Wittgenstein thought that...philosophy being particularly unmoored and thus occlusive. Philosophy as a dead, beached whale, mourn and then forget.

In contrast, Heidegger thought ...philosophy being particularly moored on ossified, unnoticed framing devices and thus occlusive. Philosophy as a still living, beached whale, and gotta save that whale. — fdrake

Put another way, both Witt and Heidegger thought traditional philosophy failed to understand meaning as emerging out of contexts of social engagement
Witt associated all philosophy with traditional
metaphysics and did not know how to articulate his thinking as a kind of post-metaphysical
philosophy, having been unable to learn from Nietzsche’s approach. Heidegger, on the other hand , claimed to locate a way of doing philosophy that moved beyond metaphysics.He may very well have located Witt’s work within a religious metaphysics akin to Kierkegaard.

In order to conflict, or to force, or any kind of violence, 'care' is presupposed. conflict and violence indicate that there is something that 'matters', that rejects me and that I feel something about. The world inescapably matters to me and that is why I might conflict with it. — Tobias

This sounds like you may be understanding care in a conventional sense. Tell me how you understand Heidegger’s notion of care in relation to his concept of temporality, because this ‘ equiprimordial’ relation between care, understanding, attunement and understanding is crucial to my treatment of ‘care’.

More specifically , the way the my ‘now’ projects my past into my future possibilities means that any ‘object’ in the world I experience is partially build out of my past. This is a crucial point , because it gives all my experiences the sense of a radical belonging to my past, at the same time that the ‘now’ contributes an element of absolute novelty. In this respect , Heidegger inherited Husserl’s formulation of the intentional act as a constitution built on a dimension similarity between previous history and what is encountered.

, Husserl's notion of the foreign must be understood in different terms than that of corporeal otherness. We have seen this difference manifested in the way that for Husserl I maintain an ongoing thread of subjective continuity within my participation in an intersubjective world. I want now to further explore the nature and philosophical justification for the internal integrity of the temporal stream of consciousness . My claim is that Husserl's articulation of the transcendentally reduced sphere of consciousness in terms (mineness, unitary, synthetic, continuous) that risk implying a solipsism closed off to the otherness of the world and history wasn't simply an unfortunate choice of terminology.

In Husserl there is a primordial motivational principle-anticipatory assimilation dominates the foreignness of the noematic object pole. We see the centrality of similarity manifest itself at all levels of constitution, in the subjective achievement of synthetic unities, analogical apperceptive pairing, associative relationality, correlations, harmonious fulfillments, subjective ‘mineness', variations, flowing multiplicities, congruities, nexuses, coherences, etc. Even in difference, negation, senselessness, irrationality, alienation there is no experience in consciousness that is not in an overarching way variation on a thematics (which are already assocative syntheses of variations on variations) for Husserl , a similarity-in-difference.
Now, it is true that Heidegger deconstructed Husserl’s notion of egoic consciousness, but his own work retains this idea of similarity in difference.

It is there also in Derrida’s interlocked concepts of ‘trace’, gramme and differance. The odd verbal construction ‘differance’ indicates
that for Derrida the irreducible primitive of experience, the trace, borrows from my immediate last in forming what differs from me. That is, any ‘object’ of my experience is parasitic in what it opposes itself
to. Therefore, my world cannot be something that ‘rejects’ me or conflicts with me except as
that rejection or conflict pre-supposes a more
fundamental belonging of what opposes itself
to me to my current concerns. It is only because I am already involved with something in a certain way and in relation to ongoing concerns that I can perceive it as conflicting or opposing or rejecting. So the
rejecting of me’ by an object I encounter , always takes place, is possible at all, only as a subordinate to a totality of relevance to which the ‘rejection’ belongs. Put differently , all the various ways in which what I experience affects me(surprising, rejecting, conflicting, agreeing) can do so only within a larger totality of relevance, Superodia to belong of what I encounter to my present understanding, which is why what I find conflictual is never the same as what you find conflictual.

Herein lies the problem I have with Heidegger. There is something like a 'true being with others', opposed to what, an untrue being with others? But if I am with others I am with others, there is no true or false. Just like Sorge, care, is not a self relation, it is a relation towards the other. that is what I mean with I as constituted by the world. It is not a self relation that lights a seinsverstehen, it is the other way around. I see that I care about things and realise that there is something like an I. — Tobias

It sounds like you’re situating an I over here and a world
over there and then putting them together, or choosing one as dominant over the other, the world as dominant over my self-reflexivity. But Heidegger isn’t starting from self and world in some kind of relation. Self-relation IS relation to world. What you need to do is look at the self that you have depicted and split it within itself. Split it so that instead of an entity or a reflexivity or a presence , it ‘is’ a change from past to
present, a differential. Forget about the ‘outside’ world that you think you know and see this world as already inherent in the split in the now. You’re starting from
presences ( Self and world ) and trying to create a difference from our of that binary. it you need to put difference BEFORE presencing.


Authentic being with others isn’t ‘true’ and
inauthentic ‘false’. Inauthentic being with
others is a derivative mode of mit-dasein, just as the present-to-hand is a derivative mode of
interpretation.

Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused 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.”

To say that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of
being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself, is to say that Dasein explicitly
experiences itself as a constituted self, introjecting norms from other selves , but this awareness
pre-supposes and is grounded in an implicit mineness.

Heidegger says average everydayness alienates Dasein from itself, but without Dasein’s therefore being merely conditioned by others.
“However, alienation cannot mean that Da-sein is factically torn away from itself....this alienation, which closes off to Da-sein its authenticity and possibility, even if only that of genuinely getting stranded, still does not surrender it to beings which it itself is not, but
forces it into its inauthenticity, into a possible kind of being of itself.”

Evidence that the heedful relevance and mineness of Care undergirds the normativity of average
everydayness, preventing it from being a mere introjection from world to self, come not only
from Heidegger’s treatment of idle talk and average everydayness, but also from his analysis of
the propositional statement. Here we see him using similar adjectives to describe what he calls an
‘extreme’ mode of present-to-handness : veiled, cut-off, levelled down.

In the present-to-hand propositional statement, “The as-structure of interpretation has undergone
a modification. The "as" no longer reaches out into a totality of relevance in its function of appropriating what is understood. It is cut off with regard to its possibilities of the articulation of referential relations of significance which constitute the character of the surrounding world.”

So the wider experience of a totality of relevance is that out of which something like a present-to- hand thing emerges. But it cuts itself off from , and thus conceals this contextual richness of significance and meaningfulness that it depends on and implies, and as a result it is impoverished of meaningful significance, intelligiblity, relevance. It is a ‘dwindling down’ relative to heedfully circumspective modes of experience.

Average everydayness of Das man and idle talk shares with the present to hand in general the features of being derivative modes of the ‘as’ structure of heedful circumspective significance, functioning as a contextually rich totality of relevance. They also share the feature of being a ‘dwindling down’ of that wider experience. Of central import here is that primary intersubjective models such as those of Gallagher and Merleau-Ponty and social constructionisms assume that, as Zahavi writes, “we take over from others (and make our own) a language, roles, attitudes and
norms” and that these culturally normed practices that we internalize represent forms of meaning no less robust in significance and relevance to our lives than those which we generate.

In contrast, for Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance. The publicness of Das Man and the present to handness of things are modes of Dasein representing a deprivation and trivialization of intelligibility, significance and relevance, and thus a reduction of meaningfulness. Dasein becomes alienated from itself not by being taken over by an outside but by encountering itself (its ownmost world of possibilities) as almost devoid of sense. Alienation as senselessness rather than internalization of an other.

Deviation is dependent on there being an established use. — Banno

I think that, instead, established or normative use is just an abstraction from individual ‘deviations’(interpretations). This is what Heidegger is arguing.

The Philosophical Investigations by any other name. It's even got the bit about engines running in idle and form-of-life. Practically indistinguishable. — StreetlightX

What would Witt make of Heidegger’s treating language interchange as idle talk and das man, as impoverished forms of Being’s self-understanding? Why does Gadamer say:

Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got
behind. Indeed, evenas he was developing the idea, his wasn't really talking about the other
at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for
granted. I must say that conscience — having a conscience — no, that wasn't terribly convincing.
"Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-
sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic
"being-interested-in-him."”(A Century of Philosophy. Hans-Georg Gadamer in Conversation
with Riccardo Dottori)

I don’t agree with Gadamer , but not because Heidegger is simply echoing Witt, it because Mitt-Dasein for Heidegger is a true being-with-others that is not simply a Witt-style sharing of language.

I do not get it Banno. Why the idea you need to know someone to appreciate his/her philosophy? — Tobias

Although I have to admit Witt’s profound but conventional religiosity through the 1930’s influences my reading of his work, and I contrast it with Heidegger’s complex
destabilizing of theology.

I... It seems he does not like the idea of the self being construed by the world in which it finds itself. He seems to hang on to some kernel of authenticity. Why cannot the self reflection and the relation to being not be established by the 'object' by a lack of a better word the world itself. I never understood what was won by the Heideggerian move to keep somekind of existential notion together with his beautiful analysis of enframing. No there is no authentic I, and no, there is no purely publically defined I. I am simply a unique constellation of forces through which other impulses (words, concepts) are iterated but never in exactly the same way. there is nothing authentic about it, just small 'corruptions' , which occur gradually. — Tobias

Very interesting. Let me address the way you characterize my experiencing of a world and see how it might differ from what I see Heidegger doing.


You talk about the self being construed by the world , Being as established by the object, my self as constellation of forces, corruptions.
So there is an interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. You perhaps would concur if I said these are just poles or aspects of an indissociable interaction between self and world.

But let me observe that the adjectives you use to describe this interaction defines the poles in a certain way. To be more specific, they flesh out the poles as inhering in a certain violence of polarization and arbitrariness. Corruption, force, impulse.( I would also add a host of other terms that various writers on intersubjectivity attribute to Being in the world, like introjection, conditioning , intersection of flows of power) These descriptors are intrinsic to how intersubjectivity creates and recreates subjects in many overlapping approaches in philosophy today ( Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology , social constructionism , post-structuralism , critical theory).

But let me now suggest that such terms of polarizing arbitrariness are only necessary because they assume as certain substantiality the the subjective and objective poles of experiencing a world. The has to be an element of resistantance and force-power implied in each pole in order for change to be a wrenching dislocation, a ‘corruption’.

But what if we give too much power, too much substance to these poles? What if,hidden within what we assume to be the irreducible pre-conditions for being in the world as a play of forces , there is a more intimate, more intricate because more insignificant and insubstantial binary at work in every moment of experiencing? This would be on the order of variations of variations rather than a colliding of impulses. These would be variations of variations with no originating subject or generating power.
Rather than ‘Heideggerian authenticity’ being an attempt to rescue the remnants of the idealist subject from its fragmentation, it would be the opposite , an attempt to show how, functioning beneath the abstractions of ‘fat’ power relations , there is a movement that is at the same time more incessant and radically self-transformational , and more seemingly self-consistent and integral. But this thematic integrity would have to be understood
as not the work of some ghost in the machine, as you and others accuse Heidegger of , the return of idealist solipsism, but the compete opposite. The ongoing ‘self-belonging ‘ of my experience would have to be understood as what is left of moment to moment experiencing when all the abstractive baggage of ‘forceful’ interactive polarity has new deconstructed.
The problem with a Wittgensteinian or Foucualtian model, then, is that it has not gone far enough to unravel idealist assumptions.

Well I dunno you just spat out an unsubstantiated one liner so I figured I'd be authorized to do the same.

Just so happens that I'm right. — StreetlightX

You are always right. And you know why? Because you’re a god.

Whereas Wittgenstein begins from intersubjectivity in his grounding of meaning
— Joshs

No he doesn't. — StreetlightX

Welll, you sure told me. Although I don’t know what you told me. It was more like a drive-by refuting. I know you want to get in on this. I can tell. Yeah, you want it , don’t you?

Congratulations on a most erudite article. You assume the primacy of the subjective but then seem to think you have demonstrated it. I was unable to follow you notion of embodiment. — Banno

Thanks for reading it. I kind of hate to use the term ‘subjective’ to describe what I’m after, and what Heidegger was after. I don’t see that there’s a subject anywhere in our approaches. Every single mention of subjective in Being and Time is in scare quotes for a reason. Dasein is ‘being there’, not a subjectivity. Yes, Heidegger uses terms like self and mineness, but these don’t refer to the relain between a subject and an objective world. All a ‘self’ is is a split , a hinge, a differential between memory, past, history on the one hand , and what is new, other, alien, on the other. This hinge or differential is the ‘now’ moment of experience. In the next moment it will be a changed history,past, memory that meets with a new otherness. Where do you find a subject here? There is no ‘me’ that stands behind or underneath or alongside or around this flow of changing nows. No homonculus or controller or spirit or categorical framer or mind. Nothing but a new past together with a new otherness forming an always new ‘now’ of experience. So why does Heidegger call this ‘mine’? Who or what is this ‘me’? It is nothing but the intimate and intricate way the new present occurs into a past which is changed by that present. It presents the ‘illusion’ of an ongoing flow of self-similarity. So ‘ self’ is nothing but an index of the relationality of one moment to the next of experience.

In a frivolous mood I pasted the first 1000-odd words of B&T and PI into prowritingaid.com — bongo fury

I wonder how Shakespeare and Joyce stack up. It would probably love Hemmingway.

Hopefully this link may give you a feel for how an increasing number of researchers on cognition and emotion are benefitting from Heidegger.

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

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290089652_Why_Mood_Matters

Wittgenstein's sympathies towards Heidegger demonstrate that he did not believe the most important types of meaning to be inter-subjectively decided. Only inter-subjective meaning is inter-subjectively decided. — sime

I know that there are many , often opposed readings of Witt. An example of what I would call a
conservative reading is that of Peter Hacker. At the other end of the spectrum are writers like Dreyfus, Lyotard, and Rorty. Where do you see yourself on this left-right continuum of Witt interpretations?
I want to add that there seems to be a converging consensus among philosophers and psychologists influenced by phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, social constructionism and poat-structuralisms like Foucault that intersubjectivity is the primary way that all personal meanings are shaped.

Not Spinoza, not Hume, not Kierkegaard, not Schopenhauer, not Nietzsche, not Zapffe, not Sartre, not Merleau-Ponty, not ... but Heidi?! C'mon. :roll: — 180 Proof

I said , AMONG the first. I would not include Spinoza, Hume or Schopenhauer among this group. They maintain a clear separation between what they call
emotion and what they consider as the rational, the intentional, the cognitive. If you’d like to summarize for me your understanding of how Spinoza integrates emotion and rational thought I’ll show you how it differs from Heidegger.


. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were directly influenced by Heidegger , but even so we don’t find affectivity, as Befindlichkeit , being give the central importance it has for Heidegger.

If you like - for Witti the within-person dynamic is either going to be pubic, and hence a part of the between-person dynamic; or private, and hence outside of the discussion.

What do you make of that? — Banno

I agree that this would be his argument. My response is that every moment my experience is public in the sense that it is exposed to an outside that changes its sense and meaning in a subtle but complete way which makes me other than what I am every new moment in time. but this ‘public for me’ is unique to my past history . It is not the same ‘public’ for you or anyone else . There can be no shared public , no joint action or ‘we’ , only , ‘my’ version of we and your version of we in each interchange.
There are two language games proceeding , from my ‘we’ and from your ‘we’. It is not that what I mean to say is not altered and influenced by your response. nBut that change in me, or I should say change OF me is a variation of my thematics and the change of you is a variation of your thematics. There is never a shared thematics, but ther can be enough similarity between your understanding and mine to make it appear as though the understanding is shared.

I know it’s hard to swallow but I want to to the paradox of my referring to my moment to moment experience as at the same time resistant to shared normativity of language games and not a subjectivity or enclosure. I am not resistant to the ‘we’ because i am an interiority , but because I am already a a fully social unfolding , and the ‘weness’ of language games is an abstraction derived from that primary sociality.

Here’s a paper I wrote about this:


https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social — Joshs

what little of it that I can comprehend is misguided: "There’s no room for each participant to form slightly different interpretations of the same rules for everyone...". — Banno

Couldnt you humor me and say it’s ‘differently guided’?
Would probably be helpful if you elaborated on why it’s misguided, although I know the rhetoric well: Witt and olp teach us that such formulations of language as ‘personal interpretation’ are problematic.
If you think the above is obscure you’ll love this:

“let's not misunderstand what I mean by making this distinction between a WITHIN-person and a BETWEEN-person dynamic. The within-person dynamic is already a between in that it is a thoroughgoing exposure to an outside, an alterity, an otherness. For Heidegger, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located publically as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I' or interpersonal ‘we', there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective and objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies, between-person conditionings or public language games.”

Imagine if all your experiences amounted to variations on a thematics which was itself constantly changing its sense, but slowly. Thus you could say that all your experience of meaning was ‘public’ in that who you are and what you think and what your world means to you is in subtle transformation every minute, as it is constantly exposed to new context. But in relation to every other that you engage with, your experience is in a real sense ‘private’ , or at least there is an unbridgeable gap between you and the another person’s experience , even in a ‘langauge game’.

Here’s a paper I wrote about this:


https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social

Subjectivity is critiqued in PI; so suggesting the primacy of intersubjectivity strikes me as problematic.

So I wonder if there is anything in Heidi that talks of following rules. For Witti, this is a public activity. — Banno

Exactly. No subjectivity for Witt, and what’s the only alternative he offers? The structure of publicness. joint engagement , rule following , language games. There’s no room for each participant to form slightly different interpretations of the same rules for everyone, because the notion of participant and individual interpretation of a language game are problematic ,
as they should be. But what Heidegger is on about is not the social as a subjective , a solipsistic self ,an ‘I’. That’s his whole point. The ‘self’ is always already an in-between that transcends ‘ itself’ every minute of time. That’s what a moment of time is, my past that is defined by my present that comes from my future. Past, present , future are not separate structures but one indissociable whole in each ‘now’. Each ‘now’ that ‘I’ experience is both my past as a totality and a remaking of that past as utterly néw. The entire structure of the social, the Other, the alien and the world originates in each ‘now’ prior to any language game. In a sense that is the fundamental language game , the way my ‘now’ remakes my past. Other persons, voices, gestures are not the basis of this exposure to otherness, and I don’t simply absorb and become shaped by what I engage with in language with others, precisely because I am already other to myself and my relation with other persons is a secondary otherness.

As Derrida asks: How do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without
this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I’ without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I’, that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I’ and
nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I’.

Do you suppose the increased interest in Heidi over the last few years is related to the rise of autocratic thinking? To the acceptance of obscure bullshit? — Banno

A big part of the increased interest in him is coming from theorists in cognition and emotion, who find his analysis of affect indispensable. Heidegger was among the first to recognize the inseparable interpenetration of emotion, mood, feeling, and intention.

IIRC, this 'solipsistic stance' is Heidi's ethical (Levinas, Adorno) failing compared to Witty's more 'cultural-pragmatic stance'. — 180 Proof

Yes, this is a common criticism of Heidegger. For instance, Shaun Gallagher writes:

“ In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

Gadamer seems to concur:

“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed even as he was developing the idea, his wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted. I must say that conscience — having a conscience — no, that wasn't terribly convincing.
"Care" is always a concernfulness about one's own being, and Mit- sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him.”

But matters are not so simple. Dan Zahavi makes the opposite critique.Zahavi interprets Heidegger’s account of the primordiality of being-with as consonant with the approach of Hans Bernhard Schmid.

“In Schmid’s recent work, we can find a position that is partly inspired by Heidegger...”
“...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication (Schmid 2005, 138, 145, )

I think Gadamer , you and Zahavi are both right and both wrong. You are right that Heidegger makes Witt’s notion of primary intersubjectivty a derivative modification of the primary self-understanding of Dasein. You are wrong to interpret Dasein’s self-understanding as prior to sociality. Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as
a referential differential inside-outside.There is no solipsistic inside for Heidegger, because self -relation is already relation with an outside. We find similar arguments in Derrida:

“Derrida says all speech is writing , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social.
“...it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other.”
“When he writes himself to himself, he writes himself to the other who is infinitely far away and who is supposed to send his signature back to him. He has no relation to himself that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other...”

In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public’: , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation’ : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with
Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public.

For Derrida, like Heidegger it is not the other person, but time itself that separates me from myself, and when I do engage in language with others I never simply introject normative meanings but interpret them in relation to my own background.

I bet you’re a lawyer

I'd count it as one of the lesser works of existential thought, far behind Sartre or Kierkegaard. — Banno

Sartre’s master work, Being and Nothingness, would not even exist without Heidegger’s writing. It’s a second rate misinterpretation. of Being and Time.

Here’s Derrida’s view of Sartre:

Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger.

I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader.

He and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted.

What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure?

And you won’t have some acquaintance with their philosophies without the slightest idea of how to interpret the way they lived their lives.

Your point?

In so far as Heidegger "thinks of (meaning) in terms of the way that meanings are uniquely my own" he fails to recognise that meaning is embedded in life.

And that is exemplified in their respective biographies. I answered your question; but perhaps not in the way you wanted. — Banno

My point was, and don’t take this personally, and correct me if I’m wrong , but I get the distinct sense that you’ve never read Being and Time.

THe way they lived their lives shows much about their respective philosophies. — Banno

I agree that a philosopher’s ideas and personal choices inother aspects of their lives are intimately connected. For that reason you won’t have the slightest idea how to interpret the way they lived their lives without some acquaintance with their philosophies. Which brings us back to the OP

It might be better not to use thei term so freely. See the topic of the same name. It's not a word used by Wittgenstein, nor by his translators - and for good reason. — Banno

That’s a good start. Give me a better word to describe his understanding of the public.

Heidegger spent the Great War reporting on the weather. Wittgenstein spent it volunteering for the most dangerous tasks to be found on the front line.

Heidegger talked about engaging with life. Wittgenstein engaged with life. — Banno

I’m not sure you’re ‘engaging’ with the OP. I should have added: no gratuitous comments on Heidegger’s politics as a substitute for having read the work.

Will you please study Spinoza ... (& Thomas Metzinger & Ray Brassier). :confused: — 180 Proof

I think Thomas Metzinger should study Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe and Dan Zahavi for a more enlightened approach to cognition

Thank you Heidegger

how do we know you understand them? And I am not saying you don't, just that we have no way of knowing this. Heidegger is notoriously difficult to follow. Derrida is understood so differently by so many closes readers who can say what he really means? — Tom Storm

We will never know what a philosopher ‘really means’, but I don’t think that should be considered the aim of reading them. What we should aim for is to learn a new way of looking at the world which we find pragmatically useful in our lives in it’s different facets ( interpersonal understanding and ethics, spiritual concerns , education and political thought, aesthetic experience and creativity).

It is unlikely that we will prevented from sharing the insights we gain, because even though as you pointed out there are multiple interpretive camps for every major thinker , it is quite likely we will identify with one of those camps and be able to share and learn alongside them.

Good philosophy is clear and accessible, even to the novice: Mary's Room, Defense of Abortion, Trolley Car, Allegory of the Cave, Riddle of Induction, What is it like to be a Bat, Ship of Theseus, Transporter Problem, and so on.[/quote]

Much of what you are listing as ‘good’ philosophy seems to belong to the conventional style of thinking of analytic philosophy, which brackets the era from
Hume to Hegel and renders those ideas palatable to a wider audience. I call it ‘applied’ continental
thought. Analytic is to continental philosophy as engineering is to theoretical physics. It doesn’t attempt to dig beneath the deepest presuppositions of an era of thinking i. sweepingly comprehensive fashion , as the continentals do.
That’s why it seems clear and accessible to you. Its language was designed for that purpose. For me Heidegger, Derrida and Husserl are clear and accessible, but then again my goal is to turn the conventional on its head, not work away at its edges.

Certainty early Heidegger and Nietzsche are accessible to the novice in the sen that they write completed , coherent thoughts, don’t use arcane language without first defining it for the layman, and circle around repeated themes of general interest. But their aim is to teach you a very different way of thinking about your world, so you end up having g to reread every apparently ‘simple’ sentence multiple times.

Derrida was once asked why , given all the other contemporary philosophers Derrida wrote about , he never devoted any time to
discussing Lacan’s ideas. I like his response:

“Lacan's style: its sometimes remarkable, and also sometimes anachronistic (I do not say untimely) effects (in relation to a certain advance and to a certain "program" of the times) seemed to me to be governed by the delay of a scene, conferring upon it, as I do not doubt, a certain necessity. (I am designating whatever constrained him to deal with institutionalized psychoanalysis in a certain way: this is Lacan's argument.) In relation to the theoretical difficulties that interested me, I read this style, above all, as an art of evasion. The vivacity of ellipsis too often seemed to me to serve as an avoidance or an envelopment of diverse problems.

Even if these reservations are far from exhausting Lacan's work, of which I remain persuaded, they were already important enough for me not to seek references (in the form of a guarantee) in a discourse so different, in its mode of elocution, its site, its aims, its presuppositions, from the texts that I was proposing. Such references would only result in the accumulation of fog in a field already not lacking it. They also risked compromising the possibility of a rigorous juxtaposition that perhaps remained to be constructed.”

Noam Chomsky - a highly complex theorist - made this exact same point about some French thinkers. Not a naïve realist or simple man by any means. — Tom Storm

His view actually comes pretty close to naive realism. He certainly is not much of a constructivist, believing as he does in innate semantic primitives. Jerry Fodor’s comment about 1st generation cognitive science applies well to Chomsky’s approach.

“the only respect in which cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer as a model of mind.”

His comment about French thinkers was probably aimed at Foucault.

generally take the view that if an idea is understood well it can be expressed simply and clearly. — Tom Storm

You agree that someone with no background in physics is not in a position to tackle QM or Einstein’s general
relativity. Why should it be any different for philosophy? I’ve never found anything Derrida wrote to be onscurantist or convoluted. On the other hand , given the limitations of Foucault’s worldview, I’m not surprised he blamed Derrida writing style for his failure to understand the fundamental concepts. Sealer writes in a nice clear style and I find his work to be utterly banal in comparisons to Derrida, Heidegger , Nietzsche and many other continentals.

Some philosophers are obscurantist. They tend to be the mediocre thinkers who don’t have much new to say.
Don’t confuse them with writers offering difficult new ideas. If you think any set of philosophical ideas should be immediately readable by you in particular in a way that appears ‘simple and clear’ then I suggest what you really are looking for is a set of ideas that fit within a worldview that is already eminently familiar to you. So if you’re only interested in ideas that conform to what you already know ( your metaphysical framework) , then continental philosophy isn’t for you.

But i think it goes further than that for you. I think your worldview itself may possibly be a naive realist one,( our scientific theories attempt to correspond to an independently existing external world ) and if that is the case then the notion of a philosophical perspective requiring a whole new way of thinking and a transformation of your language is alien to you.

That analysis goes much further back than Quine. — Banno

If you’re referring to Kant , the Quinean formulation amounts to a critique of Kant’s
idealism.

The mistake in the OP is to think in terms of objective/subjective rather than is/ought. — Banno

Putnam, following Quine said that is and ought cannot be disentangled since fact and value interpenetrate.

peoples may differ on what exactly they believe is right and wrong but they all agree that there's such a thing as right and wrong. — TheMadFool

In the same vein, people agree that there is such a thing as the familiar and the alien, the understandable and the strange. The problem is that morality , and its judgments of what is right and what is wrong , generally comes down to these dichotomies, so that morality is just another word for the drive to enforce
conformity.

I don't know if most people really need a philosophical justification to do good things anyway. — Dharmi

That would explain why they think the notion of ‘doing good things’ is objectively definable in the first place.

Can it not be explained in a simple sentence? — Tom Storm

I always get that from corporate types( not that you’re necessarily a corporate type). If an idea is worth anything it should be explicable in a simple
sentence. That works well in the world of
commerce because by definition a commercial product only has a market if it’s value is understood by a sizable number of people. But philosophy traffics in ideas
that are not already well understood by the mainstream , so buzzwords, soundbites and tweets will only be coherent to whose already well versed in a particular philosophical approach. Plus, different philosophical orientations define metaphysics in their own ways. Since I’m using Derrida’s definition , I’d need to introduce you to his vocabulary and way of thinking before his notion of metaphysics will make sense.

I could, however, respond to focused questions from you.

formalist gesture in thinking
— Joshs

I don't understand what you mean here? — Tom Storm

Metaphysics in the way authors like Derrida mean it has to do with organizing particulars via a category some sort of a priori , that is , irreducible status.
Let me give examples of metaphysical
systems. There’s Descartes’ rationalism, in which an a priori pre-established harmony prevails between world and reasoning subject , and Kant’s a prior categories of the understanding , and Hegel’s
formal dialectic of history. And then there’s the metaphysics of naive realism that Wittgenstein unravels , the picture model of meaning in which facts can be separated from interpretations of facts.

if someone chooses to place a different interpretation on the same facts, the facts haven't changed. — Gary Enfield

Here’s an example from Nelson Goodman describing the relationship between our accounts of experience and the experience in itself:

“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects?

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”

metaphysics in its most general sense is just the formalist gesture in thinking. Derrida recognized that there is no escaping this gesture , even for atheists and those who reject classical metaphysics. That’s why he dubbed his position ‘quasi-transcendental’, because it acknowledges the inseparable relation between the formal and empirical moment in every experience.

I ultimately agree with Popper about metaphysics. — norm

I would have thought you’d prefer Kuhn to Popper. There just aren’t enough Kuhnians on this forum. Popper is too much of a realist for me. Let me ask you this: who would you side with in the following debate?

“While Rorty claims that his view is "almost, but not quite, the same as Putnam's" internalist conception of philosophy" , Putnam is uncomfortable with this association. Putnam claims to be preserving the realist spirit but he takes Rorty to be "rejecting the intuitions that underlie every kind of realism (and not just metaphysical realism)" . Putnam views Rorty's pragmatism as a self-refuting relativism driven by a deep irrationalism that casts doubt on the very possibility of thought. Yet in the paper Putnam cites to support his charge Rorty insists that he shares Putnam's desire for a middle ground between metaphysical realism and relativism and that his pragmatism fills the bill. Putnam does not concur.”

The problem or comedy is that philosophical realizations (breakthroughs, revolutions) don't necessarily provide wonder-working technical power.
— norm

The philosophical realisation that underlies our world began with Descartes’ algebraic geometry combined with Newton’s and Galileo’s science. That philosophical revolution certainly provided wonder-working technical power. You’re looking at it. — Wayfarer

Norm is referring to a different philosophical breakthrough than that of enlightenment era science( the later Wittgenstein , and I would add to that a boat of other post Hegelian philosophies that have yet to be translated into wonder-working technical power). I anticipate that these more recent philosophical realizations will produce a new generation of technologies. They are already being translated into artificial intelligence platforms.