• räthsel
    24
    You're a fucking retard yourself, evidently.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k


    I actually spent 10-15 minutes trying to research how Collingwood uses the terms when I first asked, but I never did find anything that explained it. So if the terms are important or common in Collingwood, there oddly doesn't seem to be much mention of them in writing about Collingwood. Even the SEP page about Collingwood's aesthetics had no mention of "creative" or "creativity."
  • fdrake
    6.6k


    Yes, apparently. Now simmer down.

    If you have issues with how you have been moderated in this discussion feel free to start a complaint thread about me in the 'Feedback' board.
  • räthsel
    24
    The term Collingwood used was art. I was trying to explain it to you, but if you are reading about him, any way, I am sure, as someone who claims to have read so many philosophers on your page, that you can figure it out on your own.
  • fdrake
    6.6k


    Are there any quotes you can give from the text you are referencing that might help?
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k


    But you wrote "I was reading Collingwood, who distinguishes between three types of living, which are either merely functional, creative (I think this is similar to the idea of genuine Being) or both. "

    So now you're saying that he doesn't actually use those terms? His three types of living are something, art, or both?
  • räthsel
    24
    The guy's a fucking troll, you fucking retard. This site is probably a troll site, thinking about it. Or you think you're hazing me.
  • fdrake
    6.6k


    Ok. Can you please tell me how Colingwood uses the terms you referenced?

    I'm not your enemy, I promise. Nor am I trying to troll.
  • räthsel
    24
    Collingwood refers to the difference between techne and art as something which emerged only after, even, say, Shakespeare and uses the example of a scene from a play by this dramatist; something about referring to a cloak as "his art", meaning the word had a different meaning. Techne is not art, it is craft. Collingwood is referring to everything, though, with this dichotomy. The idea of art, itself, is relatively recent, but still opposed to the aspect of modernity which is merely craft-like; reproducable, repetitive, et alii.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    I think that Collingwood's art/craft distinction makes sense with respect to aesthetics (which isn't to say that I agree with the distinction he makes, but I think it makes sense), but how would we apply that to living in general?
  • räthsel
    24
    How does it not apply to living?
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k


    The distinction is about how materials are thought about, what intentions are, etc. with respect to making things like chairs and paintings.

    That has nothing to do with waking up and going to the bathroom and going to the grocery store, etc.
  • Baden
    16.3k
    The guy's a fucking troll, you fucking retard. This site is probably a troll site, thinking about it. Or you think you're hazing me.räthsel

    If you think someone is trolling you, report it by PM and we'll deal with it. Don't abuse them or the mods or you'll be the one banned.
  • räthsel
    24
    Then go do it. Don't wee your trousers.
  • räthsel
    24
    You won't deal with it, though, old chap.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k


    So how would we apply the distinction to living in general in your view?
  • räthsel
    24
    Art is the end of all living.
  • räthsel
    24
    You've pissed yourself, old chap.
  • fdrake
    6.6k


    Thanks.

    I don't know much about the distinction between art and techne in the later Heidegger, but at least the metaphysical side of your question in the OP is related to Heidegger's papers 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and 'The Question Concerning Technology'. He definitely contrasts artistic (or poetic) understanding and technical understanding, and displays suspicion and sorrow about the decline of poetic understanding and the growth of technical understanding.

    For Heidegger, technical understanding is rooted in seeing the world as primarily transformable natural resources; as the substrate of a nature full of opportunities for humans to seize. This is contrasted to more 'primordial' senses of understanding associated with art, and a more primordial understanding associated with nature. Artistic understanding and a more primordial way of understanding nature are associated with the concept of 'dwelling', as in being engaged practically in a world we ultimately respect and care about. An analogy I like here is the love you have for your family (hopefully anyway) contrasted to seeing them as sources of income to exploit. The former is a cooperative and respectful experience for those involved, even if there are troubles, the latter can be so exploitative its practitioners might not even realise it's exploitative.

    Throughout Heidegger's corpus, there's a heavy sense of nostalgia and forlornness for peasant life, associated with individual craftsmanship and pre-industrial agricultural communities. I've seen people try to make sense of his alliance with the Nazi party in terms like this. A central part of Nazi propaganda was the idea of the German people returning to an ancient (like Heidegger's 'primordial') heritage, mastering themselves, and valorising whatever communities they belonged to.

    The Jews were characterised as technocratic usurers, greedy and exploitative of the people and resources they controlled. It is not so surprising that this characterisation of the Jews aligns itself with industrial mercantilism and the increasing societal importance of technical understanding; with the same notes of exploitation you can hear in Heidegger's concept of technical understanding. And the forlorn nostalgia longing for a return to more 'primordial' ways of being is definitely present in Heidegger's thought and is fully commensurate with the nationalist Nazi myth of the nation.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    Throughout Heidegger's corpus, there's a heavy sense of nostalgia and forlornness for peasant life, associated with individual craftsmanship and pre-industrial agricultural communities.fdrake

    It's extremely dubious that previous the previous eras he was "nostalgic" for wouldn't have had just the same issues regarding the "art" and "techne" distinction he made.

    Your explanation of it makes some sense of it, even if I think the distinction is both oversimplistic--it's far too black & white--and mythological.
  • fdrake
    6.6k
    It's extremely dubious that previous the previous eras he was "nostalgic" for wouldn't have had just the same issues regarding the "art" and "techne" distinction he made.Terrapin Station

    Yeah he's definitely not trying to portray history in all its gory details and banalities, he's a lot more concerned with (his idiosyncratic notion of) philosophical history. Early Heidegger likes to put in in terms of a 'return' to fundamental questions about our lives that have become obscured through the history of philosophy. There are no battles or politics in Heidegger's history, only ideas.

    Edit: and only ideas from great thinkers.
  • leo
    882
    This site is probably a troll site, thinking about it.räthsel

    You got decent answers from 0 thru 9 and Wayfarer.

    Don't take things too personally though, we don't all think in the same ways, something you see as obvious others won't understand or interpret differently and vice versa. But I agree it can be bothering when you want to talk about something and your thread seems to get derailed.

    I have my own ideas of what's wrong with the modern world and my own intuition about what might be referred to as the "merely functional abyss" of today, however you were asking about published philosophers who wrote on the subject and I don't have any name to mention that wasn't already mentioned (not that I would know them all).

    But still, in case you ever want to discuss the subject it can be useful to clarify what you see as a functional abyss in today's world (my own intuition on that would be that we are shaped to be more like tools programmed to function in a specific way rather than creative beings expressing ourselves independently).
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    I don't think the modern world is perfect, by any means, but I'd probably not prefer to live at any other time. Whatever its faults, the modern world has a ton of advantages that weren't available previously. And re creativity and art, I do that stuff for a living.
  • Joshs
    5.7k
    For Heidegger, technical understanding is rooted in seeing the world as primarily transformable natural resources; as the substrate of a nature full of opportunities for humans to seize. This is contrasted to more 'primordial' senses of understanding associated with art, and a more primordial understanding associated with nature. Artistic understanding and a more primordial way of understanding nature are associated with the concept of 'dwelling', as in being engaged practically in a world we ultimately respect and care about. An analogy I like here is the love you have for your family (hopefully anyway) contrasted to seeing them as sources of income to exploit. The former is a cooperative and respectful experience for those involved, even if there are troubles, the latter can be so exploitative its practitioners might not even realize it's exploitative.fdrake

    Yes, the famous Heidegerrian phrase ' the essence of technology is nothing technological" is an attempt to distinguish our primordial relationality with a world from instrumental logic. We can see the development of his critique of technology out of his notion of the present to hand, and through his writing on the history of logic beginning with Plato and Aristotle and subject-predicate propositionality , up though the establishment of objective empiricism with Galileo and Descartes . Heidegger said us he wants, 'in a confrontation with the tradition', to rethink logic, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up.

    While it is true his examples of non present-to-hand involvement with the world limited themselves to individual craftsmanship and pre-industrial agricultural communities, it can be argued that potential future technologies that don't succumb to the present to hand propositionality of Gestell(enfarming) , that is , that are founded on a 'revolutionary shaking up of the notion of logic', should be possible for Heidegger. It would be matter of, as Derrida wrote, overtly and explicitly deconstructing what was already naively deconstructing itself in the guise of enframing thinking.

    One could say, as you do , that such an approach to the technological would be
    being engaged practically in a world we ultimately respect and care about.fdrake
    .

    I would add, though, that primordial Care for Heidegger, in its modification as heedful circumspective involvement with the world(the ready to hand) should be understood prior any particular sentiments about that we are involved with. Whether our affective comportment toward what we deal with is one of respect or neglect, fondness or dislike, what distinguishes the significance of handiness from that of the present to hand and enframing is simply what Heidegger calls the 'as' structure of hermeneutically taking something as something. Enframing is a privative, cut-off, levelled down, forgetful derivative mode of seeing, because it loses contact with its larger context of relevance. In enframing thinking propositional presencing “exhibits itself in the light of a cause-effect coherence”, and the danger is that
    it does not consider “the essential origin of this causality.” Thus, Heidegger warns of the “supreme” and “extreme” danger of “not apprehending Enframing as a claim”. Note that claims matter to us, whereas the present to hand is supposedly there whether we re involved with it or not.

    A "predicate" is "stated" about a "subject," the latter is determined by the former." "Positing the subject, positing the predicate, and positing them together are thoroughly "apophantic" in the strict sense of the word. "Like interpretation in general, the statement necessarily has its existential foundations in fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. But in the propositional statement "the as-structure of interpretation has undergone a modification. The "as" no longer reaches out into a totality of relevance in its function of appropriating what is understood. It is cut off with regard to its possibilities of the articulation of referential relations of
    significance which constitute the character of the surrounding world. The "as" is forced back to
    the uniform level of what is merely objectively present. It dwindles to the structure of just letting
    what is objectively present be seen by way of determination. This levelling down of the
    primordial "as" of circumspect interpretation to the as of the determination of objective
    presence is the speciality of the statement. Only in this way does it gain the possibility of a
    pointing something out in a way that we sheerly look at it." The pure beholding of theoretical
    staring-at is 'a failure to understand it. Assertion is a privation of simple seeing which
    understands.

    "In the first and authentic instance, this “as” is not the “as” of predication qua predication but is
    prior to it in such a way that it makes possible the very structure of predication at all. Predication
    has the as-structure, but in a derived way, and it has it only because the as-structure is predication
    within a [wider] experience. But why is it that this as-structure is already present in a direct act of
    dealing with something? The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and
    take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is
    always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as,
    but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness
    of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act’s so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is
    understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing
    apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure.
    Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be
    found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood. I repeat: The [primary]
    as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be
    understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like.
    Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so
    original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it’s possible at
    all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order."

    Heideger rejected humanism because its form of subjectivity turns humans into objects ('standing reserve'). For Heidegger, even recognizing, as Nietzsche did, that instrumental reason is organized and directed via subjective value structures is still a form of technological enframing.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    Heidegger said us he wants, 'in a confrontation with the tradition', to rethink logic, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up.Joshs

    Did he suggest what he was going to replace it with?
  • Joshs
    5.7k
    Good question. I like to think that his notion of Being as temporality is a kind of logic.More specifically, he would contrast the present to hand propositional subject-object statement (the basis of logic and objective causality) with the ready to hand taking something 'as' something, as he delineates in the quote I included.

    As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating. Heidegger instead describes the 'as' as a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, [and] at the same time takes apart what has been put together."

    It wouldn't necessary be that Heidegger wants to discard the use of logic, so much as he warns us to be vigilant not to orient our thinking around the totalizing and flattening tendencies that can accompany a culture that celebrates objective causality as a privileged avenue toward truth.

    Eugene Gendlin, an interpreter of Heidegger, makes this argument:"We need to go back and forth between logic and bodily-felt understanding. They build upon each other. It would be wrong to make an ideology of lauding one and pretending to do without the other."...patterns work-in another, more intricate order which talks back..."(The Time of the Explicating Process: A Comment on Thomas Fuchs’ “Body Memory”).

    For my part, I can envision a technological and empirical thinking of the future that wouldn't need to 'dip into' logical formulation at all.
  • Wayfarer
    22.4k
    Heidegger said us he wants, 'in a confrontation with the tradition', to rethink logic, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up.
    — Joshs

    Did he suggest what he was going to replace it with?
    Terrapin Station

    What we never generally never see is the *religious* dimension to this issue. Put it another way: if 'the idea of the fall of man' is meaningless to you, then you don't understand what the argument is about.

    I don't know much about Heidegger (nor necessarily want to) but he studied to be a Lutheran pastor. So, he changed course, and didn't pursue a religious vocation, but he's still a fundamentally religious thinker. Religious, not in the sense of 'obeying the dicta of ecclesiastical authority' but in the philosophical sense of 'grappling with the meaning of Being' - which is first and foremost a (or the) religious quest.

    So, so long as the question about 'what this means' is framed solely in terms of the utilitarian, what is useful, how it works, 'what does it mean' in a sense comprehensible to a secular-scientific sense, then the point is surely missed.
  • Wayfarer
    22.4k
    This site is probably a troll site, thinking about it.räthsel

    It's a shame you flamed out, I thought you had some interesting things to say. Pity about your temper.
  • Joshs
    5.7k
    The philosophical sense of 'grappling with the meaning of Being' - which is first and foremost a (or the) religious quest.Wayfarer

    Is religious the same as metaphysical? If Heidegger claimed to overcome metaphysics, could there be a post-metaphysical meaning of religion? Perhaps of a Kierkegaardian sort?
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