Its not that secondary sources are bad in themselves. It's just that someone who spends their career in slavish devotion to translating and interpreting the work of a philosophical great is unlikely to have equaled, much less exceeded, the rigor of their thought. For one thing, if they had, they would use their own voice. instead we get an almost comically sycophantic impersonation of the style of writers like Deleuze and Derrida by their translators(Massumi, Bennington).

As to whether Being and Time is clear or not, the challenge is to find a reading of it we find plausible that is itself clear, coherent and powerful. If we take up Sheehan's or Derrida's interpretation of Heidegger and, try as we might, we are not able to see the logical consistency and clarity that they claim to see in it, then i guess it s time to put Being and Time in the closet. I've had to do that with Lacan and some of Deleuze.

For me the radical core of Being and Time is not about authenticity or death, it's in the first half of the book where Heidegger introduces the equiprimoridal modalities of temporality, attunement and care. I studied experimental cognitive psychology and my central focus was affectivity. In the past decades, affect, feeling and emotion have been lifted out of the shadows to which they were consigned by the behaviorists and positivists for years.With the rise of embodied, embedded and enactive approaches in cognitive science , affectivty now takes center stage as an organizing principle of cognition, rather than the peripheral disorganizing distraction it was considered to be in earlier thinking. In this regard, Heidegger has been taken up by Matthew Ratcliffe and others in the cognitive community for the way that he views affective attunement as framing the meaningful of all experiencing. For me the key to understanding Heidegger is via his treatment of affect in relation to cognition.

I have been slapped with a glove, sir. — pomophobe

Didnt mean to sound snarky, but it would be fun to go through it briefly and see what we come up with.

perhaps you can see why a fact/value distinction is useful. I think Heidegger had some insights of independent value from his grandiose cultural concerns. For my money Being and Time is already contaminated with something not quite 'scientific.' Is the forgetfulness of Being an essentially political-spiritual point? Is authenticity really a technical term? What's with all the talk of death? Does he make himself clear? How much of Being and Time is better expressed in earlier works that were not yet available when his big book was published -- without the shakier elements? — pomophobe

Doesn't any 'scientific' theory already imply a valuative stance implicating poltical ,spiritual, ethical considerations? That's the difference between the concept paradigm understood in Kuhnian vs Popperian (or Kantian vs Hegelian, modernist vs post-modernist) terms. The Popperian asks 'Must we commit to a position here?' whereas the Kuhnian says there is no value-neutral scientific paradigm.

I don't think we can really do justice to Heidegger without first delving more deeply into your comment that a" fact/value distinction is useful".
If what you are saying is that you don't quite agree with the arguments of Putnam-Quine-Rorty-Goodman , then perhaps you identify more with the 'pre-Hegelian' branches of analytic philosophy, cognitive science and philosophy of science.

While the authenticity theme is flattering to us who aren't phony and crumby, it hasn't aged well for me. — pomophobe

Ah, but is the inauthentic for Heidegger a matter of being phony? That sounds like an existentialist reading of him. Beware of secondary sources. Many in the American Heideggerian community of scholars embraced him becasue they assimilated his thinking to Kierkegaardian religious themes dear to their heart(Sheehan, Dreyfus, Caputo, Sallis). This interpretation of Heidegger misses everything that is profound and original about him, in my view. If Heidegger were offering nothing more radical than what authors like Sheehan and Dreyfus make him out to be saying , I would join you in proclaiming that it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. At the very least, one could learn as much from Kierkegaard, Gadamer and Levinas. My favorite readers of Heidegger are the poststructuralists, particularly Derrida.

Wow, you managed to name just about all of my philosophical heroes in one post. Pretty rare for this forum.

And that is why Heidegger is a chore to read. His work is best read in reverse. — I like sushi

pomophone has exclusively quoted from Heidegger's post 1920's writing. I would agree that this later period of Heidegger's career consisted of mostly obscure and impressionistic poeticizing language. I don't view Being and Time and earlier works this way. There's no question Being and Time is an extremely dense and difficult work, but for me it is no more obscure that Kant.
As to the claim that

it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. — pomophone

, I defy pomophone to effectively summarize Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time.
It only appears to be saying something pretty simple to the extent that it is confused with older philosophical ideas that it superficially resembles.

Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? — Joshs


Must we commit to a position here? How has our species accomplished so much already without settling this issue? We mostly get by just fine without top-down theories. — pomophobe

It sounds to me like you've already committed to a position, that being the recognition of the interprenetration of fact and value. Posting an independent 'out there' would seem to contradict the sort of pragmatism you want to defend.

The input is sentences and the output is sentences, but what goes on in the middle has nothing to do with words. It's a mesh of millions or billions of floats, each of which is meaningless in isolation. — pomophobe

Francisco Varela elaborated something similar with his neurophenomenological model. It draws from the idea of a living system as self-organizing. In this view, the origin of cognition is the enactive nature of organismic functioning, the fact that a living system shapes the very environment that it is affected by. This approach doesn't require us to choose between subjectivism or empiricism. It makes the formal and empirical sides of things into poles of an interaction in which neither self nor environment, neither mind nor world , have any coherent sense or existence apart from their interaction. So no top-down theory, but also no bottom up empiricism. This is the meaning of embodiment.

this spirit or attitude is anti-metaphysical and directed toward engagement with the world and experience. — pomophobe

James is taking the empirical attitude — pomophobe

Empiricism is not necessarily anti-metaphysical. Abandoning subjective idealism for subservience to the real can end up trading off one form of metaphysics for another.

It's aimed at active personalities who take life or experience as the primary authority. It expects revision. — pomophobe

Yes, but what kind of revision, and what is presupposed in what we assume about how our theories are revised? Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? What I am asking you is whether you adhere to a Popperian falsificationism, which is consonant with Kantianism, or a Kuhnian approach ,which abandons the idea of empirical knowledge as corresponding to an independent reality, and the vector of science as toward an assdymptotic approximation of reality. Kuhn takes his philosophical cues from Quine, Donaldson, Putnam and Rorty, who recognized that all empirical facts are value-laden, and that any fact makes sense only in relation to an overarching account. This value-laden basis of factuality is not someting that Bacon or Hume understood.

Heidegger radicalized this idea of primordial subject-object interpenetration by deconstructing the basis of logic undergirding the empirical sciences. His rant against technology is really a rant against forgetting the foundation of empricism and logic in a a more fundamental inrersubjective experiential structure. What we forget when we begin from objective thinking is that objectivity and logic are contrivances invented over a period of millennia, beginning with the Greeks and solidified with Galileo and Descartes. We create the presuppositions out of which calculative thought is possible(objects as persisting self-identities with assigned properties and attributes) but the generating process out of which such abstractions emerge is invisible to us.

As Evan Thompson argues :

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that
calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn’t
conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that
such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential.All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic
facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the
conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical
things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I
wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied
mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there’ independently of how we configure or constitute it as
an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as
experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete,
canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of
the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of
consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an
additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can
make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which
is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are
attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this
transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent
metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive
dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world."

Maybe you agree with this. If so, would you not also agree that this is far removed from Bacon and Hume?

It sounds like RAH is about concern for getting something done and PAH is about an object in itself.

I always took RAH to be a sort of flow-like use of an object. It is how we encounter things in our natural state before we analyze them. Thus if RAH is more original to our being, tool-use is our natural state. Analyzing the tool and the world itself is not a natural state. — schopenhauer1

I read Heidegger as saying that that the idea of the present to hand object is a contrivance. In 'What is a thing' he talks about how it has become ingrained among people in the modern era to assume that self-identical persisting objects with attributes and properties exist , independent of the activities, thinking and purposes of individuals who encounter them. He calls this the "natural conception of the world". He goes on to say that what people today assume as natural and universal was in fact an invention of the West , beginning with the Greeks, and would have been considered an ailen notion to many cultures. Heideger argues that RAH underlies the PAH conceptualization, as well as all other possible variations of it. Why can there not be an 'object in itself? Because the notion of 'in itself' for Heidegger already implies a self-transcendence. His whole project begins from rethinking the 'is', attempting to show us that the simple copula is not just an inert glue between subjects and objects, but transforms what it articulates. This is a strange notion, but the upshot is that to experience is to alter. The meaning of anything is in the way in which it is an alteration with respect to our current situation. To point to a moment of experience and say 'object' is to do violence to this dynamism at the heart of meaning by attempting to freeze what was mobile, and thus actively significant and relevant, and make it inert , dead, meaningless. This PAH thinking which underlies our logic and empirical science allows us to do many things, but runs the risk of making us forget its basis in pragmatic involvement with the world.

Ready to hand vs present to hand differs in terms of what is conscious. I forget which is which,The hammer is consciously recognized as an object distinct from its environment when it malfunctions and we have to consider it as an object. — matt

.

When something is missing or malfunctions and it disrupts our seamless ready-to-hand involvement with tools , we don't revert to a present to hand mode of understanding unless we explicitly thematize what was missing , which means to point to it and define it as an object , in isolation from what we need it for. Normally, when our seamless involvement is interrupted by a missing tool, the way in which what was missing played a role in terms of the totality of relevance of the context of our involvement is what becomes explicit, not as a thematized 'object'. It's not a distinction of conscious vs unconscious but of whether we are understanding a thing in terms of its relevance to our purposes and activities or simply as a defined entity with properties and attributes, independent of the way it matters for us in a particular context.

"When something at hand is missing whose everyday presence was so much a matter of course that we never even paid attention to it, this constitutes a breach in the context of references discovered in
our circumspection. Circumspection comes up with emptiness and now sees for the first time what the missing thing was at hand for and at hand with. Again, the surrounding world makes itself known. What
appears in this way is not itself one thing at hand among others and certainly not something objectively present which lies at the basis of the useful thing at hand. It is "there" before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection insofar as circumspection concentrates on beings, but it is always already disclosed for that circumspection." Being and Time

There's no getting around metaphysics, and certainly Hume was not able to do so. As William James pointed out, Hume was not able to resist the temptation to ground the haphazard self spun out from the stream of consciousness in an a priori.

Hume:
"But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of
mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeeded
each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perceptual flux and movement."

James:
"Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician as Thomas Aquinas. No wonder he can discover no ’hypothesis.’ The unity of the parts of the stream is just as ’real’ a connection as their diversity is a real separation; both connection and separation are ways in which the past thoughts appear to the present Thought; - unlike each other in respect of date and certain qualities - this is the separation; alike in other qualities, and continuous in time - this is the connection. In demanding a more ’real’ connection than this obvious and verifiable likeness and continuity, Hume seeks ’the world behind the looking-glass,’ and gives a striking example of that Absolutism which is the great disease of philosophic thought."

Heidegger followed and radicalized James and Nietszche in placing intersubjective becoming before either subjective idealisms or objective reifications.

I dont like reading later Heidegger because of the looseness of the terms. Many might say the same of Being and Time but I find it profound and as precise as anything Hume wrote.

how do you think Heidegger thinks we jump from ready-at-hand to present-at-hand thinking? — schopenhauer1

Heidegger discusses this in Being and Time. When we go from experiencing a world in terms of our significant, concernful, involvement 'for the sake of which ' we do or think something, to making an object AS object the focus of significance, we transition from ready to hand concernful relevant understanding to the 'objectifying' present to hand, which forgets this larger context of relevance in refiying things. .This reification is the essence of the subject-object propositional 'statement'

"How does the statement become a derivative mode of interpretation? What has been modified in it?" Heidegger says predication points something out in a way that we sheerly look at it. By transforming the circumspective 'something "as" something' into 'this subject "as" this object', "the 'as' is forced back to the uniform level of what is merely objectively present. It "dwindles to the structure of just letting what is objectively present be seen by way of determination."When we just stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more." Heidegger recognizes the theoretical as an impoverished, 'cut-off' modification of understanding. But because, ontologically, it originates from and never departs from heedful circumspective care, it is not in-itself devoid of transformation.

I think these insights are a footnote to thinkers like Hume, Hobbes, and Bacon. — pomophobe

If that's the case, then are Hume, Hobbes and Bacon merely footnotes to Plato and Aristotle? Or do you want to imbue these Enlightenment thinkers with a radicality you don't find in Heidegger? (I just noticed your moniker. Guess that answers my question)

I know he's not on the list, but Heidegger gets my vote. — emancipate

The world for Heidegger is less depressing than uncanny and astonishing.

Heidegger from Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:

"Man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place. In projecting, the Da-sein in him constantly throws him into possibilities and thereby keeps him subjected to what is actual. Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence. Man is history, or better, history is man. Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he 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, and which the greats among the philosophers called ev9ouma.cr!l6<;-as witnessed by the last of the greats, Friedrich Nietzsche, in that song of Zarathustra's which he called the "intoxicated song" and in which we also experience what the world is:

0 Man! Attend!
What does deep midnight's voice contend?
"I slept my sleep,
"And now awake at dreaming's end:
"The world is deep,
"Deeper than day can comprehend.
"Deep is its woe,
"Joy-deeper than heart's agony:
"Woe says: Fade! Go!
"But all joy wants eternity,
"Wants deep, profound eternity!"

Why is it true, if one drops a piece of buttered bread, there is always a feeling of dread that it will land butter-side down? — ernestm

.
I don't know that dread is pessimism. In terms of cognitive-affective processes, it is connected with anxiety-fear, which functions cognitively as an ambivalence, a complexly structured affective assessment that is part hope, part disappointment. In fear, one moves rapidly back and forth between the anticipation of disappointment-pain and its avoidance. If one were confident that the worst would happen, dread and anxiety would not be the ruling affect, but rather sadness, depression, disappointment. The 'twinge' of dread is only possible because the event has not happened yet, and hope is battling against letdown. If the pessimist says ,after the fact, when the outcome is known and the dread has been replaced by actual letdown, 'I knew the worst would happen', then the pessimism inserted itself after the event, not during.
I consider Kierkegaard to be more a philosopher of ambivalence than pessimism. I would say the same of Heidegger, who positioned angst and guilt as primordial , authentic affectivities.
Heidegger would also argue that the pessimist and the skeptic are not fully understanding their own thinking, in that skepticism and doubt pre-suppose a larger enabling and validating framework of intelligibility within which doubting has its sense.

Certainty in itself isn't the end all and be all of understanding and getting along well with others. Older forms of philosophical and empirical theorization pride themselves on being 'certain' of the grounding in truth in such things as logic or God, but their certainty is the reification of arbitrary meanings which amounts to certainty in the unexplanable. Newer modes of inquiry abandon the search for certainty, replacing it with what I think is the more important and clarifying value, relationality. Philosophies and empiricisms which idolize certainty leave us with explanations of our connections with other humans in terms of causal mechanisms which do not admit of further, deeper elucidation beyond arbritrary assocaition.

There is an alternative view of pleasure and suffering, espoused by Nietzsche and poststructuralist philosophers, among others. This view does not treat pleasure and pain in terms of a hedonic economic model , but in terms of valuative meaning. Pleasure and suffering are not opposites in the sense of lack vs plenitude, as if pain is the being deprived of some sort of substance that pleasure replenishes, or that pain is the active destruction of something in the body or soul, and pleasure halts this destruction.
Rather than this oppositional, static equilibrium account, the post-Nietzscheans, as I'll call them, understand pleasure-pain as complicit in the creation of subjective meaning. The meaning in our lives always aims beyond itself and is anticipatory, The meaning of meaning is its 'aboutness', We are creatures of becoming rather than just being. This means that not only are our positive affects(joy, contentment, awe) future-oriented, but so is unpleasant experience. Furthermore, if our positive experiences are creative, then so are our negative experiences. Suffering doesn't simply take away from what is positive, as a lack . It has its own positive meaning that addresses the particularity of what matters to us , even as it disrupts the good feeling in that situation. Unpleasant experieince comes from, speaks to , belongs to, and advances the story that our positive experience unfolds

If we are on the way elsewhere in the midst of joy and contentment, then the suffering that emerges to interrupt that enjoyment addresses, belongs to and further meaningfully changes our existential situation. So when we 'recover' from a spate of suffering, it is not as if we have simply returned to a prior state of pleasantness. The suffering meaningfully changes us, and the new state of positivity is based on, uses as a foundation, the suffering it 'recovers' from. The reason we enjoy horror or suspense movies and novels, sad music and scary roller coasters, is because the suffering is a part of a meaningful story and has a significant role to play in contributing to the creative unfolding of life's narratives. If pain were nothing but empty lack, there would be no reason to insert sadness, fear and violence into our dramas. There would be no reason to create dramas.

One may argue that even if we accept this view, we still have a kind of a lifelong stalemate between what we enjoy and what makes us suffer. But the post-Nietzschean view sees no static equilibrium. Because meaningful existence is a becoming, the nature of our suffering changes as our lives unfold, along with the changing meanings that we create. As an adult, I do not experience the intensity and primalness of affects like fear, rage and sadness that I did as a child or even in my 20's, because I don't understand my world in the stark , polarized terms I did then.. By the same token ,the way I experience my joys has changed also, becoming more modulated and nuanced.

But I have the capacity to remove myself from the keyboard, thereby annihilating that relationship. And if I go on to establish relationships with other things, then just like the relationship with the keyboard, not one of these is a necessary relation. Therefore the "I" really is apart from the relations. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree, no particular relationship with a thing is a necessary relationship. All relations are contingent and temporary. What is necessary is relation in general. The 'I' and the 'thing' only ever emerge via relevant relation between the two.It will always be a new and particular 'I' and 'thing' that co-appear from moment to moment, since 'things' are not self-identical persisting essences.

Was the "I" in the midst of the sexual relation which brought you into existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

I know it sounds paradoxical, even absurd, but the 'I' is in the midst of the thinking and talking about any fact, whether that fact consists of things that I do or things that happened without me or before I was born . What I talk about, as well as what I point to as an object , is always what is relevant for me, matters to me, is of concern and significance to me right now. It's not that first there is a something and then it takes on relevant meaning for me. The relevance comes before the object in itself and defines its particular meaning for me in terms of its immediate 'use'. But the same goes for the me' that stands in relation to an object or matter. This is a kind of radical pragmatism, allowing for no reality outside of relevant relating, no existence outside current context. We can begin from this stance and derive science and the possibility of 'independent' facts from it.

In my conversations with you on this topic, these are some of the comments I've made in an attempt to show goodwill and respect:

" I find your contributions to be among the most thoughtful of the commenters on this site, and since there are few others here who are willing or able to engage at any level with Derrida , I occasionally see if I can draw you into incorporating him into discussion, even if just in the form of a critique."

"You are a thoughtful and well-read philosopher."

"I don't want to annoy or threaten or bore you. If something that I am trying to present is off-topic, I don't want to derail the discussion. But i can't know what is off topic without your help. If it will help you to call me an idiot or a sycophant of the most tedious tendencies of the Derrida brigade, I don't mind. I'm just hoping to get more of a glimpse of your analytic skills "

These are some of your responses to my perhaps less-than-focused arguments:

This Derridian regurgitation is fucking insufferable, please fucking stop. — StreetlightX

Derridians are like the fucking Borg, assimilating indiscriminately while bleeting on about differance. No one is here to talk about bloody affect. Buzz off. — StreetlightX

I think all of us should remind ourselves from time to time how our responses on this site might affect others. We don't know what kinds of personal difficulties they may be having in their lives. There can be a fine line between healthy debate and hurtful comments.

This is where I found a study.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/surge-of-brain-activity-may-explain-near-death-experience-study-says/2013/08/12/47026016-0105-11e3-9a3e-916de805f65d_story.html?utm_term=.6a7c7895aaa4

If I have to read a whole host of secondary literature to understand Nietzsche, that's just proof that he's no good at all. (It's also epistemologically suspect, in that if you need to read Heidegger to understand Nietzche, — NKBJ

I never recommend reading secondary literature before attempting the original work of an author first. But in situations where I have difficulty in interpreting someone's ideas(whether because of challenging style, lack of familiarity with the historical -cultural context of their writing, or translation issues), it is often helpful to begin with a bit of background orientation. I wouldn't recommend Heidegger's or Deleuze's account of Nietzsche to you, but I would suggest Walter Kaufmann. He doesn't write from a postmodern vantage, so avoids the associated jargon. When I find myself having to make use of secondary literature in order to understand a philosopher's work, sometimes it can mean that writer's ideas are 'no good', but it usually means(for instance in the case of Spinoza, Leibnitz and Kant), that their approach is highly complex and subtle, and their writing style idosyncratic.

I realize Nietzsche is your personal pet philosopher. — NKBJ

Actually, Heidegger and Derrida are my personal pet philosophers. Nietzsche is of only secondary interest to me.
.

there's not much you could say to convince me that he's much good at all. — NKBJ

In defending Nietzsche here, what I really want to do is defend a direction that both cognitive science and philosophy of mind seem to be going in, consisting of the abandonment of representationalist models of mental functioning and the embrace of enactive approaches.
I'm more interested in the efficacy of theories of autism, schizophrenia, development of empathy and affectivity than i am in Nietzsche per se. But it's hard to ignore him when notable neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio incorporate his ideas into their work. But perhaps there's not much I could say to convince you that Damasio's award winning research is much good at all.

Just out of curiousity, if a thinker who you greatly admired turned out to be a big fan of Nietzsche, would that al all change your opinion of Nietzsche? My hunch is there is no one on your list of admired philosophers(maybe you could name some) who, as far as you know, endorse Nietzsche's ideas. So it's not just Nietzsche, but a whole community influenced by him that you don't think are "that much good at all."

I do wonder what the distinctions are meant to be if they are nothing more than our language or experience. Are we the distinctions being spoken about? Am I the keyboard I'm using write this message? — TheWillowOfDarkness

I am not the keyboard, I am the pragmatic relation with the keyboard. No 'i' apart from this relation , and no keyboard apart from it. Both the 'I' and things have no existence apart from this being-in-the -midst-of.

Deleuze is specifically pointing a thing and its identity are beyond us. They are true by difference itself, not by our particular interpretation or experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness

IS it possible to think of a thing which doesn't matter to us, which has no significance for us? Is it possible for a thing to have a meaning independent of a way in which it is relevant to us in a particular context? I say no. Things emerge always in the midst of our concernful , relevant dealings within a particular context of involvement in the world. A thing is a 'matter' FOR us.

The level of discussion here concerning Deleuze vs Derrida-Heidegger is too abstract to make any headway in getting to the crux of the argument I am trying to make(for one thing, I'm worried it's going to give SX a stroke). Are you familiar with John Protevi's work or Brian Massumi's? Both of them have attempted to 'apply' a Deleuzian thinking to issues such as the relation between affectivity and linguistic conceptualization. Protevi has spent that past few decades trying to convince us that his reading of DG gives him a method of analyzing notorious affective-socio-political situations such as Columbine that can supplement enactivist accounts. Protevi's 'AFFECT, AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY:THE ACT OF KILLING IN THE AGE OF CYBORGS' is one example of this, as is Massumi's 'The Autonomy of Affect'.

If you are prepared to accept these writers' analyses on these themes as generally consistent with Deleuze, then I can proceed to compare and contrast them with the work in this area of Eugene Gendlin, who I consider to be an effective interpreter of Heidegger.

Doing this sort of comparison gets us into the trenches, where we need to be, in order to reveal what is at stake in how we understand the functioning of affectivity, as a source of creativity and otherness, in relation to conceptualization, language and perception. And , believe it or not, this will bring us back to the original theme of the OP.

This Derridean regurgitation is fucking insufferable, please fucking stop. — StreetlightX

What does Derridean regurgitation have to do with enaction? None of the enactivist writers I mentioned are even interested in Derrida. I know you have an interest in Deleuze(you referenced him earlier in this thread in response to another poster), which is why i mentioned him. I also mentioned him because I think he is among the most rigorous representatives of the kind of position you are supporting and which I am critiquing.

when everything is 'change as primordial ground' or whathaveyou, what you lose is precisely the ability to think change. If you make it your point of departure, any attempt at distinction is lost in the white noise of 'change': — StreetlightX

When Deleuze introduced to the world his 'philosophy of difference' which puts difference before identity, this exposed him to the same sorts of criticisms that you level against Derrida, as if there was nothing there but a white noise of relativism, chaos, indeterminacy. But of course, what Deleuze means by this move is in fact a complex dynamic in which imminence and transcendence operate. Leaving Derrida out of this for the moment, one can make the same defense for Heidegger's equiprimordial concepts of temporality, care, attunement, understanding and discourse. And what is the analytic payoff? Speaking personally, it allows me to move alongside others in their ways of being more insightfully and empathetically than I would be able to via a 'Deleuzian psychotherapeutics', which i find still too polarizing, arbitrary and violent.

But then I am becoming convinced that enactivist approaches such as those of Gallagher and Thompson also do a better job of this than Deleuxe, for similar reasons , but that's a subject for another thread.

I have found that he revels in contradiction, and that it's therefore not my cup of tea. As have most professional contemporary philosophers. — NKBJ

Daniel Dennett respects Nietzsche, as does Rorty, Heidegger, Alva Noe, Evan Thompson, Deleuze, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lyotard, Freud, most constructivists and constructionists , postmodernists and postructuralists, many pragmatists and hermeneuticists, enactivist approaches in cogntive science and philosophy of mind, and recent theories of perception .

That seems to cover a lot of ground in recent philosophy.
So when you say most professional contemporary philosophers are not admirers of his approach, you mean Modernists, Realists, Kantians and Neo-Kantians. In other words , everyone on the more conservative side of a political divide. Not to mention the conservative side of a divide within philosophy of science, anthropology , theories of consciousness and philosophy of mind.Given the recent explosion of interest in enactive approaches in consciousness studies, I think the trends are favoring Nietzsche.

How does one determine if someone understands an author? And understand how? There are many different readings of Nietzsche. I don't claim that there is a right one. I prefer to say that for me there are more or less interesting ones.The Nietzsche I find most radical and interesting is the one that I read alongside Deleuze, Heidegger and Foucault. In other words, there is a certain general consensus on a particular reading of him. So the test I use to see if from my perspective someone is understanding a particular reading of Nietzsche is , reagrdless of whether they agree with it or not, whether they can simply summarize coherently what that position is.

So for Nietzsche the fundamental questions would consist of what he has to say about the relation between truth and values, the notion of self, ego, volition, and freedom of the will, etc.

I know. I was trying to be provocative.

the only way to do this is to begin in the middle of things — StreetlightX

Your argument starts with your conclusion, that Derrida and Heidegger don't begin in the middle of things. Well. I agree with half of that. They don't begin in the middle of things. They begin in the middle of something more mobile and intricate than things. If one doesn't see how it is possible to reduce 'things', in the guise of primordial form, structure, pattern, to a more primordial starting point, then what Derrida and Heidegger are doing will have to appear as though they are performing an "absolutisation of philosophy", an "engulfment into Theory", because they are not able to get right down into the middle of things.

It's nice to escape the highfalutin language of Heidegger-Derrida every once in awhile and remind ourselves of why this all matters. You and I want to be able to understand ourselves and each other most intimately.
Moving past Hegel via discourses that begin from the middle of things(Cavell, Deleuze, etc) takes us a good way in that direction. But what they don't do is provide us with the sort of exquisitely intricate creative potentiality of moment to moment felt meaning that H-D offer, a more intimate, intricate starting point for meaning than that of the in between of Deleuzian temporary structurations.
You and I know there are many readings of Heidegger-Derrida, and yours is a perfectly respectable one. What I am offering is a minority interpretation of them. Before you can reject it , you first have to understand it, and I readily admit that I may be unable to make this interpretation coherent enough for you to summarize it the way that I am more than confident I can summarize Deleuze or Cavell or Wittgenstein (approvingly, I might add, for I don't reject anything of what they argue , as far as they go. They just don't go far enough for me).

a point where sense needs to be reoriented by our grasping our way about, by our readjusting how we understand and relate to the world about us. There needs to be a way for change, transformation, novelty to occur in the order of things, the conceptual and lived matrix by which we relate to the world and ourselves. — StreetlightX

You and I have discussed before how Massumi and Protevi treat the relationship between affectivity and language. They come close, but are simply unable to fully integrate the two notions. The reason they fall short is that structure and transformation remain distinct moments for them . Just as for you, the way they articulate matters, 'there needs to be a way for change, transformation, novelty to occur in the order of things'. But is there a dynamic more intricate than the order of 'things' as starting point, such that change, transformation, novelty don't have be seen as a problem to be explained? Is it possible to think change, transformation and novelty not as possible outcomes but as the most primordial ground of experience?

Personally I do think the current paradigm could do with a lot more scientific method — alieninstinct

And perhaps those who embrace something called "scientific method' could do with a bit of postmodern
clarification of the conditions of possibility of empiricism. I highly recommend Joseph Rouse's work on philosophy of science.

If you don't get Nietzsche, there's an entire universe of approaches to literary criticism that will be off limits to you. I would recommend Heidegger or Deleuze's book-length reading of Nietzsche but I'm guessing you wouldn't be thrilled with those writers either.

I must confess I don't have much of an interest in postmodern literary criticism. I'm much more intrigued by postmodern philosophy of science(Joseph Rouse) and postmodern cognitive science. Adherents of this approach include Jan Slaby(critical neuroscience), Shaun Gallgher(philosophic of mind, hermeneutics, enactive embodied cognition) and perhaps Evan Thompson.

i believe what you're saying is that what SX refers to as a normative region would be the forms and relations a given difference performs in its presence.
I had earlier put forth the argument that Derrida and Heidegger would take issue with the distinction between the 'normative effects' of a difference and the difference itself as existence. Essentially they would argue that there is no such distinction to made. Not that there aren't nonoperative groupings, structurations, and modalities, but that there are not the effecgt of a difference, they are the temporal unflagging of multiple differences.

The difference and its effects, are neither a whim of language (Derrida) nor ultimately mysterious and inaccessible (Heidegger). — TheWillowOfDarkness

Not a whim of language for Derrida at all , but rather a function of intricately structured contextual differential relations, What Derrida does that Deleuze doesn't is that Derrida recognizes that even the moment of the gathered field that is the screen is not a single , centered THIS but a series of differential transformations. Deleuze begins with structures and forms in differential relation. Derrida beings with differences in differential relations. Deride gives us a more intricate and intimate view into the basis of meaning than Deleuze's more polarizing and semi-arbitrary starting point in differnce as temporary structure. Heidegger, far from seeing difference as mysterious and inaccessible, makes Derrida's approach possible by determining difference primordially in terms of temporality, a complexly structured unity.

Who in your opinion was the first post-modernist? Kierkegaard? Nietzsche? Merleau-Ponty? Were Dewey and James proto-postmodernists? IS radical constructivism a post-modernism? When does a constructivism become post-modern? What about hermeneutics and Gadamer? Is this postmodern? Or Thomas Kuhn?

Your complaint is an old one, Just replace 'postmodern' and Derrida with 'Ideallsm' and Kant, or 'rationalism' and Descartes.The establishment is alway by definition slow to catch on.

Interesting argument. If you were to set up a critical divide among philosophers on this issue who would you put on each side? Streetlightx mentions Wittgenstein and Cavell in support of his position. Would you counter them with Deleuze?

America inherited the British inclination for philosophy in a pragmatic style more closely associated with the empirical disciplines than the humanities. That manifests itself in the dominance of empiricism in U.S. philosophy departments. What that means is not that that American philosophers never embrace Continental thinkers, but that they do it very slowly. Look at the frequency of references in analytic and philosophy of mind publications to Descartes, Hume, Kant and Leibniz over the past 70 years. Then see how often Hegel and Husserl popped up. It was only writers like Bernstein, Putnam , Quine, Sellars, Donaldson and Rorty embraced Hegel that we finally began to see him referenced more widely. Now the same thing is beginning to happen with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenological writers, thanks to a turn toward embodiment in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

We'll have to wait a little longer for posrtmodenists like Deleuze and Derrida to get their turn, but it is already beginning to happen. Heidegger ,Gadamer, Lyotard , Foucault and postmodernism in general are being made use of in 4ea(enactive, embedded, embodied affective) approaches in cognitive science.(See Jan Slaby, Shaun Gallagher and Matthew Ratcliffe, and the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences).

Simply said, true love is giving and taking and sharing. if only one is doing it then it is a one sided love and not true love at all. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Test

Most who are not led by faith, generally accept the truth stated above. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

What does faith have to do with it? Are you saying that most atheists accept that
love without reciprocity, works and deeds is a true love whereas most good Christians don't? Why do you think that is?
I would argue the capability to love someone is a function of one's ability to understand an empathize with another from their own perspective, by slipping into their shoes. That is probably the most difficult task on earth, and for that we need to make use of the most penetrating insights into human nature that are available to us. Embracing christian theological concepts influenced by 17th enlightenment enlightenment thinking will allow one to better achieve love and intimacy with others than relying on a 5th century Christian platonism. By the same token, I believe that seeing the world through a Kierkegaardian 'death of god' perspective will enable one to connect more effectively and insightfully with others in friendship and love that by relying on Kantian-era Christian thought.

And better still would be understanding and incorporation the psychological insights of postmodernists like Nietzsche in one's social life.

So , fist of all, my question to you is, which particular sort of Christianity are you advocating here as a guide to understanding 'true' love? Since you reject a supernatural jesus, it sounds like your thinking is more evolved than that of 17th century christian theology. What do you think it is about Christian faith that leads to the valuing of reciprocity for 'true' love in a way that atheism doesn't?