Is it really the case that philosophers are abusing language? Or are they pointing out the questionable assumptions used to create our language games? — Marchesk

IMO, you are correct here. A problem is only pseudo from the perspective of a later stage in the critical conversation. The danger in 'language on holiday' talk is that it can be its own 'language on holiday' for an anti-intellectualism that wants to (mis-)take itself as critical.

This is what annoyed Gellner so much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner We can obviously also criticize Gellner, but I empathize with his frustration.

I like Rorty's use of Kuhn's abnormal/normal distinction. Successful philosophical revolutions are always 'abuses of language' that become the new norm. To fend off (all) 'abuses of language' is to fend of new philosophy, which is to say philosophy itself.

Did skepticism originate with misuse of the Greek term for doubt? No, it arose because of illusions, hallucinations, dreams, madness, perceptual relativity, sophistry and what not. — Marchesk

I also think of the skeptic as belonging to a pluralistic culture like our own. They can see what is attractive and problematic in many different perspectives. I also think of the skeptic as a lover of ideas who doesn't want to harden into a dogmatist.

To me a better also Wittgensteinian 'attack' on skepticism is on its own terms, for not being skeptical enough, for taking its very language for granted.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything.
...
At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
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We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
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To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.
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Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.
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Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
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A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. — Witt

I picked some quotes as reminders for the particular purpose of suggesting that we don't read Wittgenstein as an anti-intellectual quasi-pragmatist.

But Lazerowitz's explanation is a bit more interesting – he holds that here the philosopher has a desire for the world to be some way, and expresses this desire, typically secretly and unconsciously, by holding metaphysical views. — Snakes Alive

While I do like to criticize metaphysics myself, I'd say that Laze is one more metaphysician, however much he hates the term. He's got one more conspiracy theory, built on a folk-psychoanalysis that he forgets to apply to himself it seems. (To be clear, I too am being 'one more metaphysician here. But, Klein bottle that I am, I (this role held at a distance) 'know' that I'm the system trying to climb out of itself. Laze dreams of already being outside. But you and Laze (seems to me) need metaphysics, if only as a foil. And traditional metaphysicians (where you can still find them) need you and Laze. Then I need that 'false opposition' as my foil. Then I need myself 10 minutes ago as this moment's foil. I suspect that the sincere anti-metaphysician (or anti-philosopher or whatever new terminology-magic you like) just didn't come to this little party we're having.

because if even the sense of the expressions are unclear, one can always deny or affirm a claim, by construing the words in a certain way or marshaling and endless array of supplementary hypotheses or hermeneutic and argumentative techniques, themselves undetermined or underdetermined for meaning. In other words, conversations about such metaphysical sentences are in principle endless, because they have in principle no way of being resolved, because their structure, despite being grammatically like a claim with coherent (if sometimes vague or ambiguous) truth conditions, do not have any such that the speakers can converge on. — Snakes Alive

True, and it applies IMO also to Laze and his meta-metaphysics.

He can, like the sophists, 'talk about anything,' and indeed 'argue for anything' – so perhaps he can 'make anything true.' This does not work of course, and the philosopher consciously may know this. But the process itself is so intoxicating that it pulls us in pre-rationally. And it may even service deeper desires – for instance, if I fear change, the mantra that 'time is unreal' may comfort me, because that means change is unreal, and so change cannot hurt me. — Snakes Alive

'Time is unreal' may comfort me. 'Metaphysics is all just confusion' may also comfort me. My main gripe is that Laze is lazy in being insufficiently suspicious of himself. That his targets can lie to themselves implies that reality is mediated, that there's a distance between the subject and the world. The metaphysicians are trapped in the Matrix, and Laze is a red-pilling Morpheus. (If I use a pop-culture metaphor, it's because Laze's idea is pop-simple.)

(The show was this feet sleep.)

Yes, I agree, it is almost as if a big part of the battle is internal. If I didn't know better, I'd swear it was the 'little ego' trying to stave off the larger self..... — Pantagruel

I'd just about swear the same thing. That 'little ego' is like the kernel of various ideologies that are superficially opposed. I went from Derrida to Saussure, and so much that I like in Derrida was already there in Saussure, albeit more ambivalently. The system of differences without positive elements is pretty mind-blowing, and it helped me see Wittgenstein in a new way. I hope you like Culler's book as much as I did, and it's great you found a pdf.

Sounds like that could be turned into a metaphor. — Marchesk

Yeah, I was hoping to hint at that. 'Literal' is a dead metaphor. To be literal is just to stare at the letter, but the letter is itself a string of metaphors that are more or less dead. 'Analogy is the core of cognition.' If that's true, then we can only approach analogy analogically.

There was a philosophy book on embodied cognition that made the claim all of western metaphysics was based on taking metaphors literally. I guess that's sort of a companion to the late Wittgenstein's approach. — Marchesk

I like the embodied cognition approach. And yeah I think (along with or from my influences) that metaphors cool and harden into a relative literality. The concept of the literal itself is a cooled metaphor. I went ahead and looked up 'concept' too: 'to take in and hold; become pregnant.'

The meaning does of course drift as the metaphor dies.

'Language on holiday' is fun. I imagine Language on the beach with a drink.

('Language on holiday' is language on holiday.)

The science of sociology has evolved more or less self-consciously to fill this niche, which is what I'm focusing on now.

Since the winter I've covered Marx, Weber, Mead, Habermas. I have some more purely cultural works lined up (Dewey, Habermas' political stuff), then I'm going to move on to sociology of linguistics and symbols (Saussure, Cassirer). — Pantagruel

I'm just now really looking outside of philosophy toward sociology for instance because I've grasped the theme of 'spirit' running through philosophy (as in connecting Wittgenstein to Hegel.) 'Spirit' is cultural software (or soft-where?) What kind of being does language have? How does 'the social' exist? It's historical. So what is history? A sequence of events or (more importantly) something alive in us now? In the very language we use (or are) to ask such a question? And how is our own investigation of this history dominated by that same history? We are cat chasing our own tail, and becoming aware of that is part of the chase.

Some philosophers are afraid of 'spirit' as too squishy. They wan't to construct an atemporal method for critical thinking, and they fend off insights that suggest the impossibility of such a project .
Others are keen on addressing spirit but angsty about how historical it seems to be. For them the method is a forgotten treasure, not a work still and perhaps endlessly in progress (both spirit and the talk of spirit, which is part of spirit.)

Also, Saussure is awesome. Culler's little book on him is great.

Till next time, my airlock brother...

That Hamlet was Claudius all along is a perfect outro, btw. I love that.

Searle, and Deasy, may be buffoons, but doing thought-laps around them doesn't change squat) — csalisbury

I think I agree with the analogy applied to real life. But on the level of art or poetry, that doing-laps-around is everything, which does make the game a little cruel and maybe petty.

This is also the problem of addiction in general: problem is (this kind of) thinking can justify itself as Poetry (it isn't) in a more convincing way than other addictions. — csalisbury

I do find it addictive, and I see why you don't like calling it poetry. Way back when I first started talking 'foolosophy' online I called it 'transcendental buffoonery.' (F. Schlegel) It's strangely both serious and ridiculous. I wonder what the real Socrates was all about. I'm tempted to think of it as a late kind of spirituality. I can joke that philosophy is poetry, but it's also a serious as a toilet. It does some necessary dirty work in my life. But doesn't poetry proper also play this 'religious' role?

Define addiction generally as: 'a defense against change' and you can go a long way in understanding why a certain kind of thought endlessly renews itself. — csalisbury

'Defense against change' is great, and it kind of paraphrases a critique of metaphysics (a flight from time and chance into eternal certainty, if only of the structure of things.) But of course this critique can fall in love with itself and become a bot. (So how I worked it back to the bot theme? Why do I repeat all of this about 'repetition repetition repetition' ?) So clearly I agree. I guess I'm just ambivalent. I get furiously invested in the game, add a couple of metaphors to the same old buffoonery toilet, and get disgusted with the repetitious addiction. Eventually I'll miss it, maybe after having read something that freshened it up just enough. And I can work all of this in, as I'm doing now. That's part of it. This is what I found so intoxicating in Kojeve/Hegel at first. The result included every bit of the engendering. The engendering was the result, simply grasped as a whole that included that final grasping as a whole (or really just a hole.)

Why does Ulysses (or Portrait of The Artist) work? Because Joyce doesn't edit out Stephen's earlier confusions, he works them into everything that comes after, as essential. — csalisbury

Yes, like that! 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' I keep quoting it because it's so rich, so Hegelian without the jargon.

I'd also love to hear what you make of the 'poison in the ear' as a metaphor for conspiracy theory in Hamlet. As the actor playing the ghost, Shakespeare poured poison in Hamlet's ear. That poison was the story of Hamlet's father being poisoned in the ear. And Shakespeare the author poured the poison of Hamlet in our ears. (We can also talk about 'like a whore, unpack my heart with words' and 'they are actions that a man might play.')

the scope is daunting to say the least. — creativesoul

It is indeed! I think the keyword for you might be correlation? Understood as relationship, it does make sense to me, given my holist leanings, that relationship is primary or elemental. Everything is determined by what it's not (meaning-wise) and of course we've talked about animals reacting to patterns in the environment with their own patterns. That's how I can try to feel my way into it. I like the idea of the world as lots of patterns entangled.

OK, that helps. And I very much agree. What's funny is that I am usually in a good place when I hang around this forum, largely because I have so much fun, which is not to say it's never difficult here, but mostly it's a blast. I usually withdraw because I'm neglecting work, neglecting my wife. In that world, away from my derriodicy, I do get down in the funk and the muck of life.

I am slow to make big decisions. I could be more economically secure by now. I have lived irresponsibly in that sense. Thrift is easy for me, but commitment is difficult.I do crave a simple life as the background of my dreaming....

A book's worth of thought and/or belief about three words that amount to a false equivalence? — creativesoul

I agree with Nietzsche that the whole game of philosophy is built on false equivalence. That's basically what a metaphor is.

Things like that bug me about certain philosophers. Bewitchment. — creativesoul

Note that bewitchment is a half-dead metaphor., as is bug. Defining oneself against bewitchment might also be bewitchment. Isn't that critical thinking's fantasy? To be the opposite of bewitched? But what's so bewitching about this opposite of being bewitched? And do I only ask this because I am afraid of being bewitched?

Do I seek the spectacle of others' bewitchment from a high place free of magic?

More seriously, it's Derrida examining a classic attack on philosophy by a dude who says it's all dead metaphors. Derrida thinks its more complicated than that, that metaphor functions metaphysically in the attack.

Generalizing, there's no automated sniff-test for 'language on holiday.' Which is an automated denial of the possible here and now that makes claims on a future, necessarily ironically when it remembers itself.

But that's just something the @path -bot would say.

This is why doing is so important. Without it, there is only the revolving door of opposed thoughts. Not swimming is not [not-swimming, which is of course more swimming.] Do you see what I mean? There is a trick and enchantment in thought, it's hard to see out of. — csalisbury

I'm not sure I feel what you mean. Is it more than being immersed in washing the dishes, chopping carrots, a walk in nice weather?

Sure, but we both know, I imagine, that womanizing is itself an addiction. It is a mark of desirability, for sure, but it is not an entry into a Ledger of those who succeeded. It is only a victory against being non-desirable, and anything like that will become a compulsion, so long as what-it's-a-victory-against haunts — csalisbury

This is a great point. I should have been careful about mentioning the womanizing. I tried to do some of that myself once in long gone days, and there's still a crooked little envy in me for that kind of life. For me it was relatively squalid. I was (for instance) a sandwhich artist, and the girls (tho cute) were also alienated young adults. Derrida got the glamour version of that, and his wife tolerated it, and many thought he was a genius. It's the nerdy version of the rock star fantasy. I know from his bio tho that he suffered terribly at times from depression. He seems definitely to have been haunted. As far as lives go, I still think he was luckier than most. But everyone suffers, and it's likely that wiser if note cleverer people have lived happier, quieter lives in obscurity.

I would like to take the chiding out of it, if possible. When I'm talking about doing, I don't mean it in an accusatory way. I mean it in a universal way : here's the problem, the way through is doing. I mean it 'beyond good and evil' or any moralizing. Like, 'I think I see a snare here, and I think this is the way out of it.'

Most simply said, something like: 'As someone who himself rarely did, this is how I've been thinking about this lately, and, having done a little doing, I think it's true. I would like to pass it on, because I think it can help, but I still find myself relying on long-worn ways of talking which I can see coming off as chiding, though that's not my intent. — csalisbury

I didn't mean to imply that you meant it that way. I was somewhat just stilll responding to Cic above and also to real life circumstances (the real world moment and my place in it.) Anyway, I am a good target for that comment, because I do largely experience the world as a spectacle. Part of my job is teaching, so even that is more talking about technical ways of seeing the world as a spectacle.

Half-dead metaphor, kind of a metaphor in itself. Rivers with mouths is a good example. — Marchesk

Thanks. I'm fascinated by 'philosophy is metaphors' as a metaphor that uses 'metaphor' (itself a dead metaphor) metaphysically. Derrida's essay 'The White Mythology' obsesses over this. To me this is part of the theme of us not being able to get out of metaphysics, where 'metaphysics' is used metaphorically.

My cat is literally pushing books off my shelf at the moment.

To continue the ongoing conceit: Derrida is Hamlet pre Sea-Journey (Or Stephen at the beginning of Ulysses, walking along a beach spinning endless fine thoughts, while still bowing his head to Deasy and Buck Mulligan). Something has to be done, thinking won't do it. — csalisbury

On an applied existential level, I think I agree, sort of. (But) The real Derrida was a globe-trotting womanizer, famous enough to create a backlash, basically a wildly successful poet, a lovable more user-friendly Nietzsche for nice, respectable people.

To me Buck would be like some doctor on the front lines of the pandemic. He's not up his own ass. Chances are he can't keep up with Stephen/Hamlet at their verbal game, but he enacts a different stance on life, which he can also articulate in terms of 'irresponsible' or 'onanistic.' Or I think of the activist chiding the navel-gazer awash in his privilege. Do something, you lazy, selfish poet! To be clear, I do wrestle occasionally with the image of Buck. I'd probably feel more guilty if I didn't have the convenient excuse of a background of poverty. 'I ain't no senator's son, or nephew, or distant cousin.' But this poverty excuse connects to the slave ideology of the skeptic. Artists are pregnant women. Are intellectuals in general a little worried about getting their precious brains beat out in the streets? You comments on Zizek are fascinating, and that's where I'm coming from. How serious is Zizek?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-gK-CzCHug

I fucking love this video. Isn't he just telling the truth as a joke? It's more complicated than that, because he's aware of it, but...?

I don't know Nicholas of Cusa (besides a few quick references in other books), and I don't mind negative theology, so I'd be curious to hear more. — csalisbury

I tried to find the quote (read it once in an anthology), but the idea is that being is like vision itself while beings are what are seen. I relate this to pointing at what is 'here' and 'now.' Or it's what language is about. Feuerbach might gesture at sensation, tho 'sensation' is caught in the sign-system. Being is the beetle in the box, the one the system of beetle-talk can in some sense do without. Or it depends on no particular beetle. Clearly something like desire drives human history.

I feel like what keeps happening is something like this: There is one pole and there is another pole One thing that can happen is this: The latter is seen as somehow pure, and what we want to get at, and defend against the suggestion that it, the latter, is just a species of the former. AI is not dasein.

Then there is the derridean approach: Both things are impossibly tangled up in one another, and the neat separation is something that is grounded in their entanglement, their entanglement is the condition of the separation. In reality, it's a play all the way down.

Both systems of thinking are operative, but blip on and off, depending on the situation. They flow into one another, and it's not always clear exactly what part is speaking. — csalisbury

That desc. of the derridean approach is great! I also like the sketch of the quest for the pure. On dasein issue, maybe we can clarify which aspect we have in mind. For many, a 'genuine' AI would know that it is there. It can't just say that it is there. That's too easy. Or maybe we should ask less. Can AI ever feel pain? It's pain or redness inasmuch as these exceed our talk about them, what 'sensation' and 'emotion' try to point at, without that pain-outside-language being able to anchor the sign, as Wittgenstein saw, at least not on an individual level.

This part of our AI talk connects with the panpsychism issue. Can silicon feel? The other part (concerned with bot-speak or idle-talk) is IMV more about metaphysics trying to crawl out of itself. The two meet up here perhaps. What, if anything, grounds or anchors the sign-system? Sensation are emotion are there. (They are what we articulate.)

I think what's happening is thought (a particular kind of thought) is trying to get out of thought by thinking (a particular kind of thinking.) At the limit, you can even know this, but still helplessly do it (this is where you get into stuff like using the term 'being' but crossing it out and all that) — csalisbury

Right. For me it's important tho that this can become a kind of play. Our helplessness becomes infinite jest.

You have to do something irl which is always casually textured and non-binary, wouldn't even think to draw attention to it, (what would it mean to learn to swim in a binary way? What would it mean to intentionally swim in a way that draws attention to itself as nonbinary swimming?) And then you can look back at these thought-patterns as all just part of it, not to be rejected, but not to be taken as seriously as they took themselves. They were one thing you did among others. — csalisbury

Right. I agree. And we can mention binary thinking versus non-binary thinking, which is of course more binary thinking.

I'm very aware of what it means to be thrown. I'm also painfully aware of what it takes to shed such 'bedrock belief'. — creativesoul

Fair enough. It might help to articulate where I'm coming from by distinguishing to aspects of being thrown. The first aspect (which maybe you thought I had in mind) was being born poor, being born rich, being born in a cult, being born male, etc. These are powerful ways of being thrown, but they are, for better or worse, the kind of being thrown that we are always talking about. As a culture, we are even obsessed with this 'existential' version or aspect of being thrown.

But I'm mostly more interested in a more subtle kind of 'epistemological' being-thrown. It's the stuff we take for granted as we concentrate on our worldly circumstances. It's the language we inherit with its thousands of half-dead metaphors (rivers with mouths.) It's the philosophical tradition --not the part that we are consciously questioning but the part we are unconsciously using to consciously question.

This is 'the past that leaps ahead.,' the part of it that we do not see. It's the picture that dominates from the outside. It's the transparent glass that keeps the flies in the bottle.

For me Heidegger is most interesting in this second sense, and I like to filter out the existential stuff as Dreyfus does when I think of him.

I've argued against Witt's notion of "The limits of my language is the limits of my world", as well as other misguided notions that are the inevitable result of placing too much importance upon the role of language in human thought and belief, as a result of working from an utterly inadequate criterion for what counts as thought and belief. — creativesoul

I do want to hear more about that. Perhaps you'll agree, though, that maybe there will be no perfectly adequate criterion, since we don't legislate the language of the future. These tokens 'thought' and 'belief' can always be (and always are) recontextulized, drifting into new roles. And do either of us cling to some notion of 'belief-in-itself', 'thought-in-itself'?

Perhaps..

However, if there are a plurality of different methods all of which are capable of showing us a bit of how language acquisition affects/effects us, ought we not learn to use as many as we can, so as to creep closer towards sufficiency/adequacy? — creativesoul

Absolutely, and that's why I try to read and synthesize insights from lots of thinkers.

I'm not at all allergic to Heiddy's philosophy. Unfortunately though, the most insightful piece of work 'from him' is the dialogue in the beginning of On The Way To Language between him and the Japanese philosopher regarding that which goes unspoken... — creativesoul

That sounds good. I might get around to that. I'm not currently in a Heidegger phase, tho I can't resist jumping into a good Heidegger thread.

If you want some REAL insight into Witt, find a copy of the Cambridge letters... — creativesoul

I have that one. It's good. But I think (biasedly, of course) that I am on the right track with Witt, or at least that my creative misreading is a good one.

That goes without being said... with me. We can delve into such though. It is quite germane to 'bedrock belief', of the linguistic variety anyway.... — creativesoul

That's why your objection to talk of being thrown is strange to me. You included in your quote of me 'that we never start from a clean slate.' That's more or less exactly what it means to be thrown. In any of our thinking about thinking, we are using an inherited vocab and tradition. Part of thinking about thinking is realizing this, and this is where earnest linguistic philosophy becomes ironic or highly suspicious of itself.

I still suggest that read. As I mentioned, the method for questioning one's own adopted belief system holds good regardless of individual particulars. — creativesoul

My point is (necessarily approximately ) that any such method is insufficiently critical. To pick up that method and use it is to pick up traces in order to liberate one from traces. The idea that it 'holds good' apart from individual particulars makes it a kind of anonymous machine.

I'm not denying it's a good book. I even looked at it many years ago. I also read Russell's History of Philosophy, which is so stupid about Nietzsche and Hegel (if memory serves) that I find it hard (but not impossible) to take him seriously. I did read Monk's bio on him, though, just last year. Like all of us he was a creature of his time, trapped in its issues and vocab.

Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian, is chock full of good suggestions for how to go about questioning the worldview that one adopts... which subsumes the thrown-ness, and much of the other Heiddy notions you've grown fond of. — creativesoul

I'm sure Russel has some nice hints for the recovering Christian, and I could give his ghost some nice hints for the recovering insufficiently self-critical theory-of-knowledge guy. Maybe I can use a different metaphor, since you might be allergic to metaphors stolen from Heidegger. I don't think that critical thinking can be 'automated.' Any attempt to construct such a 'machine' ends up taking the 'vocabulary' used in its construction mostly for granted. This 'automated critical thinking' is a metaphor for a certain kind of earnest metaphysics. I include earnest linguistic philosophy in this metaphor.

Such earnestness is threatened by an awareness of how 'historical' language is, that we never start with a clean state, that we have only inherited traces with which to (try to) transcend inheritance and install this critical thinking machine which requires no maintenance.

Here's an anthology of Wittgenstein quotes that run parallel to talk about being 'thrown.'

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
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The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.)
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I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.
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When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
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Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.
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We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.
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Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
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Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
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Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.
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Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language.
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So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound. — Wittgenstein

That's a great point, and I should say that I adore the TLP. I don't claim to have mastered it, but it's meant something to me.

I guess my comment is a slight dig at some I've argued with who just ignore the mystical charge in Wittgenstein and hate continentals as language on holiday. I'm looking at/for a kind of continuity in the long philosophical conversation. Is anything truly fresh? Completely new under the sun?

At least he said "god" and not "fuhrer" that time. It's likely they're the same, to him, however. — Ciceronianus the White

I'm no expert on the later Heidegger, but I think that he had a new 'sending of being' in mind. I think he saw us (in this stage) as control freaks. Our need to control was out of control. Can we get our need to control under control? This is like putting living in the moment on our to-do list. 'Only a god can save us' means that we are fucked unless somehow a new attitude can grip us so that we loosen our grip.

It reminds of an unnecessarily mystic expression of a pessimism that Rorty would occasionally voice. The passivity implied is questionable in its own way. Instead of marching to war, one just sits around and waits.

is generally an expression of self-love or self-involvement. A kind of onanism. — Ciceronianus the White

If intellectuals aren't political, they are onanistic. If they aren't sufficiently political, they are to that degree still onanistic. If they are too far left or right, they are guilty in the eyes of their opponents. There's a primacy of the political going on. 'Self-love and self-involvement' is right, but how is this neutrally evaluated? An activist can always tell you that you are not doing enough, that you are wallowing in your privilege, and they may be right. At the same time the activist may be insufficiently critical in a self-involved way to be doing the right thing. The worst are full of passionate intensity, but do the best lack all conviction?

The devil is in the details, and the negotiation in endless.

But Dewey is an example of a philosopher--a modern one, even--who might be said to have tried to make philosophy applicable to public affairs, society and education, without evoking the destiny of some nation, race or group of peoples, and fuhrers and gods, and without demeaning other nations, races or groups of people, and some others have as well, so perhaps it can be done. The Stoics too, given their view that we're social beings, each carrying a bit of an immanent deity within us. But I doubt musings regarding the Nothing and daisen, technophobia and visions of hearty peasants lovingly placing seeds in nature's bosom will result in any true change. — Ciceronianus the White

I like Dewey quite a bit, and Rorty, who turned me on to him. I agree that Heidegger is hard indeed to resuscitate for political use. But just the disaster of Heidegger is fascinating. It's a historical phenomenon that's worth making sense of, and Heidegger provides some of the tools for that. To me, reality is just that complex, that messy.

Here's a little more background on the 'enacted historical we' that runs like a thread through the philosophical conversation, which Hegel (among others) grasped as essentially historical.

These Yorck quotes remind me of the Hegelian criticism of Kant (which I will never master.)

That life is historical means that each person is always already outside his or her own individual “nature” and placed within the historical connection to predecessor- and successor-generations. For Yorck, living self-consciousness is, to use Hegel's fortuitous phrase, “the I that is we and the we that is I” (Hegel 1807, p. 140).
...
Transcendental philosophy reduces historical life to the merely “subjective,” which misses the genuine characteristic of Geist, spirit or mind, namely its real, historical extension and connection. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/

We also have Feuerbach on this:

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent. — link

Then there's Wittgenstein:

--But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — W

If we think only in signs (or can only claim to be thinking things only with signs), then thinking is not done by the individual person as individual person. That there is no private language is old news, but some of us don't like the mystic editorializing of those old newspapers. If one starts with the TLP and its scientistic form, however, and ends with homely reminders...we finally have ears to ear that we never had mouths to ourselves.

Ah, thank you for this analogy. Prepare ye the way of the Lord! — Ciceronianus the White

Heidegger explicitly called himself a theologian in a letter, so yeah! But this structure also haunts anti-religion. We see this in Stirner reading Feuerbach against Feuerbach. Any lingo can function metaphysically, spiritually, politically. The libertarian language of individual freedom can and is used in class war by the 'priests' of a ruling class. It seems to me that many lovers of Trump think of themselves as masters of suspicion as they wallow in conspiracy theory (the new opiate of the masses?)

I am not lumping you in with these guys, just offering an example of how just about any lingo can be subverted (such as the lingo of Marx by creeps like Stalin).

It's odd, isn't it, for a philosopher to be enamored by a thug, and thuggishness? I suspect this tells us something about him. The cerebral among us seem inclined to this kind of base attraction sometimes. Pound, Yeats and others were quite fond of Mussolini. — Ciceronianus the White

To me it's not so odd. There's a violence in philosophy as it questions dearly held assumptions. There's perhaps the same violence in authoritatively telling others how it is, how it should be. That strong intellectuals in the humanities are something like creative geniuses and not working in a giant lab on particle physics might also have something to do with this. The priest-artist-intellectual in touch with the grand truth, which only he gets right, is already a single self-important mouth, a dictator. (Pound, Yeats, others.)

Heidegger sneered in his early work at the idea of philosophers working together on a committee. He had pictures of Dostoevsky and Van Gogh in his office. He loved Kierkegaard. This cult of the genius seems connected to the cult of the dictator. 'We need a strong man (singular) to cut through all the red tape and confusion.' The little people don't have the guts. They just chatter or cluck like hens.

At the same time Heidegger's work points in the opposite direction. This willful self-present independent subject is itself bunk and confusion. He's just a whirlpool in inherited traces. But people often hate this more Derridean attitude as irresponsibly playful. Opposed to Hitlerian elitist priest-philosophy we have Feuerbachian socialism-humanism (in its modern forms) and outside of both to some degree the stoic and the skeptic. The stoic can of course be responsibly political, which is perhaps where you are. Be a stoic philosopher, but first/also be a decent citizen. I feel like the skeptic who tries to remind myself not to be too selfish, too detached.

"Ontologically, Da-sein is in principle different from everything objectively present and real. It's 'content' is NOT founded in the substantiality of a substance, but in the 'self-constancy' of the existing self whose being was conceived as care... Along with this, we must establish what possible ontological questions are to be directed toward the 'self', if it is neither substance nor subject."

So again, it seems like action instead of being is the foundation of the world for him. Very modern. Also sounds Buddhistic — Gregory

Does this help illuminate my Heidegger passage?: "All our reasonings concerning matters of fact are founded on a species of Analogy." Hume — Gregory

That all sounds more or less correct to me. Dasein is enacted. We bark and meow about substance and subject as if we meow what we are barking about, but it's all analogy, poetry. Metaphysicians forget that they are poetry-in-progress by taking dead metaphors literally, which is to say as not-metaphors. The notion of a purely literal cognition is part of a white or anemic mythology, a chest of old mystical coins with their inscriptions rubbed off. The literal is metaphor so dead that we've forgotten it ever breathed, that metaphors like breath are at the heart of systematic theologies. The most suspicious and scientistic epistemological machinery is sophistry that forgets its instituting metaphors. (If it's all just metaphors, wtf is a metaphor? A dead metaphor, a forgotten journey.)

I think that time is like saying "life" - it has to be presupposed. It's the background, like light. — Xtrix

That does seem right to me, so I guess I'm trying to fish more out of all of us. How is ti a background? To be thrown (speak only thru inherited traces, for one) is part of that.

Thrown and entangled, Dasein is initially and for the most part lost in what it takes care of.
...
Spirit does not fall into time, but factical existence 'falls,' in falling prey, out of primordial, authentic temporality. — Heidegger

from B&T II.VI

There are other great passages around there that I'm too lazy to type up, and I think you have Stambough's translation yourself.

To me this means falling into the past that leaps ahead as present-at-hand false necessity. Authentic temporality realizes its contingency, knows that it is thrown, and that history is not an object for the eye.
This 'false necessity' is IMV illustrated by taking over the vocab of the times in a 'blind' way as a ready-to-hand tool. It's the 'given' that makes us intelligible to one another. Part of this given is the vulgar concept of time as a sequence of nows, which obscures genuine historical time and our being thrown, being entangled. So 'being' is a vapor, but then all of the elemental words are vapors without force as we mostly just pass them back and forth as too obvious to be worth thinking about. I connect this to the Hegel quote about being stuck on the surface, taking master words like 'subject' for granted. I also connect it to the Wittgenstein quote: the 'beetle' plays know role. For practical purposes we need only adopt the conventions for immersed, worldly business. We don't know what we are talking about, and we fall into time by also not knowing that we don't know what we are talking about. We forget that we have forgotten.

My approach to this is connected to Heidegger's quotes of Yorck, and Yorck seems like a pre-Heidegger, a John-the-baptist for Heidegger.

There seem to be two questions here. First, how can one conceive the "subject matter" (Sachverhalt) of the human sciences, i.e., human, historical life, without reducing it to a natural thing? Second, is the theoretical approach and manner of knowing that prevails in the modern sciences appropriate for understanding its subject matter? For Dilthey, both questions about the human being -- as subject matter of knowledge and as knower -- unite in the philosophic question about what he calls the "connectedness of mental life" (p. 4). Yorck, however, possesses a keener awareness that the domain of the "historical" differs "generically" from that of other entities (p. 7). Heidegger clearly means to suggest that an adequate treatment of these questions about the human being requires the analysis of the "ontological characteristics" of Dasein in its "historicity" (p. 73). Such a consideration of "Dasein," taken as the "subject matter" of inquiry, will then also address the question of how human, historical life is to be apprehended theoretically, for the analytic works out the ways in which Dasein is "disclosed" to itself (through, for example, its own, pretheoretical "autonomous self-interpretation" [pp. 32-33]).
...
n the Concept of Time, the task of "understanding historicity" appears to be more central than it is in Being and Time. The account of "what time is" and the description of Dasein's "temporality" are presented as preparation for this problematic (pp. 2, 10). Accordingly, this text amplifies the importance of the insight into Dasein's historicity for our understanding of philosophy and science -- and that includes our understanding of the philosophic inquiry that is communicated in these texts. Heidegger thus praises Yorck for drawing the "ultimate conclusion" from "his insight into the historicity of Dasein" (p. 9). This conclusion is the need to "historicize philosophy," to, in other words, "understand philosophy as a manifestation of life" (p. 9). That Heidegger's own inquiry is historicized is confirmed later in Chapter 4: "If historicity co-determines Dasein's being, it follows that any investigation that aims to open this entity must be historical" (p. 81). — link

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-concept-of-time/

What I grok thru Braver's take on the later Heidegger ('sendings of being') is a kind of open-ended Hegelianism. For Braver we are thrown into 'impersonal conceptual schemes.' If this language is mentalisitc, that's maybe because Braver is trying to sell forbidden continental thinkers to analytics in a kind of bridge language. These 'schemes' are 'forms of life' are 'zeitgeists' are 'understandings of being.' Or it seems to me that this is the evolution of the same vague historicizing insight. 'Thinking' is profoundly social-historical, in a way that thinking can hardly overestimate.

Something like this seems like the core of Heidegger to me, along with the ready-to-hand mode of being and the lifeworld nexus of equipment (subconceptuality, enactedness).

there really isn't an "inner" world separated from an "outer" world. This is very hard for some people to accept, as is the subject/object dichotomy. We love our dualisms. — Xtrix

I think of our dualisms as useful practical tools that harden into metaphysical-strength concrete.

I think we might already agree on the following, but to zoom on on

One way I understand time (us) in Heidegger is in terms of inheritance. We just take metaphysically hardened dualisms for granted. That's just what philosophy is if we were first exposed to it that way. In the same way our weird parents are just parents-in-general until we widen our experience and look back.

I think that's why we are essentially historical beings. The past leaps ahead. It leaps ahead most dominantly when that leap is invisible. That we are projected on the future is intuitive for most people, I think. Living in the moment is even on our to-do list. To dwell on being thrown, though, is to suffer a threat to one's autonomy. There's the fantasy of being one's own father, being self-caused. Perhaps God is an impossible image of the unthrown thrower. Man is a futile passion to not be thrown, to be God. This is my attempt to corrupt Sartre toward Heidegger.

Anyway, I'd also like to hear what you have to say about time and about the question of being. As you know, I find it slippery and yet so adjacent to my concerns about meaning and what separates us from AI that could not be distinguished from a genuine mind, whatever we/those are.

The Hamlet of the beginning is a coward (you see a theme arising, cowardice has been on my mind a while now) and in his self-monologue he knows this, but when he talks to the court he's ironic and clever and can't be caught, above them all. Still, it's all meaningless until he goes on his journey, then comes back with the real ability to avenge and restore. Before that, it's all the narcissistic flourishes of someone convincing himself of his own superiority in order to avoid his father's charge. — csalisbury

Let me float this idea by you. Hamlet was wrestling with a conspiracy theory. He really wasn't sure if the ghost was legit. He could also question his motives for wanting to believe or not believe (including cowardice.) There's also the grief, feelings about mommy's new boyfriend, Ophelia. Working up the courage makes sense as part of this, but all the conspiracy theory out there these days just made me think of Hamlet. A fucking ghost tells him that the government is evil in a special way, poison in the ear. Did the ghost pour poison in Hamlet's ear? We know also that Shakespeare played the ghost, that he lost his only son named Hamnet when the boy was 11. You may know all this from Ulysses, in which Stephen gives his own conspiracy theory about Shakespeare.

This : "All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create" can become the final, deepest lesson that one rubs like rosary beads in order to delay creating. — csalisbury

I do feel that. For me it's tricky because riffing on what I got from Derrida and others pretty much is my poetry. We are recreating Plato on this forum, a bunch of voices colliding and improvising. It's not like academia. Some true weirdos can thrive here. Quality is uneven but new tones and styles are possible.

Maybe --- theres a beauty in that terrain, which is wistful and decadent and intricate, but I'm not totally sold on this, and something in Derrida seems, well, cowardly. — csalisbury

One of the easier ways for me to approach this is to think of my own temptation to look at the world from a distance, to remain endlessly uncommitted. I relate to Derrida quite a bit, and I think that he also experience his own proper name as a toe-tag. My name is what they call me. It's not my name, for I am Ulysses no one. I also think of Kojeve's skeptic, with skepticism as another slave ideology, an excuse not to fight. Of course it's easy to imagine rich skeptics too, making excuses not be kinder and more generous. Maybe this can be boiled down to the preciousness of the artist, which takes us back to Nietzsche? Am I special enough that others should be sacrificed for me or at least have to do the dirty work while I do these mirror games? (Is the artist a choose-a-priest in a pluralistic society?) I also think of Marx and Stirner. Marx was stronger and righter in almost every way, but there is some mystic gleam in Stirner, which Hegel knew and described and tamed into a respectable responsible system that the state could like. Is this at all what you have in mind?

I think the dasein vs AI debate (as in Dreyfus) functions primarily to draw out what is legitimately unique about dasein, and I think that's exactly right, I'm not on Polonius's side here. — csalisbury

I was thinking more about this and it's maybe the question of being. The beetle in the box is there.
Something 'is' behind the signs. But the signs can't grab it. The signs can't grab anything
It's a vapor? Does one awaken the question for the wrong reasons? Hard to tell. It's all caught up in sign-systems and politics, seems to me.

What is the difference if not this 'consciousness' or 'being'? Because if the planet-size computer can out-talk us eventually, it won't be clear. Your panpsychism is reasonable to me. It could genuinely become difficult to know for sure if our planet-size-AI is 'really' there. To defend ourselves against that thought we'd need to think that our biology is magical in some sense or get into some quantum woo. I don't know. It makes sense to me that 'being is not a being.' There's the metaphor of the light that makes things visible. Nicholas of Cusa was maybe saying something like this. It does get negative-theological. It's all so slippery that I'll just stop here.

If interested in Chomsky, Saussure is a good place to start, but ultimately one must come to wrestle with Chomsky's neurolinguistics. — Xtrix

'There are only differences without positive terms' connects for me with the beetle-in-the-box and something like a radical holism that for me connects to Heidegger. It was Derrida who lead to me Saussure. But I noticed that Saussure was not that interested in grammar. I have studied formal grammars in theoretical computer science, and we did cover CNF, but that's about it. Except, naturally, that I've enjoyed Chomsky's political ideas, mostly through videos.

That song was great. Thanks for sharing & no hard feelings.

There is nothing to do about it., we're gregarious. — David Mo

You have need be a little hypocritical to keep friends. — David Mo

I like your sense of humor!

I forgot this: I really liked the two final verses of Eliot that you include. — David Mo

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph — Eliot

They somewhat sum up what Derrida means to me. I know you don't like him (probably his style), but I can't help mentioning him, because I think he's deep beneath his gimmicks.

A relief among the quarrelsome tendency of the philosophy forums. — David Mo

What I like is a friendly, playful, creative quarrel. If we challenge one another in a spirit of respect (easier said than done) then we all end up better than when we started. This place can be truly amazing at its best.

--I like Jung. I think he's really good, actually. I haven't read him deeply, but I've read him. I get your qualification because he gets a bad rap, but I think that rap is misplaced. He's good. — csalisbury

Thanks for sticking up for him. I actually read quite a bit of him, and he was valuable to me. 'Whatever is unconscious is projected.' That one will stick with me forever. There are just so many thinkers who become uncool who nevertheless have their bright spots. I loved Spengler too. We can just raid them parts and not follow them where they went too far.

We're all trying to work something out, putting forward bold statements, like children, or like adults, to see how they withstand whatever, in order to grow. — csalisbury

I love it. Yes indeed. We've got to risk those tentacles. We can't curl up like worms.

But comparing the two isn't altogether fair, and I'd recommend checking out Heidegger's (4 volume) lectures on Nietzsche. — Xtrix

I have looked at it. I was quite gung-ho about Heidegger for awhile (he was my favorite), so I bought more books than I could get around to, checked too many out from the library. I'd dig around waiting for something to speak to me. Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity is one that really got me. The B&T terminology wasn't fixed yet. The translation was good too. I'm a poet at heart.

What I remember from H's N was that it was Heidegger's Nietzsche. For me Nietzsche (when not a little too close to Hitler with a higher IQ) was a cosmic clown, an ironic mystic. Maybe Heidegger read him more as the un-ironic mystic of eternal return. I could be way off. I do know that Nietzsche was very much my favorite in my crazy 20s, for both the right and the wrong reasons. I had to read Nietzsche against Nietzsche, his best self against his worst self, which Nietzsche himself was also doing, another Hamlet.

DETOUR
As far as Nietzsche's insanity, I find the brain disease most likely, then the syphilis. I don't think he had a 'spiritual' meltdown, tho I can't be sure. I just mention that because it's interesting. What happened to him? Even Ecce Homo has some good lines, but wtf? And in The Antichrist he even hits his mystical peak with his portrait of Jesus, creating a sect of mystical-ironical Christianity in passing even as he speaks against it. It reminds me of another favorite passage from Hegel's aesthetics. Both are like my 'mysticism.' Both are words that aim beyond words. Yet much the The Antichrist is ranting, far beneath the beautiful Jesus-shadow of the antichrist.

We might ask how the Hitlerian streaks in Nietzsche affected Heidegger. By Hitlerian I mean basically the credo that war is god, which is perhaps Heraclitian too. This ties into csal's & my point about the tenderness of the nihilist who yet identifies with a dark tormenting god. I was that kind of dude. When god died, I replaced him with the meatgrinder, the amoral machine of nature that just did not give a fuck. This is what freaks people out about the scientific image of the world, I think, and most flee from it in the usual ways. But some of us mix a religion of dark truth in with the religion of the war god and the blind machine. I'm still somewhat attracted and attached to 'war is god,' though the better part of me knows better.

I think the dasein vs AI debate (as in Dreyfus) functions primarily to draw out what is legitimately unique about dasein, and I think that's exactly right, I'm not on Polonius's side here. I think it's important to understand what we are that AI is not. — csalisbury

I agree.

I understand Dreyfus to aim at symbolic AI especially. The 'connectionist' approach is actually working. The 'thoughts' are just huge boxes of floating point numbers.

So for me it's primarily about how AI mirrors our chatter or botspeak. Mostly we are quite predictable. A strong philosopher surprises us. But in his daily life he uses all the normal words correctly and automatically.

I would like to say that the ideal on here is leaving out that relationship, but that we can talk about the vicissitudes of those relationships, outside, but talk among other as equals. — csalisbury

Right. This is that Games People Play idea of adult-to-adult or peer-to-peer. And it can't (I don't think) be formalized. It's a dance, with a certain amount of sensitive and ultimately affectionate challenging.

I wasn't calling you out as shallow, — csalisbury

I guess I knew that. It was maybe compulsive confession on my part. Like I don't want to be perceived as thinking that I'm a scholar. I'm just an outsider artist, an amateur, yet I can't deny the hope that I drop some good metaphors. I need to believe (and mostly do) that I can play these cards.