Heidegger could have spared himself, and us, a bit of grief if he addressed one simple question. If there is such a thing as forgetfulness of Being, is there remembrance? If your take on his view of the Greeks is what he did believe of them, he's got them wrong. They, the Greeks, were far more down to earth than he gives them credit for. Their poetry might have been highfalutin, but they were not. I wonder what Aristophanes would make of Heidegger's seriosity? The Greeks were a cosmopolitan/insular people, if that makes sense. Protected from the great powers around them by sea and geography, they were surrounded by cultures in which powerful rulers, or esoteric priests in the case of Judea and Egypt, who used the written word as an instrument of oppression. That is what writing was invented for. And I can't help thinking that is what Heidegger wants us to return it to being. But the fact is, the first appearance of Greek writing (Linear B, Linear A has yet to be decyphered) is several lines of drunken scrawl in a bawdry joke competition. What does forgetfulness of being mean there? But if the man had a shred of kindness in him (and insight!) he would have explained to us that there can be no remembrance. Can we remembrance what we've never known? Why do we grieve at the passing of someone we never really got to know in the first place? Or perhaps thought we were trying to but now know we did not? Can we remembrance the dead? Or is the very effort just more proof of loss? But if we can never really remembrance “Being”, if there is always something loss in all that we are and try to be, what does it really mean to point out our forgetfulness? Especially as a sort of accusation and unfavorable comparison to some lost golden age of remembrances? Don't those who accuse Heidegger of arrogance have a point? But, take it a notch further. Maybe there is a less accusatory tone we could take toward our inability to remembrance Being? If all our lives all we ever did what agree and find ourselves in accord with each other, how would this distinguish our remembrances of ourselves from those of each other? But if we grate a bit at the edges, we must modify our terms. And if received terms is a lesser lexical and perhaps structural body than all the refinements and innovations we grate into each other, then even if the result is the same perennial forgetting we are nonetheless rewarded with a more expansive body of terms and grammatical forms in our efforts to know ourselves and to lie to ourselves about what we think we remembrance of the dead, or of Being. But, nevertheless, since the departed is participant to that growing lexical and syntactic arsenal, even our forgetfulness is a kind remembrance. It's because that remembrance is not and cannot be ours alone that there is virtue in the forgetting. That is, our incapacity for remembrancing Being is our way of needing each other free, and maybe even setting “Being” free, to grate upon the received terms of our minds and so refresh those terms and distinguish us from the tyranny of that receipt. And in that case, Heidegger is indeed wrong. Dead wrong! About us today, and about the Greeks. And about what “Being” is.

As I said, I could not find the response of which I was notified.

There is no mystical "hidden". But we do hide from ourselves, and with good reason. Any claim of understanding Heidegger should be suspect. But our convictions, and their terms, undergo changes through the very effort we undertake to conserve them. We need others to help us see this, but they are too entailed in their own. What we hide from ourselves is how much we need each other free. Only needing each other free are we able to be foil to each other's convictions, and so by hiding that need from ourselves our convictions alter through discourse and yet enable the conceit of conserving them. But nothing is hidden from us in any mystical sense. It's psychological, if anything, not metaphysical or ontological, nothing really mysterious. The generation and growth of language is that drama. We don't want to see it, not because it's like making sausages (or laws!), but because being too aware of our participation in the growth of language undermines the facile use of it. We become the strangers to ourselves that is too 'proximally' who we really are.

Xtrix,

[The point is that time, and reason, is something personal. That is, the dynamic character of thoughtful discourse is the central issue, even of reality itself. The infinitesimal is the pivot around which everything real orbits. But it is itself not part of the mechanism. The least term of time is all the differing it is. Worth is moment, duration is the dilution and ultimate elimination of worth. If duration is being, time is the stranger to it. And the articulation of its worth is the stranger we come to know each other to be to it. Do you wonder why Plato replaces Socrates with the Stranger?

Sartre was a flawed man, and thinker, in many ways, but he was honest and consistent, he just couldn't get past the aloneness the spacial framework of the Post-Enlightenment era. "Under the gaze" was as close as he could ever get to love. By the way, he was, surprisingly, personally affable and deferential, the diametric opposite of Heidegger. And, yes, this does matter.]

I thought I had posted this yesterday. Overnight I received a notice that you replied..., to what post I do not know, unless it was the one comparing Parmenides to Heidegger. By the way, the word Socrates uses to defeat Parmenides, and Heidegger, is participation. Of course, academically trained sources portray this participation as of the sort of a cog in a machine, or recruit in a body of action thought or style of living. This, because they are readers rather than listeners.

The written word was invented to dehumanize rental accounts, and to conclude obligation in systems of exchange. Later, sovereigns wrote in stone to deny appeal, but did not expect reverence or devotion, merely obeisance. The Bible was written by a group of expatriate Hebrew scribes who, displaced from their positions in the only city in the region fit for such such professionals prospering, created a mythic resource with which to bring to the region, from which they had fled, to use as a means of domination, since they had no military skills. From then on the written word became a fetish for privileged interpreters to browbeat less literate or illiterate supplicants for their wisdom.

I can appreciate how Heidegger's terms can cloud one's capacity for discussion. For anyone seriously studying him I highly recommend an extended sabbatical from him, until one can think in one's own terms. He should be credited with demanding we reexamine fundamentals, but his performance just doesn't measure up to the hype. Being is a verb used to require calculative accounts dehumanized or divested of Socratic participation. As such it “abstracts” from “beings” a persistence in a timeless dimension of..., what? Analysts obviate the issue by reducing being to a cypher, and drop it out of their symbolic representations entirely. Heidegger is forced to be ever more expansive in the calculus of its dimensionality, until we find ourselves in a dimension where navigation is entirely ungrounded in any flesh-and-blood discourse.

Reason requires conviction in the constancy of its terms. But it is utterly absurd to suppose that conviction is the engine of language. It is simply impossible that there can ever be any term in any language that conveys a simulaneity of thought among us. That requires us to chase down all the variances and urge justification for them. The result is intended to be a reduction of differences in the apprehension of terms to the least possible variant. But the real result is to eliminate all conventionally shared terms of any simulaneity of perception between us. We are separate minds and reasoners, and this is inviolate, however zealously we convince ourselves of universals. But the result, also, is a dynamism to all terms. That is, the least term in the intended reduction of variations in our perception is the complete revaluation of all terms, unlimited by any dimension of meaning at all. Heidegger wants being to be a dimension, of which he is the prime navigator. The moment of the differing in which we are more participant to the evolution of the meaning of terms than we are in the conviction of their constancy. That participation conveys more of who we are and of the quality of our reasoning than the conviction of the constancy terms can prevent us from knowing. That conviction is isolating. That participation is nothing of aloneness. We are as fully of it as it discerns us as inviolately autonomous reasoners. But if reasoning requires the conviction we are each alone and yet wins its terms only in a participatory drama in which we are discerned each other nothing alone in it, conviction is always hidden us from each other, and from our terms, and discourse ultimately eludes all dimensions of aloneness, even as it discerns us in ways conviction never could. Nothing is hidden. We hide from each other and then find each other trying not to. Nothing “withdraws” or comes out from “concealment”. That is the view of the isolation conviction is. Truth is not a strip-tease.

Are we supposed to take this as an exhaustive account? Reminds me of Permenides. In ninety pages Parmenides tries to answer a simple proposal by Socrates, which he defeats with one word. I do hope you see the similarities, and pertinence.

Xtrix,

The point is that time, and reason, is something personal. That is, the dynamic character of thoughtful discourse is the central issue, even of reality itself. The infinitesimal is the pivot around which everything real orbits. But it is itself not part of the mechanism. The least term of time is all the differing it is. Worth is moment, duration is the dilution and ultimate elimination of worth. If duration is being, time is the stranger to it. And the articulation of its worth is the stranger we come to know each other to be to it. Do you wonder why Plato replaces Socrates with the Stranger?

Sartre was a flawed man, and thinker, in many ways, but he was honest and consistent, he just couldn't get past the aloneness the spacial framework of the Post-Enlightenment era. "Under the gaze" was as close as he could ever get to love. By the way, he was, surprisingly, personally affable and deferential, the diametric opposite of Heidegger. And, yes, this does matter.

German is ambiguous about what "da" means. "Being" is that little word we put between subject and predicate in order to count one of the other. Or, maybe better, to count “that” one is by “what” the other is. “Being” is the abstracted qualifier. That is, the qualifier so abstracted as to become a quantifier. Very convenient for logicians, who don't really want to know anything or take part in the real world, and useful to ideologues who, like Heidegger, need to put the quantifier between subject and predicate to isolate either from participating in the meaning of the other. In most speech, as we actually speak it, the verb is not a quantifier, but a qualifier, tendering a participation between the other parts of speech intimating a dynamic in all meanings that can never in truth be so isolating as any written word tends to force upon them. There is nothing so isolating to time as “Being” is. That is why ontology is a contradiction in terms. The only law of being is participation in the articulation of the worth of time life is. And no term of it is alone and unchanging. But if the very conviction that there is a “logos”, a law of meaning, and that reasoning is the extension of an antecedent term that preserves it, actually alters the meaning of all antecedent terms, and if it does so in the face of most rigorous application of the forms of reason, then the resulting dynamic changes to all terms intimates just how much more real that dynamic is than the terms of that conviction. And intimates, too, the part of each term, and each person, in that realness. Derrida says “there is nothing outside the text”. Quite the contrary. Everything real is most fully intimated in our recognizing, or rendering recognizable, there is nothing within it. The text really is neither here nor there, what matters is the response of recognition the final term of conviction is in losing its continuity to that conviction.

I was lucky enough to be introduced both to Plato and Heidegger at more or less the same time. I was intrigued by Heidegger's call for a “psychology of mood”, and, more or less in my school days, found the answer to one in the works of the other. Plato was not a metaphysician or an ontologist. He was a dramatist. Scholars universally miss this. Oh, some pay lip-service to the dramatic form, but not to the dramatic content. What he is doing is portraying the intimation of human character in the dynamics of convictions under the scrutiny of a masterful guide. That human character is the engine of meaning. What our conviction invariably does is to reduce to its least term any changes in the character of that conviction. But if that least change is the most rigorous term of our character in that conviction, and it can only come to recognition under the critique of a careful examination, then that least term of change is who we most really are. And yet, of course, there are no perfect guides, and so we wrangle against each other's convictions, and maybe never recognize any changes in them, and yet what is ultimately undeniable is there is a change in their terms. And that change is the property of neither participant. It becomes ours, and even if no more capable of conserving the terms of our convictions, by becoming ours in the face of a rigorous effort to fend them off, we are intimated the character, and so the person, each is. Time is intimation, not explication.

Physics confronts phenomena that has no discernible pattern. This should be evidence that everything in this glorious universe is unique. Every particle. But only become a calculable or “known” quantity can we engage in the dynamic of conviction and changing character in that conviction. Physics achieves this by reducing the unquantifiable to its least term. It applies calculus, first to round off, and then to zero-out, the very term it claims is its goal to understand. It amounts to keeping the bath-water and throwing out the baby. In the life sciences, random mutations simply cannot explain evolution. Sure, it's a factor, but what life does with those changes is not only crucial, but clearly has an essential impact on the trajectory of species change and development. But we may never have recognized this if the science hadn't got out of the labs full of dead specimens and observed life as it is lived. Philosophy, on the other hand, is still isolating all its terms in a system guaranteed to prevent understanding. But the least term of change rigorously untraceable to antecedent conviction is all we should need to recognize the unique character of person each of us is in the drama of it. Heidegger, of course, is lost in a wilderness of his own convictions and resistance to recognizing any changes in them.

I hope this point does not get lost. The dystopian view is that suffering is endemic. It ranges from apathy that let's it happen, as a pretext to making it happen, to zealous promotion of the view, if not the fact. Radical free-marketeers use this as a pretext to set profits above the most basic forms of justice and equity, while evangelicals use biblical passages to divide the world between the saved, themselves, and the damned, everybody else. Together these factions wield enough clout to keep America in the dark ages of social justice, and have managed to re-institute the condition of slavery outside the terms proscribed in law. And fully a third of America languishes under this moral perversity, and these days a lot of them, maybe most, are white. Even Trump supporters.

Not mumbo-jumbo? Logic makes the distinction between “orders” of attribution. Pierce gives his bizarre ranking of first thirds and second firsts, or..., whatever. Not mumbo-jumbo? Maybe, but what it is is hierarchy. But existence is not hierarchical. And whatever actor or agency the here may be, it is material. The rest is conceit. A living organism is not reading from a blueprint, with no apologies whatever to genetics. Genetics can only explain replication, not differentiation. And it is clearly something to how each cell in the body differentiates from all others that generates an organism as a whole. Aside from genetics, lots of views conspire to entrench within us the view that life is in some sense created. This is untenable. Because each cell finds its own place in the organism as a whole by differntiation, and only by some mystery we have yet to become mature enough in our perceptions to recognize, is nevertheless recognized by and as the organism each of us is. Organisms, of course, create mechanistic systems to reduce the burden upon the whole of constantly revising and revisiting the constant differentiation of its constituents. But a simple experiment will show that such mechanistic systems are only a framework within which to continually adapt to the condition of the dynamic between differentiating cells and the enigmatic recognition of the whole of its constitution as that differentiation. All you need is a finger clip. If you put one on and watch the two figures, as the oxygen level rises a bit the heart rate slows, just a bit. Then the oxygen level drops, just a bit, and the pulse increases, just a bit. And so the two figures oscillate, in response to each other. Now, take a few deep breaths. The oxygen level will rise a little, and the pulse slow, maybe a lot. But the changes registered by the clip will appear as fast as the thing is capable of doing so (it must record several pulses before it can register a rate). But if the pulse changes faster than it is possible to calculate a heart rate, then that heart rate is just a convenient framework which the heart is constantly adjusting. That is to say, each beat of the heart is in response to the immediate needs of the body. If the body is that finely attuned to its entire community of cells, and the organism as a whole is the contribution of each cell by differentiating itself from all the others, then organic mechanisms are not like a watch or computer or DNA reader, but something like and army in which each soldier is marching to a different drummer, and yet smoothly adapting to every change in every participant's tempo. Organically. We just have to grow up a bit to recognize this, even if it might take quite a lot of evolution before we understand it fully. Heidegger's Being, being, Beyng, or whatever the hell he landed on in the end, is just a reflection of his expectation of having some vacuous right to be the drummer. A close analysis of the crazy behavior of matter at the nuclear level clearly shows something similar, and at the cosmic level too. And a recognition of the dynamic value we are to each other, and of how that dynamism operates to make us a community, even if we are still too immature to see this, or at least not fully, should teach us how much we need each other, and realize our world through that need, as the differentiation each is of it. But this means time is difference, not continuity. The continuity of our perceptions is only a convenience to limit the strain upon us of continual change and adaptation. But in our systems of calculating the tempo of time we always valorize continuity over change, creating a hierarchy in which the mechanism or established pattern is given pride of place, and change is relegated to some condition of insignificance, or corruption. Conceit, all is conceit.

The individual is not an isolated entity. It is the dynamic that at once differentiates us and enjoins us in a rebellion against the continuity of time that would trap us in patterns that cannot be ours together. The individualism that would isolate each one in the face of the oneness of it all is a trope to force submission. Each alone, we cannot effectively thwart the hierarchical distinction between “Being” and beings. But the reality of it is, there is very little such a distinction can do to arrest our participating in the discontinuity time really is.

I stand, mildly, corrected. I hate the clerical side of these debates. I'm not a clerk or scribe. Essence is ideal, existence is real. I've been assiduously not reading him for some decades now, but think Heidegger's critique of Sartre's phrasing would be that it is “ontic”. But since the ontological is fallacious (an internal contradiction) it's not much of a criticism. Essence is what is left when all mere attributes are eliminated as identifiers. But since “dasein” is neither here nor there, we must look elsewhere for who and what we are. Certainly not to Heidegger!

Life is the articulation of the worth of time. That worth is unendurable. There is nothing enduring it is. It is momentousness (as Socrates tries to get Parmenides to recognize). Duration is a space or time or term attenuating moment like a reduction to essence. But when the space of time or term is measured out its full course there is nothing within, and, most assuredly, there is nothing at all akin to its beginning its end is. Only what is of no duration whatever can encompass the sweep of time. Presence is never what that encompassing moment is. But what the ends of time is is a contrariety between the markers of the space of time (conventionally referred to as beginning and end, or some such). But since those markers contradict each other and so cannot be part of the same duration, only the contrariety they share, as much to that duration (epoch, or space of time or term) as to each other, is the encompassing term. But opposites so enjoined in the encompassing moment contrary to the duration term or epochal (would-be) structure of time cannot be identified by any attributes shared within that duration, nor by the contrariety either alone is to it. Person, then, of which “dasein” is a deliberate distortion and neither here nor there, is a dynamic between contraries to the march of time. We are not alone. We need each other, and no god can help us in this save as a straw man supporting the conceit that we are alone and that the aloneness in the 'presence' of that straw man is who we are. But that conceit cannot endure the moment of contrariety we can only together, though always in a contrariety inimitably our own, bring to that conceit.

In the dawn of time, I asked my instructor what “ownmost” meant. His one word response was “crowded”.

David,
What is at stake is Heidegger's tenuous claim upon his own ego trip.

Kevin.
At the very beginning of B&T, Sartre famously quotes him in the intro to his Being and Nothingness. I don't remember where he denied it, but it was commonly discussed among students of his. I clearly remember the matter coming up in class, over fifty years ago. The response from the instructor was "he made a mistake". Yeah, and a lot more of them.

We do not fear being dead. We do not fear being nothing. The apprehension the thought of dying can cause in us is to distract us from the terrible weight of the possibility of being real. We will do anything to avoid the thought, and "anticipatory resoluteness" is just the dramatic conceit that we can do this "authentically". Being real is just what we most dread.

Writing is the supreme conceit in that dread. It is, quite deliberately, the murder of language, and poetry is its embalming fluid. "Idle talk" is far more genuinely what language really is.

Most of what we talk about is what we can't talk about. The punctuation above seems confused to me, but whatever the hell Heidegger thought he was getting at, other than pandering to those who could save his bacon (read his biographies and you'll see what I mean), it was that there is something personal to "Being". He stated, and later denied he stated, a lot of things. Most famously, to 'be is to exist'. right there in black and white at the start of B&T. Wittgenstein, by the way, is wrong. Whereof we cannot speak is what gets us talking in the first place. Everything that ensues is in error, and yet the terms of recognizing how little we know depend upon our daring to be wrong.

Being is a cipher. What does being mean in a syllogism? Is it a quantifier, or a qualifier? Analytic philosophy treats it is a quantifier. But so does Heidegger. The difference is that logicians treat being as an enumeration, Heidegger treats it as the enumerator. That is what he means by “forgetfulness of being”, we have forgotten the enumerator, in all our enumerations. Both have forgotten the qualifier. As such, being is the attenuation of the worth of time, not the moment of it. Heidegger's time is really just a warmed-over epoch (his teacher's notion), the valorizing of duration over moment, purdurance over worth, presence over the worth of the departed. Presence is nothing of moment. That is why he sides with Parmenides over Socrates in the dialog by that name.

By the way, his description of the hammer, the use of the hammer, and the blacksmith's application of the hammer, smacks of a mind that has never been inside a real smithy, but, rather, that got this view from watching Wagner's Siegfried. In a real smithy, the blacksmith does not impose shape upon the metal, just look around at how many hammer are there of all shapes and weights! No, in a real smithy, the metal teaches the smith what it can and can't do. The matter is the matter, not the mind. It is a form of Calvinism that supposes that divinity channels its design upon a corrupt world through the mind of the believer. Just the reverse is truth. Divinity is the conceit that matter doesn't matter. Truth is what belies this.

No, I said dystopian "culture" is.

The problem with history is that historians make a fetish of telling us everything we don't want to know. My studies are motivated by getting at the root of enigmas clearly overlooked or deliberately omitted by most of the literature. The English Reformation, for instance, has its origins in resentment against the Norman authority claims that caused the nobility to rebel against the king in demands for a Charter of rights (mostly the rights of nobles lesser than the king, the House of Commons, for instance, was not a move toward popular democracy, but a separate chamber of un-elected knights so lowly, compared to the other titled nobles, they only had commoners under their authority, hence the House of Commons, not of commoners!), and in resentments against Roman colonization reemerged in the form of Norse or Norman rule under the outrageous authority claims promoted and sustained for them by the Vatican.

During Norman rule of England the Anglo-Saxon peasantry, treated by the older regime before the death of Harold as comrades, were treated by Normans as property, slaves even, and with no more dignity than Black slaves in the Antebellum South. Probably the most outrageous lie about this era is that it was a "Dark Age", when, in fact, it was the leadership that was uncivilized, and the people themselves that preserved, and even continually developed, the arts of civilization. The artifacts from this era are exquisite, but made, no doubt, not by the elites, but by these "unwashed peasants" treated in the most appallingly cruel terms by those elites. The Normans found the English difficult to govern in the terms they would prefer to impose upon them, largely because they had the immense advantage of being native speakers of English, something their Norman rulers have not master to this day, a disadvantage infecting even the elites of America today. And so, the Normans took to a strategy of gradualism in the form of "Acts of Enclosure" which gradually removed ancient privileges of villagers, the vast majority of the English, to the point that five hundred years later village life began to become untenable. One such village actually pulled up stakes and left as a group, to become refugees in Holland. There they were treated as common laborers, a life they were not suited for, so they went back to England and, some of them, found a ship that would take them to the Americas. They had a charter, but at the time America was divided between the English colony on the Tidewaters of Virginia, the Dutch colony at what would become New York, and the French trading posts in the Maritimes (though I am not clear on the timing of the French appearance). But upon arriving at the headlands of Cape Cod, they decided to violate that charter, sailing north rather than risking the shoals of the cape. I suspect their actual intention was to settle in some location more or less under the control of the Dutch, but settled at Plymouth. They were, by the way, my ancestors, though my family name came over a little later. The critical factor in this is that this group of villages represented a third strain in the divisions of the American settlement, and they established a boundary or sorts between the two factions of what would become the English Civil War, with the "Cavaliers" in the south and the "Roundheads" to the north.
Because of primogeniture laws, these Cavalier classes were loaded up with displaced sons with all the accoutrements of nobility but no title, lands, or real wealth. These men craved the status of their uncles and brothers and cousins, and so came to America, with a cadre of servants, in the hopes of rebuilding the English Manorial System here. But their men were Englishmen, and at a remove from the context of English oppression of its servant classes they soon became unmanageable, and so slaves were imported as soon as they became available. And it was instantly obvious that Black slaves could not be permitted to work side by side with the White workers, lest they too become "corrupted" with English rebelliousness, and, well, sass. Blacks, too, could be rebellious, but they could not produce the kind of back-talk the English laborers could sling against their Norman overlords. Shortly after the introduction of a small group of slaves to Jamestown (though here my knowledge is sketchy) a Native tribe attacked and almost wiped out that colony, which later retaliated with such ruthlessness that the region became open to further colonization, and the American attitude towards Native peoples began to become entrenched, at the very same time that slavery and segregation were calcifying into the American soul.

In the North things were different. Settlers there were neither nobles nor villagers, but townsfolk. The towns of England had always had a special status, with their own legal systems and even some crude democracy. And by the time of the settlement they were becoming part of a burgeoning mercantile and industrial power, in direct competition with the old feudal regime. These people could not impose the kind of fealty claims upon their workers that the aspiring nobles of Virginia took for grated as their birthright. So, though their work demands were every bit as cruel, those who survived indenture, apprenticeship, and journeyman status, and that survival was by no means certain, had to be rewarded sufficiently so that a fresh supply could be enticed into the ranks of the workers. The seagoing classes were especially close and equitable, by the standards of the day, even almost democratic and cosmopolitan. And that personal investment in each other in some limited arenas could not help but influence the greater society. Also, their religious devotion was to gather in church on Sundays, and wait for the "spirit to move". This could come form any member, however lowly, again, putting pressure on the group to sustain some glimmer of democratic feeling. The Plymouth colony, and a growing number of other similar colonies in the region, were culturally villagers, and the village system of England was democratic long before the Normans tried to ruin their ancient habits and rights.

But in the North, too, Indian wars interrupted the development of some reconciliation between settlers and natives. There is circumstantial evidence to believe that in the aftermath of the English Civil War King Charles II deliberately generated strife between settlers and natives, leading to King Phillip's War in New England, and to the Bacon Rebellion in Virginia. These events would set the stage for the Westward Expansion of the colonies and set the hatred of native peoples digging deeply into the spirit of its people. But both incidents may have been, and I thing very probably were, generated by the subversive activities of the king's agent in New York, Edmund Andress, selling arms to Indians and provoking aggression amongst tribes and between tribes and settlers.

And there you have all the elements we now find so implacably corrupting our society today. There is also something else. Throughout history there has been a tradition of all social orders to require defense. Men, sometime women too, were expected to show some capacity to assist in all defensive requirements. In the most democratic settings of ancient England, the moot, or hundreds, the vote was taken by a "show of arms", meaning, not a show of hands, but a show of some weapon, however crude. This ancient trait in human life may take on entirely different, even unrecognizable form, but the requirement to sustain the existing "culture" is a powerful force for the suppression of progressive thought and habit. There may well be a substantial faction among us who are naturally inclined to bigotry, but I think the majority of warriors in that suppression are at least as much conscripted as willing participants. I'm not a sociologist, but it should be intuitive enough to most of us how it is possible to enforce such conscription in bigotry and sexism, all it takes is persistent shaming and humiliation of those who violate the norm.

Later in American life, a preacher appeared on the scene. George Whitefield. He was an itinerant fire-and-brimstone preacher who traveled about the frontier driving a rebellious alternative to Puritan and Church of England and other established religions. He founded the American Baptist Church. This created the most dangerous strain in American "culture wars": Christian dystopianism. This dystopian strain is even more dangerous than racism. It is the view that governments that try to ameliorate the suffering of people created by their fellows in a kind of tacit, largely subterranean conspiracy, goes against the will of their god, and must therefore be thwarted if that god's design is to fulfill itself in the second coming. This inspires a corporate dystopia in which we are urged to believe that only under threat of financial ruin will working people be productive. The two conspire to employ racism as a call to arms against any agitation for redress. And conscripts to that call will, of course, fulfill their role, even if it is diametrically opposed to their instincts and interests.

The trace of all these strains is arduous, but if we avoid the labor we will just go around in circles trying to conscript each other in views that really belong to none of us.

America is the product of the English civil war, and the two sides in that war, though more or less reconciled in England, are still at each other's throats in America today. The events of 1665-6 never get much notice, but actually set the stage for the mess we have since made of our country.

I think you'll find Walmart, cheered on by Ronald Reagan, demanded its suppliers divest themselves of American workers. Not the whole story, but it got the ball rolling.

Culture is not who we are. But it does supply us with the language we need to know it is not who we are. If we are intimate enough with our culture, and with each other, we can recognize in each other just what it means that our culture is not who we are. Problem is, we have to convince ourselves that our culture really is who we are to become sufficiently intimate to it to achieve its function of helping us to intimate to each other who we really are. Culture wars, therefore, is a delusion. A very dangerous one. Reason is reductive. In the end, there is nothing that really belongs there to its terms of deciding who and what belongs to a group or class. But the conviction of the decisiveness of that determination catches us in a regress we can only escape by recognizing that all the terms of that determination are fallacious. Culture can only fulfill its role of offering us the language of our knowing each other by recognizing through each other, with each other's help, that it is not who we are if it only operates by inclusion, and never by exclusion. But reason can only be reductive, and induction, inclusion, can on;y occur in the moment the reductive process fails us in our recognition of its emptiness. But we are never alone there. For we had to have help from each other getting there, and that help intimates us to each other as forcefully as it intimates exclusion is a vicious circle. Culture warriors are living in an abyss of their own making.

That's just the problem, isn't it?! The ontological fallacy is that unity and continuity is what is real. But to get from the certitude which one is which required for logic to the certitude in the count of the duration between ends mathematics is requires a paradigm shift that has to be ignored or made to go unrecognized for there to be any metaphysics at all. It also means, in view pf current quantum and cosmological models, that space is contradictory, it returns to its origin by expanding in a straight line and yet has no center to the curve so described, and time resolves the contradiction by introducing opposing pairs of contraries that thwart the paradigm of unity and continuity that logic and math, and the metaphysics of "being", must convict itself in. This is what Plato shows us in his Laws, he spend hundreds of pages spoon feeding arithmetic order into the minds of the two saps accompanying him, only to recognize in the end that something irrational to that order, something deplorably human or personal, has to be admitted into the paradigm to even get it started, and to support any hopes it has of achieving unity and preserving continuity. that personal factor is not a complete overthrow of the paradigm, but a gradual nibbling away that changes it over time into what eventuates in something unrecognizable to its antecedents and yet never violating its criteria and modes of judgment. It does this, not by a revolutionary upheaval, but via personal characterizations of the conceit of unity in continuity we must always find ourselves convicted in. And this does not happen alone, it requires us to recognize in each other the incompleteness and misapprehension of the terms of our convictions. We become a community in contrariety that bends history towards justice, to paraphrase MLK.

But what gets "rounded" out? Is it nothing? What if it's everything? There may be nothing unique in the mathematician's mind, but there is a great deal of evidence that every particle in the universe is, that reality itself is uniqueness. Can this be "rounded out"? If 1 is unique there is no arithmetic at all. Add this one apple up all you want and you won't get an orange. The question is, philosophically, what is number for? If not, that is, to sustain the logician's conceit that the excluded middle is law?

Apparently, he doesn't have "1"! One over infinity must be taken as the mathematical equivalent of zero, or the calculus, the basis of physics, is founded in a fallacy. Rationalizing the irrational is the essence of science. But what if that tiny value, excluded because of its irrationality, is what reality is? How much of a diversion from the causal nexus is needed to force the admission of freedom, consciousness, and moral value? How many is one? And, does the certitude which 'one' is which, so necessary to do logic, the same enumeration as the count of however many nines after the decimal makes 'one'? If not, don't we lose both? But if only the irrational quantity excluded by reason is that resolution between which and how many is 'one', then the excluded term is not a quantifier at all, but a qualifier. The qualifier is the heart of reason.

I hope I can be forgiven if I neglect to review this cacophony. Argumentation can only expect to be convincing if there is absolute confidence in the continuity of terms. Unfortunately for that expectation, there can be no such confidence except as a kind of lie. In fact, terms evolve precisely via our discipline of becoming unconvinced of that continuity. And the glorious fact is that the more rigorously we pursue the argument in that confidence the more complete and more real are our terms. And more glorious still, that change of terms is more all encompassing and more real than our confidence in logical continuity ever can be. It is therefore unwise to become self-congratulatory when seem to achieve a knockout blow in terms of that unwarranted confidence in the continuity of our terms. But if that process of rigor that results in the differing of all terms is the engine of human language, then our reliance on logical form to thwart the moment of that differing, and our recognition of it, is conceit. And, furthermore, if that moment of the differing of all terms is more real than the continuity of time and term, then philosophy is not a matter of persuasion, but of becoming rigorously unpersuaded, and reality is more dissent than obedience. Paradigms exist only to be overthrown, and dissent, though mute and anomalous alone, is that overthrow through the logical dynamic of contrariety. A contrariety in which the dissenter is as in contrariety to its fellow dissenter as to the prevailing paradigm. This pairing renders the paradigm recognizably incomplete. And the rigor of the paired dissension is the most persuasive term there can be. No god can espouse or partake of such dissension pairs. I would go so far as to assert that every particle of matter, every living organism, and every social dynamic, is such a community in contrariety, rendering the act of being rigorous in it is the character of each participant in it. The question arises, if reason is a matter of eliminating what is anomalous to its terms, how much of a differing to those those terms resulting from the rigorous completion of that reasoning does it take to complete that overthrow? How much of a diversion from the causal nexus does it take to be more what everything real is?

I would love to go on about what is so annoying in god arguments, but here's one point, what kind of god requires us to believe in it? It's one thing, I suppose, to hold an unwarranted belief, but it is quite another to insist on going about trying to convince others of it. Most religions don't bother with evangelism, only the biblical ones. Well, maybe Buddhism. What do you get out of it? Does this god get some sort of thrill out of our careless reasoning? Do evangelists get some sort of thrill out of convincing others of what they themselves acknowledge is an "act of faith"?

PS, I'm on borrowed WiFi, and may not be back for days.

What a load of drivel! Do you really think we understand what causality is well enough to draw conclusions from an Aristotelian meme? 1+1 only equals 2 if we go off half-cocked (as usual!) supposing we know what we mean by this fantasy! If everything is unique, and there is absolutely no adequate proof otherwise, god doesn't add up. Does god + god equal two gods? Sure? If A is A, 1+1 does not equal 2, but is merely a redundancy. Saying the same thing over and over, coming to the same asinine conclusion over and over again, may be something or other, but it sure as hell ain't philosophy. If I seem harsh, it's only because one gets tired of banging one's head against the same wall of conventional, sclerotic thinking. It may seem to all the world, and it does, that a proposition is a fixed value, but in fact it is, in its most vibrant sense, a characterization. The ontological fallacy always catches us. What is is not what was or will be, but a dramatic moment from which only what departs has any meaning for anything else. God is never such a departed moment, and therefore does not and never was or will be part of a real universe of time. The apple is red because it is not what redness is, and redness appears in the apple because it is not what the apple is. The god you suppose you have proven cannot pull off that trick!

Are there really any theories of either how language or consciousness evolved? What they are, sure, but not how they evolved. Fact is, there are no "primitive" languages, nor any signs in the historical record that can give any evidence of such. Like stereo vision, it's not something that can exist in some incomplete form.
One of my favorite TV personalities, Bianca De Groat, does a little skit in which she teaches small children how to use a map. She wanders about the Bronx Zoo aimlessly for a bit, until she relents and asks the staff-member for a complementary map. She spends a few moments getting lost again, to give herself a reason to go over how to orient a map to landmarks. But then she shows her audience the rewards of proper usage of the map by standing, with her copy, in front of a sign of an enlargement of it. That sign has an arrow pointing to a spot on the map, with the caption "you are here", which Miss De Groat reads out loud. "I am here...., I'm Here!" But, sadly, and with regrets for deflating her charming enthusiasm, she's wrong. We do not come to be and know where we are by a map. A map only tells us how to not be there. If you've ever really been lost you may know what I mean. Only completely lost do we really experience where we are. And only when we realize how little the maps and other means of navigation, of not being here but on our way elsewhere, do we even begin to know where we are. And I my view, only when we are so much a part of a place that now one else can know it without knowing you are you really there at all. The navigational aids, at least in terms of our being there at all, are only availing as a foil to what can only be recognized in loss.
What all the theories have in common is precisely the, rather dishonest and even dogmatic, commitment to fail to see this. Perplexity is the essential character and termini of consciousness and language. All that we hope to guide us away from that truer experience of where we are only serves to underscore the moment of perplexity always more complete than any theory can be. Photons, it turns out, are chaotic and unresolvable communities of highly improbable events that, helpfully for us and conveniently for physicists, are comprised of roughly balancing contraries that can be added up into an arguably coherent trajectory as readily calculated, in most cases, as the motions of pool balls. But the hidden deception is that at the core of these calculations is a false presumption, the presumption that the incoherent chaotic value is so minuscule, and its balancing contrariety so much more complete, that it can simply be ignore. That is to say, dogmatic ignorance is at the heart of modern physics, and all related sciences. But the project fails if the contrariety at the heart of the equations of quantum matter is in fact a kind of rebellion against the supposed completeness of those calculations. Genetics is hardly the rigorously perfected system. It can only explain replication, it cannot explain differentiation. And if that differentiation occurs at a cellular level, if every cell division is dynamic to the organism as a whole (and surely there can be no credible thesis of a predetermining blueprint!) then a kind of contrariety between sister cells as contrary amongst them as to any mere replicated form, is what makes an organism an individual life. And if consciousness lives its life recurrently thrown back into the maelstrom of lost theories, and yet all our theories serve only as a foil to recognize ourselves and each other in that loss, then consciousness and language are perfectly explicable, as explicable, that is, as our hopeless and yet ceaseless effort to escape loss. But that effort always comes in to form of denying our humanity, when our humanity is precisely what we pretend we are trying to understand. And so, of course there are endlessly proliferating theories that perennially elude an coherent unification, even though unity is the mission of the founding dogma. The dogma, that is, that we will find our humanity in dehumanizing ourselves. Philosophy should be the art of being human, and yet gets dominated by dehumanization. There is a pernicious history in this.
I reluctantly assume that unexplained references are meant to intimidate. I must admit that I am easily intimidated. By little kids who seem to know everything Potter, by teens who can solve a Rubik's cube in seconds, by old ladies making lace at blinding speed. But practice brings such abilities, and yet etches the map into us, a kind of surreptitious dogma that resists inquiry and therapeutic perplexity.

Schop1,
Which just goes to show that too much "philosophy" poisons the mind. The only induction is the failure of rigorous deduction (entailed extension) to preserve its trajectory between antecedent and "conclusion". Language is the triumph of the qualifier over the quantifier. Since that triumph is the final term of the completest and most rigorous extension of entailment (which relies on the quantifier for "certainty") there simply can be no primitive or inchoate form. Every effort to subsume language under the rules of quantification results in unresolvable contrariety that cannot be grasped at all in received terms. There must be a break-out to a moment of recognition in which the contrary term is more operative than continuity between premise and extension. There is no locus to mind. Consciousness is not perception ("representation", as any fan of Schopenhauer must know), it is a constant jarring away from such representation. The brain, during a boring commute, might accept everything seen along the way a ho-hum and everyday, but the mind will frequently interrupt with sudden impressions of something out of place off in the periphery. The brain is then directed to the thing and, mostly, sees nothing it does not have an immediate correlate for. And yet, as the brain, in tow to the body, goes on its hum-drum way, the mind teases, as if to say: "Made you look!". In that difference you will find the necessary clue to understanding what consciousness really is. Brain science will not avail you. Mind is not outside the brain, but any decent neurologist will tell you it has no locus there.

Language is a subterranean conspiracy we engage in together, or that engages us together, against such terms and theories as stated here. One way to make this as explicit as possible is to apply the method Socrates taught us, by refuting each other in the most honest and rigorous ways possible, until we recognize in each other the personal character to the dynamic changes to our convictions. That recognition does not come in pieces that somehow get put together later. It is always the totality of who we each are, and only grows in the completeness with which we only recognize ourselves in the dynamic we share in the changing of our convictions. We think we navigate the world by its fixed markers, but what rebels against this navigation is more real still if its community of rebels only know each other as opposed to each other as to such an idee fixe. And even though it seems we wrangle and never agree, if we are successful in breaking through the maze of fixed points we are rationally bound to convince ourselves is the ways of the world, then we can know each other more completely as opponents to that fixation than as partisans to it. Language, then, is not the terms and grammar of that dynamic of our convictions, but the recognition of ourselves in the changes to our convictions others help us with, even as we seem to wrangle with them. And consciousness is not a state of perception, but a dynamic to it that our more subterranean powers of recognition manages to jog those states away from a fixation on prior convictions and habits of thought and navigation.

Petulance? Obstreperousness? You do surprise me! Are you asking me for empathy? I've been saying all along that empathy is prerequisite, and that you continually conflate that with a claim it is conclusive, which you, petulantly, deny. It is indeed the case that empathy is not a recipe for comprehension. But recognition is indispensable to a process of learning, and empathy is its initiating moment. Now, while it is demonstrable (if you but allow the demonstration) that empathy, or something indisputably akin to it, is “originary” to the dynamic process comprehension is, this does not mean it is a priori to it. It is not like Wittgenstein's ladder that can be tossed away once climbed. It is the hidden origin to every word or thought. It is the energy of the dynamic between mind and world, and between interlocutors, that proceeds to perennially find ways to dispense with it, as if a ladder no longer of use or worth. As if mind were indeed the 'monad'. But you are not the monad, regardless of how lucidly self-contained you may believe your views and words to be. If you deny monadic separation between us, how do you explain our being a community of speakers? If you mean to pursue philosophy without a grounding even in the basics, you could do worse than to acquire a copy of the Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy.

Judaka,
The difference between analysis and synthesis is philosophy 101. The terms I refer to are every word you type at us. Yes, you have stated a belief you have a right to be understood. You have stated, quite explicitly, empathy plays no worthwhile part in your understanding others or, presumably, in your expectation of our understanding you. Well, who could empathize with that? But the question remains, where the hell do you think the terms of your understanding come from? Our empathy for you seems a likely candidate! Rather more likely than whatever these "other ways of understanding" you may think you mean. But, I'm afraid that wrangling with dogmatists is futile.

Judaka,
You can't question your premise without yielding inferences already assumed to confirm it. But if not, how does a premise form to begin with? As you exchange posts with the other contributors here, your terms alter in ways you cannot keep track of. It is that untraceable growth in the meaning of terms and the ability to engage them that is the meaning we, partially, recognize in the concept of "empathy". Do you suppose you have a right to be understood? Where could such a supposition possibly come from but an inability to trace the source of your terms, either to your own Humpty-Dumpty dogma, or as a mystical gift from the community or from some divine or regulatory authority? Empathy, as I say, is a, partial, recognition of this untraceable source of the terms by which we suppose we understand and suppose we have a right to be understood. Synthesis is the ultimate term of an untenable supposition in the continuity of analysis. That is the enigma that got philosophy going to begin with and that still is yet to be resolved. Not really even kept sight of. I don't read posts carefully if they are not addressed to me, and if the thread is extensive, but from what I can see in a cursory browsing of this discussion it seems your "solution" is very far from being philosophically well-founded, and more like a kind of techno-babble folk psychology.

If a person explicitly reports what you intuit is not what or why they show signs of feeling or thinking, what then of confirmation/dis-confirmation? Is this a synthetic or analytic judgment? Can you interrogate your premise even as you are drawing conclusions from it? What if the act of inference denatures the premise? What if the signposts move as you turn your attention elsewhere?

Well, do we have any way to confirm or refute our empathic impressions? The denial or confirmation of the subject? If not, how is that judgement not itself an act of empathy?

Making of any fundamental condition of reason a practical tool for understanding particular circumstances is to run ahead of oneself, and to abandon philosophy.

Bathos, for instance, is an effort to jump to worthless conclusions, from a, maybe, worthy intuition. That distinction, I think, will bring a bit of clarity to this discussion. It is analogous, I suppose to imagining your thesis proved by the fact that it has yet to face a suitable trial-and-error test. Scientific intuition is the driver of material understanding. To deem it worthless would be to condemn a lot of potential knowledge to oblivion.

If the infant cries, does it feel? Do you know "how it feels"? Do you know how you feel if you don't know "how it feels"? Empathy with the crying infant does not in itself teach us what it needs, but it does rather keep our interest, unless you're so insensate to the crying that letting it cry feels like "other ways of understanding". A prerequisite is not a practical method. That it is not practical hardly robs it of its being the precondition of "other ways". The gesso is hidden under the painted image, but this hardly means it is not essential to the art.

Josh,
Plato has been done to death? Well empathy is "dialectic", isn't it?

In Plato's Lysis, a young man asks Socrates for ideas about how to get Lysis, a popular fellow student in the gymnasium with him, to befriend him. They discuss strategies of ensnaring a lover for some time, but in the end have no satisfactory result. Socrates encapsulates the discussion, and remarks, ironically, "we still don't know what love (or friendship) is!" But the passage could just as well be translated, and have originally meant, "we still do not know which one is the friendship!" Empathy is, likewise, one of those things most real by proving, after careful analysis, to be impossible to identify which one is which. We need a different kind of logic to understand things so real they elude analysis. That logic is that the terms of analysis become a community in contrariety. As contrary to each other as to the presumtions of the analysis. But you cannot make of such a logic a praxis. Practical application assumes differentiation that analysis can validly manipulate. This does not prove that empathy does exist, but it does argue that if making it a science or practical exercise loses its coherence, this does not mean it is not real. In a community in contrariety that rigorously defeats the presumptions of analysis it is ultimately most analytically certain that between the two contrary terms it is impossible to determine which one is the community, and therefore the defeat of that analysis.

My access to the net is limited, so I can't follow this discussion effectively. But it seems to me it overlooks the obvious fact that empathy is the foundation of the most urgent issue in philosophy. We need to want to be understood to talk at all, and there needs to be something like talk to reason at all, even if we become otherwise convinced that a machine mind is closer to what reason is. We live in dread of being real, and so we elide and attenuate all terms, stretching out a defining epoch so as to obviate the completer moment. Truth is, we spend almost all our time in that elision and attenuation of meaning. Such is "science". And that attenuation justifies to us all the cruelty of presuming empathy unreal. But that doesn't get around the founding reality that meaning is sharing moment.

Josh, I'm surprised you didn't peg me with Habermas rather than Gadamer. I respect both, but the only influence I acknowledge is Plato.

Where is the issue of 'empathy' more real and complete? In a domestic relation that is suddenly recognized estranged? Or for the alien in a strange land who suddenly and unexpectedly is made to feel welcome? If estrangement of a long term familiarity and initial intimacy in an otherwise alienating circumstance are mirror images of the same moment, maybe we can thereby begin to get some parameters on the issue.

If you can't know the difference between good food and bad food, it's hard to see that you know what food is at all. Plato covered this one better than Moore, I think. Knowing and judging good, or not, are inseparable. Taking all terms as categorial (if not categorical) leads us into needless confusion. You don't need to classify a thing to know what it is, and if it's a good one. Logic separates knowledge of terms from what can be inferred from them. It's a kind of madness, that.

When we butt heads over ideas, if we have any self-respect, we at least sometimes discover we have been wrong. How far does this discovery go? If it changes, not only the issue at hand, but, if only in some small way, every term in our lexicon, then to continue the discussion from there inevitably brings a similar event of introspection to our interlocutor. The recurrence of this exchange can only eventuate, if indeed each moment alters all prior terms and the exchange is properly dialectical, with each participant honestly and forthrightly engaged in the changes that take place through each other, in an understanding that outstrips all received terms. Empathy? I'd call it intimacy. A transformation of terms through each other. It's name is rigor, not 'feeling'. And, if the elements are real, the moment and event is too. Very much so.

1/infinity is a contradiction. It is both something and nothing. George Berkeley wrote a paper on this titled "The Analyst". Hard to see how we can regard a contradictory as real.

Is philosophy a seance? Or, “awaiting upon the lord”? Where does rigorous or critical thinking come into it? Of course, get that little issue out of the way and you can do 'philosophy' by fiat. Which is precisely my buggaboo with all of it, Continental as much as Anglo-American, analytic as much as the inductive aspirations of lexical tradition. Is what 'shows itself by hiding' really there, or there and gone? And, either way, is it somehow unilateral? That is, in whose terms does it come and go, come or go, or come by going? If in our terms, how can it avoid “in-authenticity”? If in its own, what hope have we of anything but a pretended perception of it? Isn't there something fraudulent, here, in Heidegger?

The problem with the Turing Test is that it is rigged in favor of the computer. The problem with Heidegger is that he uses “being” as a cryptic operative quantifier. That is, as the 'unity of the one'. That may be what believers need to think their god is, but it not what person is. Person is the qualifier, the contrary term that defeats the count, both the count of divine oneness and the enumerator the machine 'mind' is. Neither is really what person is. Your ad hominem remark seems to say “get with the program”. If it is impossible to find a person in a computer, it is by no means necessary that we find the person in each other. Something programmatic tends to get in the way. But what sweeps these obstacles away is the contrariety we find in each other to them, even as we find contrariety to each other in that same action. That is why we have to be human to be rational. There is no mechanical mind. There is no divine design. Mind is personal. And finding the contrary term in ourselves through each other is how we find how true this is.

Is reality, and reason, hermetic? Anything, any least shred of meaning, not captured by the causal nexus or within the bounds of premise and consequent, changes every term. If time is that change, there is no complementary ends of time. There is nothing within those ends. Nothingness, then, is all that is deemed hermetically sealed within the beginning and end of time or between the antecedent and consequent of reason. This discussion is a good example of it.