mistersix posted:
yeah, sounds good. i don't remember much of it but i think i even have a logic textbook floating around here somewhere

I'll figure it out. The past week has been sorta disorienting for me, so it might take a little time, but I'm quite serious about both as Method. Here is a decent guide to the propositional level (don't worry about getting more than a general idea). After that is predicates and quantification, and then you get "worlds" which is where the really cool shit is at imo.

shennong posted:
I'm ambivalent about this point if only because race is a social construct masquerading as a biological one and there really aren't significant differences biologically between people of different "races" unless you're looking for specific enzymatic pathways or whatever. Not to say that race doesn't matter to individuals, but that empirically there's no real basis for those kinds of claims

Agreed w/r/t race being absolutely a social construct. For example, it's easy to imagine a situation in which skin color and other characteristics do not necessarily have to be referred to or understood along racial lines. But otoh it is very true that you can't 'ignore' race. You have to be aware of it, but being aware of it in many ways indicates the perpetuation of the fantasy. How do you destroy something that doesn't exist? We're fucked, y'all.

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:
what's up with the spacing in the bottom of the 9th paragraph? idgi

i'll cover it in that thread in one sec

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

shennong posted:
I'm ambivalent about this point if only because race is a social construct masquerading as a biological one and there really aren't significant differences biologically between people of different "races" unless you're looking for specific enzymatic pathways or whatever. Not to say that race doesn't matter to individuals, but that empirically there's no real basis for those kinds of claims

Agreed w/r/t race being absolutely a social construct. For example, it's easy to imagine a situation in which skin color and other characteristics do not necessarily have to be referred to or understood along racial lines. But otoh it is very true that you can't 'ignore' race. You have to be aware of it, but being aware of it in many ways indicates the perpetuation of the fantasy. How do you destroy something that doesn't exist? We're fucked, y'all.

Trying to work with a mutual friend with some interesting ideas on this one. What I posted was basically just a tiny sample and I think it can be made into something much bigger. Let's just say that there's something really amusing about the way that The Second Sex is viewed as a classic in feminism rather than phenomenology.

Some examples on the inability to ignore include:

1) Ways in which people live together (and ways in which they don't). Technically it's one of those untranslatable German words that gets translated as "dwelling".
2) Prejudice not in the derogatory sense of the word, but in the sense that we all bring prior understandings (prior rendered judgments) along with us when we encounter things in the world.

Moran posted:
Gadamer, again in agreement with Heidegger, rejects the Cartesian and Husserlian notions of a pure presuppositionless beginning in philosophy. We can only begin to understand from where we are now, and we can only understand a text by identifying correctly where it is coming from by being open to its tradition: "It is the tyranny of hidden prejudice which makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition" (TM 270; 254). In this sense Gadamer is influenced by Hegel's view in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) that we must make use of the knowing process when we attempt to critique it (compare Otto Neurath's image of mending a boat at sea). Similarly, for Gadamer, we have to engage in dialogue in order to bring out and make transparent to ourselves our own presuppositions and prejudgements. We cannot eliminate prejudice, but we can make it visible and thus make it work for us. As Marx said, we are not able to shed our history the way a snake sheds its skin. We cannot extract ourselves from history in our attempts to understand the process of history; history is always already operative in our understanding. The way a tradition operates is summed up by the term 'prejudice'.

3) More Gadamer

Moran posted:
Our understanding is essentially enabled and conditioned by our pre-judgements. But it is also limited by the overall 'horizons' of our outlook. Gadamer like Husserl sees all understanding as taking place within a certain horizon. What he wants to oppose is the view that these horizons are mutually exclusive or that our world-views are hermetically sealed. Gadamer wants to emphasise that in fact our horizons are open to other horizons, that they can overlap and indeed are overlapping. Against the scepticism of Richard Rorty, for example, Gadamer is emphatic that we can and do reach mutual understanding. This is a process of the interpenetration of our horizons, or what Gadamer calls 'fusion of horizons' (Horizontsverschmelzung, TM 306; 290), here taking over Husserl's notion of 'horizon' (Horizont), the inner and outer horizons in an act of perception. The attempt to understand the other must begin with the recognition that we are separated by different horizons of understanding, and that mutual understanding comes through overlapping consensus, merging of rather than through the abandonment by one of the interlocutors of his or her initial horizon.

Gadamer's model for this mutual understanding is the shared enquiry of the Platonic dialogues where the interlocutors embark on a joint journey of discovery and discussion rather than a Sophistic debate which seeks the domination of one outlook by the other. In this kind of dialogue, the presuppositions are brought to light and explored but the context is one of overall acceptance and trust. Thus, in opposition to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Gadamer rejects any Nietzschean suspicion that all understanding is really an attempt at mastery and will-to-power. Or to put it another way, employing Paul Ricoeur's terms, Gadamer practises a hermeneutics of trust rather than of suspicion. His approach, however, may be criticised as perhaps too tolerant of the 'given' of tradition, and in this sense he has often been criticised as a 'traditionalist'. He ought, according to some commentators, to give more room to a general suspicion about what presents itself as 'tradition' and 'culture'. Thus, his hermeneutics has been criticised by Jürgen Habermas as lacking a certain emancipatory dimension which would free itself from the distorting aspects of tradition.

There's a whole lot more and hopefully it will open up creative possibility that can be used at least to displace, if not destroy outright. That would obviously include turning to a lot of other traditions for guidance as well, though hopefully this could also help with interpreting them properly rather than appropriating them. Then there's the whole action thing too.

Edited by dm (Feb. 26, 2012 21:58:55)

The splintering of present-day philosophy, with its perplexed activity, sets us thinking. When we attempt to view western philosophy as a unitary science, its decline since the middle of the nineteenth century is unmistakable. The comparative unity that it had in previous ages, in its aims, its problems and methods, has been lost. When, with the beginning of modern times, religious belief was becoming more and more externalized as a lifeless convention, men of intellect were lifted by a new belief, their great belief in an autonomous philosophy and science. The whole of human culture was to be guided and illuminated by scientific insights and thus reformed, as new and autonomous.

But meanwhile this belief too has begun to languish. Not without reason. Instead of a unitary living philosophy, we have a philosophical literature growing beyond all bounds and almost without coherence. Instead of a serious discussion among conflicting theories that, in their very conflict, demonstrate the intimacy with which they belong together, the commonness of their underlying convictions, and an unswerving belief in a true philosophy, we have a pseudo-reporting and a pseudo criticizing, a mere semblance of philosophizing seriously with and for one another. This hardly attests a mutual study carried on with a consciousness of responsibility, in the spirit that caracterizes serious collaboration and an intention to produce Objectively valid results. "Objectively [objektiv] valid results" the phrase, after all, signifies nothing but results that have been refined by mutual criticism and that now withstand every criticism. But how could actual study and actual collaboration be possible, where there are so many philosophers and almost equally many philosophies? To be sure, we still have philosophical congresses. The philosophers meet but, unfortunately, not the philosophies. The philosophies lack the unity of a mental space in which they might exist for and act on one another.

intersubjectivity and intersectionality are brought together through praxis. if phenomenology has a role in revolutionary struggle, it's the problem of "mental conceptions" that David Harvey identifies, but remain somewhat elusive to him in terms of going forward: http://davidharvey.org/2009/12/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transition/

The uneven development of capitalist practices throughout the world has produced, moreover, anti-capitalist movements all over the place. The state-centric economies of much of East Asia generate different discontents (as in Japan and China) compared to the churning anti-neoliberal struggles occurring throughout much of Latin America where the Bolivarian revolutionary movement of popular power exists in a peculiar relationship to capitalist class interests that have yet to be truly confronted. Differences over tactics and policies in response to the crisis among the states that make up the European Union are increasing even as a second attempt to come up with a unified EU constitution is under way. Revolutionary and resolutely anti-capitalist movements are also to be found, though not all of them are of a progressive sort, in many of the marginal zones of capitalism. Spaces have been opened up within which something radically different in terms of dominant social relations, ways of life, productive capacities and mental conceptions of the world can flourish. This applies as much to the Taliban and to communist rule in Nepal as to the Zapatistas in Chiapas and indigenous movements in Bolivia, the Maoist movements in rural India, even as they are world’s apart in objectives, strategies and tactics.

The central problem is that in aggregate there is no resolute and sufficiently unified anti-capitalist movement that can adequately challenge the reproduction of the capitalist class and the perpetuation of its power on the world stage. Neither is there any obvious way to attack the bastions of privilege for capitalist elites or to curb their inordinate money power and military might. While openings exist towards some alternative social order, no one really knows where or what it is. But just because there is no political force capable of articulating let alone mounting such a program, this is no reason to hold back on outlining alternatives.

Lenin’s famous question “what is to be done?” cannot be answered, to be sure, without some sense of who it is might do it where. But a global anti-capitalist movement is unlikely to emerge without some animating vision of what is to be done and why. A double blockage exists: the lack of an alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the articulation of an alternative. How, then, can this blockage be transcended? The relation between the vision of what is to be done and why, and the formation of a political movement across particular places to do it has to be turned into a spiral. Each has to reinforce the other if anything is actually to get done. Otherwise potential opposition will be forever locked down into a closed circle that frustrates all prospects for constructive change, leaving us vulnerable to perpetual future crises of capitalism with increasingly deadly results. Lenin’s question demands an answer.

and here:

Harvey argues that “cultural norms and belief systems (that is, religious and political ideologies) are powerfully present but do not exist independently of social relations…” Pretty standard stuff, and not far removed from Althusser or from Marx for that matter. Harvey calls these cultural norms and belief systems our “mental conceptions of the world,” one of seven “distinctive activity spheres” that comprise the historical development of capitalism. All seven in Harvey’s words:

1. Technologies and organizational forms
2. Social relations
3. Institutional and administrative arrangements
4. Production and labor processes
5. Relations to nature
6. The reproduction of daily life and the species
7. Mental conceptions of the world

This last “sphere” of course speaks most to intellectual historians. Harvey sees all of these spheres as mutually constitutive: no one sphere dominates even as none of them are independent. "Each sphere evolves on its own account but always in dynamic interaction with the others.” So though this is a structuralist account of historical change, in that a contrived mental conception like a metaphor cannot take on a life of its own apart from the other spheres, and although it’s “total” or even “totalizing” in its sense of a social formation, which postmodernists of the world have united against, it is not economically determinist in the “vulgar” sense that economics underlies all else. More from Harvey to give a sense of how he sees this at work:

Our mental conceptions of the world… are usually unstable, contested, subject to scientific discoveries as well as whims, fashions and passionately held cultural and religious beliefs and desires. Changes in mental conceptions have all manner of intended and unintended consequences for …

Harvey argues that we should think about the interrelatedness of these spheres as we think about an ecosystem. Parts of the ecosystem can act seemingly independent of the rest, but have consequences for the whole by way of the dialectic processes of accommodation and resistance. “The complex flow of influence that move between the spheres are perpetually reshaping all of them.” In stable societies, these seven spheres roughly harmonize. In societies in flux or crisis, there are imbalances that shakedown in unpredictable ways.

In Harvey’s conclusion, he provocatively asks if this co-evolutionary theory of social change can be projected into a co-revolutionary theory of a break. He argues it can and it should. In fact, he maintains that past revolutionary projects failed in part because “they fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different activity spheres in motion and also failed to embrace the unpredictabilities and uncertainties in the dialectal movement between the spheres. Capitalism has survived precisely by keeping that dialectical movement going and by embracing the inevitable tensions, including crises, that result.”

for anyone that wants to sort of participate in the making of this thread (and perhaps the broader rhizzone itself), i'd like to slowly move it into a "Marxist" direction and provide tools to flesh out the internal relations of the "base" and "superstructure".

Berger and Luckmann posted:

The sociology of knowledge has been particularly fascinated by Marx's twin concepts of 'substructure/superstructure' (Unterbau/Ueberbau). It is here particularly that controversy has raged about the correct interpretation of Marx's own thought. Later Marxism has tended to identify the 'sub­ structure' with economic structure tout court, of which the 'superstructure' was then supposed to be a direct 'reflection' (thus, Lenin, for instance). It is quite clear now that this misrepresents Marx's thought, as the essentially mechanistic rather than dialectical character of this kind of economic deter­minism should make one suspect. What concerned Marx was that human thought is founded in human activity ('labour', in the widest sense of the word) and in the social relations brought about by this activity. 'Substructure' and 'super­ structure' are best understood if one views them as, respec­tively, human activity and the world produced by that activity. In any case, the fundamental 'sub/superstructure' scheme has been taken over in various forms by the sociology of knowledge, beginning with Scheler, always with an under­ standing that there is some sort of relationship between thought and an 'underlying' reality other than thought. The fascination of the scheme prevailed despite the fact that much of the sociology of knowledge was explicitly formulated in opposition to Marxism and that different positions have been taken within it regarding the nature of the relationship between the two components of the scheme.

Nietzschean ideas were less explicitly continued in the sociology of knowledge, but they belong very much to its general intellectual background and to the 'mood' within which it arose. Nietzsche's anti-idealism, despite the differences in content not unlike Marx's in form, added additional perspectives on human thought as an instrument in the struggle for survival and power. Nietzsche developed his own theory of 'false consciousness' in his analyses of the social significance of deception and self-deception, and of illusion as a necessary condition of life. Nietzsche's concept of 'resent­ment' as a generative factor for certain types of human thought was taken over directly by Scheler. Most generally, though, one can say that the sociology of knowledge represents a specific application of what Nietzsche aptly called the 'art of mistrust'.

people have pointed out parallels with Gramsci to me before here, as is evident in a great interview about neoliberalism that khamsek linked me:

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/defending_capitalism_the_rise_of_the_neoliberal_thought_collective_part_1
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/defending_capitalism_the_rise_of_the_neoliberal_thought_collective_part_2

How distinct is the political practice of neoliberalism from neoliberal ideas?

I think this is quite crucial. The relationship between the intellectual sphere and the political field has always been complicated. You can declare intellectual developments to be rather unimportant reflections of real world political and economic developments. Or on the other hand you can suggest that political reality pretty much depends on intellectual work. These are the clear cut idealist and (vulgar) materialist approaches. But neither is very Marxist or Gramscian, which would require us to develop a greater understanding of the intellectual field as an element of the material world. The material for Marx, unlike Feuerbach, means social form and cannot be reduced to physical substance. Juxtaposing intellectual and material developments then is basically a misinterpretation of materialism.

In order to understand the structural transformations of society we consider it necessary to study the intellectual developments at different levels – theoretical and political, including both congruence and tensions. That's where in our research we differed with histories like David Harvey's where neoliberalism essentially becomes the institutional and structural transformation of society with very little about the intellectual efforts and tensions involved in this process. Neoliberalism as a world view can be severely underestimated if it is considered a one-dimensional, single entity.

We take Gramsci seriously in emphasising the intellectual world as a key element of the material structure. This requires to do more than study a single book of an author and take that as a representative of the whole, a pars pro toto. This is not how the intellectual world operates across borders, institutions and media. It is appropriate instead to study intellectual networks of organizations, people and ideas.

So the intellectual world should not be read at a great distance in an idealistic manner – as a history of ideas, or sociology of knowledge, or ideological critique confined to the letters – nor should it be treated simply as a superstructure which is defined by the base and juxtaposed to a ‘real’ world. In fact we considered the study of the Mont Pelerin Society as a contribution to a greater understanding of the transnational, transdisciplinary and transprofessional intermingling of the intellectual world and the concrete world of politics after the Second World War.

nothing against Nietzsche, but here we want a theory of ideology/culture/tradition as partial consciousness rather than false consciousness. Marcuse and Merleau-Ponty sought to draw explicit connections back with Marx's earlier stuff (1844 Manuscripts, German Ideology, Grundrisse) as soon as it was discovered in like the 1930's.

as I've already mentioned, Marcuse was a student of Heidegger and from the beginning sought to draw explicit connections between Marx's early stuff and Heidegger. Marcuse's Reason and Revolution would be a really valuable point of reference here because his whole point there was to explain Hegel to the English-speaking world. part of it is available here.

if Marx and Engels were about social reproduction on a "macro" scale, Heidegger is about doing it on a "micro" scale. this makes it necessary to reconcile history in the sense of "historical materialism" with the temporality of Heidegger's "factical life". again, turning to Graeber's Marx interpretation:

It would have been easier if Marx had given us more of a clue in his own writings. The closest Marx himself ever came to writing general social theory was in some of his earliest theoretical writings: his Theses on Feuerbach, 1844 Manuscripts, and especially The German Ideology, co-written with Engels between 1845 and 1846. This was the period when Marx was living in Paris and making a broad accounting with the radical philosophical circles in which he’d spent his intellectual youth in Germany. In doing so, these works map out a synthesis of two very different intellectual traditions: the German idealism of the Hegelian school, and the materialism of the French Enlightenment. The advantage of Hegel’s dialectical approach to history, Marx felt, was that it was inherently dynamic; rather than starting from some fixed notion of what a human being, or the physical world, is like, it was the story of how humanity effectively created itself through interacting with the world around it. It was, in effect, an attempt to see what the history would look like if one assumed from the start that Heraclitus had been right. Not only was it about action: ultimately, what Hegel’s philosophy was about was the history of how humanity becomes fully self-conscious through its own actions; it was its final achievement of true self-understanding (which Hegel, modestly, believed to have been achieved in himself) which laid open the possibility of human freedom. The problem was that neither the conservative Hegel nor the radical Young Hegelians (who argued the process had not been completed, and more drastic measures, such as an attack on religion, were required) started from real, flesh-and-blood human beings. Instead, their active subjects were always abstractions like “Mind,” “Reason,” “Spirit,” “Humanity,” or “the Nation.” Marx proposed a materialist alternative. But neither was Marx especially happy with the materialism of his day, which was mainly a product of French Enlightenment philosophers like Helvetius. The problem with “all previous materialism,” he noted in his Theses on Feuerbach, is that it did not see human beings as driven by self-conscious projects at all. It saw them as virtually passive: driven by a fixed set of basic, physical needs, simply “adapting” to their environment in such a way as to best satisfy them. What he proposed, instead, was a synthesis: in which human beings are seen as active, intentional, imaginative creatures, but at the same time, physical ones that exist in the real world. That (as he put it elsewhere) “men” make their own histories, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

It’s certainly true that Marx’s work often seems to pull in several different directions at once. Take for example his famous description of the four “moments” in The German Ideology in which he and Engels set out the basic material realities that have to be taken into account before one can talk about humans to be able to “make history” (1846 ). What separates humans from animals is that humans produce their means of livelihood. He also notes that human beings, in order to exist, not only (1) need to produce basic requirements, like food and shelter; but that (2) the act of producing in order to meet such needs will always create new needs; that (3) in order to continue to exist human beings need to produce other human beings, which entails procreation, child-rearing, the family, etc., and that (4) since humans never produce any of these things in isolation, every society must also have relations of cooperation. It is only after this has been taken into account, Marx notes, that one can begin to talk about “consciousness,” which, he emphasizes, “here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language” (1846:50–51), which in turn arises from people’s needs to talk to each other rather than independently in the minds of individual human beings.

This certainly sounds like it’s moving towards the sort of division between material infrastructure and ideological superstructure laid out, most explicitly, in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). But this also moves away from Marx’s central inspiration: which is that consciousness is not the icing on the cake of production, but rather, fundamental to production itself. For Marx, what sets humans apart from animals was precisely that humans produce things in a self-conscious manner. What makes us human is not so much “reason” (at least in the modern, problem-solving sense) as imagination:

We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital I: 178)

Humans envision what they would like to have before they make it; as a result, we can also imagine alternatives. Human intelligence is thus inherently critical, which, in turn, is crucial to Marx’s conception of history because this which for the possibility of revolution.

If one turns back to the original four moments with this in mind, however, one has the basis (with, perhaps, a tiny a bit of refinement and rearrangement) for a very powerful theory of action (Turner 1984:11; Fajans 1993:3). The result would look something like this. In any society, one might say, production entails:

1. An effort to fulfill perceived needs on the part of the producer (these, as Marx notes, must always include basic necessities like food and shelter, but are never limited to this.). It also includes the key insight that “objects” exist in two senses: not just as physical objects that actually exist in the world, but also, insofar as they are present in someone’s (some subject’s) consciousness, as objects of that subject’s action in some sense or another—even if this is only in the minimal sense of active observation and study. (This is what he argued Feuerbach’s materialism overlooked.)

2. Humans being social creatures, this also means producing a system of social relations (families, clans, guilds, secret societies, government ministries, etc.,) within which people coordinate their productive actions with one another. In part this also means that production also entails

3. producing the producer as a specific sort of person (seamstress, harem eunuch, movie star, etc.). In cooperating with others, a person defines herself in a certain way—this can be referred to as the “reflexive” element in action. It also usually means being ascribed certain sorts of power or agency, or actually acquiring them.

4. The process is always open-ended, producing new needs as a result of (1), (2) and (3) and thus bearing within it the potential for its own transformation.

So we start with a notion of intentional action, productive action aimed at a certain goal. This action produces social relations and in doing so transforms the producers themselves. Stated this way, the model seems straightforward enough. There’s no element in it that’s not pretty self-evident. But to apply it consistently, one would have to rethink all sorts of accepted elements of social theory. Take for example the notion of “social structure.” If one starts from this broad notion of production, “social structures”—like any other sort of structure—are really just patterns of action. But they are very complicated patterns: they not only coordinate all sorts of intentional human action, they are also the means through which actors are continually redefining and even remaking themselves at the same time as they are reproducing (and also inevitably, changing) the larger context through which all this takes place. Even for an outside observer, it is not easy to keep track of all of this. There are certain points—for example, the precise boundaries between individual and collective creativity—that we can probably never fully understand. From inside the system, it is well nigh impossible.

In fact, individual actors tend to be aware of only the first of the four moments (the specific thing they are making or doing, the specific end they have in mind); it is much harder to keep track of the other three. One could well argue that all the great problems of social theory emerge from this single difficulty—whether it be Durkheim’s famous observation that even though “society” is just a collection of individuals, every one of those individuals sees it as an alien force constraining them, or Marx’s, about the way in which our own creations come to seem alien entities with power over us (cf. Taussig 1993).

Imagination, then, may be essential to the nature of productive action, but imagination also has its limits. Or, to put it another way, human action is self-conscious by nature, but it is never entirely so.

One might say there are two orders of critical theory. The first simply serves to demonstrate that our normal way of looking at the world—or of some phenomena within it—is flawed: incomplete or mistaken, and to explain how things really work. The second, more powerful not only explains how things actually work, but does so in such a way as to account for why people did not perceive it that way to begin with. Marxist approaches hold out the promise of doing precisely that. But if one considers the overall thrust of Marx’s writings, from his earlier “philosophical” works to the theory of fetishism in Capital, one finds that what he produced was less a theory of false consciousness than a theory of partial consciousness: one in which actors find it almost impossible to distinguish their own particular vantage on a situation from the overall structure of the situation itself.

the way that he characterizes the first moment in relation to Heidegger is a bit difficult. Dasein is not to be understood as a subject. it's more like the contingent temporal horizon of existence along which the "base" and "superstructure" interact. in the quote above, Graeber is dealing with the "present at hand" level where subjects come into play post festum.

Dasein has a certain relation to Marx's "species-being". the former is day-to-day reproduction within finite individual lifetimes and the latter is at a more aggregate level (though Heidegger has concepts building up towards that). for Heidegger it's not an essential humanity that's universal, but a shared human existence along the horizon of time.

an important distinction to keep in mind will be essence/existence. the former is necessary and essential and the later is contingent and potential. the movement between analyzing phenomenon in terms of essence and existence can also be thought of as temporal. if we take a phenomenon as being constituted in the past, we see it as an essential, defining feature of reality. if we look at it as being constituted towards the future, with an existence that is maintained through time, it becomes contingent and can eventually cease to exist.

since we have λόγος coming into play in a number of ways here, we can think of later Wittgenstein as an honorary phenomenologist as well in light of a little known quote:

Wittgenstein posted:

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being (Sein) and anxiety (Angst). Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori only nonsense.

from the preface to Philosophical Investigations:

Wittgenstein posted:

The thoughts that I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. They concern many subjects: the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition and sentence, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, sometimes in longer chains about the same subject, sometimes jumping, in a sudden change, from one area to another. -- Originally it was my intention to bring all this together in a book whose form I thought of differently at different times. But it seemed to me essential that in the book the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural, smooth sequence.

....

For more than one reason, what I publish here will have points of contact with what other people are writing today. -- If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine, then I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property.

you can see a lot of common influence if you think about this context. you might want to look at the second part of that lecture from Graham Priest that I linked earlier if you haven't already: http://www.themonthly.com.au/key-thinkers-graham-priest-gottlob-frege-p2-1916

one of St. Augustine's observations:

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, there would be no present time.

But, then, how is it that there are the two times, past and future, when even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet? But if the present were always present, and did not pass into past time, it obviously would not be time but eternity. If, then, time present--if it be time--comes into existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that even this is, since the cause of its being is that it will cease to be? Thus, can we not truly say that time is only as it tends toward nonbeing?

....

Whatever may be the manner of this secret foreseeing of future things, nothing can be seen except what exists. But what exists now is not future, but present. When, therefore, they say that future events are seen, it is not the events themselves, for they do not exist as yet (that is, they are still in time future), but perhaps, instead, their causes and their signs are seen, which already do exist. Therefore, to those already beholding these causes and signs, they are not future, but present, and from them future things are predicted because they are conceived in the mind. These conceptions, however, exist now, and those who predict those things see these conceptions before them in time present.

...

But even now it is manifest and clear that there are neither times future nor times past. Thus it is not properly said that there are three times, past, present, and future. Perhaps it might be said rightly that there are three times: a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future. For these three do coexist somehow in the soul, for otherwise I could not see them. The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; the time present of things future is expectation. If we are allowed to speak of these things so, I see three times, and I grant that there are three. Let it still be said, then, as our misapplied custom has it: "There are three times, past, present, and future." I shall not be troubled by it, nor argue, nor object--always provided that what is said is understood, so that neither the future nor the past is said to exist now. There are but few things about which we speak properly--and many more about which we speak improperly--though we understand one another's meaning.

....

How, then, do I measure this time itself? Do we measure a longer time by a shorter time, as we measure the length of a crossbeam in terms of cubits? Thus, we can say that the length of a long syllable is measured by the length of a short syllable and thus say that the long syllable is double. So also we measure the length of poems by the length of the lines, and the length of the line by the length of the feet, and the length of the feet by the length of the syllable, and the length of the long syllables by the length of the short ones. We do not measure by pages--for in that way we would measure space rather than time--but when we speak the words as they pass by we say: "It is a long stanza, because it is made up of so many verses; they are long verses because they consist of so many feet; they are long feet because they extend over so many syllables; this is a long syllable because it is twice the length of a short one."

But no certain measure of time is obtained this way; since it is possible that if a shorter verse is pronounced slowly, it may take up more time than a longer one if it is pronounced hurriedly. The same would hold for a stanza, or a foot, or a syllable. From this it appears to me that time is nothing other than extendedness; but extendedness of what I do not know. This is a marvel to me. The extendedness may be of the mind itself. For what is it I measure, I ask thee, O my God, when I say either, roughly, "This time is longer than that," or, more precisely, "This is twice as long as that." I know that I am measuring time. But I am not measuring the future, for it is not yet; and I am not measuring the present because it is extended by no length; and I am not measuring the past because it no longer is. What is it, therefore, that I am measuring? Is it time in its passage, but not time past ? This is what I have been saying.

in other words, acts of speech and the production of "texts" themselves take time!

e:

and even more prep stuff and some random stuff on Priest:

ok, so now that we have this idea of constant movement worked out, we are mostly caught up in "taking care" prior to everything else. Heidegger calls this "falling" and regards it as an inauthentic mode of being. inauthenticity is a precondition for authenticity, which we will get into more later. we have to sort of reproduce our daily existence in our "dealings" with the world before we can do anything else in it.

the world in which Dasein is caught up is a context of references that give it meaning. we encounter objects in terms of their uses and availability which are in turn determined in terms of other things for certain tasks that we had already planned to carry out. things we encounter in this way are "ready to hand" and it is at this level that they are invisible to us.

as for language,

Dermot Moran posted:

For Heidegger here, the nature of our practical encounter with things is encapsulated in our use of language. Husserl's conception of intentionality is not sufficiently tuned in to express our practical engagement with the world. Much more than Husserl, Heidegger is interested in the linguistic dimension of intentionality. Our whole comportment towards things is expressive, and this expression can appear as linguistic assertion (Aussage). Heidegger reinteprets Husserl's stress on propositional meaning as actually an uncovering of the nature of expressing itself. As Heidegger says:

It is not so much that we see the objects and things but rather that we first talk about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter.

Understanding is not just a matter of having a sensory input, conceptualising it, and reacting to it. The sensory dimension of the experience falls short of what the assertion says about it: I say the chair is yellow but I do not literally see the being-yellow of the chair. 'Being', 'this', and so on are not in the subjective reflection, but are correlates of the act.... Heidegger is coming to see that the essential disclosure of things takes place through Dasein's concernful dealing with things in the environment, that it takes place essentially in expression. Relating to things, disclosing them, always relates to our concerns in advance, our relation is primarily interpretative, or hermeneutical.

the beginning of Philosophical Investigations is interesting in this respect:

Wittgenstein posted:

]
Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip of paper marked “five red apples”. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a chart and finds a colour sample next to it; then he says the series of elementary number-words a I assume that he knows them by heart a up to the word “five”, and for each number-word he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer. —– It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words. —– “But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” —– Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere. — But what is the meaning of the word “five”? — No such thing was in question here, only how the word “five” is used.

this makes the third chapter and practical examples a lot easier because words are useful things that relate to the objects to which they refer when they are used. he has a concept of aletheia that can be thought of as being sort of like a proposition becoming true when the state of affairs to which it corresponds comes into existence in the world as we actually encounter it. this opens up the whole theme of world-disclosure (this is my favorite way).

digression for anyone interested in Priest's dialetheism:

he doesn't like to make references to Heidegger much, but if you see Heidegger's essay "On the Essence of Truth" where he discusses aletheia, the whole paradox thing might make sense:

Heidegger posted:

If we translate aletheia as "unconcealment" rather than “truth,” this translation is not merely more literal; it contains the directive to rethink the ordinary concept of truth in the sense of the correctness of statements and to think it back to that still uncomprehended disclosedness and disclosure of beings. To engage oneself with the disclosedness of beings is not to lose oneself in them; rather, such engagement withdraws in the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are and in order that presentative correspondence might take its standard from them. As this letting-be, it exposes itself to beings as such and transposes all comportment into the open region. Letting-be, i. e., freedom, is intrinsically exposing, ek-sistent. Considered in regard to the essence of truth, the essence of freedom manifests itself as exposure to the disclosedness of beings.

and Wittgenstein on contradiction:

Wittgenstein posted:

Why should Russell's contradiction not be conceived as something supra-propositional, something that towers above the propositions and looks in both directions like a Janus head? N.B. the proposition F(F)--in which F(ξ) = ~ξ(ξ)--contains no variables and so might hold as something supra-logical, as something unassailable, whose negation itself in turn only asserts it. Might one not even begin logic with this contradiction? And as it were descend from it to propositions.

The proposition that contradicts itself would stand like a monument (with a Janus head) over the propositions of logic.

ξ is the universal set and can be thought of as a totality. F is just false.

you'll notice that he has someone in a room (referential context) in the thing i linked earlier about him: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/paradoxical-truth/

Priest posted:

Professor Greene is lecturing. Down the hall, her arch-rival, Professor Browne, is also lecturing. Professor Greene is holding forth at length about how absurd Professor Browne’s ideas are. She believes Professor Browne to be lecturing in Room 33. So to emphasize her point, she writes on the blackboard the single sentence:

Everything written on the board in Room 33 is false.

But Professor Greene has made a mistake. She, herself, is in Room 33. So is what she has written on the board true or false? If it’s true, then since it itself is written on the board, it’s false. If it’s false, then since it is the only thing written on the board, it’s true. Either way, it’s both true and false.

anyways, going back to B&T:

B&T posted:

The Greeks had an appropriate term for "things": pragmata, that is, that with which one has to do in taking care of things in association (praxis). But the specifically "pragmatic" character of the pragmata is just what was left in obscurity and "initially" determined as "mere things." We shall call the beings encountered in taking care useful things. In association we find things for writing, things for sewing, things for working, driving, measuring. We must elucidate the kind of being of useful things. This can be done following the guideline of the previous definition of what makes useful thing a useful thing: usable material.

Strictly speaking, there "is" no such thing as a useful thing. There always belongs to the being of a useful thing a totality of useful things in which this useful thing can be what it is. A useful thing is essentially "something in order to ... ". The different kinds of "in order to" such as serviceability, helpfulness, usability, handiness, constitute a totality of useful things. The structure of "in order to" contains a reference of something to something. Only in the following analyses can the phenomenon indicated by this word be made visible in its ontological genesis. At this time, our task is to bring a multiplicity of references phenomenally into view. In accordance with their character of being usable material, useful things always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things: writing materials, pen, ink, paper, desk blotter, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These "things" never show themselves initially by themselves, in order then to fill out a room as a sum of real things. What we encounter as nearest to us, although we do not grasp it thematically, is the room, not as what is "between the four walls" in a geometrical, spatial sense, but rather as material for living. On the basis of the latter we find "accommodations," and in accommodations the actual "individual" useful thing. A totality of useful things is always already discovered before the individual useful thing.

then "handiness" and "what-for"

Handiness is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself initially a theme for circumspection. What is peculiar to what is initially at hand is that it withdraws, so to speak, in its character of handiness in order to be really handy. What everyday association is initially busy with is not tools themselves, but the work. What is to be produced in each case is what is primarily taken care of and is thus also what is at hand. The work bears the totality of references in which useful things are encountered.

As the what-for of the hammer, plane, and needle, the work to be produced has in its tum the kind of being of a useful thing. The shoe to be produced is for wearing (footgear), the clock is made for telling time. The work which we primarily encounter when we deal with things and take care of them-what we are at work with-always already lets us encounter the what-for of its usability in the usability which essentially belongs to it. The work that has been ordered exists in its tum only on the basis of its use and the referential context of beings discovered in that use.

But the work to be produced is not just useful for ... ; production itself is always a using of something for something. A reference to "materials" is contained in the work at the same time. The work is dependent upon leather, thread, nails, and similar things. Leather in its tum is produced from hides. These hides are taken from animals which were bred and raised by others. We also find animals in the world which were not bred and raised and even when they have been raised these beings produce themselves in a certain sense. Thus beings are accessible in the surrounding world which in themselves do not need to be produced and are always already at hand. Hammer, tongs, nails in themselves refer to-they consist of-steel, iron, metal, stone, wood. "Nature" is also discovered in the use of useful things, "nature" in the light of products of nature.

and then here things get interesting in a number of ways:

But nature must not be understood here as what is merely objectively present, nor as the power of nature. The forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power, the wind is wind "in the sails." As the "surrounding world" is discovered, "nature" thus discovered is encountered along with it. We can abstract from nature's kind of being as handiness; we can discover and define it in its pure objective presence. But in this kind of discovery of nature, nature as what "stirs and strives," what overcomes us, entrances us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow, the river's "source" ascertained by the geographer is not the "source in the ground."

The work produced refers not only to the what-for of its usability and the whereof of which it consists. The simple conditions of craft contain a reference to the wearer and user at the same time. The work is cut to his figure; he "is" there as the work emerges. This constitutive reference is by no means lacking when wares are produced by the dozen; it is only undefined, pointing to the random and the average. Thus not only beings which are at hand are encountered in the work but also beings with the kind of being of Da-sein for whom what is produced becomes handy in its taking care. Here the world is encountered in which wearers and users live, a world which is at the same time our world. The work taken care of in each case is not only at hand in the domestic world of the workshop, but rather in the public world. Along with the public world, the surrounding world of nature is discovered and accessible to everyone. In taking care of things, nature is discovered as having some definite direction on paths, streets, bridges, and buildings. A covered railroad platform takes bad weather into account, public lighting systems take darkness into account, the specific change of the presence and absence of daylight, the "position of the sun." Clocks take into account a specific constellation in the world system. When we look at the clock, we tacitly use the "position of the sun" according to which the official astronomical regulation of time is carried out. The surrounding world of nature is also at hand in the usage of clock equipment which is at first inconspicuously at hand. Our absorption in taking care of things in the work world nearest to us has the function of discovering; depending upon the way we are absorbed, innerworldly beings that are brought along together with their constitutive references are discoverable in varying degrees of explicitness and with a varying attentive penetration.

B&T posted:

In associating with the world taken care of, what is unhandy can be encountered not only in the sense of something unusable or completely missing, but as something unhandy which is not missing at all and not unusable, but "gets in the way" of taking care of things. That to which taking care of things cannot tum, for which it has "no time," is something unhandy in the way of not belonging there, of not being complete. Unhandy things are disturbing and make evident the obstinacy of what is initially to be taken care of before anything else. With this obstinacy the objective presence of what is at hand makes itself known in a new way as the being of what is still present and calls for completion.

Edited by dm (April 1, 2012 12:14:19)

mistersix posted:

heres some old ray brassier, i havent really watched it yet but i just started and hes jumping right into some heidegger so im posting it because i tend to think that more readings of heidegger = more clarity. difference and repetition or something. i "watched" it like a year or two ago but really it was just a blur of scottish to me then; i wasnt really in a position to pay attention to it because i wasnt interested in heidegger.

What is it that makes certain people seem so authoritative. I want to learn that so I don't just seem like a sexy teen charismatic girl who doens't know how to read

aerdil posted:

Myfanwy posted:
What is it that makes certain people seem so authoritative. I want to learn that so I don't just seem like a sexy teen charismatic girl who doens't know how to read

they pump mind control gas into university classrooms that make people trust whoever is talking in front of the classroom, wake up sheeple this is obama's america

is it the same gas that makes you smile and nod when they tell you "you should major in this subject" if you get a's in a random class

Marcuse posted:
Concerning Heidegger: it is hard to imagine a greater difference between the shy and obstinate Privatdozent who eight years ago spoke from the window of a small lecture hall and the successor to Husserl who lectures in an overflowing auditorium with at least six hundred listeners (mostly women) in brilliant lectures with unshakeable certainty, talking with that pleasant tremor in his voice which so excites the women, dressed in a sports outfit that almost looks like a chauffeur’s uniform, darkly tanned, with the pathos of a teacher who feels himself completely to be an educator, a prophet and pathfinder and whom one indeed believes to be so. The ethical tendencies found in Being and Time—which aim at philosophy becoming practical—really seem to achieve a breakthrough in Heidegger himself, although, to be sure, in a way that is somewhat alienating. He is all in all too rhetorical, too preachy, too primitive. . . . In the large lecture on German idealism and the philosophical problems of the present he has so far treated the dominant tendencies of contemporary philosophy as anthropological tendencies and metaphysics