No. It may the essence of how you account for your understanding of the world. But it's a misunderstanding of Heidegger's word. And Heidegger used a bunch of phrases and locutions to make his meaning reasonably clear.Caring, or giving a fuck, is the essence of the world — Gregory
(5) Dasein is mature; there's little discussion of learning and socialisation.
Seeing a human being as "a Dasein" misses out a lot which is relevant... — fdrake
In some ways it's an accident of history that that particular book became so central (his lectures leading up to it just weren't available, even if they are often clearer and one can follow the genesis of his thought.) — path
Anyway I think I could add something to an informal conversation. — path
I'm almost finished reading Being and Time. I think "care" is properly translated. Caring, or giving a fuck, is the essence of the world — Gregory
The OP's question assumes Heidegger is a figure of special interest to us. — TheMadFool
Personal experience; division 1 B&T is one of the most eye opening things I've read in metaphysics. The formal structure of experiential time in Div 2 is profound. — fdrake
Have some frustrations with him:
(1) Scientific/conceptual knowledge being relegated to a present at hand understanding and away from the "core tasks" of philosophy. — fdrake
(2) How he approached the history of ideas is very fecund (retrojecting; linking discourse analysis and metaphysics), how he equated that with the history of the understanding of being is not. — fdrake
(3) Little to no politics and social stuff. — fdrake
(4) There's a lot of "formal structure" that piggybacks off suggestive examples that maybe don't generalise as far as he wants ("ontological moods", the centrality of anxiety and being toward death). — fdrake
(5) Dasein is mature; there's little discussion of learning and socialisation. — fdrake
My own understanding of Sorge as Heidegger used it would be "having an interest in," as opposed to having zero interest in. And this at all kinds of levels, some of which Heidegger troubled to focus on and explicate. — tim wood
(5) Dasein is mature; there's little discussion of learning and socialisation.
Seeing a human being as "a Dasein" misses out a lot which is relevant...
— fdrake
That sums up my thoughts rather nicely as well... — creativesoul
because I doubt very many will have read his other works and exclude that from the list. — Xtrix
Well then, welcome! — Xtrix
Interesting. Like Hegel's 'Absolute' - a metaphysical strange attractor transforming (dialectically, not quite or explicitly teleologically, à la 'retro-causation'?) fundamental chaos into the ultimate cosmos (à la 'platonic heaven' (caveat: Meinong's Jungle :yikes:) ... or 'realer reality'). Yeah, I can see that in Heidegger too. Pure speculative nonsense (Kant). :sweat:Aristotle turned causality on its head and said the prime mover acted as a posterior cause instead of a prior one. — Gregory
Very true! I found B&T quite difficult. It's huge, rich, and a bit overwhelming. — path
So naturally I looked for help, found out about earlier lectures and shorter, earlier drafts. That really helped open my eyes. I could go back and read lots of Div One especially feel that I was getting it. I found Dreyfus's Being-in-the-world quite helpful, but there are some great papers in the Cambridge Companion too. I'm pretty fond of Kisiel's and Van Buren's work too. — path
Also, just to put this out there, I like to think of Wittgenstein pointing to language as a ready-to-hand tool that we tend to try to gaze at as something occurent. (Our blind skill with language is more absent than present, perhaps...) — path
The closest thing to Heideggers thought in the history of philosophy before him was Aristotle's idea of final causality. Instead of saying the prime mover started everything, Aristotle turned causality on its head and said the prime mover acted as a posterior cause instead of a prior one. Modern philosophy is essentially about putting the cart before the horse. I like that because it's counter intuitive — Gregory
Dreyfus was an excellent teacher. I'd check out his Berkley lectures as well -- they're online (YouTube et al) for free. His Being-in-the-World is valuable. — Xtrix
In the light of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Peirce, Wittgenstein-TPL & Dewey, I've found Heidegger spectacularly redundant and obscurant. — 180 Proof
Also, his 'interpretation' of Nietzsche is also egregiously anti-Nietzschean. — 180 Proof
Jaspers & Marcel, then later on Levinas, Merleau-Ponty & Gadamer, do 'hermeneutical daseinanalysis' so much better, less - or counter - solipstically by comparison (Adorno), and therefore morally, even politically, more cogent and relevant to any 'existential project'. — 180 Proof
Heidegger's crypto-augustinian fideism via metaphysical 'de(con)struction of metaphysics' (e.g. Seyn) amounts to little more IMO than a sophistical derivation of 'wu wei' (or 'satori-kenshō'). — 180 Proof
Read works by The Kyoto School thinkers (e.g. Nishida Kitarō) instead for the comparative philosophical clarity lacking in most of Heidegger's writings, especially after his so-called "die Kehre". — 180 Proof
I've been grateful to Heidegger, nonetheless, since my earliest philosophical studies in the late '70s for his monumental oeuvre as a/the paragon of how NOT to philosophize - or think-live philosophically (as Arendt points out) - as manifest by the generations of heideggerian obscurant sophists (i.e. p0m0s e.g. Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty et al) who've come and gone in and out of academic & litcrit fashion since the 1950s - apple-simulacra don't fall far from the tree-simulacrum (or is it "Ye shall know them by their fruits" :chin:), do they? — 180 Proof
I can't cite a passage at the moment (sorry) but as I get to the end of B&Y I keep feeling like his sense of potentiality and reality go backwards, almost as if we live life in reverse. — Gregory
Not really. I'm asking about Heidegger's thought, not Heidegger as an individual personality. In fact, I think his personal biography often works against him due to his being a Nazi for a while, as you know. That being said, yes I don't consider him a "god" any more than Kant or Newton or Einstein. This thread wasn't intended as a venue for hero worship. — Xtrix
'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' (Joyce) Or we are the history from which we are trying to awake. It's only our prejudices that allow us to think against such prejudices. The most potent prejudices are the ones we don't know we have. What is ontically closest is ontologically farthest. It's the glasses we don't know we are wearing, the water we swim in without noticing until a strong philosopher can make it visible and only then optional.
I'm riffing, but hopefully some of this speaks to you. — path
I wasn't going to write anything in this thread, since the less oxygen given Heidegger, the better; but than you for your summation as to why. — Banno
It does. The "water we swim" is exactly right -- it's right there around us at all times, and for just that reason is the last thing we notice. The method of "unconcealing" these hidden features of life is how I see him defining phenomenology. — Xtrix
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/Gadamer’s positive conception of prejudice as pre-judgment is connected with several ideas in his approach to hermeneutics. The way in which our prejudgments open us up to the matter at issue in such a way that those prejudgments are themselves capable of being revised exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of prejudgment, and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a version of the hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutical priority Gadamer assigns to prejudgment is also tied to Gadamer’s emphasis on the priority of the question in the structure of understanding—the latter emphasis being something Gadamer takes both from Platonic dialectic and also, in Truth and Method, from the work of R. G. Collingwood. Moreover, the indispensable role of prejudgment in understanding connects directly with Gadamer’s rethinking of the traditional concept of hermeneutics as necessarily involving, not merely explication, but also application. In this respect, all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily ‘prejudgmental’ in the sense that it is always oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue. Here, of course, there is a further connection with the Aristotelian emphasis on the practical—not only is understanding a matter of the application of something like ‘practical wisdom’, but it is also always determined by the practical context out of which it arises.
The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn. While Gadamer has claimed that ‘temporal distance’ can play a useful role in enabling us better to identify those prejudices that exercise a problematic influence on understanding (Gadamer acknowledges that prejudices can sometimes distort—the point is that they do not always do so), it seems better to see the dialogical interplay that occurs in the process of understanding itself as the means by which such problematic elements are identified and worked through. One consequence of Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice is a positive evaluation of the role of authority and tradition as legitimate sources of knowledge, and this has often been seen, most famously by Jürgen Habermas, as indicative of Gadamer’s ideological conservatism—Gadamer himself viewed it as merely providing a proper corrective to the over-reaction against these ideas that occurred with the Enlightenment. — link
Excellent. I agree with all of that. I've been talking about consciousness in other threads, and I think it's close to the issue of being. People use familiar words in a loose way without noticing just how haze these words are. For practical purposes that's fine, but philosophers build metaphysical systems on foundations of fog. I like to think of it as dragging our ignorance into the light. — path
I do notice that the Heidegger haters have stopped by. I don't blame them. But I suggest that thinkers like Heidegger, Hegel, Derrida...the ones that people love to who hate...can be appreciated without being worshiped or endorsed as a whole, as flawless human beings or philosophers. — path
I'm really only interested in opinions of those who have made a real effort to read him, hence my request in the OP that a requirement should be having read Being & Time. If you can't get through that, that's fine -- not you're cup of tea. But then why bother announcing your disapproval? — Xtrix
Incidentally, I think Derrida is very much a posturing charlatan -- just as Zikek is now -- and I've tried hard to understand him. — Xtrix
If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?
Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant — Witt
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