I would like to see Hegel's language and that of Heideggers from comparison with High Middle German. This might reveal their ideas better, if only that they may be critiuedt — Gregory
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/1818/inaugural.htmBut even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit. Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone – this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14] It can indeed be said that, ever since philosophy first began to emerge in Germany, the condition of this science has never looked so bad, nor has such a view as this, such renunciation of rational cognition, attained such [a degree of] presumption and influence. This view has dragged on [into the present] from the period before our own, and it stands in stark contradiction to that worthier [gediegenern][104] feeling and new, substantial spirit [of today]. I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit, and I address myself to it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content [Gehalt] and when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity [Not] and is inherently [für sich] capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is at home, which it [itself] constructs, and which we share in by studying it. Whatever is true, great, and divine in life is so by virtue of the Idea; the goal of philosophy is to grasp the Idea in its true shape and universality. Nature is confined to implementing reason only by necessity; but the realm of spirit is the realm of freedom. All that holds human life together, all that has value and validity, is spiritual in nature; and this realm of the spirit exists solely through the consciousness of truth and right, through the comprehension of Ideas.[15]
— Hegel
http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/heideggerm-what-is-metaphysics.pdfWhat about this nothing? The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity. But when we give up the nothing in such a way don't we just concede it? Can we, however, speak of concession when we concede nothing? But perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an empty squabble over words. Against it science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing—what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it. Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help. It has recourse to what it rejects. What incongruous state of affairs reveals itself here? With this reflection on our contemporary existence as one determined by science we find ourselves enmeshed in a controversy. In the course of this controversy a question has already evolved. It only requires explicit formulation: How is it with the nothing?
II. The Elaboration of the Question
The elaboration of the question of the nothing must bring us to the point where an answer becomes possible or the impossibility of any answer becomes clear. The nothing is conceded. With a studied indifference science abandons it as what “there is not.” All the same, we shall try to ask about the nothing. What is the nothing? Our very first approach to this question has something unusual about it. In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that “is” such and such; we posit it as a being. But that is exactly what it is distinguished from. Interrogating the nothing—asking what and how it, the nothing, is—turns what is interrogated into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object. Accordingly, every answer to this question is also impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing “is” this or that. With regard to the nothing question and answer alike are inherently absurd. — Heidegger
I'm sure we can talk endlessly about the Nothing, and I have been struck by wonder now and then, that the world exists, against the background of something like nothingness. But the idea that the 'why?' is driven only by wonder seems silly. Why is the baby crying? Is that wonder or the desire to solve a problem? Also a rhetorical objection: why oppose sober science to foolish philosophy? Fortunately Heidegger wasn't always like this. I have some of his early stuff that's solid all the way through (which is not to say that he never struck gold in his later stuff, which I mostly know only through secondary sources.)Only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects
of investigation. Only if science exists on the base of metaphysics can it advance further
in its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose
in ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history. Only because the
nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings
overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and
evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder—the revelation of the nothing—does the
“why?” loom before us. Only because the “why” is possible as such can we in a definite
way inquire into grounds, and ground them. — Heidegger
For Heidegger our bodies are made of matter but our consciousness comes from nothing. This and how it is connected to how we experience being Dasein (beingness IN time) was a mystery for him. — Gregory
Some people are turned off by Heidegger's modern work a-day German. — Gregory
https://philosophynow.org/issues/32/Towards_the_Definition_of_Philosophy_by_Martin_HeideggerHeidegger takes the path of repudiating the primacy of the theoretical attitude. For him, we are never in the position of experiencing the sensedata of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
For Heidegger, in contrast, the theoretical attitude is secondary, being predicated on the existence of a preconceptual understanding that is the basis on which we conduct our day-to-day life. We do not see sense-data, what we see – at least as students and lecturers – are, for example, chairs, desks, windows. There is no problem of the external world because we are always already in that world.
He gives the example of the lectern from which he is speaking. He doesn’t see brown surfaces, arranged in such and such a way, from which he infers the existence of a lectern; what he sees is the lectern ‘in one fell swoop’ as either too high or too low, as convenient to his purpose or not. He sees it as already something meaningful. No doubt a farmer from the Black Forest or a Negro from Senegal would see it somewhat differently, but for the young Heidegger and his audience it is simply part of the environment (Umwelt) in which they live, it has the character of a world (Welt). Further, in a neologism which is to become characteristic of his manner, he turns the noun into a verb – ‘es weltet’ – that is, ‘it worlds.’ — link
To a rube like me, anyone (and their ilk) who proclaims without satire or ribaldry that "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" (The Nothing itself noths) fundamentally is a buffoonish purveyor of metaphysical nonsense (Witty & Freddy), or pestulant charlatan (i.e. "a sophist" against whom Plato prophylactically opposes philosophy). :mask: — 180 Proof
Nothingness nihilates by its presence. The existence of nothingness was discovered by Heidegger when he philosophized his way through anxiety. That is why some find his writings comforting. Discourse on Thinking is particularly good, and I think admitting that nothing is real yet remains nothing is an important step along the philosophical path — Gregory
Here is the story of the Japanese philosopher of "nothing" during the world war eras: — Gregory
This intro is nice approximation of what I make of Hegel, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and others (not claiming to have mastered any of them or even that any of them is masterable or has some exact, final meaning ---to the contrary). These thinkers vary in important ways, but all of them saw through the limitations of a crude ego-centered empiricism. (The Crisis-era Husserl could also be included.) What puts people off a connection between Wittgenstein and Hegel is the rational fear of cryptotheism. I say that because religion also treats this theme, and not always in sophisticated ways. As I read Hegel, he saw that religion had an element that enlightenment lacked, which is a recognition of 'the sociality of reason.' Logic is not some dry, dead neutral thing (excluding mathematical logic.) There's a norm involved, a love directed at an ideal community. (You know, gross hippy stuff.)Starting with An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida’s early work calls into question two basic presuppositions of most modern epistemology: the assumptions that experience is individual and subjective, and that it leads to knowledge only via a corrective process with input from the mind or other individuals. For Nishida, experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out of it. — link
We don't need to reject these lines of thought merely because Japan joined Hitler in declaring war on the world, right? — Gregory
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