Heidegger spent the Great War reporting on the weather. Wittgenstein spent it volunteering for the most dangerous tasks to be found on the front line.

Heidegger talked about engaging with life. Wittgenstein engaged with life.

...intersubjectivity... — Joshs

It might be better not to use thei term so freely. See the topic of the same name. It's not a word used by Wittgenstein, nor by his translators - and for good reason.

Heidegger spent the Great War reporting on the weather. Wittgenstein spent it volunteering for the most dangerous tasks to be found on the front line.

Heidegger talked about engaging with life. Wittgenstein engaged with life. — Banno

I’m not sure you’re ‘engaging’ with the OP. I should have added: no gratuitous comments on Heidegger’s politics as a substitute for having read the work.

It might be better not to use thei term so freely. See the topic of the same name. It's not a word used by Wittgenstein, nor by his translators - and for good reason. — Banno

That’s a good start. Give me a better word to describe his understanding of the public.

Ah, but see the title. I addressed it directly. I took it from memory, from the entry on Heidegger in the Book of Dead Philosophers, which I commend to all. The way they lived their lives shows much about their respective philosophies.

Try speaking of the public nature of life.

THe way they lived their lives shows much about their respective philosophies. — Banno

I agree that a philosopher’s ideas and personal choices inother aspects of their lives are intimately connected. For that reason you won’t have the slightest idea how to interpret the way they lived their lives without some acquaintance with their philosophies. Which brings us back to the OP

You won’t have the slightest idea how to interpret the way they lived their lives without some acquaintance with their philosophies. — Joshs

And you won’t have some acquaintance with their philosophies without the slightest idea of how to interpret the way they lived their lives.

Your point?

In so far as Heidegger "thinks of (meaning) in terms of the way that meanings are uniquely my own" he fails to recognise that meaning is embedded in life.

And that is exemplified in their respective biographies. I answered your question; but perhaps not in the way you wanted.

And you won’t have some acquaintance with their philosophies without the slightest idea of how to interpret the way they lived their lives.

Your point?

In so far as Heidegger "thinks of (meaning) in terms of the way that meanings are uniquely my own" he fails to recognise that meaning is embedded in life.

And that is exemplified in their respective biographies. I answered your question; but perhaps not in the way you wanted. — Banno

My point was, and don’t take this personally, and correct me if I’m wrong , but I get the distinct sense that you’ve never read Being and Time.

...and I, that you have never read Philosophical Investigations...

Indeed, I'm only familiar with Being and Time from excerpts and secondary sources. It's never looked credible enough to warrant the effort. I'd count it as one of the lesser works of existential thought, far behind Sartre or Kierkegaard.

So, will you critique my criticism of Heidegger, or are you just going to reflect on my biography?

I'd count it as one of the lesser works of existential thought, far behind Sartre or Kierkegaard. — Banno

Sartre’s master work, Being and Nothingness, would not even exist without Heidegger’s writing. It’s a second rate misinterpretation. of Being and Time.

Here’s Derrida’s view of Sartre:

Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger.

I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader.

He and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted.

What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure?

You wish to change the topic of your own thread? TO make it a critique of Sartre?

Go back on topic.

I bet you’re a lawyer

No, a teacher.

Heidegger spent the Great War reporting on the weather. Wittgenstein spent it volunteering for the most dangerous tasks to be found on the front line.

Heidegger talked about engaging with life. Wittgenstein engaged with life. — Banno

:up: Poseur & bricoleur, respectively.

My participation in normative language practices thus amounts to an impoverished form of understanding.
What do you think? Do you agree, and if so, is this a weakness on Heidegger’s part or Wittgenstein’s ? — Joshs

For Witty, understanding of the forms-of-life within which we undertake living is gained from, or enriched by, shared practices, which thereby undermines (lazy, passive) conformity. For Heidi, however, shared practices (somehow) "impoverish understanding" of "the meaning of ... temporality", suggesting a preference, or priority, for withdrawal from shared practices – the commons, or cosmopolity – into (the) "ownmost". IIRC, this 'solipsistic stance' is Heidi's ethical (Levinas, Adorno) failing compared to Witty's more 'cultural-pragmatic stance'.

Do you suppose the increased interest in Heidi over the last few years is related to the rise of autocratic thinking? To the acceptance of obscure bullshit?

Well, as they say: Covfefe is as Covfefe does ... :mask:

IIRC, this 'solipsistic stance' is Heidi's ethical (Levinas, Adorno) failing compared to Witty's more 'cultural-pragmatic stance'. — 180 Proof

Yes, this is a common criticism of Heidegger. For instance, Shaun Gallagher writes:

“ In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

Gadamer seems to concur:

“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed even as he was developing the idea, his wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted. I must say that conscience — having a conscience — no, that wasn't terribly convincing.
"Care" is always a concernfulness about one's own being, and Mit- sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him.”

But matters are not so simple. Dan Zahavi makes the opposite critique.Zahavi interprets Heidegger’s account of the primordiality of being-with as consonant with the approach of Hans Bernhard Schmid.

“In Schmid’s recent work, we can find a position that is partly inspired by Heidegger...”
“...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication (Schmid 2005, 138, 145, )

I think Gadamer , you and Zahavi are both right and both wrong. You are right that Heidegger makes Witt’s notion of primary intersubjectivty a derivative modification of the primary self-understanding of Dasein. You are wrong to interpret Dasein’s self-understanding as prior to sociality. Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as
a referential differential inside-outside.There is no solipsistic inside for Heidegger, because self -relation is already relation with an outside. We find similar arguments in Derrida:

“Derrida says all speech is writing , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social.
“...it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other.”
“When he writes himself to himself, he writes himself to the other who is infinitely far away and who is supposed to send his signature back to him. He has no relation to himself that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other...”

In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public’: , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation’ : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with
Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public.

For Derrida, like Heidegger it is not the other person, but time itself that separates me from myself, and when I do engage in language with others I never simply introject normative meanings but interpret them in relation to my own background.

Do you suppose the increased interest in Heidi over the last few years is related to the rise of autocratic thinking? To the acceptance of obscure bullshit? — Banno

A big part of the increased interest in him is coming from theorists in cognition and emotion, who find his analysis of affect indispensable. Heidegger was among the first to recognize the inseparable interpenetration of emotion, mood, feeling, and intention.

Witt’s notion of primary intersubjectivty — Joshs

...I think you made that up. Subjectivity is critiqued in PI; so suggesting the primacy of intersubjectivity strikes me as problematic.

So I wonder if there is anything in Heidi that talks of following rules. For Witti, this is a public activity.

Subjectivity is critiqued in PI; so suggesting the primacy of intersubjectivity strikes me as problematic.

So I wonder if there is anything in Heidi that talks of following rules. For Witti, this is a public activity. — Banno

Exactly. No subjectivity for Witt, and what’s the only alternative he offers? The structure of publicness. joint engagement , rule following , language games. There’s no room for each participant to form slightly different interpretations of the same rules for everyone, because the notion of participant and individual interpretation of a language game are problematic ,
as they should be. But what Heidegger is on about is not the social as a subjective , a solipsistic self ,an ‘I’. That’s his whole point. The ‘self’ is always already an in-between that transcends ‘ itself’ every minute of time. That’s what a moment of time is, my past that is defined by my present that comes from my future. Past, present , future are not separate structures but one indissociable whole in each ‘now’. Each ‘now’ that ‘I’ experience is both my past as a totality and a remaking of that past as utterly néw. The entire structure of the social, the Other, the alien and the world originates in each ‘now’ prior to any language game. In a sense that is the fundamental language game , the way my ‘now’ remakes my past. Other persons, voices, gestures are not the basis of this exposure to otherness, and I don’t simply absorb and become shaped by what I engage with in language with others, precisely because I am already other to myself and my relation with other persons is a secondary otherness.

As Derrida asks: How do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without
this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I’ without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I’, that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I’ and
nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I’.

...and that leaves me cold. It looks deliberately obscure. And what little of it that I can comprehend is misguided: "There’s no room for each participant to form slightly different interpretations of the same rules for everyone...".

(Please restrict comments to their philosophies and avoid political and personal aspects of their lives) — Joshs

Noticed this little edit; No.

what little of it that I can comprehend is misguided: "There’s no room for each participant to form slightly different interpretations of the same rules for everyone...". — Banno

Couldnt you humor me and say it’s ‘differently guided’?
Would probably be helpful if you elaborated on why it’s misguided, although I know the rhetoric well: Witt and olp teach us that such formulations of language as ‘personal interpretation’ are problematic.
If you think the above is obscure you’ll love this:

“let's not misunderstand what I mean by making this distinction between a WITHIN-person and a BETWEEN-person dynamic. The within-person dynamic is already a between in that it is a thoroughgoing exposure to an outside, an alterity, an otherness. For Heidegger, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located publically as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I' or interpersonal ‘we', there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective and objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies, between-person conditionings or public language games.”

Imagine if all your experiences amounted to variations on a thematics which was itself constantly changing its sense, but slowly. Thus you could say that all your experience of meaning was ‘public’ in that who you are and what you think and what your world means to you is in subtle transformation every minute, as it is constantly exposed to new context. But in relation to every other that you engage with, your experience is in a real sense ‘private’ , or at least there is an unbridgeable gap between you and the another person’s experience , even in a ‘langauge game’.

Here’s a paper I wrote about this:


https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social

Couldnt you humor me and say it’s ‘differently guided’? — Joshs

If you like - for Witti the within-person dynamic is either going to be pubic, and hence a part of the between-person dynamic; or private, and hence outside of the discussion.

What do you make of that?

If you like - for Witti the within-person dynamic is either going to be pubic, and hence a part of the between-person dynamic; or private, and hence outside of the discussion.

What do you make of that? — Banno

I agree that this would be his argument. My response is that every moment my experience is public in the sense that it is exposed to an outside that changes its sense and meaning in a subtle but complete way which makes me other than what I am every new moment in time. but this ‘public for me’ is unique to my past history . It is not the same ‘public’ for you or anyone else . There can be no shared public , no joint action or ‘we’ , only , ‘my’ version of we and your version of we in each interchange.
There are two language games proceeding , from my ‘we’ and from your ‘we’. It is not that what I mean to say is not altered and influenced by your response. nBut that change in me, or I should say change OF me is a variation of my thematics and the change of you is a variation of your thematics. There is never a shared thematics, but ther can be enough similarity between your understanding and mine to make it appear as though the understanding is shared.

I know it’s hard to swallow but I want to to the paradox of my referring to my moment to moment experience as at the same time resistant to shared normativity of language games and not a subjectivity or enclosure. I am not resistant to the ‘we’ because i am an interiority , but because I am already a a fully social unfolding , and the ‘weness’ of language games is an abstraction derived from that primary sociality.

Here’s a paper I wrote about this:


https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social — Joshs

Heidegger was among the first to recognize the inseparable interpenetration of emotion, mood, feeling, and intention. — Joshs

Really? Not Spinoza, not Hume, not Kierkegaard, not Schopenhauer, not Nietzsche, not Zapffe, not Sartre, not Merleau-Ponty, not ... but Heidi?! C'mon. :roll:

how to interpret the way they lived their lives without some acquaintance with their philosophies. — Joshs

Wittgenstein didn't write that much. There was very little in his prose that Heidegger could have used and I doubt he ever heard of Wittgenstein. In the other hand, Wittgenstein must have known of Heidegger. But one can think of a reason or two why he wouldn't have refered to him. Witt gravitated around the Vienna Circle. Those neopositivists did not fancy phenomenology at all. Also Witt had Jewish roots while Heidegger became a Nazi as early as 1933. This may have hampered collaboration...

The biggest difference for me is Heidegger is unreadable, while Wittgenstein is almost unreadable. But I don't doubt their seminal places in Western thought.

The only theory of meaning Wittgenstein ever published was in the Tractatus, which was a solipsistic, subjectivist or idealistic doctrine of meaning that constituted conclusions he drew via methodological solipsism , that is to say by phenomenological investigation strictly in the first-person, that discounted the applicability and relevance of third-personal scientific rationalisization.

And the later Wittgenstein, whose solipsistic methodology remained the same as the earlier Wittgenstein and who now directly asserted that philosophy was purely therapeutic and descriptive and wasn't in the business of proposing theories, didn't immediately contradict himself by proposing the frankly ridiculous theory attributed to him that meaning is grounded in inter-subjective agreement or in some publicly obeyed rule-set sent decreed from above by the guardians of meaning in Platonia.

The confusion here, seem to partly stem from the public's lack of understanding of the positivistic epistemological ideas of his time that he was attacking, as well as a general lack of awareness regarding Wittgenstein's so-called "middle period", in which he wrote about his phenomenological inquiries and negative conclusions that there was no hope of obtaining a phenomenological theory of meaning of the sort proposed his earlier self proposed.

But that doesn't mean Witt then concluded "in that case, by appealing to the law of excluded middle realism is true. I propose a new epistemological foundation in which there is only one sort of meaning that is decided by the public, platonia or scientific naturalism in a mind-independent reality". All he concluded is that due to the overwhelming complexity and uncertainty of phenomenological analysis, it is impossible for himself to give an exhaustive and unconditional phenomenal theory accounting for his own use of words.

It is therefore understandable, as to why Wittgenstein was sympathetic towards Heidegger and could personally relate to Being and Time on the one hand, while at the same time insinuating that Being and Time was nonsensical when viewed as a collection of propositions with an inter-subjectively determinable truth-value.

Nonsense doesn't mean "false", it merely refers to an inability to determine the sense of a word when it used in a context from which it did not originate. Wittgenstein's sympathies towards Heidegger demonstrate that he did not believe the most important types of meaning to be inter-subjectively decided. Only inter-subjective meaning is inter-subjectively decided.

We can all agree that we can relate to Being in Time, without pretending to ourselves that we understand each-other's understanding of this work when viewing our agreement from the perspective of a different language-game.

Ah, but see the title. I addressed it directly. — Banno

Banno, you can't address the title "What’s the biggest difference Heidegger and Wittgenstein?" directly. It is impossible to address it directly or indirectly. The text of the title is syntactically incorrect, therefore semantically nonsensical. How can you address something that does not make sense? that does not make sense.