Do all things exist?

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

If you really want to know about the word "existence" (of apples in particular ) read up on "Fuzzy Logic". For general resolution of apparent dichotomies read Derrida on privileging.

Oh, surely we all know that Derrida didn't and doesn't resolve anything, much less the the dichotomies upon which his non-resolutions depend...

fresco wrote:

Wittgenstein, Russell's protege, ultimately rejected the paradox about "sets of all sets" as a linguistic abberation. Classical logic ignores the dynamic nature of semantic context which can shift the status of set membership, whereas fuzzy logic takes it on board and rejects the law of the excluded middle.

"Russel's protege", or even "ex-protege"? Really? That's how you introduce W. to the topic at hand? And then pretend that he was a proponent of "fuzzy logic"?

i'm beginning to believe that you don't understand Wittgenstein, at all...

fresco wrote:

The problem word is 'existence' which Heidegger argues can only be attributable to Daseins(humans who contemplate their own dynamic being). All other 'things' are transient functional extensions of such personal being. The 'becoming' is meaningless without the assumption of an observer whose 'existence' is founded on a concept of temporality.

And now a here's a real thowdown...Heidegger never argued for anything; if anything, he avoided argument at every point -- in favor of a prophetic mode.

Nonetheless, he also never described Dasein, not Daseins (the faux-plural is embarrassing), as an "observer", and neither did he -- nor would he, have described that state as one in which "humans contemplate their own dynamic being", nor would he have described Dasein as "personal", nor would he have ascribed "thingness" to an extension of "observation" or "personal being", and finally, "personal beings" ("thingers", as JLN would like to pretend) are neither the ontological nor the ontic source of "thingness", "things", "objectivity", "objects", or ultimately, "beings", etc...

fresco, your lexicon is failing you, and your thesaurus is not adept at translating Heidegger...

1 Reply

@Razzleg,

I take my interpretation from the 40+ hours of lectures by Dreyfus on Sein und Zeit. I couple that with my reading of Merlau-Ponty an experimentalist who gave a Heideggerian based account of "perception". If your take differs, then I suggest this might be a result of not be coming at it from the position of a former experimenter in perception like me.
It unlikely that any two readers of Heidegger or Wittgenstein will agree as to interpretations. Indeed according to that Derrida point, it is unlikely that H or W would agree with what they had themselves written previously since interpretive contexts are transient....and therein lies the "ineffability" problem, in which "lexicon" choice inevitably fails.

1 Reply

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

I take my interpretation from the 40+ hours of lectures by Dreyfus on Sein und Zeit. I couple that with my reading of Merlau-Ponty an experimentalist who gave a Heideggerian based account of "perception". If your take differs, then I suggest this might be a result of not be coming at it from the position of a former experimenter in perception like me.
It unlikely that any two readers of Heidegger or Wittgenstein will agree as to interpretations. Indeed according to that Derrida point, it is unlikely that H or W would agree with what they had themselves written previously since interpretive contexts are transient....and therein lies the "ineffability" problem, in which "lexicon" choice inevitably fails.

You're right, no doubt. i take my interpretation of Heidegger from reading and rereading his books (in various translations) for the last 20 years (he wrote a thing or two after Being and Time (1927), don't y'know), as well as reading every book in English i can find about him. (I highly recommend Heidegger: the introduction of Nazism into Philosophy by Immanuel Faye.) I do not like him, but he is a bit of an obsession of mine.

i would suggest that you don't try to interpret Heidegger via (or in comparison to) Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty was far too much of an orthodox Husserlian phenomenologist to explicate the Heideggerian morass. i will say, though, that your "humans who contemplate their own dynamic being" statement makes a whole lot more sense, in context, regarding Merleau-Ponty (a philosopher i respect very much, i might add). Still, Merleau-Ponty's account, as fascinating as it is, of perception was not Heideggerian.

fresco wrote:

If your take differs, then I suggest this might be a result of not be coming at it from the position of a former experimenter in perception like me.

Haaaaahaaa, you may be right. i'm not quite sure how to respond...i have "experimented in (or "with") perception" in a number of ways: i've meditated regularly for a while; i tried some drugs when i was younger, and still booze it up, now; i am an avid philosophy reader that has tried on a number of philosophical hats...i have certainly studied phenomenology and practiced phenomenological experiments (as described by Husserl).

In what way would you privilege your perspective (whatever it is is, and it is certainly not more knowledgeable about the source material) over mine, regarding ?

fresco wrote:

It unlikely that any two readers of Heidegger or Wittgenstein will agree as to interpretations. Indeed according to that Derrida point, it is unlikely that H or W would agree with what they had themselves written previously since interpretive contexts are transient..

Actually, both H and W took context extremely seriously, and they made their word choices accordingly...

Wait...i'm disagreeing with you! Shouldn't i expect a response that references nested systems, and how i just don't get it, or something in that arena?

1 Reply

@Razzleg,

My experimentation was for publication in mainstream journals. It was directly related to gestaltist perceptual frames and dynamic context shifts.
I had not read Heidegger at the time, but when I did, it rang a lot of bells.
Since this thread is about 'existence' I think Heidegger's restriction of it to dasein is particularly significant.

2 Replies

@fresco,

Hey Al Fresco, i'm reading a book on your hero Derrida (and Deleuze, Foucault etc) and how he influenced an entire generation of American academics, including your other hero Rorty: "French Theory", by François Cusset. Pretty amazing. Now I'm wondering if Derrida wasn't a greater con artist than Wittgenstein himself. But I'll keep reading.

0 Replies

@browser32,

browser32 wrote:

Do all things exist?

Nonexistence is the absence of existence, by definition. So, nonexistence does not exist. Therefore there is no such thing as nonexistence. To say that something does not exist thus seems to be a fallacy, since NOTHING does not exist. Everything, therefore, must exist.

Is this right? If not, what is wrong with the above argument?

Actually your whole premise here refutes itself.

browser32 wrote:

So, nonexistence does not exist.

If nonexistence does not exist then how can you say it does not exist if nonexistence does not exist? This would be a paradox.

browser32 wrote:

Everything, therefore, must exist.

If everything exists, then wouldn't nonexistence also need to exist?

The point being, why even say or use the word exists if all things exist? Here is an example of what I mean. What if everything you see was green. All things were the same shade of green. There was no other color. If everything you saw was green, why would you make a distinction? You would never say, hey that is green! All things are the same shade, so it would never occur to you. In fact the word green wouldn't even exist because the word green is used as a distinguishing word. The same would have to be true for existence if your premise were true. It is obviously not true based on this.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Since this thread is about 'existence' I think Heidegger's restriction of it to dasein is particularly significant.

i don't disagree that it is significant. We could argue whether or not it helps progress the topic, but i doubt we'd get anywhere that would qualify as "helpful", ourselves.

However, it wasn't Heidegger's restriction of "existence" to Dasein that i originally argued with, but your conflation of "human", "personal", and "observer" while pretending to employ Heidegger's use of the term, Dasein:

fresco wrote:

The problem word is 'existence' which Heidegger argues can only be attributable to Daseins(humans who contemplate their own dynamic being). All other 'things' are transient functional extensions of such personal being. The 'becoming' is meaningless without the assumption of an observer whose 'existence' is founded on a concept of temporality.

The relationship between each of those terms and Heidegger's use of the term "Dasein" is problematic, and their casual conjunction as a relation to it and /or through it is not less so. For Heidegger, Dasein was not an observer but an act-er. An agent observing, not her own dynamic being, but temporality as disclosing being, and acting as a "chosen" historical imperative.

PS: By the same token, this is also not accurate:

fresco wrote:

[Re: Heidegger] ...All other 'things' are transient functional extensions of such personal being. The 'becoming' is meaningless without the assumption of an observer whose 'existence' is founded on a concept of temporality.

Are you thinking of Heidegger's "thing(s)-at-hand" here? Even Heidegger wasn't as foolhardy as to define all things by utilitarian extension.

1 Reply

@Razzleg,

Yoa are correct in saying that Heidegger's system was transcendent of ' subjects contemplating objects'. However 'at-handeness' presupposes at least ' the hand' of transient Dasein in a specific contextual co- extensional coupling.
I don't intend to take the argument any further than that, since IMO even in a rough form it definitely has import for the OP which is antithetical to naive realism.

1 Reply

@fresco,

i'm not sure what you're saying here...i'll get back to you.

fresco wrote:

Heidegger's system

i make this next statement, not in argument, but in a genuinely conversational mode: i don't know that Heidegger had a system. He had a brilliant set of tactics, strategies, inferences, and insights...employed to support a set of values and facilitate an ideology...all of which informed his writings -- and, as it were, body of work.

If Heidegger can be said to have a "system", then it is a posthumous one, built upon his silences rather than his explanations.

fresco wrote:

You are correct in saying that Heidegger's system was transcendent of "subjects contemplating objects". However, "'at-handed-ness" presupposes at least "the hand" of transient Dasein in a specific, contextual co- extensional coupling.

fresco wrote:

I don't intend to take the argument any further than that, since IMO even in a rough form it definitely has import for the OP which is antithetical to naive realism.

The OP doesn't have any idea what we're talking about here, probably, but they were never pursuing naive realism, anyway -- so your rebuke is pretty useless.

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