Feel free to correct me. I'm spitting out some of my take on Heidegger below.

To be historical is to be the kind of social being that has a world, a form of life. The spine or foundation of this form of life is personified by [the] one (as in what one does). Such a world includes a vast equipmental nexus, chairs for sitting on, forks for stabbing porkchops, books for staring at, ... This world is an immediatelysignificant lifeworld. One lives and moves in its familiarity, popping out for a bit, grabbing something from Starbucks, be back in a jiffy. [ Note the prephysics grasping of space and time. This is not Cartesian geometrical space. Also see Carlin's monologue on how many jiffies are in two shakes of a lamb. ] One is busy, mostly absorbed in this or that little task, bringing it to fruition as part of bringing ever larger schemes to fruition. One integrates all sorts of tasks into a general mode of being or lifeproject, living into being a good father, being a good philosopher.

This world in which we all live is something like a developing organism. New memes pop up, others die. Technology changes. Those who weren't around in 1994 (in that world) can't 'get' (without serious effort ?) what grunge meant. Young people love their lingo, phrases which the old folks can't handle properly. The phrases in yesterday's books are rusty 'antiquities.' One has to turn one's imagination into a time machine, pore over the letters of that forgotten world, to begin to understand what such antiques (maybe memes thought of as tools) were good for, how one intended and wielded them back then. But how one intended them is only the beginning, because genius or authenticity twists the given and uses tools in a wrong way that becomes the right way. Each generation inherits the geniuses along with the nobodies of the previous generations. Yesterday's blazing metaphor is today's triviality, today's necessity, for the contingent tends to harden into a false necessity. This is why deconstruction and archeology are necessary. A certain path was taken once and people forget that things could have been otherwise --- until the crazy asshole philosopher questions the obvious, uses a dead metaphor as tool the wrong way and gets lucky. Interpretation, once heroic, hardens into interpretedness, what every idiot 'knows,' what every nobody (anyone and everyone) now finds obvious, though their grandpappy tried to kill the fellow who came up with it.

Time is [ the ] one's self-confrontation, a snake twisting out of its skin.

Carlin doing phenomenology ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FXtyVPEKSk

These quotes might help :

The subject that sees objects in the world cannot see itself seeing, Žižek notes, any more than a person can jump over her own shadow. To the extent that a subject can reflectively see itself, it sees itself not as a subject but as one more represented object, what Kant calls the “empirical self” or what Žižek calls the “self” (versus the subject) in The Plague of Fantasies. The subject knows that it is something, Žižek argues. But it does not and can never know what Thing it is “in the Real”, as he puts it (see 2e). This is why it must seek clues to its identity in its social and political life, asking the question of others (and of the big Other (see 2b)) which Žižek argues defines the subject as such: che voui? (what do you want from me?).

It is crucial to Žižek’s position, though, that Žižek denies the apparent implication of this that the subject is some kind of supersensible entity, for example, an immaterial and immortal soul, and so forth. The subject is not a special type of Thing outside of the phenomenal reality we can experience, for Žižek. As we saw in 1e above, such an idea would in fact reproduce in philosophy the type of thinking which, he argues, characterizes political ideologies and the subject’s fundamental fantasy (see 3a). It is more like a fold or crease in the surface of this reality, as Žižek puts it in Tarrying With the Negative, the point within the substance of reality wherein that substance is able to look at itself, and see itself as alien to itself.

https://iep.utm.edu/zizek/#He

What is this fold or crease ? A generalized seeing of the world (before organization in/by signifiers)?

what is simply events eventing (behaviors all the way down), and what is "feels-likeness"? — schopenhauer1

The boundary is rough, uncertain, controversial.

I grant you that it's only things that give a damn that can have problems (and tentatively project giving a damn with all its problems on other things.)

Antigone hangs herself. The point is that this devotion to the higher good (higher than society's understanding, anyway) is worth dying for.

The Self appears along with such fierce devotion to the Good that the Self can be sacrificed for it. — frank

Yes. You are touching on 'the' issue maybe. As you probably know, Hegel obsessed over Antigone. His master/slave relationship foregrounds a willingness to die to prove one's transcendence of the given.


***
The presentation of itself, however, as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as a pure negation of its objective form, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and is not tied up with life. ... And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment — that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phba.htm

Beyond that, wondering about the self - who am I, where did I come from, what will happen to me, and so on - are discouraged as forms of self-seeking or egocentrism. — Wayfarer

To this I must object, for how did the clever blokes figure out they were illusions in the first place if they weren't so curious about themselves ?

The self is the ground of experience, but it has no objective reality. — Wayfarer

There's a case to be made for that kind of self (pure witness, the thereness of what's there), but I don't think it's the revolutionary/heroic self discussed in the OP.

I am what's left when you subtract out the Other, yes. — frank

:up:

You, sir, are the icing on the cake.

It is essential that they are both at one with the world of the collective mind - move smoothly through everyday society - yet also permanently tense, angsty, unfulfilled, etc, because they are also necessarily standing apart from that everyday society as its critic and frustrated “other”. — apokrisis

Looks like you touched on it here.

This collective (embodied) mind(ing) is discussed by various philosophers (Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, etc.)

The subject is even pretty much dissolved by some thinkers who get labelled pomo, if I understand correctly. So it's a complex situation.

Just passing if I have any sense. :cool: — apokrisis

I can relate.

So a sense of self emerges from the process of becoming the still centre of a world in smooth predictable motion. You and your target are one. — apokrisis

Perhaps you can also comment on the self in relation to the community, as something like the way a body is held responsible.

Good to see you back!

But we don't incinerate the living (or we shouldn't) and anesthetize the dead — schopenhauer1

Sure !
But the use of 'but' doesn't make sense here, because you are merely expanding my point.

For anyone into Hegel, Marx, or Lacan at the very least he can't but be interesting. — Baden

:up:

And he's a fucking delight to watch. Charming dude.

The plants don't feel something though. — schopenhauer1

I don't know what it means to say so. Yes, I can talk the usual fuzzy talk. That's why I say look to deeds. We incinerate the dead, anesthetize the living for root canals.

We usually say that some things can sense and be aware of things and some things can't. You disagree? — schopenhauer1

No. I don't disagree. I just don't think we know very well what we mean.

Yes animals with a first person perspective, but of anything else? Photosynthesis? — schopenhauer1

This is an empirical question. Some humans nurture plants and beetles. Few if any nurture rocks.

When the retina is deprived of oxygen, it fails to send a signal to the brain, which is interpreted as white light.

Hypoxia mistaken for ontology. — Banno

Anemic mythology, the fascination of negation. As poetry, as celebration, it's fine. Lou Reed had a nice song about White light.

As the labor of the concept ? Maybe not.

Yet to the mystic and to the philosopher, there shall be an acknowledgement that everything is simply a manifestation or projection of Reality. The core of every reality is, Reality. — IP060903

This is the night in which all cows are black.

Wondering at a tautology might be an expression of love for life, for just being here.

I very much appreciate your response.

to control language is to control the social and the philosopher confronts social osmosis to avoid dissolution. — Baden

Have you ever looked into Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence ? For Bloom, the strong poet (the one that forces itself into the canon) resents dying more than others, rages, I guess, against the dying of its little light, which it must see writ large indeed on the public soul. Rorty looks at philosophers through this lens, as poets who command us to look at the world in their way, the proper way.

The primary norms of survival and reproduction of linguistic objects then utilize the philosopher in a kind of symbiotic structuring of his intersubjectivity that socially elevates him and propagates them. — Baden

Yes. Genes and memes. Where does he begin and the memes that use him stop ? What is he but a self-referential, self-marketing, bag of memes ? The memes in that bag must work together. Perhaps selves are bags of cooperative memes because they are candidate policies for a community that relies upon coherent strategies for dealing with its environment and its internal issues like law and incentive structures.

philosophizing then being to give the self over to particular processes that instantiate counter norms to those of prevalent thought, letting language explore itself as best it can — Baden

Individuals can be thought of as nodes for a parallel and adversarial computation. For Feuerbach , the individual doesn't so much think itself as it hosts the interaction of memes. By growing up in a world, we internalize semantic norms, such as what 'properly' follows from what. Like spinning tops, we can write metaphysics as a castaways, but the we that writes is sediment or software just doing its thing, updating the blockchain, waiting to be reconnect to the enternet. Dennett discusses how our neurons themselves are little fellows that competing employment to earn their glucose.

Thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

through the medium of a scared and horny ape in order to progress the evolution of ideas. — Baden

Yes. But toward what ? I think (?) it's just the enlightenment autonomy project. To be superstitious is to be thrown, to be bound, to not have been given the choice. We do we want ? Distance (for the the view and the safely) and grip (finegrained control) ? Do both the individual and community also need self-representing myths to hold that fattening bag of memes together ? As you say, scared and horny. Fear keeps lust in check, and maybe narcissism substitutes or transforms lust (look at that handsome stoic in the mirror!).

This is obfuscating. What do you mean we don't "know" this? — schopenhauer1

Like I said, semantic problem. You can check out my 'the being of meaning' thread for more, if you are curious.

I can talk the usual sloppy talk in ordinary life, but I think Hegel and Heideggar are right. There's a blurry average intelligibility that mostly doesn't notice its lack of grip. One emits the usual platitudes, appeals to the obvious, without hearing that one's thinking is being done for one, by one [ das Man ].

Philosophy makes darkness visible, drags ignorance into the light, wakes up the marching zombie.

No I get that this may be a definition of life, but I mean, what makes it have more primacy than any other event? — schopenhauer1

We say it does because it matters that our babies get milk and are kept warm. We also love puppies and squirrels.

Let me reiterate.

DIRECT REALISM
I see the apple and not an image of the apple.

Now we can get clever and think about what this 'I' is supposed to be and what seeing is supposed to be.

I see talk about the apple and not an image of the apple.

Why this shift toward talk ? Why not babble on about seeing ? Because it's too vague, too close to pretending we are psychologists. Because the entity that sees is oh-how-conveniently undefined.

One needs a larger picture in which this issue can begin to make sense. One needs to appropriate what a philosopher is in the first place.

When we talk about the tree it's directed at the shared world. When we talk about our feelings it isn't. — Michael

It still very much is.

Feelings / motives play a central role within the manifest image. Because he was enraged, he through the coffee pot into the wall. He wrote them a check for half of his savings, so he does care about the environment.

The metaphor is that each of us have tiny magical rooms in the world into which only we can enter. This is where toothaches and good intentions live.

Concepts only have grip or meaning in the first place if they figure in (potentially) binding inferences. No isolated thing has genuine or veritable being/meaning. (There are no isolated things, for things 'mean' there relationships to other things, to put it poetically.)

You accept that I don't directly see the cat — Michael

No, I don't accept that. For me subjects are normative and discursive entities. They aren't in the brain waiting for sense-data. The subject is something performed within/by human communities. While a healthy brain and its sense organs are necessary for the performance of a subject, they are not this subject, no more than a dance is simply a pair of legs. Concepts are norms. They are 'material.' Bots have learned them, just from reading examples.

It seems to me that you leave your subject undefined. What is this 'I' that sees the cat ? What is a self to which seeing can be attributed ?

Why repurpose an existing label to argue for something different? It just causes confusion as evidenced by this discussion. — Michael

I defend a minimal version of direct realism by analyzing the discursive self to which perception is attributed.

So one can be an indirect realist and still accept your claim that we talk about cats rather than our image of cats. — Michael

Sure. I just don't think it's the best way to go about things.

It's a hard problem in that we know that there are things that don't sense the sky as "blue" or sense at all and we know there are things that sense — schopenhauer1

I don't think we know this, but most of us feel/think it in some sense. We nurture our young. Our doings are deeper than our rationalizations.

Slightly more complex enduring patterns. Why give primacy to photosynthesis over the strong force? — schopenhauer1

Interesting question. I'm not a physicist, but I think it'd be about drawing a thermodynamic boundary. So it's hard to call the universe an organism, because it has no environment. Life climbs a ladder. It 'shits' more disorder than it creates. We are flowers of the death of the sun.

Illusions that are not explained etc. — schopenhauer1

Even here we are mostly on the same page. The hard problem is interesting, but I think there's a semantic problem which gets taken for granted : people don't know what they mean by 'consciousness' in a metaphysical context.

...it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

I get what you are trying to say and mostly agree. It's because we give a fuck that we have problems.

What makes it different than other events in the universe if it is just patterns without an internalness to it? — schopenhauer1

Things tend to fall apart, but here we are, strange primates, increasing in complexity, godlike cyborgs, now creating synthetic brains better than our own. Even from the outside, we are not drifting spacerock.

Perhaps the idea of a ‘collective psyche’ or ‘hive mind’ needs to be shelved along with that of an autonomous, identical self. — Joshs

This autonomous self is the essence of the humanism and enlightenment. The self is identical, singular, possesses a voice unified by consistency norms. To drop this is to drop rationality itself, to go mad.

The collective selves forming the changing person participate in the social group via the vantage of an ongoing perspective. — Joshs

I agree with complex internals, but the self is a singular avatar, the central social convention. Think of an organism in the real world that needs a coherent strategy which does not sabotage itself. It needs a plan that works, with pieces that work together.

The Self is Moses, leading his people out of evil Egypt. It's Martin Luther, breaking away from the mother church. It's Marx: the social critic. To the extent that these images become naturalized in the collective psyche, the Self endures, and will endure any assault on it. — frank

We can also contemplate how conspicuous deviation offers a high potential payoff, balancing the risk. We can consider both the advantage for genes and memes. Increased conformity might increase this potential payoff. The balance of males and females comes to mind.

She claims the right to ignore the rules of her society for the sake of a higher law. Nothing creates a more stark outline around the individual as the role of the reformer, the abolitionist, the revolutionary. Society calls them criminals. History calls them heroes. — frank

:up:

I think (?) this is deeply Hegelian. Time 'is' this endless emergence of new norms through which old norms are evaluated, challenged, and modified.

And what of those who didn't get their higher law taken seriously ? They are like failed artist who could not forge a conscience for their people.

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

:up:

The self only is to the degree that it opposes the Anyone. Some member of the chorus has to step forward and become the doomed hero.

It is just events eventing. The problems (literally) start with experiences, and mattering. I am not being literary. There are no problems before consciousness. — schopenhauer1

I like events eventing. It's like the world worlding.

What you are saying is almost tautological, which doesn't mean it's not worth saying. We could also just talk of the possibility of feeling hurt. Feeling is first. But feeling is 'under' or 'other than' concepts. So it's difficult to say it. Maybe this is why Schopenhauer claimed we knew the heart of reality directly.

A subject however, is where "matter" and "value" come into play. — schopenhauer1

We can take an external view and look at patterns that stubbornly resist being erased. The pattern doesn't 'want' to die. It'll sacrifice instantiations. Schopenhauer's insect is ready to die, having laid its eggs.

Or we can try to talk about what it feels like. FWIW, I think I get your point and agree, so I'm only being difficult on the level of emphasizing the slipperiness of these concepts.

There is a subject this is happening to.. a perspective in the first place. — schopenhauer1

As I see it, there is a body which is trained into being something like a subject. The world is 'there' for this creature. That's how we tend to understand it --- without having much of a grip, seems to be, on what it means for a creature to be or have its thereness.

Do teleological projections have problems, or do agents have problems? — schopenhauer1

It's just hard to speak for plants. From the outside we can think of their code trying to replicate, colliding with obstacles (rival plants, not enough water,...)

Are they agents if there is no perspective there? — schopenhauer1

As humans we tend to associate agents and perspectives. We hold agents responsible for claims as well as (other, less explicitly symbolic) deeds.

this is borderline mysticism in the deepest heart of philosophy — IP060903

:up:

I would go so far as to say that if I cannot put it my own words, then I do not understand it. — Arne

:up:

This is why these days I put writing at the center of education. Articulation is like bending steel. People tend to think they know from merely reading or hearing, but finding other representatives in the same equivalence class ( paraphrasing points) is the true test. One takes a risk.

Dilthey believed that Husserl (like William James) represented the new psychology he was aiming for. Heidegger has pointed out the somewhat strange fact that Dilthey was interested in an "abstract" philosopher like Husserl (who, in fact, thought that Dilthey was too much of a skeptical relativist and not interested in "ideal" meanings). — waarala

Nice background. Thanks.

"Temporality and historicality" is an important section in B&T. It is the (authentic) historicality that transcends the banality of everydayness. — waarala

:up:

Yes, a key chapter ! I happened to have just reread in the last week.