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.

For Husserl the retention-protention -scheme was a formal description of time i.e. it was not anything psychological or empirical. I think that Heidegger is differing here from — waarala

Heidegger’s model of temporality differs from Husserl’s by getting rid of the transcendental ego, among other things. But like Husserl’s, it is neither psychological nor empirical.

There's clearly something like retention, but did he really limit it to the just prior note ? I'd think there would be no 'natural' or obvious place to draw the line. — green flag

There isn’t a line, but a horizon of retentions of retentions trailing off into the receding past. It quickly gets really complicated.

How about the continuity of our experience? You can't be conscious of change or novelty if you don't have a "feel" of sameness in the experience — waarala

Husserl’s solution ( which was also William James’) was to argue that the present moment is ‘specious’. That is , it includes retentions and protentions (expectations). One could not hear a melody as a melody if all that one was aware of was individual notes in an isolated and punctual ‘now’. Husserl asserted that the just prior note is retained alongside the now itself. This provides us with the sense of continuity. In addition, the new always shades an element of similarity with what preceded it.

“Even the physical things of this world that are unknown to us are, to speak generally, known in respect of their type. We have already seen like things before, though not precisely this thing here. Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer.“ (Cartesian Meditations, p.111)

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

I’m not seeing what Heidegger and Deleuze are providing as constituting a metaphysical ground. I agree that the above authors are forming a whole out of Nietzsche’s fragments, but I read his fragments as constituting the outline of a system that is consistent with their interpetation of it, at least with regard to Eternal return. For me it boils down to the fact that Nietzsche, contrary to the claims of Brian Leiter and other ‘existentialist’ interpreters, is neither a realist nor an anti-realist.

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. I wouldn’t like Nietzsche to be a realist in the mold of Leiter. That would make him profoundly uninteresting to me.

This persistent presence could be understood to be dependent on consciousness, on the perceiver, or it could be taken, as it is with materialist metaphysics, to be prior to consciousness. a persistent presence that is "there" regardless of whether it is being perceived or not — Janus

The way I read Heidegger, the experience of persisting presence is a kind of illusion , or better yet, distortion, flattening, closing off of the what happens when we experience something as something. Experiencing the world is not accomplished by a subject directing itself toward objects. Dasein is not a consciousness but an in-between. Heidegger traces the modern idea of being as persisting presence to Descartes:

“Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being.”

“Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated.

It is therefore not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”(Heidegger 2010)


Heidegger explains that in taking something to be the case in a propositional judgement (for instance, S is P) , we are taking something as something within a wider context of pragmatic relevance.(The ‘as' structure designates the peculiar ‘between-ness' of Dasein that Heidegger also describes as the ontological difference between Being and beings). Making sense of something is an act that always has the ‘as' structure, as Heidegger tells us, but this structure of relevanting is covered over and flattened down in causal models.

“The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure. Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood. I repeat: The [primary] as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like.

Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from.” (Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122).

I’ve always taken “presence” to be connected with presence-at-hand — i.e., the mode of being we’re in when contemplating things, when things break down. Something like the centipede effect. It’s something derivative and emerges out of a more basic human state, the ready-to-hand — the realm of habit, skill, automaticity, “second nature” actions, etc. — Mikie

Yes, Heidegger’s account of presence-at-hand and Being as persisting presence are closely related.

See, I would say that his description of the mechanistic world as contiguous with our own desires and passions is exactly what Schopenhauer was saying. Am I wrong? — frank

I guess you’re right in the general sense that both assimilate the being of the mechanistic world to the will. Of course the devil is in the details. Nietzsche deconstructs the metaphysical presuppositions underlying Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the will.

Deleuze has an interesting take on cosmology and eternal return.

“First Aspect of the Eternal Return: as cosmological and physical doctrine:

Nietzsche's account of the eternal return presupposes a critique of the terminal or equilibrium state. Nietzsche says that if the universe had an equilibrium position, if becoming had an end or final state, it would already have been attained. But the present moment, as the passing moment, proves that it is not attained and therefore that an equilibrium of forces is not possible.”

Scientists will insist methodologically that the natural world is quite apart from the "human world." This is the distinction surrounding the question of whether Nietzsche meant you to take the Eternal Return as a feature of a scientific view (cosmology) or not. — frank

The interpreters of Nietzsche that I am allied with argue that he offered a critique of the assumptions guiding Western science , the main one he formulated in terms of will to truth, which is a subordinate to will to power and exemplifies the ascetic ideal. This critique turns against realism and the Kantian split between noumenon and phenomenon. Nietzsche does not propound a metaphysics of the world as thing in itself.

“Both of them, science and the ascetic ideal, are still on the same foundation – I have already explained –; that is to say, both overestimate truth (more correctly: they share the same faith that truth cannot be assessed or criticized), and this makes them both necessarily allies, – so that, if they must be fought, they can only be fought and called into question together. A depreciation of the value of the ascetic ideal inevitably brings about a depreciation of the value of science…”

Nietzsche aimed to include the so-called natural
world within the will to power, and given the inseparable relation between will to power and eternal return, the latter must encompass any cosmological view of time.

“Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect…”

Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else. –

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? — Paine

The second one.

The big picture is that I embrace something akin perhaps to 'will to power', with God or the gods as an image of what we'd like to be. In Hobbes, kings cannot stop conquering, even when sated, because their satiety must be made secure. The will wills itself, more power and freedom, but for what ? An indestructible orgy of narcissism ? — green flag

This sounds like more of a traditional notion of power than a Nierzschean one. As Foucault conceives it, “power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, some­thing that one holds on to or allows to slip away”. It is instead something that flows though subjects in a community. Power is not possessed by a dominant agent, nor located in that agent’s relations to those dominated, but is instead distributed throughout complex social net­works.”

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 — Paine

Could you elaborate on that point a bit more?

I think we have to make sure that our structure of becoming is truly self-reflexive.
— Joshs

I agree, but why ? What drives us this way ? Is it connected to the causi sui project ? the "thus-I-willed-it" project ? the nobody's fool project ? the history-as-a-nightmare-from-which-I'm-trying-to-awake project ? — green flag

What drives us this way. As opposed to being driven any other way. An arbitrary foundation. The preferring of one drive, desire , willed outcome over all the alternatives. I am nobody’s fool because I have chose truth over falsity, the good over the bad, the visible over the invisible, the dialectical unity that overcomes lack and negation.

The idea that we are driven in just ‘this way’ by the needs of a proper metaphysical grounding results from interpreting self-reflexivity as subjective idealism , the endless returning to itself of an arbitrary meaning, an arbitrary qualitative content (the good, the true, the self-identical, the unified) . What I had in mind was the self-reflexivity of becoming as difference rather than identity. What returns to itself is always an utterly new and different meaning. There is nothing evolutionary or cumulative in this self-reflexive unfolding, no aim or goal. The self is remade in every repetition.

Your starting point seems to be the autonomous individual
subject, who decides from their own vantage of free will what to agree or disagree with. But aren’t most of our agreements and disagreements features of shared conventions and norms of thinking that bind us together within the communities that we are immersed in? Note that the political polarization you refer to pits one community against another, rather than isolated individuals. One conclusion we can perhaps reach is that individuation in never absolute. Even in our polarized times there is some basis for partial mutual understanding, given the multiple threads of economic and cultural interdependence among subgroups.

Just as we don’t want to separate person and world, neither should we separate valuing from doing.
— Jamal

I guess I just think that values come first. Values tell us what we need and want. Based on that, we go and do stuff. — T Clark

So far in this discussion, whether it is considered as more primordial than or secondary to objective aspects of the world, value has been treated independently of fact. Talk about the value of money or paintings is consideration of value in strictly quantitative terms, while ignoring or keeping constant the qualitative meaning of what it is that goes up or down in price. Banno distinguishes between the value of a shelter in terms of our attitudes toward it, our needs and desires , and the objective existence of the roof.
But what is a roof? Doesn’t it depend on our account or stance towards it? If we are photographing or drawing it for artistic purposes, what the roof is will be a function of what we are creating in the experience of it. Isnt the roof something else when we shift from an engineering to an aesthetic to a climbing stance? Aren’t all of those accounts and stances themselves values? And if so , is there any meaning , any perceptual experience of any aspect of the world which is not fundamentally valuative in the sense of representing a constructed , goal oriented point of view?

Heidegger says something similar in his Lectures on Nietzsche. Both readings are difficult to square with the specificity of Nietzsche's actual words — Paine

I suppose the following, in which Nietzsche equate eternal return with will to power, is more consistent with the direction of those readings:

And do you know what 'the world' is to me? Shall I show you it in my mirror? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a fixed, iron quantity of force which grows neither larger nor smaller, which doesn't exhaust but only transforms itself, as a whole unchanging in size, an economy without expenditure and losses, but equally without increase, without income, enclosed by 'nothingness' as by a boundary, not something blurred, squandered, not something infinitely extended; instead, as a determinate force set into a determinate space, and not into a space that is anywhere 'empty' but as force everywhere, as a play of forces and force-waves simultaneously one and 'many', accumulating here while diminishing there, an ocean of forces storming and flooding within themselves, eternally changing, eternally rushing back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms, shooting out from the simplest into the most multifarious, from the stillest, coldest, most rigid into the most fiery, wild, self-contradictory, and then coming home from abundance to simplicity, from the play of contradiction back to the pleasure of harmony, affirming itself even in this sameness of its courses and years, blessing itself as what must eternally return, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no surfeit, no fatigue - this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery world of dual delights, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, unless there is a goal in the happiness of the circle, without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself - do you want a name for this world? A solution to all its riddles? A light for you too, for you, the most secret, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly? - This world is the will to power - and nothing besides! And you yourselves too are this will to power - and nothing besides!” (Writings from the Late Notebooks, 38[12])

There 'must' be some limiting of play, some center. The game is often enough seeing just how little we need in that center. What's the minimum we can get away with ? But if we claim to destroy the center or the universal vantage point (or whatever plays the Role), then we've sacrificed exactly the leverage that such a claim needs in order to be taken seriously. — green flag

Yes indeed. That is the tricky part. So if we make time and becoming the irreducible ‘center’ and ground, how do we do it in a way that doesn’t end up allowing static universals to slip back in? I think we have to make sure that our structure of becoming is truly self-reflexive. If Hegelian dialectics attempts to undergird the becoming of history via a schematics which organizes evolution but doesnt itself change its nature over the course of historical becoming, then it doesn’t seem to be truly self-reflexive.
If instead we focus of the structure of becoming that is common to each moment of time, the way that the present anticipates beyond itself while retaining the just past moment, and how via this synthetic structure , we constitute a world of objects and people, we have a phenomenological method which never has to stray from this thick ‘here and now’ in order to talk about historical becoming.

I just want to point out that you are criticizing my theory that theory is directed toward greater and greater coherence in terms of its supposed incoherence. You also invoke strong thinkers with which my own theory 'ought' to cohere. (I'd define a strong thinker in terms of that norm, or as one whose work deserves being woven into the story the storyteller tells about itself.) — green flag

This is the familiar anti-pomo argument. As Derrida put it “Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly?”

The answer is that points of view can cohere more or less closely relative to local, contingent normative contexts, but these contexts themselves are always changing, and with them the criteria of coherence , truth, etc. One cannot appeal, as dialectics does, to a criterion of coherence that transcends and grounds all contingent historical contexts.

If all that will happen has happened before over and over what is the starting and end point of what happens?

Between the two roads is the gateway "this moment". But it is always this moment. This moment is neither the past or the future, and so in what sense is there a return? — Fooloso4

It’s interesting that almost all ‘postmodern’ readings of eternal return depict it as the return of the same absolutely new difference, rather than the literal return of the same experience. The return is each time a new throw of the dice.

“When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances.” (Deleuze)

There is a return because there is never just this moment in isolation . Simultaneous with the appearance of the ‘now’ is the passing away of the former ‘now’.

Big picture, we can understand the sequence of philosophers as spirit/'software' becoming more and more aware of itself, making its nature more explicit, thereby increasing its distance from itself and its 'turning radius.' This might be described as communal self-knowledge — green flag

I’m getting hints of a complexity theory, dynamical
systems-type model here. I do think one can draw all
sorts of parallels between Hegelian dialectic and such models. But if one agrees with Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault , Deleuze and other pomo types that the past arrives already changed by the present that occurs into it , these realist models become incoherent. It no longer makes sense to build structures that progressively unify themselves as ‘better and better’ , ‘closer and ‘closer’, ‘more and more aware’. These substitutes for god simply reinstantiate theology in a different form.

Joshs
I'm not sure we should trust Heidegger when it comes to Kierkegaard. I'm reading K's journals at the moment and the strong influence is clear. As I mentioned above, Heidegger himself seems influenced by Hegel, even if he rips out this or that module, for which he indeed deserves credit. — green flag

In one sense, all poststructuralist and phenomenological thinking is indebted to Hegel and shows his influence, thanks in part to Kojeve’s interpretation of him. The question is how Hegel’s thinking, even as it influences their work, is critiqued and transformed by writers like Heidegger.
I don’t think it’s a question of ripping out, in isolated fashion, this or that particular component of Hegelian thought, but of a wholesale revision of its grounding presuppositions. What do you think is preserved of the Hegelian dialectic in Heidegger ( or Nietzsche, for that matter)? Why has the dialectic become a dirty word for postmodern readings of Nietzsche?
You can always hold onto a Kierkegaardian interpretation of Heidegger by sticking with Dreyfus , Sheehan or any of the other theologically oriented readers of him. But many have rejected those readings.

Husserlian strive for intuiting the subject matter itself behind or under the existing conventional disourse is strong influence here — waarala

Yes, Heidegger has not abandoned the Husserlian epoche

Various flavours of nihilism. Ought to inspire one to seek mokṣa — Wayfarer

Moksa is a classic form of nihilism in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. “For Nietzsche nihilism is not in any way simply a phenomenon of decay; rather nihilism is, as the fundamental event of Western history, simultaneously and above all the intrinsic law of that history.”(Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche)

With his phenomenological approach Heidegger's aim is to treat this "life context", as ontology of "Dasein", more systematically and strictly than Dilthey . Heidegger's Kierkegaardian existentialism — waarala

I don’t see Heidegger as a Kierkegaardian existentialist. His philosophy moved quite a distance from Kierkegaard, despite the surface similarities.

In Being and Time he says “In the nineteenth century S. Kierkegaard explicitly grasped and thought through the problem of existence as existentiell in a penetrating way. But the existential problematic is so foreign to him that in an ontological regard he is completely under the influence of Hegel and his view of ancient philosophy.”

In What is Called Thinking, Heidegger writes: “By way of Hegelian metaphysics, Kierkegaard remains everywhere philosophically entangled, on the one hand in a dogmatic Aristotelianism that is completely on a par with medieval scholasticism, and on the other in the subjectivity of German Idealism.” In 1958 he writes: “Marx and Kierkegaard are the greatest of Hegelians.”

As far as Heidegger’s relation to Dilthey, he moves beyond the latter’s historical structuralism by freeing history from the relativity and skepticism of Dilthey’s project.

Language isnt the sedimented past, it is the transformation of this past in the disclosure of the world.
— Joshs

I'd say it's both sediment and transformative disclosure. See page 270, for instance, of the lecture version of The Concept of Time, which can be summarized as "the Anyone has in idle talk its true form of being." And "what one [the Anyone] says is really what controls the various possibilities of the being of Dasein — green flag

Idle talk doesn’t illustrate the sedimented nature of language, as if we directly introject verbal meanings from the culture. On the contrary, idle talk is a failure of meaning, its impoverishment. For Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance.

In that same section of Concept of Time you mentioned , Heidegger says “What is talked about in idle talk is meant only in an indeterminate emptiness, which is why discourse about it is disoriented.”

Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.

“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”

“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. “ “ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”

the medium, language, is already there, as a kind of inescapable presupposition. This is one of my favorite themes in Heidegger. This inherited medium is the sediment of the living thought of previous generations. We are thrown into ways of thinking, a cage of concepts that can only be question from within, using those very concepts — green flag

I wouldnt say that Heidegger considered language as a mere medium, tool or presupposition that intermediates between thought and expression. What we are thrown into isn’t already packaged concepts, but language that reveals itself anew, that remakes its past in our ‘use’ of it. Language isnt the sedimented past, it is the transformation of this past in the disclosure of the world.

“Since long ago, that which is present has been regarded as what is.”
— Joshs

Who are you quoting and from where? It is always helpful to discuss things in context. — Fooloso4

That’s Heidegger in What is Thinking.

“To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will.”
— Joshs

I assume you are quoting Heidegger. The question is: is this true? Does modern metaphysics even address the Being of beings? What, for example, does Hegel say about will that can be regarded as meaning the Being of beings? — Fooloso4

Yes, that’s Heidegger again from WIT. The Being of beings is the question of the essence or ground of beings. We can find attempts to answer the question of the ground of all that is by all the major philosophers. What unites all these attempts as metaphysical is their defining of this ultimate ground as some sort of abiding presence.

Will to power is a force. It is not a being that resides in beings — Fooloso4

For Heidegger, will to power, whether you want to call it a force , value-positing or that which makes beings possible, is that which persists as presence.

“Since long ago, that which is present has been regarded as what is.” “To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will.”

In other words , for modern metaphysics, including Nietzsche’s will to power, will is that which is present to itself as what is.

“Since in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing "now."
“Among the long established predicates of primal being are "eternity and independence of time. Eternal will does not mean only a will that lasts eternally: it says that will is primal being only when it is eternal as will….The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.”

Thinking Being as eternal return is not to think the Being of the eternal return.

He says "as time" not in time.

The eternal return is not in time, what is in time is what eternally returns. — Fooloso4

That’s true. What is in time is what recurs in the eternal return. Only because Nietzsche thinks of time in terms of the traditional metaphysical notion of ‘in-timeless’, the sequence of present nows, can he posit the eternal return as the endless presence ( Being) of the willing of itself.

“…the answer Aristotle gave to the question of the
essential nature of time still governs Nietzsche's idea of
time. What is the situation in regard to time? In being,
present in time at the given moment is only that narrow
ridge of the momentary fugitive "now," rising out of the
"not yet now'' and falling away into the "no longer now."

. The will to power and the eternal return are not beings, but that through which and by which what comes to be comes to be — Fooloso4

They are still beings in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. Will to power is a value-positing being. The Being of the eternal return is ‘in time’ rather than temporal in Heidegger’s sense.

. Heidegger combines an insightful and penetrating commentary with a presentation of earlier thinkers that is as much a misrepresentation as it is a re-presentation. Take his claim that Plato and Aristotle conceive Being as ousia (presence). — Fooloso4

He’s far from the only contemporary philosopher who believes Plato led Western thinking on the path of truth as objective representation.

Heidegger has to have Nietzsche's metaphysics (or the latest development of metaphysics) here in mind, he never referred to Aristotle or Hegel as nihilists. — waarala

In ‘The Word of Nietzsche’, Heidegger says that the thinking of Being as a value is what characterizes Western metaphysics from Aristotle through Nietzsche.

“Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker preserves a closeness to Aristotle.

“…if the thinking that thinks everything in terms of values is
nihilism when thought in relation to Being itself, then even
Nietzsche's own experience of nihilism, i.e., that it is the devalu­ing of the highest values, is after all a nihilistic one.”

Heidegger of BT agreed with Kant that we can't avoid metaphysics. Human beings or their thinking/world view is inescapably metaphysical. What is required is a new, critical metaphysics — waarala

I like the way the I.E.P. explains Heidegger’s relation to metaphysics:

“Metaphysics cannot be rejected, canceled or denied, but it can be overcome by demonstrating its nihilism. In Heidegger’s use of the term, “nihilism” has a very specific meaning. It refers to the forgetfulness of being. What remains unquestioned and forgotten in metaphysics is Being; hence, it is nihilistic.”

Coming outside of philosophy, I find the notion of being fairly uninteresting. No doubt there is rigorous and serious scholarship behind Heidegger's work, but it often sounds like high end bong talk — Tom Storm

Given your involvement with psychotherapy, you may be interested in how Heidegger’s work is being applied in cognitive approaches to affectivity. There is no contemporary philosopher who has delved into the nature of affect, feeling, mood and emotion more deeply than Heidegger. Check out this paper from Matthew Ratcliffe:

https://www.academia.edu/458222/Heideggers_Attunement_and_the_Neuropsychology_of_Emotion

or this:

https://www.academia.edu/458309/Why_Mood_Matters

↪Tom Storm

Heidegger's influence on progressive theology is strong. Tillich and God as the ground of being is an obvious example.

Hart's "surprise" seems contrived. — Fooloso4

Heidegger’s influence on atheists has been equally strong, which has led to constant battles between theological and atheistic interpretations of his work. Concerning Hart’s surprise that there is anything at all, it is echoed by Heidegger in What is Metaphysics. We must allow ourselves to be surprised and astonished by beings.

“Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. For this insertion it is of decisive importance, first, that we allow space for beings as a whole; second, that we release ourselves into the nothing, which is to say, that we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which he is wont to go cringing; and finally, that we let the sweep of our suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing.”(WIM)

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