Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Atla]

Some people like to collect stamps, some like to play football, some people like to try to solve the big questions of existence. Why are you surprised?

Actually, it is as if you read my mind, Atla!

I was thinking metaphorically that this approach to philosophy ends up making it a kind of game like D&D. Players might have a very involved language and a set of conventions about how to use that language, and some players are superbly excellent at mastering the language and commit an enormous volume of data about it to memory. But that language has zero importance and meaning outside of playing the game.

Philosophy, or at least any approach to philosophy that I'll take seriously, is supposed to aim for something higher than that. And especially if you are going to start a thread crying about the "hegemony" of one of humanity's most important intellectual achievements, your philosophical approach had damn well better be more substantial than the act of collecting stamps.

There is something pretty narrow minded about this. No one yet actually knows what the 'ultimate truth' is, so they can't tell whether for example it holds the key to humanity's future, or maybe to its destruction, or maybe it won't really affect anything at all. In the unlikely scenario that we will ever figure out the 'ultimate truth', of course.

It's like you would expect people to know in advance what the answers will be, and then only start seeking those answers when they will be useful to us.

[Faustus5]

No one yet actually knows what the 'ultimate truth' is, so they can't tell whether for example it holds the key to humanity's future, or maybe to its destruction, or maybe it won't really affect anything at all.

I don't even think the concept of "ultimate truth" is meaningful, so I'd suspect any philosopher who thought they were seeking it was either crazy or at least very self deluded.

[Atla]

No one yet actually knows what the 'ultimate truth' is, so they can't tell whether for example it holds the key to humanity's future, or maybe to its destruction, or maybe it won't really affect anything at all.

I don't even think the concept of "ultimate truth" is meaningful, so I'd suspect any philosopher who thought they were seeking it was either crazy or at least very self deluded.

Well personally I think that people who aren't curious about existence, and don't ever seek the 'truth', are crazy.

[Faustus5]

Well personally I think that people who aren't curious about existence, and don't ever seek the 'truth', are crazy.

There are coherent and intelligent ways to be curious about existence, which tend to produce useful and meaningful results, and there are incoherent and dumb ways to be curious about existence, which produce nothing.

I only pay attention to folks taking the former path. Unfortunately, philosophy as a discipline is too willing to tolerate and enable those wasting their time with the latter path, which is way philosophy is so rarely paid attention to by non-philosophers.

[Atla]

Well personally I think that people who aren't curious about existence, and don't ever seek the 'truth', are crazy.

There are coherent and intelligent ways to be curious about existence, which tend to produce useful and meaningful results, and there are incoherent and dumb ways to be curious about existence, which produce nothing.

I only pay attention to folks taking the former path. Unfortunately, philosophy as a discipline is too willing to tolerate and enable those wasting their time with the latter path, which is way philosophy is so rarely paid attention to by non-philosophers.

Yeah well academic philosophy being a failure doesn't mean that restricting ourselves to a small box is any better.

[Hereandnow]

Terrapin Station wrote
I should probably ask you this in the thread on Being and Time, but re "tearing down assumptions," since you brought it up here, what would you say is what Heidegger is even trying to address with respect to being?

Heidegger says things like, "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of being" and that he's going to address "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." I've never been able to get much of a grasp on what he's even talking about. How would you explain it? (And please, if you can, give a relatively short answer that just explains what the heck he even has in mind with respect to any issue/confusion about "being.")

The following IS a short answer, and is obscenely short. I tried.

Well, what IS being? To be? And then, to exist, be real? These terms fill our vocabulary, but Being: I AM sitting; the student IS next to the window, etc.; this term is taken by H to be foundational, after all, the metaphysics of Being has a name: ontology. But Heidegger wants to take the metaphysics OUT of ontology. Christian metaphysics has all but ruined thinking soundly about what it means to be, here, an existing entity, in-the-world. Metaphysics has reified (made into a real thing) this for us in terms of the soul, god; Plato reified this in terms of the making verbs and adjectives and abstractions into things: The Good, Justice, Virtue, and so on.

So forget being as a substance, material thingness, the mind of god (see Kant;s Transcendental Dialectic for a formal repudiation of metaphysics), soul or spirit. H's phenomenological pov is so irritatingly difficult because he wants to construct a new vocabulary that is free of this perverse history of metaphysics, and this requires allowing the world to prsent itself as it is, not through he traditional interpretative systems. Another off putting thing you will find in H is that he does not think as a modern scientist. He respects science, but does not make it he foundation.

So the assumptions he wants to tear down are these religious, philosophical and scientific paradigms that have always been the default answer to "what is Being?" And he wants to tear down a lifestyle of complacency to open doors to what he thinks is a lost grandeur, or lost "primordiality", something IN our structured experiences that has been pushed out of awareness by culture and popular religion and this pushing out has caused a crisis of identity (Nietzsche should comes to mind; see Heidegger's war on Christian and Platonic models of ontology), and we have become trivialized and lost (like Guy Debord says in the Society of the Spectacle). We are far greater than popular conceptions allow us to be, but this greatness is NOT int he theory, but the Being, the lived experience of Being, and this makes Heideggerian thought amenable to lots of extravagant, quasi mystical thinking he never endorsed, because mystics think there is something profound but lost about our Being here, too. But its not mystical, for H, it's alienation. Modern society has built for itself a condition of existential alienation through its technological culture and metaphysics.

That is the down and dirty on tearing down. He looks at individuals as either a kind of herd mentality, or enlightened and free. He, like Wittgenstein, is trying to show us the error of our ways, only for H, it has this existential dimension (which he got from Kierkegaard): a taking hold of our freedom to be the creators of our own fate as opposed to just letting it be decided for us by our sleepwalking through life. We need to take control of our own fate through our own freedom and freedom is the fleeting present moment (as the present moves in time into the future), and this brings the matter to the structure of dasein (me, being there)

As to the "in terms of which beings are already understood" you mention, he is a phenomenologist who wants to look plainly at the world free of tradition, theory (though, well, his is a theory), popular notions, presumptions of what IS. Where to look? One looks at the world. What is the world? It is our world, the everyday world of waiting for buses and paying taxes and doing physics. this world is not, of course, handed to us; we made it (always interesting to me is that our language is not designed to tell us what a thing IS, only what it does. Nouns are really verbs!). We made politics and General Motors. This world is an historical place, built out of the ages. Every thought I can think is manufactured in some social environment, and the history of such places go way, way back, AND, it is also very personal: my history started when I was born and I grew up assimilating language and ideas, acquired what E D Hirsch called cultural literacy.

So when we wake up in the morning, we speak, think, live and breath in one of these cultures, and this culture is not only what I have, but what I am, my dasein, and every utterance, a remembrance, is done in language and culture, and this is the CONTENT of dasein, of what I am. The FORM, or STRUCTURE of dasein is TIME. A very big deal. The structure of experience is time:past, present future. As I write now, the language rises up up, associated thoughts mingle to produce propositions, ideas, questions in thought and feeling, and these are projected into the unmade future ( a very important idea: the future is unmade, a blank, nothingness. Hmmm. What shall I do next? Whatever it is, it will be my doing, my creation).

All this (this structure of past, present future in which historically produced ideas,institutions are projected into the future in the creative act of an authentic or inauthentic dasein, that is, a self that is either asleep at the wheel and just rolls through life, or one that has awakened to freedom and possibilities) is presupposed by science, religion, by anything you can think of, and this is why a temporal ontology of dasein's production of existence is THE ontology that underlies all else.

I hope that is not too bizarre sounding. I have quite forgotten what sounds normal in discussions like this.

[Hereandnow]

Faustus5 wrote
But if you are aiming at something that doesn't tell people to behave differently, doesn't make a difference in their lives, doesn't recommend some sort of tangible change in practice other than what words we use, then you aren't aspiring to anything that deserves to be called "truth". It just becomes meaningless babble that only philosophers care about, which means it has no value and is a waste of time and energy.

Grrrr. Meaningless babble is insulting. Philosophers don't care about meaningless babble. Here is what meaningless babble is: it is what is produced when opinion exceeds understanding.

[Atla]

Well, what IS being? To be? And then, to exist, be real? These terms fill our vocabulary, but Being: I AM sitting; the student IS next to the window, etc.; this term is taken by H to be foundational, after all, the metaphysics of Being has a name: ontology. But Heidegger wants to take the metaphysics OUT of ontology. Christian metaphysics has all but ruined thinking soundly about what it means to be, here, an existing entity, in-the-world. Metaphysics has reified (made into a real thing) this for us in terms of the soul, god; Plato reified this in terms of the making verbs and adjectives and abstractions into things: The Good, Justice, Virtue, and so on.

So forget being as a substance, material thingness, the mind of god (see Kant;s Transcendental Dialectic for a formal repudiation of metaphysics), soul or spirit. H's phenomenological pov is so irritatingly difficult because he wants to construct a new vocabulary that is free of this perverse history of metaphysics, and this requires allowing the world to prsent itself as it is, not through he traditional interpretative systems. Another off putting thing you will find in H is that he does not think as a modern scientist. He respects science, but does not make it he foundation.

So the assumptions he wants to tear down are these religious, philosophical and scientific paradigms that have always been the default answer to "what is Being?" And he wants to tear down a lifestyle of complacency to open doors to what he thinks is a lost grandeur, or lost "primordiality", something IN our structured experiences that has been pushed out of awareness by culture and popular religion and this pushing out has caused a crisis of identity (Nietzsche should comes to mind; see Heidegger's war on Christian and Platonic models of ontology), and we have become trivialized and lost (like Guy Debord says in the Society of the Spectacle). We are far greater than popular conceptions allow us to be, but this greatness is NOT int he theory, but the Being, the lived experience of Being, and this makes Heideggerian thought amenable to lots of extravagant, quasi mystical thinking he never endorsed, because mystics think there is something profound but lost about our Being here, too. But its not mystical, for H, it's alienation. Modern society has built for itself a condition of existential alienation through its technological culture and metaphysics.

That is the down and dirty on tearing down. He looks at individuals as either a kind of herd mentality, or enlightened and free. He, like Wittgenstein, is trying to show us the error of our ways, only for H, it has this existential dimension (which he got from Kierkegaard): a taking hold of our freedom to be the creators of our own fate as opposed to just letting it be decided for us by our sleepwalking through life. We need to take control of our own fate through our own freedom and freedom is the fleeting present moment (as the present moves in time into the future), and this brings the matter to the structure of dasein (me, being there)

As to the "in terms of which beings are already understood" you mention, he is a phenomenologist who wants to look plainly at the world free of tradition, theory (though, well, his is a theory), popular notions, presumptions of what IS. Where to look? One looks at the world. What is the world? It is our world, the everyday world of waiting for buses and paying taxes and doing physics. this world is not, of course, handed to us; we made it (always interesting to me is that our language is not designed to tell us what a thing IS, only what it does. Nouns are really verbs!). We made politics and General Motors. This world is an historical place, built out of the ages. Every thought I can think is manufactured in some social environment, and the history of such places go way, way back, AND, it is also very personal: my history started when I was born and I grew up assimilating language and ideas, acquired what E D Hirsch called cultural literacy.

So when we wake up in the morning, we speak, think, live and breath in one of these cultures, and this culture is not only what I have, but what I am, my dasein, and every utterance, a remembrance, is done in language and culture, and this is the CONTENT of dasein, of what I am. The FORM, or STRUCTURE of dasein is TIME. A very big deal. The structure of experience is time:past, present future. As I write now, the language rises up up, associated thoughts mingle to produce propositions, ideas, questions in thought and feeling, and these are projected into the unmade future ( a very important idea: the future is unmade, a blank, nothingness. Hmmm. What shall I do next? Whatever it is, it will be my doing, my creation).

All this (this structure of past, present future in which historically produced ideas,institutions are projected into the future in the creative act of an authentic or inauthentic dasein, that is, a self that is either asleep at the wheel and just rolls through life, or one that has awakened to freedom and possibilities) is presupposed by science, religion, by anything you can think of, and this is why a temporal ontology of dasein's production of existence is THE ontology that underlies all else.

I hope that is not too bizarre sounding. I have quite forgotten what sounds normal in discussions like this.

I can't really fathom why it's better to base 'ontology' on a certain male human psychological experience of being and acting through time (and get infatuated with it), instead of basing it on the entire natural world. And not even investigating what being is fundamentally, anyway.

[Gertie]

Gertie wrote
Sorry that's not good enough. As far as I'm concerned you lose any warrant to make claims about ''we'' and ''us'', if you don't even assume I exist as anything beyond your experience of me.

That is why you should distinguish between knowledge claims and ontological state of affairs claims. You can't slide between the two or ignore the difference. You can't buffer your own interpretation of your experience with what I say about mine, and still place me as just another part of your experience.

But this concern about my experience of you is not a point of concern regarding phenomenology. It is a given that there are other people, other things, for this is the way the world presents itself. The matter of showing what this is about, explaining "otherness" is not one that cancels out otherness, it is about explaining it.

Alright!

(Although it seems to me to not to be about explaining human nature, but describing and re-framing it and offering life lessons from what I've seen so far. Or how does it explain the existence of consciousness?).

So - you make an ontological state of affairs assumption that there is a world which exists independently of your experience of it. Experience is therefore, amongst other things, a form of representation of that world.

A world which you share with other people, and compare notes about. And hence we have the inter-subjective basis of a working model of the world we share. A world where there are inedependently existing things and processes. We can't know about these other things and people from a first-hand pov, but we can agree on limited and flawed descriptions based in our shared observations and reasoning. And we end up with a (flawed and incomplete) scientific, materialist working model of the world.

Agree so far?

That model contains an evolutionary explanation of why we are the way we are, physically, and why we have certain types of experience. A limited, flawed explanation, which doesn't explain the source of experience (but then neither does phenomenology?). But does give a broad utility-based explanation for things like our caring, social pre-dispositions, our competetive and tribal instincts, why we like choclate and so on.

So what is your problem with that approach to human nature? Where do you draw the line on explanations which arise in the world we share, and why? Presumably you accept what we call gravity tells us something real about the world, and you accept evolution tells us something real about why our bodies are the way they are - so why draw the line at what evolution tells us about why we are the way we are mentally?

Phenomenology, Heiedegger's and others', simply accepts that there are others, trees, chairs, people, for this is what is presented to us in the world. It does get a bit odd, but it goes like this: I know there is a world around me, and there are things and people that are there, and not me, but "me" here is defined phenomenologically, that is, as an entity that puts the stamp of "mine" and "me" on things that are contained within the "my" of being.

OK, I'd just call that the first-person pov which is the nature of conscious experience, but I think we're saying the same thing.

Other things, people, are other, and I take them in through my dasein, personal human agency of in-the-worldness... You are clearly there and you have an agency like mine, an in the worldness.

You seem to be introducing Agency as something fundamental to being a conscious human here, not requiring explanation, but rather just contextualising it as part of our relationship with the world. OK, but it's another assumption isn't it?

Matters of solipsism and idealism don't come up

Only after you make the assumption a real world exists independently of your experience.

but objects are simply there, forged out of experience (see Dewey's Art as Experience and Experience and Nature), and the idea and the sense impressions are of-a piece. things are not "out there", as some metaphysical assumed things, and discovered; rather their meanings are made when we take them up.

If you're saying their meaning to us is created by us, that's fine. But you clarified that they are assumed to ontologically be there as the state of affairs, as somethings, to be discovered in a real world existing independently of anyone discovering them.

[Faustus5]

But its not mystical, for H, it's alienation. Modern society has built for itself a condition of existential alienation through its technological culture and metaphysics.

H's philosophy is going to be absolutely powerless and utterly, even laughably feeble in addressing these kinds of issues. The way you get at alienation is by substantially changing the material conditions and power people have in their lives. It is political.

Babbling about ontology and metaphysics will only waste everyone's time and actually serves the interests of those for whom it is essential the rest of us stay alienated.

[Hereandnow]

H's philosophy is going to be absolutely powerless and utterly, even laughably feeble in addressing these kinds of issues. The way you get at alienation is by substantially changing the material conditions and power people have in their lives. It is political.

Babbling about ontology and metaphysics will only waste everyone's time and actually serves the interests of those for whom it is essential the rest of us stay alienated.

Keep in mind that it was religion that put Trump in power, and reading Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jaspers and the rest is is a philosophical response to religion that cancels out its crudity and silliness. The fact that others besides philosophers don't read it is beside the point (though keep in mind that the Bush administration hired followers of Leo Strauss, a confirmed Heideggerian); very few read physics either, and probably more read philosophy than physics, the latter being so prohibitively strong in mathematics.

Heidegger is part of an ongoing conversation humanity is having with itself (your man Rorty puts it, a huge fan of Heidegger), and it is not so much Heidegger's definitive thinking as his contribution to the project of humanity trying to figure out what it is all about at the level of basic questions.

Consider: powerless and the rest? Philosophy can have very powerful effects on human affairs. Marx? But Marx was putting Hegel to novel use, and Hegel was FAR more far flung than Heidegger. Marx's work overturned global affairs completely, you will remember. Heidegger was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, and N was very much an influence in the rise of Nazism. Husserl actually believed he had discovered the true calling of philosophy that would open doors to religious experience hitherto closed, unrealized. Was he right? Did Husserl "discover" the essence of religion? You would have to read him to find out.

Finally, the merit of a thing is not to weighed solely on the social changes it brings. Buddhism, a monumental presence in the evolution of societies, is all about a single human's interiority.

That part about keeping people alienated is so far removed from actuality it makes me wonder if you have read anything at all. One reason you find all of this so bothersome is that you don't read. This thinking screams rationalization: Too much work to understand it; must be worthless.

[Terrapin Station]

Terrapin Station wrote
I should probably ask you this in the thread on Being and Time, but re "tearing down assumptions," since you brought it up here, what would you say is what Heidegger is even trying to address with respect to being?

Heidegger says things like, "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of being" and that he's going to address "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." I've never been able to get much of a grasp on what he's even talking about. How would you explain it? (And please, if you can, give a relatively short answer that just explains what the heck he even has in mind with respect to any issue/confusion about "being.")

The following IS a short answer, and is obscenely short. I tried.

Well, what IS being? To be? And then, to exist, be real? These terms fill our vocabulary, but Being: I AM sitting; the student IS next to the window, etc.; this term is taken by H to be foundational, after all, the metaphysics of Being has a name: ontology. But Heidegger wants to take the metaphysics OUT of ontology. Christian metaphysics has all but ruined thinking soundly about what it means to be, here, an existing entity, in-the-world. Metaphysics has reified (made into a real thing) this for us in terms of the soul, god; Plato reified this in terms of the making verbs and adjectives and abstractions into things: The Good, Justice, Virtue, and so on.

So forget being as a substance, material thingness, the mind of god (see Kant;s Transcendental Dialectic for a formal repudiation of metaphysics), soul or spirit. H's phenomenological pov is so irritatingly difficult because he wants to construct a new vocabulary that is free of this perverse history of metaphysics, and this requires allowing the world to prsent itself as it is, not through he traditional interpretative systems. Another off putting thing you will find in H is that he does not think as a modern scientist. He respects science, but does not make it he foundation.

So the assumptions he wants to tear down are these religious, philosophical and scientific paradigms that have always been the default answer to "what is Being?" And he wants to tear down a lifestyle of complacency to open doors to what he thinks is a lost grandeur, or lost "primordiality", something IN our structured experiences that has been pushed out of awareness by culture and popular religion and this pushing out has caused a crisis of identity (Nietzsche should comes to mind; see Heidegger's war on Christian and Platonic models of ontology), and we have become trivialized and lost (like Guy Debord says in the Society of the Spectacle). We are far greater than popular conceptions allow us to be, but this greatness is NOT int he theory, but the Being, the lived experience of Being, and this makes Heideggerian thought amenable to lots of extravagant, quasi mystical thinking he never endorsed, because mystics think there is something profound but lost about our Being here, too. But its not mystical, for H, it's alienation. Modern society has built for itself a condition of existential alienation through its technological culture and metaphysics.

That is the down and dirty on tearing down. He looks at individuals as either a kind of herd mentality, or enlightened and free. He, like Wittgenstein, is trying to show us the error of our ways, only for H, it has this existential dimension (which he got from Kierkegaard): a taking hold of our freedom to be the creators of our own fate as opposed to just letting it be decided for us by our sleepwalking through life. We need to take control of our own fate through our own freedom and freedom is the fleeting present moment (as the present moves in time into the future), and this brings the matter to the structure of dasein (me, being there)

As to the "in terms of which beings are already understood" you mention, he is a phenomenologist who wants to look plainly at the world free of tradition, theory (though, well, his is a theory), popular notions, presumptions of what IS. Where to look? One looks at the world. What is the world? It is our world, the everyday world of waiting for buses and paying taxes and doing physics. this world is not, of course, handed to us; we made it (always interesting to me is that our language is not designed to tell us what a thing IS, only what it does. Nouns are really verbs!). We made politics and General Motors. This world is an historical place, built out of the ages. Every thought I can think is manufactured in some social environment, and the history of such places go way, way back, AND, it is also very personal: my history started when I was born and I grew up assimilating language and ideas, acquired what E D Hirsch called cultural literacy.

So when we wake up in the morning, we speak, think, live and breath in one of these cultures, and this culture is not only what I have, but what I am, my dasein, and every utterance, a remembrance, is done in language and culture, and this is the CONTENT of dasein, of what I am. The FORM, or STRUCTURE of dasein is TIME. A very big deal. The structure of experience is time:past, present future. As I write now, the language rises up up, associated thoughts mingle to produce propositions, ideas, questions in thought and feeling, and these are projected into the unmade future ( a very important idea: the future is unmade, a blank, nothingness. Hmmm. What shall I do next? Whatever it is, it will be my doing, my creation).

All this (this structure of past, present future in which historically produced ideas,institutions are projected into the future in the creative act of an authentic or inauthentic dasein, that is, a self that is either asleep at the wheel and just rolls through life, or one that has awakened to freedom and possibilities) is presupposed by science, religion, by anything you can think of, and this is why a temporal ontology of dasein's production of existence is THE ontology that underlies all else.

I hope that is not too bizarre sounding. I have quite forgotten what sounds normal in discussions like this.

It's not bizarre-sounding, but very flakey/flightly/unfocused-sounding--like we can't concentrate on something for more than a fleeting moment before we move on to something else. It's kind of stream-of-consciousness, which is only going to be pertinent to the consciousness of the person expressing it.

And it doesn't really address the issue I have with it. "Being" isn't something difficult to understand or address. "Being," or "to be," in one of its primary senses is to exist, occur, be present, be instantiated. Any of those terms will do if someone, for some reason, doesn't understand "being" on its own. It's opposed to, say, imagining something to exist, occur, etc. that doesn't actually exist or occur. So what is the big issue there?

"Being" in its other primary sense refers to entities, often reserved for biological entities--things that have metabolism, cell reproduction, etc.

So in two very short, simple paragraphs, I've solved "What is being," in the two most popular senses of the term.

There are a bunch of things you mention that we could address, such as "Heidegger wants to take the metaphysics OUT of ontology." The bulk of metaphysics IS ontology. That's primarily what metaphysics IS. So it doesn't make much sense to talk about "taking metaphysics out of ontology." It's like saying "We're going to take chemistry out of the study of molecular interactions."

If Heidegger was primarily addressing stuff like "Christian metaphysics" being wrapped up with "being," then that's a factor of both his historico-cultural milieu and his unique history (as the son of someone who worked for a church, etc.). "Christian metaphysics" isn't wrapped up with notions of being in general, and that certainly had nothing to do with my historico-cultural milieu or my familial experiences. So if that was part of what he was addressing, he probably should have made this more explicit.

[Hereandnow]

Atla wrote

I can't really fathom why it's better to base 'ontology' on a certain male human psychological experience of being and acting through time (and get infatuated with it), instead of basing it on the entire natural world. And not even investigating what being is fundamentally, anyway.

That is THE anticipated response. It is a complete reversal of this kind of thinking that Heidegger (and Husserl) is looking for. to think of a discipline like psychology is the THINK and experience! Before talk about "a certain male human psychological experience" (male??) we need to ask, what is it to think at all? The structure of thought as thought is at issue. Natural world? Where did the term "natural" come from? You've got to ask THE major question: what is language? To talk about physics, psychology, or anything at all, as ruling the day, you have to see that you are talking, thinking. Kant asked the question, what is reason, logic, but Heidegger is saying that this is not sufficient for an analytic of our Being Here, which is filled with affect and analyzable structure.

I know this is odd to think like this, but to understand Heidegger you have to put aside scientific, empirical models altogether. I look out at the world and all before me is "understood". But all of my understanding rests with predication. one has to ask what is predication? there is a bird. the bird is black and sits on a branch. What is sitting? Before language was in place so solidly, and humans or protohumans were grunting and pointing, there was a lot of sitting, but no language until grunts became representational and symbolic. the noise "sitting" and its denotative value, actual sitting, has its its phonic and denotative values in this nebulous symbolic world of reference. BUT: once there is the word, and it is in place, has this whole affair become more than the mere constitutive function of a designated term? Has the world "revealed" itself? Or have people just found practical ways to deal with it?

Same goes with ALL words. They don't bring out something there already, they just impose a representational system upon what is there. Meaning is social in nature; physics is, at the level of ontology, a social affair for the language that is used to construct meaning in doing physics is essentially a social construct that has pragmatic utility; i.e., it WORKS.

Further analysis: Language is just an extension of a primordial alinguistic condition, which is reflected in t he conditional propositional form of if....then. What is sitting? It occurs in time. Sitting was not always so easy and infants fall over all the time. But the learning process, represented in language: If I move the leg just so, then stability fails, so this time a bit more, and then, no falling. Obviously infants do not think like this at all, but to think like this is language's way to take this basic form of struggling to overcome a problem AS a linguistic form. this struggle to sit up straight is inherently pragmatic, and the meaning that settles in the understanding is the same. Now, what turns language's noises into symbols? Is it not the same as well? Listening to sounds, figuring out their referents, finally associating sounds with things, all by trial and error, and the residua of all this in later life is, "pass the salt," and "what a fine day" and "philosophy is babbling nonsense".

This is a pragmatist's view (obliquely Heideggerian) of meaning and language.

The point of all this is to take the matter to foundations, try to get to the ontological rock bottom of what being in the world is. Physics is not at all wrong, to take an example, but it is analyzable in more fundamental terms.

Of course, when one talks like this, one is talking, thinking, and the same critique applies to this, rendering talk about foundational ontology no better than anything else. This may be difficult to get, but Heidegger's principle thesis is hermeneutics, interpretation. The reason why Heidegger is right is because he does not give his ontology any status what works in the given milieu of the questions being addressed. IF you want to talk about foundatonal ontology, THEN this is the most descriptive and error free. All language is contingent and its aboutness is linked directly to utility, and NOT what is independent of experience. To even SAY such a thing, is, says Wittgenstein, nonsense.

Btw, some of the above is not from H. But close.

[Terrapin Station]

we need to ask, what is it to think at all?

Why would that be mysterious to anyone? It's simply brain processes that amount to having ideas, thinking of concepts, reasoning, daydreaming--all sorts of things. What's the mystery supposed to be?

The structure of thought as thought is at issue.

It's not clear what "the structure of thought as thought" is supposed to refer to. Are we saying that thought could be structured as something other than thought? That seems like it would be contradictory.

You've got to ask THE major question: what is language?

Again, it's no big mystery what language is. We could even just look up the term in any dictionary.

Heidegger is saying that this is not sufficient for an analytic of our Being Here

But what the heck is even the idea of "an analytic of 'our Being Here'"? It's not at all clear what the question or issue even is. What are we wondering about? What's the mystery to be solved there?

[Atla]

Atla wrote

I can't really fathom why it's better to base 'ontology' on a certain male human psychological experience of being and acting through time (and get infatuated with it), instead of basing it on the entire natural world. And not even investigating what being is fundamentally, anyway.

That is THE anticipated response. It is a complete reversal of this kind of thinking that Heidegger (and Husserl) is looking for. to think of a discipline like psychology is the THINK and experience! Before talk about "a certain male human psychological experience" (male??) we need to ask, what is it to think at all? The structure of thought as thought is at issue. Natural world? Where did the term "natural" come from? You've got to ask THE major question: what is language? To talk about physics, psychology, or anything at all, as ruling the day, you have to see that you are talking, thinking. Kant asked the question, what is reason, logic, but Heidegger is saying that this is not sufficient for an analytic of our Being Here, which is filled with affect and analyzable structure.

I know this is odd to think like this, but to understand Heidegger you have to put aside scientific, empirical models altogether. I look out at the world and all before me is "understood". But all of my understanding rests with predication. one has to ask what is predication? there is a bird. the bird is black and sits on a branch. What is sitting? Before language was in place so solidly, and humans or protohumans were grunting and pointing, there was a lot of sitting, but no language until grunts became representational and symbolic. the noise "sitting" and its denotative value, actual sitting, has its its phonic and denotative values in this nebulous symbolic world of reference. BUT: once there is the word, and it is in place, has this whole affair become more than the mere constitutive function of a designated term? Has the world "revealed" itself? Or have people just found practical ways to deal with it?

Same goes with ALL words. They don't bring out something there already, they just impose a representational system upon what is there. Meaning is social in nature; physics is, at the level of ontology, a social affair for the language that is used to construct meaning in doing physics is essentially a social construct that has pragmatic utility; i.e., it WORKS.

Further analysis: Language is just an extension of a primordial alinguistic condition, which is reflected in t he conditional propositional form of if....then. What is sitting? It occurs in time. Sitting was not always so easy and infants fall over all the time. But the learning process, represented in language: If I move the leg just so, then stability fails, so this time a bit more, and then, no falling. Obviously infants do not think like this at all, but to think like this is language's way to take this basic form of struggling to overcome a problem AS a linguistic form. this struggle to sit up straight is inherently pragmatic, and the meaning that settles in the understanding is the same. Now, what turns language's noises into symbols? Is it not the same as well? Listening to sounds, figuring out their referents, finally associating sounds with things, all by trial and error, and the residua of all this in later life is, "pass the salt," and "what a fine day" and "philosophy is babbling nonsense".

This is a pragmatist's view (obliquely Heideggerian) of meaning and language.

The point of all this is to take the matter to foundations, try to get to the ontological rock bottom of what being in the world is. Physics is not at all wrong, to take an example, but it is analyzable in more fundamental terms.

Of course, when one talks like this, one is talking, thinking, and the same critique applies to this, rendering talk about foundational ontology no better than anything else. This may be difficult to get, but Heidegger's principle thesis is hermeneutics, interpretation. The reason why Heidegger is right is because he does not give his ontology any status what works in the given milieu of the questions being addressed. IF you want to talk about foundatonal ontology, THEN this is the most descriptive and error free. All language is contingent and its aboutness is linked directly to utility, and NOT what is independent of experience. To even SAY such a thing, is, says Wittgenstein, nonsense.

Btw, some of the above is not from H. But close.

I honestly can't believe that this is all there is to it.

Yes, first we just examine the outside world etc.
Yes, the second step is that then we reverse the whole thing, and get into a long exploration about how human thinking etc. even works. And yes this is all distinctly male thinking.

So where is the third step after this, where we return to placing ontology into the entire natural world, but this time we do it properly?