Frederick Dolan

"I suppose it would be important to know the sorts of things that most of Heidegger’s readers, at least many of the more or less sympathetic ones, agree can be truthfully said about him. It would also be important to know about some common misunderstandings of his thought, so as to avoid them. And it’s important to know certain things about his life.

A few basics. Heidegger’s philosophical interests were originally stimulated by reading canonical figures such as Aristotle and Kant, but he was also inspired by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who at the time were not really regarded as philosophers. They were deeply critical of the philosophical tradition, especially in the form of what Nietzsche called “Platonism.” Heidegger too adopted a critical perspective on what he saw as insufficiently examined presuppositions of Western philosophy.

The reflections stimulated by these thinkers (along with Dilthey and Husserl, to whom Heidegger was an assistant) culminated, by some extraordinarily original process of philosophical imagination, in Being and Time (1927).

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a “turn” (Kehre) took place in Heidegger’s thinking, which is reflected in his “Letter on Humanism” (1947).

Fundamental ontology. In Being and Time, Heidegger is attempting a “fundamental ontology” – that is, he’s trying to grasp the basic semantic root of the various ways we understand what it is to be. Roughly, his answer is that to be is to be taken as being something, to be present or to “show up” to a human being. This depends in turn on the temporal unity that characterizes our “being-in-the-world” – the way in which, wherever and whenever human beings are, they find themselves dealing with a situation involving things, goals, practices, and people that matter to them.

In undertaking his inquiry into the meaning of Being, Heidegger believes he is formulating a problem that is (a) deeply significant and (b) until him, unappreciated. Philosophy has always asked questions about beings, such as: Is there a God? Is He omniscient? Does the external world exist? Do other minds exist? Science, too, investigates beings: What are the atomic and molecular structures of matter? What causes sodium and chlorine to bond? But in asking whether certain kinds of beings exist, and which properties they possess, philosophers and scientists ignore the question of what it is for something to exist in the first place.

The ontological difference. When we ask that question, it turns out that the meaning of being is both ambiguous (it can mean many things) and vague (its meanings are not clear or self-evident). Existence is what all existing things have in common, but existence itself is not a thing and so can’t be understood the way we understand things in general, as objects with properties. So not only have philosophers failed to pose the question of being, when we do pose the question it turns out that it’s not at all clear how to go about asking and answering it. Nevertheless, it’s a central problem – what could be more significant than the question of what it means for something to be?

In exploring the matter, Heidegger says, we must keep in mind the “ontological difference”: the difference between beings or entities and what it means to be (the “Being” of beings). Treating Being as if it were a being, it turns out, is the basic flaw of Western metaphysics since Plato, so one aspect of Heidegger’s project is to work out the history and consequences of this “forgetting of Being.”

At bottom, Heidegger is interested in the phenomenon of intelligibility. What is it for the world to make sense? How does sense or meaningfulness come to be? In Being and Time Heidegger calls the source of intelligibility Dasein (the German word for existence), which is something like the human way of being: not as a living creature, not as an individual agent, but as the bearer of practices, dispositions, and concerns shared with others – for instance, as the speaker of a shared language, which is something that becomes centrally important to Heidegger after Being and Time.

There’s a great deal to say about how this project plays out, putting it mildly. I’m going to ignore most of it because from here on in things become controversial (in fact, they already have). I won’t say anything (or anything much) about the Kehre, but I’ll hazard a bit more on Being and Time.

Being-in-the-world. As I said, Heidegger trains his attention on “the being for whom Being is an issue,” namely Dasein, or us. What are our most fundamental ways of sense-making, those universally shared by human beings? Heidegger develops the idea that in order for beings to show up for us as beings, we ourselves must be open to encountering them. We are essentially “Being-in-the-world,” which entails “Being-with” others in a totality of involvements such that we use particular things (“equipment”) in definite contexts (“in-which”) to take a step (“in-order-to”) that contributes to a completed task (“towards-which”) understood as relevant to actualizing a possible way for us to be (“for-the-sake-of-which”).

Thus I might press on the brake and start button of the car (equipment) in my driveway (in-which), to start the car and drive to Stanford (in-order-to), to teach a class (towards-which), all as part of my being a teacher (for-the-sake-of-which).

Authenticity. Typically, we are simply absorbed in such activities and are not consciously thinking about them or ourselves as individuals, so long as things are going well. When things go wrong, however, we may find ourselves standing outside the world, as it were, momentarily seeing it as a whole in order to grasp where the problem lies and to re-establish our trouble-free involvement. Things can go wrong mechanically, as when a piece of equipment malfunctions. For example, my car might not start because the battery is dead, at which point the world as a whole comes into view and various courses of action present themselves to me: recharge the battery, borrow my wife’s car, get a ride with a friend, ask a colleague to teach the class, cancel the class, etc.

But things can also go wrong “existentially”: we sometimes find that the world we thought was ours no longer makes sense. I can have the feeling that whether or not the class gets taught doesn’t really matter. Am I really a teacher – is that really my calling? This kind of thing makes us anxious, but it also presents an opportunity for us to understand ourselves “authentically,” as unique individuals who can own up to who we are by resolving to take responsibility for ourselves. When I say in response to the mood I described “Yes, it is my calling,” I also realize that each and every moment of my life was and is an opportunity to do the same.

When we are inauthentically or non-authentically going about our business in an un-self-conscious and un-individuated way, we casually take responsibility for what we’re doing at any given time. I understand that I’m responsible for preparing my class, setting out for the campus on time, and getting home again, just as I’m responsible for returning a book to the library when it’s due or waiting for the light to turn green before crossing the street.

But when in a state of anxiety I wonder whether any of this really matters, I have the opportunity to assume responsibility for my entire life, my life as a whole. At such moments we understand that we are “nothing but” the totality of our choices and actions and that we are responsible not merely for what we do, but also for who we are. Authenticity is owning up to this understanding such that it informs and is exhibited in everything we do.

Temporality and mortality. Crucially, “going authentic” involves grasping the peculiar condition of temporality. Wherever and whenever we find ourselves, we are projecting ourselves into the future by understanding what we are presently doing in terms of an expected outcome. What we are presently doing, however, is exercising abilities and purposes we already acquired in the past. To be present is to have drawn the past into the present and projected it into the future as a possibility that will become actual. At its most basic, then, temporality is a unified mode of Being, but different aspects – past, present, or future – typically “stand out” for us at different moments. We grasp temporality as a whole, however, when we understand that there is one possibility that will never be actual for us, namely our death, since when that becomes actual we will no longer be.

In this way we see that our death is always present in that we are mortal, that each individual’s mortality is uniquely his or hers, and that we are in a position to take ownership of our lives and approach them authentically.

Misconceptions. One misconception that might stem from what I’ve written so far is that Heidegger was mainly preoccupied with “existential” issues. This is the aspect of Heidegger that people like Jean-Paul Sartre fixated on. But for Heidegger, the existential analysis of Dasein was a means to the end of asking about the meaning of Being. In the “Letter on Humanism” and other writings, Heidegger de-emphasizes things like authenticity in favor of the more basic theme of openness to beings as exhibited in language, artworks, poetry, and things.

Reality. A common misconception is that when Heidegger talks about Being, he means that something exists. In fact, he means the intelligibility of beings as that which we take them to be. If you ignore this distinction, you can fall into thinking of Heidegger as a kind of idealist who believes that there are no natural or objective entities apart from our understanding of them, or worse, that natural entities depend on our understanding of them. The point can seem paradoxical. That there are natural entities that exist independently of our understanding of them is, of course, our way of understanding what natural entities are. Their non-dependence on us matters to us, not to them. In a sense, naturally occurring entities in themselves neither are nor are not independent. But it is emphatically the case that natural entities exist independently of us. There were dinosaurs that existed before us, but dinosaurs were not intelligible – they could not be taken as dinosaurs – until we so took them. That doesn’t imply that there were no dinosaurs – dinosaurs is precisely what there were.

Agency. Relatedly, the fact that the Being of entities is a matter of our taking them as such doesn’t imply that we are free to take them in any manner we please. On the contrary, who we are and can be is conditioned by how entities can show up to us. I am a carpenter only insofar as hammers and nails show up to me as ready-to-hand, i.e. only insofar as I can skillfully make use of them. In real life, hammers and nails will not disclose themselves to me as ready-to-hand. Taking something as something doesn’t mean forming certain beliefs about it. It is not primarily a mental act. It’s a way of being involved with something. (Part of what limits what can be disclosed to me is the interpretation of Being shared by the particular culture or community or historical period to which I belong. This suggests that different periods can have different understandings of Being, something that Heidegger explores at length.)

Truth. It’s also easy to misconstrue Heidegger’s criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth to mean that there’s no such thing as a proposition that may or may not be true, i.e. correspond to the way the world is. In fact, his view is that the relationship of correspondence depends on the more basic structures of intelligibility that he articulates in Being and Time and elsewhere. Before there can be propositions that do or do not correspond with the objects to which they refer, there must be a world in which both propositions and objects can be taken as such. To say that that world does or doesn’t correspond to reality makes no sense, because reality – whatever reality Dasein can encounter – just is that world. Analogously, the various factual sentences we can form in English either are or are not true, but it makes no sense to ask whether the English language as a whole is true or false. None of these considerations, however, implies that there is no fact of the matter as to whether utterances like “Snow is white” and “The cat is on the mat” are true or false".

'The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.” The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances'.

Guy Debord

Illusory correlation

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation

A typical tactic used by narcissists, collectively, to address atrocities is, of course, to avoid them. But when they are so obvious that they must be mentioned, they will be mentioned as briefly as possible and with as little context as possible. And there is a great example of this discussed in ‘The Peoples History of the United States’ where Zinn references a textbook which mentions that Christopher Columbus committed genocide and then drops it to talk about all the great things that Columbus did. And the point that he’s making there is that, yes they say the word genocide, yes they mention it in one sentence which means that they can’t be accused of not raising it at all and this inoculates them. It inoculates them against the larger criticism, it takes control of the criticism and internalizes it and then shunts attention in the direction that they want it to be shunted.

Derrick Jensen

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, a flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power – which groups have it and which do not.”

        Isabel Wilkerson 

 

Wilkerson

8 Pillars of caste

1. Divine Will and the Laws of Nature

2. Heritability.

3. Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating.

4. Purity vs Pollution.

5. Occupational Hierarchy.

6. Dehumanization and Stigma.

7. Terror as Enforcement and Cruelty as Means of Control.

8. Inherent Superiority vs Inherent Inferiority.

        Isabel Wilkerson 

the Other

In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other identify the other human being, in their differences from the Self, as being a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same.^[1][2] The Constitutive Other is the relation between the personality (essential nature) and the person (body) of a human being; the relation of essential and superficial characteristics of personal identity that corresponds to the relationship between opposite, but correlative, characteristics of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference, within the Self.^[3][4]

The condition and quality of Otherness (the characteristics of the Other) is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self.^[5] In the discourse of philosophy, the term Otherness identifies and refers to the characteristics of Who? and What? of the Other, which are distinct and separate from the Symbolic order of things; from the Real (the authentic and unchangeable); from the æsthetic (art, beauty, taste); from political philosophy; from social norms and social identity; and from the Self. Therefore, the condition of Otherness is a person's non-conformity to and with the social norms of society; and Otherness is the condition of disenfranchisement (political exclusion), effected either by the State or by the social institutions (e.g., the professions) invested with the corresponding socio-political power. Therefore, the imposition of Otherness alienates the person labelled as "the Other" from the centre of society, and places him or her at the margins of society, for being the Other.^[6]

The term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling and defining a person as a subaltern native, as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other. The practice of Othering excludes persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, which is a version of the Self;^[7] likewise, in human geography, the practice of othering persons means to exclude and displace them from the social group to the margins of society, where mainstream social norms do not apply to them, for being the Other.^[8]

Wikipedia

dismantling-the-npic

 https://both-and.org/dismantling-the-npic

Deception

 

 https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2017-08/NewSystems_DavidSchweickart.pdf

“As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve…he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man…exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth…This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself”.

MH

Jeremiah 6:14

"They offer superficial treatments for my people’s mortal wounds. They give assurances of peace when there is no peace".

Huang

https://www.academia.edu/29498476/The_Banality_of_Radical_Evil_in_the_Name_of_Enjoyment_Hannah_Arendt_Revisited_through_Ethics_of_Psychoanalysis

Huang (Abstract)

 

The Crime of Indistinction? The Undead and the Politics of Redemption from an Agambenian Perspective

Han-yu Huang

The undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions and essence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undead comes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with a brief critical review of Hannah Arendt's contribution to biopolitical discourse. By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the " strange logic of the undead " works in such signature Agambenian categories as the " threshold " and " zone of indistinction, " and in the context of the saturation of life in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmann who, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and bare life, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have been deprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening a site where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this paper carries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben's intervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to the politics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul and messianic thinking.

"Bunkers are built to shelter self-serving prejudice from evidence".

"The knowledge of how much easily preventable injustice and misery are present in this reality gnaws at the edges of my awareness at all times. I think less of people who don't have this problem because it tells me that their concern is performative and easily compartmentalized. If the state of the world does not fill you with unease, frankly there is something wrong with you".

"It feels like being in a burning building with all the sirens going off but everyone is confused as to why your trying to find a way out. Why your crying? Why are you coughing? All while they pretend to not feel it too. It makes you feel like your crazy but you know your not! No mental illness can create these symptoms". These symptoms and the toxic states of affairs that they are indicators of, can, however, generate illness.

"In an imbalanced power dynamic, the person with less structural protection must, when pressed into conflict, fight harder, strike more lethally, and counter attack with what appears to be grossly disproportionate force. An example is found in school bullying...the victim may take actions that are framed as "disproportionate". The bully is only "threatening"...but one day that child knocks the bully on their ass...What's really going on here is that the victim, realizing they have no choice but to counterattack, knows the power structure is against them. Unless the bully is totally put down, the system will help them quickly recover, excuse them, and set them back to bullying. An "overreaction" is necessary to correct for privilege and systemic inequity. Likewise, a person who is angered at crimes resulting from systemic discrimination and inequity has no choice but to become "overly" angry. There is massive apathetic inertia in the form of people whom the system and status quo benefits - ignorant people who don't comprehend the real harm resulting from what they are saying, doing, supporting, or merely making excuses for. And these people help form a systemic bulwark that defends the actual, active "bullies" in society. The uneducated, unaware, and uncaring will excuse the active hostility of the bullies or downplay it. They will frame people angry at injustice as overreacting - anything to maintain the pleasant, vegetative obliviousness of the unquestioned status quo". 

"0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad*. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov *fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world."

"Truth: Its Metaphysics, Epistemology and Semantics



We can say that epistemology essentially concerns itself with two things: truth and our “relationship to truth”. Many philosophers, however, would say that truth simpliciter (rather than our knowledge of truth) is a metaphysical (...or a semantic...or a philosophy of language or mind) issue, not primarily one of our knowledge and therefore epistemology.

This is the case because various philosophers see truth as either some kind of property or even some kind of entity. Not only that: a property that is mind-independent (even if minds can come to know the truth). Strictly speaking, then, truth is a question of ontology, which is a branch of metaphysics.

As for truth being deemed an issue for the philosophy of language.

We can say that this is the case because truth is seen as a property of sentences or statements. Yet even here we smuggle in metaphysics by talking of the properties of statements. What kind of property is that? How does the property truth attach itself to sentences? What is the relation between the statement and its truth-property?

The philosopher of language can circumvent metaphysics by saying that truth is literally a linguistic property, not a metaphysical one. That is, saying that truth is linguistic (or semantic) is a reference to the linguistic fact that we can add the predicate ‘is true’ to the statement “Dolphins are mammals”. Truth is a semantic endorsement of a prior truth-claim or statement. Thus truth- deflationists, for example, argue that we can easily drop the “is true” from the statement without any loss of power or meaning. In that case, the semanticist can simply get rid of truth altogether (as is the case with semantic naturalisers).

Earlier I made the twofold split between truth and our knowledge of truth. We can say, however, that truth must come before our knowledge of truth. Or the metaphysics or semantics of truth must come before epistemology simply because of the fact that we can’t have knowledge of a truth if we don’t already know what truth is. However, we can epistemologise (as it were) truth by arguing that truth is somehow a function of our knowledge of truth (or of the tools and procedures required to discover truth).

A similar manoeuvre can be found in semantics.

Many logical positivists, for example, originally argued that the meaning of a sentence is the means we use to verify it. And verification is an epistemological issue in that we require epistemic tools and procedures in order to verify a statement or proposition. So just as meaning was seen as a function of epistemic verification, we can now argue that the truth of a statement is a question - or function - of the epistemic tools and procedures we require to either construct truth or discover it. And if all we have are such epistemic tools and procedures (i.e., not a property we can call ‘truth’), then we can become truth-deflationists (or truth-naturalisers) by simply getting rid of truth altogether (or, at the least, getting rid of the predicate ‘is true’). Thus we can conclude that naturalised epistemology basically gets rid of the metaphysics of truth".


Paul Austin Murphy

Voltaire

Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact business together, as though they were all of the same religion, and give the name of Infidels to none but bankrupts; there the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends upon the Quaker’s word. 

Voltaire