/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11157287]

Explain this man's thinking to me.

[Anonymous No.11157290]

Its kinda like if Kant got scared of tractors and decided being a nazi was the best way to deal with it.

[Anonymous No.11157293]

>dude weed lmao
>also fuck jews

[Anonymous No.11157339]

[Anonymous No.11157411]

Thanking, not thinking.

[Anonymous No.11157415]

>>11157290
accurate

[Anonymous No.11157428]

>>11157411
Not too bad.

[Anonymous No.11157429]

>>11157287
Western philosophy since Plato has divided the word into the essences of beings and the mere reflections of those essences that can be grasped through detached philosophical meditation. This is a colossal ontological error.

When we detach ourselves from the world and contemplate beings in the manner of Descartes, those beings become a bunch of atoms whirling around. But when we are concernfully engaged with beings (while building a house, for instance) the whole of those beings is avaliable to us through our senses (Heidegger is an empiricist), but we lack the language to talk about them.

So science is correct, but not true. That is, beings are not exhausted by the detached ontology of the platonic philosopher or the cartesian scientist. So the proper way to understand the world is to come up with new language to describe beings.

Thus, for Heidegger, the task of revealing truth shifts from the disinterested philosopher-scientist onto the poet, who furthers the ongoing process of world disclosure by revealing beings through language. So philosophy is dead.

Accordingly, Heidegger's work after Being and Time was to create a new kind of philosophy that sounded like poetry. It didn't work very well, in my opinion, but the concept of world disclosure is way ahead of its time and precipitates the contextualist movement in contemporary analytic philosophy.

[Anonymous No.11157441]

>>11157290
fpbp

[Anonymous No.11158103]

Well, you got being and you got time, put 'em together and shake 'em up and it's an existential cocktail but the real Dasein was the friends we made along the way.

[Anonymous No.11158154]

>>11157290

[Anonymous No.11158184]

>>11157429
>the concept of world disclosure is way ahead of its time and precipitates the contextualist movement in contemporary analytic philosophy.
I'm interested, please do go on.

[Anonymous No.11158191]

We have entered a world of sheer presence that reduces things to objects of calculation. Everything becomes equally indifferent and equally valid. Everything in our world turns into nothing but a stockpile or standing reserve. Everything is reduced to its utility. True enough, carpenters always build their tables for some purpose, just as farmers put their livestock in one place rather than another for a specific reason. But what happens in our own time is something far worse than this. Land is no longer respected in its own right, but is organized and arranged in a certain way in order to extract coal or metallic ore: land is reduced to a mining district. (As a left-wing Swiss activist once joked, land now exists in Zürich only to prevent banks from falling to the center of the earth and melting.) The Rhine is no longer the mysterious river written about in Hölderlin’s poems, since (as Heidegger hilariously puts it) the Rhine is now “a site on call for inspection by vacationers ordered there by the tourist industry.” Farming is no longer what it always was, but has become a mechanized nourishment business. Controversially, though predictably, Heidegger says that mechanized farming is essentially no different from the production of corpses in gas chambers, the blockading and starving of nations, or the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. It is true that some of these things are generally seen as efficient and useful, while others are viewed as inhumane monstrosities. But for Heidegger, the “essence” in all cases is the same. All of them reduce the things of the world to stockpiled presence-at-hand, just as the history of philosophy since ancient Greece has reduced the world to presence. The damnable atrocities of the past century are the result of a metaphysics of presence that began a long time ago, and give us nothing more than its logical outcome. For Heidegger, databanks and mass-produced shoes are essentially the same as Auschwitz, Hiroshima, or Verdun.

All of which is very ironic, since he became a Nazi.

[Anonymous No.11158199]

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

[Anonymous No.11158211]

>>11157429
Good post.

[Anonymous No.11158225]

>>11158191
>All of which is very ironic, since he became a Nazi.

It's not really ironic. Heidegger talks a lot about losing your authenticity in Das Man(literally, "The Man", meaning the mob). Which is probably what happened to him, and I don't really blame him more than I blame others, and I also think it's easy to be smug about imagining yourself to be the exception to the rest of that kind of society.

[Anonymous No.11158239]

>>11158225
>Das Man(literally, "The Man"
That would be "der Mann", not "das Man"; "man" is a pronoun closer to English's "one".

[Anonymous No.11158280]

>>11158239
I know. I was trying to dumb it down.

The common English translation is usually "The They".

[Anonymous No.11158282]

>>11158239
I always found One to be a more accurate translation. Also, I enjoy They-Self.

[Anonymous No.11158340]

>>11158184
For the contextualist, all statements are "true" only in relation to the context within which they are stated. Contextualism thus shifts the epistemological dilemma from one of verifying statements onto that of finding the right context within which to speak.

For Heidegger, discourses are loaded with pre-supposed meaning that they have accrued through a historical process of world disclosure. Scientific laws are "correct," but not because they correspond to the world. Rather, they correspond scientific discourse, which is a restricted part of the world. Heidegger wants to develop a discourse that fully encompasses the scientistic one, but within which true statements can be made about the world that are not empirically verifiable. Being and Time is, it seems to me, an attempt to create such a discourse.

[Anonymous No.11158342]

>>11158280
I see why you would do that; however, when you're translating "literally" means precisely the opposite.

A better way to put it is:
>das Man (as in "the Man", meaning the mob)

[Anonymous No.11158347]

>>11158342
Fair enough my dude.

[Anonymous No.11158367]

>>11158340
So we could say Heidegger believes statements are true insofar as they are in a discourse, not in their reference to the world?

[Anonymous No.11158413]

>>11158367
Not him, but "true" for Heidegger means something a lot different than it does for most modern people.

True for modern people means that which corresponds to physical reality; e.g correspondence theory of truth.

Heidegger on the other hand reinterpreted the grammatical meaning of the Greek word for truth, Aletheia, which comes from the word "lethe" which means "to cover". "A-lethe-ia" then means to uncover, from the letter "a" infront giving a negation. A more correct translation of the word then is Uncovering.

Hence he was more interested in uncovering contexts phenomenologically, than finding some kind of empirical or scientific fact.

[Anonymous No.11158425]

>>11158367
Yes. But, for Heidegger, unlike the contextualists, the world discloses things directly to poets and philosophers, who are at work in creating the one true discourse that describes the world. But world disclosure is an endless process, and "nothing makes certain that Dasein is capable of this understanding."

[Anonymous No.11158452]

>>11158413
>>11158425
How does disclosure not contradict a context? Is disclosure historical, i.e. already inherent to what was before it?

[Anonymous No.11158462]

>>11158452
If you want an example of what he means by disclosure you can read his essay The Question Concerning Technology.

[Anonymous No.11158504]

>>11158452
No. Contexts/discourses are in our mind. Disclosure occurs when the world intrudes on that context. This is where most people "abandon ship" with Heidegger because it becomes very messianic: "only a god can save us" and it is the job of poets and philosophers to "help prepare" in case a messiah comes.

[Anonymous No.11158532]

>>11157287
A new coat of paint on Gnosticism.

[Anonymous No.11158553]

>>11158532
how so? The basic aspect of Gnosticism is that evil is not the result of free will. Where does Heidegger say this?

[Anonymous No.11158579]

>>11158462
Thank you.

>>11158504
That is precisely what I find interesting in what we are discussing, however.

[Anonymous No.11158601]

>>11158579
>That is precisely what I find interesting in what we are discussing, however.

Yes I think it is probably related to >>11158532 and the thought that Being is a kind of Demiurge who discloses himself through Gnosis.

[Anonymous No.11158685]

>>11158553
Here is a quick read if you are interested in the details.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/484568
There is a lot of information regarding both Gnosticism and Heidegger and the relation between the two. Might clear up the misconceptions you have about Gnosticism.

[Anonymous No.11158751]

>>11158685
>>11158685
This article is quite old and, I think, uses the term Gnosticism too broadly. As I understood it, Hermeticism is generally differentiated from Gnosticism in that the former locates evil in our narcissism, the latter locates it in evil in the divine.

[Anonymous No.11158766]

>>11157287
Das-ein

[Anonymous No.11158771]

>>11158685
"self. The self defies all worldly categories; it is discovered not through the world but in opposition to it."

This doesn't sound much like Heidegger to me.

[Anonymous No.11158774]

>>11158532
>abolishing dualism
>gnostic
He’s more a Plotinus-man if you want to fashion him in some kind of mysticism

[Anonymous No.11158896]

>>11158601
>the thought that Being is a kind of Demiurge who discloses himself through Gnosis
Well, I'm more interested in how knowledge retroactvely changes our understanding of the world without contradicting previous understandings, how out of context things affect understanding, and how understanding fills a previous "void" at the same time... I guess.

It's difficult to put into words.

[Anonymous No.11158920]

>>11158751
>the latter locates it in evil in the divine.
No, in Gnonsticism, evil comes from the Demiurge, the creator of the material (fallen) world we have found ourselves in. The Demiurge is a subordinate to the unknowable supreme God (often referred to as the Spirit or Light). The Demiurge is a sort of antagonist to this Light as it traps Light in the material world which is separate from the divine Light.

>>11158774
As explained above, you are definitely correct about the dualistic aspects of Gnosticism, though there are many Gnostic notions inherited by Heidegger which exist independently from this dualism.

Also (and probably the better explanation), the dualism of Gnosticism is not as strict as it historically may seem. The Demiurge may be an expression of the Divine Light which is acceptable within a nondualistic framework and does not contradict the notions put forth by Heidegger. This is a sort of panpsychism in which all material is mind which can change as states of mind between the fallen and the gnosis.

[Anonymous No.11158963]

>>11158896
Perhaps you are referring to Thaumazein which, in my view, describes exactly that experience of having "out of context things affect understanding." Plato describes it in Theatetus I believe.

I don't know how the void gets filled in but my hunch is that it's a kind of fetishization where something stands in for the unknown.

>>11158920
>No, in Gnonsticism, evil comes from the Demiurge
...who is a divinity, just not the One divinty.
>The Demiurge is a sort of antagonist to this Light as it traps Light in the material world which is separate from the divine Light.
This is part of many religions, not just Gnosticism.

>This is a sort of panpsychism in which all material is mind which can change as states of mind between the fallen and the gnosis.
I don't really see any panpsychism in Heidegger.

[Anonymous No.11159020]

>>11158963
>I don't really see any panpsychism in Heidegger.
The panpsychism comment was an example of how Gnosticism can exist in a nondualistic framework.

[Anonymous No.11159035]

>>11158963
>Perhaps you are referring to Thaumazein
I'm not acquainted with the term, but if it helps and you care, I'm talking about something more in line with Lacan's object petit a (a partial object), or something more like a mental chimaera.

[Anonymous No.11159117]

>>11159035
Lacan might identify Thaumazein with a kind of trauma that accompanies the realization of the absence "big Other" (catholic church, facebook) who "filled in the previous void" in our understanding. When something entirely new is disclosed, this effectively proves that the big Other doesn't know everything, and this is a potentially traumatic experience.

How do you think the object petit a relates to world disclosure and contextualism? Or: what do you mean by mental chimaera?

[Anonymous No.11159160]

>>11157287
>You don't need to go to school, man. Just thinkin' about stuff you don need tuh. I got my hammer and my truck. Don't even think about the hammer 'til it breaks. My daddy says I need a real job or else I'll starve and I says to him, "Least I know I'm dyin' my own death!"

[Anonymous No.11159175]

>>11157290
Nice

[Anonymous No.11159185]

>>11157429
Very nice anon, impressive really.

[Anonymous No.11159214]

>>11157429
>But when we are concernfully engaged with beings (while building a house, for instance) the whole of those beings is avaliable to us through our senses (Heidegger is an empiricist), but we lack the language to talk about them.

y tho

[Anonymous No.11159229]

>>11157429
but plato already did all that

[Anonymous No.11159248]

>>11159214
>y tho
Why what, exactly?
>>11159229
Yes. That's why Heidegger quit philosophy and wrote something more like poetry.

[Anonymous No.11159256]

>>11159248
so hes a fucking hack?

[Anonymous No.11159282]

>>11159229
pseud

[Anonymous No.11159288]

>>11159256
No, because the philosopher's job is not to make new discoveries but to keep us from forgetting the one, fundamental truth.

[Anonymous No.11159291]

>>11159288
but we didnt forget it?

[Anonymous No.11159300]

>>11159291
Then what is it?

[Anonymous No.11159318]

>>11159291
we did. that's why neil degrasse tyson exists.

[Anonymous No.11159457]

>>11159248
How can it be that beings are entirely available through concernful engagement? Why can't we talk about them?

[Anonymous No.11159469]

>>11159300

[Anonymous No.11160216]

>>11159117
My idea is that human communication and decision making is done through imagining or fantasizing. When we listen to music, read or see a picture we aren't only equating what we perceive to specific objects, we also imagine specific developments of those objects, which aren't provided in what's being communicated so much as implied in their form, so to understand these things always requires a mental action from us; in its stronger form this means an almost total obscuring of the object through which communication occurs: not only music, but reading as well, require an obscuring that is almost total: but that does not mean what’s being obscured simply disappears, rather, it still determines what we’ll derive out of it. So communication isn’t a matter of mediation but of conventional evasion: we set a convention that letter a will stand for sound a, and this will form part of various words, and those will stand for their own objects; but for these things to activate our imagination, they require first to be out of context, not in a context: what we do when we imagine is not discover an organic universe, but rather we organize these severed things.

Here common sense would dictate that the more complex such an organization, the more meaningfully charged it would be, however on the contrary, the simpler a thing is, the more our imagination is activated by it and the more meaning we can potentially derive from it; the lighter the sign, the more attention we need to put into following and seeing it and not others, the stronger its impact on us; and yet this not because the other things are negated by it or obscured by it, but rather it’s their own inherent obscurity that points out to the more important thing; that is to say, we don’t perceive things because they stand out, but because other things make themselves not to stand out: that’s where the naturalness of important ideas or symbols comes from: we don’t see them everywhere, rather everything pushes it above them.

So when we see something which has no context what happens is that we provide a set of other objects in order to organize it in a way in which its now potentially infinite meaning will be accounted for and exhausted. A contextless object isn’t something which is meaningless but rather something that could mean anything as far as we now. To borrow Heidegger’s terminology, the problem is that these things aren’t “covered”, and yet this is why we do not understand them; we haven’t gone over them, we have not yet covered that. Often this means we have to bruteforce them into being covered, and so they lose much of what we perceive; but on occasion there are objects which manage to reorganize all others by something which was already inherent to them, but had not yet been presented: something which was already “covered” but seemed uncovered, and which becomes obvious because we hadn’t thought of the possibility which was always present in its form.

[Anonymous No.11160263]

>>11160216
I like this picture of the world.

>on occasion there are objects which manage to reorganize all others by something which was already inherent to them, but had not yet been presented: something which was already “covered” but seemed uncovered

This sounds like Thaumazein, at least in the way I use the term. If you can come up with a better word for this complete reorganization of our network of meaning, I would love to hear about it. I'm not aware of any writer who has dealt explicity with such a reorganization. The word 'trauma' seems to broad and psychiatric.

[Anonymous No.11160354]

>>11160263
Thank you, I'm glad I could make my thoughts understandable and that you like it.

>If you can come up with a better word for this complete reorganization of our network of meaning, I would love to hear about it. I'm not aware of any writer who has dealt explicity with such a reorganization.
The story of the Egg of Columbus is probably the anedocte I most often use to explain it:

«Columbus being at a party with many noble Spaniards, where, as was customary, the subject of conversation was the Indies: one of them undertook to say: —"Mr. Christopher, even if you had not found the Indies, we should not have been devoid of a man who would have attempted the same that you did, here in our own country of Spain, as it is full of great men clever in cosmography and literature." Columbus said nothing in answer to these words, but having desired an egg to be brought to him, he placed it on the table saying: "Gentlemen, I will lay a wager with any of you, that you will not make this egg stand up as I will, naked and without anything at all." They all tried, and no one succeeded in making it stand up. When the egg came round to the hands of Columbus, by beating it down on the table he fixed it, having thus crushed a little of one end; wherefore all remained confused, understanding what he would have said: that after the deed is done, everybody knows how to do it; that they ought first to have sought for the Indies, and not laugh at him who had sought for it first, while they for some time had been laughing, and wondered at it as an impossibility.»

I think this is what's truly operating when it comes to something like mathematics, which seems completely natural to our world, but can be described as a language produced by humans.

Also, I ran out of space in the last post, so I couldn't answer:
>what do you mean by mental chimaera?
I mean an idea or representation that is made of disparate parts, i.e. it's illogical even though it's put together, because its parts do not imply each other; 2+2=5 is an example of such a thing.

[Anonymous No.11160731]

>>11159457
How can it be that beings are entirely available through concernful engagement?
Heidegger allows for the possibility that there's a thing-in-itself that will never be disclosed, but there's no reason to suppose the existence of such a thing.

Heidegger's point is that while a scientist could reconstruct a conscious human being atom-for-atom, he could do so only by accident, because the cartesian ontology "functions" by explicitly dispensing with an aspect of the world that is very real and "proximal": concernful engagement.

So while science is both correct and technologically useful, it operates blindly because its ontology mathematicizes everything and makes it constant. In reality, the world is in flux.

>Why can't we talk about them?

Because we have fallen into average, everyday, scientistic, technologizing discourse, from which we can only escape through philosophy and poetry.

[Anonymous No.11160771]

>>11160354
The egg story seems to be a good example of a reorganization of a single concept ("without anything at all"). But I don't see it like Thaumazein, which is a complete ontological reorganization.

Also, what is the connection to mathematics?

[Anonymous No.11161073]

>>11160771
>I don't see it like Thaumazein
Explain more, if you will.

>a complete ontological reorganization.
Well, I don't think it's something as large as that, but I think it's something that exists within a historical and not individual world. I think it's these things that are ultimately what make a society like human society possible, because they allow for mimesis to be possible; they allow for things to be copied and reproduced by various persons. Which is also why science and technology are such a thing, because they are made to be (in theory) reproducible and understandable, and therefore usable, by everyone.

>what is the connection to mathematics?
For example, take the Fibonacci sequence, and how it is seemingly everywhere in nature. Mathematical truths are "discovered" but what they discover was always there, all the elements necessary for it were always there, what was discovered wasn't something that was unknown due to a lack of information, but because a specific action wasn't performed. So you don't go to the field and find numbers and equations, you don't go looking a 1 or a 2. It's on a completely different realm to what's empirical.

[Anonymous No.11161571]

>>11161073
Very interesting. Fib sequence is good example.

Thaumazein is exactly what you're describing, only it occurs at an ontological level. Off the top of my head, one example might be: taking genesis literally and then sitting down to read "the origin of species"

[Anonymous No.11161725]

>>11157287
The being of Being is being.

[Anonymous No.11161727]

>>11157429
>So the proper way to understand the world is to come up with new language to describe beings.
He literally says philosophy of the future won't be about making up new words.

[Anonymous No.11161729]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyJVPx8tiiI

[Anonymous No.11162632]

>>11161571
Thanks, I will look more into Thaumazein.

[Anonymous No.11162965]

>>11161729
>neechee

[Anonymous No.11163805]

das ein mane

[Anonymous No.11163883]

>>11163805
10/10

[Anonymous No.11165022]

Philosophy is wrong since Plato because it creates metaphysics. Metaphysics's premise is that things come out of nothing, exist for a while, and then go back to nothing. That way, philosophy gets rid of temporality and focus only on the present.. when you talk about things, you should consider its whole history, including the fact that once it didn't exist and will cease to exist in an infinite coming-to be.
Metaphysics give birth to technology and technological society and thinking. they are both contrary to the structure of the human mind, because they don't care about temporality because of the metaphysucal error.
Heidegger thought that Man could fix this error, he trusted the nazis to do it. It didn't work, they built a technological society.
then he started waiting for an "Event" that would change our way of thinking. It didn't happen either.