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.
Yeah? Well, that’s just like… your opinion, man!
You nihilist…
Thought, I think - and this is why I don’t think there can be thought beyond language - consists precisely in the separation of experience into an experiencer and an experienced (subject and content, to speak with Nietzsche). That is, Becoming - experience - requires the idea of Being; and this is what that strange fragment of Heidegger’s was about. Two sentences earlier, he says the following:
“Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, in order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has Being only in creative transfiguration.”
http://www.escapefromwatchtower.com/heidegger.nietzsche.html
So thought is precisely this creative transfiguration of Becoming. Consciousness requires a Being beyond Becoming, an experiencer beyond what is experienced; not that this Being, this subject, really exists - for it is not an object of experience -, but in order to mirror Becoming and give the experience substance. Becoming - experience - requires the idea of Being - substance - in order to be self-conscious; not in order to be conscious. Consciousness, as most animals have it, is what I call direct experience. But, paradoxically, precisely because man is self-conscious is he not being, but becoming: he is striving, struggling, i.e., consciously striving and struggling. The un-self-conscious animal is itself strive and struggle, whereas the human animal is apart of the striving and struggling - a striving and struggling part, a striver and a struggler. Nirvana or whatever is precisely the state of mind in which there is no longer the idea of substance: in which there is no feeling of struggle and also, therefore, no thought.
“How does the perspective sphere and error come about [entsteht]? Insofar as, by virtue of an organic being [Wesen], not a being, but struggle itself wants to preserve itself, wants to grow and be conscious.
That which we call “consciousness” and “spirit” [Geist] is only a means and an instrument by virtue of which not a subject, but a struggle wants to preserve itself.”
[Nietzsche, Nachlass.]
This explains the paradox I formulated above. It remains to be seen, then, in how far Nirvana and the like are means for the struggle - “Becoming” - to grow even more. It may be the only way, for the struggle cannot grow indefinitely by means of the idea of the subject - as I have shown with my “mad God” experiment. My fear of being absolutely alone was precisely the feeling of the struggle being extinguished.
The All is one, and for that reason has nothing to struggle with. And it would itself be nothing if it were Being, for the All is a struggle, is Becoming. Therefore error - perspectivism - is necessary for the All to exist at all. It is this that I discovered in my thought experiment.
Apologies for the mud-slinging. Old habits die hard.
Do you not mean that for the All to be aware of itself, it has to err, to divide itself in to perspectives? For the all to ‘be’ instead of te become, it has to position a reflection of itself outside itself to become self aware, and to struggle.
It is not said that the All does not exist if it is only becoming, just that noone would ever know about it. For humanity to exist, there must be error. As you say yourself, animals can exist without it.
It seems to be that your explanation of thought, which I can for the time being agree with, does not explain why it necessitates language. It just explains how thought exist only through separation of being and becoming. Language doesn’t play any part in this per se.
I stand by the explanation of the primate figuring out how to make fire. You’veonly stated that there is language involved, elaborated a bit about the fact you think this, but not demonstrated that it is necessary.
As far as I’m willing to go to accept thoughtforms as language, ‘figuring things out’, connecting situations to create a third situation, does not always involve representations in my mind. Not when a thought follows a direct observation.
Yes.
“To position” here meaning “to imagine”, yes. But not to ‘be’ instead of to become, but to be becoming (phusis, dynamic) instead of to ‘be’ (to remain the same, to be static). If the all were static, it would not exist, for existence is becoming, not “being”.
Yes, but that is if you suppose there is objective existence. If only experience exists - and that is all we know that exists -, then error is necessary for existence itself.
Note that an animal, or a person not thinking (but only directly experiencing), still experiences only by virtue of an imagined ‘being’, a subject. But he, or it, does not use signals to refer to any phenomena - not even to refer to “itself”, to the subject. If anything, it refers to the total experience by that experience itself.
My point is that the primate must refer to the phenomena it combines in its thought. It must symbolise these phenomena by whatever signals.