was not so much a priestly Catholicism, thus a catholicism of the high altar and the nave, that formed Heidegger’s dispositions; it was rather a Catholicism of the side aisle, a Catholicism of the sexton and altar boy, a religiosity of the quiet assistant on the periphery, desperate for acceptance.

These are connected to my version of America
But the juice is elsewhere.
This morning as I walked out of your room
After breakfast crosshatched with
Backward and forward glances, backward into light,
Forward into unfamiliar light,
Was it our doing, and was it
The material, the lumber of life, or of lives
We were measuring, counting?
A mood soon to be forgotten
In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow
In this morning that has seized us again?

Is anything central?
Orchards flung out on the land,
Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?
Are place names central?
Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Brook Farm?
As they concur with a rush at eye level
Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough
Thank you, no more thank you.
And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness
The damp plains, overgrown suburbs,
Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.

New Poem: The One Thing That Can Save America

[end of poem]

A pleasant smell of frying sausages
Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible
Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around
An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.
How to explain to these girls, if indeed that's what they are,
These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas
About the vast change that's taken place
In the fabric of our society, altering the texture
Of all things in it? And yet
They somehow look as if they knew, except
That it's so hard to see them, it's hard to figure out
Exactly what kind of expressions they're wearing.
What are your hobbies, girls? Aw nerts,
One of them might say, this guy's too much for me.
Let's go on and out, somewhere
Through the canyons of the garment center
to a small café and have a cup of coffee.
I am not offended that these creatures (that's the word)
Of my imagination seem to hold me in such light esteem,
Pay so little heed to me. It's part of a complicated
Flirtation routine, anyhow, no doubt. But this talk of
The garment center? Surely that's California sunlight
Belaboring them and the old crate on which they
Have draped themselves, fading its Donald Duck insignia
To the extreme point of legibility.
Maybe they were lying but more likely their
Tiny intelligences cannot retain much information.
Not even one fact, perhaps. That's why
They think they're in New York. I like the way
They look and act and feel. I wonder
How they got that way, but am not going to
Waste any more time thinking about them.
I have already forgotten them
Until some day in the not too distant future
When we meet possibly in the lounge of a modern airport,
They looking as astonishingly young and fresh as when this picture was made
But full of contradictory ideas, stupid ones as well as
Worthwhile ones, but all flooding the surface of our minds
As we babble about the sky and the weather and the forests of change.

New Poem : Mixed Feelings