Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"In his landmark book Being and Time (1927), Heidegger made the bold claim that Western thought from Plato onward had forgotten or ignored the fundamental question of what it means for something to be -- to be present for us prior to any philosophical or scientific analysis."

No. "what it means for something to be" is, for Heidegger, merely "ontic being", which he was not interested in. Instead, Hedigger was interesested in "ontological being", or "the being of Being".

Now, what "the being of Being" is, is itself the subject of a multi-hundred page unfinished book of what is widely considered to be some of the most difficult writing in all of philosophy.

Because Heidegger's writing is so difficult and so open to interpretation (and re-interpretation), many philosophers disagree strongly about what he actually meant.

For example, what "Being" itself is, for Heidegger, is one of the biggest points of contention. The entire field of Christian Existentialism[1] crystalized around interpreting Heidegger's "Being" as God. But many other philosophers don't interpret it theistically at all.

His other essays outside of Being and Time are equally difficult to understand and open to interpretation. This includes "The Question Concerning Technology", and I'd caution strongly against taking any one summary or interpretation of it as gospel or the final word on the subject.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_existentialism

>Because Heidegger's writing is so difficult and so open to interpretation (and re-interpretation), many philosophers disagree strongly about what he actually meant.

There’s a bit of a joke out there about Heidegger’s difficulty. “Heidegger is impossible to translate - especially into German”

It intuitively seems to me like "what it means for x" is not clearly one or the other, ontic or ontological. At a kind of indirect approach, the ambiguity whether we are actually investigating something ontically or ontologically is kind of a problem for the ontic approach... are we picking out Natural Kinds, or are they just the categories with the greatest utility and/or intelligibility to us?

Anyways, MH says 'so if we should reserve that term "ontology" for that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities' (page 12 of the German edition). Wouldn't the meaning of being, as one of those theoretical entities, be an ontological question? Ontic being, on the other hand, would be ontic man, or the subject of the sciences? It could also be presence in the Derridean sense, but that is not really meaningful in the ontic register, since negation necessitates a Being...

I am not really a Heidegger guy so I would love some insight here.

So what is the value of such work, which is so open to interpretation that 100 years later you will find diametrically opposed takes on its meaning?

Does it not just devolve into a Rubik's Cube for literary nerds?

I ask seriously. I was deeply enchanted with critical / Continental philosophy for a decade, but I don't think I came out of it with any unique insights. "Nothing can be proven to be objectively true" is an insight one can find many other places. Conjectures about what the driving forces of society are a dime a dozen, but any useful means of verifying and comparing them seems far out of our reach.

So, why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the Derridas. What does it really contribute to humanity?

"why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the Derridas"

I can't speak for anyone else, but my interest in Heidegger dovetails with my interest in Asian and Indian religion and philosophy, and with my interest in the illusory nature of the world and what lies behind the world of appearances.

I'm not interested in Lacan or Derrida, so will leave them for others.

"What does it really contribute to humanity?"

Is having one's eye's opened or seeking ways to open one's eyes useful?

Does something have to "contribute to humanity" in order to be of value?

What did the Mona Lisa or other great works of art contribute to humanity? Should Beethoven never have written a note of music because none of it is useful? Or does Beethoven's music's use in parades finally justify its creation?

Can philosophy, like art and music, somehow connect us or open us up to the core of humanity or the world? Is that useful? Does it have to be?

My take on it is as follows: Most of the thoughts we have day in and day out, even when tackling hard, existential or universal topics are constrained by the abstract aystems they are thought in. Think how language affects the way a person thinks. Of course you can also think mathematically, geometrically, in terms of pictures, colors, computer programes, small mechanical contraptions and so on.

What philosophers like Heidegger tried to do (the reason for the often hard to read language) is to go to places, think thoughts and create systems of reflection that are hard to express with language alone.

On top of that there have been certain philosophical movements who thought that thinking itself is more valuable than froming any coherent theory of the world into which all is forced to fit.

So in short: they tried to expand on thinking all while jumping through various hoops and trying to avoid various pitfalls.

>So what is the value of such work, which is so open to interpretation that 100 years later you will find diametrically opposed takes on its meaning?

Different takes to make sense of complex phenomena happen in many fields. It's not a co-incidence that it is especially as such in the realm of our culture where challenging existing interpretations is common place.

>Conjectures about what the driving forces of society are a dime a dozen, but any useful means of verifying and comparing them seems far out of our reach.

Indeed it is difficult, but I would highly suggest not being too empirically minded about abstract concepts like these. What conceptual frameworks and methods are useful in one field (e.g. quantification and measurements in the sciences) do not carry over to another necessarily. Human societal structures and phenomena are complex and would be more difficult to make sense of were it not for useful works like these.

>So, why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the Derridas. What does it really contribute to humanity?

One answer is tradition given these are thinkers part of significant and established schools of thought, and another is that there simply are contemporary scholars that find value in furthering and fleshing out the (usually dense) systems of thought and frameworks. Modern psychology for example has come about from philosophical and psychoanalysis frameworks, some of which are still explored and furthered alongside empirical investigations.

I might be mistaken, but it feels as if your post fails to wrap itself around the idea that not all human knowledge need not be something that contributes to practical or immediate assistance to humans or their productivity. And that instead, sometimes, it can be simply related towards the pursuit and sake of knowledge itself.

>And that instead, sometimes, it can be simply related towards the pursuit and sake of knowledge itself.

But is what we get from Heidegger "knowledge"? Or is it the intricate and imprecise fantastical construction of one (perhaps brilliant) mind? Does it amount to anything more knowledge-producing than a Jackson Pollack painting?

I meant my response generally since you listed some thinkers I'm more familiar with.

For Heidegger, perhaps you would find this overview (and related videos) interesting for some context: https://youtu.be/eDAyhsZ-Gs4

With regards to Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida— each in their own way, they hold off philosophical decision. Lacan stylistically (he sucks, but is pretty structural and emphatic about his registers, sexual distinctions, mirror stage, etc) and Heidegger and Lacan through their interrelated development of the problematic of closure and archi-writing, right? But Heidegger doesn't consign himself to closure, he very emphatically sees a way out in death, the condition of possibility for the authenticity of being. Derrida does not take a way out, but also does not write or reason arbitrarily, his process rests on the simultaneous articulation of a straightforward and historically oriented commentary, and a counterpoint exposed through the repetition of the language of the commentary back at itself until underlying confusions are revealed. This is the basic knowledge I assume you have after 10 years. If you are not familiar, I recommend Simon Critchley's 'Black Socrates', and 'The Ethics of Deconstruction' in addition to the Seminars, Being and Time, and Violence and Metaphysics obviously.

The way it reckons with your question, is that these points of tension, even when they are not fully resolved, allow us to come to a place of improved understanding about the systematic and historical functionality of the language and culture that produced them. This is really nothing new: we do not need to come to the same conclusion about any other subject, anthropological, historical, even hard-scientific, to deploy our provisional understanding. A concrete example of this is talking about moral reasoning- considering similarly non-philosophical work by Levinas, I have come to the conclusion that many of the ethical dilemmas I struggle with in my health care work are not neatly decidable, and are frequently more a question of how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice for my clients... or how much I can hold back for myself in good conscience, rather than a logically and arithmetically guaranteed minimum or maximum fair ratio. This is why deconstruction + pragmatism is such an interesting subject for people like Brandom and Rorty, I imagine.

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