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This thread will cover the basics of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the most important German philosopher of the 20th century, and is in some ways the last European philosopher in the tradition stretching back to Descartes. Some of this might seem irrelevant in our fast-paced modern environment, and maybe people won't have much to say about a single dead German philosopher. But some of these issues are still relevant to the present day. There is not much to say about the early life of Martin Heidegger. He was raised in a lower-middle class Catholic family in the south of Germany, went to university, imbibed the German philosophical tradition, studied under Husserl, and became a professor. Then in the 1920s, he started developing his big idea, the idea of Being with a Capital B. Heidegger's basic contribution to philosophy was to make Being (or in German, Sein the center of philosophy. Being is such a simple thing that we forget it, and that was, Heidegger said, just what Western philosophy from Plato to the present has done: forget about Being by trying to order the cosmos into metaphysical hierarchies, trying to make distinctions and dichotomies, all of which erased the simple truth of Being, hidden behind it all. But, if Being is so omnipresent, if everything from a broom to the Sun to our own minds, how do we even talk about it in a useful way? Heidegger said we should talk about Dasein (Being There), how our own individual experience and rootedness in the world give us a window into Being. This approach was somewhat complicated (okay, really complicated), by Heidegger's hermeneutic method, which was basically to explain these big concepts by taking fragments of old German poems and pre-Socratic philosophers and draw hidden meanings out of them. In 1927, he published the single most complete explanation of his philosophy, Being and Time, Sein und Zeit. All of this might seem like a pretty good thing, because by deconstructing "Western Metaphysics", Heidegger managed to challenge basic ideas of what we would now call The Patriarchy or Hierarchy, taking away the idea of a detached mind observing and directing nature in favor of remembering ourselves as Beings surrounded by other Beings. This seems to be putting the groundwork in for an ecological, holistic view of the world, instead of reductionistic metaphysics. So, the other shoe has to drop: Martin Heidegger was a nazi. As in, he was a member of the NSDAP. He joined in 1933, shortly after becoming the Rector of his university, and resigned in 1934, and stopped attending NSDAP meetings. This much was known. After World War II, he was briefly banned from teaching, but was later judged to have been a "Fellow Traveller". Since that time, there has been more evidence about the amount that Heidegger embraced nazism, with the most charitable interpretation being that he was a cowardly opportunist. Some people think that his philosophy is tied to nazism. It is true though, that he was never a fanatical supporter, or violently anti-Semitic. He did seem to have no personal animosity to Jews, although that just makes his conduct worse in some ways. His teacher, the great philosopher Husserl, prepared him for his career, but since Husserl was Jewish, Heidegger distanced himself from him with the rise of Hitler, even removing his name from the dedication to Being and Time. One of his students, Hannah Arendt, was Jewish, and was also seduced by Heidegger when she was an 18 year old undergraduate, and then discarded by him when he wanted to ally himself closer to nazism. Questions of his personal conduct aside, the basic charge against Heidegger's philosophy being close to fascism is that instead of taking the cognition of the individual, and the ethical responsibilities that come from it, as the start of philosophy (Descartes and Kant), he thought people should immerse themselves in the poetic experience of Being, as evidenced by life in the community, and by feeling at one with the epic myth of the German Language (and he did believe that German was uniquely superior to communicate feeling). That is, many people believe that Heidegger's deconstruction of Western philosophy was a way to slip in "Blood and Soil" instead of the detached, academic perspective of democracy. The debate about Heidegger's involvement with the nazi party centers around looking at the historic record of his involvement with the party (which is pretty ambiguous), and about the meaning of his works (even more ambiguous). Almost every philosopher and cultural historian post-World War II has had something to say about the debate, with no real conclusion. This guy sounds like a fascist and a jerk. Why does anyone care? And this is another twist on the matter. Despite his reactionary leanings, Heidegger was an inspiration or source for basically every school of Post-World War II leftist philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a communist, relied heavily on Heidegger. Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, who were both Jewish, were his personal students. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard, both founders of post-modernism, depend heavily on Heideggerian concepts. Michel Foucault's deconstruction of power relations is descended from Heidegger's deconstruction of Western metaphysics. There are a number of other philosophers who also adopted Heidegger's rejection of Western metaphysics into either a leftist or liberal philosophical critique. Basically, almost any political, social or philosophical system that depends on something other than "we are detached observers trying to order the world for logical gains" traces itself back to the trenchant and obscure reactionary philosophy of Heidegger. So why does this all matter in 2019, here, where we mostly post about things in the 24 hour newscycle? I guess my main interest in writing all of that was that many people on this forum seem to view fascism as being just another name/another form of statism, or of economic conservativism. While there is lots of reasons to look at fascism as being allied to state power, and embracing economically conservative positions, there is a deeper strain to what fascism is, and I believe a lot of it is concealed inside of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The idea of wanting to do away with our individual consciousness and conscience, and replacing it with an oceanic feeling of being part of something bigger, is something that we can appreciate. The idea of returning to the unity of a community and a simpler world is something that sounds like a good idea, until we think of all that could mean. Looking at the damage caused by "Western rationality" is a good critical perspective, as long as we don't forget what the alternative has been. So, in conclusion, Martin Heidegger is a land of contrasts. And what does this all have to do with Final Fantasy VII?
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Jan 22, 2019 01:05
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There no is debate – Heidegger was an unrepentant anti-Semite. He joined the party in 1933 but was worried about jews before them, he remained with the party until 1945 despite them not being Blut und Boden enough for him. After the war he never apologised but lived in his loving hut in the Black Forest. Literally there is no debate about him being a piece of poo poo Nazi and anti-semite. Even the head of the Heidegger Society resigned in 2015 when Heidegger's diaries were published in Germany. That said, feel free to discuss Heidegger's philosophy…
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Jan 22, 2019 02:29
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Boatswain posted:There no is debate – Heidegger was an unrepentant anti-Semite. He joined the party in 1933 but was worried about jews before them, he remained with the party until 1945 despite them not being Blut und Boden enough for him. After the war he never apologised but lived in his loving hut in the Black Forest. Well, when I was saying that Heidegger was not "violently anti-Semitic", I was comparing him to a rural German of the early 20th century who joined the nazi party. Not saying that in some absolute terms, he was not anti-Semitic. AFAIK, his opposition to Jews was that they represented an element of detachment and separateness, somewhat akin to the notion of "Rootless Cosmopolitans". As far as him sticking with the nazis...as much as I understand it, after about 1935 or so, he didn't make any active statements or take any active acts to support naziism, but he didn't take any effort to distance himself, either.
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Jan 22, 2019 02:43
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Jan 22, 2019 02:53
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To clarify: I find myself in antipathy when it comes to Heidegger as a philosopher and I don't care to parse Sein und Zeit to make a proper judgement, as far as that is possible. As a person Heidegger was a moral idiot and a Nazi and there should be no excuses. As for the Nazi party - Heidegger fell out with them because their racism was too scientific and IIRC 34-35 was when time he realised this. glowing-fish posted:he was not anti-Semitic. AFAIK, his opposition to Jews was that they represented an element of detachment and separateness, somewhat akin to the notion of "Rootless Cosmopolitans". I can't tell if you are trolling me with this poo poo. E: Bernhard is funny on Heidegger (and Austrians) in Old Masters: quote:I still value Stifter more highly than Heidegger, who has always repelled me, because everything about Heidegger has always been repulsive to me, not only the night-cap on his head and his homespun winter long-johns above the stove which he himself had lit at Todtnauberg, not only his Black Forest walking stick which he himself had whittled, in fact his entire hand-whittled Black Forest philosophy, everything about that tragicomical man has always been repulsive to me, has always profoundly repulsed me whenever I even thought of it; I only had to know a single line of Heidegger to feel repulsed, let alone when reading Heidegger, Reger said; I have always thought of Heidegger as a charlatan who merely utilised everything around him and who, during that utilisation, sunned himslef on his bench at Todtnauberg. When I think that even super-intelligent people have been taken in by Heidegger and that even one of my best women friends wrote a dissertation about Heidegger, and moreover wrote that dissertation quite seriously, I feel sick to this day, Reger said. His nothing is without reason is the most ludicrous thing ever, Reger said. But the Germans are impressed by posturing, Reger said, the Germans have an interest in posturing, that is one of their most striking characteristics Boatswain fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 03:09
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Boatswain posted:To clarify: I find myself in antipathy when it comes to Heidegger as a philosopher and I don't care to parse Sein und Zeit to make a proper judgement, as far as that is possible. As a person Heidegger was a moral idiot and a Nazi and there should be no excuses. Not trolling, saying that his particular anti-Semitism was related to his overall philosophy, and had to do with him viewing Jews as not related to his idea of blood and soil. To him, Jews represented alienation, detachment, mobility, rootlessness, analysis, as opposed to the instinctive communal identity that he preferred. I am trying to explain how his philosophy is related to his politics, and the really simple answer is, both were marked by a fear of "The Other".
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Jan 22, 2019 03:32
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If one wants to talk about Being without the nazi, an alternative route is Tillich. Another German he got chased out of Germany by the Nazis in 1933 (for The Socialist Decision). Havard Theological Review on how they are related: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1509278?read-now=1&seq=2&socuuid=b66c5320-08b8-4ca7-bec6-3f3e215f1459&socplat=email#page_scan_tab_contents Thing is it's theology, which aint everybody's jam. Edit: as it's MLK day, MLK's thesis was about Tillich btw.
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Jan 22, 2019 07:22
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Heidegger's career was that he wrote Being and Time, then he became a Nazi, then he became a weird , reclusive technophobe more interested in mysticism than philosophy. I will still insist that Being and Time is worth studying, and is one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Everything after that, not so much.
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Jan 22, 2019 07:46
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glowing-fish posted:there is a deeper strain to what fascism is, and I believe a lot of it is concealed inside of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The idea of wanting to do away with our individual consciousness and conscience, and replacing it with an oceanic feeling of being part of something bigger, is something that we can appreciate. The idea of returning to the unity of a community and a simpler world is something that sounds like a good idea, until we think of all that could mean. Looking at the damage caused by "Western rationality" is a good critical perspective, as long as we don't forget what the alternative has been. It's the corruption of salvation. Fascism, terrorism, the various right wing christian nationalists, they offer a false salvation. Tillich defines the demonic in systematically theology as basically this.
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Jan 22, 2019 07:49
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glowing-fish posted:Heidegger Checks out. And I don't mean this just as a glib "lol what a weirdo, so clearly a nazi lol" jab. Half-dumb fucker with just enough brains to be dangerous quote:While there is lots of reasons to look at fascism as being allied to state power, and embracing economically conservative positions, there is a deeper strain to what fascism is, and I believe a lot of it is concealed inside of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The idea of wanting to do away with our individual consciousness and conscience, and replacing it with an oceanic feeling of being part of something bigger, is something that we can appreciate. The idea of returning to the unity of a community and a simpler world is something that sounds like a good idea, until we think of all that could mean. I propose that many faux-spiritual and woo fads (yoni eggs, anti-vaxx, OMG GMO/pseudoscientific back-to-nature nonsense) stem from a similar line of thought that attempts to locate dumb fucks in a vision of a pure and all-encompassing whole threatened by any attempts to point out that poo poo is hosed and won't be solved by positive thinking unless accompanied by reality-based *spits* action. I would also be surprised if this doesn't mesh extremely well with the just world fallacy. quote:Looking at the damage caused by "Western rationality" is a good critical perspective, as long as we don't forget what the alternative has been. Looking at the damage caused by cultures with older ideologies (especially considering what was then technically achievable) when the west was still a disease-ridden backwater, I'd argue that just pointing at the philosophy of whoever happened to be the top oppressor previously and saying "thought bad" is the easy way out and doesn't solve anything. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 12:51
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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I guess this is why I posted all that yesterday, how it is still relevant to this forum. There are a lot of critiques of things like state power, capitalist economies, on these forums. But when I read them, I can't tell whether they are based in rationality or irrationality. Whether they are an enlightenment idea or the type of post-enlightenment that Heidegger started. For example, say we read someone say "The police will only ever protect the wealthy, the justice system is only used to protect those in power". You can read that about 50 times a day on here. There are two ways to interpret that. The first is that there are universal moral and ethical laws, that people can learn and understand through discourse, but that presently, law enforcement and courts do not follow laws derived from those principles. That would be the rationalist, enlightenment take. The second way to interpret that is the Foucault way, that is derived from Heidegger, that "universal moral and ethical laws" are just masks for the exercise of power, a form of disguising what can't even be called Truth anymore, a continuation of "forgetting" our primal truth and that, in effect  Because on the surface these arguments might say the same thing, but they start from different places and have different ends. With the first one, we can at least theoretically talk about what a just society looks like. With the second, we are just left posting disconnected discontent on an internet comedy forum.
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Jan 22, 2019 17:26
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glowing-fish posted:I guess this is why I posted all that yesterday, how it is still relevant to this forum. I think what people usually mean is somewhere in between the two.
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Jan 22, 2019 17:29
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glowing-fish posted:But when I read them, I can't tell whether they are based in rationality or irrationality. Whether they are an enlightenment idea or the type of post-enlightenment that Heidegger started. Luther. Luther went gently caress Aquinas yo and created the break. The enlightenment is not outside of this break (they're all German Lutherans, Kant, Hegel, Shelling, etc) nor are the various strains of post enlightenment thought, be they marxist, existentialist, or religious existentialist. Edit: Zizek is taking it back to Hegel to try to resolve this question, but that's not far enough back. Edit 2: They aren't disconnected, there just is not much translation between the different branches, but there can be! Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 21:45
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BrandorKP posted:The enlightenment is not outside of this break (they're all German Lutherans, Kant, Hegel, Shelling, etc) Noted Germans Voltaire, Diderot, Locke, Hume, and Thomas Jefferson.
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Jan 22, 2019 21:49
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Who are they reading, reacting to, and being influenced by?
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Jan 22, 2019 21:54
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BrandorKP posted:Who are they reading, reacting to, and being influenced by? Bacon, Hobbes, Newton, Leibniz, and Montesquieu.
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Jan 22, 2019 22:06
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Let's cut to the crux, Where do you think the break between the analytical and continental branches starts? What sets that spilt in motion for you? Edit: Tillich thought the break occured with Luther in his History of Christian thought. Convince me there's a better place to locate the split? Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 22:09
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BrandorKP posted:Where do you think the break between the analytical and continental branches starts? What sets that spilt in motion for you? With Frege, who was indeed a German, and even, to bring the discussion back to the OP, a proto-Nazi. Though it's a lot easier to separate from his philosophy than in Heidegger's case; apparently no one had any idea until they discovered his diary. Though Frege would be obscure were it not for the non-Germans Peano and Russell. Edit 2 years later: I originally wrote "Wittgenstein's" instead of "Heidegger's" here, which was simply wrong. Sorry for falsely calling you a Nazi, Wittgenstein! Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jun 14, 2021 |
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Jan 22, 2019 22:28
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BrandorKP posted:
Ah, okay, and this is where I should have been more careful in my terminology earlier, because I used a few words in their general meaning, not their philosophical meaning. "Rationalist", for example, is bandied out by atheists in a way contrary to its traditional meaning. Traditionally, Rationalism, trying to understand the world through Reason, was opposed to Empiricism, trying to understand the world through the sense and experience. So Benedict Spinoza was a Rationalist, because he tried to construct a completely rational model of the world. During the enlightenment, Rationalists were not opposed to religious notions, they just tried to understand them through Reason. So at the time, a philosopher like David Hume would have been seen as against the Rationalists, because he viewed the world through the idea of Empiricism. Today, colloquially, he would be described as a Rationalist, because he argued against the Supernatural, etc. But both of these Enlightenment philosophies, Rationalism and Empiricism, are still based on some sort of thought and discourse and first principles. They are still in common terms "rational". And then you have "post-Enlightenment" thought, which really begin with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, and continued with Heidegger and Sartre, through Foucault and Lyotard. So basically, there are three schools, and one of them is extinct. code:
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Jan 22, 2019 23:35
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Yeah but Frege is just responding to questions raised by Kant. And I don't think it's any accident that it's mostly the English being the ones to respond to the Germans because they broke with the Catholics in a different way, that didn't involve a fundamental change in the way they thought.
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Jan 23, 2019 00:05
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glowing-fish posted:For example, say we read someone say "The police will only ever protect the wealthy, the justice system is only used to protect those in power". You can read that about 50 times a day on here. I'm not entirely sure I agree with your conclusions there. While the post-structuralist writers do indeed deconstruct anything they can get their hands on and, one could argue, the entire post-structruralist/post-modernist project is in its own a reaction to the modernist project of actually theorising and proposing a better world by critique , post-structuralism can and does actually propose something better. Not in the sense of the promised, though slightly unexplained, clear world of communism, but a better world or society nonetheless.
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Jan 23, 2019 00:16
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glowing-fish posted:I guess this is why I posted all that yesterday, how it is still relevant to this forum. In practical terms, does it matter? "Cops will defend the rich and powerful when push comes to shove" can be understood as descriptive of the state of cops in society, presenting a problem for the goal of establishing socialism against the wishes of the rich and powerful. Solutions such as "remove cops", "reform cops and give them different incentives", "replace cops with red guards" (as if there is a difference between this and the previous option  ), etc. will be tried until the problem is solved or eternal cyberpunk plutocracy sets in. Whether the eventual outcome is in accordance to hypothetical universal laws of morality doesn't really matter. starting here:In general terms, I also ask whether allegedly-universal moral and ethical laws can possibly be universal in the first place, and again, does this even matter? Now, I'm sure I'm pissing over centuries of philosophical thought by taking positivism über alles as the fundamental assumption of the argument, but I fail to see how we could possibly discuss the idea of natural or universal morality without taking into account that humanity is essentially apes transplanted into new habitats and societies vastly different from natural ones due to rapid advances in culture and technology. ~~~human nature~~~ is a mess of adaptations and maladaptations to living as small tribe/family group omnivores who might occasionally meet another group (new findings suggests some core behaviours are more ancient, but this doesn't change the overall argument). As a behaviourally-complex and flexible species, we would have evolved general behavioural rules that broadly encourage behaviour consistent with performing everyday functions of paleolithic life such as optimal (or sufficiently good) resource sharing, conflict resolution, group-level decision making, etc in line with the need to survive and reproduce. The underlying rules form a 'natural' system of morality, and it is in principle possible to discover them. However, we run into two main problems when trying to apply 'natural' morality to modern societies: Firstly, it is unlikely that a few generations would have been enough to adapt humanity to a world where societies number in the tens of millions (if you're an ardent isolationist) to billions (if you're a (((globalist)))) with easy access to long supply chains, public works, unprecedented means to build power structures, etc. There is no reason to assume that 'natural' morality is sufficient to regulate behaviour here, instead of reaching its limits as factors that have never been relevant to selection become overwhelming. Evolution doesn't anticipate, it reacts, it can take some time to do so, and sometimes it loving fails and poo poo goes extinct. Natural morality cannot be considered complete. Secondly, why the gently caress is 'natural' morality supposed to be universal, good, and/or prescriptive? Core assumptions of moral arguments typically include something along the lines of 'suffering bad', and arguably 'suffering bad' is part of natural morality. It's obvious to us that less suffering is generally desirable, but this can again be explained through pure biological adaptation. If you're suffering, poo poo has gone wrong, and it's adaptive to do something about it. As a group animal, we are capable of empathy for anything that shows a recognisable response to stimuli we understand. However, it's equally obvious that inflicting suffering to a clearly morally repugnant degree is possible without running into an insurmountable obstacle of natural laws. Inflicting such suffering merely makes other people consider you a loving rear end in a top hat, and maybe inflict some retribution or justice on you after the fact. Since this is an extremely online argument, I'll point to exhibit 1, literally Hitler  . There is also no way to show that suffering is universally bad without making unprovable prior assumptions (critics will attempt to argue for universality by pointing out that a lot of non-human life will also attempt to avoid suffering, or whatever state of being comes closest. This again boils down to the fact that "if you're getting hosed up try to stop getting hosed up" is a useful response for anything adapted to survive). Hence, natural morality cannot be seen as universal, or objectively good, but merely as a behavioural adaptation of humans.Because humans are behaviourally flexible and have the potential to be at least minimally capable of reasoned and/or evidence-based argument, it is possible to develop new moral rules to supplement or supersede natural morality and take into account the state of modern society. These rules could be considered unnatural in a very strict sense (though if your conception of the human phenotype is sufficiently broad, you would argue that the fact that humans use their human brains to make new moral rules makes these rules natural by definition). They will be based on some set of unprovable a priori assumptions, and are true only in the sense that they ought to follow from logical argument and evidence to actually loving work instead of backfiring. The assumptions may still be influenced by very powerful parts of 'natural morality' that people find hard to overcome. If people use different a priori assumptions they may arrive at different moral rules. Objectively, , and Truth with a capital T does not exist for morals. But so what? Some key parts of natural morality are likely to be shared across the human (and potentially other intelligent species) experience due to certain adaptations common to any self-replicating life form. It makes little sense to deviate from them without overwhelming need. Other parts may not be so widely distributed. Sections of society (e.g. plutocrats or some sociopaths) may voluntarily use assumptions taking them to entirely incompatible moral rules from the bulk of humanity (e.g. FYGM is cool and good), and this leads to a conflict that will eventually be resolved one way or the other. Why should it matter to the masses that plutocrats may or may not be more objectively right in some metaphysical sense? The masses are still deprived of food and other resources, and will inevitably feel compelled to rectify this situation.
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 01:23
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Glowingfish, What are the existentialists (and most of that post enlightenment / post modern category is rooted in existentialism) reacting to? Idealism, not nessisarily the enlightenment. But to confuse matters some of the religious existentialists are idealists! But let's take an author close to existentialism, Melville. Melville has two works that I think capture what Tillich calls the existentialist impulse, one in personal terms and one in societal terms. The one that is autobiographical and personal is Bartleby the Scrivner. The one that deals with society is Billy Budd. Tldr: (not for you, I'm sure you're very familiar with both) gently caress your well meaning ideas about what you think I should do with my life, "I'd prefer not to." gently caress being sacrificed, literally wrongly executed knowingly, to enforce societies norms for the greater good. This impulse I think one finds in Nietzche and Marx and Kierkegaard and Lacan and Foucault, etc. I dont think it's accurate to limit it to merely a reaction to the enlightenment. It's a dialectic between this impulse and the construction of ideas with language. Which is why I like the putting of it as starting at Luther, particularly his rejection of Aquinas and Aristotle combined with the breaking of Catholicism theonomy. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 04:22
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glowing-fish posted:
Liberalism may formally renounce the 'oceanic feeling' as a legitimate mode of politics but in practice liberal societies like America are quite noteworthy for the mass esctatic public events such as music concerts, sporting events and megachurch meetings which seem to directly tap into the same psychological drives. Liberalism partially justifies and expands itself through the freedom of its popular culture, and much of American pop culture seems to provide a culturally safe venue for expressing behaviours that a communist or fascist society might channel into politics. While we might argue that fascism represents a particular marriage of aesthetics and politics but in that case I'd argue there have been fascistic strains in a lot of western countries for some time now and that it's dangerous to present fascism as some kind of totally foreign or alien system when so many of its signature features (propaganda, race law, a colonial mindset toward foreign territory, etc.) were pioneered in America. For instance, America is generally taken as the prototypical 'liberal' market economy (as compared to the social market economies of a place like Sweden or the state capitalist economy of China) and perhaps it is not a coincidence that religiosity is vastly higher (and also typically more focused on experience over rational discourse) in American than any other advanced country. And you can hardly say that religion is incidental to politics in America given religiosity is an important predictor of who you'll vote for. glowing-fish posted:I guess this is why I posted all that yesterday, how it is still relevant to this forum. I'm not sure it really makes sense to interpret the average person's moral claims as following some clean chain of logic going back to either postmodernism or the enlightenment. I think most people construct a folk morality that mixes their intuitions with social norms and that quite often the formal reasoning they give for their ethical claims is a largely ad hoc justification added after the fact (perhaps without the person in question even realizing this is what they're doing). I think there is plenty of value to examining the philosophy underlying our ethics because this does inform the norms that structure our society, but you're taking it a bit too far when you suggest all people reason and make claims based on a clearly articulated philosophical tradition. Most people are way more muddled in their thinking than that and carry around all kinds of random and not entirely compatible nuggets of belief in their skulls. I also strongly dispute the idea that all claims to universal morality derive from the Enlightenment. If that were true then what is your take on the various monotheistic religions of antiquity? suck my woke dick posted:
This is a highly politicized theory of how evolution impacts our behaviour that relies on a lot of 'just so' reasoning and which involves all kinds of assumptions that can't actually be easily tested or evaluated. You shouldn't present it as obviously true or even as representative of the scientific consensus. quote:
You come off as someone who is trying to make confident generalizations about a field you have only a passing familiarity with, and its kind of obnoxious. I'm not saying everything you say is without merit but it's very obvious you're just debating against what you assume other people think rather than having done any work to investigate the beliefs you're trying to refute. For starters, I don't think you can reduce all ancient ethical systems to some kind of vulgar utilitarian 'suffering bad, pleasure good' principle.
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Jan 23, 2019 21:04
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The one Literary Theory course I took in university focused a lot on Heidegger. It also focused on the man who the professor teaching the course considered his modern equivalent, another German philosopher named Peter Sloterdijk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk I had to read some passages of both Being and Time and from Sloterdijk's own magnum opus, Spheres. Both were completely unintelligible to an undergraduate, and apparently incredibly difficult for the Philosophy department at the school, who was made up of analytic philosophers, to understand. Which is why the continential philosophers were only discussed in the english department. The analytic philosophers thought what Heidegger and Sloterdijk wrote was very verbose nonsense. Germany seems to have a culture that still reveres these philosophers though. Sloterdijk even hosts a show on German television called the "Philosophical Quartet". Personally I think these right-wing philosophers get their reach because elevating their ideas is convenient for the ruling class. Billionaires like being told by esteemed intellectuals that their wealth is a sign of their productivity and that they need to reign in liberal democracy with their power.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:11
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Ccs posted:
I had many criticisms of continental philosophy along those lines going through undergrad, some of which I keep, but I have more appreciation for it now. I can not say the same for analytic philosophy; analytic philosophy never comes in conversation about topics I am interested in. Also the people who talk about and quote analytic philosophy are libertarians.
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Jan 25, 2019 04:33
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Just an observation a prior first lady named her book "Becoming". Now I know, with certainty, that this comes from the churches she attended in Chicago, and the thought of Tillich, which comes from Heidegger in 1925 (edit see Jstor link I posted earlier). I'm not sure we can look at America without taking about Being and Nothing. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Jan 25, 2019 |
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Jan 25, 2019 07:03
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side_burned posted:I had many criticisms of continental philosophy along those lines going through undergrad, some of which I keep, but I have more appreciation for it now. I can not say the same for analytic philosophy; analytic philosophy never comes in conversation about topics I am interested in. Also the people who talk about and quote analytic philosophy are libertarians. What changed your mind, and what aspects of continental philosophy appeal to you?
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Jan 25, 2019 21:24
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Oil is the combination of death and time. It is the most Heideggerian substance.
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Jan 27, 2019 03:41
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alpha_destroy posted:Oil is the combination of death and time. It is the most Heideggerian substance. What is this oil, that in seeing, we are blind to? It comes to us, not as a substance, not as a Thomist substantia, fixed in a schema, a silent reserve of scientifically/industrially defined reserve, kept inside of a pump. For in remembering these things, in remembering the theories of chemical composition and geological movement, we are forgetting the openness of our Being to what-is-that-is oil, the acrid smell in our noses as we stop at the pump, the concealed depths of the crack of the attendants butt cheeks as he waddles forward to greet us, even the rip of the Cool Ranch Doritoes as we step into the minimart to purchase "snacks", in this forgetting of the oil, in forgetting of the technical/utilitarian components of the gas station, in forgetting this abstract substance, stored in vats under the asphalt, we remember. We remember the unity that gives rise to this experience, we remember the folk spirit of the workers, united in their purpose of servicing vehicles, we remember the highway interchange that cradles the gas station. And we remember that we forgot out parent's credit card at home.
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Jan 27, 2019 04:06
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glowing-fish posted:What is this oil, that in seeing, we are blind to? It comes to us, not as a substance, not as a Thomist substantia, fixed in a schema, a silent reserve of scientifically/industrially defined reserve, kept inside of a pump. For in remembering these things, in remembering the theories of chemical composition and geological movement, we are forgetting the openness of our Being to what-is-that-is oil, the acrid smell in our noses as we stop at the pump, the concealed depths of the crack of the attendants butt cheeks as he waddles forward to greet us, even the rip of the Cool Ranch Doritoes as we step into the minimart to purchase "snacks", in this forgetting of the oil, in forgetting of the technical/utilitarian components of the gas station, in forgetting this abstract substance, stored in vats under the asphalt, we remember. We remember the unity that gives rise to this experience, we remember the folk spirit of the workers, united in their purpose of servicing vehicles, we remember the highway interchange that cradles the gas station. And we remember that we forgot out parent's credit card at home. I have nothing to add except that this is perfect and you deserve an award.
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Jan 27, 2019 05:06
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Heidegger was a gibbering, idiot, nazi hack. His works are basically incoherent and incomprehensible. Once you boil off the bullshit all that remains is a pile of useless and trivial observations, and a lovely half-baked re-articulation of ideas which pre-date him by more than a thousand years. The fact that the impotent dribbling dick of 20th century western postmodern philosophy was influenced heavily by him is damning praise. He somehow gets credit for resurrecting ontological concepts that are old as gently caress despite the fact that, when the fart cloud of pointlessly obtuse terminology settles, it turns out he didn't actually develop these ideas any further at all. He did do a lot to popularize the idea that "not making any goddamn sense" is, in fact, a profound epistemological position and when called out on being a sputtering font of verbal diarrhea he had the balls to basically declare "well, if I used specific words in a certain order that actually meant something, my ideas wouldn't make any sense!" If he had spent more time carefully or sincerely developing his ontological ideas instead of swerving off into bongrippingly lazy anthropology and being up his own rear end about lovely German poetry or whatever, maybe he would have written something worth reading. But he didn't. And that's all I have to say about that. Morbus fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 05:51
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"[Dasein is] that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue". Glowing fish you characterise Heidegger's hermeneutics as "complicated" why? What's the word mean literally? Translation, interpretation, explaination! Imagine a pastor at a mainline (not evangelical!) doing an exegesis of scripture to answer a contemporary question. Now imagine instead of one question it was towards the end of building a system and there were many exegesis involved. This is the same thing in a religious context (and it's where the process Heidegger uses for his hermeneutics orginates from). You look to the past: the poetry, stories, philosophies and then explain them to answer the questions of now and to build a system. Look at Zizek for someone thinking this way now. Also I think of it sort as the inverse of deconstruction. In Tillich the equivalent concept is the method of correlation. If you need examples I can dig atleast one up?
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Jan 27, 2019 05:57
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Blurred posted:Heidegger's career was that he wrote Being and Time, then he became a Nazi, then he became a weird , reclusive technophobe more interested in mysticism than philosophy. Not even his essay "The Question Concerning Technology"? Probably the most seminal piece of writing in the 20th century. Heidegger's later works are even more profound than B&T, and I love that book.
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Jan 27, 2019 05:59
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suck my woke dick posted:Objectively, What you're searching for is what Hegel attempted to address after rejecting Kant's moral imperatives as insufficient, because they do not transcend the individual and so can never be universal or truthful. Hegel's Sittlichkeit (ethical order) has the root German word Sitte which builds into ethics the normative standards of society. Heidegger is also against such moral imperatives because we would be needlessly enframed in an individual's metaphysical subjectivism. Morbus posted:He somehow gets credit for resurrecting ontological concepts that are old as gently caress despite the fact that, when the fart cloud of pointlessly obtuse terminology settles, it turns out he didn't actually develop these ideas any further at all. He did do a lot to popularize the idea that "not making any goddamn sense" is, in fact, a profound epistemological position and when called out on being a sputtering font of verbal diarrhea he had the balls to basically declare "well, if I used specific words in a certain order that actually meant something, my ideas wouldn't make any sense!" Heidegger's innovations are heavily contingent on the concepts developed by Kant (The a priori space-time structure of cognition), Hegel (Shaping philosophy & history through each other), & Kierkegaard (Subjective temporality).
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Feb 25, 2019 22:06
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KVeezy3 posted:What you're searching for is what Hegel attempted to address after rejecting Kant's moral imperatives as insufficient, because they do not transcend the individual and so can never be universal or truthful. Hegel's Sittlichkeit (ethical order) has the root German word Sitte which builds into ethics the normative standards of society. I want to make a sequel to this thread, where I talk about "rationality", what "reason" and "the enlightenment" are, how they underpin our current political and social situation. Obviously, Heidegger is fun to talk about, but it seems a lot of people are interested in the history behind Heidegger, and how the enlightenment started and has kind of run out of gas.
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Feb 26, 2019 01:34
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Heidegger is too tedious to read. What's even the point of philosophy if its going to be boring? Nothing.
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Feb 26, 2019 04:24
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Squalid posted:Heidegger is too tedious to read. What's even the point of philosophy if its going to be boring? Nothing. The mass man, the man of the city, divorced from being, scampering from one event seen-through-the-eyes-of-others to another, is unable to understand the poetry of language, the language of poetry, and how they are both silent. And so he looks into Being, looks into the logos, not the logos of category, but the logos of connection, of linking, that ideas-as-thoughts-as-words-as-poetry, are what is Being-there-as-human-as-history-as-Volk, and he calls it "nothing". Because the teleology of "interest", where essence leads, through a series of hints and allegations and things-left-unsaid, to existence, and where existence, in its circuitous path that is not the forest-path of the German Worker who joyfully uses the trees in the service of the Volk, is lead back into essence, this game is the game the urbanite plays and speaks, and where the true nature of Being, that forgotten ray of light piercing the forest kanopy, becomes "boring", becomes "Nothing".
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Feb 26, 2019 04:38
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glowing-fish posted:The mass man, the man of the city, divorced from being, scampering from one event seen-through-the-eyes-of-others to another, is unable to understand the poetry of language, the language of poetry, and how they are both silent. And so he looks into Being, looks into the logos, not the logos of category, but the logos of connection, of linking, that ideas-as-thoughts-as-words-as-poetry, are what is Being-there-as-human-as-history-as-Volk, and he calls it "nothing". Because the teleology of "interest", where essence leads, through a series of hints and allegations and things-left-unsaid, to existence, and where existence, in its circuitous path that is not the forest-path of the German Worker who joyfully uses the trees in the service of the Volk, is lead back into essence, this game is the game the urbanite plays and speaks, and where the true nature of Being, that forgotten ray of light piercing the forest kanopy, becomes "boring", becomes "Nothing". you lost me at the third clause. If you can't open a book to a random page and make sense of what it says its not worth reading. If a philosopher won't say anything comprehensible in plain language its because he has nothing to say important enough that it needs to be comprehended.
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Feb 26, 2019 05:12
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Ze Germans write different yo. It's like the difference between writing a paper for a UK university and a US one, the structure you use is different. On top of the structural differences there is the difference between materialists and idealists. The materialist writes about one thing the idealist writes about many things like that fragmented light coming through the canopy.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:18
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