Comments

  • Heidegger’s Downfall

    I think some of the anxiety came from the revolutions of 1848 where institutions accepted some democratic reforms in exchange for protecting the status quo. The anti-liberal reaction to the revolutions became the grounds for the ultra-nationalist movements that followed.

    Nietzsche tried a few lines of this when he was young. His rejection of Wagner signaled the end of that party. To my knowledge, Heidegger never addressed that part of Nietzsche's teachings despite the considerable effort to interpret other parts.
  • Karma. Anyone understand it?

    The aspect of cause and effect says to me that there is not a sentient being tallying up a person's score but rather there is a structure that is changed immediately by the 'good' or 'bad' act but the different effects play out in different ways over time. A sort of action at distance that seems accidental but is not.

    I think of it like the Picture of Dorian Gray, where the canvas is constantly being updated but cannot always be viewed. The idea that one is reborn under that condition is a tragic one. The song Born under a Bad Sign comes to mind.
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    It seems to me that generations of humans have dealt with being a self. It has been framed in different ways, but I am pretty sure we all are in the same pool, treading water. The recognition of isolation is interwoven with different ideas about connection.

    The situation is not self-explanatory. Very different kinds of investigation, philosophical and psychological, have and are being pursued.

    The tiny boat is not close to any shore.
  • Heidegger’s Downfall

    Yes, I can see how the gap between evaluations involves the experience of being lost. I brought up the gap, however, in order to address this challenge in regard to the politics involved:

    Nietzsche has played that role for decades. Apart from the political aspect, the question is, is there any evidence that such readings get the philosophy right?Joshs

    Whatever Heidegger hoped for or feared in his political actions, the interim between the point of departure and the true "abode" provides no register for taking responsibility for any 'compulsion to malignancy' he may have participated in.

    That gap is there in the things he said, not merely an interpretation of what he meant.
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    Is there a concern for the human things in this more originary thinking? Where do we see it?Fooloso4

    In Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, he puts the matter this way:

    The thinking that inquires into the truth of Being and so defines man's essential abode from Being and toward Being is neither ethics nor ontology. Thus the Thus the question about the relation of each to the other no longer has any basis in this sphere. Nonetheless, your question, thought in a more original way, retains a meaning and an essential importance.
    For it must be asked: If the thinking that ponders the truth of Being defines the essence of humanitas as ek-sistence from the latter's belongingness to Being, then does thinking remain only a theoretical representation Being and of man; or can we obtain from such knowledge directives that can be readily applied to our active lives?

    The answer is that such thinking is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass before this distinction. Such thinking is, in so far as it is, recollection of Being and nothing else. Belonging to Being, because thrown by Being into the preservation of its truth and claimed for such preservation, it thinks Being. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is. But it is by saying its matter. Historically, only saying [Sage] belongs to the matter of thinking, the one that is in each case appropriate to its matter. Its material relevance is essentially higher than the validity of the sciences, because it is freer. For it lets Being-be.
    — Basic Writings of Heidegger, translated by Capuzzi and Gray, page 259

    The above would seem to place us on the verge of a kind of quietism but this is shown not to be the case shortly afterwards:

    And yet thinking never creates the house of Being. Thinking conducts historical ek-sistence, that is, the humanitus of homo humanitus, into the realm of the upsurgence of healing [des Heilens].

    With healing, evil appears all the more in the clearing of Being. The essence of evil does not consist in the mere baseness of human action, but rather in the malice of rage. Both of these, however, healing and raging, can essentially occur only in Being, in so far as Being itself is what is contested. It it is concealed the essential provenance of nihilation. What nihilates illuminates itself as the negative. This can be addressed in the "no." The "not" in no way arise from the no-saying of negation. Every "no" that does not mistake itself as willful assertion of the positing power of subjectivity, but rather remains a letting be of ek-sistence, answers to the claim of of the nihilation illumined. Every "no" is simply the affirmation of the "not." Every affirmation consists in acknowledgment. Acknowledgment lets that toward which it goes come toward it. It is believed that nihilation is nowhere to be found in the beings themselves. This is correct as long as one seeks nihilation as some kind of being, as an existing quality in beings. But in so seeking, one is not seeking nihilation. Neither is Being any existing quality that allows itself to be fixed among beings. And yet Being is more in being than any being. Because nihilation occurs essentially in Being itself we can never discern it as a being among beings. Reference to this impossibility never in any way proves that the origin of the not is no-saying. This proof appears to carry only if one posits beings as what is objective for subjectivity.

    [Skipping to next two paragraph to reduce typing]

    The nihilating in Being is the essence of what I call the nothing. Hence, because it thinks Being, thinking thinks the nothing.

    To healing Being first grants ascent into grace, to raging its compulsion to malignancy.
    — ibid. page 260-261

    The benefit of grace and the suffering of a compulsion to malignancy seems to be a "human" thing but Heidegger says we will not benefit from knowing about this condition until we reach one not yet experienced:

    More essential than instituting rules is that man find the way to his abode in the truth of Being. — ibid. 262

    It can be a long time between trains.
  • Reasons to call Jesus God

    Christianity has come to be different things at different times to different people. Placing Feuerbach in a more specific context was a thought I had about how the personal became something different than what was expressed before.

    The basis upon which that observation is made is not the same as how I see the matter by myself. I am not going to do that here.
  • Reasons to call Jesus God

    Or a beginning of a new one required more work than originally anticipated.

    Project Management is born.
  • Reasons to call Jesus God
    One does not have to decide about the limits of the law (in regard to Paul's view) to see how Augustine made the issue about a personal choice.
    — Paine

    Can you explain ?
    plaque flag

    Paul expected the world to change forever and the sooner the better.

    By the time of Augustine, waiting for the change required an adjustment of expectations. A dual citizenship of sorts was encouraged. The cleanliness of the inside of the cup compared to the outside is now entangled with the future of the world.
  • Reasons to call Jesus God
    Did Christianity contribute to a tradition of radical interiority?plaque flag

    One does not have to decide about the limits of the law (in regard to Paul's view) to see how Augustine made the issue about a personal choice.

    And the idea that a person was a locus for changing or not changing things became a thing, set against a background of relentless continuity. The City of God versus the City of Men.

    I am not ascribing to that view but think it is closer to what Feuerbach was talking about than the Gospels taken by themselves.
  • Reasons to call Jesus God

    Okay. I see we are at the boundaries of the other's perspective.

    Yes, another thread.

    I will read your selected essays if you read The Concept of Anxiety.
  • Reasons to call Jesus God

    Kierkegaard was pretty clear about what conditions he laid out required of an individual.

    You will have to enlighten me how and where Heidegger 'generalized' that.

    One challenge in that regard is how to see Heidegger as a bridge Kierkegaard saw Hegel unable to build.

    Let me put it another way. The emphasis upon the Single Individual versus a 'person in their situation" is not a difference unless it is one.

    Is that not the question?
  • Reasons to call Jesus God

    Whatever else one might think of Kierkegaard, he saw the demand from a person to follow Christ as a direct requirement even if the metaphors were unclear. The wiki page you cite gives a few tastes from the Works of Love:

    But the metaphorical words are of course not brand-new words but are the already given words. Just as the spirit is invisible, so also is its language a secret, and the secret lies in its using the same words as the child and the simpleminded person but using them metaphorically, whereby the spirit denies the sensate or sensate-physical way. The difference is by no means a noticeable difference. For this reason we rightfully regard it as a sign of false spirituality to parade a noticeable difference-which is merely sensate, whereas the spirit's manner is the metaphor's quiet, whispering secret – for the person who has ears to hear. Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 1847, Hong 1995 p. 209-210

    Love builds up by presupposing that love is present. Have you not experienced this yourself, my listener? If anyone has ever spoken to you in such a way or treated you in such a way that you really felt built up, this was because you very vividly perceived how he presupposed love to be in you. Wisdom is a being-for-itself quality; power, talent, knowledge, etc. are likewise being-for-itself qualities. To be wise does not mean to presuppose that others are wise; on the contrary, it may be very wise and true if the truly wise person assumes that far from all people are wise. But love is not a being-for-itself quality but a quality by which or in which you are for others. Loving means to presuppose love in others. Soren Kierkegaard Works of Love, Hong p. 222-224
  • Ukraine Crisis
    I remember Putin's shrug. The rhetoric at the time was to emphasize that Finland was an independent country that could join clubs as they wish while Ukraine was an internal component being stolen from Russia. That seems like a long time ago after months of attritional warfare.

    The latest Russian threats are directed to what and whether new elements are brought into Finland on account of the change. I have no idea what is being considered in that regard.
  • Meta-Philosophy: Types and Orientations
    This is an interesting approach since I have problems with classification.

    I agree with Deleuze when he treats some concepts as created things. When one uses them as a point of departure, the thought is some of them and some of the one using it. That is a different activity from each of us expressing ourselves as well as we can with the words we can share as given starting points.

    That is why I put effort into wrestling with 'primary' text. I want to have what is said to be mine, but I recognize when the feeling is not mutual.
  • Bunge’s Ten Criticisms of Philosophy

    Well said. The focus on Naess is appreciated. I would add the perspective of Gregory Bateson as one who saw a 'humanism' integral to the conditions of life. Bateson's development of 'feedback loops' and 'recursion' to draw parallels between the 'mental' development of types and changes in other organisms blows past Bunge's clumsy distinction between what is an 'ideal' or a 'material'.

    Naess and Bateson also bring into question Bunge's need to dispel nihilism because it is degrading. That is an odd way to dismiss any discussion of a pathology as a well established condition.
  • Bunge’s Ten Criticisms of Philosophy


    Bunge points to a problem with specialization and then ends up tossing a lateral pass to a certain group of specialists. Others have made that move a part of their thesis. Bunge is excluding work on the basis of a value that is being negated by this list of thinkers.

    Is that a set of judgements masquerading as facts?
  • Bunge’s Ten Criticisms of Philosophy

    Bunge's observation about constructive criticism, as a lack in philosophical discourse, does bring into question his dismissal of so many thinkers on the grounds of being useless wankers.

    That part, however, was fun.
  • What are your philosophies?

    What do you take as examples of 'previous groundings'?
  • What are your philosophies?

    I get the map versus terrain distinction. Where we disagree is if the efforts of thinkers are properly understood as:

    "previous groundings of signifiers so as to receive the stated grounding of the speaker."

    That makes it sound like you have gained a height above the others where you have a better view. The presumption does not offend me.

    But you are taking the 'previous groundings' as something that can be accepted as such.

    So, where are you going to put all those who object to the map drawn under those conditions?
  • What are your philosophies?
    There is definitely much value inherent in this process. It exercises many things; one's discipline, one's ability to comprehend and reason, one's ability to fluidly shift between semiotic mappings, etc.Ø implies everything

    There is always the question of what the author was/is trying to say. I am not sure what the 'fluidity' you mention refers to. Is it the way academics talk amongst each other or are you saying that those original intentions are simply not available?

    "Art" is treated very differently by different people. Do you have someone who frames this particularly well in your mind or do you have your own theory?
  • What are your philosophies?

    I did not mean to imply struggle had an intrinsic value in this context. Trying to read important thinkers is not easy because they are the ones handing out the difficult homework. Readers have to interpret a meaning to even have an inkling of what is being said. The movement from first guesses to better ones is a commitment to learn the lessons as they are presented. I have not had yet the experience of getting to the end.

    That is different from settling upon a mark of what was intended. A mark that can be freely traded in the marketplace of ideas. Those two dimensions are entangled with each other. I propose that they cannot be dissolved into one.
  • What are your philosophies?

    I hope I did not imply as much.
  • What are your philosophies?

    I did say that the method has value. Maybe saying "too easy" sends the wrong message. I find a value in struggling and becoming familiar with a thinker that cannot be replaced by skillful summation.

    Perhaps my perspective is a disability of sorts. I share many of the interests you mentioned but don't think of them as matters I have a clear relationship with. I feel most closely to what Kafka said:

    "I am the problem, no scholar to be found, far and wide."
  • What are your philosophies?
    I hear many of the differences between philosophers as a problem of translation. The encyclopedic method of putting views into a common language where they can be readily compared to each other has a value but makes it all too easy at the same time.
  • What is needed to think philosophically?
    Must a philosophical mind remove the ego?TiredThinker

    I am disinclined to take "ego" as a given, either as an experience commonly agreed to have happened or as a necessary supposition that means what it means well enough to refer to it as a self-evident thing.

    As my grammar demonstrates, the intention to speak for oneself is a requirement of honest discourse but is not a proof of something by itself.
  • Fear of Death
    I think a lot about how memory changes its role as it becomes harder to do.
    If I am a ball thrown, describing a parabola through space and time, it seems like there is no gap between when I was trying to escape my past and when I realized the connection was so tenuous in the first place. No effort or resignation was asked from me at that point in the orbit.

    I can see how this shift relates to the anxiety in dreams. Many of the roles are the same but something has changed.
  • Eternal Return

    I think Nietzsche is saying that the problem with recounting cultural history is entangled with the problem of accepting 'natural' science as proceeding from a given ground. The question of cause and effect is raised in the context of what is past and present in all events. These passages are a small sample of an often repeated theme:

    205
    Need.- Need is considered the cause why something came to be; but in truth it is often merely an effect of what has come to be.

    217
    Cause and effect.- Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does afterward.
    — ibid, The Gay Science.

    As you note, Nietzsche wants to cancel the teleological framework through which events are described. Nonetheless, he also wants to relate a record of the past that can be accepted as such. This is why he approaches it as a work of genealogy; What has come about may be a compilation of accidents and 'errors' but the sequence of events places us here, in the moment.

    The 'will to power' perspective lets us gather evidence in a different way but is it a replacement for what it cancels? The question asked back at 109 about whether one view of nature has been brought to an end and another has begun still lingers after other matters have been decided.

    I am confused by your use of the term 'historicism". It is used by the detractors of Nietzsche and Heidegger to object to the idea we are a collection of circumstances without any sort of inherent nature shaping outcomes in our experience.
  • Eternal Return
    We glimpse that milieu from within the terms of our own milieu.Joshs

    This brings into question what the 'historical' view provides against the background of what does not change (or not at the same rate or for unrelated reasons). When Nietzsche and Heidegger, for example, present how ancient people thought and felt differently than 'we' do, the idea is not presented as an independently experienced fact because that is impossible. The past and present people share a condition that places them in contrast to each other. The proposal can only be interesting if it introduces a new way to look at what is being experienced presently.

    That dynamic is missing in a world where our "situatedness" is a horizon that never lets us know what other people thought. That could be the basis for cancelling the 'historical' as a category. Accepting that limit as self-evident also cancels the history of why the contrast became interesting.

    Apart from arguments about what is 'metaphysics' any longer, it is fruitful to read 354 and 355 of The Gay Science because it directly addresses what is often discussed in "post modernism."

    My observation does require accepting a common language capable of such a comparison.
  • Eternal Return

    Heidegger specifically claimed that Nietzsche "closed the circle of Western metaphysics but did not think beyond it. What is at issue is to what degree Nietzsche intended the system others filled out for him.

    In any discussion of a philosopher’s work, what is just as important as what they ‘actually’ said is what we would like them to mean.Joshs

    How is my presentation not an effort in that regard? I was not arguing about how to classify Nietzsche in relation to other thinkers but to wrestle with what is meant by the author. Every reader has to decide what is being said for themselves. "Liking them to mean" something has to be tied to more than a wish for it to mean something.
  • Eternal Return

    Nietzsche directly addresses what science is when he asks these questions in The Gay Science:

    Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in terms of a pure. newly discovered, newly redeemed nature? — ibid. 109

    This brings a fundamental tension into the investigation because a ground is not being invoked where the two uses of science are clearly distinguished. That tension is evident in the next section where the human condition is put forward as the combination of two errors:

    Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power-until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference:Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110, translated by Walter Kaufman

    The "life-preserving power", through which these conditions are introduced, cannot be called upon to settle the case here because what is to be counted as a fact is under investigation. In regard to the recent discussion about truth upthread, these set of conditions Nietzsche puts forward has 'truth' as a component of the creature in question.

    Passing from one kind of nature to another will be tricky. Nietzsche speaks differently (sometimes contradictorily) of how one is going away from the old or toward the new in different contexts. The preference for a genealogy of ancestors over a chain of causes can be seen in this light. As The Gay Science nears the end, the "combination" of errors in 110 is explained in a different way:

    My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, "to know ourselves," each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but "'average." Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness, by the "genius of the species" that commands it--and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique. and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be.

    This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities. and generalization. Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and anyone who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease.

    You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: This distinction I leave to the epistemologists who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of "thing-in-itself" and appearance; for we do not "know" nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction. We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for "truth": we "know" (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "utility" is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.
    ibid. halfway through 354

    The question about science asked in 109 is no longer a tug-of-war between motivations but has its benefits and defects collected together:

    Even the most cautious among them suppose that what is familiar is at least more easily knowable than what is strange, and that, for example, sound method demands that we start from the "inner world, from the "facts of consciousness"... because this world is more familiar to us. Error of errors! What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to "know" - that is. to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as "outside us." The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness-one might almost say, with the unnatural sciences - is due precisely to the fact that they choose for their object what is strange, while it is almost contradictory and absurd to even try to choose for an object what is not-strange. — ibid. half of 355

    The passengers on the little boat are not only seasick but cold and hungry too. If this is the primary condition, what happened to the perspective of the individual and the choices they make? The difference
    Nietzsche sees in embracing the return for the benefit of becoming who one is happens where the elements favor a different outcome. That is why I ask:

    Are "metaphysicians" such as Heidegger and Deleuze providing a ground that Nietzsche does not?

    Pardon me if that was more elaboration than you were asking for.
  • Eternal Return

    I can but it would help if you gave a point of departure from the argument I put forward making the proposition.

    Are you saying that what I said is not intelligible as it stands? Or are you saying it makes some kind of sense but you are not sure what?
  • Eternal Return

    This description of the 'world' does fit better with later thinkers of 'cosmology' concerned with stating the conditions of our existence. How that search for elements relates to personal experience is critical to many of the disputes, Jamal referred to. The "thought experiment" presses the acceptance of the condition to be either a cruel punishment or an unanticipated release. If this is amor fati, there can be no hedging of bets.

    This places a tension between attempts to explain the world and questioning what those explanations are. The section 110 from Gay Science I quoted upthread puts the problem in sharp relief. The role of explanation is being explained against a background of circumstances that no Organon of Aristotle could support.

    In the horizon of the infinite.-- We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now. little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom and there is no longer any "land."ibid. 124

    In the face of this, it seems fair for me to ask if Heidegger and Deleuze are asking for more "land' than Nietzsche was willing to put on the market.
  • Eternal Return
    Sounds like you have fun with Nietzsche ahead of you.frank

    That was a contemptuous reply. I sense an underlying animus is underway.

    Perhaps you were thinking of the following:

    Origin of knowledge.- Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith* which were continually inherited. until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species. include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late that truth emerged-as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions. sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those basic errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial. Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which "true and "untrue,. were determined down to the most remote regions of logic. Thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any real fight. but denial and doubt were simply considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics. who nevertheless posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors believed that it was possible to live in accordance with these opposites: they invented the sage as the man who was unchangeable and impersonal, the man of the universality of intuition who was One and All at the same time, with a special capacity for his inverted knowledge: they had the faith that their knowledge was also the principle of life. But in order to claim all of this, they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration; they had to misapprehend the nature of the knower; they had to deny the role of the impulses in knowledge; and quite generally they had to conceive of reason: as a completely free and spontaneous activity. They shut their eyes to the fact that they. too, had arrived at their propositions through opposition to common sense. or owing to a desire for tranquility, for sole possession. or for dominion. The subtler development of honesty and skepticism eventually made these people. too, impossible; their ways of living and judging were seen to be also dependent upon the primeval impulses and basic errors of all sentient existence.
    This subtler honesty and skepticism came into being wherever two contradictory sentences appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors. and it was therefore possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life; also wherever new propositions. though not useful for life, were also evidently not harmful to life: in such cases there was room for the expression of an intellectual play impulse, and honest~ and skepticism were imminent and happy like all play. Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgments and convictions. and a ferment, struggle, and 'lust for power' developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about "truths". The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified-and eventually knowledge and the striving for the: truths" found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all "evil" instincts were subordinated to knowledge, employed in her service, and acquired the splendor of what is permitted, honored, and useful and eventually even the eye and innocence of the good.
    Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power-until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation?
    That is the question; that is the experiment.
    Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110, translated by Walter Kaufman

    Describing it as a thought experiment is too detached. It is without the struggle:Fooloso4

    Note that the end of the quoted passage shows that we are the "thought" experiment. Pretty darn attached.
  • Eternal Return

    Heidegger says something similar in his Lectures on Nietzsche. Both readings are difficult to square with the specificity of Nietzsche's actual words:
    ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live again, and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it; but rather every pain and joy, every thought and sigh, and all the unutterably trivial or great things in your life will have to happen to you again, with everything in the same series and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’ — The Gay Science, §341
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    We are thrown into ways of thinking, a cage of concepts that can only be question from within, using those very concepts.green flag

    Is there not a limit to that idea in so far that it could not be expressed without a shared language.?

    If I was convinced of existence as a solipsist, what would be the point of proving it to other people?
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    I think it would be more accurate if he said that this is how he thinks they thought that thought. But I think he would think that I am not thinking historically:

    ...until philosophy is forced to think historically-in a still more essential and original sense of that word-taking its own most grounding question as its point of departure. (186)
    Fooloso4

    It seems that the questioning in that direction is over for Heidegger.

    Has a scholar who did much to pull apart the veil of Scholastic interpretation of Greek thinkers hidden them behind another?
  • Heidegger’s Downfall

    By not understanding, I mean specifically the questioning that Heidegger says is most difficult. In the passage I quoted above:

    Thinking Being, will to power, as eternal return, thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy, means thinking Being as Time. Nietzsche thinks that thought but does not think it as the question of Being and Time. Plato and Aristotle also think that thought when they conceive Being as ousia (presence), but just as little as Nietzsche do they think it as a question.
    If we do ask the question, we do not mean to suggest that we are cleverer than both Nietzsche and Western philosophy, which Nietzsche "only" thinks to its end. We know that the most difficult thought of philosophy has only become more difficult, that the peak of the meditation has not yet been conquered and perhaps not yet even discovered at all.
    Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e

    The limit of metaphysics is found by going past where Nietzsche could go no further. Heidegger is tasking the reader with grasping that end. Otherwise, taking the limit as a given would be to repeat:

    Plato and Aristotle also think that thought when they conceive Being as ousia (presence), but just as little as Nietzsche do they think it as a question.
  • Heidegger’s Downfall

    I don't understand what Heidegger means by going beyond Metaphysics but the following is how he describes its beginning and Nietzsche as the end:

    What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement (of Greek thought)? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the as yet undeveloped guiding question, the question as to what being is?

    The one answer-roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides-tells us that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of is and Being - permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present.

    The other answer-roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus-tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming, its self-unfolding and eventual dissolution.

    To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being in such a way that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent; and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet being is both of these, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, in order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has Being only in creative transfiguration. What is and what becomes are fused in the fundamental thought that what becomes is inasmuch as in creation it becomes being and is becoming. But such becoming-a-being becomes a being that comes-to-be, and does so in the perpetual transformation of what has become firmly fixed and intractable to something made firm in a liberating transfiguration.
    ibid. page 200
  • Heidegger’s Downfall

    That is a different slant for me; Will have to ponder.

    It does seem different than Heidegger saying we posit persistence rather than find it.
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    It would interesting to see where and when the idea of Eternalism originated.Janus

    Heidegger seems to put Heraclitus in this role. Cycles of Becoming repeating without beginning or end.