You my Heidegger: Dasein vs. The World of They

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, 08 June 2010 12:22.

by PF

The following are quotes from the 1998 Harvard edition of Rüdiger Safranski’s intellectual biographical work, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, originally published in German in 1994.

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We already know one moment when “disguises” break up and authentic Being discloses itself - the moment of anxiety. The world loses its significance, it appears as a naked “that” against the background of nothingness, and Dasein experiences itself as homeless, unguarded and unguided by any objective Being.

The breakthrough to authentic Being thus takes place as a contingency shock, as the experience of “there is nothing behind it.” Even more clearly than in Being and Time, Heidegger formulated this initiation experience for a philosophy of authenticity in his Frieburg inaugural lecture of 1929. Philosophy, he then said, only begins when we have the courage to “let nothingness encounter us.” Eye to eye with nothing, we then observe not only that we are “something” real, but also that we are creative creatures, capable of letting something emerge from nothing. The decisive point is that man can experience himself as the place where nothing becomes something and something becomes nothing. Anxiety leads us to this turning point. It confronts us with the “being possible” that we are ourselves.

Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety expressly does not have fear of death as its subject. It would be more correct to say that its subject is fear of life, of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency. Anxiety reveals that everyday life is fleeing from its contigency. That is the meaning of all attempts to firmly root oneself in life.

One might assume that ‘They’ are only Everyman, [had previously spoken of the fact of self-loss into the ‘World of They’], but ‘They’ are also the philosophers. Because these, as Heidegger remarks critically, firmly root themselves in their grand constructs, their worlds of values and metaphysical backworlds. Philosophy, too, is for the most part busy removing the contingency shock or, better still, not admitting it in the first place.

... The meaning of Being is time. This means Being is nothing enduring, it is something transient, it is nothing present-at-hand but an event. He who really dares to think his own death will discover himself as a finite event of Being. This discovery is almost the maximum of self-transparency that Dasein can achieve for itself. If self-concealment is inauthenticity, then this self-transparency is an act of authenticity. As Heidegger’s philosophy works on this self-transparency, it understands itself as an act of authenticity.

This ideal of Dasein, to begin with, is negatively defined. Dasein is authentic when it has the courage to base itself on itself and not rely on Hegel’s so-called substantial morality of state, society, or public morals [editor: or racial morals?]; when it can dispense with the unburdening offers on the part of the world of They; when it finds the strength to bring itself back from “being lost”; when it no longer toys with the thousand possibilities existing but instead seizes the possibility that one is oneself.

For Aristotle and his tradition, and all the way to ethical pragmatism and the theory of communicative reason, the starting point and yardstick of successful and ethically responsible life is just that area that Heidegger describes as the world of the They.

If the Self retrieves itself from the They and returns to itself, where then does it arrive? Heidegger’s answer: at the awareness of mortality and time, at the realization of the unreliability of all civilizational solicitude for Dasein, and, above all, at the awareness of its own Potentiality-For-Being, hence at freedom in the sense of spontaneity, initiative, creativity.

... What matters in Heidegger’s authenticity is not primarily good or ethically correct action but the opening up of opportunities for great moments, the intensification of Dasein. Insofar as ethical aspects are concerned at all, Heidegger’s ideas in Being and Time can be summed up in one sentence: Do whatever you like, but make your own decision and don’t let anyone relieve you of the decision and hence the responsibility. The Marburg students who, parodying Heidegger, said: “I am determined, but I don’t know what for,” had perfectly understood Heidegger’s decisionism and yet misunderstood it. They had understood it in the sense that Heidegger really supported determination without reference to the content or values that one would have to decide about. They had misunderstood him in expecting from his philosophy such directives or signposts. Heidegger expressly wants to disappoint such expectations as belonging to the inauthentic way of philosophizing. Philosophy is not a moral inquiry office; it is, at least for Heidegger, the task of removing and deconstructing presumed ethical objectivities. What is left after this task is truly nothing - measured against the rich tradition of ethical thought.



Comments:


1

Posted by tc on Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:30 | #

“Whites now are searching for their ground”

No, we are not. Those of us, who will live, live on the ground. Whites in general are in hysterical denial of anything “ground”.

And that is that.


2

Posted by Wandrin on Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:25 | #

Off-topic apologies but they’re talking themselves into paranoid hysteria

http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2010/06/06/alice-walker-my-heart-is-breaking-too-stop-the-lies-about-israel/

It is painfully clear. The world does not want a Jewish state. And to understand that is to understand that the world does not want the Jews to live. Day by day, I understand more deeply how the Nazi Holocaust could actually have happened—and how another one might now be in the offing.

The Jews will prevail. Israel will not fail. But, the necessary cost will be so very high. My heart is breaking.

The jews get criticized for screwing up a ship boarding and shooting a bunch of people. This gets translated in their ****ed up heads as the world wanting to wipe out jews. The jews will prevail but:

the necessary cost will be so very high

What cost? To who? According to her “The world doesn’t want the jews to live.”

One of the commentators

There may very well be a Final Solution, however, this time around the rest of the gang is going along with us.Out WMD’s-yes, we have them & they are plentiful-are aimed, like daggers in the heart, of ALL the Middle East & EU capitals.
So, if Walker & Co want to take ‘comfort’ in the untimely demise of Israel, well, she should prepare for another type of worldwide ’solution’.
It may very well be that the gang in Washington, under Obama, is also in our crosshairs.
I can only hope…..

This is where their paranoia eventually leads. Killing not just white people but everyone.


3

Posted by Thorn on Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:15 | #

“This is where their paranoia eventually leads. Killing not just white people but everyone.”

—-

What you decribe there is called the Samsom Opton.

This should make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option

[...]

In 2003, Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at Israel’s Hebrew University, thought that the Al-Aqsa Intifada then in progress threatened Israel’s existence.[18] Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst’s “The Gun and the Olive Branch” (2003) as saying “I consider it all hopeless at this point. ... We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under.” He quoted General Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”


4

Posted by tc on Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:15 | #

“Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”

They are and we should not deny them their wishes.

Is there really an underlying issue concerning all of us more serious, that this self proclaimed rabid hound?

Has there been for the previous century? Through the death of the most refined of our race aside from the masses.

What would that be?

Our inability to group? Sure - our fault
Our regard for life in general - sure, mea culpa
Our patience, tolerance, curiosity, individualism?

Guilty.

But here it is brothers in arms:

I am a Hungarian.

I will not fight another war for the kiken sake.

In case of conscription, I will absorb in my military training all I am capable of, and then issued the rifle/ammo turn it against the target I already deem appropriate.

That is my credo…and it is coming - make no mistake.


5

Posted by Wandrin on Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:08 | #

I will not fight another war for the kiken sake.

Good rule.


6

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:37 | #

Can I ask you gentlemen not to post on the JQ on a Heidegger thread.  If you want to discuss the question of the Jew prepare a submission of suitable quality - and originality, if possible - and mail it to me.

tc,

With your talk about rifles and targets you are running pretty close to incitement.  I appreciate that you are talking about the suppositional scenario of a future large-scale war in Europe.  Even so, can I ask you to be sensible to the law, for example, of Hungary.


7

Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:24 | #

Do whatever you like, but make your own decision and don’t let anyone relieve you of the decision and hence the responsibility.

Funny, this could be interpreted as both a justification for anarchy and the Fuhrer Principle.

This is not about ‘materialism,’ it is about primordial autochthony.

 

I highly doubt that English “ontological nationalists” (really it is all rationalization for their preferred brand of humanism, or the “acquired” as GW would put it, in combination with their intuitive grasp of what inherent talents they possess that would tend to increase their reproductive fitness and genetic interests as against even members of their own ethny - all to set up a social order to the benefit of the former and the latter, you see) would wish for a state of autochthony in all its primordiality.  Something tells me Bowery’s single combat to the death strikes closer to the mark.

Under the sway of a domineering soccer hooligan alpha or find your throat cut in about two seconds flat.  Is that what you want, PF?


8

Posted by Thorn on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:55 | #

“Can I ask you gentlemen not to post on the JQ on a Heidegger thread.  If you want to discuss the question of the Jew prepare a submission of suitable quality - and originality, if possible - and mail it to me.”

———

Guessedworkrker,

If you know anything about business, you should know the customer is always right.


9

Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:59 | #

If we are to be conscious of our being, or enter into a state of “Being,” we would need to be aware of what we really are.  What are we?  A sack of guts with a mind that is but a vehicle for the deliverance of our payload of genetic material.  But, having entered into a state of “Being,” a seemingly near mythical state rendered all the more so by the fact that no “ontological nationalists” have experienced said themselves and hence cannot give direct evidence regarding it, will Self act in a way that is true to what it really allegedly is, and tend to maximize its reproductive fitness, genetic interest and EGI?  And if not, and in fact to a lesser degree than merely laboring under authoritarian dogma - that is, the mind so attuned will actually be taken more into a state of estrangement from its presumably evolved role of maximizing reproductive fitness, genetic interest and EGI as opposed to lying dormant and goose-stepping with the rest of the boys - just what good is instantiation of Self?

And what is instantiation of Self anyway but a means to the end of maximizing reproductive fitness, genetic interest and EGI?  I think we all agree it is a means and not an end.  Given that, is it a sufficiently effective means if not indeed the most effective means?


10

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:01 | #

Safranski: Anxiety leads us to this turning point.  It confronts us with the “being possible” that we are ourselves.

We can’t hang around waiting for some Germanic existential angst to deliver us fortuitously ... accidentally ... from the evil of absence.  Waiting for an accident is too submissive.  Accidents be damned.  We have to get on and do it ourselves.  Accordingly, it is attentionality that leads us to the point of return.  And the return is to what is.  “I am” and “this is us” are companions in self-hood, complete and unique, and sufficient unto themselves.  “I” or “we” can be nothing else, and nothing else can be “me” or “us”.

It would be more correct to say that its subject is fear of life, of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency.

I must say, I am lost to this argument.  What takes us away from a perpetual state of “whole contingency”, like a dog or a bird, is not fear but a kind of gravitational pull into the comfort and warmth of the sleep state we call ordinary waking consciousness.  Why this pull should exist and what, exactly, it is, is an interesting question.  I have a suspicion that Heidegger addressed it in his discourse on lazyness.  But I could be wrong.  My own theory is that it is a product of the very rapid evolutionary development of the mentational or intellectual capacity.

Much else here is very heartening to read, and I am grateful to PF for posting it.


11

Posted by danielj on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:17 | #

Under the sway of a domineering soccer hooligan alpha or find your throat cut in about two seconds flat.  Is that what you want, PF?

PF has been in a more than PG fight with a coke dealer. He got Dasein all over his underwear smile


12

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:17 | #

CC,

If we are to be conscious of our being

Only the few will follow here.  It is too difficult for the masses.

What are we?

That is the question!  When people begin asking that question we’ve won because they have already recognised that they are not what the world has made of them and is attempting to make of them.

no “ontological nationalists” have experienced said themselves

You are confusing two issues here.  We are not speaking of mysticism but ontology - the investigation of being by reason. 

will Self act in a way that is true to what it really allegedly is, and tend to maximize its reproductive fitness, genetic interest and EGI?

People are more likely to do so if the world-spell - that which they unconsciously acquire from the world around them - is sufficiently weakened.

just what good is instantiation of Self?

Just what good is illusion?  You can see what it is doing to us.  You want to offer an illusion-based answer: heroic rebirth.  We say we can do better.

I think we all agree it is a means and not an end.

It is beginning and end, if that is what you mean.


13

Posted by Thorn on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:23 | #

The only commenter here at MR that consistently makes sense is Fred Scrooby. All you other folks should take a lesson from him. He’s the Teacher.


14

Posted by danielj on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:26 | #

A sack of guts with a mind that is but a vehicle for the deliverance of our payload of genetic material.

Wow. That is inspiring.

And what is instantiation of Self anyway but a means to the end of maximizing reproductive fitness, genetic interest and EGI?  I think we all agree it is a means and not an end. 

Double wow! Selfness is merely the means to an end, the end being self. Self creates and maintains a selfness that parades itself as self. It is not self, or a representation of self but self as selfness as self concerned with advancing and multiplying self by its selfness masquerading as self. Self seeking to multiply self by a self that is not.


15

Posted by danielj on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:28 | #

Links to Mr. H should be right up on top in the sidebar underneath the EGI stuff…


16

Posted by danielj on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:29 | #

Much else here is very heartening to read, and I am grateful to PF for posting it.

Me too. It is birdie for the course. Let’s keep it that way ah boys.


17

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 09 Jun 2010 22:11 | #

Just what good is illusion?


It provides continuity or the illusion of continuity over time. It fills in the gaps. Consciousness is not necessarily desirable.


18

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:16 | #

Desmond,

It provides continuity or the illusion of continuity over time. It fills in the gaps. Consciousness is not necessarily desirable.

I think you might be confusing the role of the elites with the position of the masses.  Whether or not we can do anything about the blindness of the latter, we can’t have the blind leading the blind.  Not in respect to an existential threat.  A mere moral one, such as faced Italy, say, in the years after WW1, is another matter.


19

Posted by PF on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:34 | #

GW,

Its quite amazing to find in the description of Heideggerian authentic Dasein, a paraphrasal of the Guessedworkerian Being, named by another name and with idiosyncratic differences of interpretation.

We can’t hang around waiting for some Germanic existential angst to deliver us fortuitously ... accidentally ... from the evil of absence.  Waiting for an accident is too submissive.  Accidents be damned.  We have to get on and do it ourselves.  Accordingly, it is attentionality that leads us to the point of return.  And the return is to what is.  “I am” and “this is us” are companions in self-hood, complete and unique, and sufficient unto themselves.  “I” or “we” can be nothing else, and nothing else can be “me” or “us”.

I understand this as Heidegger describing his own personal ‘point of interface’ with authentic Dasein. His method, if you will. You also hear him talk about ponderousness as a prerequisite to a knowledge of being - by which he means to indicate that one arrives at the knowledge of being by “endless tiers of theory” (credit: J. Bowden).

Heidegger did not have a theory of mind to account for what he was interfacing with - at least none that I have seen. So his ‘method’ is inevitably scratched into the side of his portrait of Dasein, as if it were characteristic of Dasein itself, or mankind’s only method of interfacing.

I must say, I am lost to this argument.  What takes us away from a perpetual state of “whole contingency”, like a dog or a bird, is not fear but a kind of gravitational pull into the comfort and warmth of the sleep state we call ordinary waking consciousness.  Why this pull should exist and what, exactly, it is, is an interesting question.  I have a suspicion that Heidegger addressed it in his discourse on lazyness.  But I could be wrong.  My own theory is that it is a product of the very rapid evolutionary development of the mentational or intellectual capacity.

Yes, but Heidegger’s “method”, described crudely above, was via mentation.

.....Does anyone know more specifically about this?....

I imagine that philosophical speculation can achieve contingency shocks (by disidentification, sudden epiphanies) and that agitated states and new circumstances provoke this, or at least in H’s mind were associated with these shocks.

[I submit to the amendment of MR’s *Dasein* anything I say about H because I’m a novice]


20

Posted by PF on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:02 | #

Dasein wrote:

Reading Heidegger is a bit like bible study.  You can open up to any random page and find something worthwhile and, yes, understandable, so long as you keep the overall message in consideration, which can be formulated a number of ways, for example by remaining open to Being.  It sounds perhaps rather mystical, and it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.  When I was growing up, I was introduced briefly to transcendental meditation.

Yes, its unlike anything else, and I prefer getting things summarized. However, if studying Heidegger leads to this….

This feeling, a sort of religious epiphany, came to me again about 10 years later when I read Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking.

Do you remember the realization which triggered this epiphany? I’m interested to know if Heidegger-euphoria is reproducible, or in fact a reliable method. Of course you have just doomed me to read this book. smile

I had a similar ‘religious’ experience when reading Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, when I was 15. It forced me to realize what a huge impact television and TV-culture had had both on me and everyone I knew. I felt like it was so all-pervasive (Debord rightly frames the influence of the Spectacle as quasi-metaphysical. [I use this word simply to denote its extremely all-pervasive, inescapable, in-the-ether type nature, its universality and permeating-everythingness]. He describes it as a vast force, the cumulative influence that arises from the entrainment of human minds by modern media. And in fact, it is just such a force, he is absolutely right to let it distend to that size.

These influences require a perspective shift and are somewhat subtle (viewed from the perspectives trapped within the circle of their influence), but seeing them at once revealed as a totality, I was able to realize that my whole previous personality (as I then thought) had been illegitimately programmed into me by television and media, which things I despised beyond utterance at that point in my life. The subsequent distrust of the voice in my head, which I literally took to be The Spectacle talking inside me, lead me to experience of higher states which, I later found, are only described in eastern mysticism and in glimpses by western philosophers - especially Nietzsche, Rilke, and now I find, Heidegger.

Intellectualism is a haphazard way to approach these things, to me, but since we are all frolicsome geniuses, every avenue deserves a shot. In my view this is akin to ‘getting high’ off of contingency shocks, and its this kick that makes thinking worthwhile.

As for Heidegger’s methodology, he studied under Husserl and was influenced by his new method of phenomenology.

We would have to split H’s methodology into several pieces, which perhaps it is not legitimate to do (they may form an inextricable organic whole and suffer by analysis):

1. How did he experience or know authentic Dasein?
2. What were the intellectual trappings and baggage by which he approached these things?

In my opinion, his baggage is quite substantial. He didn’t have a self-critical theory of mind, which would lead him to distrust the output of his symbol-machine, so he simply performed cross-checks of the output with prior knowledge and then pronounced it good. Neurobiology is for me a prime relativizing influence as far as thinking about thinking. Look inside the guts of one of these things, i.e. investigating the processes which constitute a nervous system, its like looking inside a lamborghini or a corvette, or an Alfa Romeo or lets just get our pro-Anglo biases out on the table, a Jaguar. With a deeper understanding of the mechanics of the system, the shadow of romanticism, and trusting loving belief recedes around one. And as humans, so long as the mind remains a black box to us, we naturally tend to assume - as a cultural prejudice shared by all human groups - that the output of the mind or its internal readings are something special. I much prefer the mechanic’s view, to the view of the man who think a ghost is driving the pistons, which is our default belief.

He therefore wasn’t in a position to correct for artifacts caused by his own way of conceptualizing - and perhaps its irrelevant. He’s an example of someone who, if you grant a few assumptions, will use them to build a towering structure which at least says enough about what is not and what cannot be true, while pointing obstinately and as best he can to what is, to free us up for the realization - if only purely intellectual - of what is.

I’ve been listening to these lectures: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Philosophy/Modern-Philosophy/Heidegger-Podcast/24272

and the fact, which is confirmed elsewhere, that Sartre for example was a Heideggerian is astounding. There is no way that men of that type interfaced with Being, the drug-addled furious scribbling pokemon-character (I’ve newly read Johnson’s “Intellectuals”, an absolute must IMO). What explains his pull on that type of men? Does anyone have any ideas?

Over the years he came to see language, especially poetry, as the home of Being, and this was the ground he tilled (art was also a medium which conveyed Being, e.g. Van Gogh’s “Peasant’s Shoes”, though not as important to him as was language).

Interesting, will have to think more about this. I always thought language was the playground of the usurper…

I think your example of English children playing football was an excellent example of the national Being revealing itself.

For me the acquaintence of another half-English kid, whom I know, sparks a resonance that is not of my mind and my EGI-calculator. The self-embarrassedness, rigid posture, the pristine ordered thought and niceness of sensibility, the handsome and unmistakeable physiognomy, and beyond the description and enumeration of all of these things, the resonance that arises in a moment of talking to him - that is a step closer to shared Dasein. Because that sensibility, the posture, the tonality and manners - is in me, by imprint and by nature. We create it together, when we are not here amongst the muddled masses with blood from every-which-where, assimilating to various assimilated branches of deracinated unsharpened Euro-man culture, which has the precision of self-knowledge of a dull club instead of a scalpel. That is national life, in perhaps its dying agonies, in its bastardization, which is still beautiful, especially by comparison with places where it does not exist. It is the same bright strengthening kick as when you are among family.


21

Posted by Captainchaos on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:24 | #

GW,

It is beginning and end, if that is what you mean.

No, I refuse to conflate instantiation of “Self” and realization of genetic continuity of the race.  They are not necessarily the same, nor does the former necessarily lead to the latter.  That is why I say instantiation of “Self” is a (alleged) means of achieving the end of genetic continuity of the race.

So let me ask you, What do you value more, instantiation of “Self” or realization of genetic continuity of the race?  A direct answer would be appreciated.

We are not speaking of mysticism

I hope not, but then again…

Do you remember the realization which triggered this epiphany? I’m interested to know if Heidegger-euphoria is reproducible, or in fact a reliable method. Of course you have just doomed me to read this book. 

I had a similar ‘religious’ experience when reading Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,

you might want to consider that PF has for all intents and purposes just described instantiation of “Self” right there.  Forgive me if I am underwhelmed.

You want to offer an illusion-based answer: heroic rebirth.

I have a sneaking suspicion that instantiation of “Self” might just be illusion, or the result of an act of self-hypnosis, a process PF has expressed interest in.  That being the case, your preferred illusion will either more likely deliver genetic continuity of the race as opposed to palingeneticism or it won’t.  And if not, all those Krauts burned for nothing.


22

Posted by PF on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:34 | #

Does anybody remember the film Dimensions explaining the 4th dimension - the actual mathematical fourth dimension, not make-believe ideas about it - where they devoted a long section to a theoretical discussion between 2D beings and a 3D being, and what the 3D being would need to do - go to some quite laborious lengths - to explain to 2D beings what life in 3D was like?

They talked about the 3D being showing the 2D beings many 2D cross-sections of a 3D object, by inserting them into the 2D layer in succession. If the 2D beings could remember the 2D sections as they were shown one after the other, and then create a composite image in their mind of the 2D sections stacked atop each other - somehow “thinking” or imagining in 3D - than they would be able to reconstruct a 3D shape in a 2D brain.

To me this is like giving someone a contingency shock - you take some repository of social value in flatworld, show how it changes over time and psychological distance, and at the end finally disappears (whereas it was posited to go on forever) - and then they realize that there is another ‘dimension’ where this stuff doesn’t exist, yet we still do. The 3D lizard had a hard time explaining why he looked only like two pairs of footprints.


23

Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:12 | #

Guessedworker,

I was thinking about it more on the evolutionary level and the analogy or metaphor or whatever of the flashlight. Is illusion incidental to consciousness or is consciousness incidental to illusion and does the illusion provide something adaptive?

‘  It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.

  It is much more probable that the seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion, just as most of the other metaphors about consciousness are. In our flashlight analogy, the flashlight would be conscious of being on only when it is on. Though huge gaps of time occurred, providing things were generally the same, it would seem to the flashlight itself that the light had been continuously on. We are thus consciousless of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious….’

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070418120855.htm

The creation of the illusion of continuous sight appears to make seeing much more efficient yet the viewer, like the flashlight, is never aware of the darkness. ‘What good is illusion?’ Well, it appears to be adaptive at least for sight. Is it then like sympathy? Does it become wide spread and reinforced with doctrine and thus seemingly maladaptive? Those tourists who saved the drowning Africans, off the coast of Spain or wherever, can they be conscious of what they are not conscious of, the existential threat?


24

Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:27 | #

It just appears that ‘being’ is like the darkness or nothingness in sight. It exists but we can never be conscious of it.


25

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:02 | #

CC,

I refuse to conflate instantiation of “Self” and realization of genetic continuity of the race.  They are not necessarily the same, nor does the former necessarily lead to the latter.  That is why I say instantiation of “Self” is a (alleged) means of achieving the end of genetic continuity of the race.

This is another way of saying the realisation that your leg-irons are imagined does not necessarily lead to being free.  Not, of course, if one easily forgets, and falls under the spell of the illusion again.

Do you have a theory of how personality accretes, CC ... or sociality, if you prefer to deal at the collective level?  Do you have a value-theory of consciousness and unconsciousness?  The question is unfair, I know.  But I’d like to find a way to engage you on your own theoretical terms, which might be more profitable for us both.

What do you value more, instantiation of “Self” or realization of genetic continuity of the race?

It is true that we love our children above ourselves, above all things, above even our people, I think.  But the choice you offer me is too simple.  Let’s turn it about for a minute.  There are men in this world who sagely offer the well-known pearl of wisdom that the attainment of inner peace and liberation demands the relinquishment of all attachment.  By my reckoning such a man has, at best, no sense of the size and number of rooms in his mansion or that we humans can occupy more than one of them at any given time, and at worst he is a psychopath.  It is pathological to drive instantiation, to use your term, into opposition to love of kind.  The collective self is intimately entwined with everything else that we share, and the meaning of a collective discovery, to use my term, is Love.

I have a sneaking suspicion that instantiation of “Self” might just be illusion, or the result of an act of self-hypnosis, a process PF has expressed interest in.

So the end of illusion is, in fact, illusory?  Well, I repeat my request: Do you have a theory of how personality accretes?  Do you have a value-theory of consciousness and unconsciousness?

That being the case, your preferred illusion will either more likely deliver genetic continuity of the race as opposed to palingeneticism or it won’t.  And if not, all those Krauts burned for nothing.

CC, almost all life is for nothing.  There is Nature’s conflict with Time.  There is our personal and collective part in that conflict.  But all the rest is for nothing.  The comedy of the human condition lies precisely in our perpetual misapprehension as to how little and how much the natural life really requires of us.


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Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:47 | #

Desmond,

Is illusion incidental to consciousness or is consciousness incidental to illusion and does the illusion provide something adaptive?

Illusion is a characteristic of the state of ordinary waking consciousness.  Mechanicity is another.  Suggestibility is another.  More accurately, ordinary waking consciousness is a product of psychological disassociation (actually the disassociation of the three faculties of perception of the world outside).  Its reversal requires the re-association of two of those faculties, at least.  The result is a degree of real consciousness.

The first rule of this consciousness is that it is intentional.  You can decide for consciousness and against illusion - for a brief while, not for life, of course.  The second rule is that to effect the decision requires an act of attention.  It is the effort of attention which associates by stilling the hitherto mechanical - that is, involuntary and uncontrolled - operation of the mind.

‘What good is illusion?’

Which illusion?  The illusion of the image held before the longing gaze of the Nazi novitiate?  No, you have moved on to the role (and fitness) of illusion in the operation of the mind.  But you know that we have already discussed this in regard to Blackmore and the non-existence of the self, only then I was pressing the case for illusion.

I don’t think we disagree on that, Desmond.


27

Posted by PF on Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:03 | #

The comedy of the human condition lies precisely in our perpetual misapprehension as to how little and how much the natural life really requires of us.

You just spit gold 24/7 dontcha GW?

By my reckoning such a man has, at best, no sense of the size and number of rooms in his mansion or that we humans can occupy more than one of them at any given time, and at worst he is a psychopath.

Is there a fixed number of rooms? What is it?


28

Posted by Lurker on Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:26 | #

The way I see it those tourists who saved drowning Africans did the right thing.

That the Spanish state then failed utterly to do its duty to the Spanish people, Europe and whites in general, namely patch them up and then dump them back where they originally came from is not a part of the equation the tourists can have been party to.

Our problem is not saving drowning Africans, its where they end up having not drowned.


29

Posted by Wandrin on Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:51 | #

These solutions are not radical enough, they don’t find the ground of our Being, which is the genetic endowment bequeathed to us by our ancestors (and perhaps God before them).  This is not about ‘materialism,’ it is about primordial autochthony.

Naturally empathic people can feel that. I think a lot of the (genuine) priest vocations people have felt down the centuries have come from it. I think it’s the root of “do unto others as you would be done by” and “what you do unto the least of my brothers you do unto me.” The natural reaction is to believe that feeling comes from God and maybe it does or maybe it’s the blood god.


30

Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:10 | #

It seems clear to me that the proper conception of a “value-theory” of consciousness, or what have you, is a quantified calculation of that thing’s marginal utility for increasing or decreasing EGI.  The more a thing tends to increase EGI, the more it ‘ought’ to be valued; the more a thing tends to decrease EGI, the less it ‘ought’ to be valued (this includes individuals as well as states of mind).  Otherwise, one is merely guilty of propounding one’s preferred humanism - producing a “philosophy” which rationalizes the remaking of the world according to what one wishes the world to be; whether that be Bowery’s heroic rebirth of the rugged individual, GW’s Victorianism transposed to a modern technological-industrial backdrop, or PF’s high-class hedonism for the literati set within a racially homogeneous context (because niggers are a buzz-kill [yes, that’s true]).


31

Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:47 | #

Or I suppose a general philosophic framework could be developed which tends to channel the competing humanisms of individuals towards the maximization of EGI.  But then we are still left with the clear fact that these competing humanisms could be empirically studied and statistically mapped as to which would tend to maximize EGI as above the others within given contexts, i.e., determine their marginal utility for maximizing EGI.  Now, I’m sure most, including most of those here, would be willing to sacrifice the greatest possible maximization of EGI if the implementation of their preferred humanism required it, assuming this increase of EGI did not fall below a certain threshold consistent with their personal tolerance threshold for loss of EGI (that personal tolerance threshold could also be studied empirically and hence statistically mapped as relates to individuals).  In other words, most individuals would be will to compromise a full-throated pursuit of their ultimate interest in favor of their proximate interests - up to a point.


32

Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:09 | #

maximization of EGI x prefered mode of civilization for a given individual = racialist theory of value for that given individual

This also answers the Jewish Question and the Mud Question for a given individual in that anything from the Linderian solution to total miscegenation under Jewish hegemony could be pursued according to the above.


33

Posted by Wandrin on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:46 | #

maximization of EGI x prefered mode of civilization for a given individual = racialist theory of value for that given individual

General theory of relatedivity.


34

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:48 | #

CC,

It seems clear to me that the proper conception of a “value-theory” of consciousness, or what have you, is a quantified calculation of that thing’s marginal utility for increasing or decreasing EGI.  The more a thing tends to increase EGI, the more it ‘ought’ to be valued; the more a thing tends to decrease EGI, the less it ‘ought’ to be valued (this includes individuals as well as states of mind).

Fair enough.  Consciousness is a utility ... it’s value is its utility.  To be precise, consciousness’s utility as an evolved system should just be the fullness and accuracy with which it cognises the state of “the thing that is” beyond the organism.  PF recently sent me a paper which proposed how the work of cognition might be done at the molecular level.  The proposal was for a continuous time-based comparison on which potential reward would be calculated, not a hundred million miles away from the principle at work here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1285652/Mystery-sharks-astonishing-sense-smell-solved.html

This, however, presupposes that the system also fully and accurately cognises the interests of the subject to whom the reward appends and, indeed, the subject itself.  If the reference points of the calculating mechanisms are flawed, the reward may be incorrectly calculated or it may be the wrong reward that is sought, and maladaptive choices will follow.

We happen to be living through a time when there is so much artifice, misdirection (culture war), social dislocation and other trauma that this is more likely than not.  It cannot be fixed by anything less than a total change of the water in the fishbowl.

Otherwise, one is merely guilty of propounding one’s preferred humanism - producing a “philosophy” which rationalizes the remaking of the world according to what one wishes the world to be; whether that be Bowery’s heroic rebirth of the rugged individual, GW’s Victorianism transposed to a modern technological-industrial backdrop, or PF’s high-class hedonism for the literati set within a racially homogeneous context

If and when the quality of truths become clearer you might retire a little of your present hostility.

Or I suppose a general philosophic framework could be developed which tends to channel the competing humanisms of individuals towards the maximization of EGI. But then we are still left with the clear fact that these competing humanisms could be empirically studied and statistically mapped as to which would tend to maximize EGI as above the others within given contexts, i.e., determine their marginal utility for maximizing EGI.

What do you mean by “humanism” but a way to pigeon-hole thinking deeper than the anti-human ideology of the Third Reich?

Philosophy, if it is true, doesn’t happen in the manner you describe.  It cannot be “developed” to join stuff up and get a certain desired end-product, like welding a stock-car together.  It has to grow out of the earth and trail where it may, according to its own truths.  There is a reasonable likelihood that an ontological nationalism will do what we desire because it follows nature.  We believe it will.  But today we are blind to its end-product.  It is its truths that energise us.

In other words, most individuals would be will to compromise a full-throated pursuit of their ultimate interest in favor of their proximate interests - up to a point.

You’re right.  Let’s annex Poland and bomb Rotterdam.  We could be dipping our toes in the Pas de Calais within days.

Don’t you think it might be a good idea to be a little less Hitlerian and a little more German?

maximization of EGI x prefered mode of civilization for a given individual = racialist theory of value for that given individual

I think I’ll pass on that one.


35

Posted by PF on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:44 | #

CC wrote:

PF’s high-class hedonism for the literati set within a racially homogeneous context

...just let me finish licking the last remnants of jello-vodka shooter out of the navel of my playwright girlfriend and I’ll get right back to proving how you have misunderstood me…

Safranski wrote (from the above post):

The Marburg students who, parodying Heidegger, said: “I am determined, but I don’t know what for,” had perfectly understood Heidegger’s decisionism and yet misunderstood it. They had understood it in the sense that Heidegger really supported determination without reference to the content or values that one would have to decide about. They had misunderstood him in expecting from his philosophy such directives or signposts. Heidegger expressly wants to disappoint such expectations as belonging to the inauthentic way of philosophizing. Philosophy is not a moral inquiry office; it is, at least for Heidegger, the task of removing and deconstructing presumed ethical objectivities. What is left after this task is truly nothing - measured against the rich tradition of ethical thought.

So, CC, you might be asking philosophy to direct your private life - and that of others - in a way that philosophy has already understood it cannot legitimately do. There is no map about how to become great, no thinking that is going to intercede and give you a clear, certain map towards an end-goal. This has to be painstakingly and personally carved out of life with no hope of certainty, and in a way unique to each man.

I was going to write something about how lower-class people don’t understand playfulness. They only understand imperatives. If they see playfulness exhibited in the upper echelons, they assume it is the absence of imperatives, which is read as an imperative to nihilism. Everything coming from below is the search for an imperative, the unwillingness to command oneself and the desire to be commanded from outside. There is no understanding of the fact that you can use imperatives to structure the basic functions of your life (e.g. no drug use, etc.) and then shift the modality to playfulness (self-directed enjoyment of things). This is because, I imagine, they inherited reactivity and tendency-to-react and simply dont understand what it would take to leave this way of thinking behind and become one’s own man.

There is, instead, this perpetual, grizzled self-consolation that one is doing what is required by necessity. But this is a comforting illusion only, because as Nietzsche said, necessity is an illusion, and there is no necessity that we continue on living. It is a choice which we interpret as necessity. We could also choose to see it as playing a game. Grizzled seriousness is a modality, playfulness is another one, truly having the freedom to choose, there is no real question about which one would be selected in most cases. What you are trying to back-interpret through your filters of imperatives is (1) the philosophy that acknowledges that life is bigger than imperatives and includes both modalities as ways-of-seeing and still more beyond these, and (2) the anecdotes used by individual philosophers to explain this philosophy, which philosophers have the power to choose between modalities. “Hedonism” is the 3D lizard’s footprint upon the plane in which the 2D lizard’s existence is bound.


36

Posted by Rod Cameron on Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:22 | #

PF
Philosophy, he then said, only begins when we have the courage to “let nothingness encounter us.” Eye to eye with nothing, we then observe not only that we are “something” real, but also that we are creative creatures, capable of letting something emerge from nothing. The decisive point is that man can experience himself as the place where nothing becomes something and something becomes nothing.

—Mysticism and I have a positive attitude to mysticism. However, note that creativeness is suddenly part of the story. Does creativeness cling to Being? Does creativeness identify the individual by race? i.e. this person belongs to a creative race. Hence, Being has a racial hue?

This ideal of Dasein, to begin with, is negatively defined. Dasein is authentic when it has the courage to base itself on itself and not rely on Hegel’s so-called substantial morality of state, society, or public morals [editor: or racial morals?]; when it can dispense with the unburdening offers on the part of the world of They; when it finds the strength to bring itself back from “being lost”; when it no longer toys with the thousand possibilities existing but instead seizes the possibility that one is oneself.

What has happened to the idea that man is a social being, hence his identity is irrevocably social because it depends upon society to exist?

Philosophy is not a moral inquiry office; it is, at least for Heidegger, the task of removing and deconstructing presumed ethical objectivities. What is left after this task is truly nothing - measured against the rich tradition of ethical thought.

Not so fast, you have not dismissed Hegel.

Heidegger did not have a theory of mind to account for what he was interfacing with - at least none that I have seen.

A theory of Mind would connect Being to the ground of Being, Correct?

Dasein
I think your example of English children playing football was an excellent example of the national Being revealing itself.

Where is this?

Dasein
Knowledge of what expressions of our national Being are real (are us) can be informed by our understanding the ground from which it arises- our shared genetics.

Surely it is our shared history, i.e. Being-Time? Likewise the ground of Being is due to history, not genetics?



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