Our situation is being-in-our-world-in-our-language-together, where language includes the logic thereof in terms of semantic and inferential norms. It's rationalism because I think doing philosophy always already assumes this situation, if only tacitly. — plaque flag

Aren’t you putting the norms before the generating process that creates and continually modifies those norms? For Heidegger , for instance, the linguistic community does r create our language norms, Daseins in their interaction do, but always from a vantage that subtly reinvents the basis of the norm. A space of reasons is always particularized on the basis of each of its participants As to the questions of what is at stake and at issue, the ‘norm’ can’t answer these, because it is precisely the sense of space of reasons. that is under question from the vantage of each participant and in each new context of use. That is why the contexts of norms are always only partially shared.

The world is described or articulated or disclosed by our true claims. In different words, the world is that minimal something that a self can be wrong about. This underspecification is not an oversight. What is the case is endlessly revisable. — plaque flag

Would you say your view of rationalism is compatible with Donna Haraway’s?

“So I think my problem, and ‘our' problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real' world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

What is at issue is not thinking but a thinking that is insular and self-referential. A thinking that calls itself philosophy — Fooloso4

I’m still waiting for you to name names. Who are these mysterious philosophers whose work disappoints you so? Actually, you did name one: Derrida. So were you suggesting that perhaps his thinking is a bit insular and self-referential? You left me with a quote but it would require a new thread to even begin to do it justice.

— Joshs

Have your already forgotten what you said? — Fooloso4

Is there a special compartment in the brain dedicated to something called ‘thinking’ or ‘ideation’? Do we manage to bypass this neurological process by living in certain ways? Or is even the simplest act of sensory perception already a form of ideation tapping into a functionally integrated background of previous experience, wisdom, feeling , attitude and intention?

Here's a little secret. Learning how to think as a prerequisite for learning how to live is nihilism. Pursuing ideas for their own sake is pursuing ideas for their own sake, and often at the expense of living rather than "pursuing life" for its own sake. — Fooloso4

Unless of course the dualism you are presupposing (thought-action, inner-outer, fantasy-reality, rationality-irrationality) in opposing ‘ideas’ to ‘life’ is incoherent.

And secondly, I think philosophy, if it is not about how to live, is just a hobby. That said I'm not opposed to anyone pursuing ideas for their own sake. — Janus

Here’s a little secret (don’t let it get around). Learning how to think is a prerequisite for learning how to live. Pursuing ideas for their own sake is pursuing life for its own sake.

Philosophy that is of no significance to the person in the street is nought but an elitist hobby; which is fine provided the delusion that it is more than that does not set in. Unfortunately... — Janus

Would you make that argument about quantum physics or molecular biology?

“If we were to be shown right now two pictures by Paul Klee, in the original, which he painted in the year of his death-the watercolor "Saints from a Window," and "Death and Fire," tempera on burlap -we should want to stand before them for a long while-and should abandon any claim that they be immediately intelligible. If it were possible right now to have Georg Trakl's poem "Septet of Death'· recited to us, perhaps even by the poet himself, we should want to hear it often, and should abandon any claim that it be immediately intelligible. If Werner Heisenberg right now were to present some of his thoughts in theoretical physics, moving in the direction of the cosmic formula for which he is searching, two or three people in the audi-ence, at most, would be able to follow him, while the rest of us would, without protest, abandon any claim that he be immediately intelligible.

Not so with the thinking that is called philosophy. That thinking is supposed to offer "worldly wisdom" and perhaps even be a "Way to the Blessed Life." But it might be that this kind of thinking is today placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom. It might be that a kind of thinking has become necessary which must give thought to matters from which even the painting and the poetry which we have mentioned and the theory of math-·ematical physics receive their determination. Here, too, we should then have to abandon any claim to immediate intelligibility. However, we should still have to· listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary.“ ( Heidegger, On Time and Being)

Philosophy has become in large part insular and self-referential. Written by philosophers for philosophers. With a specialized language designed only for the initiated, a cramped style of writing intended to ward off attack, overburdened by its own theory laden stranglehold on thinking and seeing, enamored by its linguistic prowess and the production of problems that only arise within this hermetically sealed sterile environment. It either laments the fact that it is regarded as irrelevant or takes this to be the sign of its superiority. — Fooloso4

Let’s name names. Who in particular do you have in mind? Here’s a starter list of philosophers, half of whom are actively writing, who I don’t associate with your characterization:

Derrida, Eugene Gendlin, Ken Gergen, Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe, Evan Thompson, Foucault, Deleuze, Rorty, Davidson, Joseph Rouse, Dan Zahavi,

The Self is just a ghost in the hive mind of society until it appears out of the fog of history in a cloak of righteousness, defying a world that's become evil. — frank

Perhaps the idea of a ‘collective psyche’ or ‘hive mind’ needs to be shelved along with that of an autonomous, identical self. In their place we can substitute the perspectival consistency of a point of view. Point of view is itself a multiplicity of selves that are produced within the collective called a person. The collective selves forming the changing person participate in the social group via the vantage of an ongoing perspective.

Husserl (who, in fact, thought that Dilthey was too much of a skeptical relativist and not interested in "ideal" meanings). — waarala

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

Interesting and vivid description. Can we 'un-linear' ourselves in practice? What does an account like this mean for day-to-day living and how can it be utilised in human thought? — Tom Storm

Eugene Gendlin’s Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning introduces an approach that applies this non-linear temporality to everyday life. His Focusing technique, incorporated into his psychotherapy practice, offers a way for us to go back and forth between the implicit intricacy of bodily-felt meaning and linguistic-scientific and logical conceptualization.

“Implying is not an occurring that will happen. It is not an occurring-not-yet. It does not occupy a different time-position than the occurring. Rather, one implying encompasses all three linear time positions, and does not occupy an additional linear time position of its own. (See A Process Model, IVB. This is a more intricate model of time. It includes a kind of “future” and a kind of “past” that are not linear positions. This time model can be reduced back to the liner model by considering just occurring-occurring-occurring as if it were cut off from implying.”

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37 )

If you're engaging with other strands of thought I believe you've got a responsibility to translate into a more neutral vocabulary. Hence, my request to de-Heidegger-ese your remarks. If they can only be articulated in Heideggerese it proves all those hermetic cult accusations quite true. — fdrake

Well, the OP is titled ‘Martin Heidegger’ and includes its own request: “I'd like to reserve this thread only for those who have at least read Being & Time”.

Heideggerian thought is best delivered in Heideggerese, Derrida’s thought is best articulated in Derrida-eze, Deleuze’s ideas are best conveyed in Deleuze-speak. This is a key difference between analytic -style and Continental-style philosophy. The former strives for a commonsense normative discursive vocabulary while the latter tries to say close to the text. This does not mean one should only use vocabulary from the author’s text, rather one should interweave exegesis closely with the original terminology.

Among members of the long-running Heidegger Circle, there is an endless debate between theologically-oriented Heideggerians and atheist Heideggerians concerning his relation to God:

Here’s some quotes to chew on:

Heidegger on God:

Heidegger, GA 73.2: 1000

13. Being and God

The pressing question of the relation of being and God should better restrain its fervor, and instead of demanding answers from me, one should ask themselves how far one is at peace with the esse— to say nothing of God and its comprehensibility.

But this prudence of thoughtful reflection is just what I've already insisted upon time and again for nearly a quarter century, in order to awaken this reflection.

Moreover — my thinking does not at all require this — I would be very happy to receive an exposition on this issue that people so easily and seriously propose as an objection against me; thereby we turn the assignment and order of responsibilities and paths around!

14. The Relation of Seyn and God

1. how “being”? As being of beings or beyng? Or beyng?

2. what is God? Which God? The God of the bible? Or the God of fundamental-theology — the “natural God”?

Heidegger, GA 73.2: 991

2. Of Being

The lightest of the slight is beyng.

The most entity-like of entities is God.

In beyng, the distinction between beings and being (in the sense of beingness) comes into its own.

Being means: presence.

Seyn never lets itself be identified with God. It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity.

As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.

No. I think it's not useful as a way of explaining Heidegger's thought to people who don't already understand it. — fdrake

Tbh, I don’t know that there’s a good substitute. It all
depends on how serious one is about understanding what he’s getting at. One could work ones way up to his language via secondary sources, but there are risks, like taking Dreyfus as a solid authority on Heidegger. It was because of secondary sources that I delayed reading Being and Time, having convinced myself I already understood him. But those sources didn’t prepare me for the real thing, which was a life-changing experience for me.

Temporality is the unfolding of Being, of what is present and what remains concealed in and through the space or openness of time. It is not simply the linear sequence of moments from what was but no longer is to what is to what will be but is not yet.

In what is present and what is thought there remains something that does not yet come to presence and is not thought.

The future is present in the sense of possibilities. We are oriented to the future in that we plan and act and hope for what might come to be. — Fooloso4

You’re certainly not alone in interpreting Heideggerian temporality in those traditional terms.
For instance, Matthew Ratcliffe splits temporality into three separated time positions. Heideggerian Care is ”the way that we are anchored in the past (facticity), situated in the present (fallenness) and forever looking to the future (projection)”

Jan Slaby refers to his model of affect as ‘radical situatedness' and yet shares Ratcliffe's traditional, inauthentic understanding of temporality as causal dispositional state taking place in time, which is to say that, contrary to Heideggerian temporality, for Slaby time is divided into separate phases: the present as what is happening now, the future as what is not yet now, and the past as what is no longer now.

Slaby says factual situatedness

“is situatedness in a place and a time, synchronic and diachronic”. “Affectivity ultimately is time, namely the factual past in the form of sedimented remainders that infuse, burden, and potentially suffocate ongoing comportment.” “ The existential task of affective disclosure is circumscribed by this essential tension: A tension between what is already apprehended, articulated, and made sense of, and what is furthermore “out there,” beyond us, yet weighing on us and determining our situation in unforeseeable ways.”

For Heidegger, temporality is neither a separate past that burdens the present nor a generator of future possibilities as a hypothetical present that has not happened yet. Instead, it encompasses all three temporal ecstasies as the way in which I find myself changed. The future is not what has not yet happened , not empty possibilities in logical space. And the past is not represented memory but a having -been which arrives already changed by what occurs into it.
Putting it differently, the traditional approach is to treat past, present and future as having separate contents and the. line them up in a sequence. We could instead glom them onto each other and say that we have freed ourselves of linear time by making these three contents (past, present, future) simultaneous. But that is not what Heidegger is doing. He is letting the future lead the show. The future isn’t the not-yet , but a kind of scaffolding into which the present emerges. The having-been is already shaped and defined by how this scaffolding produces the present, so that is why Heidegger says the past comes to us via the future.

“The being-possible, which Da-sein always is existentially, is ... distinguished from empty, logical possibility and from the contingency of something objectively present, where this or that can "happen" to it. As a modal category of objective presence, possibility means what is not yet real and not always necessary. It characterizes what is only possible. Ontologically, it is less than reality and necessity. “(Being and Time p.135)

that kind of talk isn't productive for the initiated or the uninitiated — fdrake

Are you saying ‘that kind of talk’ represents a failure on Heidegger’s part to express himself clearly?

The unitary structure of the three ecstasies, future-present-having been, determines the ‘is’, the essence, the Being of being as this structure of transit.
— Joshs

Now the first statement can and should be explained simply and clearly. The second does not do that, and no attempt to clarify it is made — Fooloso4

Your definition of ‘simply and clearly’ is circular. If you can understand it, it is simple and clear. If you can’t , it is the fault of the messenger rather than the ability of you as the receiver to comprehend the message. The problem is not fundamentally with how Heidegger’s articulation of temporality is worded, but with the inherent difficulty of the concept he is attempting to convey. It took me not only reading B & T multiple times, but numerous other works of his before I could grasp what temporality was all about. And this wasn’t because Heidegger failed to condense the idea down to a 140 Twitter characters.

Clearly, you're mistaken, Joshs. Foucault, Nietzsche & Deleuze have much to say about ethics (re: "care of the self", "master / slave morality & revaluation of all values" and "anti-oedipal desiring-production", respectively). — 180 Proof

If you look at how Deleuze translates Nietzsche’s Eternal
Return via his desiring-production model, the ensuing ethical imperative ( using the revolutionary potential of philosophy, art and science to free ourselves of fascist social productions) is quite compatible with Heidegger’s embrace of Nietzschean becoming.

I don't see anything in his discussion of care that applies to ethics. Or the concern for human life except with regard to the question of Being. The second is how we are to understand es gibt. — Fooloso4

i suspect you aren’t too crazy about Foucault , Rorty, social constructionism, Derrida, Deleuze, Nietzsche or Husserl either when it comes to ethics. You would likely consider their approaches , like Heidegger’s, as ‘lacking’ an ethics, as if the ossified old school notion of respectable philosophy requires it to check off all the usual categories such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetic and logic. The fact is none of these writers is lacking an ethical impetus in their work in the most fundamental sense of the term. On the contrary, their work is profoundly ethical i. this sense. What they reject is reducing the concept of ethics to a normative or prescriptive category of thought or behavior, which is what happens when we separate ought from is, feeling from thought, value from fact. I suspect that the kind of treatment of the ethical you are looking for can be argued, from the perspective of these writers, to be profoundly unethical. Welcome to the postmodern

One could care very much about being a good Nazi — Arne

If I were a Nazi, I would want to be the best Nazi possible. Otherwise, why bother?

Not humans or even sentient beings but entities. Man seems to be of concern only in so far as he is the ventriloquist dummy of Being — Fooloso4

As far as I’m concerned, the very heart of human relations is the connection between feeling and thinking, affect and cognition, mood and intention.
And there is no philosopher I know of other than Derrida who understood the exquisitely intimate, intricate , contextually changing affective workings of human psychological functioning better than Heidegger , which is why many of today’s most advanced theoretical models of emotion, mood and affect in its relation to cognition rely on Heidegger’s analyses of Befindlichkeit. Who do you rely on for your understanding of these crucial aspects of human functioning?

Yes, indeed. And many can mouth the words 'justice' and 'truth' without caring much for — plaque flag

I suspect this who believe in such concepts
most zealously are the most dangerous.

↪Joshs

Is there a concern for the human things in this more originary thinking? Where do we see it? — Fooloso4

The basis of Dasien’s being-in-the-world is care. By care, Heidegger does not mean sentimental concern. He means that our connection with other people and things ( the things we experienced are understood by reference to their relevance to our human relationships) is one of pragmatic involvement. The world of human affairs always matters to us in a certain way, affectivity as well as cognitively. there is very much an ethic running though his work, which tries to teach us to notice the always intricate way in which our concepts and values maintain their health by refreshing themselves in an open-ended way. Ironically, his political
weakness was his failure to appreciate the capabilities of groups less familiar to him than his own to adopt this ethics of creative becoming.

The Socratic philosopher's concern is first and foremost the human things, the inquiry into the just, the beautiful or noble, and the good.

Heidegger's concern is first and foremost Being. — Fooloso4

Heidegger’s concern is to uncover the presuppositions underlying concepts like ‘human’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘good’, and to ground them in a more originary thinking.

What does it mean for time to be the preliminary name for the truth of Being? — Fooloso4

The unitary structure of the three ecstasies, future-present-having been, determines the ‘is’, the essence, the Being of being as this structure of transit.

Sorta-kinda.
— Joshs

Nossir, exactly. "Dasein is time, time is temporal." — plaque flag

We must be careful in attributing exactitude to Heidegger’s discussion of time at this preliminary point in his career, and in the specific context of your quote. The introduction to Concept of Time notes that in Chapter 3, “Heidegger warns against the 'misunderstanding' that would summarize his view as: 'Dasein is in each case time'. Heidegger was always far more nuanced than many of his critics acknowledge. The review article is best understood as 'preliminary notice' of his own research, as Heidegger states in the Introduction to this work. As such it is an important way station, not a fixed doctrine.”

Given that this is the first draft of Being and Time, let’s see what Heidegger says about Dasein and time in his magnum opus. Heidegger begins Being and Time saying his aim is to answer the question of the meaning of being in general. Alas, by the end of BT, he leaves us with only questions and a promise for answers in a division III which was never produced.

He does define Dasein's kind of being as the ontological difference , the in-between , happening , occurrence , the ‘as' structure , projection.

“ Something like "being" has been disclosed in the understanding of being that belongs to existing Da-sein as a way in which it understands.”

“The ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is temporality itself.”(Basic Problems, 1927)

“In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”(What is Metaphysics)

But he leaves us with the following questions:

“The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Da-sein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?

'Don't nazis suck' is just too easy to say. Of course they suck. It's the most banal self-flattery that I can think of. If you think even Heidegger's early work is contaminated, make a case. Or just air a petty prejudice as if you are paying alms. The world is running low on reasons not to read, not to think. Let's burn some books for Jesus and Apple Pie, boys ! — plaque flag

I think a case was made, which goes something like this:

‘It’s not really Heidegger I’m all hot under the collar about. The Nazi connection is just a convenient post-hoc justification. The truth is he’s just a symbol for an entire culture of thinkers in philosophy, the arts and social sciences whose ideas are alien to the way I look at the world.’

Dasein is time.
— plaque flag

Does he say that? Why not Being and Dasein? I would have to read it in context before saying more. — Fooloso4

Sorta-kinda. What he actually says is that Being is time. Being is disclosed to Dasein in its way of understanding.

“In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”(What is Metaphysics)

The author thinks that Heidi himself believed such scribblings to be part of his oeuvre, and that his previously published work was "sanitized" in some cases by fans — Ciceronianus

Richard Wolin is not considered by most Heidegger scholars to be an authority on Heidegger’s philosophy. This has less to do with ‘fandom’ than with rigorous scholarship. Even if Heidegger was a bigger Nazi than Hitler, this doesn't change the fact that Wolin is out of his depth philosophically.

Can you explain this in your own words? — Fooloso4

For Heidegger, the past, present and future don't operate as sequential modes which mark distinct states of objects. They interpenetrate each other so completely that they together form a single unitary event of occurrence.
A prior object is already changed (affected) by what it interacts with before it can simply inhere in itself as cause. Whereas for traditional notions of time it is only later, that the difference made to other objects can in turn affect “it"”, the fact of its being already affected in serving as the past of that present object with which it interacts deprives both past and present poles of the interaction a separate identity. Rather than there being first one element followed by its effect on a second element (‘caused' by the first), there is only a single event of crossing simultaneously determining past and present in their interaction. Past and present function as already cross-affected by the other. Each is determined by, and also determines the other.

To ‘be’ is to be a crossing or intersection between past and present.
— Joshs
:up:
Perhaps comment on the future too here ? — plaque flag

I’ll let Heidegger have at it.

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Being and Time)

I don't see how the thought of being in something is not dualistic. The thought of simply being is not dualistic, but when it 'in-the-world' is posited it becomes so. — Janus

The history of philosophy has offered a variety of ways to think about subjects, objects and their relation. Traditional approaches posited a unitary a priori subject with self-identically persisting faculties of mind surveying external objects across a divide. More modern perspectives
de-transcendentalize the subject but still retain from older thinking the assumption that the being of a subject or object is the being of an inherence, an in-itself, an identity, even if this is only a temporary identity that is continually modified by its interaction with other things in the world. Things are beings-in-themselves that appear before a subject. The dualism in this way of thinking is that between the inside and the outside, the self- inherence of being vs its becoming, alterity and identity, feeling and intention, state and transition. For Heidegger subjects and objects don’t inhere in themselves, have no internality or subsistence. To ‘be’ is to be a crossing or intersection between past and present. Being is one part memory and one part present. It is between these two as a becoming , a transit , a difference. Dasein, as Being-in-the-World, is a worlding’, not the appearing of things before a subject but an enacting of world in which to be is to be displaced into what discloses itself.

Did he with the Being stuff generalize Kierkegaard into a more glamorously negative cryptotheology ? For me the key stuff is human historicity in language, which Gadamer ran with, along with lifeworld centrality and the unbreakable unit of world-self-language-others that makes philosophy possible. — plaque flag

Exactly. We can thank Dreyfus , and to a certain extent Gadamer, for a god-awful misreading of Heidegger that turns him into a Kierkegaardian existentialist.

I'm listening to Heidegger in Ruins. It's interesting to learn that he's become something of a hero among far-right groups in Europe — Ciceronianus

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?

Karl Jaspers or P.W. Zapffe ... thinkers who have much more cogent things to say about "the nature of being" than Herr Rektor-Führer. :eyes: — 180 Proof

Gadamer’s conversation with Ricardo Dottori:

D.: Hence the analytic of Dasein in Heidegger. Is this the same thing as the illumination of existence of which Jaspers speaks?

G.: Insofar as Jaspers even thought conceptually at all, one could an­swer this question very harshly. On the other hand, it is a very elegant expression — the illumination of existence — an expression that one understands immediately, but not one, in any case, that suggests a fundamental critique of the history of being in the West.

…these days, all of a sudden, I find Jaspers wrongly being
considered important. He wasn't really all that important.

D.: To what extent is he now considered important?

G.: One detects it everywhere. One notices it in every corner. When­ever we don't want to read Heidegger any more, we read Jaspers.”

In the metaphor, the icon represent the objects we see and the bits represent the deeper reality.
So, the bits are not an icon but reality (or, at least, a deeper reality — Art48

But of course the bits are themselves bits of language (mathematics belongs to language) just as the Word icon is. The Word icon can ‘mean’ a program, it can mean the bits, or it can mean anything else that use of language associates it with. The same is true of the concept of a bit. Is there a deeper, truer reality these bits of language anchor themselves to? Or is language self-refential all the way down, not a system of signs hovering over the ‘really real’ but expressing pragmatically how social relationships construct and change a world and what passes for true or false, real or imaginary within it.

The icon for a Word document is really on the screen but it is not the Word document itself, so in that sense is somewhat unreal. The reality of the Word document is computer bits. Janus and Wayfarer make a similar point — Art48

And what are computer bits an icon for?

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. — Paine

Is this problematic of cultural history not also that of natural history? When scientists delve into the earliest and oldest origins of life or of physical or chemical history, don’t we understand the earliest and oldest via the latest and most empirical models? Doesn’t that mean that our past is always ahead of us? When we spin out a history , we are creating and then following a trajectory leading into fresh territory of thinking, going back and forth between our new rendering of the ancient past and the way this revisionism alters our vantage on the present. It is from this new vista that we make our comparisons between what was , what is and what may be. We always know what previous cultures thought. But the purpose of our knowing, just as in the case of our knowledge of empirical past of nature, is forward looking. We know the past only by producing a new pragmatic set of relations with others in our present.

It is not history that is cancelled in this way of thinking , it is historicism , the metaphysical assumption that a history is a causal chain on a timeline. It is historicism that conceals the actual dynamics of history.

I see this as the condition and starting point, not the jumping off point. How an author comes across to me, my perspective, is not fixed, it can change as I learn from him, and must change if I am to learn from him — Fooloso4

But you are not just learning from him. The reason you have a perspective in the first place is that your thinking is situated within an intersubjective matrix that delimits and informs what is relevant for you and how it is relevant. It is in this way that authors go in and out of fashion. Your nietzsche is filtered through your perspective, which is itself a discursive element of a larger cultural perspective. There is continuous change in these dynamics , but also a robustness that relativizes what we learn , and how we change, to our partially shared cultural perspectives. The framework and concepts of his work itself, in its own situatedness, is also inextricable from Nietzsche’s situstedness within his own discursive milieu. We glimpse that milieu from within the terms of our own milieu.

Here we see a fundamental hermeneutical difference. On the one hand, the attempt to understand an author on his own terms, on the other, the attempt to find one's own interests in an author. The former requires a kind of humility and the idea that certain authors are worthy of being read because they have something to teach us that is not easy to understand — Fooloso4

The former requires a trick of hememeutic acrobatics that runs counter to the historically perspectival nature of authorial interpretation. The only way to truly understand the author on their own terms is to be that author, and even then , ‘their’ own terms change from writing to writing. We have to make do with filtering the author’s ‘own’ terms through our own times and our own philosophical frame of reference. If our philosophical framework is postmodernist , we are likely to recognize Nietzsche’s work as postmodern, but if we don’t grasp postmodern concepts, we will
never see these ideas in his work no matter how closely we try to hew to the author’s own terms. This is what I meant by the relevance to interpretation of what we would like to read an author as saying. The reader’s perspective isn’t superior to the author’s , but it is inextricable from how an author’s work comes across to us.