Postmodern philosophy, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the sophists, Gianni Vattimo.

My description of metaphysics is not history of philosophy: since there are so many concepts about metaphysics, I already hinted that the title of this thread is not so correct: it is impossible to answer, because of the plurality of concepts about it, unless you want just to describe a history of how metaphysics has been conceived over time. My description of metaphysics is a choice to build a philosophy of metaphysics that opens perspectives of research, rather than just describing passively how the different philosophers have conceived it.

it is impossible to envisage a world where there are no necessary facts. — Wayfarer

This is your opinion, your philosophy, other philosophers don't think so.

if what you say is true, and we cannot assign a name to anything that changes -- then we can't name anything, including change itself. — Xtrix

We assign names because we see that, together with elements that change, there are elements that don't. If all elements of an object change, we cannot give it a name, it is impossible.

So if tomorrow we call the sun "horse," it won't change that bright ball in the sky — Xtrix

I didn't say that we just call it differently. That would not be a real change. I said "is": if what we today call "sky" tomorrow stops being sky, but rather is really, objectively, as a fact, a "horse", I cannot give it a name, it is impossible to give it a name.

If you consider “being” as "something”, but not permanent, how are you able to give it a name, which is, the word “being”? It seems to me that we can use names only if we consider that something remains unchanged over time. For example, if what I call “sky” today is a “horse” tomorrow, it is completely impossible to me to give it a name, I cannot even figure what I am thinking about. But you call it “being”, which means that, in this something that you call “being”, something remains the same over time, so that today and tomorrow you can still call it “being”. This seems to me that actually you are not conceiving “being” as something really completely changing, really not permanent.

I think it is obvious that metaphysics has different meanings in different times and different authors. As a consequence, the question in the title of the thread “What is metaphysics?” has not much meaning. How do you think to deal with the plurality of positions about the question?

If you consider change as a kind of being, I think this is not really consistent, because, if you really want to be consistent with a perspective based on change, you must consider change also about your idea of change. In other words, if I say “everything changes”, I must admit that this very statement and its meaning must be included in the set of things subject to change.
If you think about change as a way of being, then you are assuming that, along the change, being remains being. But, if it remains being, then you are excluding it from change, you are excluding your statement from the field of things that change.
Heidegger was able to include change in the category of being because he actually modified the meaning of being: being in Heidegger is not absolute, but conditioned by time, by the human condition.
In this context, the meaning of “being” is itself exposed to change. This way Heidegger forced the meaning of “being” to something that actually means human condition, subject to time and death. In this context we cannot say that change is an expression of being, because being itself hasn’t any stable meaning. In other words, Heidegger wanted to keep his philosophy in the terminology of being, and the price for this was to force the meaning of being to something subject to the human condition. This forced him to have nothing to say at a certain point. I think that after Heidegger no other philosophers have reached the high level of his philosophy so far, but I think also that we can do better, we can take his research to better levels.

Anything can be not good for anyone. Can you say any source that is good for you and shows that what I said is wrong?

You can have a look here, as an example.

I am interested in seeing how it is not true, according to what philosophers.

I think it is good to clarify the following things.

The aim of metaphysics is to go beyond physics, beyond science, to get some stable, unassailable truth, that must be impossible to reach by science. If it is possible to reach it by science, then it is subject to all the changes that science is able to bring, like new discoveries, new instruments, new evidence. As such, it is not metaphysics, it is science.
So, if we realize that “the moon is a planet” is something that can be proved or disproved by science, then it is not a metaphysical truth.
An example of truth not reachable by science is this one: the ultimate meaning of the world is to be an instrument to make humans happy. Or: the world was created by God. The purpose of these statements is to reach levels of knowledge that science is unable to reach. This way, metaphysicians feel that they have found a remedy to two problems of science: 1) what science says is changeable by new discoveries; as such, it is not stable, it has not the absolute reliability of eternal truths; 2) science is unable to give us any knowledge about transcendent things, like God, meaning of existence, spirit, interpretation of life.

Science can deal with metaphysical concepts, but when these concepts are dealt with by science, the aim of research about them is not to find anything stable: science has no interest in finding stable things; science has interest in making research based of measurable evidence. So, for example, science can be interested in dealing with the meaning of human existence, insofar as it is possible to find in this question some measurable elements, like, for example, statistics, history, geography. In this context, science is not interested in finding a meaning of existence that must be the ultimate, the definitive one.

After having clarified these things, we can go on by exploring how weak or strong metaphysics is.

Since the very beginning they could have used better self-criticism. Think about Aristotle, for example: why didn’t he ask himself “Why should things be the way I am describing them, matter and shape?”. Plato as well: it is strange that, in the cave myth, he didn’t realize that the one who looks outside the cave is in the same conditions of the ones inside it: every position is conditioned by itself. And Descartes: how is it possible that he didn’t realize that his assumption “I think, then I am” was so highly exposed to criticism? We can even notice that already at their time there were people criticizing their thoughts: think about the sofists, for example. Aristotle knew the problem raised by the sophists; nonetheless, he just carried on, with the result that his philosophy is easy to be demolished. I even think about Heidegger: he criticized the traditional ideas about being, but he also talked about “authenticity”: how didn’t he realize that this concept is extremely similar to the idea of “truth”, which is again exposed to his very own criticism, just on a different level? The simple question that most of them, surprisingly, ignored, is: why should things be just the way I am thinking they are?

In other words, it seems to me that metaphysics just lack self-criticism.

I think that metaphysics, whatever meaning you give to it, has the defect of being bound to being: in certain contexts it is almost a synonim of ontology. The consequence of being bound to being is that it ignores time and subjectivity. Along history metaphysics was criticized by historicists, because, by trying to understand how things are, it looses sight of the fact that things, rather than being, are becoming (Heraclitus). As a consequence, about any metaphysical system of ideas, we should never forget that it is itself conditioned by its own being immersed in the flowing of becoming, changing.
The problem raised by subjectivity is similar, because the fact that anything we think of is conditioned by our subjectivity makes our thoughts dependent on the variability, unreliability of subjectivity.
In other words, the defect of metaphysics is its intention to reach a system of ideas that is expected to be stable, definitive, ultimate, objective, reliable, solid.
We can mean metaphysics in a more flexible and humble perspective, but in this case it seems to me that what we are doing is not philosophy, but science. When science makes its hypotheses, it doesn’t build them with the intention of reaching an end to research. On the contrary, science makes hypotheses as simple intruments to acquire better and better knowledge of the world, without any intention to stop.
So, I would say: if you suppose, for example, that the moon is a planet, just to see how this idea works in comparison to the results coming from observation through technical instruments, then “the moon is a planet” is a scientific hypothesis, which means, there is no intention to make it the ultimate, fundamental system of ideas about the moon.
If you say “the moon is a planet” with the intention to build an assertion that should resist to any criticism, any objection, any doubt, so that, if different conclusions come from observation, we should think that most probably observation is wrong, then you are trying to build metaphysics.
If we think that 2+2=4 is an eternal truth, indesctructible, unassailable, impossible to question, then you are thinking of it in a metaphysical way. As such, this kind of thought has the defect that not only tomorrow 2+2 might give a different result, but also our thoughts about it might change, because ideas are subject to time, change, becoming, as well as anything else.
This way, any attempt to build a system of ideas, with the intention to reach something stable, is metaphysics. So, even when I say that everything is subject to change, if I treat this assertion as a stable and permanent theory, I am doing metaphysics as well.

I agree. Essentially, I think this is Heidegger and unfortunately it iseems to me that analytical philosophy has been prevailing more and more, changing philosophy in science, and this way ignoring Heidegger's research, because science doesn't need to examine the radical questions of philosophy.

Let's forget about my experience of my own consciousness for a minute — T Clark

This is exactly the problem: if you try to forget your own consciousness, what you are trying to understand is not consciousness anymore, it is impossible for it to be consciousness: after trying to forget your own consciousness, what you are trying to understand in an objectified concept of consciousness. An objectified concept of consciousness is not a concept of consciousness, because the experience of consciousness is the experience of your subjectivity, your experience of being a subject. Subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity. If you objectify subjectivity, what you are talking about is not anymore subjectivity.

The problem is in the ambiguity of the concept of consciousness. For example, a computer is able to react to the presence of a person or even to the expression of her face. Can we call this consciousness? If the answers is yes, then consciousness is everywhere, because everything is able to react to anything. If the answer is no, then it becomes extremely difficult to show the difference. When I say “extremely difficult”, I refer also to Chalmers’ expression “hard problem of consciousness”. Obviously, anybody is able to show that their position is not stupid, since the very existence of the “hard problem of consciousness” is impossible to prove.
In order to talk properly about consciousness we need first to admit this ambiguity and confusion. The first problem about consciousness is in using the word “consciousness” as we knew what we are talking about, while actually we are in the middle of the deepest confusion and ambiguity.

Coming from a science and not philosophy background, my first reaction is that in order to truly understand something, you must first extract yourself from within it and observe it objectively.

This is obviously very difficult, perhaps even impossible, in the case of consciousness. We can only really understand consciousness when inhibiting that consciousness, leading to my doubt that we can objectively figure out what that consciousness is.

How can we exit a casual loop of consciousness, where our understanding of consciousness is biased by requiring consciousness? — PhilosophyRunner

This is exactly the problem. Philosophy of consciousness seems stupid to me because, even if we can easily understand where the basic problem is, like you did, it still carries on by following the same wrong way. What can I think about somebody who knocked his nose against a wall, but, nonetheless, he keeps going against that wall?

in order to truly understand something, you must first extract yourself from within it and observe it objectively — PhilosophyRunner

Exactly. And, since what we are talking about is consciousness, which is intimately connected to subjectivity, I mean, our human experience of feeling a subject, an “I”, this means that philosophers persist in extracting themselves from within it and observing it objectively. But, at this point, what we are observing objectively is not subjectivity anymore. Subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity. Objectifying subjectivity is an oxymoron, it is like wanting to freeze fire, and nonetheless this is what philosophy persists in doing.
Even now, when I write “subjectivity”, actually, as soon as I write it, subjectivity is not there anymore, because I have objectified it by putting it in words, so, when I try to communicate the concept of subjectivity by writing here “subjectivity”, instantly I am not talking anymore about subjectivity. I just hope that the reader, instead of working with the object costituted by the word “subjectivity” and its objective meaning, will direct his attention to his own experience of feeling “I”, feeling a subject.
This is in my opinion what Pascal tried to do. As a consequence, when you start following this direction, you cannot adopt a precise language anymore: when Pascal talks about escaping ourselves, or about spirit of fineness, this is not, obviously, a precise, a scientific language: it is logical: if we want to talk consistently about subjectivity, we need to put aside objectivity, that is the language of precision, maths, science.
We all know that, once we are forced to abandon objectivity, we cannot establish anything strongly exact, determined, like science is. This, as a consequence, leads us either to give up, abandoning the research, or to force everything again into science (the stupidity of philosophy I was talking about), or to adopt a non scientific language (Pascal).
I think that it is possible to do more and better, we just need to go on in the research, but not with the stupidity of philosophy. We can notice that similar problems are met when we, for example, want to talk seriously, with degrees of exactness, about, art, literature, music. We can notice that, in order to talk seriously about a text of Shakespeare, or about a painting of Van Gogh, we don’t need to reduce it to maths, molecules, quantums. Obviously, art criticism about Van Gogh cannot reach the strength and the exactness of a math expression. But this does not mean that art criticism is a ridiculous activity. Instead, it is what in philosophy is the language of continental philosophy. Pascal’s “spirit of fineness” is continental philosophy. Continental philosophy is far from being perfect, consistent, precise, but it can be improved, we can make it stronger, better, more efficient. But this still needs work, a lot of work and research, that anyway is better than abandoning it in favour of analytic philosophy, that has driven philosophy to the stupidity of persisting in wanting to reduce conscience to maths.
It seems to me that we have no other alternative: either working in improving the non exact language of continental philosophy, art criticism, while avoiding it to fall back into maths, or falling into the stupidity of thinking that we can understand everything by reducing it to maths, that actually is far from being consistent and exact.

Then?

I think that metaphysics is the most important issue in philosophy. The problem is that, since it is closely connected with ontology, it can be interpreted and reconsidered in so many ways that it can become just a point of confusion.

The word means literally "beyond physics". This expression can be considered from two essential perspectives.

One is that adopted by, for example, some artists, where "beyond physics" means beyond the world of material things; so, these artists try to represent pure emotions, feelings, abstract ideas. This is not the perspective we are interested in here.

The other perspective is that stemming from Aristotle, since his books describing the nature of things were called "metaphysics" because they were physically beyond, which means after, his books about physics. This important coincidence is the origin of the philosophical meaning of metaphysics. The basic meaning of "metaphysics" in philosophy thus depends on how we interpret the meaning and the importance of Aristotle's research. Since different philosophers have interpreted differently the other philosophies, as a result we have not a final, exact meaning of "metaphysics". However, I think that, at this point, we can ask what the best, the most productive, the most fruitful, the most useful, definition of metaphysics is. I think that this way we can obtain good results.
I think we can say that ontology is about being, while metaphysics is about how things are. This implies a specific interpretation of Aristotle's research. In this perspective, we interpret Aristotle's research as an effort to compensate the unreliability of knowledge acquired through physics. Knowledge acquired through physics is unrealiable because it relies on our senses: sight, hearing, smelling, touching and so on. Everyone can see that our senses can be easily deceived: we see an animal and after approaching it we realize that actually it was just a stone, or a plant. We interpret that Aristotle found a solution to this problem in the use of reason: reasoning, applied to the data given by our senses, is able to compensate and solve the problem of unreliability of senses. So, he elaborated all the stuff we know about form, substance, nature, essence and so on. What is important is that this way his highly systematic work gave a very strong and reassuring impression of order, domain over reality, reliable knowledge. Many philosophers after, or even before Aristotle, can be interpreted this way: they tried to find some strong interpretation able to explain how things are.
Now we can realize some points that are very useful to clarify what metaphysics is or implies. Metaphysics means:

- having been able to finally reach truth, true knowledge, absolute and objective certainty;

- that reality exists out there, it is not a dream, an illusion produced by our mind.

All of these strong points are based on the irresistible strength of logic, reasoning, whose roots are in Parmenides' principle of non contradiction. As a consequence, those who disagree must necessary be people who either don't understand, don't know, or are mad. Logic and reasoning are the roots of truth and, as such, the roots of what is good. From here, a lot of theology can be built, based on metaphysics.


Now we can better realize the difference between metaphysics and ontology: metaphysics is about the truth of being, the absolute certainty of reality; since ontology is just about being, if, for some reason, we say that "being" means actually doubt, or involvement in human time (Heidegger), or subjectivity, in that case what we say is ontology, because it is about being, but is not metaphysics, because it disagrees with the concept of objective truth, objective reality.

It is good to realize that, even when we say that the world is just a dream produced by our mind, although apparently this can be considered something non metaphysical, since it is against the idea of objective reality, actually it can still be accused of being metaphysics, because its conclusion sounds like "the real, objective, absolute truth, is that the world is a dream". Similarly, when we say that "everything is relative", this can be accused as well of being just another metaphysics, because it tries again to reach a final conclusion about "how things really are".

At this point the question is: is it possible to make a truly non-metaphisical philosophy, since, whatever we say is exposed to the criticism of being just another attempt of finally establishing how things objectively are?

One way to try to exit this cage is trying to be aware of the constraint coming from language: language is made grammatically in a way that forces us to talk by assertions, statements, that again and again make us fall into the mechanism of saying how things are. So, we can try some workarounds by specifying that what we say is not meant to be a final, objective, metaphysical statement.
Another way is to make clear that what we say is meant to be a subjective opinion, an hypothesis, an attempt. In this context, the opposite of metaphysics is the subjective perspective. Another philosophical perspective that is one of the greatest efforts to be non-metaphysic is postmodernism. There is also the "weak-thought" of the philosopher Gianni Vattimo.

I am interested in your question because I am doing some research on spirituality in my website spi.st and time is an essential part in the process of growing, self improvement, following a path.
I think that setting deadlines is essentially positive, because it makes your plans real, avoids forgetting, helps to be serious, fair, solid.
However, there are risks as well, depending on the kind of growth you want cultivate.
Deadlines contain the risk of distracting you from listening to your personality, your humanity, the specific rhythms, pace, speed of your body, your mind, your psychology, you.
For example, if you want to grow in your ability to love people, you can set deadlines, but you might loose sight of your creativity in this process: creativity can mean that your personality needs to set its own spontaneous pace and speed to develop its new and maybe even revolutionary ideas: you can consider how contradictory the following statements are: "I want to make a discovery within the next two months", "I want to create a revolutionary idea within this year": you can see how the idea of a deadline is kind of contradictory and even funny if connected to creativity.
Another problem about deadlines is frustration: it depends how you react if you fail in respecting a deadline: if you end up thinking that you are a failure, you are not good, this means that you lost sight of the importance of listening to yourself.
On the contrary, it can also happen that being successful in reaching a goal within a certain time can make you blind about the amount of work, of improvement and refinement that you still need to do: for example, you might set the deadline of learning and understanding the philosophy of Heidegger, or of Nietzsche, within the next two months. After reaching the deadline, you might think that you have been fully successful, loosing sight of the fact that most philosophies are so deep, so rich, so open to unknown consequences, that most probably we will never finish understanding them.

The whole purpose of the monastic life is to teach men to live by love. — Dermot Griffin

I would say, about the monastic therapy of love, the same I said about person: it doesn't work, there are too many objections that make it unreliable:
- if love is so powerful in changing people's heart, why people, including the monks who are most advanced in their path, find loving so hard to practice?
- The obvious Christian answer is: because they are all sinners. Well, this shows that even being in Christ's love doesn't heal at all anybody. The word "therapy" in the expression "monastic therapy" suggests some kind of healing, while actually no advanced monk, nobody, has ever been able to witness any kind of freedom from sin;
- Even Jesus himself has a lot of contradictions. Essentially he is exposed to the problem of theodicy: why doesn't he save the world, leaving instead it under the power of sin? If God, or Jesus, is love, why doesn't he do anything about the suffering that oppresses the world?
Even charity, if meant as witnessing the power of Christ's love, becomes contradictory in this context, because it seems that Jesus' disciples have the responsibility to compensate God's contradiction: when the disciple is successful in practicing some acts of love, then it is God's merit; when he is unsuccessful, then it is because he is a sinner: it is a perfect formula to always save God's face, so that the so important concept of "person" means actually, in this context, being God's victim, means slavery of a contradictory God, whose face needs continuously to be saved by the sins of the "person".

It seems to me that "subjectivity" at least opens to a humble idea of love, meant just as an attempt, a try, free from the contradictions of God, free from being idealized as a therapy that actually doesn't show any therapeutic ability. I think that love can be therapeutic only in the context of humility created by criticism and self-criticism, that includes criticism of the concept of love itself. Subjectivity means criticism and self-criticism.

If we really want to change the world then I think we need to start with a change in our own hearts first — Dermot Griffin

I essentially agree, but then we need to clarify what kind of change we should make in our hearts. Peace, hating violence, is not enough, because they are negative concepts: peace has some meaning only assuming conditions of war. What shall we do after having realized peace? If we are unable to give solid directions, unfortunately war is able to be more attractive than peace: if peace means just “not-making-war”, it is almost equivalent to “making-nothing”, that is, at the end, death: dead people are those wo are in the most perfect peace. So, if peace means being dead, then war is better. I am not supporting this opinion, I am just showing how problematic the concept of peace is. That’s why, when peace has been reached, for example by democracy, a lot of more problems come out, problems that are able to cause war again.
Let’s assume that we should change our hearts towards personalism. I disagree. Today “person” is becoming more and more poor, because more and more people realize that there is no need to be a person to deserve respect: animals deserve respect, plants as well, the environment as well. And, actually, thinking that we are “persons”, could even have a violent result, if we take the consequence that animals and a lot of other things are not persons, so that they don’t have the same dignity we have. Again, I am not supporting this thought, I want just show that such ideas like peace, non violence, person, are weak ideas, good just to move hearts in naive ways, good to make revolutions that actually prepare the conditions for new wars.
That’s the reason why I consider more effective, more able to create a clear context about where the real problems are and where the best solutions are, the concept of “subjectivity”: I think that this concept is able to include automatically peace, non-violence, person, with the advantage of making things much clearer and creating a much more solid basis to work on.

I would say anti-subjectivity, which is almost the same, but guides towards a clearer direction. About civilization, it doesn't work because it is just a popular, social, unrefined version of progress of subjectivity. For example, art is subjectivity and it is not by chance that dictatorships and violence are against art and viceversa. I would say the same thing with another more explicit word: spirituality.

Isn't this what Heidegger exactly meant by saying that we are beings towards death?

There is no shift, it is not a jump, a next level. Rather, you can always try to be better, to think better, to behave better, assuming, while nobody is able to prove it, that we can improve, that we can perform some kind of freedom, of active and intelligent contribution. If you do this, which means, you are working on it, then you are already in the next level: the arrival point is the way, the path, the becoming.

Making depression as a tool is one the best ability of humanity. I think you have just practiced one of the best capabilities you have: transforming anithing in a resource for growth.

I think that the experience of suffering confirms what I said:

perception does not produce just knowledge, but also emotions, choices, answers, art, action, life, communication, progress, spirituality, meditation, history, dream, love... — Angelo Cannata

Emotions, choices, answers and so on are not always joyful things. Even love includes experiences of suffering.
I didn’t say that life is all joy and beauty. Rather, I wanted to say that framing life in the concept of “perception” can make us blind about the whole universe that is in life and in perception.

I have deep perplexity on the value of John Paul II as a philosopher or theologian. Before him, the fact that only men where admitted to priesthood was just a tradition in the Catholic Church; this means that there was some possibility to admit women to priesthood in the future: traditions can be changed. John Paul II changed this tradition into a dogma (see Ordinatio sacerdotalis), which means that it can never be changed in the future, because it must be considered an essential part of the infallible faith, infallible revelation. In other words, John Paul II closed, destroyed any possibility for women to be priests in the future.
The theological reasons for this decision are out of any human understanding: it is so just because it is so. They refer to the fact that Jesus was a man and his apostles were men; this way this theology decides to ignore the historical context, that instead is considered relevant in other cases. For example, the fact that Jesus had no properties was considered something historically limited to his person and not relevant to become a rule for the priests.
How can be considered valuable John Paul II as a theologian, considering that, by creating this dogma about the priesthood denied to women, he followed a theology lacking humanly understandable explanations?

In 1992 John Paul II promulgated the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In canon 2358 of the Catechism, homosexual tendencies are officially declared “objectively disordered”. This way homosexual people are publicly exposed to be treated differently from other people: it is said explicitly in the same canon: “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity”. What is wrong in homosexual people so that they deserve particular compassion, particular acceptance? What are the theological basis to explain these declarations? Who establishes what is objectively ordered and objectively disordered in nature? What are the criteria to establish it?

Enrique — Enrique

I don’t get what you wrote: what does it mean “how brain chemistry is a percept, not merely correlated with it”? Besides, you cannot give for granted that any kind of foundation is philosophical: you have a responsibility to explain how they are philosophical. Otherwise we can talk here about anything, like how to cook potatoes, leaving to the readers the task to guess how deeply philosophical it is.
But there is something even more important: it is obvious that today nobody has an exact, detailed, coherent, clear, definition or idea of what consciousness is. How can you explain the phisical roots of something that nobody is able to define clearly? This way is too easy to find the phisical root of a lot of things, like, for example, ghosts, telepathy, magics, beauty, love, art, miracles, freedom, will... Nobody will be able to disagree with you, since there are no clear elements to be based on. It looks like just fishing in troubled water.

We already know that our brain works by cells, neurons, electromagnetic interactions and so on. So, we already know a lot about how all brain activities are produced by its structures and mechanisms. From this perspective, we can say that we already know that consciousness is just a product of our brain components and activities.
We also know that everything in science can always be explained in more detail, endlessly. From this perspective, we will never complete the explanation of anything, because there will be always more to discover and to explain.
In this context, being in the middle between already reached explanations and never ending research, you have just added some details.
So, we can say that you have not explained consciousness for two reasons: 1) because we already know where it comes from (brain components, activity, mechanisms); 2) we will never finish explaining consciousness, because nothing in science is ever finished, ever explained in its entirety.
You have just added your details that can be interesting to biologists. What is the philosophical value of the details you added?

I agree. I would even say: the objective in philosophers’ mind was not “to discover how to live the good life”, but “to live the good life”. I mean, the aim was not to understand or to discover something, but, first of all, to immediately experience it. They, more or less consciously, realized, or felt, that making philosophy produced immediately, automatically, an inner experience that can be called “good life”. Let’s say a spiritual experience, considering Pierre Hadot’s research.

If you think that perception does not produce just knowledge, but also emotions, choices, answers, art, action, life, communication, progress, spirituality, meditation, history, dream, love...yes, perception is something very limited, but great enough to fill our life with the whole infinite universe of inner life.
Since perception is human, involves our human condition and happens over human time, we can even connect the idea “to be is to be perceived” to Heidegger’s philosophy of being and time.

mysticism being impossible for an evolutionary realist or to us homo sapiens to whom everything is the "real" and non mystical — Sapien1

It seems to me that this assumption of yours is what makes you impossible to understand Wittgestein’s mysticism: why should mysticism be impossible for an evolutionary realist?
I think your answer is already in the second part you wrote:
“to us homo sapiens to whom everything is the "real" and non mystical”:
I think you should realize that by saying “everything is the real and non mystical”, you are automatically saying: “what I cannot understand does not exist, cannot exist” which is a kind of faith far from being evolutionary. If evolutionary means that reality is just what is material, like our material origin from fish, by saying that “everything is real”, your are not being connected to reality, because you are just closing yourself inside your idea of what “real” means. So, instead of connecting yourself to reality, that is external to you, you close yourself inside your idea of reality, that is internal to you.
Wittgestein didn’t close himself inside his comprehension of what reality is: he understood that, if reality is to be thought as something external to us, then we need to keep ourselves always open to something that will be always different from how we imagine it. As soon as you think that the only existing world is material reality, you are automatically closing yourself inside your mental comprehension of what reality is, closing your connection to the world external to your mind.
Saying “I don’t know” is one way to keep connection, openness, to external reality. But this kind of connection can be refined. For sure not by saying that reality is the only thing that exists in the world.

This is my understanding of Heidegger’s position about it, but I am not 100% sure I am correct.

Considering that the alternative is between

- logic depending just on unrealiable states of mind and
- logic depending on how things actually work in reality

we cannot think that Heidegger would ever criticize psychologism by choosing the second chance. Choosing the second chance would mean considering reality as objectively independent, which Heidegger didn’t think: for Heidegger being is not being, for Heidegger being is being there, which is, being somewhere, in some time context, which makes reality not stable and independent.
I think that Heidegger criticized psychologism because he perceived it as equivalent to the realistic option: thinking that everything depends on our mind appeared to him just like another realism, which is, the realism of our mind.
In order to escape from the trap of 1) realism of reality and 2) realism of our mind, he refused both, psychologism and realism, choosing instead a unified idea of being conceived as relative not mechanically to our mind, but relative in itself, which is, being depending from its relationship to time, being conceived as something that is relative even if we as subjects do not exist.

It's well known now that human beings have evolved from primitive fish — Sapien1

If I understood correctly your thoughts, it seems that you mean "we come from fishes and that's it", in the sense that reality is limited to what we can scientifically understand about it; if something cannot be grasped or at list imagined by science, then it doesn't exist. Wittgenstein thought the opposite, but not in a methaphysical way. Being mentally open to the existence of things outside the horizon of science does not mean being open to believe in the existence of supernatural things like spirits, angels, energies, telepathy, reincarnation and so on. Wittgenstein's mysticism does not mean this. Believing in the existence of supernatural things is again metaphysics, but Wittgenstein's mysticism is not metaphysical. The problem of metaphysical mysticism is that it frames the idea of things beyond science still in the frame of existence, things that exist objectively. It is not necessary to believe in the objective existence of supernatural things to be mystical. You can be open to the idea of things beyond science without framing these things into the mental scheme of objective existence. Actually this is the true mental openness towards mysticism, because thinking of supernatural things as framed in the concept of objective existence is actually not really beyond science. This is the real openness to something different, otherwise we are actually still in the mental frame of science, let's say pseudo-science. Wittgenstein was intelligent enough to understand that mysticism practiced as pseudo-science is not a real jump to another level: pseudo-science is in the same mental frame of science, because pseudo-science and science are both based on metaphysics, which is, framing things in the field of objective existence.

or rather he believed there is something mystical about the world — Sapien1

I think you are expressing your hypothesis about Wittgenstein's mysticism in a way that is not helpful to make things clear. Wittgenstein was not a metaphysical philosopher, which means, he didn't think of reality as something having an established, autonomous, external existence, distinct from our ideas. Nor he thought that reality is just a product of our mind. So, your hypothesis I quoted doesn't makes much sense in his thought, because you wrote "he believed there is...". Rather that believing in the metaphysical existence of thing, he approached experience in terms of dynamics where language has an essential role. This is my understanding of him and of your question.

Why should life have a meaning?

Carlikoff — Carlikoff

I think that the basic problem is in what I said at the end of my preceding message:

We talk about knowledge just because we have taken this concept from everyday language, which is a completely inaccurate language. — Angelo Cannata

This is a general radical problem of philosophy, that causes unproductive reflections in all fields and topics. One consequence of deriving philosophy from everyday language is that we treat concepts and logic as static things, things that “are”, while instead a deep analysis of everything makes us realize that nothing is static (Heraclitus). So, in philosophy we talk about reality as something that “is”, while Heidegger showed us that we must take time into account (“Being and time”, that, from this point of view, reconnects with Heraclitus). The same happens about knowledge: after what Heraclitus and Heidegger reminded us, we need to talk about it differently.
In this context, I think that the basic problem of the concept of knowledge is that it assumes the existence of reality in a metaphysical, which is objective, sense: if you have knowledge of something, linguistically the use of the word “knowledge” excludes that it is an opinion. Linguistically you cannot have knowledge of something that is not sure. For example, it is a nonsense saying “I have knowledge that perhaps God exists”. The fact that linguistically the word “knowledge” excludes the word “perhaps” creates a basic problem, because it means that talking about knowledge, whatever we say about knowledge, means assuming automatically the existence of something beyond doubt. Assuming the existence of something beyond doubt means putting the entire discussion in a metaphysical context, which means assuming automatically the idea of reality as something that for sure exists outside our mind.
The idea of reality as something outside our mind is highly questionable for me, so, this is for me the basic problem of talking about knowledge: we should first discuss what we think about metaphysics, which is the existence of reality as something independent from us.