For triangulation on Heidegger's thinking, two books recommended.

https://www.amazon.com/Commentary-Heideggers-Being-Time/dp/0875805442/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=a+commentary+of+heidegger%27s+being+and+time&qid=1623463407&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Heidegger-Introduction-Richard-Polt-1999-01-07/dp/B01F9G0IHY/ref=sr_1_fkmr3_2?dchild=1&keywords=heidegger+richard+polk&qid=1623463469&sr=8-2-fkmr3

Both warn against reading feeling and emotion as psychology into his thinking. The simplest approach is to consider that if and when he talks about love and such things, then that is what he means. And where he does not, then he doesn't. On the other hand, some commentary does go that way, so no fault, imo, in finding what is there even if by interpretation. Just the caution that maybe that's not altogether what he was talking about.

So I've been reading this great work as a work of love about love. — Gregory

I think it’s best to start from what we can understand about Heidegger. Just take the title: Being and Time. That gives us a clue.

There’s been a lot of analysis about Sorge, but I think it’s best to place it in the context of his entire thesis. What he’s doing is asking about being. He does so by interrogating an entity: us, dasein. This entity has the basic state of being-in-the-world, which he goes on to discuss at length.

Later, he ties many of these aspects to “care” as their existential meaning. I used to think of it as a kind of willing, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it has more to do with Husserl’s intentionality—our directed activity, our concernful engagement with the world.

But it’s not that important in my view. What’s more important is the ontological interpretation of care, which turns out to be temporality. Dasein is care in the sense of embodied time, which is the horizon for interpreting or understanding being (including ourselves) — hence “Being and Time.” He’ll also go through a long history of how we’ve traditionally understood ourselves, time, and being generally, starting with the Greeks. This is the main thrust of his work.

So is care that important? Not really, and it can often be mistaken as being emotional somehow because of the connotations of the word, when it’s more akin with directed activity or more related to awareness/attentional behavior.

I think when he says "taking care of the world" he means love, plain and simple — Gregory

our most fundamental ability psychologically, ontologically, and spiritually is love. — Gregory

Heidegger isn’t talking g about love or any other particular sentiment but of the pre-condition for any sentiment , or experience, whatsoever.
Care is the pragmatic relational structure of relevance that holds between self and world at all times. We o lu experience anything in the extent to which it matters to us, is significant to us relative to our ongoing concerns.
Care is just as much about hate and indifference as it is about love. If you want to locate a primordial ‘affect’ underlying all others for Heidegger, it’s anxiety, not love.
Love as you mean it is an ‘ ontic’ concern, shears Care is an ontological theme. What’s the difference. The o rival level has to do with how I relate to specific objects in my world, including how I feel about them. The ontological perspective has to do with what makes possible the relation between self and world in general.

Heidegger in Zollikon seminars:

“ would Binswanger's "psychiatric Daseinanalysis" form a section of Heidegger's analytic of Dasein? But as Binswanger himself had to admit a few years ago, he misunderstood the analytic of Dasein, albeit by a "productive misunderstanding," as he calls it. You can see this from the fact that there is a "supplement" to Heidegger's "gloomy care" [diistere Sorge] in Binswanger's lengthy book on the fundamental forms of Dasein.t It is essentially a treatise on love, a topic that Heidegger has supposedly neglected.

What was Binswanger expressing in his endeavor to develop a supplement? What is lacking in reference to the thinking in Being and Time, when Binswanger attempts to make such a supplement? In Being and Time it is said that Da-sein is essentially an issue for itself. At the same time, this Da-sein is defined as originary being-with-one-another. Therefore, Da-sein is also always concerned with others. Thus, the analytic of Da-sein has nothing whatsoever to do with solipsism or subjectivism. But Binswanger's misunderstanding consists not so much of the fact that he wants to supplement "care" with love, but that he does not see that care has an existential, that is, ontological sense. Therefore, the analytic of Da-sein asks for Da-sein's basic ontological (existential) constitution [ Verfassung] and does not wish to give a mere description of the ontic phenomena of Da-sein. The all-determining projection of being human as ecstatic Da-sein is already ontological so that the idea of the human being as "subjectivity of consciousness" is overcome. This projection renders manifest the understanding of being as the basic constitution of Da-sein. It is necessary to look at it in order even to discuss the question of the relationship of the human being as existing to the being of beings (of the non-human being and of existing Da-sein itself). But this question is a result of the question of the meaning of being in general.”

So is care that important? Not really, and it can often be mistaken as being emotional somehow because of the connotations of the word, when it’s more akin with directed activity or more related to awareness/attentional behavior. — Xtrix

I like your summary of Being and Time but I have a quibble about the importance of Care. I agree that it is misinterpreted as being about emotionality. The difference between Husserl’s intentionality and Heidegger’s Care is that the entirety of one’s history as a totality of relevance comes into play in the supposedly simplest acts of perception for Heidegger. For instance, according to Husserl, in constituting a spatial object , that is an objectivizing intention striving for the harmonious fulfillment of the object as a total unity. And each adumbrated moment of the object constitution affects and attracts ( or repellent) the ego.

Notice that the motivation directed toward the object from the ego and from the object to the ego is restore yes to the intentional act of object constitution. Other motivations can be brought to bear , but via shifts of interest. For Heidegger, by contrast, the entirety of Dasein’s past comes into play in any experience, and this is what Care expresses. We care about each minutia of experience in a totalistic way in relation to our past goals, desires, understandings as a unity. Relevance isnt circumscribed for him in the way it is for Husserl.

“The for-the-sake-of -which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance. These relations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial totality. They are what they are as this signifying in which Da-sein gives itself to understand its being-in-the -world beforehand. We shall call this relational totality of signification significance. It is what constitutes the structure of the world, of that in which Da-sein as such always already is.”( Being and Time).

If Heidegger believed that love was ontic and anxiety was ontological, than I think he has it backwards, although I don't think he says this. Intentionality always has to be activated by love of something in some sense. You can't just have will power and anxiety. You would be crippled instantly. And Heidegger doesn't just use the word "care" but says over and over again that man takes care of the world, and I think he would say the world takes care of him too. As I see it, being is man and time is spiritual love. But this is my first impression of the book. It's the only one I've read by him

If Heidegger believed that love was ontic and anxiety was ontological, than I think he has it backwards, although I don't think he says this. Intentionality always has to be activated by love of something in some sense. You can't just have will power and anxiety. You would be crippled instantly. — Gregory

Before one can love or hate anything, or have any particular affective response to the world, one must be affected by the world. If you want to think of Dasein in terms of intentionality (although that is Husserl’s concept, not Heidegger’s) one intends an object of experience, which in Heidegger’s
terms means that Dasein projects ahead of itself. You can think of this as the way that each moment of time is an anticipating beyond itself. At the same time, each moment is my being affected by what I project myself into. So there is an aspect of familiarity and astonishment in each new experience. You could say there is an aspect of love and joy here in this structure, as well as wonder and awe, and that is all implied by primordial anxiety. Heidegger also calls it uncanniness.


“Angst individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as "solus ipse." This existential "solipsism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“ "Together with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility.”

“Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.”

Good description of Care from Joshs and good points from Xtrix.

Citation from B&T from Section VI (Care as the Being of Dasein) subchapter 41. "Dasein's Being as Care" (the preceding chapter 40 has the title: "The basic state of mind of anxiety as distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosed") :

"The formally existential totality of Dasein's ontological structural whole must therefore be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world). This Being fills in the significa­tion of the term "care" [Sorge], which is used in a purely ontologico­-existential manner. From this signification every tendency of Being which one might have in mind ontically, such as worry [Besorgnis] or carefreeness [Sorglosigkeit], is ruled out."

So, Care (as the Being of Dasein) is the temporally stretched structural whole: ahead = future = existentiality, already = past = facticity, alongside = present = falling.

Interesting, that little later Heidegger has to specifically stress that Care is not just existentiality (future aspect) but also facticity (past) and falling (present):

"Care does not characterize just existentiality, let us say, as detached from facticity and falling ; on the contrary, it embraces the unity of these ways in which Being may be characterized."

For the most part the "subject" of this Care is the "They" (i.e. the current society and its ways of thinking, its norms).

More:

"Care, as a primordial structural totality, lies 'before' ["vor"] every factical 'attitude' and 'situation' of Dasein, and it does so existentially a priori; this means that it always lies in them. So this phenomenon by no means expresses a priority of the 'practical' attitude over the theoretical. When we ascertain something present-at-hand by merely beholding it, this activity has the character of care just as much as does a 'political action' or taking a rest and enjoying oneself. 'Theory' and 'practice' are possibilities of Being for an entity whose Being must be defined as "care".

The phenomenon of care in its totality is essentially something that cannot be tom asunder; so any attempts to trace it back to special acts or drives like willing and wishing or urge and addiction, or to construct it out of these, will be unsuccessful. " p.193-194

Care is an a priori structural totality cf. Heidegger's "methodology" as "phenomenological ontology".

Care is the pragmatic relational structure of relevance that holds between self and world at all times. — Joshs

This isn’t right. You’d have to cite something to back this up, but the very distinction between “self” and “world” is very much antithetical to Heidegger.

As I see it, being is man and time is spiritual love. — Gregory

I read it more as: Man, who understands being, is time.

The phenomenon of care in its totality is essentially something that cannot be tom asunder; so any attempts to trace it back to special acts or drives like willing and wishing or urge and addiction, or to construct it out of these, will be unsuccessful. " p.193-194 — waarala

Yes— thanks for citing this passage.

Again, I think it’s best not to dwell on care. I see care as a bridge between the analysis of being-in-the-world and temporality. We “care” about the world by default— we can’t help it. Just as we can’t help being (or having) a world. What’s more important is the structure of time that emerges from the analysis. After all, it’s not “Being and Care”, it’s being and time.

the very distinction between “self” and “world” is very much antithetical to Heidegger. — Xtrix

You’re absolutely correct. Heidegger does not view Dasein from the vantage of a subject-object binary. If one instead speaks of self and world, then Dasein belongs to both poles. Specifically , the self is a constantly changing creation. It exists in unveiling itself by projecting itself on a possibility. What it projects itself on is its world. So the self is its world as the possibility that it projects itself into. Put differently , the self is the tripartite structure of temporality as the past anticipating itself into the future.

Heidegger understands that to be radically, irreducibly, primordially situated in a world is to be guaranteed , at every moment, a world that feelingly creatively impinges on me anew as foreign in some aspect. And it is simultaneously, to feel a belonging familiarity) to what impinges on me in its foreignness due to the anticipative, projective futural aspect of temporality. Heidegger's being-in -the world is always characterized by a pragmatic self-belongingness that he articulates as a heedful circumspective relevance that events always have for Dasein in its world. For Heidegger, self is Dasein, Dasein is attuned understanding , attuned understanding is projection, projection is a happening, an action, historicality, temporality, the over and beyond, self as transcendence, the unveiling of a specific possibility.

I think it’s best not to dwell on care. I see care as a bridge between the analysis of being-in-the-world and temporality. We “care” about the world by default— we can’t help it. Just as we can’t help being (or having) a world. What’s more important is the structure of time that emerges from the analysis. After all, it’s not “Being and Care”, it’s being and time. — Xtrix

Yes, but how has Heidegger radicalized the concept of time so that it can be understood as heedful circumspective relevance? Why can’t we help caring about the world? Temporality is at the heart of Husserl’s model also but Care doesn’t apply to his approach. Why not? Because the structure of temporality for Heidegger describes an intimacy between past present and future missing from Husserl. Care is this intimate pragmatic relevance, this for-the-sake-of which orients all experience with respect to the immediate past.

Being must be defined as "care".

The phenomenon of care in its totality is essentially something that cannot be tom asunder; so any attempts to trace it back to special acts or drives like willing and wishing or urge and addiction, or to construct it out of these, will be unsuccessful. — waarala

But any human willing can be torn asunder. The only thing that can't be torn asunder is matter which can't be created or destroyed. So care would be the substance of the world which holds us in existence and allows us to care, love, and will. That's where I'm at at this point in the discussion.

how has Heidegger radicalized the concept of time so that it can be understood as heedful circumspective relevance? — Joshs

Heidegger says the present arises from and is held up by the future because the future is the past. He doesn't see time as a succession of moments. He says "Time makes itself time as a future that makes the present temporal". Now I just wanted to point out that I think he was highly influenced by Einstein on this.

I read it more as: Man, who understands being, is time. — Xtrix

I like where this is going. Is man time or being?

You’re absolutely correct. Heidegger does not view Dasein from the vantage of a subject-object binary. If one instead speaks of self and world, then Dasein belongs to both poles. — Joshs

It's very tricky to talk about, and I myself often fail to explain it without falling into contradictions. But let me nit-pick a little here: saying "belongs to both" is correct, I think, but notice that "both" also implies that two separate things exist, and that dasein belongs to both of them -- a self and a world. Or perhaps a mind and a body. But another way to say it would be, confusingly, that both are distinctions made by dasein as present-at-hand entities: the present-at-hand entity (the being) of "self" and the present-at-hand entity of "world."

I think you probably agree with this, but it's worth pointing out -- Descartes creeps into even our very way of speaking.

Yes, but how has Heidegger radicalized the concept of time so that it can be understood as heedful circumspective relevance? Why can’t we help caring about the world? Temporality is at the heart of Husserl’s model also but Care doesn’t apply to his approach. Why not? Because the structure of temporality for Heidegger describes an intimacy between past present and future missing from Husserl. Care is this intimate pragmatic relevance, this for-the-sake-of which orients all experience with respect to the immediate past. — Joshs

True, but Sorge is the word that ties together various aspects of being-in-the-world, which is more fo pragmatic the nitty-gritty of dasein's "average everydayness." So while Care is the skeleton, the real analytical meat on the bones comes from the first 5 sections, where he analyzes being-in, worldhood in general, talks about the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, use of equipment (hammering), etc. I personally find that stuff more interesting and insightful, but to each his own.

But any human willing can be torn asunder. The only thing that can't be torn asunder is matter which can't be created or destroyed. So care would be the substance of the world which holds us in existence and allows us to care, love, and will. That's where I'm at at this point in the discussion. — Gregory

But just the way you're describing it betrays a kind of Cartesian way of looking at things. Matter is the only thing that can't be created or destroyed? Why invoke matter? That's already two steps removed from what Heidegger is talking about, because now you're bringing concepts from natural philosophy (science) into the equation -- namely, of physics and chemistry.

Equating care with "substance" is also completely off track, in my view. Substance ontology is another example of something Heidegger is trying to overcome -- he feels Descartes inherits a substance ontology from the middle ages (and thus from the Greeks): "He [Descartes] defined the res cogitans ontologically as an ens; and in the medieval ontology the meaning of Being for such an ens had been fixed by understanding it as an ens creatum. God, as ens infinitum, was the ens increatum." (B/T 46/25)

To say that care is substance or matter, and allows us to love/will is like saying "care allows us to care," which is tautological, and is furthermore treating "care" as some kind of entity that isn't dasein (a substance). But care is dasein.

Also, we have no clue what "love" is. If you want to switch "care" for "love," you can of course, but I think that leads to the potential for huge misunderstandings given the connotations -- for example, that love is a kind of desire or an emotion (as distinct from "hatred"), etc. You can completely hate something or be disgusted by something or be "absorbed" by something or fascinated by something, etc., and that's all care. To subsume all of this under "love" is just a mistake.

I read it more as: Man, who understands being, is time.
— Xtrix

I like where this is going. Is man time or being? — Gregory

Man is time (temporality). Man also exists, of course, and so is a "being" -- but he is the being (entity) for which "being" is even an issue -- he exists with an understanding of being. In other words, he exists and has an understanding of existence. That's how I would say it. But don't take my word for it:

"We have already intimated that Dasein has a pre-ontological Being as its ontically constitutive state. Dasein is in such a way as to be something which understands something like Being. Keeping this interconnection firmly in mind, we shall show that whenever Dasein tacitly understands and interprets something like Being, it does so with time as its standpoint. Time must be brought to light -- and genuinely conceived -- as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it. In order for us to discern this, time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands being." (B/T 39/17)
[Italics are Heidegger's, the underlined part is mine]

If this passage makes sense to you differently, I'm interested in hearing why.

What type of being does Man understand? The material world? I haven't seen where Heidegger explicitly denies this, although he focuses on hammering for example instead of hammers. Also, do you believe Heidegger is saying more than Aristotle and Augustine in putting time in the soul of Dasein?

The understanding I presented of Heidegger on this thread was that the world is material but Time (or Spirit) encircles everything and the world and our action is an action of care on part of something transcendental. I guess this was just my impression, but Heidegger does vaguely speak about transcendence

What type of being does Man understand? The material world? I haven't seen where Heidegger explicitly denies this, although he focuses on hammering for example instead of hammers. — Gregory

I agree with Xtrix. Heidegger’s account is an explicit critique of materiality and objective causality on which science is based, including Relativity. The material object in modern science is derived from Descartes’ notion of substance as res extentia, a thing which is identical
with itself , purely present to itself. The geometrical description of time and space as mathematical grids independent of what takes place in them is made possible by this notion of object as substance. This fall under the mode of the present to hand.

I got a line from Heidegger: "We can this further clarify the temporality of taking care if we pay attention to the modes of circumspectly letting something be encountered that were characterized before as conspicuousness, obstructiveness, and obstinacy."

The self is open, closed, and resistant to non-existence as is inanimate objects.

What type of being does Man understand? The material world? — Gregory

Again, forgive my nit-picking, but when you say "type" of being, do you mean how Man interprets being? I'm taking you to mean this.

So yes, seeing the world as material is a good example. That's certainly one interpretation. In this view the world is a substance -- ousia, in Greek (or how it's traditionally translated, anyway). That substance ontology goes right through Descartes, according to Heidegger. His mind/body dualism is really the res cogitans and the res extensa, in Latin. The res is basically a substance -- the conscious/thinking substance and the extended substance. So here we have a split between our consciousness and the contents of our consciousness, the objects of the "outside world." Seems very natural to most of us. Does this ring true to you as well?

In Kant, the formulation becomes more of a subject with representations about the objects of experience, objects which "pass through" the forms of space and time. But he's still taking up Descartes' ontology. As for his analysis of time, it dates back to Aristotle's essay in his Physics, where time is treated as a present-at-hand being.

But there are many ways of interpreting the world. He argues that the early Greeks interpreted it much differently than those in the middle ages, or even the later Greeks like Plato and Aristotle. He's trying to find the "horizon" for any understanding or interpretation of being at all, and he does so by analyzing us -- dasein. But not in the way we've usually been analyzed and thought of -- in terms of our "reason" or "mind" or "subjectivity" (after all, with an interpretation of being comes an interpretation of human being -- in the West, mostly "echon zoon logon" (the rational animal)). This is why he comes up with this name (dasein), and why he insists on analyzing dasein in its "average everydayness" in a phenomenological manner -- without invoking traditional assumptions, beliefs, prejudices, frameworks, concepts, etc, but letting things speak for themselves, especially that which is "hidden."

As you know, he concludes that time is the horizon for any interception of being, but not "time" in the traditional sense, but in the sense of temporality. Temporality is simply another way of interpretation Sorge, which is a way of tying together our basic state of being-in-the-world.

So you see the different layers here. It's a complicated work, and hard to see it all unless you've read it all (and several times over), studied other texts of his (I recommend Intro to Metaphysics and Basic Problems of Phenomenology), etc.

Also, do you believe Heidegger is saying more than Aristotle and Augustine in putting time in the soul of Dasein? — Gregory

I'm not sure what you mean by this. He does quote from both, and has a long analysis of Aristotle in particular. I'm not sure about his position on Augustine, but with Aristotle he'll go on to say that Aristotle treats "time" as an object, something present-at-hand, and explains it as such in his essay in the Physics. I could go into it more if you're interested, but I'm out of time right now.

To my eyes Heidegger's ontic is dualistic (me and a hammer) but his ontology is not so, and is even onto-theological in a sense. If you have more on how Dasein understands itself as not separate from matter but not lost in the ocean of matter i'd be interested. The next books I wanted to read from him are his essays on Heraclitus and Parmenides. You clearly have read a lot of Heidegger

To my eyes Heidegger's ontic is dualistic (me and a hammer) but his ontology is not so — Gregory

Remember that "ontic" refers to entities, and "ontological" to being. It's not that Heidegger discounts the fact that at times we consider ourselves "selves" or even "subjects" apart from an outside world -- that is certainly the case, sometimes. But precisely in moments of absorbed coping (as Dreyfus puts it), the ready-to-hand moments of skilled action, like hammering, we're not a subject wielding a hammer. Another example is driving, or maybe even walking or opening a door. There's little memory of most of these things, we can be talking or on the phone or thinking about all kinds of things -- most of it is unconscious and not guided by any conscious rule-following. In moments like this, we're not subjects or objects.

If you have more on how Dasein understands itself as not separate from matter but not lost in the ocean of matter i'd be interested. — Gregory

It's worth keeping in mind that "matter" is a scientific concept from physics and chemistry. So from this perspective, which seems to be true for sure, we're atoms and molecules and cells. We have bodies, brains, eyes, organs, flesh, tissue, muscles and bones and blood, etc. But remember the "perspective" part -- just as a hammer can be thought of as a wooden stick with a metal piece on the end of it, weighing a certain amount and of a certain dimension or having other properties, but isn't thought of such when we're absorbed in the activity of hammering, likewise the world isn't simply "material." That's a strong perspective, the perspective of natural science, but it's limiting and, basically, derivative. It leaves out the "world," and our typical being in the world. It's an abstraction which, while true, isn't the whole truth, and isn't even the primary truth. Even as Kant pointed out, rightly, it forgets the "subject" and our contributions to the "outside world" of matter. In a sense, there would be no matter without human beings.

Does this make sense?

That does makes sense, I like that. Maybe *time* is the haze that *being enters* where it no longer knows what is at hand but simply knows the activity as an ontological subject in its own right (and man is then time)

He's second from the right, sitting, at this rally for Peace and Love.

https://philosophynow.org/media/images/issues/121/Heidegger%20with%20Nazis.jpg

just as a hammer can be thought of as a wooden stick with a metal piece on the end of it, weighing a certain amount and of a certain dimension or having other properties, but isn't thought of such when we're absorbed in the activity of hammering, likewise the world isn't simply "material." — Xtrix

Does that mean for Heidegger the world is more than material, that it is at least material? Is a material thing
something that has a countable duration i. time and an extension in space? Does Heidegger accept this description and only want to remind us that the subjective aspect contributes such notions as usefulness to what an object is? How are duration and extension derived? Do they presuppose some basis on which to measure duration and extension, that is , some feature that remains constant and self-identical such that it can be counted?

To my eyes Heidegger's ontic is dualistic (me and a hammer) but his ontology is not so, — Gregory

To Heidegger the present at hand object is assumed by empirical science to be self-identical. It persists as itself. Only in this way can it have duration and extension , so that it ‘occupies’ time and space, with its fixed properties. . But Heidegger says that understood most fundamentally , nothing Dasein discloses ‘occupies’ time and space as enduring and extending itself. Why not? Because each moment of time changes the sense of what it ‘is’ we are experiencing. There are no countable moments of a being. If that is the case, the. how did modern science end up with the notion of self-identical objects in causal interaction in a mathematical-geometric time-space grid?Heidegger derives the present-to-hand from the ready-to-hand as an impoverished modification, where our relevant pragmatic engagement with beings becomes leveled down and distorted ,to ‘just staring at’ something, which he calls a failure to understand. “ “When we just stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more".

In other words , we create out of our constantly transforming relevant engagement with beings an empty abstraction cut off from its origin as relevant engagement in order to produce the method of mathematically based objective science.

We are discussing his work from the 20's

It's about community, work for the community, and love of family and community. — Gregory

Perhaps it took some time for him to find a community/family he could love and work for, then. Consider it a kind of family portrait.

Don’t mind Ciceronianus. He’s just bummed that he doesn’t understand Heidegger’s philosophy. Turning him into a cartoon villain gives him an excuse not to try and read him.