For me at least, the importance of this term lies in how its frequency demonstrates just how formalist and ossified the whole analytic of Dasein is in B&T. — StreetlightX

I agree that it is quite formalist. Really I don't like that book, despite liking the ideas in it. I get impatient. I prefer to zoom in from the big picture (hence my preference for some of the preceding texts). But I do like his attempt to find a universal structure in existence (an update of Kant.)

This is one of the reasons why I much prefer - following Arendt - to emphasize not death but natality - beginnings and births, not ends - as a far more interesting philosophical theme. The broodiness of Heidegger is not accidental but in fact very much in keeping with his philosophy. So, to bring this all back to the OP, I'm not drawing a distinction between the 'intoxicating', 'exhausting' efforts of capital-P Philosophy qua dark, introspective discipline and 'everyday life', but rather, looking at ways to inject the (sometimes) aerialities and lightness of the latter into the former. It's a question of philosophy all the way through. Speculative thought doesn't have to be the world turned upside down. It can instead be - to quote Elizabeth Grosz - an effort to "enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. [To be] among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought".

Philosophy augments, extends, and edifies. It is not pale imitation and inadequate 'proximating'. — StreetlightX

Actually I agree with most of that, but inadequate proximating doesn't have to be read in a gloomy sense. As I understood Kisiel's rendition, the point of all of this proximating is to live more fully and openly. I think the heavy style obscures what is finally aimed at (openness to the depths of life) . And of course avoiding the world turned upside down seems central here. In Ontology:Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger writes some beautiful paragraphs about a table in his home, skis in his garage. As we go back we have factic life at the center. Switching to the language of being gives the project a different feel.

I would like to emphasize the H's vision circa 1919 is not at all for me an exhaustive description of what philosophy is or ought to be. I did find it stirring. It's one more direction, one more persona even. I'd say that I experience philosophy as a gallery of vivid personalities. None of them get it right. Most of them offer something, often an excess that needs the others as a complement/supplement.

I take it that's all talking about the contemplation of death, and not death per se? — Terrapin Station

As I understand it, death is intended as a constant possibility. It allows us to grasp the phenomenon of the world from the outside, as a whole, from the perspective of no longer being there. This vision of ourselves as no longer there can snap us out of our usual Anyone mode. IMV, there is an implicit denial of afterlife in play. A big theme is that no one can do our dying for us. Like no other possibility, the possibility that all possibilities cease singularizes or grabs us by the personal throat, not Anyone's throat.

A person who knows that they are mortal experiences time as finite and his own existence as a story with an undecided closure (but still a closure, which allows existence to grasp itself as a whole.)

Feuerbach also talked about the finitude of time. We can't take every path, can't realize every possibility. Decisions matter. Unless we consent to sleepwalking through life and doing what anyone has planned for us, we are forced to decide without the help of anything eternal. I'd say Heidegger is a philosopher for atheists or at least those who only believe in this world (allowing for some radical Christianity, etc.)

As I understand it, death is intended as a constant possibility. — macrosoft

A claim that people constantly think about it?

A claim that people constantly think about it? — Terrapin Station

On the contrary, 'Anyone' always sees it as far off and considers it morbid to talk about or at least not worth the waste of time. The idea is that certain moods can throw us into this awareness. Some choose to keep this awareness close, 'resolute' in an embrace of mortal freedom. Wanting to have a 'conscience,' where 'conscience' is interpreted as being personally responsible for one's decisions. But no explicit ethic is or can be offered here. That would be more flight into some eternal, universal principle --more hiding from death in its fullness.

People debate this stuff. It's not an easy part of Heidegger. He thinks facing death this way opens a vision of man's utter immersion in time (as a futural being in his own or authentic mode.)

I think lots of early readers of H really liked the death and authenticity stuff, for the same reason Sartre was liked. One can find an atheist ethics there, though Heidegger claimed that he was just describing a basic structure, not preaching some new abstract ethic. Given his thorough and detailed critique of Kant in the lectures on logic right before writing B&T, it's clear that he had a great passion at one time for describing the structure of the subject correctly. He felt he also had to explain why the subject had not been grasped correctly. So he traces an idea from the early Greeks all the way through Descartes to Kant. Among other things, he was a meticulous theorist of the subject. He used 'dasein' to try to get beyond the baggage and presuppositions he was dismantling or deconstructing. In his view, facing death as constant possibility opened up the priority of the future and possibility over the present and the actual.

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. — macrosoft

The 'I' and the 'world' are just further signs in a grand linguistic play of signs. But pan-semiosis would be an actual model of ontology and not merely an acknowledgement of epistemic limitedness. So really, this would be two different conversations.

I like what you have been saying on Heidegger. I am in full agreement with the psychological accuracy of distinguishing between the kind of consciousness which is a biological being in the world - the enactive, embodied, ecological, etc, understanding of mind - and then the socialised, linguistic, second-order structuring of experience that comes once phenomenology is carved up by language.

Only humans have dasein of this form. And where it becomes ontologically significant could be the degree to which it takes existence in general - cosmic existence - to some kind of dialectical, end of history, extreme. We have gone beyond just words to numbers. We speak the language of pure Platonic forms.

An animal is just buried in its little world, its unwelt, in a direct, pragmatic and unthinking way. An organism entropifies. Sure it may have dasein in that there is a running modelling relation in which the world is comprehended as a (neural/experiential) system of sign. But that is a completely particular kind of relation. Task-specific and highly situational. Not at all a general one. That is why I wouldn't rush to give it ontically general significance - like talking about spirit, or soul, or consciousness, as any kind of metaphysical stuff.

But through language, humans came to socially objectify themselves as psychological subjects. That was a first detachment, a first step away from the embedded particularity of neurobiological dasein. And then through maths and logic - completely abstracted symbol play, drained of embodied semantic content to leave just a naked syntax - we have opened up the possibility of grasping something completely general about existence. We can put our hands on mathematical-strength forms or patterns. We can release the mechanistic and technological possibilities that the Universe also happened to contain as potentials.

Now humans of course make pretty pedestrian uses of what seem rather exalted capabilities. And we will probably always do so. Yet still, something new has been manifested. And it seems a key project for philosophy to make sense of that. What do we really think about machines - after we learn that they might in some proper sense stand as existence's other natural pole of being? The mechanistic and computational represents some kind of end state or limit. That would be a fact that still mostly inspires ambivalence.

To give the best example of what I mean, I am thinking about how the Standard Model of particle physics has turned out to rest on the Platonic-strength necessity of permutation symmetry. As the Cosmos developed organisation by cooling~expanding, it had to become fragmented locally by a cascade of symmetry-breakings. It had to bump down the levels of the permutational symmetries, from the most complex to the most simple.

The Big Bang started out in some very large and confused geometry. Let's call it E(8), SU(5) or SO(10), as the question is still open. But then it boiled its way down to SU(3), SU(2) and then U(1) - representing the strong force, electroweak force, and electromagnetic force.

So - as Ontic Structural Realism says - through a mathematical system of sign, a mathematical language for relating to dasein - we, as highly particular biological creatures, have come to grasp something absolutely general and necessarily true about the physical world. Reality turns out to have this hard and mechanistic formal face to it. Only these permutation symmetries are logically possible. And that is a constraint so objective that it always lay in wait as the future of any Cosmos. Chaos thought it could do what it liked. Randomness was its destiny. But permutation symmetry already spelt finitude. The ultimate shape of the future was an inevitability. The Heat Death of the Universe was foretold.

This is a bit of an excursion into the big picture. But I want to demonstrate where the relation between epistemology and ontology may lie. That question is pretty confused. And it is what Peircean semiotics makes clear, in my view.

So the big picture is Aristotelean - reality as a hylomorphic interaction of matter and form, action and constraint. possibility and necessity. Everything rests on a duality - or more properly, a dialectic or dichotomy. In the "beginning" is just a chaos of everythingness. A vagueness. And then that symmetry of fluctuations gets broken so that it becomes crisply organised into a global aspect - an informing weight of history and direction - and a local aspect, the now atomised and fragmented collection of material components or degrees of freedom, which are all the further accidents waiting to happen.

To us humans, living in the Cosmos right when it has got nearly as large and cold as it ever will be, but with still enough fuel to spark some local fires, it seems we exist in a world of reductionist construction. We live in that era of the medium-sized dry goods where matter exists stably as solids in a void. And so a mechanical or technological mode of action - the constructive mode - can have its fullest expression. Us humans are at the apex of that. Biology rests on the possibilities of constructive action, local choices. If we pick up a rock and move it, it will still be there a hundred years later most likely. Then humans have continued on along this path of constructive causality to invent machines of the most absolute kind - like computers. Mathematical machines.

But then - through the sciences of cosmology and fundamental physics - we can now grasp the particularity of the era that has informed our dasein. We have been opened up to its more general or objective mathematical-strength underpinnings. We can see the actual forms that impose a structuring necessity on "everything".

And at this point, ontology becomes semiotic. We see that the duality we are always grasping after is not the trite mind~world relation (a very particular biological dasein or umwelt), but a dualism of entropy and information (or chaos and order, matter and form, flux and logos, apeiron and peras, etc).

So semiotics deals with epistemology. At the level of biology, it become pretty clear that "mindfulness" is just about the particularity of an embedded thermodynamic relation. An organism exists with the sole cosmic purpose of breaking down entropic gradients. Dasein boils down to that. An organism's umwelt or system of signs is really something pretty physical - a collection of on/off regulatory switches.

We think of signs as marks - indelible scratches that can then become the material subject of a mindful interpretation. But really, a sign in the biologically primitive sense is a switch - a logic gate - that can be thrown. It is a bit of machinery or syntax that can be inserted into the material flow of the world so as to start to control that world with stored information.

At the level of biology, the fact that "mindfulness" is purely pragmatic is nakedly visible. An enzyme is a message from the genes to the cell. It says turn on this, switch off that. That is dasein as mechanistic action. It is all about the imposition of constraints, not some exploration of intellectual freedoms.

And when humans invented language, it too was ultimately a means of sociocultural regulation. It was the mechanistic framework which could be dropped over the top of the psychological animal to establish an appropriately detached notion of self as a social actor, keeping a close eye on the wants and impulses of the beast within.

So semiotics gives us the duality that works because it is a properly interactive one. We can see why the trick would exist. The whole of the Cosmos only exists because there is this fundamental duality between entropy and information, local material action and global formal constraint. The Big Bang couldn't have happened any other way except that it would become organised by the constraints of permutation symmetry. Confusion can't stay confused as it has to start cancelling much of itself out. Just as every baby must become organised to have the psychological truth of its embodied dasein. Regularity must emerge as habits form and enduring mechanism arises.

So there would be the story of what constitutes the particular dasein of being a conscious human. We can dissect that in the now standard psychological way to bring out the semiotic levels involved. The arc of regulating machinery from membranes and genes, to neurons and muscle fibres, to words and even numbers. On the epistemological side, this is a story of the embedded semantics dropping away and pure syntactical mechanism becoming fully realised. An enzyme is as dedicated as a lock and key. But technology is as general purpose as mathematical form permits it to be.

And then there is the story of dasein as an ontology of semiosis. The world itself arises as some kind of interaction between information and entropy ... as the most primal constructs we can apply to its description. (Of course, we never escape our epistemological situatedness to talk about the thing in itself in some naive realistic fashion. Ontology is only about the commitments we are prepared to risk our necks by. That too is already taken as read by the post-Kantian Pragmatist.)

FYI here's a quote from intro 2 that you might find interesting regarding hermeneutics:

The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of this word, where it designates this business of interpreting. But to the extent that by uncovering the meaning of Being
and the basic structures of Dasein in general we may exhibit the horizon for any further ontological study of those entities which do not have the character ofDasein, this hermeneutic also becomes a 'hermeneutic' in the sense of working out the conditions on which the possibility of any ontological
investigation depends. And finally, to the extent that Dasein, as an entity with the possibility of existence, has ontological priority over every other entity, "hermeneutic", as an interpretation ofDasein's Being,
has the third and specific sense of an analytic of the existentiality of existence; and this is the sense which is philosophically primary. Then so far as this hermeneutic works out Dasein's historicality ontologically as the ontical condition for the possibility of historiology, it contains the roots of what can be called 'hermeneutic' only in a derivative sense: the methodology of those humane sciences which are historiological in character.

I like what you've written, but I think I've interpreted death differently (perhaps a misreading.) If death (as possibility at every moment and not some future event) opens the genuine future, it rips open the timeline and shreds it into a welter of possibilities. For me this would be like clashing orientations and associated disorientations. To experience a stable orientation would be to make the future present in the form of waiting for its already determinate form. As I read him, death reveals us as essentially possibility in a dizzying way. The 'pastness' theme seems important too. We can already image ourselves dead in a way that allows us to grasp our lives as a completed story. And we can author that story within the constraints of our thrown-ness. — macrosoft

I guess if I were to summarize the critique it is that Heidegger doesn't pay enough attention to the impossible: that every possibility is equally and also an im-possibility, the possibility of the impossible. And the impossible in turn speaks to the recalcitrance of things to 'worldhood', their opacity and irreducibility to intelligibility. Lingis gets at it thus:

"Does it not happen that we find the onward drift of our environment disconnected from our actual movements and operations? Does not each life extend across metamorphoses, in which it finds itself reborn with tasks that were nowhere yesterday; docs it not find whole fragments of its past drifting behind it, unintegratable like dreams in the daylight reality about it? We go to the cellar to fix a broken chair with drill, screws, and glue; the phone rings and we plan a trip with a friend, mapping out an itinerary, jotting down things that have to get done-have the car greased and oiled, get a passport,
arrange for injections from the doctor; suddenly there is a scream and we drop the phone, hurdle out the door and grab a stick to thrash the cat that has caught a blue jay; on the way back to the house we glance at our watch and realize it is almost time for our appointment with the hypnotist to stop smoking ...The one that grasps the hammer does not comprehensively envision the carpentry of the whole world. The practicable fields are limited and discontinuous. Between and beyond term, there are innumerable impracticable fields."

The unintergratable, the impracticable, the impossible, the discontinuous, the opaque: these are things that Heidegger only tends to think of negatively in the guise of limitation and breakdown, and not as constitutive of the human condition:

"Heidegger's analysis, axed not on the material but on the forms a practical life manipulates in the dynamic field, argues that things are essentially means; - each mundane end is a means in turn. The relay from implement to implement and to work being done returns to the manipulator. Before the hand
grasps the hammer, this whole circuit must have already been laid out. The handling is a movement .rhat fits in this comprehensive system and is de!-ermined by it from the start. But does not the finality in things also come to an end in them? Water which one knows in the savoring and in the drinking, berries which one gathers and which melt in one' s mouth as one walks through the meadow do not catch our eye as refurbishments for our cells and muscles and means for our projects; they are substances in which sensuality glows and fades away. The materiality of things is not just there as the materialization of the dynamic form we grasp; once grasped and brought under one's eyes and in -one's home, the instrumental forms of things dissolve into the density of their substance."

This is 'worldhood' held in suspension, time as condensed into the beatitude of an unintegrable moment, one that resists being woven into some overarching narrative in which would reduce it to just one more story beat among others. Anti-holism.

Actually I agree with most of that, but inadequate proximating doesn't have to be read in a gloomy sense. As I understood Kisiel's rendition, the point of all of this proximating is to live more fully and openly. I think the heavy style obscures what is finally aimed at (openness to the depths of life) . And of course avoiding the world turned upside down seems central here. In Ontology:Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger writes some beautiful paragraphs about a table in his home, skis in his garage. As we go back we have factic life at the center. Switching to the language of being gives the project a different feel. — macrosoft

While I think there's a rich and laudable tradition of philosophy that links it with 'life', I'd be very careful about the over-determination of philosophy by the concerns of 'life'. Philosophy can be richer than even that. Brassier's well-known injunction on this is well worth heeding imo:

"Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. ... Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter." (Nihil Unbound).

I would like to emphasize the H's vision circa 1919 is not at all for me an exhaustive description of what philosophy is or ought to be. I did find it stirring. It's one more direction, one more persona even. I'd say that I experience philosophy as a gallery of vivid personalities. None of them get it right. Most of them offer something, often an excess that needs the others as a complement/supplement.

Fair enough. I'm a big fan of pluralist approaches to things, and my worry is generally always the over-determination of philosophy by one aspect over others; I want richness, always.

In short, philosophy is more a form of life on the edge of expression than a science. That phenomenology is more a preconceptual, provisory comportment than a conceptual science, that the formally indicating 'concepts' are first intended to serve life rather than science, becomes transparent only after the turn... — Heidegger/Kiesel

For me this passage highlights the schizoid nature of philosophy: poetry aspiring to become what it can never be: a science. The grotesque alternative is philosophy becoming "handmaiden' to science as it has been in the past to theology. while the 'nerdy' alternative is philosophy becoming an endlessly fascinating exercise in conceptual masturbation.

Before the 'turn' Heidegger strove to produce an analytic which would transform philosophy into a phenomenological science. However phenomenology throws science into "Epoché", out of play insofar as it asks 'objectivizing' questions that transcend the subject; whereas phenomenology as conceived by Husserl aims to objectivize subjectivity itself. Heidegger (wrongly, I believe) saw Husserl's project as being still mired in Cartesian dualism, and he tried to circumvent what he saw as a morass via his analytic of Dasein. Husserl introduced the similar notion of 'lifeworld' in 1936 in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (which in turn probably derived from Uexküll's idea of 'Umwelt' and indeed even has it's roots in the Kantian notion of 'intersubjectivity').

After the turn Heidegger gives up on the analytic approach, perhaps realizing that poetry cannot ever become science, to opt for a more poetic approach.

Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did. — frank

I've been dwelling on this question more. I think he implied something like that. I haven't read much of the later Heidegger, but I have read secondary sources like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Mystical-Element-Heideggers-Thought/dp/0823211533

I am quite curious about how Heidegger reads in German. I hope he's a great prose poet. I expect that he would be, at least when he wanted to be.

'The rose exists without a reason.'

As I understand it, Heidegger understood (in this context) grasping for grounds to be switching into subject-versus-object mode, obscuring the genuine 'thing in itself,' a being which just shines forth without a why. From this angle, metaphysics looks like a power play that obscures the very object it wants to name. I think Heidegger might save said not that we should be silent but that we should listen to the poets on these matters. They approach what is hidden from the greedy subject's objectifying ground-sniffing.

...embodying a strange mystical pantheism drawn mainly from the writings of Jakob Böhme and his followers. Silesius delighted specially in the subtle paradoxes of mysticism. The essence of God, for instance, he held to be love; God, he said, can love nothing inferior to himself; but he cannot be an object of love to himself without going out, so to speak, of himself, without manifesting his infinity in a finite form; in other words, by becoming man. God and man are therefore essentially one.[9] — Wiki

The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself. — Hegel

The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realised and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself. — Hegel

For me this passage highlights the schizoid nature of philosophy: poetry aspiring to become what it can never be: a science — Janus

I agree that there was some kind of quasi-scientific quest involved, but there is also a rejection of this. What struck my mind was the word comportment. As far as poetry not being science, that is trivially true in once sense and far from obvious in another. Poetry is poesis, creation. Even Popper (who respected metaphysics) had to give the creative element its due. Science is only a filter or criterion. And then of course Heidegger doesn't have physical science in mind but something closer to a praxis-centered linguistic pre-science of life. What we have here is something closer to the actual human situation: an individual exists in the midst of incompatible language games, forced to interpret this total situation not as a professional or a technician but as a living, loving, fearing, mortal individual. The demand that philosophy be science is already questionably, since this presupposes that man's highest function is to be a de-worlded, a-historical 'transparent' subject grasping a public object to maximize public utility.
(Everyone loves this of course, but no one in particular perhaps. ) Or it leaves the 'highest' outside of philosophy altogether. No doubt this 'highest' varies and science largely makes such pursuits possible, but I remain skeptical of the implication/assumption that philosophers ought to be scientists. They are just as easily described as poets who work mostly with grand abstractions.

As far as poetry not being science, that is trivially true in once sense and far from obvious in another. Poetry is poesis, creation. — macrosoft

Yes, but I didn't say that poetry is not science; which is of course 'trivially true'; a mere matter of definition. I said that poetry cannot become science. To say that poetry cannot become science is to say that the metaphorical cannot become determinate, propositional. I am aware of the ancient meaning of "poesis" as 'making'; but I don't really see what this has to do with the point at issue.

And then of course Heidegger doesn't have physical science in mind but something closer to a praxis-centered linguistic pre-science of life. — macrosoft

Certainly it's obvious that Heidegger does not aspire to produce science in the 'present at hand' sense; but I think he does aim (in his pre-turn work) at producing a science (in the broadest sense of 'a determinate knowing'). And this aim does necessarily, and ironically, involve looking at the vorhanden dimension of human experience in a zuhanden way, try however you might to evade it.

The demand that philosophy be science is already questionably, since this presupposes that man's highest function is to be a de-worlded, a-historical 'transparent' subject grasping a public object. Or it leaves the higher things outside of philosophy altogether. — macrosoft

If philosophy aims to be "love of wisdom" does this not necessarily entail knowing what wisdom is? Of course it would not be wise to live estranged from the world (if that were possible) but any account of how to live, that aspires to extend itself beyond mere metaphor, is always already "de-worlded', or so it seems to me. Such accounts are always abstract; that is they are always abstracted from their living context. Of course this doesn't mean that we cannot have 'living' reactions to such accounts, or to science itself, for that matter. I don't believe there is any real, living, as opposed to merely abstractly conceptual, separation between the zuhanden and the vorhanden.

Water which one knows in the savoring and in the drinking, berries which one gathers and which melt in one' s mouth as one walks through the meadow do not catch our eye as refurbishments for our cells and muscles and means for our projects; they are substances in which sensuality glows and fades away. The materiality of things is not just there as the materialization of the dynamic form we grasp; once grasped and brought under one's eyes and in -one's home, the instrumental forms of things dissolve into the density of their substance. — Lingis

Great quote.

And the impossible in turn speaks to the recalcitrance of things to 'worldhood', their opacity and irreducibility to intelligibility. — StreetlightX

I like this point very much. Sensuality. Not the pre-theoretical but the non-theoretical. This reminds me of Feuerbach's joyful materialism. You have any thoughts on him? He has the blind spots pointed out by Marx, but he's just a good dude. Some philosophers just shine through their work.

While I think there's a rich and laudable tradition of philosophy that links it with 'life', I'd be very careful about the over-determination of philosophy by the concerns of 'life'. Philosophy can be richer than even that. — StreetlightX

I quite agree. I get absorbed in very formal questions at times. So much fascinating math can be done around the set of infinite sequences of 1s and 0s. But it's not just math but also an interpretation of what is going on that is not subject to its epistemology. What does one make of the situation that the computable numbers have measure zero? I know I have used it as a metaphor in a life-philosophy context, but the issue has its own life. To me this bit-model of the continuum brings it to consciousness in a new way. The continuum as the set of infinitely long, in-compressible 'files,' yet dotted with those that can be collapsed to pre-loaded Turing machines. I believe you've put some time in with math. I wonder if any of this has caught your attention? And have you given much thought to neural networks?

"Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. ... Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter." (Nihil Unbound). — StreetlightX

Ah yes, I like him. And I like that harsh attitude. But that's also part of what I like about Heidegger. Late Heidegger is a gloomy hippy waiting for a god to save him. I'm too Nietzschean for that in some moods, though I get that the rose is without reason and that my cat in her groundlessness is a miracle. Give me in other moods Hendrix's screaming guitar on 'Machine Gun.' I'd say part of us loves to destroy meaning and boundary. Even this seems conceptually in Heidegger, despite his often unbearable seriousness. I very much get how annoying his tone can be. In some ways he's one more turtle to smash open for its eggs. 'The spirit is a stomach.' But back to Ray. I like that he really knows some math and writes about it.

Fair enough. I'm a big fan of pluralist approaches to things, and my worry is generally always the over-determination of philosophy by one aspect over others; I want richness, always. — StreetlightX

I couldn't agree more with you. My process is usually to just grab a personality and really inhabit that personality without truly being dominated. I at least got better at not being captured with age. Nietzsche, for instance, is a mess. Grabbing that personality with the hot blood of one's 20s was going to be a bumpy ride. For me there's just no last word, except maybe a bias for this world in all its sensual brute presence that I've never been able to shake. I love Hegel, but I can't agree that grasping the 'absolute' feelingly or intuitively is bogus. And really who needs the 'absolute.' I tend to use the 'highest' in a sloppy way, it occurred to me. Peak experiences come in all shapes and sizes. There is no single high thing.

If philosophy aims to be "love of wisdom" does this not necessarily entail knowing what wisdom is? — Janus

Reading that made me think of this haha

I siad that poetry cannot become science. To say that poetry cannot become science is to say that the metaphorical cannot become determinate, propositional. I am aware of the ancient
meaning of "poesis" as 'making'; but I don't see what this has to do with the point at issue. — Janus

Sorry if I didn't read you charitably. I just don't see why metaphor isn't a mode of knowing. Must science be determinate? Can all objects be grasped determinately? I don't think so. Life is full of ambiguity and rounded corners. Metaphors are the right kind of model for that.

Certainly it's obvious that Heidegger does not aspire to produce science in the 'present at hand' sense; but I think he does aim (in his pre-turn work) at producing a science (in the broadest sense of 'a determinate knowing'). And this aim does necessarily, and ironically, involve looking at the vorhanden dimension of human experience in a zuhanden way, try however you might to evade it. — Janus

I'd say that indeed he's a theorist of the pre-theoretical. Formal indication is offered as one more microscope. And we can even accuse him of pragmatism. It's of the James variety, but still just about using words to improve life with a rarefied vision of utility at hand.

If philosophy aims to be "love of wisdom" does this not necessarily entail knowing what wisdom is? Of course it would not be wise to live estranged from the world ( if that were possible) but any account of how to live, that apsires to extend itself beyond mere metaphor, is always already "de-worlded', or so it seems to me. Such account are always abstract; that is they are always abstracted from their living context. Of course this doesn't mean that we cannot have 'living' reactions to such accounts, or to science itself, for that matter. I don't beleive there is any real, living, as opposed to merely abstractly conpetual separation between the zuhanden and the vorhanden. — Janus

Fair points. As to the deworlded subject, I thinks that's a fair description of science. It is about a public criterion. It seduces us ultimately with technology, with some old-timey theological absolute objective truth for the truth's sake. And I am down with that. Some of my favorite personal acts of creativity were 'machines' (algorithms.) (They were crypto systems.) I am down with the a-historical formal subject as the condition of possibility for an ideal language in which one can still write a poetry of pure form. Admittedly I've been experimenting with a certain perspective, but I would like to stress that I am not so captured by the perspectives I inhabit for the pleasure of working them through.

Ha, that's hilarious (and very wise to boot!). I am fond of Zizek's live performances.

I found that video pretty moving. It's a hatred of cliche, or sentimentality. 'Wisdom' can be a sickening word. For me this is part of the inability of particular words to stay put. One generation's sexiest words are just mom-and-dad-talk for the next. And I also like the implicit embrace of being a sinner and a fool. Posing as wise may be a fool's errand in the first place.

I love Zizek for being so damned real. He's a maniac. He can't control his own creativity. Those mannerisms are of course unforgettable too. It would be very hard to write your own Zizek. His comic exterior would be easy enough, but the genius that rides such a ridiculous vehicle not at all.

Thanks for sharing that!

Must science be determinate? — macrosoft

The hard sciences, including mathematics are on the most determinate end of the spectrum; they are the paradigm cases of determination, I would say. There's little of the ambiguous in science proper (although much of it in the interpretation of its purported ontological or metaphysical implications, of course).

Science, in the broader sense as 'knowing' (of a certain kind) is not poetic or aesthetic knowing, the latter is more like direct experience. Of course you may object that there is no truly direct experience, but that depends on how you think about it. From one perspective (the subjective) our experience is indeed direct, whereas from a "de-worlded", analytic viewpoint it's directness is an illusion purportedly due to our ignorance of its conditions.

The 'I' and the 'world' are just further signs in a grand linguistic play of signs. But pan-semiosis would be an actual model of ontology and not merely an acknowledgement of epistemic limitedness. — apokrisis

So the sign is just pure meaningful being, the primary 'atom.' My speculative mind is there. The only question is not the 'consciousness' for which the sign exist (because we don't need that along this line of thought), but something like time for the play or alteration of the signs. The sign-stream rushes forward with memory.

We have gone beyond just words to numbers. We speak the language of pure Platonic forms. — apokrisis

Kojeve liked to call it 'the silence of algorithm.' I think you'd like him if you haven't checked him out.

we, as highly particular biological creatures, have come to grasp something absolutely general and necessarily true about the physical world. Reality turns out to have this hard and mechanistic formal face to it. Only these permutation symmetries are logically possible. And that is a constraint so objective that it always lay in wait as the future of any Cosmos. Chaos thought it could do what it liked. Randomness was its destiny. But permutation symmetry already spelt finitude. The ultimate shape of the future was an inevitability. The Heat Death of the Universe was foretold. — apokrisis

Who said heat death couldn't be poetic? That's like Greek tragedy. I'm not denying its nonfictional aspect, but I can't help admiring the narrative in other terms as well.

And then there is the story of dasein as an ontology of semiosis. The world itself arises as some kind of interaction between information and entropy ... as the most primal constructs we can apply to its description. (Of course, we never escape our epistemological situatedness to talk about the thing in itself in some naive realistic fashion. Ontology is only about the commitments we are prepared to risk our necks by. That too is already taken as read by the post-Kantian Pragmatist.) — apokrisis

I like this 'commitments we risk our necks by.' Indeed, lived 'pre-theoretical' ontology keeps us waking up alive in the morning.

We think of signs as marks - indelible scratches that can then become the material subject of a mindful interpretation. But really, a sign in the biologically primitive sense is a switch - a logic gate - that can be thrown. It is a bit of machinery or syntax that can be inserted into the material flow of the world so as to start to control that world with stored information.

At the level of biology, the fact that "mindfulness" is purely pragmatic is nakedly visible. An enzyme is a message from the genes to the cell. It says turn on this, switch off that. That is dasein as mechanistic action. It is all about the imposition of constraints, not some exploration of intellectual freedoms.

And when humans invented language, it too was ultimately a means of sociocultural regulation. It was the mechanistic framework which could be dropped over the top of the psychological animal to establish an appropriately detached notion of self as a social actor, keeping a close eye on the wants and impulses of the beast within. — apokrisis

Yes, I can see this, even without knowing all the details. And indeed there lurks a beast within, chained up by words and gestures, internalized words and gestures largely.

Science, in the broader sense as 'knowing' (of a certain kind) is not poetic or aesthetic knowing, the latter is more like direct experience. — Janus

I am generally open to the point you are making, but I think you underestimate metaphor. Speaking from experience with math, the whole enterprise is a system of analogies. The epistemology is formalist and machine like, but actually doing it and understanding it is surprisingly metaphorical.

Also we have thoughts like 'analogy is the core of cognition'. And yet another thinker influenced me on this, Lakoff:

Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as a purely linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development of thought.

In his words:

"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."

According to Lakoff, non-metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk about purely physical reality; the greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons, including that some metaphors become 'dead' in the sense that we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on". — wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff#Reappraisal_of_metaphor

Also we have thoughts like 'analogy is the core of cognition'. — macrosoft

Sure, but I am not disagreeing with that at all. My point is that metaphor is not the core of propositionally determinate modeling, and nor is the discipline and the practice of mathematics (which a computer utterly blind to metaphor can do). I am not denying that analogical or metaphorical thinking may be involved in mathematical discovery and invention of course, because that is a kind of poesis, or making that involves imagination, what Peirce calls 'abduction'.

So the sign is just pure meaningful being, the primary 'atom.' My speculative mind is there. The only question is not the 'consciousness' for which the sign exist (because we don't need that along this line of thought), but something like time for the play or alteration of the signs. The sign-stream rushes forward with memory. — macrosoft

That gets it. It is the atomism of the event that is the sign. Flashes of actuality that then weave the collective history.

So we do want to search for crisp atomism as the basis of our ontology. But we find it not in atomistic matter - the usual answer. The passively existent answer. We find it being conjured into being as the emergent product of a context of constraints reacting with a ground of naked possibility. A physical event is the answer to a question that was asked. The quantum physicist interrogates with their measuring apparatus - has "it" happened yet? At some point, the sign is given. History branches in definite fashion. There is an updated context that requires the posing of some different question.

So yes, history is memory. Memory is information. Information is the record that constrains future possibility. Yet still, the other half of the deal is entropy or informational uncertainty. Material surprise. The naked ground is probabilistic and contributes its capacity for the accidental.

Nature asks the question - has that damn particle decayed yet? And the decay is spontaneous - within the constraints imposed on it. (See quantum zeno effect.) Nature actually is an observer waiting for the sign the event has happened. The question does have a meaning as an answer has to be given. The fact doesn't just passively exist. A dynamic has to play out.

Again, Peirce is the rare metaphysician who got it because he made chance or tychism as fundamental as law or synechism. His view of probability was propensity-based. He was way out on a limb in accepting spontaneity as real and creative, not merely a convenient modelling fiction.

So there is a play. Events have to manifest. And there is a flow. The answers weave a collective memory. There are even the atoms - definite events. But metaphysically, they have the quality of signs - in the full Peircean sense.

My point is that metaphor is not the core of propositionally determinate modeling, and nor is the discipline and the practice of mathematics (which a computer utterly blind to metaphor can do). — Janus

In a friendly spirit, I must say that computers don't really do math. Saying so is close to saying that an abacus does math or that a magazine writes shorts stories. Indeed, real numbers don't exist! They aren't even (physically) 'real.' It's worse than that: the integers don't even exist. Nor do Turing machines exist (since they have infinite tapes.) We have finite state machines that can process symbols. They can indeed check a string of symbols representing a proof for correctness, but only a human could understand what was going on there, having built the machine, the axioms, the definition, and the encoding. Only humans care about proofs. Proof is not the essence but only the hygiene of a supremely creative enterprise, which I'd say is founded on basic human intuitions of form.

So we do want to search for crisp atomism as the basis of our ontology. But we find it not in atomistic matter - the usual answer. The passively existent answer. We find it being conjured into being as the emergent product of a context of constraints reacting with a ground of naked possibility. A physical event is the answer to a question that was asked. The quantum physicist interrogates with their measuring apparatus - has "it" happened yet? At some point, the sign is given. History branches in definite fashion. There is an updated context that requires the posing of some different question. — apokrisis

I follow you here. I agree (without pretending to have gone beyond my first QM class --but I did get that A!--which is not to say that I remember the stuff that well. )

The naked ground is probabilistic and contributes its capacity for the accidental. — apokrisis

Fascinating. Does time get into the picture here?

Again, Peirce is the rare metaphysician who got it because he made chance or tychism as fundamental as law or synechism. His view of probability was propensity-based. He was way out on a limb in accepting spontaneity as real and creative, not merely a convenient modelling fiction.

So there is a play. Events have to manifest. And there is a flow. The answers weave a collective memory. There are even the atoms - definite events. But metaphysically, they have the quality of signs - in the full Peircean sense. — apokrisis

I think I am actually following what you say here.

Time is implicit in all of this. Ol' Heidegger made the point that the concept of time is central in a metaphysics. Was he right? I don't know. But having dwelt on that lately, I'd like to see how you might more explicitly weave it in. I am down with chance being fundamental. Is there chance without time?

This is arguably an out of the blue tangent, but I like to read the Germans as a progress, or at least as a family. I have a sense that Feuerbach is not read much, so I'm sharing some good passages which fit in various ways with some of the shards of the conversation so far.

In love, man declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart; he reckons another as part of his own being; he declares the life which he has through love to be the truly human life, corresponding to the idea of man, i.e., of the species. The individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite; because in it the self-consciousness of the individuality is the mysterious self-consciousness of the perfection of the race. But this result of love is produced by friendship also, at least where it is intense, where it is a religion as it was with the ancients. Friends compensate for each other; friendship is a mean,. of virtue, and more: it is itself virtue, dependent however on participation. Friendship can only exist between the virtuous, as the ancients said. But it cannot be based on perfect similarity; on the contrary, it requires diversity, for friendship rests on a desire for self-completion. One friend obtains through the other what he does not himself possess. The virtues of the one atone for the failings of the other.

Friend justifies friend before God. However faulty a man may be, it is a proof that there is a germ of good in him if he has worthy men for his friends. If I cannot be myself perfect, I yet at least love virtue, perfection in others. If therefore I am called to account for any sins, weaknesses, and faults, I interpose as advocates, as mediators, the virtues of my friend. How barbarous, how unreasonable would it be to condemn me for sins which I doubtless have committed, but which I have myself condemned in loving my friends. who are free from these sins!

But if friendship and love, which themselves are only subjective realizations of the species, make out of singly imperfect beings an at least relatively perfect whole, how much more do the sins and failings of individuals vanish in the species itself, which has its adequate existence only in the sum total of mankind, and is therefore only an object of reason! Hence the lamentation over sin is found only where the human individual regards himself in his individuality as a perfect, complete being not needing others for the realization of the species, of the perfect man; where instead of the consciousness of the species has been substituted the exclusive self-consciousness of the individual; where the individual does not recognize himself as a part of mankind, but identifies himself with the species, and for this reason makes his own sins, limits and weaknesses, the sins, limits, and weaknesses of mankind in general. Nevertheless man cannot lose the consciousness of the species, for his self-consciousness is essentially united to his consciousness of another than himself. Where therefore the species is not an object to him as. a species, it will be an object to him as God. He supplies the absence of the idea of the species by the idea of God, as the being, who is free from the limits and wants which oppress the individual, and, in his opinion (since he identifies the species with the individual), the species itself. But this perfect being, free from the limits of the individual, is nothing else than the species, which reveals the infinitude of its nature in this, that it is realized in infinitely numerous and various individuals. — Feuerbach

To me this is a great interpretation of God. It's a prosier version of Blake's notion. F saw that language networked us all intensely, that we are really only what we are as individuals in a wider context. The individual is an abstraction, we might say, even if he has to die his own death.

On the other side of Heideggarian angst (which is real) is the sense that what dies is not the essence. This essence is distributed. A node in the neural network of selves goes dark. Others light up. Each node is a snowflake, which keeps things fresh. But the snowflake particularity is also replaced --with an also never-before-seen and never-to-be-seen-again particularity. I love Feuerbach's sense of the earth, of the planet we were made for --apparently by chance, but that is beside the point. He is also quite a generous critic of religion. He sees what is pre-theoretically or pre-critically true in it.

In a friendly spirit, I must say that computers don't really do math. — macrosoft

To do math is to calculate, measure or follow a set of rules; all of which computers can do. Of course creative math, invention and discovery, is something computers cannot do; as i already acknowledged; so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.

Also, I don't see why you needed to qualify with 'in a friendly spirit"; why would there be, or need to be, any unfriendliness at work in such discussions? Disagreement and critical questioning does not equal unfriendliness in my view: I have nothing to defend in any of this, it's of no crucial import to me one way or the other; I'm just presenting my thoughts on what you seems to be proposing.

To do math is to calculate, measure or follow a set of rules; — Janus

Well, I'll drop it if you want. But I'm a mathematician, and that's not what I do. Those who just use math might fit that description, but to do math is to create those rules along with the entities they rule. As I mentioned, I invented some crypto systems that were works of art to me. AFIK, no one had ever contemplated exactly those structures, which were machines designed with two constraints --that they work and that they be elegant. That they worked was more like the canvas. I chose to write a sonnet, let's say. Utility wasn't the goal, only a constraint of the genre, to focus creativity.

Also, I don't see why you needed to qualify with 'in a friendly spirit"; why would there be, or need to be, any unfriendliness at work in such discussions? Disagreement and critical questioning does not equal unfriendliness in my view: I have nothing to defend in any of this, it's of no crucial import to me one way or the other; I'm just presenting my thoughts on what you seems to be proposing. — Janus

Why so touchy about a courtesy? I'm not really trying to hold you to an answer there.

But I'm a mathematician, and that's not what I do. — macrosoft

Sure, but I've already acknowledged several times that the creative side of math (probably) cannot be done by machines; I think this is so because that would involve intuitively grasping context.

Why so touchy about a courtesy? — macrosoft

There is no "touchiness", that would seem to be your projection. In fact I felt that the "friendly" qualification ( which seemed unnecessary to me) itself suggested that for you there is a 'touchiness', perhaps in yourself and/or perhaps projectively imputed to me, and that's why I commented on it to allay any such fears. Anyway, i think we can safely move on from that, as it's not important.

You seem to have been objecting that my distinction between determinate (mathematical, scientific) knowing and indeterminate (poetic or aesthetic) knowing is inapposite and yet you have provided no argument for that assessment. Instead you have repeatedly made points against what I have not been saying. (And again, just to preempt any further misunderstanding of what I have been saying; I am not claiming that science or math do not also involve the more indeterminate or poetic kind of knowing).

Check out the proto-Heidegger in the first passage!

The philosophy of the modern era was in search of something immediately certain. Hence, it rejected the baseless thought of the Scholastics and grounded philosophy on self-consciousness. That is, it posited the thinking being, the ego, the self-conscious mind in place of the merely conceived being or in place of God, the highest and ultimate being of all Scholastic philosophy; for a being who thinks is infinitely closer to a thinking being, infinitely more actual and certain than a being who is only conceived. Doubtful is the existence of God, doubtful is in fact anything I could think of; but indubitable is that I am, I who think and doubt. Yet this self-consciousness in modern philosophy is again something that is only conceived, only mediated through abstraction, and hence something that can be doubted. Indubitable and immediately certain is only that which is the object of the senses, of perception and feeling.

The sensuous is not the immediate in the sense of speculative philosophy; i.e., in the sense in which it is the profane, the readily obvious, the thoughtless, the self-evident. According to speculative philosophy the immediate sensuous perception comes later than conception and fantasy. Man's first conception is itself only a conception based on imagination and fantasy. The task of philosophy and science consists, therefore, not in turning away from sensuous – i.e., real things – but in turning towards them – not in transforming objects into thoughts and ideas, but in making visible – i.e., objective – what is invisible to common eyes.

An object, i.e., a real object, is given to me only if a being is given to me in a way that it affects me, only if my own activity – when I proceed from the standpoint of thought – experiences the activity of another being as a limit or boundary to itself. The concept of the object is originally nothing else but the concept of another I – everything appears to man in childhood as a freely and arbitrarily acting being – which means that in principle the concept of the object is mediated through the, concept of You, the objective ego. To use the language of Fichte, an object or an alter ego is given not to the ego, but to the non-ego in me; for only where I am transformed from an ego into a You – that is, where I am passive – does the idea of an activity existing outside myself, the idea of objectivity, really originate. But it is only through the senses that the ego is also non-ego.

Only in feeling and love has the demonstrative this – this person, this thing, that is, the particular – absolute value; only then is the finite infinite. In this and this alone does the infinite depth, divinity, and truth of love consist. In love alone resides the truth and reality of the God who counts the hairs on your head. The Christian God himself is only an abstraction from human love and an image of it.

The old philosophy had its point of departure in the proposition: I am an abstract, a merely thinking being to which the body does not belong. The new philosophy proceeds from the principle: I am a real and sensuous being. Indeed, the whole of my body is my ego, my being itself. The old philosopher, therefore, thought in a constant contradiction to and conflict with the senses in order to avoid sensuous conceptions, or in order not to pollute abstract concepts. — Feuerbach