Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:13 | #

This is more Dasein’s territory than mine.  But since he has not commented yet, I’ll say something that might get the ball rolling.

Lacking the advantages of a formal education in the Western canon I have to approach these issues from a somewhat idiosyncratic direction, that is, by beginning with an apology for any violence done to that intellectual rigour and wider understanding which are to be got from formal education, and which auto-didacticism can never really supply.  I hope that lets me off the hook a bit because what I can say about this passage is going to draw from some currents of thought that Heidegger disdains.

Heidegger looked to the pre-Socratic because he concluded that “being”, as the ultimate root of all and everything, had somehow been set aside by the Athenian thinkers who had mistakenly raced away into epistemology, logic, ethics, mathematics and all the uplands of what would become Western philosophical thought.  When Heidegger disparages “a mere thought-construct” or, indeed, “propositional statements” he is making a claim for the foundationalism and paramountcy of the truth of being.

The difficulty, however, is in moving beyond this claim, which is itself a propositional statement, and taking ownership of this obviously elusive truth.  Heidegger addresses this, in his own mind, at least, by turning against the normal method of intellectual investigation as an inadequate tool. “So long as we hear a mere sentence in what was said, and expose that sentence to the cross-examination of logic,” he says, we cannot draw close to, or appropriate, “that ancient something which conceals itself” in the truth of being.  He is trying to split methodologies, without making it clear (here, at least) what intellectual tools remain.  He simply commends that we engage in the act of appropriation in order to appropriate ... we “look through Being itself, through time itself, and look into the destiny of Being and the extending of time-space.”

This brings us immediately up against a second difficulty.  Students of “serious” metaphysics have always addressed this issue of taking ownership of “what is” by renouncing the sole agency of thought - not some thought as Heidegger contends.  They force consciousness to depart from its thought-bias towards something more holistic.  They do this precisely because thought takes us away from presence and into absence.

For this reason thought cannot appropriate.  What is clarified in the mind one moment - the “truth of being”, say - passes into the void of forgetting or, at best, into memory the next.  Its subsequent reification does not call forth the same intensity or awareness of relatedness which accompanied its original discovery.  It becomes familiar by repetition but atrophies a little each time, losing something of itself.

“Appropriation” is not that.  “Being” is most certainly not that.  To “own” one must first “be”, and to “be” one must first learn to “be”.  It is not given instinctually, like flight to a mayfly.  All that is given, so to speak, is the “number of the beast” - the state of the exiled Man.  But “the name of God” is “I am that I am” - a state of Being which may be sensed through our own presence ... through experience of our own being.  But like all such metaphysics, that very obviously belongs to the personal - I cannot experience your presence and you cannot experience mine (if, indeed, we ever get to experience it at all).  Heidegger is dealing strictly in matters of truth and of the collective.  So he says we must “think Being without beings ... without regard to metaphysics”.

So, in summary, we are not to approach Being experientially, but through thought.  Yet thought as the familiar “cross-examination of logic” cannot appropriate the truth of this Being and, thereby, draw close to “that ancient something” -the creative force or first cause - which is concealed there.  Heidegger’s solution is hardly clearly expressed in this passage.  It appears to be, basically, to declare sufficient or fit for philosophical purpose an act of labelling.  He appears, to my mind anyway, to conflate knowing something of the truth of being with ownership of it.  And this, he says, was the first thought in the Western intellectual tradition - perhaps like the tribesman who fears that a photographer may capture his soul.  Suitably pre-Socratic, then.

Now perhaps James or Dasein will put me straight on all this!

Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:32 | #

Being and Time in pdf format:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7253536/Heidegger-Being-and-Time-300Dpi-Eng

Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:03 | #

To be clear, “Being and Time” was published decades before the lecture
“Time and Being” from which I quoted.

Posted by White Preservationist on Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:51 | #

Heidegger on the Jewish Problem: “There is a dangerous international alliance of Jews.”

Posted by Kenneth Lloyd Anderson on Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:33 | #

Here is different way of looking at Being under the category we call “The Idolatry of Denotation”

Transvaluing the Being-narrative

Being does not begin with abstract non-Being, Being is the force of nature which is only reflected or mirrored in abstract non-Being. God is in nature as the highest evolved Being, God is the goal of life and evolution.

The Being-narrative does not pass from symbol to idea to nature, Being is nature, and symbol and idea only reflect the nature of Being.

The Spirit (Will) is also part of nature, It is not non-Being. Spirit is yet to be defined and discovered by modern science, but one day it will.

from Civilizing The Beast
Posted by Kenneth Lloyd Anderson from Civilizing The Beast http://civilizingthebeast.blogspot.com/2009/05/idolatry-of-denotation.html

Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:29 | #

Op cit p57 (Martin Heidegger’s essay titled “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”):

Is not then the end of philosophy after all a cessation of its way of thinking?  To conclude this would be premature.

As a completion, an end is the gathering into the most extreme possibilities… This development looks like the mere dissolution of philosophy, and is in truth its completion.

It suffices to refer to the independence of psychology, sociology, anthropology as cultural anthropology, to the role of logic as logistics and semantics.  Philosophy turns into the empirical science of man
...
The end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world.  The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world civilization based upon Western European thinking.

I could quote many similar, but inferior, passages from E.O. Wilson’s “Consilience”.

In defense of philosophers—especially natural philosophers—in this end of philosophy, I’ll quote from Herbert Butterfield’s “The Origins of Modern Science” ISBN 0-684-83637-8, p15:

Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years, the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in character and the most stupendous in scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion.
...
The Aristotelian doctrine of inertia was a doctrine of rest—it was motion, not rest, that always required to be explained.  Wherever this motion existed, and however long it existed, something had to be brought in to account for it.

The essential feature of this view was the assertion or the assumption that a body would keep in movement only so long as a mover was actually in contact with it, imparting motion to it all the time… If resistance were reduced to nought, the speed would be infinite; that is to say, if the movement took place in a vacuum, bodies would move from one place to another instantaneously.  The absurdity of this was one of the reasons why Aristotelians regarded a complete void as impossible, and said that God Himself could not make one.

It is astonishing to what degree not only this theory but its rivals—even the ones which superseded in the course of the scientific revolution—were based on the ordinary observation of the data available to common sense.  And, as writers have clearly pointed out, it is not relevant for us to argue that if the Aristotelians had merely watched the more carefully they would have changed their theory of inertia for the modern one—changed over to the view that bodies tend to continue either at rest or in motion along a straight line until something intervenes to stop them or deflect their course.  It was supremely difficult to escape from the Aristotelian doctrine by merely observing things more closely, especially if you had already started off on the wrong foot and were hampered beforehand with the whole system of interlocking Aristotelian ideas.  In fact, the modern law of inertia is not the thing you would discover by mere photographic methods of observation—it required a different kind of thinking-cap, a transposition in the mind of the scientist himself; for we do not actually see ordinary objects continuing their rectilinear motion in that kind of empty space which Aristotle said could not occur, and sailing away to that infinity which also he said could not possibly exist; and we do not in real life have perfectly spherical balls moving on perfectly smooth horizontal planes—the trick lay in the fact that it occurred to Galileo to imagine these.

Indeed, and it is for that reason that I think Martin Heidegger’s final conception of Appropriation in “Time and Being” may be important—for what if we are among natural bodies of information providing direction for time just as surely as natural bodies of mass provide up and down?  This is part of what has me fascinated with Heidegger’s seeming obsession with Being and Time within philosophy—indeed natural philosophy.  Might we be the Aristotelians of with our own fixation on “impetus” to the exclusion of “momentum” in our treatment of Appropriation? 

Anyway, back to defending the primacy of experiment over theory, I think I can answer Butterfield:

What really happened was an advancement of communication technology in the form of Gutenberg’s press, made it possible to go beyond scholastics and hermeneutics to directed memetics where selection pressures of a very different character were brought to bear on the memes.  Among the pressures was the idea that you could report an experiment and expect many others to reproduce it.  This then created pressure for more precise descriptions of experimental setups and results.  This created selective pressure for more precise quantitative formalisms.  This created selective pressure for more reliance on mathematics.  Once mathematics became the lingua franca it created a second revolution in epistemology that rendered experiments more effective in overthrowing outmoded theories and their ways of thinking.  So, in truth, the revolution in science was as much a revolution in communication about experiments as it was a revolution in thinking.

We may be in another such revolution in communication at this end of philosophy.

Posted by Fr. John on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:09 | #

“Heidigger, Heidigger was a drunken beggar who could drink you under the table…”

That’s Monty Python, I believe. A Fragment from college days

Anyway, Heidigger’s quoted comments all began to sound like Clinton’s ‘What is, ‘is’?”

Which means, it’s absolute rubbish.

Good day.

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:47 | #

A quick websearch yields:

The Philosopher’s Song (Monty Python)

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya’
‘Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed…

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: “I drink, therefore I am”

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed!

Posted by Frank on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:52 | #

I present this for discussion by those more familiar with continental philosophy than I because I have a hunch it is as important as it pretends.

Seek out the original values and beliefs and follow those because they’re the source and origin. There might be a sense that the original ways were given by God, similar to how Plato’s Atlantis tales speak of the gods having designed different societies with their own distinct Constitutions and peoples.

At least I think that’s what he’s saying. If so, it’d just be what a virtuous pagan would do if he rejected Christ. Without Christ he’d seek out what he was before.

I don’t think it’s as simple as finding ancient values though. Some value systems will work, and some simply won’t…

Posted by Frank on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:10 | #

To think Being without beings means:  to think Being without regard to metaphysics.  Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics.  Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.

This might refer to how philosophy and metaphysics have no solutions. All they can accomplish is to undermine the beliefs that found society, because there are no answers.

So, the solution is to believe in that which society is founded upon, and accept it and live through it because there’s nothing else.

-

““that ancient something which conceals itself”” - sounds like the idea that the highest things in life are unknown - the idea that understanding something is a like a basilisk that kills what it sees.

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:07 | #

Not “Wilhelm Friedrich” but “Schopenhauer and “, James.

It is always intellect - affirming to read that devotee of the Jewish supernatural, Fr John’s anti-rationalist vapourings especially when he dismisses the work of a philosopher whose name he cannot even spell.

Posted by Frank on Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:54 | #

This sounds just like Jewish mysticism, albeit written by a German. When one completes the math problem, is there a point at the end? Or is just a difficult math problem that presents a useless solution once you’ve learned the language that’s being used? Esoteric complexity makes things appear great, but it’s such a headache… At core is this just religion for atheists? I’m assuming my guess in the previous two posts was off… I see “Dasein” is mentioned in there, so that respectable poster in here who posts as “Dasein” must be a fan too. I’m wary as with Fr. John though - the philosophy they taught us in college was bunk and simple-minded. Maybe this is different though.

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:09 | #

I suppose I should outline briefly how I came to bother with “Time and Being” at all, since I’m not a big fan of philosophy or philosophers in general. 

I’ve been involved in computer networking since before personal computers.  One of the things that became apparent to me early on was the problem of synchronization in distributed computing systems and the resulting inadequacy with which programming languages dealt with temporal constructs.  Look for better formalizations of time that might be applicable to network programming (circa 1981) I ran into some reasonable attempts by functional programming folks but it quickly became apparent that the nondeterministic aspect of relations was more appropriate for modeling the nondeterministic aspects of distributed computation, as well as being a more general grounding for functional programming (functions are N to 1 relations).  This then led me to look for the strongest foundation I could for relational modeling of dynamic systems.  I eventually was able to squeeze some consulting money out of Hewlett Packard to hire someone specializing in this field of mathematics and was able to correct Bertrand Russell’s “Relation Arithmetic” (see “Bit-Strong Physics: A Finite and Discrete Approach to Natural Philosophy” and the article “Reflections by Tom Etter on “Process, System, Causality and Quantum Mechanics: A Psychoanalysis of Animal Faith” p538).  In the process of doing that work, it became apparent that equality and indeed mathematical identity were most properly formalized in relative terms (equality is best thought of in terms of “as”—for example, “Bill and Sam are equal as citizens of the US”).  This led to Robert Sokolowski’s work in phenomenology focusing on identity.  Sokolowski is primarily of Husserl’s school of thought and tended to dismiss Heidegger’s “obsession with Being and Time”.  I had never read any of Heidegger’s work and even though his obsession seemed more in line with my original interest—it wasn’t until I read “Indiscrete Thoughts” by Gian-Carlo Rota that I became aware of prior work in relative identity regarding what I now know is Heidegger’s “as structure” (Stanislaw Ulam’s interest in the use of “as” rather than “is” formed a chapter in Rota’s book and seemed to Rota to be the key to opening up a new field of identity-oriented mathematics for natural philosophy—although neither Ulam nor Rota cited Heidegger).  Eventually, looking around for prior work in this area I discovered that Heidegger had originated the “as structure” approach to identity.  That’s when it dawned on me that I probably had neglected looking into Heidegger’s work for too long. 

Heidegger’s popularity among some white nationalists never actually entered into my decision.  Indeed, it is almost as though I put off looking into Heidegger as long as humanly possible given the intriguing aforementioned “coincidences” that independently led me to his work.  Strange, that…

Posted by Dasein on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:44 | #

So, in summary, we are not to approach Being experientially, but through thought.—GW

I think this is right, GW.  A special form of thinking, Heidegger’s term for this in Discourse on Thinking was ‘Gelassenheit’ (releasement).  It’s not something that can be forced or which can be used to win arguments.  In the preface to Identity and Difference, Heidegger says “In this realm one cannot prove anything, but one can point out a great deal.”  Poetry (Hoelderlin and Hebel) and mysticism (Meister Eckhart) instead of logic or phenomenology (Husserl/ Being and Time), in order to overcome the duality of Western metaphysics, first introduced by Plato via the Forms.  Overcoming the duality between Being and Time is a matter of practical philosophical interest in reconciling our genetic identity (Being) with evolutionary process (Time).  The following verse from Hebel, chosen by Heidegger to conclude his memorial address to Conradin Kreutzer, seems appropriate, a poetic rendering of the Will to Power:

We are plants which- whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not- must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and to bear fruit.

Posted by Dasein on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:07 | #

When Heidegger disparages “a mere thought-construct” or, indeed, “propositional statements” he is making a claim for the foundationalism and paramountcy of the truth of being.

I think he takes issue with a certain type of thinking or use of language that represents (subject/object dualism) and thus separates man from Being.  Language, particularly through poetry, can overcome this separation:

  The event of appropriation is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature by losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them.
 
  To think of appropriating as the event of appropriation means to contribute to the self-vibrating realm.  Thinking receives the tools for this self-suspended structure from language.  For language is the most delicate and thus the most suscpetible vibration holding everything within the suspended structure of the appropriation.  We dwell in the appropriation inasmuch as our active nature is given over to language. (Identity and Difference pp 37-38)

Perhaps this sounds quite mystical and airy-fairy.  Heidegger tried different approaches to conveying this understanding of Being through ‘ordinary’ language (though he did invent many words).  I am not aware of any attempts by him to convey it poetically, but the method used in Discourse on Thinking (a conversation between a Scholar, Scientist, and Teacher) was, for me, the most rewarding.  After struggling with it for a while, I finally understood its message in what I would perhaps describe as a religious epiphany.  It’s nothing like finally working out the solution for some math proof or understanding the principles underlying some chemical reaction.  Results may vary, but I highly recommend that book (it’s quite short) for anyone interested in Heidegger’s later thought.

Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:51 | #

Some of this is as simple as the distinction between the thought “That’s green.” and the thought “I think that’s green.”  When one encounters uncertainty about a thing, one distances one’s identity from the thought.  It is the thought of the being called “I” as distinct from “that” Being “green”.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 23:05 | #

Dasein: I think he takes issue with a certain type of thinking or use of language that represents (subject/object dualism) and thus separates man from Being.

Every tradition of serious metaphysical thought of which I am aware holds that Man is not - definitely NOT - divorced from the truth of his being merely by his type of thinking but by the quality of his ordinary waking consciousness.  In this reading, duality means absence of self, which is the state in which we ordinarily pass our entire lives.

Absence implies a certain mechanicity or passivity before the active principle of the external world.  It follows that presence to self is not a passive state in regard to that world, but is active and provides for the discovery of being in that plane.  What burdened us before, without us really knowing it, becomes something in which we not only subsist but act.  Our being is inseparable from our power to do.

I hope that isn’t too obstruse or jargon-laden, and I have done justice to a very old idea.

Now, if one attempts to apply this model of the awakening subject to European Man generally, passive and asleep in his end-days as he is, it’s quite obvious that it doesn’t work.  The model applies to individuals who comprehend certain facts about themselves and about life of which, like as not, they came into possession quite accidentally and with no intentionality on their part.  They are nonetheless emotionally constituted to strive to discover the real meaning of these facts and to live their lives by that meaning.

Whole sections of society cannot be apprised of these facts ... will not hear them right ... do not happen to possess the emotional finesse to do so.  It’s the parable of the sower.  Hence, the esoteric nature of Truth in metaphysics.  Nothing about being, nothing about the pathways to being, nothing about the true condition of Man can be communicated widely.  It will not be heard.  It will be misinterpreted.  It will be misused.

So it is that the metaphysical approach to being disappears like the Okavango River in the Kalahari, just as, also, Heidegger’s approach by “releasement” disappears into an entirely idiosyncratic particularism that no one can be sure they have truly grasped, and cannot truly communicate.  Esoterism has its day no matter what.  So even if Heidegger is right and the metaphysicians wrong, and there is a mode of thought that can break the bounds, it cannot be translated to the life of the masses.  We have to look for a third way of approaching Truth.

Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:44 | #

An addendum to my prior description of my motives:

Where “identity” entered into my interests was in the attribution of assertions for electronic commerce.  There are various roles in which various identities can make assertions.  A statement like “Acme Corp. says it will pay $1000 to Ace Corp. if Domino Pizza says Joe Blow failed to pay back his loan to Ace Corp.” is an attributed assertion, which is different from an assertion like:  “Acme Corp. will pay $1000 to Ace Corp. if Domino Pizza says Joe Blow failed to pay back his loan to Ace Corp.”

The logic of such relative assertions is central to reputation networks and computer-mediated contractual relations.