Dilthey believed that Husserl (like William James) represented the new psychology he was aiming for. Heidegger has pointed out the somewhat strange fact that Dilthey was interested in an "abstract" philosopher like Husserl (who, in fact, thought that Dilthey was too much of a skeptical relativist and not interested in "ideal" meanings). — waarala

Nice background. Thanks.

I would go so far as to say that if I cannot put it my own words, then I do not understand it. — Arne

:up:

This is why these days I put writing at the center of education. Articulation is like bending steel. People tend to think they know from merely reading or hearing, but finding other representatives in the same equivalence class ( paraphrasing points) is the true test. One takes a risk.

Feel free to correct me. I'm spitting out some of my take on Heidegger below.

To be historical is to be the kind of social being that has a world, a form of life. The spine or foundation of this form of life is personified by [the] one (as in what one does). Such a world includes a vast equipmental nexus, chairs for sitting on, forks for stabbing porkchops, books for staring at, ... This world is an immediatelysignificant lifeworld. One lives and moves in its familiarity, popping out for a bit, grabbing something from Starbucks, be back in a jiffy. [ Note the prephysics grasping of space and time. This is not Cartesian geometrical space. Also see Carlin's monologue on how many jiffies are in two shakes of a lamb. ] One is busy, mostly absorbed in this or that little task, bringing it to fruition as part of bringing ever larger schemes to fruition. One integrates all sorts of tasks into a general mode of being or lifeproject, living into being a good father, being a good philosopher.

This world in which we all live is something like a developing organism. New memes pop up, others die. Technology changes. Those who weren't around in 1994 (in that world) can't 'get' (without serious effort ?) what grunge meant. Young people love their lingo, phrases which the old folks can't handle properly. The phrases in yesterday's books are rusty 'antiquities.' One has to turn one's imagination into a time machine, pore over the letters of that forgotten world, to begin to understand what such antiques (maybe memes thought of as tools) were good for, how one intended and wielded them back then. But how one intended them is only the beginning, because genius or authenticity twists the given and uses tools in a wrong way that becomes the right way. Each generation inherits the geniuses along with the nobodies of the previous generations. Yesterday's blazing metaphor is today's triviality, today's necessity, for the contingent tends to harden into a false necessity. This is why deconstruction and archeology are necessary. A certain path was taken once and people forget that things could have been otherwise --- until the crazy asshole philosopher questions the obvious, uses a dead metaphor as tool the wrong way and gets lucky. Interpretation, once heroic, hardens into interpretedness, what every idiot 'knows,' what every nobody (anyone and everyone) now finds obvious, though their grandpappy tried to kill the fellow who came up with it.

Time is [ the ] one's self-confrontation, a snake twisting out of its skin.

Carlin doing phenomenology ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FXtyVPEKSk

This also gets at the heart of Heidegger :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#DiaPhr
To put the point more generally, and in more basic ontological terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must already find ourselves ‘in’ the world ‘along with’ that which is to be understood. All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in a prior ‘ontological’ understanding—a prior hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be understood as the attempt to ‘make explicit’ the structure of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the explication of this situatedness—of this basic ontological mode of understanding—is essentially a matter of exhibiting or ‘laying-bare’ a structure with which we are already familiar (as well as a structure that is present in every event of understanding) and in which we are already embedded. In this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger’s thinking, as just such a ‘laying bare’ (it also takes the form, given the focus on situation and situatedness, of what Heidegger later calls a ‘topology’ (Topologie) or a ‘saying of place’—see Malpas 2014).

The dominant memes (tropes) of a generation (of a form of life) are the tentacles it uses to explore and grasp any novel object. We are cyborgs to the core, enacting an impersonal conceptual scheme which we do not notice and did not choose. See the child learn to bark and scratch English and its contingent singifiers for a contingently articulated web of intercontrastive signifieds. This is how we roll, what we do, what we are, interpretive processes, bound time on the backs of primates.

Maybe how thrown we are is underestimated. It's not just being born lefthanded to a lavatory attendant and an epileptic with long fingers. It's the deepest part of me, my boldest thoughts, the language I am forced to think them in and with. It's my most basic bodily tendencies to react (Dreyfus likes this part, such as how close people stand in different cultures, how assertive they are physically.) Does Bergson fit in here ? We are continuous beings, gliding and accumulating, skating understandingly on a pre-conceptually significant and soporifically familiar roundabout. We do 70 on the highway, thinking about the book we are going to write, remembering an interaction that went beautifully, wincing at one that hurt.

As it turns out, Dilthey’s historicism ends up
idealizing history in a way that Husserl avoids. — Joshs

Hmmm... (I guess I should reread The Origins of Geometry.)

:up: Excellent! Lots of valuable ideas.

Very kind!

Those who weren't around in 1994 (in that world) can't 'get' (without serious effort ?) what grunge meant. — plaque flag

Quick digression. I have no idea what grunge meant and I was there. Nirvana, I take it? Don't know any of their music. I've never participated in popular or contemporary music or culture, so the period when I was young - 80's/90's - is a black hole of films, TV and music unconsumed, except, perhaps, through ads and cultural osmosis. We don't all inhabit the same place, even when we do. :wink:

I have no idea what grunge meant and I was there. Nirvana, I take it? Don't know any of their music. — Tom Storm

First things first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWh2lA1m-c

Making a case for the trip from Hegel to Heidegger in terms of form-of-life, Geist, das Man (a generation) :

Yorck emphasizes the “virtuality” or “effectivity” of history, i.e., the cumulative effects and results of individual persons exerting power and influence in transmitting the possibility and conception of life to their descendants. — plaque flag

from Hegel :

The mutations which history presents have been long characterised in the general, as an advance to something better, more perfect. The changes that take place in Nature — how infinitely manifold soever they may be — exhibit only a perpetually self-repeating cycle; in Nature there happens “nothing new under the sun,” and the multiform play of its phenomena so far induces a feeling of ennui; only in those changes which take place in the region of Spirit does anything new arise. This peculiarity in the world of mind has indicated in the case of man an altogether different destiny from that of merely natural objects ... namely, a real capacity for change, and that for the, better, — an impulse of perfectibility.
...
Universal history — as already demonstrated — shows the development of the consciousness of Freedom on the part of Spirit, and of the consequent realisation of that Freedom. This development implies a gradation — a series of increasingly adequate expressions or manifestations of Freedom, which result from its Idea. The logical, and — as still more prominent — the dialectical nature of the Idea in general, viz. that it is self-determined — that it assumes successive forms which it successively transcends; and by this very process of transcending its earlier stages, gains an affirmative, and, in fact, a richer and more concrete shape; — this necessity of its nature, and the necessary series of pure abstract forms which the Idea successively assumes — is exhibited in the department of Logic. Here we need adopt only one of its results, viz. that every step in the process, as differing from any other, has its determinate peculiar principle. In history this principle is idiosyncrasy of Spirit — peculiar National Genius. It is within the limitations of this idiosyncrasy that the spirit of the nation, concretely manifested, expresses every aspect of its consciousness and will — the whole cycle of its realisation. Its religion, its polity, its ethics, its legislation, and even its science, art, and mechanical skill, all bear its stamp.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history5.htm#iii

The entire given psycho-physical reality is not something that is, but something that lives: that is the germ cell of historicity. And self-reflection, which is directed not at an abstract I, but the entirety of my own self, will find that I am historically determined, just as physics grasps me as determined by the cosmos. Just as I am nature, I am history. And in this decisive sense we have to understand Goethe's dictum of [our] having lived [Gelebthaben] for at least three thousand years. — plaque flag

In other words, we are not a thing like a rock or even a honey-badger but instead a living concentration or accumulation of three thousand years of research and development, and that's just the software, the compacted-transmitted training, the human dance after centuries of improvisation within the constraints of what had already happened up to that point. I do not see the world through universal timeless eyes (with eternal platonic concepts) but through historical eyes (with evolved and 'liquid' concepts). We take a compatible (thrown) place within the social construction performance of reality. This is not to deny that physics reveals a relatively solid and unchanging core, but Nature is a product of (part of ) Spirit. In other words, physics is part of that performance, methodically reducing 'rich time' to 'clock time,' a succession of equally meaningless nows. A system of dead predictable stuff is a powerful tool.

the analysis and evaluation of the contemporary intellectual-historical situation is integral to philosophy—all the more so if philosophy self-reflexively grasps its ineluctably historical nature — plaque flag

The young philosopher is always already thrown into a set of famous philosophers and their approaches, their pet themes and concepts --- and these influences were themselves thrown in the same way, so that the whole sequence is temporally cumulative and continuous, a smooth but curving torchlit path in some vast space left mostly dark, habitat of unchosen lifeworlds.

That life is historical means that each person is always already outside his or her own individual “nature” and placed within the historical connection to predecessor- and successor-generations. For Yorck, living self-consciousness is, to use Hegel's fortuitous phrase, “the I that is we and the we that is I” (Hegel 1807, p. 140). — plaque flag

We see this Hegelian insight (which he surely got elsewhere) appear in Feuerbach, Yorck, Dilthey, and Heidegger. Predecessor generations have been discussed already (our having been thrown.) The mention of successor generations emphasizes our future directedness (our projection, our livingtoward, strivingtoward, bringing-to-fruition, expectant concern. Summer porn posthumously. The strong poet intends to pry its way into the past of the future. This poet hopes to be experienced as fate by those who come later. Indeed, those who come later will be (to some degree) a repetition of this poet, a reenactment of its memes. What is it in us that wants to come home with silver and gold?

Yorck understands religious life in terms of its “freedom from the world” or Weltfreiheit (ST, p. 81 & 112). Psychologically, freedom from the world is the precondition for the consciousness of a world-transcendent God, or the consciousness of transcendence (ST, p. 105). — plaque flag

Freedom from the world is a genuine lack of interest in more typical status indicators like wealth and fame, as well as (perhaps) a lack of attachment to longevity. One values differently. One has a rich interiority, a secret source of status. Consider the supreme myth of a transcendent god who only appears for the public eye (for One's eye) as a church-and-state crucified blasphemer. How could such a myth be intensified ? It screams its message, even to an atheist like me.

I find a gnostic (?) meaning in it as well. All good and beautiful and lovely things that exist...do so down here in 'hell,' on our mad prison planet, subject at all times to humiliation and accident, enacting the 'will' of that old gametheoretical demonking Moloch. Matrix, mother : tender and yet devouring.

I'm using Bard for the first time, and here's a great example of idle talk.

Here is an imitation of Martin Heidegger making fun of Plato:

"Plato, my dear friend, you are a dreamer. You live in a world of your own making, a world of eternal forms and perfect ideals. But the real world is not like that. The real world is messy and imperfect, and it is constantly changing.

You think that you can escape the real world by retreating into your ivory tower, but you are wrong. The real world will always find you. And when it does, you will be forced to confront it.

I urge you to come down from your ivory tower and face the real world. It is a harsh world, but it is also a beautiful world. And it is the only world that we have.

So stop dreaming, Plato, and start living."


This is better:

The snake of history
Uncoils and eats itself,
Writhing and twisting
Through the centuries.

Its tail is its head,
Its head is its tail,
And it devours itself
In an endless cycle.

It is a symbol of death
And rebirth,
Of destruction
And creation.

It is a reminder
That nothing is permanent,
That all things must change,
And that even the past
Is not set in stone.

Today I got the Winter Semester 1919/1920 Basic Problems of Phenomenology lectures. This is very early stuff which is already quite powerful, as good as the more famous stuff, something like its beginnings. Instead of 'Dasein' the word is 'life,' and Heidegger is trying for a pretheoretical description of life. He's digging like a poet for the words that'll make it explicit. It's also about a radical grasp of phenomenology as fundamental prescience from within phenomenology, from out of the current of life itself.

Just to be clear, this is not the other later Basic Problems.


It's is this one : https://www.amazon.com/dp/1441103600