There are two texts called The Concept of Time? — Terrapin Station

Yes. A lecture and an article written for a journal that was only published much, much later. Because the article was never published while H. was alive, I guess he never picked out a new name.

Keep in mind that he published nothing for a decade as he developed the ideas he was famous for. Only many years later did all the lectures he was giving during that decade come out to illuminate the otherwise overwhelming complexity of B&T --itself written under economic pressure and never finished.

Stress the word object and method. In short, Heidegger thought the standard approach to history was shallow. One of his big themes is a taken-for-granted method that is doomed from the get-go. Our initial grasp is crucial. — macrosoft

None of that helps at all, unfortunately.

It's that blind first step, what we think is obvious, that blinds us. This is what dismantling the tradition is all about. It's the attempt to take off the blinders we didn't know we were wearing. — macrosoft

That part makes sense, at least, but if we're going to say that we are "wearing blinders," we'd need something to support that other than just making the claim that it's the case.

That part makes sense, at least, but if we're going to say that we are "wearing blinders," we'd need something to support that other than just making the claim that it's the case. — Terrapin Station

But, as any good Hegelian knows, such pithy summaries are more deceptive than informative. The truth is not the naked result but the result along with its becoming. — macrosoft

Basically Heidegger and Hegel are sometimes a pain in the ass to read, but there is no fast food summary-substitute for at least sweating out a good secondary source.

This is a very readable introduction: https://www.amazon.com/Heidegger-Introduction-Richard-Polt/dp/0801485649

There 'might' be a pdf out there.

Anyone (like Heidegger) who cannot come up with an argument that grants that others exist as well is not worth considering further.

Anyone (like Heidegger) who cannot come up with an argument that grants that others exist as well is not worth considering further. — hks

hks, you are being silly here. You are basically accusing Santa Clause of hoarding all the toys.

Are you not just gossiping about a philosopher you haven't read? Such idle talk is actually one of the little wizard's themes. I think most philosophers would like some of Heidegger if that was presented to them without the rest. Homeboy is dense and tangled.

I have read Heidegger and I did not like it so I have discarded him.

Anyone (like Heidegger) who cannot come up with an argument that grants that others exist as well is not worth considering further. — hks

You can skip to near the end if you want when Heidegger calls the scandal of philosophy the idea that such a proof is needed. The phenomenon of 'world' (which is 'primordial') makes all this ridiculous. It's the shallow ontology of dead junk and a theological focus on absolute certainty to the neglect of the meaning of basic terms that makes this possible. Arguments about whether others exist or the world exists presuppose a world with others. To me that kind of wordplay is just the videogame and energy drink version of philosophy. Along with that, I might as well gripe like an old man about cutely arguments devoid of any sincere desire to learn and come to a consensus.

We must in the first instance note explicitly that Kant uses the term 'Dasein' to designate that kind of Being which in the present investigation we have called 'presence-at-hand'. 'Consciousness of my Dasein' means for Kant a consciousness of my Being-present-at-hand in the sense of Descartes. When Kant uses the term `Dasein' he has in mind the Being-present-at-hand of consciousness just as much as the Being-present-at-hand of Things.

The proof for the `Dasein of Things outside of me' is supported by the fact that both change and performance belong, with equal primordiality, to the essence of time. My own Being-present-at-hand — that is, the Being-present-at-hand of a multiplicity of representations, which has been given in the inner sense — is a process of change which is present-at-hand. To have a determinate temporal character [Zeitbestimmtheit], however, presupposes something present-at-hand which is permanent. But this cannot be 'in us', 'for only through what is thus permanent can my Dasein in time be determined'. Thus if changes which are present-at-hand have been posited empirically 'in me', it is necessary that along with these something permanent which is present-at-hand should be posited empirically 'outside of me'. What is thus permanent is the condition which makes it possible for the changes 'in me' to be present-at-hand. The experience of the Being-in-time of representations posits something changing 'in me' and something permanent 'outside of me', and it posits both with equal primordiality.

Of course this proof is not a causal inference and is therefore not encumbered with the disadvantages which that would imply. Kant gives, as it were, an 'ontological proof' in terms of the idea of a temporal entity. It seems at first as if Kant has given up the Cartesian approach of positing a subject one can come across in isolation. But only in semblance. That Kant demands any proof at all for the `Dasein of Things outside of me' shows already that he takes the subject — the 'in me' — as the starting-point for this problematic. Moreover, his proof itself is then carried through by starting with the empirically given changes 'in me'. For only `in me' is 'time' experienced, and time carries the burden of the proof. Time provides the basis for leaping off into what is 'outside of me' in the course of the proof. Furthermore, Kant emphasizes that "The problematical kind [of idealism], which merely alleges our inability to prove by immediate experience that there is a Dasein outside of our own, is reasonable and accords with a sound kind of philosophical thinking: namely, to permit no decisive judgment until an adequate proof has been found." But even if the ontical priority of the isolated subject and inner experience should be given up, Descartes' position would still be retained ontologically. What Kant proves—if we may suppose that his proof is correct and correctly based—is that entities which are changing and entities which are permanent are necessarily present-at-hand together. But when two things which are present-at-hand are thus put on the same level, this does not as yet mean that subject and Object are present-at-hand together. And even if this were proved, what is ontologically decisive would still be covered up—namely, the basic state of the 'subject', Dasein, as Being-in-the-world. The Being-present-at-hand-together of the physical and the psychical is completely different ontically and ontologically from the phenomenon of Being-in-the-world. Kant presupposes both the distinction between the 'in me' and the `outside of me', and also the connection between these; factically he is correct in doing so, but he is incorrect from the standpoint of the tendency of his proof. It has not been demonstrated that the sort of thing which gets established about the Being-present-at-hand-together of the changing and the permanent when one takes time as one's clue, will also apply to the connection between the 'in me' and the 'outside of me'. But if one were to see the whole distinction between the 'inside' and the 'outside' and the whole connection between them which Kant's proof presupposes, and if one were to have an ontological conception of what has been presupposed in this presupposition, then the possibility of holding that a proof of the `Dasein of Things outside of me' is a necessary one which has yet to be given [noch ausstehend], would collapse.

The 'scandal of philosophy' is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. Such expectations, aims, and demands arise from an ontologically inadequate way of starting with of such a character that independently of it and 'outside' of it a 'world' is to be proved as present-at-hand. It is not that the proofs are inadequate, but that the kind of Being of the entity which does the proving and makes requests for proofs has not been made definite enough. This is why a demonstration that two things which are present-at-hand are necessarily present-at-hand together, can give rise to the illusion that something has been proved, or even can be proved, about Dasein as Being-in-the-world. If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it.
— Heidegger

Beings that are present at hand are experienced like objects (for a universal subject) when we just stare at them. For instance, I can stare at my bike. I can be curious about how much it weighs. But the bike exists in a different way for me when I am riding it. Heidegger gets below bright theoretical curiosity and looks at tool use.

Our initial way of being in the world is pushing and pulling on it, immersed in tool use in which the tool disappears. The obsession with Cartesian candles has covered over this other, primary way in which things exist for us. We are obsessed with rigid object, held fixed in a merely theoretical or derivative present instant. Time is spatialized unthinkingly. Or rather its spatialization (modeled by the real line) was a work of genius that now, like many works of genius, blocks access to other possibilities. Heidegger adores the philosophers he dismantles. He wants to make them brighter. If we are as conscious as possible of what they said, we have them at their brightest without being trapped by them.

What's bad is the lazy common sense that forgets origins and loses possibility. Things are vaguely half-understood, so that there is a 'film' of what Everybody knows that blocks access to the depths of our most intimate situation. The phenomenon of world, for instance, is nothing mystical. It is just a bringing-to-consciousness of what is already there in ordinary life, taken for granted, looked 'through' like a clean window. When we do philosophy, we tend to pick up the old problems and play the same variations on them. Subjects, objects, blah blah blah. Stuck on the surface, having never questioned the blind first step, a naive ontology of present-at-hand objects for an unserious 'curiosity'. To be sure, Heidegger was caught up in the spirit of his own time, and was one more thinker disgusted by a new urban decadence. As far as I can tell, one of his motives was just a frustration with the triviality and irrelevance for life of the old problems.

But I can only speak for myself. I read philosophy and try to paraphrase/interpret/create it in my free time. One little point of honor is that I try to always mean(understand) what I say, even if others don't know what I mean. Hence paraphrases and, usually, not just quoting. But hk was not going to believe a paraphrase.

What is the difference between a being and a thing? What is the significance of the fact that humans are called ‘beings’?

What is the difference between a being and a thing? What is the significance of the fact that humans are called ‘beings’? — Wayfarer

I think you and Heidegger are similar on this issue. One of his fundamental ideas was that humans do not exist like rocks. For him, we've been mistakenly interpreting ourselves in terms of a flawed ontology --like one more static present-at-hand substance. But we aren't stuff. We are more like the open space for meaning. Nor are we separate from the world. We are being-in-the-world-with-others. We are the world itself being in itself, something like that. We are the future as possibility acting in the present but having a past that grounds all this. Experience experiencing itself as experiencing a world and as the ontic possibility of that world. 'My' world goes when I go. (Influenced by Sheehan in that last bit.)

But we aren't stuff. We are more like the open space for meaning. Nor are we separate from the world. We are being-in-the-world-with-others. We are the world itself being in itself, something like that. We are the future as possibility acting in the present but having a past that grounds all this. — macrosoft

Have you come across semiotics as a sharper way to make sense of this - being as an Umwelt or sign relation?

What we are looking for is a process metaphysics that works. We don't want either mind, nor even matter, to exist in some substantial and primordial fashion. Instead we want a metaphysics where both are co-emergent in a proper sense. And a problem with phenomenology would be this "we" that is doing the being-in-the-world, etc. That makes it sound like consciousness is the primordial stuff or primordial ground.

A pragmatic/semiotic metaphysics instead focuses on the interpretive relation that forms an Umwelt. A world of experience arises which mediates between the "self" that is implicit in the development of habits and dispositions, and the "world" that then represents all the recalcitrant facts that stand in opposition to this pole of intentionality.

So this is quite a psychologically realistic view. All organisms are agents forming their view of the world - experiencing it as an organised system of signs. But it can also be a physically realistic metaphysics as our best understanding of physics already demands that it be "organismic" in having historically developed habits, dispositions and even (thermodynamic) intents.

Modern physics now relies on information theory to account for why reality is atomistically fragmented into "degrees of freedom". A particle is essentially "a sign" of something that could happen. We know it was there because we record the event - the mark it leaves.

So in a sense that semiosis can make precise - which information theory can measure - we do now have a worldview, a metaphysics, which is founded on "meaning making". And it can apply both to psychological science and physical science.

Have you come across semiotics as a sharper way to make sense of this - being as an Umwelt or sign relation? — apokrisis

I think the views are related. I still haven't immersed myself in Peirce, despite my respect for him. The damned Germans just speak to me with all their cosmic music in the background.

And a problem with phenomenology would be this "we" that is doing the being-in-the-world, etc. That makes it sound like consciousness is the primordial stuff or primordial ground. — apokrisis

Put yourself in Heidegger's shows, though. The view from outside was so dominant that the discourse had to be framed 'from the subject' to be intelligible/plausible for that community. The source or nature of meaning, according to Sheehan, was H's fundamental question. Existence isn't dasein, it's the sign. I'm with you that really the subject and object would have to emerge as a difference within a primordial sign system. I'm a pretty radical semantic holist at the moment. The difference might whether one's motivations are primarily scientific or spiritual. I'd say that Heidegger was ultimately a philosopher concerned with how to live in the world not as a scientist first but as a man. I do not at all mean to imply that this is the right way. I'm just explaining why subject talk might remain fundamental: It speaks to our culturally mediated sense of religious freedom, etc.

A pragmatic/semiotic metaphysics instead focuses on the interpretive relation that forms an Umwelt. A world of experience arises which mediates between the "self" that is implicit in the development of habits and dispositions, and the "world" that then represents all the recalcitrant facts that stand in opposition to this pole of intentionality. — apokrisis

Indeed. And in another lingo existence just is the world. It is 'care' that forces a differentiation. My hand is mine because I can usually make it do what I want without having to think about it. 'I' am the stuff that does not resist my will. One can see how thinking becomes considered the essential self, despite it actually coming largely as it wants to. It is a maximally fluid 'thing.' Given meaning holism, I like to talk about a field of meaning, not a set of meaning atoms. Those atoms are theoretical abstractions, largely dependent on our eyes being prioritized and seeing spaces between written words.

So this is quite a psychologically realistic view. All organisms are agents forming their view of the world - experiencing it as an organised system of signs. But it can also be a physically realistic metaphysics as our best understanding of physics already demands that it be "organismic" in having historically developed habits, dispositions and even (thermodynamic) intents.

Modern physics now relies on information theory to account for why reality is atomistically fragmented into "degrees of freedom". A particle is essentially "a sign" of something that could happen. We know it was there because we record the event - the mark it leaves.

So in a sense that semiosis can make precise - which information theory can measure - we do now have a worldview, a metaphysics, which is founded on "meaning making". And it can apply both to psychological science and physical science. — apokrisis

This is very promising. As such a view is disseminated, I'd expect it to further open the human imagation and close the gulf between science , philosophy, and maybe even religion. One concern I have is the annoying shortness of the human life-span. To really learn physics requires years of dedication, certain geniuses excluded. It's the same with philosophy. So along with all of this we could use some life-extension and labor-saving technology. I like what I know of physics, but I can barely find time for math and philosophy --and I am already getting a little old. I'll have a Phd in a few years if all goes well. I am more aware of my stupidity than ever. One small mind in a vast world, trying to at least grab at the essence while there's time.

What I can say is that I think I understand your general perspective without having the physics know-how to grok the details. It's a liberating perspective that dissolves lots of old problems and tramples over rigid, obsolete, mind-numbing distinctions.

This is why Sheehan's book is so appealing. He's worldly and funny, doing his best to cut through all the smoke and music. I'd love to hear what you think of it if you get a chance to check it out. — macrosoft

I've read some of Sheehan's work on Heidegger before and I found all very good. The emphasis on 'meaningfulness' was always - I'd like to think - how I understood Heidegger, although I picked that up from readings prior to Sheehan, even as the latter codified it in a full-throated way I'd not come across before. That said, my 'distance' from Heidi actually takes its cue from readings like Sheehan's: as productive as it is to think of the world as a meaningful whole, it's also a very simplified view of things. As I see it, the world is rather full of holes, perforated by ambivalence and opacity, instances of indifference and insignificance.

Psychoanalytic theory gets at this very nicely, showing how we employ a whole range of necessary psychic mechanisms to patch over these holes in ways that create a whole bunch of very interesting effects that also constitute our 'humanity'. Basically, I take issue with Heidegger's holism, which always struck me as far too ideational and seamless. One of the more devastating charges against Heidegger's whole project was Levinas's, for whom "Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry" - to which he coupled with a criticism of the sheer absence of sensuality in Heidegger. I think this is a nice synecdoche for why Heidegger's project seems so barren to me, at the end of the day. It's far too formal (despite all the excellent and insightful mileage Heidi got out of that formalism, which still deserves study).

Part of the problem of course is the adherence to phenomenology, and with it, intentionality. Unless the latter is put into radical questioning, any philosophical project which take its cue from it is destined to incapacity.

MV, he is outright rejecting deep/final truth, but clearly some kind of pure lifestream is functioning along those lines. The truth is just the open space that times, self-interpretively. If we are relentlessly pointed back to our own lifestream, however, I think 'truth' is the wrong word. — macrosoft

Yeah, I simply used 'Deep Truth' as a stand-in for that mystical core of Being or whatever that Heidegger consistently tried to 'proximate'. It was more a figure of speech than anything precise.

I don't know if Sheehan is right about Heidegger, but I like this attempt at a general description of what it means to be human.

The 'essence' of the human being...consists in its having to be constitutionally ahead of itself, as possibility amidst possibilities. Such essential stretched-out-ness is what Heidegger calls 'thrown-ness.' And since being thrown ahead = being pulled open, the stretch into possibilities is thrown-open--ness. But with us, being thrown-open always entails living into meaning-giving possibilities. Existence thus unfolds as --is thrown open as --the open region of possible meaningfulness.

In its most basic sense, openedness as the possibility of intelligibility remains the one and only factum...of all Heidegger's work.

Soon enough, however, it became clear to Heidegger that, more fundamentally, existence is meta-metaphysical. That is, we transcend things not only in already understanding their possible meanings and then returning to the things to give them meaning, but also and above all by being already 'beyond' things-and-their-meanings and in touch with what makes the meaningfulness of things possible at all. We are not just fully intentional --present to both things and their meanings. More basically, we 'transcend' things-and-their-meaningsto --that is to say, we in fact are--the thrown-open clearing that makes possible our 'natural metaphysical' relations to things-in-their-meanings. Existence is not only transcendental but also trans-transcendental or transcendental to the second power.

No matter how much our engagement with intelligibility may be parsed out into its component parts, it is a strict and original unity that cannot be resolved into anything more primal. If we were to ask what we might be prior to our engagement with meaning, such an inquiry would entail that we already have enacted an engagement with meaning by simply asking the question, and hence we would be moving in a vicious circle. Our very existence is such an engagement, and absent that, we would not be human, much less able to ask questions at all. — Sheehan

He never drew and maintained the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. In his defense, no one else in philosophy proper has either to my knowledge. Not even to this very day...

That difference helps to acquire knowledge of all thought/belief. That knowledge has the broadest possible rightful scope of application.

His dasein is akin to an unquestioned original world-view... all of which are virtually entirely adopted.

That said, my 'distance' from Heidi actually takes its cue from readings like Sheehan's: as productive as it is to think of the world as a meaningful whole, it's also a very simplified view of things. As I see it, the world is rather full of holes, perforated by ambivalence and opacity, instances of indifference and insignificance — StreetlightX

Fair enough, but I would frame this in terms of the instability of any given interpretation. And fair enough about the 'simplified view of things. Perhaps every big theory suffers this fate. It is grand at the cost of being vague. I approach the 'limited whole' in terms of groundlessness. We run around in a nexus of concepts, no particular concept serving as a foundation, a Nuerathian rowboat on a vast ocean. There's no apparent 'outside' of the usual, passionate human meaning-making. It can therefore be grasped as a whole, its own ground = abyss.

Basically, I take issue with Heidegger's holism, which always struck me as far too ideational and seamless. One of the more devastating charges against Heidegger's whole project was Levinas's, for whom "Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry". I think this is a nice synecdoche for why Heidegger's project seems so barren to me, at the end of the day. — StreetlightX

Perhaps. But I found the idea of 'tool-being' pretty revolutionary. For me that welds ideas to the world of the body. And I find holism pretty inescapable --which is to say a description more than an invitation. In practical life one forgets all this theoretical holism and just lives in a world, sometimes immersed in analytical tasks. Anyway, for me philospohy has something like a holistic essence. It grasps for the largest possible situation, the entire open space.

That said, I can relate to that barrenness. I think one just has to be in the mood for a certain kind of talk. In other moods, I feel like shrugging. For me the most revolutionary philosophers have probably been Nietzsche and Hegel-via-Kojeve. Heidegger adds some kind of grasp of continuity. His thinking on time strikes me as trying to get becoming a little more right.

The difference might whether one's motivations are primarily scientific or spiritual. — macrosoft

Yep. Peirce speaks to me as a scientist. I could never get into the German idealist and naturphilosphie tradition even though it gets oh so close to the same thing a lot of the time. (Peirce was very inspired by Schelling, btw).

However, if you are going to be a holist and process thinker, I believe it is unavoidable that you will end up favouring immanence over transcendence. And so the idea of "spirit" is going to lose all its bite by the end.

A big part of that is that monism also has to give way to an irreducible triadicism. And to make Geist or other somesuch the monistic foundation is already to begin with something too developed. It is a dualism willing to give up its material aspect but insisting on some kind of residual mental aspect.

The Peircean alternative is that "in the beginning" is just the vagueness of a potential. It is a start that is as devoid of spirit as of matter. And then your opposing limits of the real can emerge from that. You can have mind and world develop as synergistic limits to being. You can have causality divided in Aristotelean fashion so that there is both global finality and local action - constraint and freedom - as the vague begins to achieve a more concrete or substantial state of definition.

So the Peircean model is clean. It doesn't impose any emotional motif on the initial conditions. And that then justifies the emergence of mind, spirit, or whatever you want to call the informational aspect of the deal, as the proper partner to the material, entropic, etc, part of the deal.

You don't have to sneak the forbidden into how you start the story. You can be content by the way it emerges as a necessary conjunct of the good old physicalist stuff.

I'd say that Heidegger was ultimately a philosopher concerned with how to live in the world not as a scientist first but as a man. — macrosoft

And so I'd reply that Peirce's insight is that reality itself is "scientific". It arises by ... the universal growth of reasonableness.

My hand is mine because I can usually make it do what I want without having to think about it. 'I' am the stuff that doesn't not resist my will. — macrosoft

Exactly. The self at the centre of things is merely the sum of all that is found to be not part of the world. It is a fluid development built on a process of othering. The self is just the other "other" that arises in opposition to "the world" (and thus - against dualism - is wholly dependent on that "world").

However, if you are going to be a holist and process thinker, I believe it is unavoidable that you will end up favouring immanence over transcendence. And so the idea of "spirit" is going to lose all its bite by the end.

A big part of that is that monism also has to give way to an irreducible triadicism. And to make Geist or other somesuch the monistic foundation is already to begin with something too developed. It is a dualism willing to give up its material aspect but insisting on some kind of residual mental aspect. — apokrisis

You may already know, but Hegel made a big deal of the Christian trinity. I haven't grasped exactly why, but chances are it's along your lines.

As far as 'spirit' goes, I think it's a nice word. It's dramatic. It captures a certain grandiose stimmung.
But it's more realistically just consciousness. I get that this mind/matter distinction breaks down in 'speculative' philosophy, and I understand why. But talk of the subject accords with doings and talking in the ordinary world stuff.

I also have some concerns with the limits of explicit systems, from a perspective of semantic holism. Math/physics is freer from this, but a living language always double back to bite some fine distinction we make. Ordinary language is a metalanguage in which we construct our object language that gets it just right. But then everything still depends on the metalanguage, which wasn't clear enough in the first place. In short, no explicit foundation. No ideal language.

One thing maybe you can answer? Does the sign just exist in your view? Or does it exist for a subject? In a speculative frame of mind, it seems that we just have a flow of signed-sensation, with the subject being a recurrent theme of that flow. Clearly the flow of signs is motivated, directional, even motivated toward self-knowing, though only perhaps indirectly. What do you say?

And so I'd reply that Peirce's insight is that reality itself is "scientific". It arises by ... the universal growth of reasonableness. — apokrisis

I find this idea appealing and believable. You know I love my Hegel.

Exactly. The self at the centre of things is merely the sum of all that is found to be not part of the world. It is a fluid development built on a process of othering. The self is just the other "other" that arises in opposition to "the world" (and thus - against dualism - is wholly dependent on that "world"). — apokrisis

I see what you mean and agree. I do think things get very messy as we abandon fundamental distinctions of ordinary discourse. We seem to have a world-self trying to know itself via othering. The absolute unfolds in time via distinctions that it recognizes as still 'it.' The old problem remains. A shared world only meaningfully perceived by mortals who come and go. They do accumulate a kind of social consciousness, so that individual minds are neurons. The brain that looks at the world has human brains as its cells (which it can and does replace.)

He never drew and maintained the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. In his defense, no one else in philosophy proper has either to my knowledge. Not even to this very day... — creativesoul

This is a surprising perspective. Philosophy strikes me as being largely itself a thinking and believing about thinking and believing --and a thinking and believing about this same philosophy. It eats itself to the n-th power in limitless self-consciousness. Examine the Sheehan quote. Let me know what you think.

His dasein, as I understand it, is akin to an unquestioned original world-view... all of which are virtually entirely adopted. — creativesoul

This doesn't square with my experience. What first grabbed me about Heidegger was his dimantling of certain taken-for-granted approaches to the subject and object theme, the idea of the world, etc. He uses the word 'existence' (dasein) in order to avoid all the meanings attached to person, subject, mind. The so-called mind is largely immersed in (is) its activity. Existence doesn't drive. Existence is driving. Driving is. Existence doesn't wash dishes. Existence is the washing of dishes. For him, being-in-the-world is 'primordial.' The idea of proving that other minds or an external world exists indicates a failure to grasp this pre-theoretical phenomenon. To me it's (among other things) an update of Kant.

I like to think of philosophers arguing about theories of truth. In terms of what shared theory of truth can they be arguing? And yet they argue! This IMV suggests a pre-theoretical 'primary' sense of 'our reality.' Explicit formulations are secondary to this and only entertained and advanced in the light of this receding phenomenon.

Yeah, I simply used 'Deep Truth' as a stand-in for that mystical core of Being or whatever that Heidegger consistently tried to 'proximate'. It was more a figure of speech than anything precise. — StreetlightX

OK. I guess I somewhat knew that. But in my view this stuff isn't mystical except as a kind of mystified mundane. I think incarnation is the operant theme. We have the most personal kind of experience that is resistant to theory, the kind of stuff Feuerbach accused Hegel of missing. Philosophy should think the non-philosophical, in F's perspective, and all that resists thought.

Heidegger's grandiose style and taste for politics maybe obscures a deep sense of how personal a certain kind of ultimate thinking must be. It's gloomy, etc., but the death theme is important. There's no time to figure it all out the right way. The future roars with too many possibilities. They can't all be claimed or explored. And then some fundamental assumptions just have to be grasped, as risk understood to be risk. That's one way to understand resoluteness. A person groundlessly chooses and makes the best of it, with no Universal Time-safe Entity to insure that leap.

And I find holism pretty inescapable --which is to say a description more than an invitation. — macrosoft

In a way I do think holism is 'inescapable'; much though, in the same way that the fridge light is inescapable: its not on when you look, its on because you're looking. Which is to say, of course we're bound to find meaningfulness and intelligibility everywhere - we can't but not. But it's important to attend to the asymmetry of our relationship to the world which, for its own part, is largely indifferent to what one can even call our 'primordial comportment' to it, if you like.

Moreover - and this is something the French reception to Heidegger understood very well, perhaps because of their interest in Nietzsche - meaningfulness can be asphyxiating. Heidegger got something of this in his speaking of our 'throwness', but perhaps didn't draw the full consequences from it. To make one's way in a world loaded with inescapable meaning can be incredibly oppressive, and one of the things we happen to be very good at is ignoring much of it and, and it were, playing with reality. The almost fanatical thematics of 'appropriation' in Heidegger - speaking also to his conception of philosophy outlined in the OP - strikes me being insensitive to precisely the liberatory power of disappropriation, of the anonymous and of Das Man that Heidi consistently disparages.

One thing maybe you can answer? Does the sign just exist in your view? Or does it exist for a subject? In a speculative frame of mind, it seems that we just have a flow of signed-sensation, with the subject being a recurrent theme of that flow. Clearly the flow of signs is motivated, directional, even motivated toward self-knowing, though only perhaps indirectly. What do you say? — macrosoft

This is a difficult area now. We would have to distinguish between two stories - the fairly uncontroversial and scientific bio-semiotic one, and the rather more metaphysically speculative pan-semiotic one.

The biosemiotic one is just regular metaphysics. Creatures form a picture of the world - with themselves in it. So we are only talking about the signs they experience which betoken the world as it is optimally understood by them.

When I see a red light at a crossroads, I see a place where I should stop. There is danger in continuing. The danger is real. But the sign is psychological you would say. And if I see a dark cloud, I know to read that as a feature of the world promising rain. The conceptual essence of there being a cloud for me is this meaning. And then we can quarrel forever about the reality of "a cloud" as some actual object or entity that would deserve being named and taken as a habitual sign of anything in particular.

But if you want to continue on - like Peirce - then everything would only "exist" to the extent it forms a sign or mark that can be read by the world in some sense. So everything that could count as an actual event - something definitely happening, something that is a positive fork in a developing history - would be semiotic. It would be information. A fact. Meaningful in terms of a context that "observes".

Again, this might just sound like a redescription of physics. Things are possibilities, then they actually happen. Big deal.

However the semiotic view does underwrite the new information/entropy distinction that has arisen in physics, along with the contextual or holistic causality implied by QM and the rest. Classical reality is the emergent umwelt - the actuality that mediates between the realm of "pure material possibility" and the realm of "global contextual order".

All sorts of things were possible the moment before that atom decayed. But then it did decay and a degree of freedom was definitely used up. The history of the universe was forever changed. And so the "real world" is the world of all those accumulating marks - each mark being the intersection of some story about global laws and other constraints, some story about local possibilities or degrees of freedom.

So it is the triadic logic that connects, not the dualistic story of subjects and objects. What is real emerges as the substantive middle ground of actuality. And what has been related is a global information-bearing context and a local action-producing propensity. The umwelt become the (somewhat metaphorical) place inbetween where the signs or definite marks are getting written.

In a way I do think holism is 'inescapable'; much though, in the same way that the fridge light is inescapable: it not on when you look, its on because you're looking. — StreetlightX

I think I see what you mean and agree. In ordinary life we just largely bounce off significations, responding to the signs as individual signs and not the sign-as-node. In philosophical life, for me anyway, semantic holism is switched on in certain kinds of arguments. If both people are sincerely just grasping the other's idea as a whole without having to be reminded to, then there's no reason to sing the song of holism, holism, holism. It does seem largely therapeutic, something like an immune system. I know you like Wittgenstein. That to me is the important holist realization.

But it's important to attend to the asymmetry of our relationship to the world which, for its own part, is largely indifferent to what one can even call our 'primordial comportment' to it, if you like. — StreetlightX

I agree, and I'd extend this critique to most of philosophy. Sometimes what is needed is the ability to change a flat tire on the highway. From this ordinary life perspective, Heidegger's grandiosity, for instance, is a rubber bullet. 'Speculative' thought is the world turned upside down. What sometimes amuses me (in the midst of my doing it anyway) is that the idea of ordinary life and the non-theoretical can become a fetish for theory. I have a similar feeling about the 'great outdoors' of Meillassoux. Philosophers (myself included) often adore words that point beyond words --perhaps more than whatever is actually not word, at least while gripped by the theoretical-poetical drive.

Moreover - and this is something the French reception to Heidegger understood very well, perhaps because of their interest in Nietzsche - meangfulness can be asphixiating. Heidegger got something of this in his speaking of our 'throwness', but perhaps didn't draw the full concequences from it. To makes one's way in a world loaded with inescapable meaning can be incredibly oppressive, and one of the things we happen to be very good at ignoring much of it and, and it were, playing with reality. The almost fanatical thematics of 'appropriation' in Heidegger - speaking also to his conception of philosophy outlined in the OP - strikes me being insensitive to to precisely the liberatory power of disappropriation, of the anonymous and of Das Man that Heidi consistantly disparages. — StreetlightX

I completely agree here. But maybe his politics was a way he lived an escape from that. To melt into the nation, etc. To melt into a group. This echoes Sartre's 'condemned to be free.' Except really we are mostly immersed. I can say that sometimes philosophy becomes a little intoxicating and exhausting at the same time for me. It's like stimulants wearing off. One gets tired of talking, explaining, defending, evangelizing, making distinctions. I just watched TV for the first time in a few days (the Coen Brother's new Western). It was great to sink into fiction again and take a break from finding words, decoding other people's abstractions...

When I see a red light at a crossroads, I see a place where I should stop. There is danger in continuing. The danger is real. But the sign is psychological you would say. And if I see a dark cloud, I know to read that as a feature of the world promising rain. The conceptual essence of there being a cloud for me is this meaning. And then we can quarrel forever about the reality of "a cloud" as some actual object or entity that would deserve being named and taken as a habitual sign of anything in particular.

But if you want to continue on - like Peirce - then everything would only "exist" to the extent it forms a sign or mark that can be read by the world in some sense. So everything that could count as an actual event - something definitely happening, something that is a positive fork in a developing history - would be semiotic. It would be information. A fact. Meaningful in terms of a context that "observes". — apokrisis

This nears the question I am getting at. Who is it that reads the sign? What makes sense to me (in a speculative mode) is that there is no 'I' and no 'world' but just the signs. The 'I' and the 'world' are just two frequent signs that refer to still other signs. There is no viewer. 'Consciousness' would just be the name of something that certain signs have in common (connected the sign for a person alive and awake.)

I understand that if we think of living organisms surviving that we need some kind of subject. This to me is one of the rough edges. What is consciousness? Or is consciousness just a sign that meaningfully exists 'directly.' And what are these individual organisms if not also signs? There is a tension between what we know in non-speculative terms and where we might want to go speculatively. I have followed these lines of thinking before and usually am turned back by linguistic entanglements.

Your 'context that observes' sounds like a 'thrown open space' for interpretation.

He never drew and maintained the crucial distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. In his defense, no one else in philosophy proper has either to my knowledge. Not even to this very day...
— creativesoul

This is a surprising perspective. Philosophy strikes me as being largely itself a thinking and believing about thinking and believing --and a thinking and believing about this same philosophy. It eats itself to the n-th power in limitless self-consciousness. Examine the Sheehan quote. Let me know what you think. — macrosoft

Yes. I see that he skirts around what I'm asserting here regarding the aforementioned distinction being sorely neglected. I mean, there's evidence of that in his words about Heiddy.

His dasein, as I understand it, is akin to an unquestioned original world-view... all of which are virtually entirely adopted.
— creativesoul

This doesn't square with my experience. — macrosoft

I would actually agree that that was a bit too oversimplified. Still yet, I do think that dasein includes one's initial worldview(thought/belief system)...

What first grabbed me about Heidegger was his dimantling of certain taken-for-granted approaches the subject and object theme, the idea of the world, etc. He uses the word 'existence' (dasein) in order to avoid all the meanings attached to person, subject, mind. The so-called mind is largely immersed in (is) activity. Existence doesn't drive. Existence is driving. Existence doesn't wash dishes. Existence is the washing of dishes. For him, being-in-the-world is 'primordial.' The idea of proving that other minds or an external world exists indicates a failure to grasp this pre-theoretical phenomenon.

Yes. I would credit Heiddy with the very same thing that I credit Witt for... how's that for a surprising grouping?

They both realized and struggled(on my view) to clearly set out what it was that was driving them. The driving force, if I may use a bit of poetic license, was that they both realized that meaning was attributed in far more ways than had been accounted for.

Heiddy wanted to make it a point to talk/write in such a way as to emphasize the fact that meaning is always being attributed... or at least that's how his style strikes me. Admittedly, I've not read a whole lot of Heiddy. Being And Time was left unfinished. On The Way To Language impressed me quite a bit. "Where word breaks off no thing may be..." left it's mark, and the dialogue in the beginning of the book, the one with the Japanese philosopher that is about that which goes unspoken... That dialogue is actually brilliant and very relevant to traditional Japanese cultural mores.

Witt, as much as I like him for a number of ways, was himself the fly in the bottle when it came to thought/belief. Unfortunately he followed the conventional(epistemological JTB) vein of thought regarding belief, and it's wrong at it's very foundation. One consequence was Gettier's foothold, aside from the fact that he also showed that 'logical' entailment is a misnomer.

I like to think of philosophers arguing about theories of truth. In terms of what shared theory of truth can they be arguing? And yet they argue! This IMV suggests a pre-theoretical 'primary' sense of 'our reality.' Explicit formulations are secondary to this and only entertained and advanced in the light of this receding phenomenon. — macrosoft

I'm fairly certain that I agree with this wholeheartedly. Arguing about theories of "truth" is to argue about a product of thinking about thought/belief. On my view, and I've argued it many times over, true belief is prior to language... thus, either true belief does not require truth or that which makes belief true is prior to language. Only correspondence theory gets close. Although I reject it in it's details, I have supplanted it with my own version.

Correspondence to: fact, reality, the world, the way things are, events, happenings, etc, does not always require language.

This is not in the direct spirit of the thread though, so I'll not expand.

The driving force, if I may use a bit of poetic license, was that they both realized that meaning was attributed in far more ways than had been accounted for. — creativesoul

Well said. That does square with my perception.

Witt, as much as I like him for a number of ways, was himself the fly in the bottle when it came to thought/belief. — creativesoul

I've got On Certainty. I haven't reread it for years, but I had the impression that he was more sophisticated than that. We use the word 'know' in 23,456,123,456,789 ways. Semantic holism vanquishes so many of the old problems, reducing them perhaps to a greater problem --the mystery of intelligibility itself. And even this Wittgenstein seemed to see in some way in the TLP. The world (what is the case) is just there, a limited whole, unexplained =groundless.

On my view, and I've argued it many times over, true belief is prior to language... thus, either true belief does not require truth or that which makes belief true is prior to language. Only correspondence theory gets close. Although I reject it in it's details, I have supplanted it with my own version. — creativesoul

I'm excited that someone gets it. It's early to say we get it in the same way, but I think this is very fascinating. As far as I can tell, all speaking presupposes both others and a shared space of meaning in an IN-explicit way. Theories of truth try to make this space explicit, forced to work all the time in this same primordial and elusive space or sense of shared/shareable meaning. Argumentive epistemologists ask me to prove it. They use it to do so. I can only point, dismantle, point, dismantle. An inexplicit ground is a direct threat to the project of the perfect system, which would like to be its own explicit ground. Uncomfortably, the operating system is quietly functioning, out of reach for the most part, big and soft (hence 'macrosoft'.) We look through like glass until we catch it by the glitch.

To me this is a holistic meaning field, a open space of meaningfully being-with-others-in-a-world.
Everything is caught up in futurity. Static being is a useful fiction, not only for the outer world but also as a model of the inner world.

It's my version of the Apo's vagueness. I woke up here. I reached for explicit formulations. They always crashed and burned, collided with one another.

If we switch into a third person mode that thinks of evolved brains, we can reduce it to some weird feature of what it is like to be a functioning brain in a its natural environment among other brains. Human beings are profoundly social. Anti-social beings perhaps especially so! They want to be left alone by actual company the better to enjoy virtual company.

We can also just do descriptive phenomenology. That's maybe what is most potent in Heidegger for me. We can try to grip with concepts a blurry-automatic-experience-structuring. The taken-for-granted method that needs to be (and has been) questioned is that only explicitness counts. Phenomena aren't like that, and yet they can be grasped or pointed at via formal indication and dismantling. For me semantic holism is grasped in the same way. Bennington's book on Derrida woke me up to this. If we just really look at the way meaning flows through sentences like a current, it becomes obvious that meaning is a fugitive, distributed ghost.

This is not in the direct spirit of the thread though, so I'll not expand. — creativesoul

Expand. We are already all over the place, and thatis appropriate, IMV.

Still suspect that ‘signs’ don’t make sense in the absence of an interpreting subject. And it seems to me that the ‘degree of freedom’ attributed to particles is based on an equivocation between the choices made by conscious agents and the mere potential for things to turn out in some statistically possible way. It’s an attempt to eliminate the role of the subject, which was essential to Peirce, but which is of course taboo because of its dualist implications.

Witt, as much as I like him for a number of ways, was himself the fly in the bottle when it came to thought/belief.
— creativesoul

I've got On Certainty. I haven't reread it for years, but I had the impression that he was more sophisticated than that. — macrosoft

Not sure what the term "that" is referring to at the ending... more sophisticated than what? It may not matter, if that is the case then there is no clarification necessary. If so, then please do so as you see fit...

Either way, curiously enough... it is in On Certainty that Witt is seeking to solve the problem of infinite justificatory regress. Unfortunately, the notion of "belief" that he worked from led him to look for hinge propositions as the foundation/basis/bedrock of all subsequent thought/belief; the kind of belief that is outside the purview and/or bounds of justification. Looking for propositional content as the basis of all thought/belief is looking through the clouded lens of an utterly inadequate criterion. It is to look at an apple pie and conclude that crust and filling is part of the basis of apples. In his defense, it was because of an inherent presupposed falsehood tightly bound wihin that particular notion/conception of "belief"... notably that all belief has propositional content. This also fueled some of his later mantras. Enough of that though...

Exactly. The self at the centre of things is merely the sum of all that is found to be not part of the world. It is a fluid development built on a process of othering. The self is just the other "other" that arises in opposition to "the world" (and thus - against dualism - is wholly dependent on that "world"). — apokrisis

Maybe I can zero-in my question on this. Is the self above the model or idea of the self for another self that is pure consciousness? Are we thinking of an organism with a body evolving its notion of itself, it 'you are here' on the map of the world it uses as a tool to thrive?