Is this actually worth studying? Seems it would take weeks just to skim it...

The object is ready-to-hand when it is only apprehended as it is "for us," which in the archetypal example of the hammer is its capacity to strike and remove nails. It isn't encountered as it is in the world.

When the hammer breaks, the object becomes present-at-hand. Its being is revealed, its truer qualities come to the surface, because the reduction we make when we encounter it as ready-to-hand has been washed away.

It's basically concealment/revelation.

I see, similar as the being-in-itself and being-for-us of Hegel.

yeah but i'm not sure if it is "as" dialectical. Hegel famously remarks that the "essence must appear," being-in-itself must become being-for-us. I do not think this is the case in Heidegger. in the move from concealed to revealed the mask of "use" (scare quotes because that's not the optimal phrase) is eviscerated and you just get pure Being.

disclaimer: i havent read heidegger, only harman

Going to dump-quote some Heidegger stuff here for any anons interested.

1/3

Technics and Technology: Enframing the World

In the Question of Technology as Steven Shaviro tells us Heidegger warns us against the danger of technological “enframing,” with its reduction of nature to the status of a “standing reserve.” He demonizes science, in a manner so sweeping and absolute as to be the mirror image of science’s own claims to unique authority. But you can’t undo what Whitehead calls the “bifurcation of nature” by simply dismissing one side of the dichotomy. Whitehead’s account of science and technology is far subtler than Heidegger’s, in part because he actually understands modern science, as Heidegger clearly does not. For Whitehead, scientific and technical rationality is one kind of “abstraction.” This, in itself, is not anything bad. An abstraction is a simplification, a reduction, made in the service of some particular interest. As such, it is indispensable. We cannot live without abstractions; they alone make thought and action possible. We only get into trouble when we extend these abstractions beyond their limits, pushing them into realms where they no longer apply. This is what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” and it’s one to which modern science and technology have been especially prone. But all our other abstractions—notably including the abstraction we call language—need to be approached in the same spirit of caution. Indeed, Whitehead’s reservations about science run entirely parallel to his reservations about language.

In Absolute Recoil Slavoj Zizek would comment on “enframing” saying, In this precise sense, Heidegger is the ultimate transcendental philosopher: his achievement is to historicize the transcendental dimension. For Heidegger, an Event has nothing to do with ontic processes; it designates the “event” of a new epochal disclosure of Being, the emergence of a new “world” (as the horizon of meaning within which all entities appear). Catastrophe thus occurs before the (f) act: the catastrophe is not the nuclear self-destruction of humanity, but that ontological relation to nature which reduces it to techno-scientific exploitation. The catastrophe is not our ecological ruin, but the loss of our home-roots, thus making possible the ruthless exploitation of the earth. The catastrophe is not that we are reduced to automata manipulable by biogenetics, but the very ontological approach that renders this prospect possible. Even in the case of total self-destruction, ontology maintains its priority over the ontic: the possibility of total self-destruction is just an ontic consequence of our relating to nature as a collection of objects for technological exploitation— the catastrophe occurs when nature appears to us within the frame of technology. Gestell, Heidegger’s name for the essence of technology, is usually translated into English as “enframing.”

Neither did I, it just remembered me of those particular Hegelian terms.
So, in a way is Heidegger a Kantian? In the sense that there is a world of pure Being beyond subjective activity? Isn't the revelation of the hammer's true presence still within the framework of 'use' (except it is perceptional or conceptual use instead of practical)?

2/3

At its most radical, technology designates not the complex network of machines and activities, but the attitude towards reality that we assume when we engage in such activities: technology is the way reality discloses itself to us in modern times, when reality has become a “standing-reserve”:

Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.

Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological. The paradox of technology as the concluding moment of Western metaphysics is that it is a mode of enframing which poses a danger to enframing itself: the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human, it loses the very feature of being ecstatically open to reality. However, this danger also contains the potential for salvation: the moment we become aware of and fully embrace the fact that technology itself is, in its essence, a mode of enframing, we overcome it … Giving such priority to the ontological over the ontic dimension leads Heidegger to dismiss gigantic human catastrophes (like the Holocaust) as mere “ontic” events; it leads him to dismiss the differences between, say, democracy and fascism as secondary and ontologically irrelevant (and some critics have hastened to add that this obliteration of ontic differences is not only the consequence but also the hidden cause of his emphasis on the ontological dimension— his own Nazi involvement thus becomes an insignificant error, etc.).

3/3

The realization that we are both products and producers enframed within an ontological organization of transcendental forces of an energetic unconscious that is at once technics and technology is both a catastrophe and a creation. As Slavoj will continue: “In our most elementary phenomenological experience, the reality we see through a window (our bodies: senses) is always minimally spectral, not as fully real as the enclosed space we inhabit while looking out. The reality outside is perceived in a weirdly de-realized state, as if we were watching a performance on screen. When we open the window, the direct impact of the external reality causes a minimal shock, as we are overwhelmed by its proximity. This is also why we can be surprised when entering the enclosed space of a house: it seems as if the space inside is larger than the outside frame, as if the house is bigger on the inside than the outside. A similar frame, conceived as a window onto another world, appears in Roland Emmerich’s 1994 film, Stargate. The “stargate” is a large ring-shaped device that functions as a wormhole enabling people to teleport to complementary devices located cosmic distances away. No wonder the world they enter through the stargate resembles Ancient Egypt— itself a kind of “stargate culture” in which the pharaohs organized gigantic public works to secure their passage through the stargate to Orion after their death. And, in science itself, is not the ultimate stargate the idea of a black hole, conceived as the passage into an alternative universe?” (AR)

>inb4 memeing on the Ziz
Anyways, Heidegger's interesting.

Source: socialecologies.wordpress.com/page/2/

Man, now I want to go straight to Heidegger, but I need to go through everything else first.

Meme answer: Get into Heidegger to unironically get preserved in a cryo-museum for historical purposes. Our concept of technology is so un-Heideggerian that we're going to create un-Heideggerian AI to which the meaning of the question of Being might never occur. Maybe Heidegger is a hedge against technology turning upon us, because Dasein is what we are, and thus what "value" (in market terms) we might retain in a posthuman world.

We already know what Being is. There is no "deciding" that occurs because it is already a given. Any question regarding the "nature of Being" is likely mischaracterizing the question as being one of substance, nature, God, etc.

>Heidegger doesn't understand modern science
Ofc he probably doesn't understand quantum tunneling but that's not the point is it?

Yes. Your exact line of thinking is what Heidegger will challenge and I think engagement with Heidegger will help with your maturation. While you talk about history/science/geopolitical/art books adding "practical value" I cannot help but think "Where? At trivia night?". Meanwhile, I think in the course of your life, you, your friends, family members, etc-- all of them will struggle with finding the meaning of their own lives and their place in the world.

In those conversations, Heidegger has always helped me think through it a little better. Some of his concepts have really helped me communicate to friends who were struggling. I also find his ideas on technology to be very edifying.

You do not need to read B&T without guidance, I believe that there are open courses/lectures that walk through it. Dreyfus might be a good source.

Personally, I think Heidegger and Wittgenstein were the two most important philosophers from the 1900s. These are people that thought a lot about the things that really matter. Their approaches are at the very least worth exploration.

>We already know what Being is
Perhaps. It's still very much an open question for me. I'll admit that I'm still in a place where I'm prone to getting my own sense of ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics rather confusedly tangled up tho. Still cleaning my room, so to speak.

>Ofc he probably doesn't understand quantum tunneling but that's not the point is it?
I don't understand what you're getting at here. What is the point? Not baiting you, just require some clarification.

I'm am a rube with regards to the intricacies of modern physics, but I don't consider that a hindrance to understanding the nature of the scientific worldview. I lean towards the skeptical when scientific claims are used to shed insight on the "meaning" of metaphysics, or attempt to abolish metaphysics by replacing it with physics. So saying Heidegger doesn't understand science seems like a non sequitur.

Right, ok. I understand what you mean then. Personally I'm skewing pretty heavily towards Deleuze and away from Heidegger these days but only after a protracted stay in Heidegger land about which I will always feel nostalgic (and which is potentially the desired endgame of much Heideggerian thought when it comes up against politics).

>I don't consider that a hindrance to understanding the nature of the scientific worldview
Me neither. And it can be potentially used as a rather cheap and dismissive tactic by positivists. As much as linguistic obfuscation can be used in return by continentals.

>I lean towards the skeptical when scientific claims are used to shed insight on the "meaning" of metaphysics, or attempt to abolish metaphysics by replacing it with physics.
Same here.

I wanted to explicate one other thing also.
>ethics/aesthetics/metaphysics
By which I mean, I'm not actually sure which of these "ought to" go first, second, and third: the good, the beautiful, and the true. Or if they should all be balanced by a neat division of checks and balances.

The attraction to reading philosophers for me lies in the way in which inevitably something will come across to them as *beautiful.* Something always has to be beautiful. Regardless of however devastating their critiques may be, there is always something valorized, somewhere, and that is the part I tend to fixate on. And being a highly sentimental and covetous meatbag with a sadly rather low-functioning cognitive microprocessor, my natural tendency is - I suspect - to prioritize the beautiful, minimize the ethical, and then conclude on the metaphysical as that which justifies this arrangement. And then shitpost about it. For what it's worth.

It's an admittedly terrible arrangement and a ridiculous way to go through one's life but I'm still glad to encounter a thread that provokes an interesting exchange of ideas. Maybe a wiser version of me would just stick to ethics and put aesthetics on the back burner.

Oldfag

>ethics/aesthetics/metaphysics
Personally i'm tending towards the Greeks lately. Maybe it's just larping. But immersing myself in the intricacies of the many ways they conceived of the good/beautiful/true is refreshing. For example MacIntyre points out that "excellence" meant excellence at a practice but also at winning. This "winning" is in the context of a contest that is fair so that excellence may shine. Hence the need for justice. And the microcosm of the agon is mirrored in their view of the world as being ordered in accordance to dike.

We don't have a clear concept for this. "Selective pressure" is too clinical, and besides, such a "contest" selects for whoever survives. And natural selection is ugly. Social Darwinism was an incredibly optimistic facelift, but didn't question the premises of selection, only insisted on a different result. A just method of selection is needed in order for the excellent to prosper, and yet confusions in what we consider "justice" end up leading us into a morass where half of our society wants to redistribute social goods towards the less excellent because that is one facet of our contemporary sense of justice.

Maybe that's why instead of spending their spare brainpower on philosophy or politics a lot of potential thinkers in the Soviet Union turned to chess. It's considerably less ugly.

Yes. The Greeks are indeed that. Heraclitus puts it all altogether very neatly in one place. Small wonder Heidegger was so big on him.

>For example MacIntyre points out that "excellence" meant excellence at a practice but also at winning. This "winning" is in the context of a contest that is fair so that excellence may shine. Hence the need for justice. And the microcosm of the agon is mirrored in their view of the world as being ordered in accordance to dike.
I like this. Academia, meet gymnasia. The body is a thing that is easily forgotten in techno-wonderland. However perpetually it is being stimulated by commerce.

>A just method of selection is needed in order for the excellent to prosper, and yet confusions in what we consider "justice" end up leading us into a morass where half of our society wants to redistribute social goods towards the less excellent because that is one facet of our contemporary sense of justice.
Yup. Down this road lies the dilemmas and quandaries of all things Peterson.

Maybe that's why instead of spending their spare brainpower on philosophy or politics a lot of potential thinkers in the Soviet Union turned to chess. It's considerably less ugly.
I read that Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is to former Soviet republics what Starcraft is to South Korea. Thought that was interesting.

The Greeks are a good look. I was reading about this in Agamben as well. Before we started taking things apart. The Chinese have a good sense of this too: the empire long united/long divided/and so on.

Did you ever read Zweig's story about chess?

yeah bro

I feel like there is a contradiction between your acknowledgement that the contest must be fair and then your problem with the alleged morass of redistribution towards the "less excellent". Particularly when many of these "less excellent" are really just "less connected to the established power structure".

A guy I know appears excellent. He went to Northwestern and then became a realtor who makes about $2M a year through closing huge volumes of business. However, the only reason he got into Northwestern was through his father's connections. All of his business deals are with people in his father's network. He appears and believes he is "excellent" but really, through the established networks of distribution, he has just been given it all by his family.

This is the present truth-- the established system of distribution /already/ funnels resources to the mediocre. They then gain victories through those resources, appear to be excellent from the victories they never had to earn, proclaim themselves as excellent, and continue to justify the current distribution, so that their mediocre children can also pretend to be excellent.

The unfairness is inheritance itself and the use of past excellence to monopolize future excellence. If we truly wanted to foster a human excellence, we would have to remove the material hand of the past and level the playing field. I would love to see what our civilization would look like if every generation had to compete on an even field rather than one already rigged by networks of power.

Yes i've read Zweig's Chess a long time ago. I'm sure i've missed a lot of the details since. Maybe it stretches my metaphor of chess as describing a "fair" game which leads to the question of what exactly is fairness? Fabian strategies are after all effective, but are they excellent? Maybe the "ideal" contest and proxy in place of violence for me is something like the Aztec Flower Wars. Highly ritualized small scale "battles" where prestige was at stake. I'm sure we can find a way around human sacrifice. I think, maybe there would be a way to fit that within the framework of justice. I don't think i'm able again to view human sacrifice as "brutal" but rather "meaningful". That opens up the meaning of Abraham and Isaac. Eric Gans points out that the common understanding that the parable detailed a moral shift from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice misses the point that animal sacrifice was already being regularly practiced at the time God ordered him to do it. Maybe we don't need to literally sacrifice humans, but we need to rethink our concept of justice.

Chinese "philosophy" is interesting because philosophy was closely related to society in a way that isn't true of the West. If I had to pin down a central assumption it's that the Middle Kingdom was ontologically prior to philosophy. I don't think such a thing is intelligible in contemporary philosophical discourse. It's less controversial if you consider the polis as prior to philosophy, because the polis is not an arbitrary social institution but another facet of an ordered universe. Trying to base philosophy on pure argument (manifested in Kant) strikes me as an error. Maybe i'm a pleb and overly Orientalizing but all this talk about "Asian Philosophy" strikes me as a poor attempt to legitimize their philosophy which isn't quite up to the same intellectual rigor as in the Occident. But that might not be a bad thing. Even Taoism became ritualized, and Zhuangzi didn't cause societal instability. So even spontaneity has order. They figure out ways to make things work. It's a hopeful thought.

what's the name of the course?

>putting chinese philosophy in quotation marks
I'm a big fan of the Chinese. The more I dive into acceleration the more I start to realize why.

>Maybe the "ideal" contest and proxy in place of violence for me is something like the Aztec Flower Wars. Highly ritualized small scale "battles" where prestige was at stake.
Possible. But I think it's the nature of these things to get out of hand.

>I'm sure we can find a way around human sacrifice.
The boy at centre thought so.

>f I had to pin down a central assumption it's that the Middle Kingdom was ontologically prior to philosophy
*Super* interesting and I agree. Mega-interesting. The Tao precedes thought and creation. Massively interesting stuff there.

>rying to base philosophy on pure argument (manifested in Kant) strikes me as an error. Maybe i'm a pleb and overly Orientalizing but all this talk about "Asian Philosophy" strikes me as a poor attempt to legitimize their philosophy which isn't quite up to the same intellectual rigor as in the Occident.
In a sense yes, but the Occident is now reaping the whirlwind of capitalism and automation. That's why acceleration is required reading. Nothing ever outsmarted Western metaphysics except its own time-bending progeny: technology and finance.

>Even Taoism became ritualized, and Zhuangzi didn't cause societal instability. So even spontaneity has order. They figure out ways to make things work. It's a hopeful thought.
Spontaneous order. Hopefulness. I am right there with you on that.

he forgot Dasein

That's a good point. So contemporary social institutions don't promote excellence except with regards to its utility, and to the extent that excellence, especially moral excellence is encouraged, it's relegated to the realm of ethics. The closest thing you're saying instead is something like "he's not maximizing productive utility because of nepotism, which is unjust". Well I don't have a problem with the non-maximization of utility (it's an impossible way to live even), because excellence sometimes demands that. But I do have a problem with redistribution to the Rawlsian extreme. Even more so when you suggest inheritance is unjust! I think there's room in the ethical sphere that "unearned" inheritance (assuming it's truly "unearned" in this sense, but his father did earn it) allows. It allows for the exercise of noblesse oblige. I think one would have a greater tendency to keep everything for oneself should they believe they earned it with their own efforts. Of course, the possibility of "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps" was only possible in modernity. You can claim that no one "helped" you despite people buying your highly demanded products because they were just following their "self-interest", aside from thanking your parents for raising you (ironically you would only be able to thank them for birthing you should radical redistribution go to the extent of abolishing inheritance). Being born to wealth allows a certain detachment to wealth that makes one less liable to hoard wealth. Since our sense of "justice" already contains the element of redistribution in it, one is paradoxically less encouraged to give. One earns no brownie points for charity aside from "virtue" signalling because he ought to do it anyway.

Reading your response I realize that I pointed out what I felt a contradiction was, but did not really clarify why exactly it mattered or what my real concern was. My real concern is the loss of excellence itself.

The boy who is given everything has already lost the striving that makes excellence. Because of their father's power and connections, it is nearly impossible to not "succeed". They lose the striving, the growing, the pain, their self-actualization becomes a leaning on the actualization of others. They are only able to get "high scores" because they start with a million points. All claims or pretensions to achieving excellence ring hollow, even to themselves. They are denied excellence because they never had to compete on a real proving ground.

Meanwhile, there are the greatly impoverished. They have no networks of power. They have no resources from their fathers. In fact, they probably have debts. They compete in this very rigged game, lose it, and then get dehumanized, called inferior, and blamed for their loss.

I think your statements regarding Noblesse Oblige are misplaced optimism. I would say that being born to wealth does not add a detachment-- it adds a certain kind of self-blindness. Particularly because you get spoiled and make a lot of value judgments from that elevated position. Regardless of where you are on the spectrum, it is hard to see Trump as a guy who has a detachment to either wealth or power.

Your thoughts on giving interest me but I do not see them as proven.

Ultimately, my concerns are more about the life experience of the person as opposed to their material conditions. I see as the most exciting possibility the even playing field, not because it is materially just (though it is) but because I see it as providing the challenge from which true excellence can emerge, a crucible from which all men and women cannot make excuses for either their possession or lack of excellence. The death of excellence is caused by both being coddled and being deprived. The equal playing field is the womb of a more fulfilled future-- a clear plane where hiding behind wealth or the achievements of others is blissfully impossible.

This is a very chill 3x3.

>""""
Quotation marks are my friend. My command of language is insufficient to express what I want to say, and I like being precise.

>Possible. But I think it's the nature of these things to get out of hand.
Only if you view it under the lens of conflict resolution where advantage itself was at stake. That's the neat thing about the Flower Wars. They were totally subsumed in a shared body of ritual that it becomes akin to a game. Our assumption for violence as being inherently escalatory are because violence for us is the last resort when all other things have failed. But what if violence itself was brought under the purview of ritual? In this case it isn't an avenue of last resort, but becomes a space for excellence. This is why I can't see the Aztecs as being "barbaric" merely because of human sacrifice. It seems like it's a necessary feature in their notion of justice. Games are things that have a stable equilibrium, else they wouldn't exist qua games. Generally. Witty did bring a poker to a debate.

>3x3
Cheers. Although somebody on there may have to get the axe if Nick Land keeps on rewiring my head. Right now either Heidegger or Lacan may be on the hot seat.

>Our assumption for violence as being inherently escalatory are because violence for us is the last resort when all other things have failed. But what if violence itself was brought under the purview of ritual? In this case it isn't an avenue of last resort, but becomes a space for excellence. This is why I can't see the Aztecs as being "barbaric" merely because of human sacrifice. It seems like it's a necessary feature in their notion of justice. Games are things that have a stable equilibrium, else they wouldn't exist qua games. Generally.
Yep. Games as spectacle are absolutely necessary for civilization. I could have gone with a Starcraft match here too but I thought this pic of Beast Mode was pretty cool.

Videogames though. And virtuality. That stuff is only getting started.

How could an interpretation of the ontology of Being and Time leave out Dasein? Surely Heidegger would have something to say about this.

i guess an object-oriented ontologist would naturally attend to objects and forget about the ground of the possibility of objecthood

This boils down to the agon I think. It's crucial that the agon is a microcosm of society and not society itself. Because losing in the agon is no biggie, but "losing" in society results in a crisis. Which is where one then becomes destitute, turns to crime, and counter-signals excellence and enters into a competition for advantage that benefits the non-excellent out of survival. And the purpose of the agon is to showcase excellence, not to churn out a mass of losers that subverts the idea of the excellent (as opposed to being just not so excellent).

Regarding "inheritance", let's ignore wealth for a moment and talk about physical strength or intellect. Do you deny that physical strength is heritable? Or intellect?

Heidegger wanted to write Dasein from the point of view of Being, while Being and Time was Being from the point of view of Dasein, but never did. Maybe he foresaw he would've ended up with OOO.

>tfw when you're hammering away but your head falls off instead of the hammer

Predispositions towards both are certainly heritable, but I feel that the material conditions are so much a part of it already.

We know that it is possible for even two wholly average people to give birth to a genius. We know that it is possible for two geniuses to give birth to a child with down syndrome. Even if a child is born "strong" or with a predisposition towards superior muscles-- those muscles are materially made of protein. Even if a child is born a genius, if they are starved, or if their entire reality is devoid of intellectual materials to react with, or their psychological instabilities caused by fear of hunger, destitution, constant exposure to injustice-- it's hard to imagine them realizing their measure of genius.

My issue is that the genetic lottery is much more "fair". There are chance elements. The material lottery is not at all random. I am more okay with accepting "yes, he really is just a genetically superior person", if that is the answer. I think we cannot get to that answer because of the inheritance issue. The material inheritance always predisposes the children of superior people towards greatness-- but it does not prove those children actually have the greatness on the equal playing field.

No it's not.
Phenomenology and the rest of continental philosophy was a mistake.

Why, though?

yeah but that Being doesn't "remain" noumenal. despite technological obfuscation (technology becomes the systematic becoming-ready-at-hand of the world for us), Dasein can always "break" instrumentality and recover being-in-the-world, or something like that.

So a naturally well-endowed person (in terms of height, say) has an advantage in a physical contest, just as a naturally intelligent person has an advantage in an intellectual contest. This, I hope, doesn't prevent us from claiming that they are excellent in what they do. But these genetic qualities are inherited from their parents, barring the rare anomaly. I think the reason you might be okay with accepting that one can be physically and mentally excellent by birth is that (contrary to what you said) you accept one's genes as one's "birthright", while one's inheritance is not one's "birthright". "Genetic lottery" is an interesting metaphor though. How are one's genes chosen out of an unbounded set, unless we are behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance? It's more like a "genetic tree". You can only be causally related to your parents and no one else. And I think your notion of it as "fair" collapses, because the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Inheritance is already the model.

Now you could accuse the naturally tall or intelligent person of not having to strive as much and you would be correct, but they are still excellent. Now someone with inherited wealth does not have to strive as hard, but can we not see excellence in their wealth, namely, the excellence of their father? And if he did inherit it himself, then it was his father, or his father's father, and so on. And the child, traditionally, would have no qualms with saying "I am the guardian of my father's excellence". But because inheritance has become something of a taboo to us, the contemporary person who comes across wealth is inclined to occlude this factor and pass it off as his own. Even if it's an open secret and every knows where it came from. I think people just like to pretend otherwise, perhaps because it feeds into their misguided notions of what justice is supposed to be? And the guy would be doing a favor to those who covet by paradoxically claiming self-excellence. And I wonder if covetousness does not explain our inclination to advocate for wealth redistribution quicker than genetic redistribution. If one has no wealth, one envisions oneself as gaining wealth, while one's own or potential children are at stake if children were to be redistributed. On the other hand, this analogy is telling because one is also subject to wealth redistribution himself. But perhaps these people who advocate for it do not envision themselves as having much a chance at gaining wealth. And that's worrying because one's judgement of oneself is already the opposite of excellence. As I said before our notions of justice are misguided, and perhaps what is covetousness masquerades as "justice" because the mask serves covetousness' will-to-power.

Of course, since "wealth" is nowadays gained through utility maximizing skills that are disentangled from excellence they do not get automatically get praise from me for being "excellent", but the inheritance of it is not the issue.

>is it worth studying a text that is so dense and convoluted that it would take years to truly grasp it?
Are you fucking retarded or what?

I think I've been reading your posts here for the better part of a year now. You have an unmistakably self-reflective way of reading and discussing philosophy that is very grounding for a Marxist flung skyward into post-Frankfurt epistemology. Keep it up, for all of us.

Thank ye kindly sir. all credit to the glorious Veeky Forums mimetosphere

I guess I'll have to actually read the thing.

Kant's First Critique and Being and Time—which one is more difficult?

This is a good and simple reason for reading Being and Time. Listen to it.

>Graham Harman argues cogently that Heidegger's work basically reduces to a dialectic of two terms applied universally. These terms are presence and readiness, two phenomenological states of objects in the world. So take that and run with it and Being and Time should fall into your lap pretty quickly.

except being and time is a study of the beings that do not belong to the schema of vorhandenheit

the entire purpose of being and time is to submit the metaphysics of presence to the project of destruktion. did you literally miss the entire purpose of the book?

>We already know what Being is. There is no "deciding" that occurs because it is already a given. Any question regarding the "nature of Being" is likely mischaracterizing the question as being one of substance, nature, God, etc.

this is exactly the stance that heidegger attacks in the introduction of being and time. the introduction, man. the givenness of being, heidegger writes, is *exactly what covers up its meaning*. the physis of being is not reducible to its essence, that is what being and time is attempting to show in the second division.

>Kant's First Critique

no doubt

I meant that "deciding whether Being is a thing or not" is not compatible with his concept of Being. He would say something like "Being for Dasein is either occluded or clear" which has the sense of the "givenness" of Being. To decide whether Being is to be or not to be is to detach oneself as a subject from the object one is holding up. If Being was a being in terms of other beings we could say that it either is or is not (the same way my dog is or is not in this room). But for Heidegger the "dog" is already in the room and Dasein already is open to it, even though "you" might not "see" it especially if you're under the spell of standard conceptions of "I". Not a perfect metaphor because to use that as an example is still to talk only about a being and not Being ofc. This is probably a huge butchery of Heidegger, but I guess everyday language is just that misleading.