Heidegger_ Private experience as a step towards Nihilism

Direct Quote from The Essay by Hubert L Drafus – “Heidegger on the connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics” published in the book Cambridge Companion to Heidegger.

“When everything that is material and social has become completely flat and drab,  people retreat into their private experiences as the only remaining place to find significance. Heiddeger sees this move to private experience as characteristic of the modern age. Art, Religion, Sex, Education all become varieties of experience when all of our concerns have been reduced to the common denominator of experience we will have reached the age of Nihilism.”

Guignon. C (editor), 1993,  the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press.

Pg 292

The Clock.

“The Clock was the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes; the whole thoery of the production of regular motion was developed through it”

Karl Marx - On Machinery

Letter to Engels 28 jan 1863

Karl Marx selected Writings

David McLellan 

Oxford University press.

pg 527

Difference and Repetition, Introduction, Deleuze

“The subject dealt with here is manifestly in the air. The signs may be noted: Heidegger’s more and more pronounced orientation towards a philosophy of ontological Difference; the structuralist project, based upon a distribution of differential characters within a space of coexistence; the contemporary novelist’s art which revolves around difference and repetition, not only in its most abstract reflections but also in its effective techniques; the discovery in a variety of fields of a power peculiar to repetition, a power which also inhabits the unconscious, language and art. All these signs may be attributed to a generalized anti-Hegelianism: difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction. For difference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra. Man did not survive God, nor did the identity of the subject survive that of substance. All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical ‘effect’ by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative.”

Gilles Deleuze
Difference and Repetition
Translated by Paul Patton

Columbia University Press
New York, 1994

Pg 5 “Preface to the Original Edition”

Idea and Video + the Sterilisation of ideas through Platonic forms.

In preface to Plato, the scholar Eric A.Havelock argues that the realm of the forms may also have revealed it’s self to Plato through the alphabet.

Havelock points out that the etymological root of the term idea, which also gives us the word Video has a visual connotation. Havelock argues that Platonic forms were conceived as analogies to visual forms, not just the perfect shapes of geometry, but the visual forms of the alphabet. Like letters Platonic ideas were immobile, isolated, and devoid of warmth and secondary qualities; they seem to transcend the world at hand. As David Abram observes, ’the letters and the written words that they present, are not subject to the flux of growth and decay, to the perturbations and cyclical changes common to other visible things; they seems to hover as it were, in another, strangely timeless dimension.’

Pg 34

TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

Meditation – immediacy of experience.

‘Naturally it is difficult to explain meditation experiences, since they contain at best rough analogies with other mental states, but a key feature is the immediacy of experience. The breakthrough comes when we no longer think about what we are doing in meditation but just enter into the experience itself.’
Teach yourself Philosophy of the Mind.
Mel Thompson.
Publisher: Teach Yourself Books; New edition edition

Meditative absorption – loss of self awareness

‘From the moment of meditative absorption the issue ‘who am I ?’ becomes irrelevant. The very notion of defining the self – and thereby distinguishing the self from everything else that is not self – ‘is superficial and pointless’

Teach yourself Philosophy of the Mind. Mel Thompson Publisher: Teach Yourself Books; New edition edition (26 Dec 2003)

Summary of Wittgenstein’s proposal

‘In Other Words.

Whatever we describe, it cannot be the subject self, for as soon as we describe it, we externalise it and make it part of ‘our’ world, standing over there against us. The self cannot describe itself, unless it tries to make itself an object. And if it tries to do that, it loses the very essence of it’s selfhood. ‘

 

pg 54

 

 

Teach yourself Philosophy of the Mind. Mel Thompson Publisher: Teach Yourself Books; New edition edition (26 Dec 2003)

Excentration of the self – Meditation

‘To be lost in music, enraptured by a work of art, absorbed in a creative activity – all these approach the same experience that is explored through meditation. It is an utter excentration of the self, turning it inside out, so that personal meaning is now experienced as much on the outside as on the inside.’

 

 

Teach yourself Philosophy of the Mind.
Mel Thompson
Publisher: Teach Yourself Books; New edition edition (26 Dec 2003)

The Body is a Hypothesis

‘The Body is a hypothesis’
William Forsythe

Reductionism a Problem of Philosophy

‘The problem here is the conflict between ‘full and explicit’. for when we adopt a reflective attitude we can analyse the elements which are operative in a particular experience. However by analysing by taking the whole apart – we change the structure of the experience, it finds expression as a fragmented whole. The fullness, the qualitative unity – of the reciprocity is lost. The problem here is problem of philosophy itself. ‘

Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-consciousness
Paul Crowther
Publisher: OUP Oxford; New edition edition (5 April 2001)