Heidegger

25 June 2015

Martin Heidegger is the Continental philosopher most analytic philosophers love to hate. I actually never knew enough about Heidegger to form much of an opinion. I knew that he said that “Nothings noths” (Das Nichts nichtet),giving Carnap a paradigm of meaningless, unverifiable, unfalsifiable, metaphysical gibberish. I knew that he invented the term “Dasein” – “Being There”, for human beings, or human existence, or something like that, and it sounded profound. And over the years I met many thoughtful philosophers who thought highly of his ideas, like Burt Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall, and Tom Sheehan. But my attempts to read Heidegger were few, far between, and frustrating.

最近,加州大学河滨分校(UC Riverside)的研究生、拉萨尔学院的学生凯文•金(Kevin Gin)就是这些深思熟虑的哲学家之一,他说服我再看一看。他看到了我的一些想法之间的联系,关于未表达的成分和自我认识,和海德格尔的各种想法之间的联系。所以,也许这家伙是深刻的,毕竟!在凯文的帮助下,我对海德格尔正在做的事情有了一些感觉,并发现它很有趣。

As for Dasein, Rocks aren’t Daseins (or Daseine? My German is rusty, to put it charitably). Lizards aren’t, but they come closer than rocks. And at least most other animals aren’t. But we are.

我认为这个术语应该反映海德格尔对人类的看法。这与笛卡尔式的自我形成对比。笛卡尔的自我基本上是一个思想家和观察者,从它的存在和它的思想,推理到上帝的存在,进而推理到世界和其他人。出发点:这个非物质的自我及其思想的起点;这场斗争是为了证明世界其他地方的信仰是正确的。

With Dasein, as I get it, it kind of goes the other way. Considering myself as Dasein, I am not basically a thinker and an observer, but an agent, a do-er immersed in the world from the getgo. And things in the world aren’t basically presented to me as what my ideas might or might not stand for, but as tools I have to use for various purposes. The Cartesian picture, seeing myself as a separate entity, a mind, the world as something quite separate, and my ideas as linking the two by the relation of representation is, insofar as it makes sense, is the result of an intellectual struggle, recapitulated in a more reflective way in philosophy, not the starting point for human cognition or philosophical thinking.

Rocks simply persist through time. Animals, and plants too, for that matter, react to circumstances, in order to survive and reproduce. But humansleadlives, forming projects --- goals --- and making choices about how to achieve them. And our world, or worlds, arise out of this.

Put this way, Heidegger sounds sort of naturalistic --- that is, a philosopher who wants to understand consciousness, thought, freedom and the like in the natural world as natural processes, based in evolution It seems to me that, in pursuing his project, Heidegger’s was led to some of the same insights about representation and thought as philosophers like Dretske, Dennett or Millikan, insights that, IMHO, I’m getting at too. But we explicitly see humans as basically biological beings, with capacities for handling information developed by evolution. Heidegger never says anything like that, as far as I know.

To move on to a different issue about Heidegger, should we be comfortable in finding good ideas in someone who was a member of the Nazi party?

Well, I suppose, good ideas are where you find them. All I really know is that Heidegger joined the Nazi party in the early thirties, probably as a condition for becoming rector of Freiburg. He gave up that job a couple of years later. In the meantime, he dutifully implemented some Nazi policies at Freiburg. People disagree on whether he was an enthusiastic Nazi or a reluctant and somewhat opportunistic dupe. He never tells us much. Apparently in his diaries, the “Black Books”, Heidegger linked anti-Semitic ideas with themes in his philosophy, even before joining the Nazi Party. But he dedicates his major work,Sein und Seit他还和他战前的学生汉娜·阿伦特(Hannah Arendt)有过一段婚外情,两人都是犹太人。矛盾吗?表里不一?Deprativity吗?All I know is that if he readMein Kampfbefore joining the Nazi Party, I’d have to see him as more than merely naïve (Arendt’s defense of him, after World War II, when she helped get him the right to teach again). Shuka Kalantari will tell us a bit about this is her report, and I’m sure Thomas Sheehan, our guest, will shed some light on it.

Final deep thought:

Now that I know I am but Dasein

I’m thinking things will turn out fine

First I’ll be something,

And then I’ll be nothing

And noth away til the end of time

Comments(15)


Gary M Washburn's picture

Gary M Washburn

Friday, June 26, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Dasein is that entity for

Dasein is that entity for which its being is the issue. Rocks don't. I am not a great fan of Heidegger, but at his best he is brilliant. At his worst he is repetitive, haughty, and (strangely) a suck-up to whatever power structure he thinks can advance his career. But give credit where it's due.
当我问我的教练“最拥挤”是什么意思时,他告诉我,“拥挤”。有趣的回答。当然,它在分析上是空的。但是,这只是那些武断地致力于分析的人的问题,他们没有看到还原过程的崩溃,这是唯一真正的归纳原因可以实现的。因此,他们早在这个过程走向糟糕的结局之前就停止了。这就是为什么逻辑学家或分析哲学家从不考虑超过几个句子的论证,因为形式主义导致了一个如此完整的变形,以致语义在所有可以推理的地方都被追溯性地改变了。现在,甚至海德格尔也没有直接面对这种倒退的暂时性,而是选择了,就像所有以前和大多数以后所做的那样,为一种教条的超越。仿佛永恒是时间的“本质”。但是,除非我们把语言牢牢地交到它真正的创造者、软弱的、情绪化的人手中,否则我们不会看到教条之间的对比有什么意义。

focus8@telus.net's picture

focus8@telus.net

Friday, June 26, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

For my money Ken Wilber is

For my money Ken Wilber is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century and perhaps of this one, too. I would very much like for John and Ken to invite him onto the program some day soon.
Submitted by C. Marxer, June 27, 2015

Gary M Washburn's picture

Gary M Washburn

Saturday, June 27, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

一些AQAL !Sounds like

一些AQAL !听起来像是"海龟一路下来"“威尔伯”与海德格尔的关系是我无法理解的。
海德格尔问:“存在意味着什么?”分析型思考者不敢这样做,因为他们的整个系统会因为任何不确定性而崩溃。这就是为什么“英美哲学”是彻头彻尾的教条主义。不要说海德格尔在表达问题的意义上有很大的用处,更不要说在追求问题的意义上。他曾经声称要不带偏见地解决这个问题,但长期以来被证明是一种欺骗。但这并没有贬低这个问题本身。分析不能用它自己的条件来提供它自己,它必须以推理的形式为它的使命。在这个意义上它是福音派的。说教,而不是思考。然而,海德格尔从长远来看并没有更好。 Being and time is his obeisance to his teacher, and superior, in which he characterizes human existence as epochal. The problem, of course, is that Husserl regarded the epochal structure of time as impersonal, even dogmatically depersonalized. And so Husserl dismissed Heidegger's magnus-opus as "psychologism". But Husserl was already being pressured out by the Nazis, leaving Heiddeger free to seek Nazi approval by proclaiming a mystical connection with ancient wisdom. If wisdom it be.
However, the question remains. How does meaning arise? Either as the meaning that humans aspire to, or the more technical issue of the meaning of terms in any language and language per-se. The "linguistic" tradition pretends to make this its motivating issue, but is so convicted in the "entail" of reason or logic that this pretense is ludicrous. As if freedom were an "entail"! The reason reason does not manage to encompass reality is not that reality is somehow remiss in its failing to obey the rules of logic or, supposed, causality, or because reason lacks facts. It is because reason cannot supply its own terms. There has to be freedom if there is to be any concrete necessity. That is, freedom is the more encompassing term. What eludes the entail nourishes the growth of meaning, supplying the terms of that entail. Some say time is one. What a joke! Time is no one, for the supply of meaning is never the possession or enclosure of any epochal structure. This explains why the three threads of Western philosophy have all fallen flat, the Anglo-American, the Continental, and the Existential. That is, all of them would reduce value to the quantifier. The only result of that count is the loss of the enumerator in it.
Next:
情绪心理学。

Gary M Washburn's picture

Gary M Washburn

Sunday, June 28, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Heineken? Actually, Heidegger

Heineken? Actually, Heidegger was a wine drinker.
The Stambaugh translation is a much more readable version of Being and Time than the Harper and Rowe edition. Kaelin provides a refreshingly lucid evaluation of it. After Husserl was rendered unnecessary to his career, Heidegger reevaluated his whole methodology in what he called the "kehre", or "turn" (literally, a fork in the road). The result is a tumult of shoddy reading of ancient thinkers and a number of revisions to the idea (and spelling) of "being". It's all a clumsy mess at bottom, but since no one else even tried to broach the subject he should at least be noted for this. It's appalling to see how ignorant American "philosophers" are of philosophy! Husserl was thought in his day to be the living spirit of German philosophy, inheritor of the legacies of Kant and Hegel. Heidegger was his heir apparent, and even though he betrayed that trust, he did become an essential influence for the existentialist movement that came after him, though Sartre was actually influenced more by Husserl directly (few read his earliest works on imagination, the direct implication of Husserl's "intentional object").
在《存在与时间》中,海德格尔注意到缺乏对人类情绪的理解,似乎建议着手这项工作。考虑到他所处的时代,我想他一定是有意进行某种弗洛伊德式的分析。但我以自己的方式接受了这个挑战,认为这是一个解释理性在情感中的作用的机会,它是相互关联的,不受另一个的支配。这是因为存在是一个尚未解决的问题,以及对存在的范畴和条件的确定性和持久性的追求被破坏了。其结果是,维持它们不变的严格努力需要改变。但是,由于持久时间的概念的核心是,变化是不可容忍的,或者是对一个完美而永恒的“存在”的概念的破坏,所以这种变化是不能被承认的。因此,它只能采取改变这种自负的性质的形式。我们"知道"结果的规定不能超越它的前件(因为这将包含我们对它的规定性,甚至包括我们对它的认同),结果也不能成为它的原因的中介(因为这将混淆我们自以为知道的"存在"的秩序)。所以我们改变我们思想的意义或性质,在情绪上改变我们对它们的确定程度或我们对它们的感觉。这似乎与正式事实无关。 But if the extremity of rigor is that we are lost that conceit, if only in the least term of it, that "being" is a perfect or permanent term upon which the quantifier (to which "being" is the qualifier) can be relied upon to preserve the "law of contradiction" even in a real temporal world, then that quantifier is lost and quality, the meaning and worth of time, is the only real issue. and so feelings precede reason as a posterior entailment. We cannot anticipate the worth of time, or the meaning of being. And so no resoluteness can be "authentic".

MJA's picture

MJA

Wednesday, July 1, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

A Simple Thought:

A Simple Thought:
I've connected everything in the Universe
Finding One or all just the same
So nothing is truly something
And something simply is.
= is

MJA's picture

MJA

Wednesday, July 1, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Being:

Being:

B?
And if A = B, and B = C, then A = C
But what about B?
They all look different to me, so what is truth,
What can it B?
不同的或等于?
What should it B?
To B or not to B?
这就是问题所在。
The Nature of B,
Aristotle, Shakespeare and Me.

=
MJA

Gary M Washburn's picture

Gary M Washburn

Wednesday, July 1, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Humpty-Dumpty?

Humpty-Dumpty?
"布瑞格和滑石toves做了gyre和gimble在wabe...."

Brad's picture

Brad

Friday, July 3, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

I think Perry's contrast of

I think Perry's contrast of the Cartesian ego that is a kind of vanishing point that thinks, and that recovers a world from doubt in reflection, with the Heideggerian being that is there in the world before thinking, is apt.

Gary M Washburn's picture

Gary M Washburn

Monday, July 6, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Brad,

Brad,
Descartes spent his life eluding the censors. Had he asked the real question, how it is we can even state the proposition "cogito sunt", he would have been accused of heresy, since language could only be attributed to the Christian god. Heidegger had the advantage of being influenced by thinkers like Hegel, Simmel, Brentano, Dilthey, and Weber. But to attribute language to a preexisting world is hardly any more satisfying than inventing a divinity as the source of it. And by the time Being and Time was being written it was no great innovation, and it did not impress his mentor Husserl.
Michael,
You are perfectly at liberty to suppose you know what you mean, but not that I do, nor that I am persuaded you do. Discipline can seem constraining, and even imperious in the hands of soneone like Heidegger, infamously a bully to his students. But this is because he, like so many others, do not drive the rigor to its fullest extent in self-criticism. But without a critical response from others we cannot situate even that resolution to the violence of discourse. It is disciplined responsiveness that saves us from being bullies to each other, and repudiating rigor altogether is no less bullying than the rigorous criticism that stops short of self-criticism.
The notion of "anticipatory resoluteness" could have an important place as a call for epistemic discipline, for a responsiveness to evidence of events and meaning not predicted in reason. But Heidegger's undercooked material on "being towards death" rather spoils the effect. The one thing we cannot anticipate is the worth of our being. And, no, it is not for others to take the measure of us. But it is through the responses of others that we do get whatever evidence there may be in life of anything opportune through our being in life of anything worthy of our time. We are not the measure of each other, nor of ourselves. But we are the act which may be opportune of a response through which we can learn and revise what worth there may be in us. But what does "being already in a world" then mean? Heidegger gets a lot of grief for attributing a kind of agency to "being" and "world". But there is a sense in which the world is a kind of agency. The world is its offer of the facile term of our knowing it. Compare the difference between a foreign language and your native tongue and see immediately what I mean. This difference in facile "hearing" is not a simple matter of biology or socialization. It is an intensive engagement in a drama of uncompleted thought and meaning constantly revived and revisited and in the throes of examining ramifying and chancing to act and to respond. With every chance we take we differ, not just the meaning of the terms, but the very context of the drama engaged. This is not a game, as Wittgenstein would have it. It takes up the offer the world is as the means of attenuating the loss and the responsibility that is the ultimate meaning of it. Meaning is a drama of loss, lost conceit that we know what we mean, and the freedom enabled, through that loss, that its response is in responsibility of recognizing its worth, its worth even to the world, as the differing of the context of its lexical and formal tools. But we are never as alone in that drama of act and response than we are as "being already in a world" and so received the facile term attenuated the worth of that act and that response to each other. But there can be no resoluteness in the drama, as there always is in that facile attenuation of loss and responsibility the world is. It is precisely that we not anticipate death that we know the world at all. And so, we are already inauthentic there. But Heidegger does not define his "inauthenticity" as "being in the world", but as irresoluteness in anticipation of death. And yet we cannot know the worth of our being save as the response evidenced how opportune we may be to each other in the examination and measure of that worth. The details are difficult. Much more difficult than any text Heidegger ever produced. But the notion of "anticipatory resoluteness" is a contradiction so glaring as to demonstrate conclusively the same Calvinist dogma Descartes echoes in the notion of the "cogito sunt". That is, the notion, circuitously formulated through a thousand and more years of entrenched power struggles amongst the various intellectual religious and political/military power centers from which, in the form of the Reformation, ultimately emerged as the paradigm of covenant enshrined as the feudal relationship of lord and vassal, abstracted as a personal relation to the Christian god. Substitute "being", and you get the dogmatic character of Heidegger's thought, early and late, before and after the "kehre".




MJA's picture

MJA

Tuesday, July 7, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Hi Gary, I haven't read

嗨,加里,我没有读过海德格尔,所以我无法回复你上面的评论,我不理解。至于Descates和"cogito sunt"我能理解。Descates在乌尔姆租了一个房间,在那里他爬进一个炉子里,从所有后来他发现不确定或不真实的知识中重新引导他的思想。剩下的只有一个绝对的“我”。他找到了自己,找到了真理,但可悲的是他无法维持它,慢慢地让那些不确定的东西重新回到他的脑海中。如果我没记错的话,他从上帝开始。哦!笛卡尔自己发现了真理,又失去了它。
His process was a great help in finding me. Just me. Everything! Einstein believed as well that simplification or reductionism was the Way to the equation that unites all things. Sadly he came close to truth with his simple equation e = mc2 then like Descartes before him, began to compound his equation again. So much so that he hired mathematicians in the end to help him struggle through. It was Maxwell and his belief in the speed of light that turned him the wrong way. The solution he searched for will change the world someday.
Truth shall set us free.
As for understanding my other comments above, the B poem was a response to "Dasien" or being, that's all.
And the simple thought only in response to John's "Deep thought".
The solution to everything is much more simple than thought!!
=

Guest's picture

Guest

Wednesday, July 8, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

I've never been able to get

I've never been able to get far into Heidegger either, but two elements of his thought have always intrigued me. Dasein is embedded, a point John makes. But this embedding happens both "outside" and "inside" but there's not necessarily a hard-and-fast distinction between the two spaces. Specifically Dasein is aware of its own demise, which from a naturalistic standpoint flops over both. A friend of mine once argued that Heidegger thought it was the awareness of its own demise that gave Dasein a perception of time. I haven't read enough Heidegger to know whether that's textually true, but it introduces an interesting internal emotional color to Dasein's information processing that I don't think Professor Dretske got into.
第二,在很多方面,"此在"的概念使皮尔斯的实用主义和科学实践理论更容易理解。Peirce的“理论化”构想利用了这一概念,这一概念是关于导致思考者做某事的恼怒。如果我们把Peirce看作是思想家作为Dasein对其所体现的媒介的反应——在Peirce的例子中,这也允许我们不仅把智人视为理论家,而且把任何更复杂的哺乳动物视为理论家——我们可以开始看到两种说法之间的一些宏观一致性。

MJA's picture

MJA

Thursday, July 9, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Equal Gary is the unified

Equal Gary is the unified field equation Einstein was searching for.
When all is equal all is One.
Truth is =

Gary M Washburn's picture

Gary M Washburn

Sunday, July 12, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Mr. Grover,

Mr. Grover,
海德格尔对遭受死亡的存在(此在)和那些仅仅遭受“死亡”的存在(此在)作出了非常明显的区分。“死亡”被定义为不真实的,或无法预测其结局,因为它是一个问题,因为它是其利益和关注的焦点。“此在”不只是努力活着,它知道它必须死去,因此以某种方式解决它在生命中所拥有的时间的意义。海德格尔给了我们很多关于非真实性的段落。它被称为优柔寡断,因此它对自己的存在的关心是如此的无能,以至于它就像一个只遭受死亡的动物,没有创造出有意义的大厦来界定它所处的时代是一个特殊的存在时代。对于“存在的意义”这个问题的迷恋的哲学分支来说,这意味着什么?这是一条漫长而艰难的道路,除非明确表达出一种真诚的兴趣(而不仅仅是陈述!),否则我不想踏入这条道路。我已经在这条道路上走了很长时间,以至于我已经深入到那些对海德格尔来说只是地平线上的领域,并且会发现它很难介绍给一个新手,就像把它指给海德格尔对事物的长期流逝的兴趣一样。
Michael,
你认为麦克斯韦和爱因斯坦是同时代的人吗?正是基于迈克尔逊-莫雷实验的洛伦兹变换,让爱因斯坦和所有理性的物理学家相信,光速是一个常数。麦克斯韦是前相对论的物理学家。你一直在含糊地引用一些“学来的”东西,开始看起来更像是抄袭。笛卡尔的“洞见”已经被彻底否定了。自信是哲学体系最基本的基础。如果你想理解“我思我要”,我建议你做一些思考。你将要去的那个人,他是没有一体性的。要么它是一个不能把单位的多重算作一体的统一体,要么它是一个只被算作没有统一的单一的多重。不管怎样,你的肯定都是毫无意义的。 '=' simply does not mean what you say it does. You're just flat wrong about that. Logic 101 would knock that nonsense out of you. Dogma has a certain advantage, I understand that. It simply reasserts the same thing in the hopes that, eventually, all adversaries will be so forced to use your own terms that you can thereby simply and literally define them, by fiat of the terminology, in agreement with you. Have you ever seen a person 'saved'? It's quite a process. A person is surrounded by the community under the direction of an imperious preacher, and bullied into 'accepting the faith'. It's quite exactly like watching someone being tortured into confessing being a witch or a heretic. And what is really appalling is how the congregation regards this crime and inhumanity as a holy event. Michael, you're getting no hallelujah moment from me, and hopefully not from anyone else on this site. Meanwhile, I'm starting to feel like your posts are part of a Turing test, a badly programmed one.

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Saturday, April 21, 2018 -- 1:17 PM

I read Being and Time. It was

I read Being and Time. It was interesting. But over-rated.

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Wednesday, May 9, 2018 -- 12:38 PM

I do not see how anyone would

我不认为有人会把海德格尔描述为二十世纪最伟大的哲学家。如果《存在与时间》被认为是海德格尔最好的作品,那么,我就像约翰·佩里,一个先天的凯文·金一样,觉得海德格尔的作品是难以理解的胡言乱语。现在,我想有些人声称他们知道他在说什么。如果他们真的这么做了,你就会明白他们为什么会给他这么高的评价。我不能这样做,因为在我看来,二十世纪活着的哲学家的思维能力远远超过了马丁。也有一些人遭遇了“死亡”。用深奥的流行语写出晦涩的散文,实际上有条不紊地提出理论,用经过研究的论据和证据来支持它,这是完全不同的。写那些受过古典教育的哲学家能够理解的哲学是一回事。当写作如此错综复杂、令人费解,以至于人们不禁认为作者是在凭空幻想,只有他自己知道,也只有他自己知道时,这就是另一回事了。一位评论家写道,肯·威尔伯是他/她在20世纪最喜欢的人(还有这个人)。 I read His earlier work and concur that it was well done. My first choice, though, would have to be John Searle: his clear-headedness and facility with linguistics makes his work enjoyable. And even someone green to philosophy can make sense of it. That I discovered his work late in life does not diminish its enlightening quality.