We aren't wading in life's kiddie pool when we're born. We're thrown into it with a blinding light in our eyes. We cry, we hear our crying and respond to it by crying some more. There's so much information coming in, it's overwhelming. We decide to make choices on what to prioritize. We begin attuning to the sound of our mother, the only familiar frequency we've ever known. There's a varying frequency of sounds initially unintelligible but we get so used to the reaches of the range of the human voice that we point this out when we hear things over other noises.
Attunement is a wonderful amalgamation of the concepts of attention and presence.
As temporal beings, our engagement with the world has been highly refined, even the scientist herd would agree. Our own quirks can be observed by understanding what stands out to us when we are engaged with the world while present. Maybe a painting at a friend's house lights up to you. It may be an objectively crappy rendition of starry, starry night but it reminds you of art class at the local mall with your older sister where you tried painting your tigger backpack on a sheet of construction paper while your sister had tried to recreate starry, starry night for the purpose of learning Van Gogh's techniques.
A musician is highly attuned to the intricacies of his instrument. Perhaps so much so that other non-musicians couldn't quite point it out. Not only is this shown in his commitment and care for his craft but also in the way he expresses it. And we as casual listeners have the ability to attune to that after being exposed to so much music growing up. We have to experience the world and recognize its continual unity through time as our marked relationship with being.
Things out there in the world mean something to us, somehow. We care about it over other worries in the world. We take this care with us as we traverse through time, albeit stubbornly. But why care about anything? Frankly, that question is misleading for we already express our care in the question, which shows concern of what we're already doing.
Perhaps we're attuned to care, that's a plausible reason. But attunement cannot become a theory of everything, for it will simply amount to nothing if so. Rather, attunement is built into our care as being-in-the-world that can be seen through our continuous engagement with something we care about. Things about this care are revealed to us unlike any other. Features, details and even just hunches about our intended care that was not apparent to us before. I use "we" a lot to point out to a common ground of experience but really, that ground is just ground; your experience is just as unique as mine.
Not to sound existentialist or anything...
Nevertheless, like a radio tuned to a station, our attunement is selective but not like that of the psychologist's notion of attention. For even if we found out which specific areas of the brain light up when we pay attention to a chair, the qualia of our experience remains at large, and all the built-in contexts behind this chair. We are built into attunement is what I'm trying to say. We can read the mood of the room at a party or feel our own emotions while being at said party. Perhaps being "in-tune" with one's emotion may take the spotlight for an example of attunement but being "in-tune" with your significant other holds just as much ground.
Understanding your significant other "better than they can" is a well-repeated adage and has some truth to it. However the comparative is obviously relative. "Better than they can understand themselves" can amount to understanding someone better in terms of how they are revealed to them. The rug under the carpet feeling gets released when one realizes the other person is "not who they thought they were" because of this fixation with attunement as it is only one kind of attunement.
Attuning to something discloses a kind of being of a person but also necessarily covers it up. Maybe it will cover up other aspects that become mere background noise in terms of priority or simply cover up the potential for understanding someone in terms of the goal they set out for in the first place.
This skill itself is a particular attunement. And so my awe with attunement perhaps isn't that it is a particular unique notion not recognized by previous philosophers before Heidegger. Rather, it is my amazement at how people have taken many lengths to deny it.
Attunement isn't the groundbreaking concept to tell you the underlying message about what it means to be a human being, rather it is the ground from which you can explore your presence and engagement with the world. It is the fundamental mood, an attitude you've felt like you've always known and take pride in knowing. The world that you disclose and cover-up, that you bring to stand out and leave behind the curtain. This is simply a structural demonstration, one can only find out if this is truth by engaging with this everydayness and give time to notice that there are many things in the everyday that become a world to be disclosed, integrated and most importantly lived-in.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Pros and Cons of being Heideggerian
- Having a more enriched notion of Being (pro)
- Know the difference between "being" and "beings" (pro)
- Saying you’re Heideggarian is uncool (con)
- Having to use a new form of vocabulary/language to speak about things which regular language tends to misrepresent (con)
- Having to defend the relevance of Heideggerian thought despite Heidegger being a Nazi (con)
- Having a good argument against Descartes (pro)
- Being able to say the metaphysics project failed and know what you’re talking about (pro)– get effectively get that two-way nod with those Wittgensteinians.
- Have a stronger notion of theology than most religious people if desired (pro)
- Heideggerians may not know formal logic/ the continental problem (con)
- Have a better grasp of the history of philosophy than most Analytic philosophers (pro)
- Knowing pre-Greek terms that you can show off to Greek students (pro)
- Automatically become an etymologist (pro)
- Your dogma is to doubt the dogma (pro)
- Being dogmatic is hard when other philosophers don’t grasp Heidegger well (con, arguably pro because humbling)
- Not having a philosophy for ethics, having to outsource, and not really find anything (con)
- Having to explain to people you’re not an existentialist (con)
- Have most of your ideas be associated with existentialism (con)
- Most of the time the only thing people know about Heidegger are Authenticity/inauthenticity and know the word Dasein but not what it becomes to mean over time (con)
- Be confused when people say Heidegger doesn’t make any sense (con)
- Have your philosophy accept science (pro)
- Having to work on philosophy without using the word consciousness (con)
- Having to read Merleau-Ponty if wanting to extend ideas about being to perception and corporeality (con)
- Having to study Husserl in order to truly grasp Heidegger (con)
- Other Heideggarians shit on you if you don’t know German (con)
- Typing Greek is as difficult as it sounds (con)
- Be able to interact your philosophy with many different departments from different countries (other than USA) (pro)
- Potentially fall into postmodernism (con)
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
Phenomenology of death: intending loved ones
While the existentialists made radical strides on the topic of death as a personal possession of every human’s, the phenomenology of death need not only dwell on one’s own end. Most of the time, one stumbles on dwelling the topic of “death” in general after hearing about the death of a loved one or variable levels of acquaintance with someone who had passed. While philosophy from the Greeks to the existentialists prepare for death, what remains hushed is those who used to possess the verb to be. The phenomenological method that Husserl revolutionized allowed for a more ‘scientific’ understanding of the categories of our intention- the ‘logic’ of our consciousness. One may confuse this logic with the logic of Descartes, Kant, Hegel. But phenomenology is supposed to return us to the things themselves. When we engage in perceiving the object, consciousness intends the object, tries to grasp it. But in our natural attitude, in the hum bum of everydayness, our perception maintains the wholeness of an object despite only seeing one of them. The part is intended, the unity is what consciousness is intending.
But what of intending the departed? Whatever euphemism we use, language can only try to describe the phenomena, the kind one would know when one actually engages in phenomenology. And so this investigation will attempt to do just that. But this will not solely follow the Husserlian telos, other variations of the modern dogma will manifest themselves in thought as it helps the process. For philosophers, even if their backgrounds were in mathematics, theology, anthropology, etc. all studies are just studies of humans situated and narrowed into a subject of interest about the human. And so we must inquire whether or not intending the dead is akin to intending an ideal structure such as mathematics. For what characterizes human beings is that they are always unfulfilled, always a potentiality until death. Heidegger calls this notion being-towards-death. To begin to try answering this, one must ask what does one think of when one intends the phenomenon of a loved one and is that different from intending the dead in general? Phenomenology is always a first person investigation, and so others dwelling on this should think of this themselves. For when I intend the dead in general, all I’m dealing with the facticity that they used to be, always thought of in one tense– the past. And so I find it strange when other people say something along the lines of “she would have wanted it like this” or “she doesn’t like it to be this way”, turning whoever into a mouthpiece for one’s own interpretation. And these people aren’t mystical prophets or completely self centered manipulator, at least that’s not how I intend them ;). Jokes aside, any tense a person uses referring to the departed other than past is inaccurate but not entirely false. Language is just a tool for us to aim our intentions at what we’re intending.
With a specific person in mind, when we intend them, our act of intention puts them in our consciousness. Is the act of intention a fulfilled intention? For our interests, the logic behind consciousness, where supposed transcended ideas arise from, is that where our intended loved one resides? Mathematics is a fulfilled intention as it does not require us to rediscover 1+1=2 over and over again. But death doesn’t appear to us as a fulfilled idea, at least not intuitively. In our everydayness, thinking about a dead loved one is normally associated with emotions, which trigger memories that grasp the past intentions. And the constant grasping by consciousness for a person who at the time before her death was being with possibilities, provided us with an insight into the structure of our intentions. Most people are on the fence on whether death is a certainty. But phenomenology takes the things themselves, and the very notion of death gained from seeing the corpse itself or reading about it in the obituaries affects the structure of the life world of the phenomenologist. Regardless of the source, the notion of death of an other remains a factually true statement but also an ontologically debatable discourse. For to describe death itself, one may turn to the Kantian cop out and claim one cannot know the thing in itself but that only promotes skepticism.
Death is first person for me but always third person for any one else. And so Phenomenology’s first person technique grasps for the kind of being that used to be continuous beings that are always a “yet to be” but always is. And so even the most sophisticated and considered of phenomenological analysis has to deal with this intending in time. “Being is time” Heidegger ironically answers about the relationship of being and time in his large magnum opus.
One thing that can’t be denied as mentioned previously is the fact that one cannot help think of one’s own death when dealing with the thought of a dead person. Death is a looming certainty in our being. And so arguably in trying to grasp or intend the death o ta loved one, the ego is also trying to grasp the fulfilled intention of one’s own death. For all of this activity of intending is going on within consciousness. Noth the consciousness of the subject and the pure consciousness for which all consciousness operates under.
The notion of death when dealt with and put in the forefront of one’s life world, can lead towards either authenticity or inauthenticity. Authenticity occurs only when one is dealing with one’s own death. Projecting it unto another and denying one’s own certain, impending death leads to inauthentic behavior, one may tend to go with the “crowd”, “herd”, “they”, “one”, etc.
Underlying all this activity in the forefront is the background being-in-the-world, our everydayness still dominates even if one falls into lapses of coping with the idea of death. And so when speaking/intending of a loved one , it appears that the phenomena will try to grasp the person who has deparrted and realize that he/she is actually intending one’s own death. Either way, the investigation remains a looming uncertainty, like an unsolved mathematical problem. And from one’s own attitude towards death (inauthentic or authentic behavior) leads to the fundamental underlying ethics that stems into our everyday ethics. So this kind of pre-ethics, appears to be fundamentally irrational for grasping something that is unfulfilled does not leave comfort into certainty. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why ethics ends up with relativism. Because each person’s death is their own. no one can take hold of it. But death isn’t unique in that sense, each person’s own unique experience with death itself is unique. But also everyone’s own experience with the phenomena. There’s no way one can experience the same as another, only a notion that some things remain certain while other aspects of a thing remains a practical endeavor.
This analysis is leaning towards the Sartrean notion of nothingness, and will likely end up in that train of thought as the notion of the nothing, when truly considered is a complex endeavor and may arguably the same as mathematics.
Nonetheless, thinking of a dead person, especially one that I know makes me think about myself because that death is his/her’s. My death is mine. We may be caught in existential crises and melodramatics death as if it were unnatural but death is really an integral part of a person’s life. The choice to anguish over our death is authentic behavior but not practical. Because alongside our being-toward-death are the goals we set to ourselves as we engage within the world, necessarily as part of the world. To disclose being through activities such as ontological phenomenology, history and even science. The problem of death is the problem of life so long as we make a part of us a problem.
But what of intending the departed? Whatever euphemism we use, language can only try to describe the phenomena, the kind one would know when one actually engages in phenomenology. And so this investigation will attempt to do just that. But this will not solely follow the Husserlian telos, other variations of the modern dogma will manifest themselves in thought as it helps the process. For philosophers, even if their backgrounds were in mathematics, theology, anthropology, etc. all studies are just studies of humans situated and narrowed into a subject of interest about the human. And so we must inquire whether or not intending the dead is akin to intending an ideal structure such as mathematics. For what characterizes human beings is that they are always unfulfilled, always a potentiality until death. Heidegger calls this notion being-towards-death. To begin to try answering this, one must ask what does one think of when one intends the phenomenon of a loved one and is that different from intending the dead in general? Phenomenology is always a first person investigation, and so others dwelling on this should think of this themselves. For when I intend the dead in general, all I’m dealing with the facticity that they used to be, always thought of in one tense– the past. And so I find it strange when other people say something along the lines of “she would have wanted it like this” or “she doesn’t like it to be this way”, turning whoever into a mouthpiece for one’s own interpretation. And these people aren’t mystical prophets or completely self centered manipulator, at least that’s not how I intend them ;). Jokes aside, any tense a person uses referring to the departed other than past is inaccurate but not entirely false. Language is just a tool for us to aim our intentions at what we’re intending.
With a specific person in mind, when we intend them, our act of intention puts them in our consciousness. Is the act of intention a fulfilled intention? For our interests, the logic behind consciousness, where supposed transcended ideas arise from, is that where our intended loved one resides? Mathematics is a fulfilled intention as it does not require us to rediscover 1+1=2 over and over again. But death doesn’t appear to us as a fulfilled idea, at least not intuitively. In our everydayness, thinking about a dead loved one is normally associated with emotions, which trigger memories that grasp the past intentions. And the constant grasping by consciousness for a person who at the time before her death was being with possibilities, provided us with an insight into the structure of our intentions. Most people are on the fence on whether death is a certainty. But phenomenology takes the things themselves, and the very notion of death gained from seeing the corpse itself or reading about it in the obituaries affects the structure of the life world of the phenomenologist. Regardless of the source, the notion of death of an other remains a factually true statement but also an ontologically debatable discourse. For to describe death itself, one may turn to the Kantian cop out and claim one cannot know the thing in itself but that only promotes skepticism.
Death is first person for me but always third person for any one else. And so Phenomenology’s first person technique grasps for the kind of being that used to be continuous beings that are always a “yet to be” but always is. And so even the most sophisticated and considered of phenomenological analysis has to deal with this intending in time. “Being is time” Heidegger ironically answers about the relationship of being and time in his large magnum opus.
One thing that can’t be denied as mentioned previously is the fact that one cannot help think of one’s own death when dealing with the thought of a dead person. Death is a looming certainty in our being. And so arguably in trying to grasp or intend the death o ta loved one, the ego is also trying to grasp the fulfilled intention of one’s own death. For all of this activity of intending is going on within consciousness. Noth the consciousness of the subject and the pure consciousness for which all consciousness operates under.
The notion of death when dealt with and put in the forefront of one’s life world, can lead towards either authenticity or inauthenticity. Authenticity occurs only when one is dealing with one’s own death. Projecting it unto another and denying one’s own certain, impending death leads to inauthentic behavior, one may tend to go with the “crowd”, “herd”, “they”, “one”, etc.
Underlying all this activity in the forefront is the background being-in-the-world, our everydayness still dominates even if one falls into lapses of coping with the idea of death. And so when speaking/intending of a loved one , it appears that the phenomena will try to grasp the person who has deparrted and realize that he/she is actually intending one’s own death. Either way, the investigation remains a looming uncertainty, like an unsolved mathematical problem. And from one’s own attitude towards death (inauthentic or authentic behavior) leads to the fundamental underlying ethics that stems into our everyday ethics. So this kind of pre-ethics, appears to be fundamentally irrational for grasping something that is unfulfilled does not leave comfort into certainty. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why ethics ends up with relativism. Because each person’s death is their own. no one can take hold of it. But death isn’t unique in that sense, each person’s own unique experience with death itself is unique. But also everyone’s own experience with the phenomena. There’s no way one can experience the same as another, only a notion that some things remain certain while other aspects of a thing remains a practical endeavor.
This analysis is leaning towards the Sartrean notion of nothingness, and will likely end up in that train of thought as the notion of the nothing, when truly considered is a complex endeavor and may arguably the same as mathematics.
Nonetheless, thinking of a dead person, especially one that I know makes me think about myself because that death is his/her’s. My death is mine. We may be caught in existential crises and melodramatics death as if it were unnatural but death is really an integral part of a person’s life. The choice to anguish over our death is authentic behavior but not practical. Because alongside our being-toward-death are the goals we set to ourselves as we engage within the world, necessarily as part of the world. To disclose being through activities such as ontological phenomenology, history and even science. The problem of death is the problem of life so long as we make a part of us a problem.
Friday, August 3, 2018
Being as horizon in relation to thought, nihilism and atemporality
We inherit the thought we choose to adopt. We are the vessels of the structure of this thought; thought that drives our regular engagement with the world is necessarily self-sufficient. Yet this thought entertains a multitude of possibilities.
This thought hides in the laying out of hypotheticals, oscillating through the basic three tenses. It is fundamentally our thinking that affects this tension of time. The subjunctive, pluperfect, conditional are call called “moods” of time. They open up the possibilities of different worlds. We attune to these worlds through our practical engagement with the world. This everydayness is in fact a thought. Our being, though not actively “thinking” is in fact a thought. It is through this unrestricted engagement that being manifests pure thought.
Being is immeasurable, for when one tries to, being is necessarily hidden/concealed. This is what I believe/think Heidegger means when he calls for the destruction of Western philosophical tradition, those slaves of reason. For this kind of philosophy corrupts being. It is through our own tendency to want to improve the already established thought that we hide the truth that lies in being. For being is a horizon that this philosophy looks at through a telescope, fixated only on the vanishing point instead of this unrestricted, infinite, endless horizon of being.
And we grow up to inherit this thought and express the being of this collective telescope, the lens of which clearly enhances the tunnel vision from which we suffer. It is paradoxical that philosophy (through Heidegger) realized its own necessary self-destruction but only through it, can we free thought to freely speak being.
“Language is the house of the truth of being” - Martin Heidegger
Freedom in the sense of freedom of discourse and not the radical freedom that existentialism cried for. Rather, it is the being, situated in the world that is all being thinks. For even attempts to go beyond the world necessarily discloses a world.
And because we inherit thought we choose to adopt, we structure ourselves in one world. And it is through this misunderstanding that we eventually find in trying to unite ourselves into the “one”, “they”, “herd” or “crowd” that we forget that we’ve lost ourselves in our little telescope. Yet with infinite possibilities of other worlds we may disclose, being may lose itself to the nihilistic attitude. We don't realize we have imported skepticism from the myopic "one" world into being the beings that we are, in the horizon of being-there.
For beings experience the world necessarily (as being-in-the-world) but being doesn't. Being is the hidden door not through which experience passes through. The significance of being is simply its separation from beings.
We see being everyday, through our everydayness, because of our everydayness. For thought is being's spirit, language its furniture, rooted in being-in-the-world.
The nihilistic attitude's attempted coup stems from this misinterpretation from the "one". The nihilist doesn't realize that before coming to this conclusion, Dasein/being-in-the-world/human-being fundamentally cares. For if Dasein does not care, how would it come to contemplate its world? And because of nihilism's identity as the skeptic who gave up, it is evidence of the skeptic's circular thinking.
Nihilism is this anxiety turned apathy from going around in circles. This is the condition "myopia"/"myopic thinking" suffers from. Not only has it realized its great distance but zero displacement, it stubbornly marches on, expecting something to be the same and being upset about its restricted certainty. And this kind of judgment is simply the means of escape from this myopia from disclosing it.
This does not mean that Dasein should not be anxious. It is only in understanding this anxiety from this engagement with the world that we can examine as an existential analytic that we can recover our engagement with being. For the hidden history of the west, the history of being before plato established "being as entity" as dogma, is evidence of human engagement with its roots.
Being as "phronesis" (coming to be then coming not to be), as "power"; even the overrated western being as "entity" as well as "creation" in the christian interpretation is the original philosophy, the roots of the question of who we are. In this modern age, the millenial will come to realize that information isn't simply a value of knowledge about being, but by its too quick availability, brings about an awareness that the kind of being "the one" is heading towards is atemporality.
But "being is time", said Heidegger. However, the "one" will not heed Heidegger's warning regarding technology. As we attempt to become atemporality through becoming this thought, we will find that the project of being as entity- essentially all disciplines ending with "ology", worshiping only one sense of the "logos", we only continue to suffer from this mute logos, unable to utter thought as discourse (legein, greek, another sense of the word logos).
Artificial intelligence, the brainchild of "being as entity" party will only reach the limit of the resolution its telescope can resolve. The "limit" akin to the mathematical "limit" is the horizon's vanishing point discovered and developed to be an artificial being. And out of frustration, "being as entity" will walk towards the horizon, hoping to find its end, unaware that they are missing the point. And it will continue to walk on "in circles" or towards the vanishing point and see the same thing, and will feel secure with the collective myopia. They will stumble together, trip together, and push the boulder like sisyphus up a hill together or even turn to nihilism-- unfounded and unfortunate.
For in all these attempts, being is concealed, continuously buried through every wrong step we take.
For beings experience the world necessarily (as being-in-the-world) but being doesn't. Being is the hidden door not through which experience passes through. The significance of being is simply its separation from beings.
We see being everyday, through our everydayness, because of our everydayness. For thought is being's spirit, language its furniture, rooted in being-in-the-world.
The nihilistic attitude's attempted coup stems from this misinterpretation from the "one". The nihilist doesn't realize that before coming to this conclusion, Dasein/being-in-the-world/human-being fundamentally cares. For if Dasein does not care, how would it come to contemplate its world? And because of nihilism's identity as the skeptic who gave up, it is evidence of the skeptic's circular thinking.
Nihilism is this anxiety turned apathy from going around in circles. This is the condition "myopia"/"myopic thinking" suffers from. Not only has it realized its great distance but zero displacement, it stubbornly marches on, expecting something to be the same and being upset about its restricted certainty. And this kind of judgment is simply the means of escape from this myopia from disclosing it.
This does not mean that Dasein should not be anxious. It is only in understanding this anxiety from this engagement with the world that we can examine as an existential analytic that we can recover our engagement with being. For the hidden history of the west, the history of being before plato established "being as entity" as dogma, is evidence of human engagement with its roots.
Being as "phronesis" (coming to be then coming not to be), as "power"; even the overrated western being as "entity" as well as "creation" in the christian interpretation is the original philosophy, the roots of the question of who we are. In this modern age, the millenial will come to realize that information isn't simply a value of knowledge about being, but by its too quick availability, brings about an awareness that the kind of being "the one" is heading towards is atemporality.
But "being is time", said Heidegger. However, the "one" will not heed Heidegger's warning regarding technology. As we attempt to become atemporality through becoming this thought, we will find that the project of being as entity- essentially all disciplines ending with "ology", worshiping only one sense of the "logos", we only continue to suffer from this mute logos, unable to utter thought as discourse (legein, greek, another sense of the word logos).
Artificial intelligence, the brainchild of "being as entity" party will only reach the limit of the resolution its telescope can resolve. The "limit" akin to the mathematical "limit" is the horizon's vanishing point discovered and developed to be an artificial being. And out of frustration, "being as entity" will walk towards the horizon, hoping to find its end, unaware that they are missing the point. And it will continue to walk on "in circles" or towards the vanishing point and see the same thing, and will feel secure with the collective myopia. They will stumble together, trip together, and push the boulder like sisyphus up a hill together or even turn to nihilism-- unfounded and unfortunate.
For in all these attempts, being is concealed, continuously buried through every wrong step we take.
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