Showing posts with label Heidegger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heidegger. Show all posts

Monday, January 12, 2009

Have You Ever Danced with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?


I have been writing something recently. I don't quite know what it is. It takes place in a city engulfed in fog. The main character is an ex-fisherman wandering around in a hazy unclear world, unsure of his own motives as well as others. I'm not sure where I should send him next: To the mine or to the factory? The saying "Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?" feels like a good way to describe this story.

On to other matters, I posted something on a political forum. These people are smarter than me, I'm not sure I'll be able to respond. I need time to regroup. I hate not having anything to contribute, yet whenever I open my mouth I sound stupid to all. I question my right to even bother thinking in these instances. Only good opinions are worth expressing. The problem is that everyone needs an opinion and yet nobody is an expert. 

Is it bad that I judge my worth as a person according to wether or not I can make a valid point about anything?

Religiously I am now a Hellenic Pagan. I might talk about that here sometime. Heidegger paper on formal indication is going rough.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Inner Space

Since I have looked into Heidegger and Wittgenstein I have found that the main force they battle against is the idea of a mind removed from the public world. Before being exposed to these ideas I was a property dualist. Now that I have a more holistic view of the mind there are still some questions that bother me. In this public view of the world can we now address the idea of the inner space with more clarity? That is, can we return to the old epistemological questions without worrying that if we fail the solipsists win? We now know there is the world of our existence that we live in and deal with. But this picture does not address the sense of wonder that dualists like Descartes had about the way the senses and mind deal. When we go to sleep at night our minds enter a different kind of existence (though still laden with concepts and ideas of the public world). Our senses are giving us existence but what if we bracket them out? What is it that we are left with and how does it relate back to the public world. More importantly how does it relate to being?

Friday, August 8, 2008

Nausea

Nausea's by Jean-Paul Sartre themes now seem odd to me looking back. The character comes into contact with pure existence. This is odd especially now that I've learned about Heidegger. In Heidegger being is always "understood" in a certain way. Present at hand, ready at hand, being taking a stand on itself &c. Is the character doing the impossible?Being as nothing but being? If this was done in a buddhistic way then I could wrap my head around this. But the character is not just letting himself be. He is in the world and yet the world acts as if he was not in it. The world is a character itself in Nausea. He describes himself as not knowing whether the change (The Nausea) came from within or without. Maybe this comes from Sartre's dualism. Later he talks of there no longer being "perfect moments". The meaning or understanding (a link between the two concepts?) in the world can be taken away because the mind had willed in onto the world. In Hiedegger this can't happen and he might say that Sartre was actually still seeing the world in a present at hand only way and that leads to Sartre's character to being able to come into contact with existence. In other words there is a contradiction between viewing the mind in a dualism and experiencing pure being. Sartre only ventures into this by "pure being" meaning naked objects.