Heidegger and historical purpose

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 16 December 2012 01:27.

James has introduced the concept of foundation from nowhere, based on something Husserl brought into his own work once and only fleetingly. I am not sure how central it really is to the Husserlian approach to Mind, consiousness, self, and the object . In any case, there was a certain immanent development (basically, authenticity of Dasein) in Heidegger which was not in Husserl’s (late and defensive) championing of reason and the transcendent ego, and which heads in the opposite direction to foundation. It is the exploration of this which would benefit James, as it has benefitted many others, and which explains, for example, why Heidegger is revolutionary today as well as why he was foundational to postmodernism during its revolutionary period of inception. To me at least, the Husserlian approach seems oddly dead and anthropological by contrast. I will try to explain this further.

Kant said that you cannot demonstrate being. But you can experience it, under certain psychological conditions. Otherwise you can only infer it, only gesture roughly in its presumed direction. Strictly speaking, Heidegger’s project in Being and Time was to explain why, in the West, our inferred sense of being is so different to the sense we think it should have, and which philosophers and spiritual leaders have told us for millenia that it can have. Heidegger used the phenomenological method to give an account of this “everydayness” ... the life that is ordinarily lived. But his essentially spiritual quest constituted a complete break with Husserl and a challenge to the study of Mind as pure function. As such, it was intimately wrapped up with the meaning for us all of a lived life in which Being was rarely consciously experienced, and in which the inference was everywhere employed without thought for qualitative distinctions. Where no such distinctions apply, the road is open to nihilism and destruction. Thus seven years later, in his lecture Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger made the following remarkable and much quoted statement:

This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organisation of the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like in any place you like, and at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes, then there still looms like a spectre over all this uproar the question: what for? - where to? - and what then?

The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength; the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline (which is meant in relation to the fate of Being) and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism - nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of anything creative and free has already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.

We lie in the pincers. Our people, as standing in the centre, suffers the most intense pressure - our people, the people richest in neighbours and therefore the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical people. We are sure of this vocation; but this people will gain a fate from its vocation only when it creates in itself a possibility of a resonance for this vocation, and grasps its tradition creatively. All this implies that this people, as an historical people, must transpose itself - and with it the history of the West - from the centre of their future happening into the originary realm of the powers of Being. Precisely if the great decision regarding Europe is not to go down the path of annihilation, precisely then can this decision come about only through the development of new, historically spiritual forces from the centre.

To ask: how does it stand with being? - this means nothing less than to repeat and retrieve the inception of our historical-spiritual Dasein, in order to transform it into the other inception. Such a thing is possible. It is, in fact, the definitive form of history, because it has its onset in a happening that grounds history. But an inception is not repeated when one shrinks back to it as something that once was, something that by now is familiar and is simply to be imitated, but rather when the inception is begun again more originally, with all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that a genuine inception brings with it.

This statement, with its percipience and its relevance to our circumstance today, as well as its interesting and clear rejection of conservatism (and the conservative revolutionary movement - then a powerful force in German intellectual life), is Heidegger’s revolutionary claim. For us, it is what is interesting in Heidegger, and what raises him above other exponents of phenomenology and other existentialists (Heidegger did not categorise his thought as existentialism). It contains the idea that Being itself is an historical actor, and a naturally creative force. We know this, to some extent. It is the common currency of race-realism, and of Rushtonian psychology, that an energy for the unfolding of human destiny inhabits the evolved Mind. It tells us that evolutionary time is an honest witness. What comes out of human populations in the grand historical context is true of them. However, Heidegger addresses the question of inception in an era of hiatus, telling us how this energy can be reclaimed and released. He gestures not to the analytical, ontologically speaking - he doesn’t analyse identity and say “this is precisely it” - but to a method of realisation. He is telling us how to light the burners.

This is why postmodernism was about methodologies, and why, ultimately, a nationalist ontology will have the same focus. Whatever intellectual rigour can be brought to bear is required here. Heidegger himself, pondering his own human being in his little cabin in the Black Forest, may have been too disinterested in rigour. There are aspects of his thinking which exhibit disinterest, for example, he was not interested in the material body, and he was not interested in evolutionary science. But rigour is servant not master. Clarity of purpose is master.

Tags: The Ontology Project

Comments:

Posted by DanielS on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 09:35 | #

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GW, well said, that articulated what for me had only been largely felt, where at all recognized, as a result of reading Heidegger.

I am frankly a little surprised but pleased that you make a point of noting that whatever foundational quest that Husserl may have sought was one from which Heidegger, at his best, had departed.

There are many things to be gained from Heidegger. Dasein (the anti Cartesian, there-being) as you note, and midtDasein (there-being amidst the class of one’s folk) as Michael O’Meara highlighted, are important notions.

As is the idea that thinking is more like poetry than science. His emphasis on slowness is a great help.

That the language comes into Being in writing.

That one must stand aside and let the words come. etc. .. many great ideas.

A pivotal moment for my thinking came through a piece of advice by Heidegger that one needs to situate themself in a historical, hermeneutic, perspective and process.

Setting out my own autobiography as such, my subjective perspective on social consciousness was formed in a tension between the hippie quest for being vs. the feminist quest for actualization.

.. with Blacks being similarly, antagonistically aligned against White male Being.

I was doing Heidegger in my first post, and I think it may be a bit underrated:

http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/re_evaluating_hierarchy_of_motives_optimized_for_the_white_class

I am not just setting out personalities, these were the proprietors of significant logics of action and meaning in that historical sequence. That has been confirmed by academics that I trust.

Nor is it an attempt to merely reconstruct what was…

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:16 | #

GW, when I speak of Rota as my “Rosetta Stone” I am presuming his high regard for Heidegger (indeed regarding Heidegger’s “as structure” to be the culmination of a major thread of all philosophy, subsuming Husserl’s briefly-mentioned notion of “founding”) was evidence I could rely on him to translate Heidegger into a language I could approach from the philosophical history of mathematical logic, in which I was profoundly interested. You had already expressed to me your objection to my “commitment to ground”, which I take (correct me if I’m wrong) to be the same as an objection to my interest in the notion of “founding”. My response was my disquisition on Rota’s account of the primacy of identity over the “folie” of existence, an account giving rise to Heidegger’s “as structure” to generalize Husserl’s “founding” into a “logical connective” on par with AND, OR, NOT, ∃ and ∀ in the predicate calculus—a structure in which that upon which one “founds” identity is considered as irrelevant as is the “facticity” of the manufacturer of your screen vs my screen in the identity of the meaning of these very words you are reading. However, it appears that relegating “ground” to mere “irrelevance” is insufficient to pique your interest in Rota’s high—perhaps even ultimate valuation of Heidegger’s “as structure”.

Perhaps Rota doesn’t really “get” Heidegger. And perhaps you don’t “get” Rota. In any event, without my Rosetta Stone I am stuck with my reading of Robert Sokolowski’s Husserlian bias in my phenomenological literacy and must do more direct reading of Heidegger. I would, however, ask that you do me the courtesy of at least trying to understand the relevance, or irrelevance, of Heidegger’s “as structure” since it does seem to be a point at which Rota sees Heidegger as preeminent over Husserl—going so far to say that Husserl would have objected to the extreme to which Heidegger went in it.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:17 | #

What precisely does the philosophical history of mathematical logic have to tell us about the visceral and embodied nature of life - let alone the politics of life, community and the projects of the family and nation which links past, present and future?

I hope it’s noted that Heidegger profoundly disliked the concept of America as an ideological superstructure - in much the say way Schmitt did.

P.S.

@Leon - I wasn’t really under the impression you wanted to kill me. It was joke. But as Danny pointed out the imprecise use of the term ‘the left’ as some sort of catch-all term of abuse is rather silly. There is much more to politics than the presently defined red and blue pill definitions served up by contemporary American parameters.

Equally, to pardon the pun, but many on the liberal right do profoundly believe in equality. The equality of individual rights to own one’s labour and the products of that labour, the equal right to accrue wealth and property, the equal right to certain legal norms being applied etc.

So when they (and you) rag on equality as a concept it does make me chuckle. It’s not that you don’t actually like some quite profound forms of equality you just don’t want your income taxed. Fair enough but bog-standard modern conservatism (right-liberalism) is certainly not high-minded politics in any shape or form.

Given Silver mentioned his name G.A. Cohen explores this idea of equality on the right - particularly the liberal right - in his book “Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality”. Incidentally Cohen was a political philosopher trained in the analytic tradition. In his introduction to his “Karl Marx’s Theory of History - A Defence” Cohen declares the Frankfurt School etc., as being ‘bullshit’ with his aim to produce a Marxian theory of history using the rigor of the analytical tradition. Thus he was a self-described ‘analytical Marxist’ or more colourfully a ‘non-bullshit’ Marxist. It’s an open question if he was successful or not. Butt he was no intellectual lightweight.

Another serious figure within the Marxist tradition - Perry Anderson - loathes the Frankfurt types and ‘cultural Marxism’ as it would be understood as as term at MR (perhaps even more than he loathes liberals and liberalism).

In fact the class element (or simply socio-economic factors if the ‘c word’ scares you all) of liberalism (of both right and left) is a sadly neglected topic. If time and energy allow I hope to take up this theme in the future. Liberalism as bourgeois class project.

For my own point of view I prefer the optic of the politics of homogeneity versus heterogeneity - economic distribution doesn’t escape this perspective.

OK that second part towards Leon was off-topic.

Please I’d like GW and Mr. Bowery to continue.

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:52 | #

GL asks: “What precisely does the philosophical history of mathematical logic have to tell us about the visceral and embodied nature of life - let alone the politics of life, community and the projects of the family and nation which links past, present and future?”

Read The New Science by Tom Etter for a synopsis of the project on which I embarked with him while at Hewlett Packard’s eSpeak project. Note that the date on this is just a few months before Gian-Carlo Rota’s death. We were putting together a formal presentation for Rota’s review “as” a Heideggerian. In order to get Tom hired I had to basically threaten to resign when I was told that instead of Tom I could hire all the H-1bs from India I wanted even though I knew, and claimed that Tom was possibly the only person in the world qualified for this work. It is from that work on Relation Arithmetic and Structure Theory, out of our work at HP, that the refocus on the primacy of identity in natural philosophy was emerging. The funding was short-lived but something was accomplished. Tom continued his work on the mathematics of identity for several years until age-related dementia set in. I’ve been piecing together the last few, partially complete, papers he wrote and my prior post on existence was a result.

I should also add that Tom incorporated the Husserlian notion of “absence” in what the synopsis “The New Science” mentions as “Structural Privacy”. Moreover this notion was mathematized. The resulting “structure theory” provided for hybrid quantum mechanical/classical phenomena that are necessary for “an intelligible and completely general account of the relationship between mind and matter”.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:11 | #

Totally off topic but one for UK based readers “A Very English Winter: the Unthanks” has just started on BBC 4.

Examination of English folk traditions etc., with regard to the winter. The Unthanks are sisters that sing traditional English folk songs particularly from the North-East of England.

But is it not a thought-crime on the BBC to suggest the ordinary people of the Isles had a set of cultural traditions all of their own - you know before the age of the multicult and all that exciting and enriching diversity?

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:56 | #

James,

The Google free-view of that chapter from Indiscrete Thoughts (3 senses of A is B in Heidegger) ends at precisely the wrong point: the mystery of the possibility of relationship. Of course, the problem that is often raised about Being-talk is precisely whether a relationship between the individual and the collective is possible. You made a link on your original Rota post to an essay I had written about identity, and I note that the final one of the 101 comments, by our erstwhile colleague PF:

http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/false_identity/#c87869

... kept pretty much within the frame of the individual, even when Americans were discussed. Within a year, I would say, PF was writing his valediction, telling us that insights into individual liberation could not be transferred to the coarse matter of the ethnic group. The principles simply did not survive the journey. I remember responding to that to the effect that the collective movement out of self-estrangement in modernity and towards the primordial “Is” is the same as the movement of the individual from relinquishment of the acquired to appropriation of “I”. It’s just that the range of movement is both greater and more precise in the latter, and, of course, vastly more intense.

This movement is the key to the possibility of the experience and expression of our truth of self becoming an active change-agent in the world, as per Heidegger’s comments from Introduction to Metaphysics. Such a thing, as the man said, is possible. To my mind, it is the only serious possibility we have in all the subject matter studied and advocated in WN, or I wouldn’t be talking about it so singularly now.

I cannot comment on Husserl’s conception of absence. It appears to be a concept appended to his philosophy of mathematics - a subject from which I withdrew my cooperation after my maths teacher at Secondary Modern hit me round the head one day for dreaming up the answers to my homework rather than calculating them. Dreaming may lack rigour but I don’t know where I would be without it.

Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 01:30 | #

GW, here is the remainder of that chapter starting where the Google free-view left off:

But what if we realized that the same mystery is the condition of possibility of all “relationships?” Then the mysteries would reduce to one single mystery, namely, the condition of possibility of “relationships.” But a universal mystery is no different from a universal law. Heidegger concludes with the discovery of the universal law of the as.

The universal as is given various names in Heidegger’s writings: It will be the primordial Nicht between beings and Being, the ontological (emphasis JAB) difference, the Beyond, the primordial es gibt, the Ereignis.

The discovery of the universal “as” is Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy.

Heidegger’s later thought in no way alters this discovery. He came to believe that the language of phenomenology, in which his middle writings are couched, was inadequate to his discovery. The later Heidegger wanted to recast his discovery in a non-objectivistic language, since the universal as lies beyond objectivity. The universal “as” is the surgence of sense in Man, the shepherd of Being.

The disclosure of the primordial “as” is the end of a search that began with Plato, followed a long route through Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Vico, Hegel, Dilthey and Husserl. This search comes to its conclusion with Heidegger.

Its hard for a man to make a more superlative statement of Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy than did Rota in that concluding sentence.

Posted by Vail on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:28 | #

GW,

You can download the full text of Indiscrete Thoughts here: http://bookfi.org/book/1158609

It is in DjVu, not PDF, format. You will need a DjVu viewer such as WinDjView to read it: http://download.cnet.com/WinDjView/3000-2248_4-10907418.html

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 06:14 | #

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The disclosure of the primordial “as” is the end of a search that began with Plato, followed a long route through Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Vico, Hegel, Dilthey and Husserl. This search comes to its conclusion with Heidegger.

Its hard for a man to make a more superlative statement of Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy than did Rota in that concluding sentence.

It makes sense that “as” would be the concrete-izng factor in the joinings of internal relation: the continental philosopher’s notion of internal relation was apparently influential on the American pragmatists as well as the later Wittgenstein - much sense can be made of him with it, looking at people and the world as internally linked almost like fractal technology.

...I am just a bit averse to saying this is “the” contribution of Heidegger, as if there is nothing else. I don’t know where Rota was coming from, but I think that computer technologists are a bit prone to try to isolate one factor: and that may be a good technique (techne) for operating on hard scientific matters, such as computers; but insufficiently complex for social considerations (praxis), which require prhonesis (practical judgment)*, as does Heidegger, in all likelihood.

I do fancy linking imagination to practical judgment as a result of these conversations between GW and Jim.

Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 07:20 | #

Rota was not a computer scientist but his commentary on computer and brain sciences and their relation to philosophy is as follows:

The great philosophers of our century have dealt with these problems with amazing foresight and unmatched philosophical rigor. We ignore their arguments only at the cost of painful repetition and embarrassing rediscovery. The once abstruse conclusions of Husserlian phenomenology, the exasperating counterexamples in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations will be vindicated by the demands of intellectual honesty of the computer scientist who has to make programs that work, and by the brain scientist’s search for a theory that will adequately fit his experimental data. The theme of our time is the improbable but inevitable marriage of philosophy and the new sciences of the mind.

Even in our days of constantly predicted revolutions, it is difficult not to be led to an optimistic conclusion. The new sciences of the computer and the brain will validate the philosopher’s theories. But what is more important, they will achieve a goal that philosophy has been unable to attain. They will deal the death stroke to the age-old prejudices that have beset the concept of mind.

<cite>Gian-Carlo Rota, chapter “Philosophy and Computer Science”, part “II. Philosophy: A Minority View” of his book “Indiscrete Thoughts”

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:12 | #

Vail,

Thanks, I downloaded DjVu. I will have a longer look at Rota’s material.

Posted by George_C on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:18 | #

What is the relationship between Heidegger and reductionism? Is Being ontologically fundamental, or is it a high-level object which can (in principle) be described as a physical configuration of quantum amplitudes?

Also, what is the relationship between Heidegger’s Being and patterns of gene frequencies? Is it possible to experience Being if one is ignorant of “genes”, or if one has yet to encounter a human being outside one’s immediate family?

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 17 Dec 2012 23:48 | #

George,

Is it ever possible to speak of human being without a mighty reduction. Is not language, by dint of its signatory function and grammatical structure, already incapable of holding the experience of human presence? Is not the matter entirely hopeless when the part of the brain which receives philosophical theory - intellect - cannot perceive anything at all except through thought-modelling in words (representation)?

Of course, Heidegger is reductionist. As thoughts in words, everything is reduced. The question then is not whether Heidegger presents an indivisible whole as parts but what else the human mind is supposed to do, frankly.

I can’t see that it matters. We do the best we can with the tools we have (we also have the tool of attention, incidentally - that great stiller of thought and all the noises of the machine, and revealer of the pathway).

As to what Being is, well, the notion of Ground certainly seems a natural assumption, not least because of the experience of annihilation of self which mystics report. But faith is a great meddler, always providing the same answer. It has a curtailing effect, and it’s sneaky too. It switches the game to justifying its prejudice, all the while parading itself as a principled actor. It compromises the Ground notion, and leaves me wondering whether, in fact, there is any non-faithist argument for Ground. You just can’t tell.

The notion of Being as anterior to Identity is more interesting to me, at least. We can say that its anterior status renders it a product or process of the organism, and possibly of Mind ... something belonging to the organism but never, I think, a quality of the organism. Personally I do not see Being as phenotype. I am interested in more coherent states of consciousness than ordinary waking consciousness, and I strongly suspect that Being (ie, a becoming present) is a dimension of such states rather than an object, however immediate, however interior, in the field of perception. I cannot segregate such consciousness from Being.

Incidentally, there is no conflict between Being as experience and being as the facticity of objects. There is a unity here, a single field. Which brings us back to those hopeless cases with a dob of red paint in the middle of their foreheads, sitting cross-legged for five decades in the sand-dunes of some Californian beach while their dratted, noisy mechanicity continues to whir away ...

Posted by DanielS on Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:04 | #

We can say that its anterior status renders it a product or process of the organism, and possibly of Mind

I strongly suspect that Being (ie, a becoming present)

We should prefer that the word Being correspond with organic function, yes; antecedent, pre-existent of consciousness.

That is, it ought to correspond with biology.

This will keep our inquiry properly oriented with what is natural, normal and of vital life force.

As for becoming present, that, to me, looks more like dasein – therebeing.

I can see internal relation to rocks, but I cannot see the point of ascribing being to them.

Rocks would be more like present at hand, if I recall my Heidegger language.

As I recall, Heidegger did use the word Being differently in different places, probably to be provocative – nevertheless, a bit stiff at times. It is not a certitude that we ought to feel beholden to his every word, anyway - e.g., “own-most guilt” comes across as quite the opposite of Being.

I guess that I am applying a bit of “ordinary language” philosophy.

Rather, asking what are people normally doing with the word, “being.”

In this case, I am satisfied with the answer: The ordinary use does not deny its elusiveness, its mystery, especially because it corresponds with the unconscious, pre conscious, pre existent structures. It does not deny its importance; nor does it reduce it to something altogether easy to pin down in words.

One of the best things about an ecological question, as a basic premise, is that it is always relevant and yet not subject to the recalcitrance of foundational reification.

Now, there is another extreme, as there are slower evolving, patterned structures which can and should be reliably be pointed to and counted on as they are profound; the pursuit of which would be quite unlike the facile recommendations of Wittgenstein – “philosophy is a mental illness that requires psychology.” …”Give the man a latter and then throw the latter away.” – blecch!

This is where Wittgenstein, even in his later incarnation, got cute: He turned Kant on his head, and advised, rather, that we not look toward principles, but look toward what is popular.

We ought to ask what ordinary people are doing in everyday episodes - as if they are infallible and are not importantly influenced by broader patterns and contextual force from above. To him, rather than look toward principles in the broad pattern, we ought to find use in episode

I have the impression that one day Wittgenstein attended the flag ceremony at Buckingham Palace and asked, what was useful about this episode originally? I guess the answer would have been that it was meant to rally Englishmen to their identification with the flag. To situate meaning in episode is fine and useful as one part of a process; but identification of principles of the broader patterns (e.g., of Englishness) as expressed, would be crucial on the other hand. The identification of these broader, reliable patterns as contextualization strikes me as central to the ontology project at MR. Correct me if I am wrong.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:20 | #

/.
Being: The predominantly embodied, self contained homeostasis of a creature.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:20 | #

We can say that its anterior status renders it a product or process of the organism, and possibly of Mind ... something belonging to the organism but never, I think, a quality of the organism.

It is unlikely it, if it exists, is a product of the organism (biological) unless of course the process of natural selection is denied. What would the incremental process be? What is the increment of being present? Presence is the state or fact of being present. There is no bridge from absence to presence.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:37 | #

Posted by Desmond Jones on December 19, 2012, 04:20 AM | #

We can say that its anterior status renders it a product or process of the organism, and possibly of Mind ... something belonging to the organism but never, I think, a quality of the organism.

Being is the biological process of the organism.

Therebeing would be the increment of being present; it is the bridge from the unconsciousness of Being to the consciousness of presence.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:13 | #

Desmond,

The incrementals are:

absence ← fracture ← ordinary waking consciousness ← mechanicity/attention → stillness → unity → presence

The bridge from absence to presence is, therefore, the stilling effect of a willed attention.

Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:42 | #

Although I might not agree I appreciate the most recent and succinct comments by GW and DanielS as attempts at “producing” a working ontology as an “output” of the philosophical process. As Rota warns us, philosophy’s rigor does not begin with such “definitions” and “axioms” of a working ontology—those are its end. However, to propose such succinct definitions (and axioms) is necessary even though they be “mere” propositions that may undergo radical revision or even be discarded as “wreckage”.

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