Status Updates From Groundless Grounds: A Study...

ngl this is all a bit droll now. like, c'mon wittgenstein, is it really that profound that when you move from one clique to another, they signify differently, and that there's no ultimate grounds to understand all significations? how did it take you 45 years to figure that out, dude.

Heidegger: “the question of whether there is a world at all and whether its Being can be proved, makes no sense if it is raised by Dasein as Being-in-the-world; and who else would raise it?”

we are under no obligation to demonstrate the validity of our belief in the external world: first, because the world is not external; and second, because we don’t believe in it. Not because we’re skeptical, but because our relationship takes place at a much deeper level, so that to approach it in epistemic terms is to commit a category mistake.

the world is “there” before all belief. The world is never experienced as something which is believed any more than it is guaranteed by knowledge. Inherent in the being of the world is that its existence needs no guarantee in regard to a subject. . . . Any purported belief in it is a theoretically motivated misunderstanding.

Freedom is to be free and open for being claimed by something. This claim is then the ground of action, the motive. I cannot exist at all without constantly responding to this or that address in a thematic or unthematic way; otherwise I could not take so much as a single step, nor cast a glance at something.

Heidegger inverts his early project, from encouraging a self-conscious choice of the roles and equipmental webs we had merely drifted into to praising “releasement” of the will. Whereas Dasein had, in SZ, rarely exercised his will though he should do so in a heroically anxious moment of claiming and making his self, in the later writings modern technological man is constantly willing but should let things be.

Kant PFM: Were angels to whisper to us of the inner workings of reality in-itself, we should stop up our ears like Odysseus against the Sirens. The desire to follow this disastrous metaphysical call is built into our nature, so that we can never decisively quit metaphysics—we have to be tied to the mast.

🤔

Authenticity consists in choosing to choose, fighting the inertia of banality with a practical version of spotlight consciousness. We need to be jolted awake from “the oblivious passing of our lives” in order to engage in our lives vigorously. For existentialists, the unexamined life is barely lived. Heidegger’s antihumanist later work overcomes this early voluntarism, offering the most coherent account of free will

We have already seen three obstacles to accurate description: inconspicuousness, inherited prejudices, and dread-motivated cover-ups. Another cause is our failure to appreciate the “ontological difference”: our dealings with individual beings keep our understanding of their modes of being in the taken-for-granted background, so that our ontology remains pre-ontological.

Heidegger’s combination of hermeneutics w phenomenology means that understanding phenomena involves interpretation. While this can never lead us to reject phenomena in favor of something noumenal hidden behind them or something substantial lurking beneath, neither are we forced take things as they initially appear. Conclusions must be borne out by experience, and this often requires considerable effort and patience.

early H follows Kierkegaard in defining the self as caring about what happens to her. Our pre-ontological understanding of being—the necessary condition for us to do anything and be anyone at all—comes from Dasein’s unavoidable investment in her own well-being, her future; our encounters with others, tools, and objects receive their intelligibility within the context of our quest to be a certain kind of person.

skepticism is a fake problem that must be dissolved by restoring us to our normal, seamless state of being-in-the-world, rather than solved by bridging an illusory gap between inner and outer realms. Once regained, the pre-ontological understanding of our mode of being disperses philosophy’s bewitchment and pseudo-issues (similar to W popping speculative bubbles w. grammar/tacit knowledge in normal circumstances.)

Like Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of being, our everyday grammatical proficiency contains all that we need; we simply need to recognize and return to it. Wittgenstein compares our situation to a man desperately trying to get out of a room without realizing that an exit lies behind him; he must simply turn around to see that he is not actually locked in at all.

(Mr Robot stole from this!)

Phenomenology unearths the meanings flowing through our behavior which evaporate under the light of theoretical reason.

W: true philosophical theses would not be contested by anyone since they consist in universally known but inconspicuous facts,

H: these phenomena command immediate recognition once brought to our attention, our pre-ontological understanding serving as a partial inoculation against bad ontology

Like W, H must explain how philosophical confusion has come about and how it can be removed. Both end up adapting Socrates’s response to Meno, positing an intermediate sort of understanding between simply knowing or not knowing something which Heidegger calls “pre-ontological—that is to say, not conceived theoretically or thematically.”

Dwarves hiding in a long lingustic overcoat ... wearing logical structure honestly on their sleeves ... tripped up by language’s loose clothing ... ending millennia of philosophical rainbow-chasing ... I’m dying. I hope Lee Braver lives a long life and writes many more books. If there’s a LB hero-cult I want to be its priestess.

About the title:
“while the grounds of all thinking lack the kind of foundation philosophers have long dreamt of, and thus are groundless, they still function as grounds for finite creatures like us.”

Our primary relationship to reality has traditionally been portrayed as one of knowledge, which ought to be purified and actualized as much as possible. Besides being untrue to what actually occurs, this picture creates insurmountable aporias such as the rule-following paradox, skepticism, and solipsism. 🤔

Wittgenstein’s insistence that “we must avoid accepting party lines” is echoed by Heidegger (KPM 207), who also rejects both realism and ideal- ism due to their shared assumptions: “in elucidating these positions it is not so much a matter of clearing them up or of finding one or the other to be the solution...

Player 3, Simone Weil, has entered the game.
And active at around the same time too.

“Nietzsche ... scorn these lesser philosophical workers scurrying about underfoot ... Geniuses work in a fundamentally different way ... Heidegger ... develops his own thoughts in an ongoing conversation with the history of philosophy, a study that frequently uncovers partial anticipations of his own ideas, the way he carries out this project and the ideas he “discovers” in the canon are profoundly original.”

Preach!

If we use the dubious criteria of clarity of style and rigor of argumentation to define analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein fails miserably.

😂”As usual, Cavell’s sentences are very rich, and very long.”