(Keeping in mind that personally I think both are horrible authors as is.) — Terrapin Station
. It's not possible to just have "motion of nothing," or "just potential motion of nothing" which is even more nonsensical. — Terrapin Station
Facing mortality can give you distance from what is petty in one's community. In that sense it is isolating, especially if most don't want to face embarrassingly deep issues while there are gadgets to collect and while there is respectable worldly position to enjoy. On the other hand, the terror of death forces us to flee from what is petty or less important in ourselves. Flee where? To universal virtue which is more like poetry or music than a fixed idea — macrosoft
These heidegger ideas- as well as the one you mention with how our time is lived historically- I just can't get inside these ideas to feel them. So I know I don't really understand them. — Jonah Tobias
A philosopher always has an ego and the grandiose abstract nature of philosophy can certainly play to this ego. So we don't know how to dance or dress fashionable or make social conversation but all this is "petty" and we are above and beyond these "petty things".... I can't help but see philosopher's like Heidegger in this manner. — Jonah Tobias
Beauty and materialism in their right place are fundamental parts of a good life- even though some are more sensuous when it comes to these things and some are more enamored with thought and other aspects of life. The Carpenter values working with your hands, the philosopher values work of the mind, and the concierge or fashion designer values the art of comfort and appearance. All are valuable and have their place. — Jonah Tobias
My suspicion is that when Heidegger appeals to these fringe extreme concepts like the fact we all will die one day- its an attempt to render these parts of life worthless. Nietzsche criticized this a good deal when he was talking about those who raise a god only to cast a shadow upon life. Who are the lovers and who are the haters of life- Nietzshce who often asked. This is too simplistic because Nietzsche was of course full of hate and he admitted it himself- but the question has some validity. And where do we put Heidegger in terms of this question? — Jonah Tobias
"Is something truly good if it is only temporary.... don't we want that which is Good Always?" — Jonah Tobias
To face death and our own mortality seems like it throws us more into the now- the present moment- and here is how I understand your talk of musicality and poetry. There's no point to it per se- its not to get somewhere. As a guru once said to me. "So you seek enlightenment. Where will you find it... over there?" Our life can not be justified by some imagined goal- it must be its self justification at each moment- like music or poetry. — Jonah Tobias
Tell me if I'm on the right track with any of this. What I'm missing and not understanding. I've always felt like an outsider looking on Heidegger's thought.
I'll only add from my perspective- music or poetry also reach that dialectical ideal of becoming- where we are not trying to exploit or control but are equally putting ourselves in the mixture. The embodied cognition, as you called it, also means that our bodies and ourselves are at stake in our thought and actions. And isn't this what is truly Authentic? — Jonah Tobias
When do I decide that I can only play the cards that were dealt with me? When do I choose a project in terms of what is possible given those cards and not imaginary cards that let me do anything? What is it to get serious with a kind of sober joy that embraces the world I was thrown into? Arguably this adds more to the text than the text gives. — macrosoft
What allows the way we are caught up in time to become visible? In stronger terms, what allows us to see that existence 'is' time? — macrosoft
I'm hearing Sartre's decision here in a way. Maybe Sartre presented his decision more as a radical break than this- there seemed to be a kind of unnatural randommness required for him- you don't decide for reasons but simply because to decide is to be free... I'm less impressed with Sartre in general lol. But it was fundamental that one choose one's decision- and here I see a choosing- a choosing of one's thrownness. Would you say the two are similar or different? Am I putting it correctly. — Jonah Tobias
What does this really mean- this choosing of our thrownness? Do you think that we often live our lives with imaginary cards? — Jonah Tobias
I'm not sure that I understand this importance of time as you and Heidegger are using it. — Jonah Tobias
And then Sartre though man was a futile passion to be God. — macrosoft
I guess that depends if one believes in an afterlife or counts fantasies of starting from zero. — macrosoft
This reminds me of Sartre's take on love- the impossibility of trying to dominate the subject, etc etc. Its not that relevant to what we're talking about except to say- how foolish is it that we try to elevate our own experience to the universal? A lot of times our philosophies describe us better than they do the world. — Jonah Tobias
Hmmm. So there's two contexts of not accepting our thrownness. Thinking that we are an original causa sui- or believing a metaphysical story. These days it seems this is less common. Now people just don't believe in anything lol. Distraction has replaced faith. — Jonah Tobias
Memories are present creations, recreated time and again and exist only so long as they exist in our synapses. The future is a similar story. Consciousness created "the Thing that Persists in Time" so that it could compare different impressions and draw conclusions. But my belief is that past and future only live in one's consciousness.
So if this is what Heidegger means to say by time- then yes I agree. — Jonah Tobias
Maybe the better contrast, however, is between 'our' cards (the tribes cards) and 'my' cards. Because authentic means 'own,' just as one's death is one's 'own' more than just about anything else can be. It is literally the end of the world, a personal apocalypse. It exists now in the form of possibility. What does it mean to look at it and take it into account, as a constant possibility and not as distant event that one buys insurance for? — macrosoft
Heidegger is trying to show us that our notion of the present is mostly inherited baggage that doesn't do our first-person experience of meaning justice. — macrosoft
This way of seeing the world- of one's own death as a possibility- I'm not sure I'm familiar with it. — Jonah Tobias
I can sit here right now and think about if everything just ended. If my own personal experience was gone. And what do I get from that thought? Personally I get a kind of peace. There's some famous christian who said to an atheist- "come here and see me upon my death bed. I want you to see with what peace a christian dies." I'm not christian but I'm spiritual. I see my life as a sort of mission in some ways. I'm doing my best. If I'm gone... well shit I sure tried. but since I don't feel like I have to control everything- the sense of me vanishing doesn't leave me with some great anxiety about what I leave behind. That was never up to me to begin with. I was just doing my best and proceding with trust. — Jonah Tobias
This is what trying to feel the possiblity of my own death brings up in me. I'm not sure if this experience coincides with what you speak of. Neither does it make me feel necessarily more like this life is my own rather than shared with others. My spirituality still makes me feel like I am part of something shared....
Speak on this- what am I not understanding that makes Heidegger so hard for me to grasp :) — Jonah Tobias
In a sense I don't believe in time at all. Just constant change. — Jonah Tobias
There is constant change- let us give up on the idea of trying to seize everything all at once and then passing it through some medium called time. etc. — Jonah Tobias
Death allows us to see our entire existence from the outside, from nothingness. Nothingness lets beings be against a background of their possible not-being. We can see the entire world (the meaningful world with others) from the outside, imaging ourselves gone. — macrosoft
For Heidegger and you it seems like there is something more profound supposedly there. Does this view of time impact your life in some kind of way? can you describe how? — Jonah Tobias
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things. — N
What you're describing here- isn't the feeling of it a kind of lessening of seriousness? A kind of- Shit since we're all gonna die anyway- I'm not as caught up in the gravity of it all?
In my life- when I was about 20- I decided the future that I was taught to hold sacred and fear missing out on- getting a good job- the american dream etc- was a crock of lies. So I felt a kind of lessening of the seriousness of these shared perspectives and was freed to embrace my own. Is this talk of death having a similar effect? — Jonah Tobias
I think what maybe that statement neglects is the connectedness of mental life. It's not pure noise, for instance. The past is reinterpreted in terms of a future project. The future is projected in terms of what has already been. What is the dynamic here? Is it a simple forward flow? — macrosoft
A "future" is always imagined- A "past" is always imagined. The present is always real. So the three are not equal- Past and future all exist in the present- and the present is just flux. Reality. — Jonah Tobias
The past that we encounter is always a picture/ a memory/ a bit of our imagination. It is never real. Things change and they leave nothing behind. — Jonah Tobias
If he is right (and you will have to decide for yourself), then we've been locked in a 'presentist' illusion (useful fiction) for centuries, beguiled by one of our own inventions, asleep to its apparently necessary but actually merely contingent dominance. — macrosoft
When we consider our reality- our experience- in terms of something in the "past"... isn't this past constructed just like a movie by our minds? We try to be faithful to what we were recording but its still a movie. — Jonah Tobias
Speaking phenomenally- it seems we are always in a reality that can't be pinned down (flux) and we strategize and contemplate based on constructed memories and projected imaginations which are also part of this unpinnable reality.
Can you explain to me how it is otherwise? — Jonah Tobias
So the past is 'still here' in that sense. And the future is already here to as the words pour out toward the end of the sentence. — macrosoft
t. But perhaps the most important part of the past is the way we interpret the 'present' and the 'future.' The 'living' past is how we do 'now'. — macrosoft
The world does not need everything that ever was preserved and laid out in sequential order of time. We're the ones who need this. — Jonah Tobias
But is this anything more than an impressive trick? Does it change us? — Jonah Tobias
I still retain the impression that what Heidegger is concerned with more than anything else- is just turning everything into philosophy! lol These sophisticated descriptions... is this really embodied and lived philosophy? — Jonah Tobias
When you talk about how the the living past is how we do the now- are you saying for example- like the way foucault reinterprets the past how that changes our present? Are you saying-
"He who controls the present now- controls the past.
He who controls the past now- controls the future!"
-Rage against the machine :)
If this is the case- maybe I'm not effected by this thought because I could say- right- reality is a narrative. Why describe it in such a complicated manner. — Jonah Tobias
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