I would like to see Hegel's language and that of Heideggers from comparison with High Middle German. This might reveal their ideas better, if only that they may be critiuedt — Gregory

FWIW, Hegel's lectures are pretty clear. He also gave some great public speeches.

But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit. Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone – this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14] It can indeed be said that, ever since philosophy first began to emerge in Germany, the condition of this science has never looked so bad, nor has such a view as this, such renunciation of rational cognition, attained such [a degree of] presumption and influence. This view has dragged on [into the present] from the period before our own, and it stands in stark contradiction to that worthier [gediegenern][104] feeling and new, substantial spirit [of today]. I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit, and I address myself to it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content [Gehalt] and when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity [Not] and is inherently [für sich] capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is at home, which it [itself] constructs, and which we share in by studying it. Whatever is true, great, and divine in life is so by virtue of the Idea; the goal of philosophy is to grasp the Idea in its true shape and universality. Nature is confined to implementing reason only by necessity; but the realm of spirit is the realm of freedom. All that holds human life together, all that has value and validity, is spiritual in nature; and this realm of the spirit exists solely through the consciousness of truth and right, through the comprehension of Ideas.[15]
— Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/1818/inaugural.htm

He rejects the reduction of spirituality/religion to mere feeling. , and he rejects with disgust the idea that the height of philosophy is some kind of complacent skepticism/relativism/etc. Note his insistence on the 'comprehension of ideas' (AKA 'the labor of the concept'). Even if his themes make the mouths of mystics water, his method was 'rational.'

Thanks for the quote. His three targets are Catholic scholasticism, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic supremacy of "sensibility". The idea of a new religion of the Holy Spirit taking over from the obsolete tradition of Jesus and of the Popes was prophesied by Franscican friar Gerardo Dan Donnino and Joachim of Fiore and seems to have started (to the mind of the First Reich) with Eckhart and continued through Tauler and systematized by Jacob Bohme. This was a properly new cultural religion like the Italian philosophy of Antonio Rosmini and Giovanni Gentiles. Maybe Heidegger was outside his great tradition as B. Croce found himself to be in Italy. In separating politics from philosophy and mysticism, I would be interested to see more passages from Heidegger that people have issue with. I always found him profound

G. Gentile's philosophy ("actual idealism") is interesting when separated from his politics. Since Luther (in Germany) there was a desire for a German Christian quasi-pagan Kabbalah like system with a strong emphasis on language. Not all the fruit from that tree is bad

Here's what I'd consider an off-putting Heidegger quote:

What about this nothing? The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity. But when we give up the nothing in such a way don't we just concede it? Can we, however, speak of concession when we concede nothing? But perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an empty squabble over words. Against it science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing—what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it. Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help. It has recourse to what it rejects. What incongruous state of affairs reveals itself here? With this reflection on our contemporary existence as one determined by science we find ourselves enmeshed in a controversy. In the course of this controversy a question has already evolved. It only requires explicit formulation: How is it with the nothing?

II. The Elaboration of the Question
The elaboration of the question of the nothing must bring us to the point where an answer becomes possible or the impossibility of any answer becomes clear. The nothing is conceded. With a studied indifference science abandons it as what “there is not.” All the same, we shall try to ask about the nothing. What is the nothing? Our very first approach to this question has something unusual about it. In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that “is” such and such; we posit it as a being. But that is exactly what it is distinguished from. Interrogating the nothing—asking what and how it, the nothing, is—turns what is interrogated into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object. Accordingly, every answer to this question is also impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing “is” this or that. With regard to the nothing question and answer alike are inherently absurd. — Heidegger

http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/heideggerm-what-is-metaphysics.pdf

I think some of Heidegger is first-rate, but I can imagine a person reading this and saying 'nevermind.'
Where is it leading?

Only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects
of investigation. Only if science exists on the base of metaphysics can it advance further
in its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose
in ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history. Only because the
nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings
overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and
evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder—the revelation of the nothing—does the
“why?” loom before us. Only because the “why” is possible as such can we in a definite
way inquire into grounds, and ground them. — Heidegger

I'm sure we can talk endlessly about the Nothing, and I have been struck by wonder now and then, that the world exists, against the background of something like nothingness. But the idea that the 'why?' is driven only by wonder seems silly. Why is the baby crying? Is that wonder or the desire to solve a problem? Also a rhetorical objection: why oppose sober science to foolish philosophy? Fortunately Heidegger wasn't always like this. I have some of his early stuff that's solid all the way through (which is not to say that he never struck gold in his later stuff, which I mostly know only through secondary sources.)

I would like to see Hegel's language and that of Heideggers from comparison with High Middle German. This might reveal their ideas better, if only that they may be critiuedt — Gregory

Eh?!

Why MHD, arguably, the least comprehensible stage of German??

It depends on how well someone understands the concepts presented by any language. The German language is capable of having a very multifaceted presentation of philosophy, according to German writers, which allows one to think quickly about matters which could otherwise cause someone to get stuck and rushes the mind to the ends of philosophy rather quickly. Each language perhaps is suited to a particular philosophical outlook

For Heidegger our bodies are made of matter but our consciousness comes from nothing. This and how it is connected to how we experience being Dasein (beingness IN time) was a mystery for him. Sartre wrote of this too, saying our consciousness is always being created anew

I mentioned the "actual idealism" of Giovanni Gentile. I did so because he completed the thought of Rosmini, which is in line with Jewish esotericism and gnostic Platonism. He was killed by antifascists while he was on his way to defend other antifascists from being executed. To his credit..

Some people are turned off by Heidegger's modern work a-day German.

For Heidegger our bodies are made of matter but our consciousness comes from nothing. This and how it is connected to how we experience being Dasein (beingness IN time) was a mystery for him. — Gregory

That doesn't sound quite right to me. Perhaps you could find some quotes to support your interpretation?

Some people are turned off by Heidegger's modern work a-day German. — Gregory

I can only go by translations, but I find it hard to believe that B&T-and-after Heidegger was easy reading for the working class. I am aware that he could be brilliant with terminology, such as 'it worlds' or 'the world worlds' and so on. He had some early breakthroughs that only much later became well-known through Being and Time (just as the 'Blue' and 'Brown' books already contain many insights from Philosophical Investigations.)

Heidegger takes the path of repudiating the primacy of the theoretical attitude. For him, we are never in the position of experiencing the sensedata of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

For Heidegger, in contrast, the theoretical attitude is secondary, being predicated on the existence of a preconceptual understanding that is the basis on which we conduct our day-to-day life. We do not see sense-data, what we see – at least as students and lecturers – are, for example, chairs, desks, windows. There is no problem of the external world because we are always already in that world.

He gives the example of the lectern from which he is speaking. He doesn’t see brown surfaces, arranged in such and such a way, from which he infers the existence of a lectern; what he sees is the lectern ‘in one fell swoop’ as either too high or too low, as convenient to his purpose or not. He sees it as already something meaningful. No doubt a farmer from the Black Forest or a Negro from Senegal would see it somewhat differently, but for the young Heidegger and his audience it is simply part of the environment (Umwelt) in which they live, it has the character of a world (Welt). Further, in a neologism which is to become characteristic of his manner, he turns the noun into a verb – ‘es weltet’ – that is, ‘it worlds.’ — link

https://philosophynow.org/issues/32/Towards_the_Definition_of_Philosophy_by_Martin_Heidegger

Perhaps what I like most in Heidegger is his insistence that human being is being-in-the-world and being-with-others first and foremost. We aren't dreamers trapped in skulls, who need to figure out
how contact with the world and others is possible. The very language we express such theories in is radically dependent on the assumption of a world-with-others (which is not 'made' of something definitively ultimate.) Many of games that philosophers play (those that seem silly in retrospect) depend upon taking a massive 'pre-conceptual' background utterly for granted.

I was listening to Dr. Gregory Sadlers videos on this last night. Type in "Gregory Sadler Heidegger nothing" on YouTube and you'll find 4 ten minute videos on this. I will try to write more on this later today

To a rube like me, anyone (and their ilk) who proclaims without satire or ribaldry that "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" (The Nothing itself noths) fundamentally is a buffoonish purveyor of metaphysical nonsense (Witty & Freddy), or pestulant charlatan (i.e. "a sophist" against whom Plato prophylactically opposes philosophy). :mask:

To a rube like me, anyone (and their ilk) who proclaims without satire or ribaldry that "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" (The Nothing itself noths) fundamentally is a buffoonish purveyor of metaphysical nonsense (Witty & Freddy), or pestulant charlatan (i.e. "a sophist" against whom Plato prophylactically opposes philosophy). :mask: — 180 Proof

I agree. Or it's buffoonish to solemnly and pompously drop phrases like 'the nothing itself noths.' Nevertheless, Heidegger could and did do much better at times. One my favorites (in just 75 pages) is https://ia802907.us.archive.org/30/items/heideggermartinontologythehermeneuticsoffacticity_202003/Heidegger%2C%20Martin%20-%20Ontology%2C%20The%20hermeneutics%20of%20facticity.pdf

Perhaps. I won't quarrel with his better, even brilliant, moments; Heidi's output, though, was mostly obscurant, deliberately cryptic & oracular, anachronistic, luddite antimodern, and nazi-"blood and soil"-compatible. A grand exemplar of how not to do philosophy IMO.

Nothingness nihilates by its presence. The existence of nothingness was discovered by Heidegger when he philosophized his way through anxiety. That is why some find his writings comforting. Discourse on Thinking is particularly good, and I think admitting that nothing is real yet remains nothing is an important step along the philosophical path

Fair enough. And I think one can get "Heidegger's" insights elsewhere. It's the same with Jung. To me it's more about the 'chemical reaction' of a reader and a book. As we get older and less unwise, we can look back and see the absurdities and blindspots of thinkers who nevertheless helped us become a little less foolish. With Heidegger, it's easy to speculate that he never recovered from the nazi disaster, & that he reinvented himself as a kind of shepherd guru. I find even B&T somewhat tiresome and pompous.

Nothingness nihilates by its presence. The existence of nothingness was discovered by Heidegger when he philosophized his way through anxiety. That is why some find his writings comforting. Discourse on Thinking is particularly good, and I think admitting that nothing is real yet remains nothing is an important step along the philosophical path — Gregory

For me the issue is not that Heidegger has nothing in mind when he says the nothing nothings. I do expect him to go somewhere with this strange rhetorical device. The issue is how such rhetoric comes across and the type of listener it seems to be aimed at (gaped-mouthed followers sitting at his knee.)

Nothingness's existence (Heidegger's claim) leads back to Eckhart's statement that "man in God is God". Heidegger failed to see this and retreated to the materialism of the pre-Socratics with a little does of Pythagorean mysticism. Nobody believes he was a great man, but Heidegger did have an impressive range of thought. In the end, nothing must be filled by Dasein

Herbert Marcuse took Heidegger's philosophy into Marxism as Gramsci had done with the growing Italian school of thought. Ideas, and in fact whole books, can be taken out their political contexts and seen on their own terms within philosophical thought. This is especially true when studying phenomenology

Here is the story of the Japanese philosopher of "nothing" during the world war eras:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeOTbyy7uYE

We don't need to reject these lines of thought merely because Japan joined Hitler in declaring war on the world, right? His thinking is much like Heidegger on this subject. Hegel said that in self-consciousness being and nothing stand to each other as completely empty, and find a synthesis in the synergy of living, which tries to discover the divine through the concepts of universals

The difference between the East and West on these issues is that the East desires for contradictions never to be resolved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da#:~:text=Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da%20(Sanskrit%3B%20Pali%3A%20pa%E1%B9%ADiccasamupp%C4%81da,to%20exist%2C%20that%20also%20ceases) in order to separate the person from the world as if from something illogical. The West (through Hegel for example) embraces contradictions as a challenge to be overcome so that a final place of rest is eventually found for the mind at the end of its journey

Here is the story of the Japanese philosopher of "nothing" during the world war eras: — Gregory

I looked into Nishida back when I was making sense of Stirner.

Starting with An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida’s early work calls into question two basic presuppositions of most modern epistemology: the assumptions that experience is individual and subjective, and that it leads to knowledge only via a corrective process with input from the mind or other individuals. For Nishida, experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out of it. — link

This intro is nice approximation of what I make of Hegel, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and others (not claiming to have mastered any of them or even that any of them is masterable or has some exact, final meaning ---to the contrary). These thinkers vary in important ways, but all of them saw through the limitations of a crude ego-centered empiricism. (The Crisis-era Husserl could also be included.) What puts people off a connection between Wittgenstein and Hegel is the rational fear of cryptotheism. I say that because religion also treats this theme, and not always in sophisticated ways. As I read Hegel, he saw that religion had an element that enlightenment lacked, which is a recognition of 'the sociality of reason.' Logic is not some dry, dead neutral thing (excluding mathematical logic.) There's a norm involved, a love directed at an ideal community. (You know, gross hippy stuff.)

We don't need to reject these lines of thought merely because Japan joined Hitler in declaring war on the world, right? — Gregory

Again, I really don't think that's the issue here. Of course some people can't get over the political sins of thinkers, but I don't think folks are really so squeamish. I suggest thinking in terms of the tough-minded versus the tender-minded approach. As I see it, Wittgenstein used a tough-minded approach to gesture vaguely toward conclusions more often found among the tender-minded. The tough-minded are anti-systematic, always worried about oversimplifying things, with a pessimistic tendency connected to their openness to facts. The tender-minded 'must' fit things into a usually-optimistic system.

Everyone philosophises at the ontic level. Its implicit because as Heidegger says Dasein is metaphysics. I think that is where you are directing your post in a way, in the stuff about sociality of reason?

I like to think that we foolosophers can sometimes manage to be ontological and not just ontic (which is maybe what you meant?). The 'sociality of reason' is the theme and the title of a good book about Hegel. The intro is especially impressive, and it's nice that Pinkard tries to put the gist of Hegel in more modern terminology.

What 'the sociality of reason' means to me is something like: we don't think (primarily) as individuals. Obviously we have individual brains, but the point is the shared cultural software that runs on these brains. For instance, I'm using my individual hardware to expound on a thought which is not my own so that another brain/person can 'be there with me' 'in' or 'with' the thought. Another way to look at it: rationality and science imply a community. To tell the truth, to see through illusion, etc., implies a community in a world, some gap between the finite (individual, frail) mind and 'what really is.' I think this 'what really is' cashes out in terms of something like what an ideal community would eventually decide. (Or, in more banal terms, what 'those in the know' have already agreed on.) This makes more sense if one thinks of the word as 'all that is the case' (in terms of facts in human language.) While we are all quite sure of some kind of ineffable direct experience, this stuff has no epistemological weight, precisely because it is 'unmediated' and a private show for the lonely humunculus in the skull (or so runs the questionable tale.) What makes more controversial propositions true or at least plausible is their relationship to less controversial propositions. This seems like a digression, but it gets us out of the useless habit of seeking non-verbal truth-makers that can't actually function in a rational discussion.

I'll stop there & see what if anything seems worth elaborating on.

Also, I like 'Dasein is metaphysics.' It's a nice overstatement to get a point across the gulf. I read it as 'we are language' (at least our most particularly human aspect is something like our bravest and highest thoughts and their associated passions.)

I've seen evidence of a collective subconscious that stretches across the globe in human minds. The fact that we understand ancient text is evidence for me for the reason that language changes every generation and there would be no way to connect to the past through pages of history were we not united to our ancestors via the images and archetypes that we inherited from them

,

Were you referring to Hegel's philosophy of right (1821)?

I don't dispute something like archetypes or biological inheritance, but I had something far more ordinary in mind. I'm talking about us both speaking English, both living in a world where there is the internet, there are automobiles, there are dishes to be washed. Then there's these thinkers we can talk about, which exist publicly. Finally, there are unwritten and perhaps unwritable norms for having a conversation about such things, to which we mostly automatically conform.

Pinkard's book is about the The Phenomenology of Spirit.

I'm reading his German Philosophy book, Hegel's philosophy of Nature, and the lesser Logic. I'm almost done with all of those but I still need to read the greater Logic, which might be a chore like washing those dishes

I think the big version of the Logic will be like the smaller version (which overall I liked, without grasping all of it or needing to.)

That's cool, a lot of writers on this forum don't like Hegel. I read the Phenomenology 3 times, the Philosophy of Mind 3 times as well, and on my second reading of the Nature book. I have a good background in his thought you could say