Home | Community | Message Board


This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   Mushroom-Hut Grow Bags   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   North Spore Bulk Substrate

Jump to first unread post Pages: < Back | 1 | 2  [ show all ]
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: falcon]
    #22124035 - 08/21/15 07:24 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

falcon said:
What I've read of Heidegger, he seems to straddle that fence in his writing, mostly Being an Time. I'll check out some more of his writing, might be a while till I get to it. I'd like to watch Dreyfus some more, but not before I read more of Heidegger, Dreyfus is persuasive, it would make it hard to critique Heidegger, for me.




I must be getting old AND feeble-minded. :frown: I could use a philosophy course to understand Heidegger. I took a course on Being and Time after finishing my philosophy degree and went to seminary, but promptly dropped it because I wanted to leave philosophy for theology. I seem to be trying to complete a task I abandoned, but I do not think my life will somehow be enhanced by understanding Heidegger. I'm questioning my motives other than to exercise my neurons.


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlinefalcon
 User Gallery


Registered: 04/01/02
Posts: 8,005
Last seen: 20 hours, 48 minutes
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #22124327 - 08/21/15 08:21 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Dreyfus' mention of flow got me to thinking that Heidegger may have been doing something instructive not only with the meaning of, but the way he presents the topic.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: falcon]
    #22125003 - 08/21/15 11:15 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

falcon said:
Dreyfus' mention of flow got me to thinking that Heidegger may have been doing something instructive not only with the meaning of, but the way he presents the topic.




Care to elaborate?


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: falcon]
    #22125173 - 08/22/15 12:11 AM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Good points, maybe I can attempt to contribute. I don't know how useful this will be to these points of discussion, but I thought I'd try with further exegesis of the ways of being, Hubert Dreyfus mentions at the end of the video.

I think you already suggested some direction to exegesis, Markos. I am not entirely sure but I think I grok what Falcon has been saying. The hard part is addressing the criticisms, while not dissolving their importance. Maybe I can mention something side long to these criticisms.

As Hubert Dreyfus suggests at the end of the video we can consider  Heidegger's suggestive “ways” of being. What would that mean? Are these various ways of being, suggestive of a substantial notion of being, and its derivative modes, that we should seek to unify? Heidegger, I think, would say no. He wants a different face value consideration.

I can't say this is any less of a problematic involvement, and it can't just be found in relative position. Definitely we need to be critical since it is pretty formalistic to say the least. I think I'd consider this criticism in terms of the point Markos made a few posts back: in what sense are we now apparently departing into a kind of pluralism; and view on ontology, one that Heidegger himself is criticizing at least in some way? Didn't he say we would be mistaken to look to the “being of beings” (in plural)? So I guess the question would have to be; what would we even mean by “ways” of being among others? Are we with Heidegger way-waying?

In any case we must apparently consider a relatively derivative consideration of “ways” of being, with Heidegger too, which is not simply being itself in unity, but apparently some kind of proliferation. That should definitely strike as a problem. The way to pick it up, might be to ask; aas "opposed" to this, what would being itself be? Are we not practically and in an embodied way, asking? If we are significantly asking, it is not a single variable or another which we seek in a simple sense; to Heideggers consideration, this is not something from the beginning representational (being = x). That representation is perhaps more in a gap, formally speaking, which is not to say it can't be covered. Dasein, as the meditative point of existence, has a way of being in everyday existence.

Such a position does seriously seem to suggest considering a problematic sense of “involvement”, (as per Falcon's suggestion), but that problem may present itself relatively different. That is maybe something to be distinguished, to greet this criticism.

I don't think in a single swoop of an approach this can be resolved. This is an investigation of being, through existence? How do we think about this, as actually possible? It has to be considered aside from some general notion of stepping out of Cartesian dualism of course – even if it may still be essential that that is said.

More specifically, I'd argue that Heidegger is not looking away from the Unity of being (being itself) in his manner of generalized involvement with a formal investigation, that apparently proliferates in this way. Instead, he calls the question of being a formal “ontological priority”, that presents itself, and that can be formally stood for. (See passage below for this relative "position")

Crucially, these involved considerations in the investigation of being, in the broadest sense do not mean derivativeness to any particular ontological hierarchy as given by culture. While this is not a satisfactory response to these critiques, I don't think this point is being over-emphasized just yet. Maybe looking to two ontological conceptions that have been suggested in this thread - Platonism, and Cartesianism - by closely considering how we might actually step out of them, there might seem to be more clarity in Heidegger's approach. That would clarify that what we do with Heidegger is not just in a face value claim of a relative or meditative “position” for its own sake. That would be my tack anyway, and I will attempt to make this point.

Heidegger seeks to raise a “question” of being, or even “the question”, and so it could be perhaps clarified that he seeks in that to be able to recover broad sense of the meaning of the question itself, its appropriate investigative problematic, and finally in some sense of consequentiality, he would like to reveal what is sought as being. This general form of the question, (found in the introduction) is something that it is pretty difficult to broach, not merely in the sense of Heideggers style. We are very inclined, to the contrary, to base an ontology on what we just assume.

So what stands out hugely in Heidegger is how in view to what he suggests as the formal “priority” of ontological inquiry in general, this is something at face value that is relative to, and variously at odds with already "colored" interpretations of the meaning of being in the history of western philosophy. A renewed consideration of being does not occur isomorphically just as a blending or replacement of one ontology with another. This is why Heidegger considers the idea of being of beings problematic, and is outgoingly critical of derivative bases.

Our tradition tends to pose the question of being as meaningless, or the meaning as implicit to whatever we are talking about – or both at the same time in some remarkable gap. Heidegger was aware and critical of how in assumed values we may actually “void” being as being meaningful at all, especially. As I take it, Heidegger's approach is a radical critique of Western culture. It is "fundamental", in this manner of suggestion at least. Mainly as distinctive in Heidegger, the provisions of ontology are not just culturally "relative"; Heidegger is responding to what would be taken as the relative cultural critique on its own terms. This (in many points of his career) is what he attributes as something that the 19th century philosopher Friendrich Nietzsche brought to bear.

Rather than suggesting this pending crisis of western nihilism (Do we really need to...?) we can just think about typicality, or everyday, or common sense values, somewhat critically. Today we do not necessarily fully appreciate the sense that we just already think we know the meaning of being in a positive way for instance. In our usual epistemological considerations (our considerations of what we know and are able to know as general departure) we speak of what is true about the world in just one sense. What is true, of course, or what we know things of, is what “is”, rather than what “is not”. Who would say that realizing this is profound, some key to thinking? More, to delve into this as significant may likely even seem superficial, or even to be an error. I have to wonder this as I write these words myself.

Yet being is in a way implied in what we speak of, in what is formally representational, and some critical consideration of this is appropriate too. What is typical? Well perhaps we only need to think the idea of what "is", as the priority of truth “itself”, as computational “validity” of an argument or proposition? Is it not said that we should dwell on is the “symbolic” or “analysis of language”, today, and assume everything falls into place?
 
In any case, Heidegger's suggestion is that we dwell in the representation of being, in such a way, and apparently not wholly or at all in regard to what we really mean by what it is. Heidegger does not say this manner of presentation is wrong, or without use, but he takes this cursory presentational structure - nothing other than platonism - more loosely. In coming to his own basis of interpreting " presence" (not merely as representation of forms) in an ontological priority, it doesn't mean that there is an answer. Presence is just opened up a bit in its meaning, and that opens to other considerations.

I would guess coming to it, the question of whether this is justified or not depends on how genuine Heidegger's own relative existential-phenomenological interpretation of being is, ultimately, (not just a relative position of "interpretability" in other words) and that is what we all seem to be trying to approach, both formally, and in our own ways. Something genuine, least to say in involvement with this obscure text... yeah. That I realize comes to attention.

Incidentally I appreciate the dialogue outside of typically derivative argumentativeness guys. I am realizing how important it is to bring critical attention to these considerations in a relative way, as you guys have been suggesting, although I am not sure how this works to be honest. There is so much depth to Heidegger.

I am myself picking up with Heidegger again. I never felt like I understood very well. I would not consider myself “Heideggerian” exactly, but whether I would like it or not, I have found in many ways, being so preoccupied with just trying to understand for so many years, that even when I put Being and Time down, I realize my own thoughts somehow attune with many of Heidegger's concept. I identify with these thoughts, or respectively find that Heidegger is pretty helpful at articulating them.

That (putting things down and picking them up) is really by and large the only way I have made any progress with Heidegger, and I have almost always felt a sense of sheer brickheadedness with this stuff, even as I have understood something or other. Who knows how long you should stare at a single page?

I think Hubert Dreyfus is great; by the way, and he has at least two lectures up on Being and Time, and another on Heidegger's "later" thought. He is very listenable in himself too. I wouldn't worry about missing something. Also I wouldn't miss out on Heidegger's later thinking which is less formally systematic. But yeah anyway, to have gone on so long, I feel like it is essential to grapple with these notions and relative critical consideration of e
“involvement” in this investigation, in different ways. I do not ultimately know what to think or say.

Maybe the basic thing to say is that his “ways of being”, may have a relative basis we do not immediately appreciate. What would this apparently strong, relative, if not negative attitude be exactly? It does seem to be given at face value. In Heidegger you get a critique of "metaphysics of presence". I guess anyone would have to consider for themselves if this is important or just a platitude. It should be mentioned though, as an approximate "position" of so many continental philosophers.

Here is a useful Wikipedia page on the critique of Metaphysics of Presence:

Quote:


The concept of the metaphysics of presence is an important consideration in deconstruction. Deconstructive interpretation holds that the entire history of Western philosophy with its language and traditions has emphasized the desire for immediate access to meaning, and thus built a metaphysics or ontotheology based on privileging presence over absence.

In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger argues that the concept of time prevalent in all Western thought has largely remained unchanged since the definition offered by Aristotle in the Physics. Heidegger says, "Aristotle's essay on time is the first detailed Interpretation of this phenomenon [time] which has come down to us. Every subsequent account of time, including Henri Bergson's, has been essentially determined by it."[1] Aristotle defined time as "the number of movement in respect of before and after".[2] 

By defining time in this way Aristotle privileges what is present-at-hand, namely the "presence" of time. Heidegger argues in response that "entities are grasped in their Being as 'presence'; this means that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time – the 'Present'".[3] Central to Heidegger's own philosophical project is the attempt to gain a more authentic understanding of time.  Heidegger considers time to be the unity of three ecstases, the past, the present and the future.

Deconstructive thinkers, like Jacques Derrida, describe their task as the questioning or deconstruction of this metaphysical tendency in Western philosophy. Derrida writes, "Without a doubt, Aristotle thinks of time on the basis of ousia as parousia, on the basis of the now, the point, etc. And yet an entire reading could be organized that would repeat in Aristotle's text both this limitation and its opposite."[4] 

This argument is largely based on the earlier work of Heidegger, who in Being and Time claimed that the theoretical attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more originary involvement with the world in concepts such as the ready-to-hand and being-with. Friedrich Nietzsche is a more distant, but clear, influence as well.

The presence to which Heidegger refers is both a presence as in a "now" and also a presence as in an eternal present, as one might associate with God or the "eternal" laws of science. This hypostatized (underlying) belief in presence is undermined by novel phenomenological ideas, such that presence itself does not subsist, but comes about primordially through the action of our futural projection, our realization of finitude and the reception or rejection of the traditions of our time.





Here would be a straight reading of Heidegger: He is not seeking right at the outset to make a fundamental heirarchy of the "being of beings", and he even says this is a huge problem to confront, along with being a mistake of an approach, when it is so often derivative. His approach insists on our considerations growing out of existence, or Dasein.

So from that point, even though he is talking about "ways of being" in proliferation, we can at least recognize the possibility it may be something different. The way things present themselves in the world could in some way be distinguished from, and also found suggestible in Plato's unity of "form", which relatively speaking is more provisionally unified in theory.

On such a tack, Heidegger confronts this notion of presence in a unique way, by turning to existence. This confrontation is different, than say, the typical empirical critique from "experience".

He doesn't look away from the possible unity of being in his own approach. He suspends judgment. Plato's unified conception of being, when considered in itself, seems to come down to the analogical unity of different “forms” of being, all those forms being multifarious and yet the forms. Maybe Heidegger is critical while he wants to truly unify this? So I'd argue he has not dropped the ball, even if he thinks this presence can't be considered chiefly, or as an approach to understanding being.

Also, according to Heidegger, the “appropriate” investigation of being itself is existential, something which departs somehow from Dasein. From that point of departure, I think Heidegger is in a way,  deferring on a question of the “position” of mind, in respect to matter, what is colloquially referred to as internal and external, based on Cartesian ontology. In all those considerations, the “place” is the arguable being of mental substance, that is not placed. (It is no less an incomplete investigation of ontology, which is just something we would assume and attempt to reconcile in various ways.)

Heidegger does not pick up his investigation in this, in any case, although he is doing something phenomenological. That is definitely a specific issue which needs to be covered. Clearly; this is not the suggestion that Heidegger resolves his own ontological problematic (“involvement”, everydayness of Dasein), but that issue is something that at least arguably could be extracted as relatively unique in its own way, from Cartesianism. Being becomes a different sort of problem, than of a mental substance, in relation to an extended material substance, internal and external, theoretical and involved.

But if I would be able to say anything positive at all in this sense, I'd say Heidegger in a formal sense, is not strictly talking about the "being of beings" when he is talking about the proliferated ways of being. When we consider two other “ways of being” Hubert mentioned, aside from Dasein, these ways of being are found in respect to Dasein's every day existence. These ways he mentioned are of being “present to hand” and being “ready to hand”.

Heidegger bears some critique of the way things "present" themselves in the world, which as I take it, Heidegger takes a shot at, in opening the looser phenomeonological considerations he is suggesting. I think Heidegger's position seems in some manner to proliferate out in a way, that can perhaps be both involved and theoretical, in general. The most basic meaning of both these considerations, of "handiness" should have to do with the proximate, and apparently active tactile involvement with the physical world of an embodied being. I think this handiness of Dasein can be grounded.

But for now, much has been predicated on something different or other than the Cartesian problematic, and I'll conclude there: Cartesian ontology presents these layers of internal and external, and tries to reconcile the alienation and did involvement with the world, which thinking this way creates, and yet is implicitly involved in its alienating  assumptions, in that. For instance there was a discussion recently typifying this: "What I can know beyond my head", and then what can I know beyond the walls of the room I sit in? These layers, or these walls, are what we usually take as our phenomenological primer, the internal and external, and yet why? We think theoretical departures are over in this one place, and practical (or namely empirical, experiential) involvements are something else, and we interpret theoretical and practical in this sense, in a way which maybe is actually itself, questionable.

Hubert, via Heidegger, says that this Cartesian problem is not necessarily what we should be looking to, when we consider what is “present at hand”, or “ready to hand”. "Theory" and "practice" are approximate notions in our own parsing of an assumed problematic, but not the same, clearly.

To me the question is how is the consideration of present at hand and ready to hand different than theory and practice.

To my mind Heidegger's philosophy typically seems to be both philosophy and meditation, a kind of a chop wood, carry wood thing. Heidegger might be way-waying through it all...


Edited by Kurt (08/22/15 11:23 AM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22125214 - 08/22/15 12:32 AM (8 years, 5 months ago)

I'll get relavent Heidegger texts up later. Here is just something I think is interesting as a possible "existential" parallel.

Quote:

In Indian thought, Dharma is the truth about the
world: the underlying nature of things, the way things are in reality. One
might say, therefore, that at the heart of Buddhism lies a metaphysical Truth. Yet in the Sutta-pitaka—the collection of the Buddha’s discourses in the Triple Basket collection of Pali texts regarded as canonical by the Theravada school of Buddhism—the Dhamma is presented in a way that notably
refrains from metaphysical underpinnings.

The Dhamma is understood to be a path of practice in conduct, meditation, and understanding leading to the cessation of the fundamental suffering (dukkha) that underlies the human condition as lived in the round of rebirth (samsara). The texts repeatedly state that the Buddha taught only what is conducive to achieving that goal of cessation, or nirvana (Pali nibbana), and there are strong suggestions, as captured by the renowned undetermined questions, that purely theoretical speculations, especially those to do with certain metaphysical concerns about the ultimate nature of the world and one’s destiny, are both pointless and potentially misleading in the quest for nirvana.

Nevertheless, while it is true that the Buddha suspends all views regarding
certain metaphysical questions, he is not an antimetaphysician: nothing
in the texts suggests that metaphysical questions are completely meaningless, or that the Buddha denies the soundness of metaphysics per se. Instead, Buddhism teaches that to understand suffering, its rise, its cessation, and the path leading to its cessation is to see reality as it truly is.

Reality, as seen through the lens of Buddhist epistemology, is not a container of persons and substances, but rather an assemblage of interlocking physical and mental processes that spring up and pass away subject to multifarious causes and conditions and that are always mediated by the cognitive apparatus embodied in the operation of the five aggregates (khandhas).

Indeed, the main doctrinal teachings found in the suttas, including the postulate of impermanence (anicca), the principle of dependent origination (paticcasamuppada), and the teaching of not-self (anatta), are all metaphysical views concerning how processes work rather than what things are. Thus while the Dhamma is silent on ontological matters, it is grounded in what may be identified as process metaphysics: A framework of thought that hinges on the ideas that sentient experience is dependently originated and that whatever is dependently originated is conditioned (sankhata), impermanent, subject to change, and lacking independent selfhood.

Construing sentient experience as a dynamic flow of physical and mental occurrences and rejecting the notion of a metaphysical self as an enduring substratum underlying experience, the Buddha’s process metaphysics contrasts with substance metaphysics...

Process metaphysics has deliberately chosen to reverse the primacy of
substance: it insists on seeing processes as basic in the order of being, or
at least in the order of understanding. Underlying process metaphysics
is the supposition that encountered phenomena are best represented and
understood in terms of occurrences—processes and events—rather than in
terms of “things,” and with reference to modes of change rather than to fixed stabilities.

The guiding idea is that processes are basic and things derivative, for it takes some mental process to construct “things” from the indistinct mass of sense experience and because change is the pervasive and predominant feature of the real. The result is that how eventualities transpire is seen as no less significant than what sorts of things there are.

-Noa Ronkin
Theravada Metaphysics and Ontology; Essential Buddhist Readings






Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22126655 - 08/22/15 12:23 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

It is refreshing to say the least to be able to discuss academic philosophy at this forum, so do not take this as a criticism. However, I have become increasingly pragmatic in my burgeoning old age. The reason I even took an interest in philosophy as a youth was the consequence of having the Psychedelic Experience, several times on some very potent 1970-era LSD. Very quickly I used my intuitive function (as an INTP by the MBTI) to filter the more 'worldly' philosophies - those which I deemed particularly materialistic, empirical, or political. I found myself early on moving away from those action-oriented philosophies, including Nietzsche's emphasis on action because I had had experiences which were best described as mystical, and by that I mean the paradoxical dynamic stasis of Being. In those early experiences, Presence, The Present, the Clear Light, or even the word God best expressed unitary Being. After 5 semesters as a philosophy major who preferred the writings of Plato and Plotinus in the West, and conversely the practices of Hindu and Buddhist Yoga (not so much the writings) in the East, made the most sense of Psychedelic Experience to me.

It became evident that the "Thinking function" that the MBTI isolates as one of four doorways to ego-consciousness was not the optimal approach to any comprehension of Being. Experiences of the Unity of Being, elicited by Yogic and/or Psychedelics, yielded more results to the Transcendental organizing center of my psyche (Self) than the predominance of intellection via the Thinking function. The Bhakti or emotional/devotional method of Yoga epitomized by the Bhagavad Gita and demonstrated by the then ubiquitous Hare Krishna movement was not the type of Yoga that appealed to me. rather, it was what the Gita called the "impersonalist," who was only "indirectly Krishna-conscious" which appealed to me. Such an one was depicted in my copy of the Gita as a dhoti-clad yogi, meditating in the jungle, with a glowing countenance of Krishna as "the plenary expansion of Vishnu in the lotus of the heart" emblazoned on his chest. This was the Jnani (Gyan) yoga, the Yoga of Intellect, but an intellect which sought the descent of the mind into the heart. In other words, the immersion of the rational in the transrational. So, when I decided to find a bridge from the East to the West, mentally and spiritually), and I entered a Methodist Christian seminary, I very pointedly avoided the chapel with its liturgical, devotional rituals and fashioned for myself a makeshift hermitage cell back in my childhood bedroom. There, I located Christian practices that resembled the Jnani yogis practices, culled from Eastern Orthodox Christian Hesychasm. Mantra Yoga also had its corollary in the Prayer of the Heart, and like the Catholic icon of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the Crown of Thorns encircling the radiant Heart, the symbolism was the same - the descent of the mind into the heart. The intellect is like the prismatic division of simple white light into constituent parts. The contemplative path was the reversal of the process of differentiation, howsoever eloquent, into unification. Now, a temporal leap forward 37 years to the present ->

I do not think Martin Heidegger, or his mentor Edmund Husserl were familiar with tconditions of mind that are evoked by the Psychedelic Experience. The nature-mysticisms of the lower-dose animistic or polytheistic stages, all the way through non-theistic, pantheistic, panentheistic or straight-up theistic encounters with Being are not even an issue with these philosophers. Indeed, it seems from only my cursory reading of Heidegger that Being retains a most atheistic position, not in the way of the non-theistic Buddhist idiom of Emptiness, but in my understanding it is more a  cognition about Being, not an immersion IN Being which I can only call mystical, and from which one identity as 'a' being is radically changed with regard to living beings, human, animal, reptilian, insectoid and even vegetative. In other words, I find myself reading the workings of abstract thinking, not a phenomenological explication of what it means to experience oneself AS Being qua Being. His approach is further removed by an insistence on understanding Being, through the investigation of inanimate objects considered to be substances or beings in some sense. Being and Time apparently neglects even animal life completely, (although he later wrote a book on animals according to Dreyfus). It strikes me, after having listened to Dreyfus, that the assumption of an identity "nowhere," is phenomenologically similar or identical with what others have called "The Witness" (Ram Dass popularized this term in BE HERE NOW). I have considered that this Witness may also be what Husserl's 'Transcendental Ego' was purported to be, which Heidegger apparently thinks is an impossible condition to attain to (unless I misread Dreyfus).

Meanwhile, Plato, and quite possibly Socrates too, were partakers of the Mystery Rites of Eleusis. There is even far-out speculation that Socrates may have been executed for corruption of youth by having obtained and administered the psychedelic kykeon of Eleusis outside of the prescribed rituals. Speculation at best, I realize. But the notion of ἀρχέτυπος (archetupos),"first-molded," occurred to me while on acid, while milling around my own personal Eleusis, at Grateful Dead shows in the 70s. I first hit upon the notion of archetypes when looking at the physical typologies of the concert-goers. This insight expanded to other 'forms,' like the spiral patterns in my psychedelic visions, its presence in things large and small, galaxies and seashells. God, it seemed had a set of cookie-cutters for reality - the Forms or Ideas. I am not stating that I experienced the identical revelations of Plato, and it is difficult to say now how much I was aware of Platonic thought back then, whether it influenced my experiences as the Constructionist school of mysticism maintains or whether I arrived at those conclusions independently, but the insights were extremely formative. Now, in an attempt to step outside of the very structure of my psychedelically-informed weltanshauung, which is apparently very Platonic, and possibly for the same reasons that it was for Plato, I am meeting with great resistance. This is even more true because I have probably spent more time realizing Being along Yogic idioms, both Advaitic as well as Abidharmic than I have along Western lines since having left my philosophy and theology classes in 1976 and 1978, respectively.

It further begs the question as to why I am endeavoring to understand a difficult position intellectually that I intuit as being erroneous. Would the assumption of Heidegger's position on Being be corroborated by Buddhist philosophy, or is the 'storehouse consciousness' of Buddhism (the alayavijnana) more consonant with the Platonic Forms? I understand disavowing Cartesian dualisms, mind-body at the foremost of those dualities, but the Forms, the Plotinian Nous, and the Christian Logos might all be stating the same aspect of Ultimate Reality, and what good would it be (if any good at all) to jettison these ideas? I am not speaking to any ideosyncratic syncretism of Platonic-NeoPlatonic-Christian ideas here, I am, as always, attempting to see the transcendental unity of apparently different formulations of Being. I cannot help but see Heidegger's being as Spinozan substances or Leibnizian monads in an atheistic and abstract idiom. For this lack of sophistication I apologize. I feel like my appreciation of Heidegger parallels a paleolithic cave dwellers animistic understanding of God.


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #22127854 - 08/22/15 04:45 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Markos, first of all thanks for sharing insights into experience of being, and emphasizing the importance of such a departure. I think it is a good point, but I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

This is something that is indeed very difficult to find in Heidegger. I think that is largely explicable due to the polarized intellectual environment he is part of in context. Maybe some due consideration and openmindedness to this, is all that could be suggested, for the sake of Being and Time. To my mind the cerebral basis of Heidegger's work has not ultimately been an obstruction though, and so maybe I can try to make a case, of how I think Heidegger might be appreciated, relatively speaking, and you can of course judge for yourself.

To the point of context of the intellectual climate, I would say that to a western philosopher, the broaching that we refer to as "experience", is typically given to paradigmatic expressions. One is that experience is pretty much definitively found in the senses, in a certain representable or reproducible way. One response to this, within that tradition, is to phenomenological bracketing. But still, this broaching of "experience", is systematically posed in itself, in a manner of opposition to "theory". I would say this paradigm is not just "the" opposition (physics/metaphysics, mind/body, matter/form) but something, which we may get a hint, that is expressed in many ways.

Largely in our Western tradition, in empirical research, what is found "in trial" or "experience", posterior to senses, has since Descartes been basically setup to rupture of the plenum of rational thought, "the walls" of our mind, or following that conventional manner of extension of our senses to a certain point of conventional finitude. The problematic of induction in other words, is based in this.

As I take it, in his existential position, Heidegger is attempting to reconsider our whole concept and dichotomy of "practical" involvement in the world and "theoretical" insight, in their oppositions, and of course, this consideration doesn't fall into pre-given categories, as they are just mentioned in passing if he is reconsidering them. Heidegger is talking about what is "present to hand", and what is "ready to hand" in a way which should be clarified.

I think there is a lot to be said for how closely they are considered, in novel meditative ways - and that is the chief bridge I would like to cross. What we keep returning to, is that experience to Heidegger, is going to be expressed as existential. That is what he is constantly broaching,  because that is his slant. But hell, what do we even mean by existence?

It's not a limitation, but it is probably important to recognize that this is not the only way to talk about experience in general too, so I take the point. You are talking about a certain kind of experience, (psychedelic/spiritual/theological) and as mentioned, there is also a scientific or empirical concept of experience. And now Heidegger seems to be talking about existentiality, in his own paradigmatic way as yet another experiential reality of being. His preferred expression of an experience basis, is also in its way, idiomatic. The existential could maybe be clarified as Heidegger's main pivot in such a sense.

To my own familiarity, in commenting on Heidegger, it was only Sartre that in face value determined Heidegger was both an "existentialist", and an "athiest" and finally a kind of "subjectivist" all in one fell swoop, a controversy which is worth quoting:

Quote:

Most of those who are making use of this word would be highly confused if required to explain its meaning. For since it has become fashionable, people cheerfully declare that this musician or that painter is “existentialist.” A columnist in Clartes signs himself “The Existentialist,” and, indeed, the word is now so loosely applied to so many things that it no longer means anything at all. It would appear that, for the lack of any novel doctrine such as that of surrealism, all those who are eager to join in the latest scandal or movement now seize upon this philosophy in which, however, they can find nothing to their purpose. For in truth this is of all teachings the least scandalous and the most austere: it is intended strictly for technicians and philosophers. All the same, it can easily be defined.

The question is only complicated because there are two kinds of existentialists. There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?




Heidegger didn't take to the characterization of being "existential" in general. Maybe it's somehow demonstrative that for many "existentialists" (what we typically think of that) precedence of existence never gets to being itself, and like Sartre himself says, becomes just another case of subjectivism, that place in the walls of the mind, just expressed in a new way?

For Heidegger, existence, Dasein is not the leveling of being. He wants to know about being itself. What I'd note is that incredible recursiveness, and formal apparatus of Heidegger's approach, particularly in Being and Time, is indeed thoughtful, but not in any typified way. All I can say, in that in typification is it is very "interesting" to me.

Of course I'd try to clarify that that doesn't mean I describe my favorite things about the world and experience itself as beardstrokingly and belly gazingly "interesting". Actually, I have seen that Heidegger has been broadly appreciated, by more than the "usual philosophers", but artists, and theologians, California farmers, and weirdly enough, software engineers and information scientists (information ontology)

As an INFP myself, maybe I can elaborate some of my own appreciation of this too, but what I'd say may seem a little goofy, and that is I think these "F" qualities are just something  you can dive into, and I think in some ways, the very cerebral approach of Heidegger can be well appreciated as a non-typical place. It is very thoughtful, and you can swim in the head for sure, and I could even admit I am one of those pisces types; I know the fish knows least the water he is in, knows most in a way. I am not sure what that says, but I thought I'd add in that I come from the "feeling" side...When you consider for instance, how Heidegger was pretty inspired by the pathos of Nietzsche it makes a little more sense maybe.

When Heidegger talks about a general structure of the question of being, in respect to what presents the "being of beings" (forms), he is definitely talking specifically about a turn to recursive thinking. No doubt about it. But to a large extent I think what is usually appreciable in Heidegger, is how he is often taking the structures he refers to apart, while presenting in a similar way, in reflection, a priority to understand the fundamental unity of being, or "more originary" experiences. That seems to be mainly how Being and Time rings out anyway, even in its very systematic/formal way. I don't exactly know what his practical slant is, in face value appeal to a "fundamental ontology" in Being and Time, and he doesn't claim it outright other than a sense of wonder.

To the present point - it is very reflective in this way. Since you point out the question of pragmatism, or a more notional term of experience, I think Heidegger, is very much involved with this in a general way that can be broached, under all these formal issues. A notion of experience, as such: What we have managed to speak to a little bit, is how he or how Dasein is involved with the world, and particularly with regards to how these other ways of being come to light.

Being "present to hand" and "ready to hand", could be understood in that sense, something like theory and practice, but I think what we have gone back and forth on from the beginning, is that Heidegger is not taken in the typical sense, ie. it would be important to try to understand how these reflections are specifically not derivative of substance metaphysics in general, or Cartesianism. Maybe we have yet to hit the nail on the head on that. I don't think Heidegger is a substance metaphysician. I would like to make a specific argument for this, but at the same time, it is important that Heidegger's critique is not in making such response exactly, but in just doing what he is doing in a general way.

Heidegger was at least not intentionally doing the typical substance metaphysics, and his way of reconciling this in his own terms was that substantia, that which appears to "stand firm", and also appears in peoples minds to always have to be so fundamentally important, is actually just an example of a broader, and looser consideration of what is just "present". Heidegger's apparent "ambivilance" - his letting of presence, to be, rather than protracting these analyses, is opening to broader phenomenological inquiry, which is fundamental to his critique. That is the basic turn of Heidegger, I think.

At least, I think you can get a sense that this was a big part of Heidegger's overall intent. At mention of this phenomenological departure, I could really digress into the way Heidegger's Dasein relates with the physical world...but neither I or you think that is exactly the point. I think pivoting here in a more broad sense, will allow me be better able to relate anyway

Namely, I don't know to what extent Heidegger falls into a kind of ambivilance in a prescribed relation to a physical world, and I would acknowledge that I think that is potentially a pretty important criticism to make, so I think it's a good point. I would just say we can maybe be open minded, and critical in that sense at the same time.

At face value, Heidegger wants to protract a very broad phenomenology, a phenomenology of "being itself", and it seems like there is so much effort just to grok this. I think this is largely because what has been at issue, is the point in which phenomenology seems to finally depart from the paradigmatic expression of conscious states. What are "states" of being in the world, for instance? Maybe what we are talking about is not "modes" or "states", or static points, to grapple on, but something we have to think of differently. Maybe they are acts, and doings? In any case, Heidegger is not likely to believe in an overlying conception of being as substantia (the typical "being of beings") that which "stands firm" grounding things. He is also not just departing into a completely mutable, ungrounded flow, or cessation of the interruption of conscious states either. That is getting close, I think.

In a broadly appreciable way, I think when he talks about Dasein, Presence at Hand, And Readiness to Hand, he is contemplating something like a "chop wood, carry wood". I think there are parallels to pragmatism for sure, and of contemplation specifically, and maybe somehow, to say both.

I am guessing we have neglected this so far, because we have looked to Heidegger's most systematic magnum opus, that is claiming the "place" of this kind of thinking, this meditation (against, or deconstructing Cartesianism), even if it is not a "position" that he is getting at, for the most part. A position, is like a description of a mental apparatus, paradigmatically (whether in abstract or contemporary argument - where is the bridge, is it behind the pineal gland as Descartes said? etc) There are definitely more contemplative writings to mention, and maybe the best way to consider this would of course be to look to them. I have definitely been trying to be "systematic", and have been partial to give mind to the controversies of this departure.

Anyway, I think on this prospect, your experiential insights into different forms of contemplation will be greatly appreciated here, since experience in some sense, seems important. I'd say you might be surprised and judge that he can at least be quite meditative, when you get down to it.

Thus far I'd say - particularly in respect to Being and Time - what strikes as Heidegger's sort of ambivalence and allowance and critique of the "metaphysics of presence", (as a bracketed phenomena of being in the world), is pretty cerebrally based. I would in my own experience, draw broad and tentative parallels to yoga. That is probably because that is mainly what I am familiar with, to make such a bridge, but I have found that yoga at least relates in some ways to this broad phenomenology of being, that Heidegger is describing.

Surely this priority to a kind of experience could be looked to though. I would myself like to consider some of Heidegger's less systematic writings, which are definitely more easily relatable in this way. There is one I am looking at now, that seems more in this line.

At the same time, while I don't think it is possible to get closure, I think it is still important to recognize Heidegger's intellectual climate, in the West at the turn of the century when he wrote Being and Time, and clearly, all was in an uproar. The "stand" Heidegger takes, his position, is important, and I hope not to overemphasize it or underemphasize it either. That stand is intellectual, and he often has at least one foot down, to pivot in that...but maybe that's not all there is to Heidegger, too.


Edited by Kurt (08/22/15 06:42 PM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22127867 - 08/22/15 04:49 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

I'll get to one of these better examples of contemplative effort in Heidegger, but I want to point to "the stand" Heidegger takes for "ontological priority", and his critique of approaches that are based on "being of beings" This mainly gestures to the departure of his own question of being, from conventional, pre-given bases and structures of inquiry.

Quote:

The characterization of the question of being, under the guideline of the formal structure of the question as such, has made it clear that this question is a unique one, such that its elaboration and even its solution require a series of fundamental reflections. However, what is distinctive about the question of being will fully come to light only when that question is sufficiently delineated with regard to its function, intention, and motives.

Up to now the necessity of retrieve of the question was motivated partly by its venerable origin but above all by the lack of a definite answer, even by the lack of any adequate formulation. But one can demand to know what purpose this question should serve. Does it remain solely, or is it at all, only a matter of free-floating speculation about the most general generalities – or is it the most basic and at the same time most concrete question?

Being is always the being of a being. The totality of beings can, with respect to its various domains, become the field where particular areas of knowledge are exposed and delimited. These areas – for example, history, nature, space, life, human being, language, and so on – can in their turn become thematized as objects of scientific investigations. Scientific research demarcates and first establishes these areas of knowledge in a rough and ready fashion. The elaboration of the area in its fundamental structures is in a way already accomplished by prescientific experience and interpretation of the domain of being to which the area of knowledge is itself confined. The resulting “fundamental concepts” comprise the guidelines for the first concrete disclosure of the area. Whether or not the importance of the research always lies in such establishments of concepts, its true progress comes about not so much in collecting results and storing them in “handbooks” as in being forced to ask questions about the basic constitution of each area, these questions being chiefly a reaction to increasing knowledge in each area.

The real “movement” of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself. A science's level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In these immanent crises of the scinces the relation of positive questioning to the matter in question becomes unstable. Today tendencies to place research on new foundations have cropped up on on all sides in the various disciplines.

The discipline which is seemingly the strictest and most securely structured, mathematics, has experienced a "crisis in its foundations." The controversy between formalism and intuitionalism centers on obtaining and securing primary access to what should be the proper object of this science. Relativity theory in physics grew out of the tendency to expose nature's own coherence as it is "in itself." As a theory of the conditions of access to nature itself it attempts to preserve the immutability of the laws of motion by defining all relativities; it is thus confronted by the question of the structure of its pre-given area of knowledge, that is, by the problem of of matter. In biology the tendency has awakened to get behind the definitions mechanism and vitalism have given to "organism" and "life" and to define anew the kind of being of living beings as such. In the historical and humanistic disciplines the drive toward historical actuality itself has been strengthened by the transmission and portrayal of tradition: the history of literature is to become the history of critical problems. Theology is searching for a more original interpretation of human being's being toward God, prescribed by the meaning of faith itself and remaining within it. Theology is slowly beginning to understand again Luther's insight that its system of dogma rests on a "foundation" that does not stem from a questioning in which faith is primary and whose conceptual apparatus is not only insufficient for the range of problems in theology but rather covers them up and distorts them.

Fundamental concepts are determinations in which the area of knowledge underlying all the thematic objects of a science attain an understanding that precedes and guides all positive investigation. Accordingly these concepts first receive their genuine evidence and “grounding” only in a correspondingly preliminary research into the area of knowledge itself. But since each of these areas arises from the domain of beings themselves, this preliminary research that creates the fundamental concepts amounts to nothing else than interpreting these beings in terms of the basic constitution of their being. This kind of investigation must precede the positive sciences – and it can do so. The work of Plato and Aristotle is proof of this. Laying the foundations of science in this way is different in principle from “logic” limping along behind, investigating here and there the status of a science in terms of its “method”. Such laying of foundations is productive logic in the sense that it leaps ahead, so to speak, into the particular realm of being, discloses it for the first time in its constitutive being, and makes the acquired structures available to the positive sciences as lucid directives for inquiry...





Edited by Kurt (08/22/15 05:16 PM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlinefalcon
 User Gallery


Registered: 04/01/02
Posts: 8,005
Last seen: 20 hours, 48 minutes
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #22128829 - 08/22/15 09:54 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

That is a given,IMO. But I don't look for or at it always. Dreyfus statement drew my attention to it.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22129936 - 08/23/15 08:32 AM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Thanks for your in-depth reply. I plan on listening to all of Professor Dreyfus' lectures on Being and Time, (even though the YouTube series doesn't go into Division 2) before I pick up the book again. I have read the intros, even though the professor recommends reading them afterwards. This philosopher is important (despite his Nazi affiliations) and the book in question is obviously a landmark in modern philosophy. Aside from being a challenge to my reading comprehension which these days is tempered by some impatience, I will endeavor to read the book. It is good to be in dialogue with you and others  over truly academic philosophy. Actual philosophers in the Western tradition have rarely been discussed in my 16 years on this forum. I suppose I could've searched elsewhere for such discussions, but I am reminded of one of those Mula Nasrudin Sufi stories:

"One day Nasrudin was outside his house. He was on his hands and knees frantically searching for something under a lamppost when his friend passed by and asked him what he was looking for. My key he said to his friend, I lost the key to my house. His friend being a nice person also got down on his hands and knees and tried to help him look. Some time passed. Eventually it was so dark they could barely see each other, when his friend asked him where he had lost his key. I lost it inside the house Nasrudin replied. If you lost your key inside the house, his friend asked him very confused, then why are we looking for it outside? Because Nasrudin said with a gleam in his eyes this is where the light is.”  :wink:


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #22183236 - 09/03/15 02:00 PM (8 years, 4 months ago)

Anyone still interested in Heidegger?

I have been listening to this lecturer a bit, on "Truth of Being in Heidegger". To clarify, the notion of truth " of being" is that it belongs to being, and is situated around Dasein at least at face value.

Of course the lecturer follows the common exposition of this, of Heidegger's departure from transcendental subjectivity. He goes into a little more depth of how Heidegger finds the manifesting of being qua being, is different than the consciousness's way of presenting of things.

Namely, he suggests how conceiving this turn is not emphasizing a contradiction or just displacement of Husserl's phenomenological approach, but is indeed both in influence and departure, a different way of understanding. So he speaks directly to the face value issue of Dasein replacing transcendental subject, in a little more depth.

Fair warning, this guy is adopting Heidegger's language, and is getting into it, and is not so off the cuff as Hubert Dreyfus. But he makes some good points to suggest Heidegger's emphasis on truly delving into an investigation towards being itself, is not just something which warrants the "turn" toward Dasein or the coping existential way of being in the world. That turn is just what makes such an investigation possible (so it is neither a principle of contradiction, or displacement).

Anyway, per anyone's interest, here is another lecturer remarking on some of Heidegger's departures, in a little more depth. 



Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22187688 - 09/04/15 11:53 AM (8 years, 4 months ago)

Yes, still interested, but conditionally, considering Heidegger's atheistic stance and Nazi affiliations. I see myself as something of a Panentheist, but the root 'theist' is still a part of the concept, howsoever modified. I rather like Husserl because he seems to speak to the same mental conditions that much of Yoga philosophy recognizes (i.e., "the Witness"). I just finished Roaring Silence by Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen (they're British) after experimenting with the free Aro® meditation course they taught over the last year, Tibetan Zen: Discovering a Lost Tradition by Sam van Schaik, and Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. I promised myself that when I retired I'd work through Plato: Complete Works trans. John Cooper, but I've lapsed after having reconnected with a former philosophy professor whom I haven't had since 1975 and last saw in 1979. He's turned me onto writings by R.W. Emerson which I've obtained, (it's been great fun being his student again after decades), and The Sybil by Par Lagerkvist (I rarely read fiction). I also bought the little The Bacchae by Euripides while I was trying again to appreciate poetics instead of heavy prose. I think I'll listen to the Dreyfus lectures, but at my stage of life, if I do not perceive a time-consuming enterprise to be life-enhancing, I will skim it at best. There's no skimming Being and Time however. :lol: I have yet to complete The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, but since I've quite a bit of Ken Wilber over the years, it's fun to see how much he has relied on Gebser's Great Chain of Being material. "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." - Ecclesiastes 1:9


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22192491 - 09/05/15 12:36 PM (8 years, 4 months ago)

It just occurred to me that Heidegger's emphasis on time as a substratum to Reality may well been a corollary to his cosmological stance. Of course this is one of those intuitions that appeared without forethought, but it seems that he must have assumed a Steady-State Theory of the universe, which is to say, a universe which is of indeterminate duration and which did not have a point of creation. If The Big Bang Theory hypothesized to have been some 13.3 billion years ago was not in Heidegger's mind, it would have reified his atheistic stance of no Creator. Without a point at which the universe was not, a Steady-State assumption would merely replace time for eternity, and inasmuch as time (space-time actually) denotes duration, and duration is fully half the nature of existence, the other half being extension (in space), existence becomes synonymous with Being, and under this system, there is no consideration of a "Ground of Being" which ontologically precedes existence.

I am reminded of something from my seminary years, where a quaint story arose ostensibly about a joking response that Augustine of Hippo to those who inquired about the Being of God prior to creation. I lifted this from a Christian site which sums it up for me:

"Saint Augustine had two answers to those who asked what was God doing before creation. Jokingly he said, God was preparing Hell for people who ask such questions. On a serious level, he noted there was no time before God created and hence the question is meaningless. When God created the heavens and the earth He also created space and time. Before time began there was only eternity. God is a timeless being and time only began with His creation of the universe." - https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_643.cfm

I have entertained pantheist ideas such as the spiritual and material energies that are one as promulgated in the Bhagavad Gita, but I realize the difficulty I have with Heidegger is that trying to get into a philosophical system that is atheistic is like trying to scuba dive without a weight-belt. Try as one might, you are not going to be able to get down to deeper levels. You are going to keep floating back up. I can demythologize, depersonalize, de-anthropomorphize Deity, but even the impersonal Nirguna Brahman which became the Buddhist Sunyata is still a kind of Ground of Being. But at this point of my life, I cannot take seriously or even [bracket] out the Presence of God in my life. It is not merely a belief, it is an abiding Presence that reaches from the marrow of my bones to the most sublime intuitions.

I can suspend scientific or historical knowledge when I watch things on TV or film that do not belong in that era (like using Primacord to blow up a bridge during the Civil War in the film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That stuff wasn't developed until 1936 and burns at 21,000 feet per second. Or, I remember in the sci-fi film Outland, when a spacesuit gets ripped on some distant planet, instead of mere evacuation of the air, the man inside exploded). I see inconguities and falsehoods all the time and most people do not know, care, or look them up. These details annoy me no end, but OK, it's just a story. However, when it comes to a basic metaphysical stance that is predicated upon false assumptions (IMO), I cannot take it seriously, nor do I find a need to understand the assertions. Moreover, the literary piece loses any real gravitas because it does not elaborate truth, but conversely, weaves an exquisitely complex and difficult to understand falsehood, which appears to be founded upon an erroneous yet unarticulated cosmology.

My wife began a new TV series last night, The Last Ship, which like the zombie shows is just another iteration of a dystopian future. As a kid I found these themes interesting. My era still enjoyed horror films from the 1930s to the 1950s, before the genre of slasher films that began in the early 1970s. But now I find that even fictional shows taken in excess begins to exert an effect on one's psyche. There are survivalists who anticipate zombie attacks in the near future, being so affected by the cultural geist. I wonder if repetition does in fact create chreodes or pathways in Reality like Rupert Sheldrake hypothesizes, which actually create Reality through continual human psychic participation. Humans have often been considered to be Aristotelian Efficient Causes which manifest the Absolute Cause of Deity (or whatever one chooses to call the creative faculty of Ultimate Reality).


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #22193576 - 09/05/15 04:58 PM (8 years, 4 months ago)

First, as per your suggestion, Heidegger's Nazism should be addressed. It is a difficult subject but at some point we should try.

Second, just for sake of clarity, I wonder, where or in what statements, or methods, do you see atheistic assumptions in Heidegger in particular?

I would say it is interesting to me how the priority of his "question of being", does not fall into either "theist" or "atheist"  positions. Arguably it is not likely even the usual third option, of an "agnostic" position, because clearly Heidegger is not at all deflationary, and plainly involved with ontological provisions.

For instance, Heidegger's questioning, or puzzlement or "aporia" with being, on closer examination, is clearly not agnostic in any sense of being "non-seeking", because as he says, questioning "is a seeking", and indeed what he is doing is ontology. However, unlike most ontological "arguments" he admits we do not even know (although he may well have certain insights) of what "horizon" being appears on. He hints at "time", and this is ultimately suggestive at so many different points.

We have focused in this thread a lot on his novel departure from Dasein, this involvement, for the being for whom being is an issue to it, upon this "own" horizon. This "hermeneutic" circle, on the provisional basis of Dasein's "everyday existence", could be described as secular. But establishing this point of existence for meditation, is not an answer to the essential inquiry Heidegger raises either.

For example these provisions are what Sartre appropriated as the suggestion "existence precedes essence" in his writing. I think you could well say that this "existentialist" camp, as well as the "atheistic" camp, as well as finally the essentially "subjectivist" determination of essential relations to the world in this statement (I quoted it previously), are all face value attributions, and not Heidegger's own. Heidegger responded, in his somewhat usual gnomic response, that Sartre misunderstood him, and that Sartre remains in the realm of "metaphysics", and in "void of being".

As for cosmology, I think Heidegger has his foot in the door, but is not simply expositing a point. I would take a stab, that according to his round about, Heidegger is clearly critiquing substantia, or the whole of the growth and prevalent dialogue of "substance metaphysics", or the persistent consideration of what was assumed to "stand firm", as it opens into other considerations.

That notion of substance, as "standing firm" (aside from whether it does or not in so many particular considerations) is something Heidegger takes to be based on a misunderstanding of a particular interpretation of time, as something being present, in a particular way.

So to put it in his terms, is a question, how is substance, that which stands firm, an interpretation of presence, and the present? How is this interpretation hiding the provision of presencing of beings in general when we interpret presence in this particular way? How is almost the whole tradition of Western philosophy, following Aristotle, locked in a particular notion of substantia as what is present?

So I would say at face value he largely intended a peculiar critique of metaphysics of presence, which he found to be at the base of many cultural values in general. Rightly I would say, he looked critically on a constant and compulsive calling of things as present to mind, a compulsion based on certain tendency of appropriating these impressions in an atemporal sense. That reinterpretation could open up. I think while Heidegger's thought could open to process metaphysics, a cosmology, at the same time it is crucially meditation. The point of involution is Dasein.

Presencing, is something Heidegger wants to describe on novel phenomenological grounds (a phenomenology of being), both in terms of Dasein and temporality, mainly.

Or anyway, that is my understanding thus far. So I'd say in just understanding Dasein's way of being in the world, Heidegger's "secular" involvement, the temporal interpretations of being can come to clarity. I am not overall sure what that means. Chiefly an a-temporal and eternal present ascribed as substantia (again, that which stands firm as being) is something Heidegger is going to critique though, as a meditation on presence, for instance.

What I think is crucial is that the meditation on Dasein, is not only the critique or "deconstruction" but what opens to possibilities in presencing of being. Not only is there this novel phenomenology, but in reconsidering existence this way, as not being suggested by the particular compulsions namely of a world Dasein is automatically "subject" to, the world opens up to other ways of being like "readiness to hand", Dasein's involvement with the world, means and ends and mainly, with the craft, where "creation" (the efficient cause) is something that could ostensibly be interpreted most clearlt in the world.

I don't imagine that this meditation, and implied involvements in the world (the notion would be quite open with Heidegger) is something that should be perceived as a limitation in any typical way though. Being very inspired by Greek philosophy, he is likely like Aristotle, pre-theological in his hermeneutics.

My own point of departure in reading Heidegger is indeed precisely in that efficient cause and how it opens up. I don't think you can understand Heidegger well, without thinking about these means and ends in the world, just because that is what he is talking about. Dasein for instance may have not only a being that is an issue to it, but a being to take a stand on, the being to be.


Edited by Kurt (09/05/15 09:05 PM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22196903 - 09/06/15 11:56 AM (8 years, 4 months ago)

Not interested in addressing Heidegger's Nazi affiliations. I investigated similar allegations about Jung decades ago. I obviously have been able to [bracket] that in the past, but my future with Heidegger's writings is going to be negligible. As to atheism, he is generally assumed by other philosophers (the last I read was in William Barrett's Irrational Man) to have a stance wherein God is never addressed in any idiom. There are several more possibilities than those you noted. I was not smitten by Process Theology when I read Hartshorn, Griffin and Cobb (I met Cobb's grandson one one of these forums). Perhaps I'll take another look at A.N. Whitehead. I am still tickled by:

"...So far as concerns philosophy only a selected group can be explicitly mentioned. There is no point in endeavouring to force the interpretations of divergent philosophers into a vague agreement. What is important is that the scheme of interpretation here adopted can claim for each of its main positions the express authority of one, or the other, of some supreme master of thought - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant. But ultimately nothing rests on authority; the final court of appeal is intrinsic reasonableness.
  The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion..." - Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39, 1979

However, it is evident by your own writing style that Heidegger's style would appeal to you. Perhaps you have been significantly influenced by his writing style, in which case no affront to you or the late philosopher is intended. I appreciate a more immediately transparent style of expression. I understand the stance you mentioned on more than one occasion that reading Heidegger may constitute a form of meditation in itself, but this suggests to me the use of the word meditation that is akin to the Christian's use of the term meditation as a cognitive pondering of biblical verse, an intellectual savoring that may result in an intuitive (or transrational) insight popping out of the roiling intellect as an iridescent bubble. Meditation for me has the connotation of thought-less awareness which can become stabilized with practice allowing for a deeper experience of that atemporal Presence which suffuses space-time. A bubble's nature is insubstantial, yet it often shines with resplendent colors and is itself a momentary encapsulation of air and space that is capable of being apprehended in the moment. Ultimately, the goal is to experience the totality of Spaciousness (I prefer this Buddhist term emotionally more than Emptiness).

I suppose with this disclosure I am back to the moment when I withdrew from Professor Charles Courtney's course on Being and Time at Drew Theological Seminary in the fall of 1976, fresh out of college with my little B.A. in philosophy, and I decided to shift idioms to theological language. At the time, the new idioms (including those of 'substance,' as in the Latin description of the Christian Holy Trinity as "Una Substantia, Tres Personas") as a radical departure from the ostensibly pure intellection and reason that philosophy asserted for more intuitive-based affirmations, to wit, faith. Faith was deemed a 'contemplative attitude' by author Andrew Greeley, but it was more than faith I was seeking. It was gnosis which seemed the closest thing to the gyan or jnana form of knowledge (as in Jnana Yoga, the Yoga of Knowledge or Intellect) that the Psychedelic Experience yielded and what the yogic literature had reified for me.

Without being an emotional typology (INTP) and hence never feeling 'devotional,' I still required a 'descent from the head to the heart,' as best illustrated by the Catholic iconography of a crown of thorns encircling a radiant heart. The crown descends to the heart is the mind descending into the heart - the central practice of the Hesychast contemplatives on Mt. Athos and the closest thing Christendom had to Indian and Tibetan yogas. The heart is not meant to be understood as an emotional center but as a transpersonal center, a transrational center. The ancients were not wrong mystically, they were wrong only if considered strictly physiologically with their emphasis of this center. Interestingly enough, people with transplanted hearts have disclosed memories belonging not to themselves, but to the donors of their hearts! Perhaps those ancients knew some things about our physiology that we are just getting inklings of. This paragraph has been a complete departure from the thread at hand. Nevertheless, it is illustrative of why delving into Being and Time is like attempting to scuba dive without a weight belt. As lofty an intellectual exercise this book is, I find it to be like the deeper parts of our oceans, dense and cold and dark with the occasional luminescent creature bringing light to the darkness. While it is home to those creatures for whom such pressure is necessary to their existence, one cannot remove them from their depth. Conversely, as a sport diver, 130 feet is the limit (I have been to 110 at night). Special gas mixtures are needed for greater depth, and special equipment the deeper one dives.

Similarly, we each find our own comfort zones. I applaud your interest in Heidegger, and wonder what other philosophers you are most interested in. I however will leave Being and Time on my shelf, as the temporal pressure I find myself under at age 62 does not admit of a usefulness that the work may provide for others. For me, the Tibetan prayer flags of Earth and Water seem more represented by Heidegger's substantial sense of Being, and I require some Fire, but a good deal more Air and Space as I move toward the limits of my temporal existence. :wink: Besides, I gave up diving long ago, and now prefer some form of lighter-than-air vehicle.


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #22197226 - 09/06/15 01:17 PM (8 years, 4 months ago)

"Diaphane, adiaphane."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22197375 - 09/06/15 01:59 PM (8 years, 4 months ago)

Quote:

Kurt said:
"Diaphane, adiaphane."




And the synthesis would be...?


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #22198065 - 09/06/15 04:16 PM (8 years, 4 months ago)

Would the synthesis be able to describe something there and not? Present and absent?

Is unity a door on a hinge? Poetry is walking through it?

I am not sure about this either, but aside from describing any implied convenience or value to Heidegger's approach I know something in myself, that when I look out on a horizon, over green hills I do not do this without also feeling the way those hills lay. Hills are then in my memory, you could say this by whatever accident, kiss or concussion.

I wonder, why does the transcendentalist say experience is merely impressed, detached, or "transparent, floating", something there and not, but specifically not? Why not say this transparent eyeball has hands, and maybe give them a head, body heart to say so?

Heidegger, who talks so much about "being in the world" swims in head space though. He talks about "seeing thinking", of phenomenology. Maybe it is no different than Emerson's nature, somehow "something" is there, and we try to describe it. Dasein, being-there, transparently. Heidegger is sometimes given credit for taking phenomenology to knew grounds, more grounded in the world, maybe more corporeal. But it is still all presence, at the same time, and well, it is weird.

Is Heidegger's phenomenology synthetic, ie. offering direction towards implicit value, (namely truth)? Or is it more useful? Particularly when he is situated with a contemporary philosophy, Heidegger is a philosopher, and his thought definitely isn't in a conventional deliniation of the pursuit of truth and knowledge for its own sake, and so it is often described as neither. He is said to be obscurant by many people, or just too provincial.

What I see, is that Heidegger had to argue his unique phenomenology, or exposit it amidst a contemporary world, and that has its upsides and downsides, both exacerbated by Heidegger personally. I think I am personally into seeing-feeling, whether that makes me less of a philosopher, or more (or less) Platonic. Yes I'll come back to the forms, truth, beauty and goodness. But where agreement might be, in that, is that some things have to be experienced... no? Diaphane, Adiaphane.

Maybe it is as if we all have various degrees of synthesesia, I don't know. I think that this may be the closest insight I can seem to pull from this...aside from just "going through" existence.


Edited by Kurt (09/06/15 09:19 PM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
Re: Heidegger's Spiral [Re: Kurt]
    #22200203 - 09/07/15 12:23 AM (8 years, 4 months ago)

I get a feeling (as opposed to an articulated critical, intellectual analysis) of Heidegger, as I did with Hegel, of idiosyncratic Pantheisms. These are Pantheisms of great intellectual minds, not the Pantheisms of quaint Neopagans marveling at nature, symbolized as Goddess and God, and approached via the Feeling function as devotion. Rather than Pantheism, I prefer a Panentheistic description even if it immediately suggests a radical pluralism of spirit and matter, with the former having ontological priority and eternality, and the latter being derivative of Eternal Being. Intimately connected, Creator and creation are not identical as in Pantheism. Universe or multiverses can certainly be postulated, yet the Eternal Being transcends either possibility. In Panentheism, I can grok Being and non-being co-existing as Being and Becoming both present and accounted for by the human experience, and the human spiritual endeavor to find identity with Eternal Being as the only means for personal peace, liberation from the anxiety of which Kierkegaard spent so much time addressing, as well as Shroomerites in their discussions of 'death-anxiety.'

There may be peace for some in their acceptance of human beinghood as becoming-ness, non-being, and the enthronement of the Myth of the Eternal Return. Wiccans have no illusions of an afterlife beyond transmigration, and I cannot but feel saddened by the "King of the Witches," Alex Sanders whom I was intrigued by at age 18 (partly because of his much younger beautiful blonde wife Maxine) who, as it turned out was terrified of dying. He epitomized all Pagans for me, and was a poignant example of the effect on a particular specie of Pantheism on the human condition. In his case anxiety and terror in the face of his fatal cigarette-related lung cancer. Most people have an "Atman Project," whether it's children and grandchildren or their art or literature, but the error is in trying to find some enduring personal identity based in becoming rather than our human communal sense of being One - all of us waves formed of the same Ocean of Being. Even the tomb of the pharaoh Khufu (Cheops), the Great Pyramid, will return to sand in much less than a million years. It's a great Atman Project relative to the duration of human civilization, but laughable relative to Geologic Time. Being is a horse of a different color than Being-in-the-world. I'm not an Epicurean, and I differentiate happiness for fulfillment, but ultimately, shouldn't philosophy contribute most significantly to human fulfillment? Should not a philosophy worth its salt be useful in both showing us Truth (Ultimate reality) as well as teaching us the least painful way to accept the Truth about Reality? Philosophy is a human endeavor. What additional purpose should it have?
:strokebeard:


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleKurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
Posts: 1,688
Re: Heidegger on Humanism [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #22626073 - 12/07/15 02:40 PM (8 years, 1 month ago)

Of all ideologies, the idea that world is following logic, "determined" in a vacuum, is the most general, and highest dogma to a mechanical age.

Look around to what we dwell in today! We do not only test our "experience", and that is clearly not all that we have put on the line.

Are we to continue to dwell on the apologetics of logical empiricism, or of early 20th century philosophy?

To distinguish the principles which have been handed down; to "understand" nature φύσις, physis, or even our nature or being, is in part to free them from the dogmas that have built up. What is called "constructive" or "productive" today, is built up.

As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote; much in line with the contemporary, we do dwell in language, as much as in the world. In his open letter written partly in regards to the French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, Heidegger considered following meditation on humanism. To think of the world is not to "determine", but in participation, to "lead forth" (producere).

Is this not true? Look around. When will we acknowledge the burden to think decicively of human action in nature?

Quote:

We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough. We view action only as causing an effect. The actuality of the effect is valued according to its utility.

But the essence of action is accomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness-producere.

Therefore only what already is can really be accomplished. But what "is" above all is Being. Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation.

Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

Martin Heidegger; Letter on Humanism




Edited by Kurt (12/07/15 03:50 PM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: < Back | 1 | 2  [ show all ]

Shop: Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   Mushroom-Hut Grow Bags   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   North Spore Bulk Substrate


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* LSD, Sex, Cosmic Consciousness and Evolution
( 1 2 all )
Swami 3,958 39 11/26/07 05:47 PM
by redgreenvines
* Heidegger and Being Authentic
( 1 2 all )
r72rock 2,418 25 02/01/15 06:28 PM
by quinn
* Why is Phenomenology so esoteric and difficult? spud 1,342 5 04/28/07 11:52 PM
by spud
* Heidegger, Time, and Tripping
( 1 2 3 4 5 all )
Jessel 3,160 93 03/10/12 02:37 AM
by BlueCoyote
* The phenomenology of death.
( 1 2 3 4 all )
deCypher 4,043 63 11/25/08 03:30 PM
by deranger
* Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology Malachi 847 4 12/17/03 10:24 AM
by fireworks_god
* Heidegger and Being NiamhNyx 650 4 11/05/07 10:04 PM
by NiamhNyx
* [[Departure]] AlteredAgain 601 4 09/01/06 11:28 PM
by AlteredAgain

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: Middleman, DividedQuantum
3,231 topic views. 2 members, 7 guests and 3 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.037 seconds spending 0.009 seconds on 14 queries.