/lit/ - Literature

>>18851242
No, Heidegger was opposed to any theories like that which would explain things via the subject as conceived by any psychological account. He agreed with Husserl almost exactly on this. Besides, you don't find the "real" Dasein by examining some interior structure. There is no interior in any analogous way to Freud.

>>18851242
>>18851254

I forgot to mention, if you're interested in this sort of thing, you should check out Medard Boss, who worked for 20+ years with Heidegger to develop a non-Freudian school of psychoanalysis based on Dasein.

>>18851242
Heidegger was disgusted by psychoanalysis explaining everything through 'instinct', and denied the unconscious as a basis for being, since being for him after all is the groundless ground. Basically he thinks it's an easy way out in trying to explain life.

>>18851265
Don't forget Boss worked with Jung and was a personal friend.

>>18851254
I don't know man. It seems like Heidegger is doing for ontology what Freud did to psychology. In the latter the mind has feelings, thoughts, urges, - and in the case of Jung, a priori archetypes that give meaning to our experiences - which are the contents of the unconscious, which we might, if we wish to know to mind more fully, try to make conscious; while Heidegger is saying that it is ourselves - Dasein - which has an implicit understanding of Being, so to know Being we must do an analysis of Dasein; in his later days he would go so far as even saying that traditional philosophy with its focus on logical argumentation is superfolous because cognition is only derivative of Dasein's understanding. In both cases there is a commitment to an implicit repository which we possess which shapes our interaction with the world.

>>18851321
>so to know Being we must do an analysis of Dasein

No, the analytic of Dasein only gets us to the point where we can start asking the right questions about Being and get a vantage point to recognize the ontological difference, which has been uncritically swept under the rug by centuries of metaphysics. There is no foundational relationship here. The space Dasein occupies is "abyssal", the groundless grounding. Dasein is not and cannot be thought of as anything like a "subject" which grounds some conceptual representation of Being as an object or experience.

>in his later days he would go so far as even saying that traditional philosophy with its focus on logical argumentation is superfolous
No, traditional philosophy is part of our unique "destiny", but we can't properly appreciate it or see it for what it is until we find a new vantage point with appropriate distance to view it from. This is the epochal beginning he references later as opposed to the "first beginning" which gave us metaphysics. His commitment to any sort of repository in his later work is even less pronounced, the final boundary of hermeneutics becomes the event [Ereignis] rather than Dasein. We don't "possess" anything because there is nothing in our essence which has the capacity to be in a properly ontologically grounded relation of "possessing". This is similar to his critique of the Aristotelian rational animal, the animal which "has" language as a possession or a predicate.

>>18851360
>Dasein is not and cannot be thought of as anything like a "subject" which grounds some conceptual representation of Being as an object or experience.
This is not what I said though. That Dasein has an understanding of Being, and that this understanding is implicit, is precisely what I compare with Freud and Jung's view of the unconscious. The contents of the unconscious are not conceptual in a similar manner.

>>18851378
This is a tenuous comparison if thats the basis for it though. Dasein is not a subject and we understand things in Heidegger's arrangement through practical capacity, at least pre-ontologically. Understanding becomes even less subjective in later Heidegger.

>>18851419
But consider Jung's claim that in the primitive man and even in children the world is experienced in more or less unconscious manner. For Jung, consciousness, the precondition of knowledge, is an extension of and built upon the unconscious. This view of conscious/unconscious parallels Heidegger's view of cognition and knowledge as derivative of practical, pre-ontological, understanding. I don't claim a one to one similarity here (no need to spell out the differences for me) but that the spirit of their projects share similar general commitments.

>>18851475
At this point we might as well being saying that Heidegger was a crypto-Platonist because anamnesis says that we have unconscious memories of things that we don't realize, and these things condition our pre-reflective experience of the world. In your specific phrasing there might be some cognates between them but it doesn't stand up to any kind of deeper consideration, and Heidegger himself was quite seriously opposed to Freudian thinking and psychologism as a way of apprehending the human being. His work is structurally incompatible with it in any way that matters.

>>18851242
>unconscious mind
Schelling invented the concept of the unconscious mind, I don't see the Heidegger connection but they are both downwind of him.

>>18851242
They're both attempts to achieve the intellectual advances of Buddhism circa 300 CE.

>>18851505
>Schelling invented the concept of the unconscious mind,
Wrong, but he did develop it for the time.

>>18851493
Heidegger could not be considered anything- Platonist as he explicitly says truth is relative to Dasein. Husserl, though, could be considered a Platonist in his effort to uncover the ideal essences of phenomena (although he tried to reject the association). To the point: it is clear that Heidegger saw a repository of implicit understanding - as Jung and Freud did. It is even more illuminating in his turn to poetry and poeticizing, which Jung calls the vessels of the contents of the unconscious. Heidegger's insight is in seeing that experience is shaped and mediated by what is unconscious and implicit. His mistake was that he took the contents of the unconscious as the Being of things - he psychologized ontology. After all, ontology is a simple matter. To be is to be the value of a bound variable. The only question lies in what precisely is the range of these values.

>>18851265
>>18851310
>Daseinanalysis
Kek. Where do I get started on Daseinanalysis?

>>18851713
>Heidegger could not be considered anything- Platonist
I know, my point was that if you dilute the views of people to a certain point you can make virtually any comparison you like.

>he explicitly says truth is relative to Dasein
Sort of, truth isn't relative to Dasein so much as Dasein is the precondition for anything like truth. It sidesteps the whole objective/subjective question of truth.

>it is clear that Heidegger saw a repository of implicit understanding
I don't mean pedantic but your wording here is troubling. Heidegger saw Dasein as a place where understanding happened, but "repository" implies that there is.a thing with discrete essence such that it can "contain" understanding, whether conscious or unconscious. There is no such essence in Heidegger. We happen together with understanding, not prior to it.

>It is even more illuminating in his turn to poetry and poeticizing, which Jung calls the vessels of the contents of the unconscious.
Heidegger's poeticizing says nothing of the unconscious, if anything, the ek-statical function of poetry is to reveal our relationship to language itself which precedes any "us".

>Heidegger's insight is in seeing that experience is shaped and mediated by what is unconscious and implicit. His mistake was that he took the contents of the unconscious as the Being of things - he psychologized ontology

This is simply not true, I don't know how else to put it.

>After all, ontology is a simple matter. To be is to be the value of a bound variable.
I don't know why you would include this statement in proximity to Heidegger, this is totally alien to the project of phenomenology.

>>18851916
Medard Boss - Existential Foundations of Medicine & Psychology. Expensive and hard to find any hard copies of but readily available as pdf.

>>18851310
CUTE.

>>18852013
>I don't know why you would include this statement in proximity to Heidegger, this is totally alien to the project of phenomenology.
Most of your post is missing my points, but I would only clarify this part. That statement is precisely is alien to Heidegger, and because it so, it is the correct way to do ontology. When Heidegger makes it the entire goal of his project to do a hermeneutic of Being as Dasein already understands it, as he admits himself, he makes the truth, the world, and indeed Being entirely dependent on Dasein's pre-ontological understanding. But after a little scrutinizng of Heidegger's project we see that this Being which hides itself, which Heidegger was so obsessed with uncovering, happens to be nothing but the contents of the unconscious, which is the way we chiefly understand and act in the world without even having the cognition or consciousness of it. This means that mistaking Being of entities with his own psychological content, Heidegger makes the grave error of psychologizing ontology. When he says he intends to let that which hide itself be seen from itself, he does not know it, but he has precisely the contents of the unconscious in mind. Husserl himself realized this when he said Heidegger's "ontology" is nothing but philosophical anthropology. Rejecting the whole analysis of Dasein as the way to ontology, if we look elsewhere, we find that the only way do ontology is laid bare in Quine; given that philosophy and sciences in general would, ideally, consist of a set of logically true propositions, and that these logical propositions would have to refer to things which they describe (entities, possibly numbers, and anything that exist), then the task of ontology is to decide what things logical variables refer to. This is the sort of ontology that is not psychologized or anthropologized.

>>18852029
>CUTE.
Are you a woman?

>>18852029
>Get in here, bros. We're gonna save Western Civilization!

>>18852166
>Lets destrukt tradition!
Yeah, truly they saved us.

>>18852129
>But after a little scrutinizng of Heidegger's project we see that this Being which hides itself, which Heidegger was so obsessed with uncovering, happens to be nothing but the contents of the unconscious, which is the way we chiefly understand and act in the world without even having the cognition or consciousness of it. This means that mistaking Being of entities with his own psychological content, Heidegger makes the grave error of psychologizing ontology.

I have an amateur understanding of Heidegger, I believe, from my undergraduate days, and from also rereading B&T as of now, but I believe it's YOU psychologizing ontology and simplifying Heidegger. At the start of B&T, Heidegger points out how phenomenology and ontology are inextricably intertwined. There is no Being without a mode of being, Dasein, there to "see" Being (Heidegger, I believe, gets into philology here, I think, pointing out how the Greek for this doesn't mean necessarily just to "see" with the eyes but can transcend it). So it's YOU making the analogy between Heidegger's analysis of Dasein, and subconscious/conscious distinction made by Freud, Jung, and the like. If someone ties some cloth around your eyes and you can no longer see anything in front of you, then takes the cloth off so you can now see (uncovers, discovers -- aletheia, the Greek for truth which etymologically literally means "uncovering", as Heidegger makes much of -- truth as unveiling, uncovering what was there but wasn't being paid attention to, was covered up by Dasein's own fallen-ness into the They, by the history of philosophy, and so forth), this isn't a shift from the subconscious to the conscious, but simply a shift in attention, in what one is seeing.

It's YOU making the analogy between this and and the subconscious/conscious distinction. I'm putting this crudely and some people could probably find things to nitpick in it. Hopefully some gracious scholars could let me know if I got anything wrong.

>>18852129
>. But after a little scrutinizng of Heidegger's project we see that this Being which hides itself, which Heidegger was so obsessed with uncovering, happens to be nothing but the contents of the unconscious,
U literally wot

>>18852333
Nice trips, but there is something you missed. The point is what Heidegger wishes to uncover he says is already present in the understanding of Dasein pre-ontologically. I explained in the earlier posts how Being - hidden from our cognition but implicit in understanding - and the task of uncovering Being from the implicit understanding to explicit cognition, which Heidegger says is done by analyzing ourselves, parallels the psychoanalytic practice of making the unconscious content of the mind conscious. To put it crudely, where psychoanalysts talk about the unconscious, Heidegger talks about pre-ontological understanding; and where psychoanalysts talk about unconscious content, Heidegger talks about Being. His turn to poeticizing as a way of uncovering Being gives credence to the claim, since psychoanalysts have shown have in poetry the contents of the unconscious are expressed.

Even if you don't accept the understanding/unconscious parallel, you would have to accept that analyzing Dasein as a method of enquiry results in anthropologizing (Husserl's word) ontology, since it makes Being dependent on Dasein. I'm not even saying anything controversial here; Let me quote his own words in §44c: "Because the kind of Being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein's Being."

>>18852434
Hmm. I think the point Heidegger is making is that this isn't a crude anthropologization, rather he's trying to get beyond anthropology by pointing out how even anthropology is a constriction (again, covering, litheia) of Dasein, which goes beyond the study of evolution, of anthropology as a field of science.

>it makes Being dependent on Dasein

I think you're confusing the important point Heidegger makes, which is that Being and Dasein are part of a continuum which transcends the subject/object duality so common in the history of Western philosophy and in common day-to-day thinking. Here's a Sufi joke about the classic Sufi hero, Mulla Nasrudin, which explains this surprisingly well:

>Walking one evening along a deserted road, Nasruddin saw a troop of horsemen rapidly approaching. His imagination started to work; he saw himself captured or robbed or killed and frightened by this thought he bolted, climbed a wall into a graveyard, and lay down in an open grave to hide. Puzzled at his bizarre behavior, the horsemen – honest travelers – followed him. They found him stretched out, tense, and shaking. “What are you doing in that grave? We saw you run away. Can we help you? Why are you here in this place?” “Just because you can ask a question does not mean that there is a straightforward answer to it,” said Nasruddin, who now realized what had happened. “It all depends upon your viewpoint. If you must know, however, I am here because of you – and you are here because of me!”

Dasein is itself "Truth" and Truth is itself Dasein. There is no Dasein without Being and no Being without Dasein. Dasein is here because of Being and Being is here because of Dasein. The Zen question relevant to this also goes, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?"

Dasein is just as dependent on Being as Being is on Dasein. So Heidegger is anthropologizing ontology as much as you could say he's ontologizing anthroplogy (such as by pointing out that ontology is the fundamental, primordial field of study which is prior even to anthropology). Confusing? No? I'm not as much of a scholar as you and haven't even gotten around to reading Husserl yet.

>>18851242
Literally everything is connected by virtue of the fact that they exist in the same universe.

>>18852715
What if that universe is random?

>>18852733
If it is random, then its randomness becomes its laws, and the things are related by virtue of being random.

>>18852745
Randomness can't become a law

>>18852750
Yes it can, the law being randomness

>>18852434
>>18852707
To further elucidate and repeat my point, this is also what Heidegger tries to make clear by pointing out how phenomenology and ontology are inextricably intertwined. There's no Truth in itself, as seen by no one. There's nothing that a tree falling in a forest without anyone there to hear it sounds like. In the Kantian terms which he also critiques, there's no noumenon (the object, event, or truth as independent of human perception) independent of the phenomena we experience. Does this make sense?

>>18852842
It's effectively not a law then, so calling it a law is a bit of a misnomer.

>>18852877
but randomness would be the principle of the universe, which is what a law is.

>>18852887
What kind of principle doesn't repeat itself?

>>18852895
but it does repeat itself by repeatedly making everything non-repeating

>>18852899
It would only appear to repeat itself, but if it was random, there would be nothing connecting one moment to the next. No cause and effect would be occurring and such a relationship would simply be the inconsequential effect of a randomly produced configuration.

>>18852906
by describing how randomness would work you are proving my point, randomness is a principle by which this universe would function, if it didn't have principles you wouldn't be able to describe it at all. there would be no physical cause and effect, but the lack of cause and effect would be caused by the randomness. If anything this just creates some kind of paradox, which is just evidence that the universe isn't random.

>>18852921
Neither of us could honestly grasp such randomness. All we could talk about is a rudimentary, indirect form of it, based on those inconsequential effects mentioned before. And if it can't be grasped, it can't be formalized into a principle. We would be deluding ourselves if we thought otherwise.

>>18852928
>Neither of us could honestly grasp such randomness.
Why not? We are talking about it right now. Our brains can't really generate completely patternless sequences, but that doesn't mean we can't understand randomness as a concept.

>>18852960
>Why not?
Because to grasp something means to be able to communicate it, and such randomness in its purest form is incommunicable. To make such randomness communicable, to make it into a principle, means to give it structure, which it can't have since it is random, so we are only describing an impure form of it (in other words: we are not communicating this randomness at all, but our own corrupted version of it).

Psychoanalysis is a complete and utter hoax.

>>18852858
I have next to no knowledge of Kant, by the way, and don't remember and understand Heidegger's critique of Kant very well for just that reason. So I may have put it too simplistically or imperfectly. But once again, Heidegger is saying the study of experience (phenomenology) is inseparable from the study of Being (ontology), because, once again, once again, to repeat this point and Heidegger's point, there is no Truth in itself as seen, observed, and experienced by nobody.

Thomas Nagel's famous "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" probes into this issue, too, I think, and sheds some light on it, but much more briefly and from the analytic school of philosophy as opposed to the Continental school. In Nagel's analysis, we are always trying to "get outside of ourselves" in our efforts to understand the truth in various fields of study, but we can't really do this (in Nagel's famous analogy, for instance, know what it's like to be a bat), because all we know is our own experience. We can make various formulations ABOUT it but can't really know what it's like to be a bat without actually being the bat. I think this ties into Heidegger's point about how being a self-aware being "within" (not in the spatial sense, like a goldfish is contained in a bowl of water, but in the sense of being inextricably connected to, a part of, forming a continuum with) Being (Dasein, Being-here) gives a different kind of knowledge than just knowing about things, such as scientific formulations, measurements, mathematical equations, etc., which many view as an approach to getting at "the truth in itself which is totally independent even of human formulations of it", but which, as Heidegger points out, is not really so -- it's in fact removed from the more primordial ontological way of understanding reality which realizes all truth is relative to Dasein itself. Which strangely enough even has some parallels to discoveries in physics coming out at the time, with Einstein's theory of relativity pointing out that space and time are relative to the observer, but Heidegger isn't even necessarily talking about physics here, but pointing out, for instance, that in our day-to-day life, when walking from our house to church, for instance, we're not computing how many kilometers it is or counting the minutes like we're computers or calculators, but just going, "It's a pretty short walk" or even using colloquial phrases such as, "It's a stone's throw from my house".

>>18852434
Also, I think it's rather that the conscious/subconscious distinction parallels Heidegger's analysis, once again, of aletheia as uncovering the truth, uncovering what's already there. Heidegger dislikes this distinction between subconscious/conscious, I think, because it crudely "divides" Dasein into different compartments, when really Dasein's consciousness is one single thing, whole, complete -- it's just a matter of what's paid attention to. Again, I think my analogy of the blindfold over the eyes, first there then taken off. It's not that what you're not seeing when the blindfold is on is "subconscious" and then when you take it off it enters your "consciousness." It was there the whole time but you weren't looking.

I don't know. Are we going in circles? Am I saying irrelevant things or missing something? When Heraclitus said, "I searched myself," this wasn't in a psychoanalytical sense. Heraclitus is talking about something more primordial than looking into his "subconscious," his upbringing by his parents, his sexual complexes, etc. He's searching HIMSELF as a being, what Heraclitus himself "is", which isn't something present-at-hand like a stone or object, in Heideggerian terminology, but something unique and perhaps undefinable. In Heraclitus's own terms, "A man cannot step into the same river twice," and "Everything is flux." Heraclitus himself is not an object -- and he is not even a "subject" either (Heidegger disagreed this crude subject-object division, as I've pointed out before).

And this is why Heidegger loved the Presocratics, gave a lecture on Heraclitus, and also why his thought has analogies to Buddhist and Taoist thought. In Buddhism, for instance, mindfulness and self-investigation is not crudely "psychological" either, in the sense of raising something up from the subconscious to the conscious mind. Does this make sense?