Question about Heidegger's Being and Time

[Anonymous No.19098892]

In what sense exactly is the World (the equipmental totality and such) irreducible to bare present-at-hand facts? Is it casually unexplainable? If that is what is claimed, then wouldn't that be an empirical claim about what neuroscience/physics/whatever may or not be able to explain? Is it like Sellar's space of Reasons which is reducible to causes but within which the relations are normative rather than casual? Or is it more like more like a Trancendental/Empirical situation in which it is the practices (for instance the practices of a laboratory) that allow us to view things as separate from our practices?

Secondly, Present-At-Hand is supposed to be a view from nowhere that lacks a transcendental hermenuetic for-having, not just another for-having, right?

Dreyfus and Blattner have confused me on this point and I am now unsure where exactly Heidegger stands on Science in Being and Time.

[Anonymous No.19098896]

>>19098892
>Heidegger is a good example of how nothing is left but a number of ridiculous photographs and a number of even more ridiculous writings. Heidegger was a philosophical market crier who only brought stolen goods to the market, everything of Heidegger's is second-hand, he was and is the prototype of the re-thinker, who lacked everything, but truly everything, for independent thinking. Heidegger's method consisted in the most unscrupulous turning of other people's great ideas into small ideas of his own, that is a fact. Heidegger has so reduced everything great that it has become German-compatible, you understand: German-compatible, Reger said. Heidegger is the petit bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy night-cap, that kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger always wore, on all occasions. Heidegger is the carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher of the Germans, nothing else. I don't know why, Reger said yesterday, whenever I think of Stifter I also think of Heidegger and the other way about. Surely it is no accident, Reger said, that Heidegger just as Stifter has always been popular, and is still popular, mainly with those tense women, and just as those fussy do-gooding nuns and those fussy do-gooding nurses devour Stifter as their fovourite dish, in a manner of speaking, so they also devour Heidegger. Heidegger to this day is the favourite philosopher of German womanhood. Heidegger is the women's philosopher the specially suitable luncheon philosopher straight from the scholars' frying pan. When you come to a petit-bourgeois or even an aristocratic-petit-bourgeois party, you are very often served Heidegger even before the hors-d'oeuvre, you have not even taken off your overcoat and already you are being offered a piece of Heidegger, you have not even sat down and already the lady of the house has brought Heidegger in with the sherry on a silver salver. Heidegger is invariably a well-cooked German philosophy which may be served anywhere and at any time, Reger said, in any household. I do not know of any philosopher today who has been more degraded, Reger said. Anyway, Heidegger is finished as far as philosophy is concerned, whereas ten years ago he was still the great thinker, he now, as it were, only haunts pseudo-intellectual households and pseudo-intellectual parties, adding an artificial mendaciousness to their entirely natural one. Like Stifter, Heidegger is a tasteless and readily digestible reader's pudding for the mediocre German mind.

[Anonymous No.19098897]

Did you check over your head?

[Anonymous No.19098904]

>>19098896
Look mom I posted it again

[Anonymous No.19098906]

>>19098896
Kill yourself bro

[Anonymous No.19098909]

>>19098896
>Anyway, Heidegger is finished as far as philosophy is concerned, whereas ten years ago he was still the great thinker, he now, as it were, only haunts pseudo-intellectual households and pseudo-intellectual parties
Didn't age well

[Anonymous No.19098969]

>>19098892
Nobody knows?

[Anonymous No.19099032]

>>19098892
Does anyone have the letters between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt as PDF in either English or German? It's only in Spanish and Italian on libgen
Would be really nice if someone has it

[Anonymous No.19099144]

Present at hand "factuality" shouldn't be conflated with a realist/referentialist notion of pre-mental "givens" about the "objective world in itself," to just use lots of scare quotes to indicate the trickiness of these concepts. For the same reason, Heidegger's "world" should not be confused with a kind of mental/subjective "covering" for the world of pre-mental/objective facts. The world-character of being is just the totality of ways of taking beings to be, in the ways in which they are so taken. It concerns the being of the beings, and thus it is phenomenological and hermeneutic, and not concerned at all with how Being and beings relate to "real" (physical or otherwise) entities.

>Secondly, Present-At-Hand is supposed to be a view from nowhere that lacks a transcendental hermenuetic for-having, not just another for-having, right?
Presence-at-hand is better understood as something defamiliarised but still not appearing "as it really is in itself, prior to 'interpretation'." One way of thinking of Heidegger's conception of phenomenological hermeneutics or hermeneutic phenomenology is that it's all interpretations all the way down, or put better, we can't escape interpretations, even when trying to come up with ways to escape interpretations (e.g., the very notions "objective" and "subjective" or "physical as opposed to mental" or "real as opposed to imaginary/illusory/merely conceived" are all themselves beings with complex histories). Hence all the scare-quoting.

Merleau-Ponty would probably be more helpful here than Heidegger since Heidegger doesn't really consider the phenomenology of sensuous perception. Merleau-Ponty takes hermeneutics and phenomenology down to the level of the body and its immediate flux of sensations, including what William James called the "blooming, buzzing confusion" that would presumably result if we sheared all conceptuality/"theory-ladenness" away and tried to get down to "bare" perception. "Bare" perceptions would be nothing, because even the perception of spatiality and dimensionality are themselves "conceptual."

[Anonymous No.19099151]

>>19099144
>(Continuing)
>wouldn't that be an empirical claim about what neuroscience/physics/whatever may or not be able to explain?
Not intentionally, at least. Heidegger is frustratingly evasive on how his hermeneuticised form of transcendental phenomenology would relate to extra-mental objective reality. Fichte is also extremely evasive on the issue and it creates similar problems of "does he mean apparently objective reality ACTUALLY reduces to the ideal subject's projections or is he just not talking about hard, physical nature?" Another thinker with similar issues, potentially at least, is Schopenhauer, and interestingly Schopenhauer talks quite openly about them, criticising the vagueness in Fichte, and deliberately clarifying his stance vis-à-vis natural-scientific reality (e.g. he openly mentions the brain as opposed to the mind). But Heidegger just doesn't do this much. The official answer is "that's not phenomenology's job or purview," but you're perfectly right to be frustrated by it.

tldr Think of it like Sellar's myth of the given. No matter how hard you try to dig down you will never find the simply and self-evidently given "given." All perception is theory-laden.

There's an analytic philosopher recently who does stuff like this with evolution and pragmatism. His overall view is that we have no veridical perceptions whatsoever, we have no purchase on objective reality at all, because our sensoria and cognition are from-the-ground-up evolved for specific purposes, not for "truth" or "direct knowledge of nature." He goes almost as far as Kant in arguing that there is absolutely no NECESSARY connection between our transcendental forms of perception, space and time, and the real, external, pre-human existence of spatiality and temporality, not even something that might come close to what we perceive. There is presumably some causal relation, but aside from that we really can't infer anything from our experienced reality and the gut-feeling is gives us for "how time/space are."

I don't think Heidegger would go this far but just saying there are positions like this out there. The main thing with Heidegger as I said is that it's vague. You can at least see in analytic pragmatists like Sellars that they're frustrated by it, they treat it as a problem, that they can't access the given. But Heidegger just doesn't concern himself with it. Dreyfus in some interview actually gets visibly excited when asked about this issue and talks about how we can't know nothin' outside of our little transcendental bubble.

Wittgenstein is also frustratingly vague about the relation between his grammatical inquiries into always-already-pre-interpreted language ABOUT thought, and the actual external reality OF thought. You keep wanting to ask, so what IS all this then? Don't you want to know? And you only slowly acquire the sense that his implicit, and shitty and unsatisfying, answer is "not my concern in this book sorry."

[Anonymous No.19099181]

>>19099144
>"Bare" perceptions would be nothing,
Sorry I should have said this better. What I mean here is not that they would be NOTHING, i.e. "take away the subjective element and nothing remains; therefore there is only the subjective," which would be that bizarre Fichtean position, the one where you can't tell if he's serious because the objections to it are so obvious ("I refute it thus!" except throw a rock at Fichte instead of kicking one).

What I mean is that bare perceptions would be nothing FOR US, because tautologically, for something to be something for us, it has to be something FOR US. Interpretation is built into what it means for us to have knowledge.

You can only solve this problem by avowing the metaphysical reality/truthiness of, say, the "hardness" of a rock. You could do this directly and naively by saying hardness exists, or more subtly by saying that various properties of matter (whatever matter ultimately is) exist, and we have a complex chain of causal interactions with these properties, via the evolution of our minds, which culminate in the subjective and immediate feeling of what Locke called secondary qualities, "this is hard/heavy," as opposed to primary qualities.

But to avow such a metaphysics is a big move today. More often scientists just presuppose it, without going into details, or saying something vaguely about how the real "base" of things is matter, which is a pythagorean/platonic position that is virtually meaningless without further clarification. Heidegger is just sidestepping the whole issue. Sellars shows his frustration at it and ends up a kind of deflated pragmatist empiricist. So does Quine. Nobody knows how to deal with it. That shouldn't be surprising since it's related to the most fundamental problems in philosophy, the relationship between thought and being / subject and object, the problem of knowledge and its object, etc.

[Anonymous No.19099194]

>>19099144
>"Bare" perceptions would be nothing,
Sorry I should have said this better. What I mean here is not that they would be NOTHING, i.e. "take away the subjective element and nothing remains; therefore there is only the subjective," which would be that bizarre Fichtean position, the one where you can't tell if he's serious because the objections to it are so obvious ("I refute it thus!" except throw a rock at Fichte instead of kicking one).

What I mean is that bare perceptions would be nothing FOR US, because tautologically, for something to be something for us, it has to be something FOR US. Interpretation is built into what it means for us to have knowledge.

You can only solve this problem by avowing the metaphysical reality/truthiness of, say, the "hardness" of a rock. You could do this directly and naively by saying hardness exists, or more subtly by saying that various properties of matter (whatever matter ultimately is) exist, and we have a complex chain of causal interactions with these properties, via the evolution of our minds, which culminate in the subjective and immediate feeling of what Locke called secondary qualities, "this is hard/heavy," as opposed to primary qualities.

But to avow such a metaphysics is a big move today. More often scientists just presuppose it, without going into details, or saying something vaguely about how the real "base" of things is maths, which is a pythagorean/platonic position that is virtually meaningless without further clarification. Heidegger is just sidestepping the whole issue. Sellars shows his frustration at it and ends up a kind of deflated pragmatist empiricist. So does Quine. Nobody knows how to deal with it. That shouldn't be surprising since it's related to the most fundamental problems in philosophy, the relationship between thought and being / subject and object, the problem of knowledge and its object, etc.

[Anonymous No.19099329]

>>19099151
If we can't know nothin outside of our little transcendental bubble how do we know we're even in the transcendental bubble?

[Anonymous No.19099431]

>>19099151
>Dreyfus in some interview actually gets visibly excited when asked about this issue and talks about how we can't know nothin' outside of our little transcendental bubble.
Link to interview? As far as I know Dreyfus see's Heidegger as a scientific realist.

[Anonymous No.19099505]

>>19099151
>There's an analytic philosopher recently who does stuff like this with evolution and pragmatism. His overall view is that we have no veridical perceptions whatsoever, we have no purchase on objective reality at all, because our sensoria and cognition are from-the-ground-up evolved for specific purposes, not for "truth" or "direct knowledge of nature." He goes almost as far as Kant in arguing that there is absolutely no NECESSARY connection between our transcendental forms of perception, space and time, and the real, external, pre-human existence of spatiality and temporality, not even something that might come close to what we perceive. There is presumably some causal relation, but aside from that we really can't infer anything from our experienced reality and the gut-feeling is gives us for "how time/space are."

This gets really fucky because we only even know about evolution and what our brain adapted for through the activity of that very brain. Self-refuting. If you believe it, you have have to admit you have no reason for doing so.

[Anonymous No.19100035]

Bump