Heidegger

I know, really.
<–Look at my wonderful German hands, LOOK.
You don’t suppose I couldn’t rule the world?
Heidegger may be a nut but he knows the German way.
Who needs a brain anyway. I can do kung-fu.
Reality can shove it. I’m being imagined.

Apparently so does Ben Harper. Damn Germans.

Well, that certainly is a good thing to hear, and something I would like to believe. That you experience me, that is. Or rather, to still make a subtle distinction, that there is a bundle of impressions referred to as Sauwelios (or Saully) that is being experienced by a being that refers to the bundle of impressions it experiences as “itself” (or herself) as SilentSoliloquy. The reverse is true, so why should that not be true? It is just that I cannot know for sure. But I am willing to go with that hypothesis. In that case, there is not only Being experiencing itself as Sauwelios, and from the perspective I call “mine”, but also, Being experiencing itself as SilentSoliloquy, and from the perspective I call “yours” (though you may call it “mine”). This is possible and certainly looks that way. But appearances can be deceptive. I am willing to believe in this world of appearances, to avail myself of the conviction that it is real. Just don’t think I have ceased to be a nihilist. I am still a scientist according to the definition that is my signature. This is not a white flag. It is still a black flag, but it has a tiny white corner.

If it weren’t for drowning in complex thoughts, you could see like the child you used to be.

Don’t let it get to you. Everything is here and it’s simple.

Questioning and contemplating is good but don’t step off the edge to where you start to deny yourself individuality in judgement and thought.

A child is not, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra calls it, “a first motion”. The “innocence” of the child is in the forgetfulness of the fact that everything, or at least a lot, has been prepared for it. As Jim Morrison says, “We must tie all these desperate impressions together”. The parents are eager to provide the child with ways to do this, with pre-conceived connections, which have proven, for them, to “work” - but “to be workable” is something different altogether from “to be true”. Parents bundle impressions together, or sanction the child’s instinctive bundling-together of certain impressions, by saying: “that is a car”; “that is a plane”. As for the mentioned “instinct”: this “first nature” is actually an inherited second nature, a trait that has been naturally selected in the course of many (many, many) generations, because it “worked” - not because it reflected “the truth”. Certain traits are sanctioned by custom because they have experientially proven to “work”. Thus custom actually legislates natural selection, because those who do what is sanctioned by custom are rewarded with security and privileges - “freedom under the law” -, whereas those that experiment with it, who go “new, untrodden ways”, are “cast out” psychologically or even actually, losing their privileges or even their safety.

Even if I do not entertain any hope of success, I will still try to make you see why I consider your “truth” to be dogmatic.

“A word, once [i.e., in the past] mistaken for knowledge, is really a sound used as a sign for an experience, and it becomes a concept as soon as it is used for more than the one original experience. […] “A concept is an invention to which nothing corresponds entirely, but many things a little,” and so provides a “sign apparatus” for the mastery of great masses of facts. […] The primitive men who formed [language] believed in souls possessing free will as a faculty of capricious action. They projected this notion into things, and came to interpret their own sensations as the “actions” of other “agents,” later as the “qualities” of those “agents.” These superstitions became grammar - subject and predicate, active and passive, etc. Since that time, grammar has been a “folk metaphysic” dominating even the greatest philosophers. […]
Alleged “immediate certainties” […] are really just so many beliefs […]. For instance the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” involves a number of bold assumptions - that I know what “thinking” and “existence” are, that thinking implies a thinker, that I am the thinker in this case, that the inference indicated by “therefore” is logically valid. Thus it involves judgment, interpretation, and therefore refers to something beyond the “immediate.” […]
Mathematics and logic have also been favorite sources of infallibility. Nietzsche regards mathematics as applied logic, and both as a “sign convention” or “theory of signs” which, in themselves, have no concern with reality at all. As applied to experience, they are animal contrivances of great utility for mastering the environment, but, far from revealing a structure of eternal Being, they positively falsify reality by using such fictitious entities as straight lines, points, and enduring self-identical things. There is no reason, therefore, to take our human logic as more than one of many possible kinds. So in any case neither logic nor mathematics can give certainty about the world.”
[George Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, pp. 248-253.]

I do not wish to imply that you believe in logic (mathematical or linguistic; from the Greek verb legein, meaning “to count” or “to speak”) to the extent described above. I do wish to give you an impression of the extent to which Nietzsche questions assumptions. In principle, every assumption is a questionable one for Nietzsche: hence his “fundamental certainty” which is expressed so well by Harry Neumann (below). As we have to make assumptions, however, in order to function, those ideas that “work” have a value for life (indeed, their value is determined by how well they “work”), but not a truth-value. Apart from the fundamental certainty that there is “something”, which is in a state of flux, there is no truth, but only probability. It is probable that similar, but different experiences from my own exist (i.e., “other people”). I always work with this hypothesis, otherwise how could I function? Your assertion that I exist is not exactly revolutionary for me.

I don’t know if I can tell you but I have a pretty good idea what it produces. Heidegger aims at an understanding of ‘existence’ or ‘life’ or ‘being’ or whatever titles you attribute to the central interest of all philosophy, that is beyond language and logic. That is why he is such an ingeniously bad writer.
What I remember most vividly from reading him is his idea of being as non existent in actuality, but only existing as a function of actuality.
That he managed to write so much about this in such an insane way is unfortunae, if he had sticked to one essay he might have gotten his point across.
I do not think there is much more to Heidegger than the notion that ‘being’ does not, in reality, exist, that it is only an interpretation of actuality, which is more like becoming. With the addition that ‘being’ is always linked to a think that is, whereas becoming can be seen (with some effort) as, paradoxally, a thing in itself.
I think I’ve managed to say something very Heideggerian here, as it appears to be 100% self-negating. Excellent…

And what is that bundle of impressions when you pick it apart? There must be a perceptor to be impressed. Only then is there experience in the first place, which can be determined as that which is experienced and vice versa.
Rationally reducing does not actually reduce.

The experience is not experienced; it is the experiencing (experiens). The experiencing, however, is the experiencer; without the experiencing there would be no experiencer. The experiencing is all there is.

Jakob - you have said it better than me. I think that Heidegger is correct insofar as he states a triviality - that existence does not exist. This had already been accomplished, over and over, in different ways, some bad and some good, by other writers. He seeks to refute Hegel. Okayfine. Easy target. You are right on the money - an essay would have done the trick. As he continues, his obsession becomes clear, and he loses any real point in hopeless incoherence. This is why I jokingly say that one can read every other sentence to good effect - I am actually burlesquing him by understatement - only I am capable of that. Okay, Horace and me. Okay, maybe a few more.

But Nietzsche had done the dirty work as far as laying out the “central interest” for philosphers. As much as Heidegger is supposedly influenced by N, he seems to have mistaken N on any important point.

You have certainly expressed the Heideggarian spirit, yes. If nothing else, Heidegger is fun.

So glad you’re back and posting.

That would be an actual statement if you were able to provide a definition for ‘experiencing’ without mentioning the experiencer.

When I was stilll conditioned to regard established philosophers with awe, I took this incoherence to be a statement, or a demonstration of ‘how exactly being does not exist’. I thought Heidegger delved into secret mechanics of the nonexistence of being. But eventually I figured out that he was just falling into the trap he aimed to dismantle - he keeps trying to establish the ‘fact’, which is a thing that ‘is’, that being does not exist.
He must have been able to justify this to himself in some way, I hope. Otherwise it’s just plain idiocy.

I think that Heidegger makes one all-explaing mistake, which is to think that complexity is profundity. He seems to set off on a trajectory of reasonings, constanty discovering that the one reasoning leads to another which leads again to the first but from a slightly different angle. Therein he sees the facets of a great mystery which he desperately tries to uncover, not realizing that the more he writes, the greater the mystery becomes, and the further he is removed from it’s solution.

The only chance I give Heidegger is to read his work as a hypnosis-inducing mantra, which brings the reader into a state where all reason falls away and the ideas of becoming being, being becoming, becoming becoming being and being becoming of becoming take over the mind and propel it into a very German state of Zen.

Perfect. That’s what I wanted to know. Apparently Nietzsche is your revolutionary assertion that you don’t exist. I recommend dropping Nietzsche’s every quote and begin focusing on what Saully has to see and say for a while. Get your own head back and your own way of seeing things from a child’s perspective. Nietzsche was a good philosopher but it seems to me you get obsessive over him. Why not listen to yourself? Why not speak for yourself?

SS - As Jakob has taught me (although I didn’t admit it at the time, I think - had to think about it), no one is more childlike than Nietzsche. That may be ironic, with the context of what you are saying here, (the ironically-named) SilentSoliloquy, but I believe (now) that it is true.

Nietzsche never asserted that we do not exist, however. He wasn’t knocking the idea of our existence - he was knocking the idea of epistemology.

I have already done so. It is the last sentence of my statement.

“Speaking for oneself” is impossible, as there is no such thing as a “self”. That, by the way, is the revolutionary assertion. It is literally revolutionary, as in “revolving”, as of a wheel - the wheel that needs to invented again and again. It had been (re)invented by the Buddha. He supposedly formulated this assertion as follows:

“Human beings are imprisoned because they have not yet abandoned the idea of the ego. The thing and its quality differ in our mind, but not in truth. In our mind, heat is different from fire, but in truth one cannot separate heat from fire. One can say that it is possible to separate the qualities from the thing, but if one thinks the theory through to the end, one will find that it is not so.
Is a human being not an organism of many aggregates? Do we not consist of various properties? The human being consists of the material form, of sensation, of mind, of tendencies, and lastly, of understanding. That which human beings call the ego when they say “I am” is not an entity behind the properties; it comes about by their interplay.”

I like this passage. But the following is even more definite:

“The doctrine of karma is undisputed, but the theory of the ego has no ground. Like everything else in nature human life is subject to the law of cause and effect [which Nietzsche also disputes - he replaces it by a more accurate description, even as quantum physics have provided a description of nature more accurate than Newtonian physics - but that does not matter for Buddha’s argument]. The present reaps what the past has sown, and the future is the product of the present. But there is no evidence of the existence of an immutable ego-entity, of a self that remains the same and travels from body to body. There is reincarnation, but no transmigration of souls.”

There is no transmigration of souls because there is no soul. But there is reincarnation, which literally means “again becoming flesh”. There is a circle of life in which flesh begets flesh. But the absence of a soul does not only mean that I have had no past lives, nor will have future lives, but even that I don’t have a present life:

There is no remaining the same as there is no such thing as sameness. There is similarity, which is a relatively small difference. Nietzsche called himself a nuance. God is in the details.

Grmbl… valid enough. I’m curious to know how you fit thought into this model? You earlier suggested it to be from direct experience. Does indirect experience also qualify as experience? Or do thoughts not actually carry any substance?

I thought of an explanation for the primal reaction we experience in the face of absurdity, in humor, jokes - in these moments our thougths do not Platonicly position a metaphysical thing in itself, but rather present language as it is without it leading attention away from itself by meaning something. Laughter as the result of seeing language naked, unclothed by meaning. What do you think?

I think that the will to power is directed at establishing and sustaing the experience of a soul, the ego - something that objectively doesn’t exist, yet experiences itself as real. When the will to power prevails there is an individual, a hero and there can be a myth and an archetype, and with that immortality. When Buddhism prevails there is only the fleeting direct experience of reality.
The problem with this formulation arises when you consider that the concept of the thing and the I as separate has enabled humans to control and manipulate reality. The fact that the concept heat has been separated from the concept fire enables the concept of heat beyond fire. This has enhanced man’s power, and changed his experience of reality, changed experience, changed ‘all there is’.
It seems all there is isn’t all there is.

Well, I have no clue as to what you mean by “speaking for oneself is impossible” because I’m speaking for myself at this very moment. I also don’t really care what Buddha had to say. He can be Buddha and I’ll be me. I agree on the cause and effect cycles of life. That I observed on my own before I ever heard about Buddhism or Nietzsche. I also know I’m more than an ego or an increment of these cycles. I’m in charge of my will to power. I’m me and I’m willing to stand for my own beliefs.

“Those who have the courage of their convictions should prove it by standing on their own two feet; thos who want to learn whether they have the courage for an attack on their convictions should study Nietzsche.”
[Peter Berkowitz, "Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, preface.]

STOP WHINING you two.

The only one who’s whining here is you.