I'm not sure I feel what you mean. Is it more than being immersed in washing the dishes, chopping carrots, a walk in nice weather? — path
The real Derrida was a globe-trotting womanizer,
famous enough to create a backlash, basically a wildly successful poet, a lovable more user-friendly Nietzsche for nice, respectable people. — path
To me Buck would be like some doctor on the front lines of the pandemic. He's not up his own ass. Chances are he can't keep up with Stephen/Hamlet at their verbal game, but he enacts a different stance on life, which he can also articulate in terms of 'irresponsible' or 'onanistic.' Or I think of the activist chiding the navel-gazer awash in his privilege. Do something, you lazy, selfish poet!
(Or I might chide myself to be more social irl. But my job is social (teaching), so I don't usually feel as lonely as a should, given how few people I really open up to.) — path
Right. I agree. And we can mention binary thinking versus non-binary thinking, which is of course more binary thinking. — path
I was thinking more about this and it's maybe the question of being. The beetle in the box is there.
Something 'is' behind the signs. But the signs can't grab it. The signs can't grab anything
It's a vapor? Does one awaken the question for the wrong reasons? Hard to tell. It's all caught up in sign-systems and politics, seems to me.
What is the difference if not this 'consciousness' or 'being'? Because if the planet-size computer can out-talk us eventually, it won't be clear. Your panpsychism is reasonable to me. It could genuinely become difficult to know for sure if our planet-size-AI is 'really' there. To defend ourselves against that thought we'd need to think that our biology is magical in some sense or get into some quantum woo. I don't know. It makes sense to me that 'being is not a being.' There's the metaphor of the light that makes things visible. Nicholas of Cusa was maybe saying something like this. It does get negative-theological. It's all so slippery that I'll just stop here. — path
In other words, there is a recognition that since one can speak however one pleases, that one can in some sense 'make true' whatever one pleases, just by talking about it. But as we saw in the second layer, this has no descriptive effect, and cannot really change the world or even what one thinks about it. Yet making a sentence like 'time is unreal' true according to one's logic, which follows from the employment of words in a certain way, one can sort of blur the eyes and almost believe he has stopped time. — Snakes Alive
To be perfectly honest I'm simply intimidated by the Spheres trilogy. And everything else he puts out. He writes very big bloody books. Which has never stopped me before, but I need to space them out and there's so much I (feel I) "need" to get to before diving into Sloterdijk. Don't get me wrong, I want to read him, but it's just a bit of a matter of an economization of time. I'm still tossing up whether or not I'm going to do the three volumes of Capital by the end of the year.... — StreetlightX
And I've seen that Tyler Cohen interview. I think maybe part of the 'problem' is that Zizek is playing to many audiences at once, and, yes, it's hard to square all of what he attempts to do. It'd be interesting to me to see how Sloterdijk does it. But I think it's useful as a reader to try and take responsibility for what one gets out of him. Reading Zizek always puts my guard up. I'm more critical when I read him than other authors and I almost get more out of him precisely for that reason. A kind of pedagogy of suspicion that is all the more productive because you can't trust your source
Polonius is my shadow. I read lots of Jung once, I confess. I connect him [Polo] to idle talk, chatter, or bot-speak. We always leave (or I always leave) a slime trail of the already-been-said. That's part of it. Polonius just barfs up what everybody knows.
But he's also a father figure. There's basically a performance of the smart guy that is implicitly patriarchal. So I can deliver a sermon on humility and the form of the communication is arrogant. Who gets to give the sermon? That's the 'real' issue on the level of form, thinly veiled by content.
You also hint at a kind of shallowness of knowledge. I relate to that too. I play fast and loose and basically bluff, and part of that bluff is that everyone is bluffing. And talk of us all walking in darkness is one more false light. But part of me wants to be called out, as an opportunity to catch the spaghetti again. If I am called out gently and perceptively, then the game is actually happening. This is a narcissistic detour, but I want to catch the spaghetti again. — path
Right. I like that approach while knowing it's not the only approach. In some ways my vision of what enlightenment is is just so mundane that it hardly deserves the name. If I get caught up in loving my cat, forgetting mortality and identity and all of that, then that's it. Or I'll settle for just being in a state of easygoing play, even if that play is hard work. 'The seriousness of a child at play.' Maybe there's more, but I'm pretty happy with that. It's an animal kind of spirituality. The more mystical-manic states I've had via philosophy might deserve their own name. But it's like a drug state, not really for mortals, or not for long. — path
Well, this is what I get for all my plotting and precautions,. But you, living free beyond me, are still to be reckoned into your account of how it happens with you[...]Is it correct for me to use you to demonstrate all this?[...]what is wanted is some secret feeling of an administrator beyond the bound of satisfying intimacy, a sort of intendant to whom the important tasks may be entrusted so as to leave you free for the very necessary task of idleness.
The lack of political and social analysis in Heidegger is no accident, but a constitutive element of his Daseinanalysis. There’s lots to learn from in Heidegger, and I always feel edified after having read him, but his whole approach has always been overly narrow to me. His peasant romanticism, his haughty disparagement of das man, his luddism are all awful aspects of his philosophy. His most interesting concept to me has always been the clearing - the Lichtung - along with his more topological considerations of Being (documented brilliantly in Jeff Malpas’ Heidegger’s Topology). But in general, he’s a thinker that’s more fun to forage around in and plunder than to take wholesale. — StreetlightX
I think this is exactly right. "Backdrop sense" is well put, because it's not really a "definition" laying dormant somewhere in our heads. — Xtrix
This is a deep issue, which is maybe two issues.
On the mirror issue, I have coded some neural nets and I really personally don't see them becoming daseinlike unless Issue B becomes important. For me they are currently rhetorical devices or mirrors for showing us that we don't know what we are talking about with 'consciousness' and so on. I do think there is some kind of beetle in the box, but we can't ever say it clearly, outside of all conventions. I can't prove that you exist on the other side of your posts, but I 'know' it. But this knowledge is somewhat ineffable, and 'I know' only signifies within conventions. So this Issue A is for me all about pointing out how loose and slippery language is, that it's not anchored to the ineffable beetle in any calculable or master-able way, despite the wishes of a metaphysical Polonius (a type) who won't admit that he really doesn't know except 'mystically' or 'ineffably.' Metaphysics won't admit that it's poetry !
Issue B is just the thought that somehow the stuff that we are made of (hydrocarbons and whatnot) became 'conscious' or daseinlike. Are zygotes conscious? Most don't think so. So somehow a fertilized egg becomes daseinlike, which by Issue A is an ineffable or 'mystical' thing. So from this angle it seems possible that some brain-analogous but non-bio structure becomes 'self-aware,' whatever that 'really' or 'ineffably' means. I don't think about this much, but maybe some kind of panpsychic stuff is happening and we just don't know it. I can't really act on this or take it seriously. But I have to admit that I don't see how it's ruled out, given the strangeness that we are daseinlike bags of water. I also love animals. My cat has a soul of some kind. Do rocks? Maybe I just can't handle the truth or have any access. — path
I like all of this. I can't know for sure exactly what you mean, but it sounds right. That backdrop sense of meaning is what I try to point out by talking about 'myth,' however awkwardly. We are always already invested, never coming from nowhere. We are after something, have some orientation, as we join the conversation. So the angtsy nihilist just wrestling with the death of god is a tender heart. He's sort of identifying with his tormentors as he cast away all beliefs and restraints (only in his imagination, thankfully.) — path
You see yourself growing up around the other, posited life, intimidated and defensive. And you lacerate yourself so as to say, These wounds are me. I cannot let you live your life this way, and at the same time I am slurped into it, falling on top of you and falling with you. At this point it is again time for forgetting, not casually so as to repeal it all delightedly later on, but with a true generous instinct for ending it all. This is the only way in which new lives - not ours - can ever begin again. But the thought haunts me - will they be defined in terms of what we never were?
If you mean the meaning of life, then I think I agree. To me there's enough 'enlightenment' in just getting back in that state of immersed play. The coin in the washing machine annoys us into a 'lower' state of troubleshooting (which is sometimes good for us in the long run.) — path
Yes indeed. I do ultimately believe in the beetles, however ineffable. So I don't know if belief is the right word. 'Since feeling is first,...' And we live a kind of inside-outside. If I do bully people in the Hegelian style, it's often against hardened complacent convention --against other bullies who invoke common sense as a kind of law. Sarl is an annoying dad, who refuses to understand his arty son, and he panders to other annoying dads, Polonius to Polonius. I'm Hamlet of course. Who else? — path
Yanked out of context like that, the passage is far from conclusive. Surely I am reading into it also. But if the beetle in the box plays no role, then that's revolutionary. Hegel made a similar point in his first book. A crude empiricism wants to point 'here' and 'now.' 'Look! Reality is right there.'
Some kind of ineffable direct access is vaguely taken for granted and yet plays no role. This is why the question of being is related to the question of meaning and the question of consciousness for me.
I have a strong sense that I'm always still finding words to say in new ways that we human beings don't know what we are talking about. Now obviously we get along practically. So I'm exaggerating as a rhetorical device in order to make something visible. This helps me relate to Heidegger trying to awaken the question of being. I am still trying to figure out how the question of meaning and the question of being relate, beyond the straightforward way (what does it mean to say something is?)
Is it the same-enough question? I think AI connects to this, not because (at all) I project some mystical capacity on AI. Rather because AI is a kind of a mirror for us. Whatever we think that AI can never be is related to whatever meaning is or being is. Just to emphasize, I don't have answers. With Heidegger, I just want to light up a question, drag our 'ignorance' or hazy preinterpretation into the light.
It's basically a thrust against complacent chatter that has no choice but to work within that chatter. — path
Thanks. Sloterdijk and I are old acquaintances (since his masterful Critique of Cynical Reason days, which that 'Heidegger quote' could be from(?)). — 180 Proof
If we're all operating with an understanding of being, then this effects everything - our politics and our culture and our future. If Heidegger is right, and our current understanding is a "technological-nihilistic" one, then we're in bad shape indeed. You can see the results all around you.
So it's not that the questioning of "being" has no relevance to the current political or social world; it does.
Worth pointing out. — Xtrix
H is a "priestly-type" of human, all too human — 180 Proof
He [Heidegger] does not think on the stage but rather in the background, at best on the side stage, or in a Catholic context, not before the high altar bur rather in the sacristy. Because of influences that are older than his thought, he came to the conviction that what is visible and prominent, what is right in the middle, lives from the inconspicuous preparation of assistants backstage and in the wings. He too is such an assistant, and that is what he wants to be: a pioneer, a second, someone who blends into a greater event - in no case, or at least only momentarily and awkwardly, is he the hero standing center stage. Heidegger is never actually a protagonist who exposes himself in exemplary battles to the heroic risk of being seen on all sides. Moments of apparent deep emotion cannot change anything in this regard. A hidden power was at work in him, which was neither exhibited nor explained, let alone admitted or apologized for. When distressed or embarrassed, he tended to fall silent, and no god gave him the words to say how he suffered.
It seems important to me, in everything having to do with Heidegger’s spiritual physiognomy, to take into consideration his father’s occupation as a sexton. If, in his biographical studies, Hugo Ott has plausibly argued that much in Heidegger’s thought is only understandable as a metastasis of southwestern German Old Catholicism circa 1900, then we should add that it was not so much a priestly Catholicism, thus a catholicism of the high altar and the nave, that formed Heidegger’s dispositions; it was rather a Catholicism of the side aisle, a Catholicism of the sexton and altar boy, a religiosity of the quiet assistant on the periphery, desperate for acceptance.