Dasein/dasein

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iambiguous
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Re: Dasein/dasein

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Making Sense of Life: The Existential Self Trying to Deal with Personal Uncertainty
Kees van den Bos
This article is about how people make sense of life and focuses on one core threat that may play a pivotal role in people’s lives as existential meaning makers: personal uncertainty.
Tell me about it.

But how about you? Or, more to the point [mine], how do you go about defending what you are certain about when others are just as certain that you are wrong. Starting with, say, those newspaper headlines.
Personal uncertainty is defined as the aversive feeling that you experience when you feel uncertain about yourself. Drawing on an uncertainty management perspective, it is hypothesized that cultural worldviews may provide a means to cope with personal uncertainty and that this may explain why under conditions of personal uncertainty people may respond especially positively to events that bolster their cultural norms and values and particularly negatively to persons and events that violate these norms and values.
That's how it works alright. Pick a point in history. Then pick a particular community embedded in a particular culture at that time. Lo and behold there will be a moral narrative and a political agenda that may or may not be ensconced further in a religious denomination.

Only that was far more the case "back then". Back then? Back before such communication technologies as radio and television and movies and newspapers and the internet brought men and women around the globe into contact with all of the truly vast and diverse One True Paths of other people.

What then? You think this but now you are aware that others think something altogether different. So, does that prompt you to expand your own horizons...or prompt you all the more to cling self-righteously to your own local dogmas.
Findings are reviewed that support the uncertainty management model’s predictions. Furthermore, the uncertainty management model may explain why terror management theory is not always about terror, but (at least partly) about personal uncertainty. Finally, conceptual implications, conflicting findings, and loose ends are noted, and testable hypotheses are formulated, which may further insight into the psychological processes pertaining to sense-making, worldview defense, and self-regulation.
So, what's your own "uncertainty management model"? And how is it able to confront and to rebut the arguments of those like me? As for terror management, that depends on just how threatened you are by those who do not accept all the things that you yourself are very, very, very certain about.

You know the ones.

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iambiguous
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Re: Dasein/dasein

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Making Sense of Life: The Existential Self Trying to Deal with Personal Uncertainty
Kees van den Bos
When you think about it for a minute or so, you realize that life is absurd.
Or, for some of us, considerably longer than a minute or so. But whether for a minute or for seventy odd years, it still often comes down to this: if you say so.

After all, absurdity will always be a point of view regarding this or that situation. It's not like, in regard to a particular thing, someone says "that's absurd" and then when another asks what she means by that, she pulls the absurd out of her pocket and says, "I mean this".

And then the part we concern ourselves with...the philosophical parameters of absurdity.
This conclusion has been drawn by philosophers such as Kierkegaard and other observers of the human existence such as Camus and Sartre. For example, it could well be argued that quite a number of people in the Western world work too hard, spend too little time on the things that they truly love or that are really important to them, and then die.
So, is this absurd to you? Philosophically absurd? Absurd for all practical purposes? That millions upon millions of men and women around the globe live this life...a life of "quiet desperation" as some say...can be construed as merely a manifestation of the human condition itself. In order to survive at all you must sustain a livelihood that enables you to pay the bills. For some, the absurdity here revolves around capitalism. For others, socialism.
A related view on mankind finds its way in the colloquial expression, “Life sucks and then you die.” A more formal treatment of this issue involves absurdism, a philosophy stating that the efforts of humanity to find meaning in the universe ultimately fail (and hence are absurd), because no such meaning exists.
Now, given your own set of circumstances and philosophy of life, plop yourself down in the midst of all the rest of us.

Let's pin this absurdity thing down once and for all.

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iambiguous
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Re: Dasein/dasein

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Making Sense of Life: The Existential Self Trying to Deal with Personal Uncertainty
Kees van den Bos
According to one of the basic tenets of absurdism, humans historically attempt to find meaning in their lives. Traditionally this search follows one of two paths: either concluding that life is meaningless, and that what we have is the here-and-now, or filling the void with a purpose set forth by a higher power, often belief in God or adherence to a religion.
Well, first and foremost, what humans have been doing historically revolves far more around the assessment and the assumptions of those like Marx and Engels than of those like the postmodern absurdists.

If you don't eat and drink and provide yourself with all the necessary components embedded in subsistence itself, what does anything mean?

Though, sure, with that out of the way, those "traditional" searches for meaning seem to be the paths we take. I just start with the assumption that this does all revolve around whether or not we, as individuals, are or are not able to convince ourselves that a God, the God, my God does exist. Or the Buddhist/pantheist equivalent.

If He does, we have access to both objective morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side of it.

If He does not, start here:

https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=176529
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=194382
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 5&t=185296


Then it can go in any number of "existential" directions:
There are also several less traditional ways to cope with the potential absurdity of life, and there are many self-regulatory mechanisms that people can use to deal with the threats they encounter in their lives. In short, it is a noteworthy fact that typically people do not stop with the observation of life being meaning-less. Instead, they go on and try to make sense of life, thereby trying to live a meaningful existence. In other words, they try to buffer and shield themselves from the threats they are encountering in their lives. This article is about how people make sense of life and focuses on one core threat that may play a pivotal role in people’s lives as existential meaning makers: personal uncertainty.
It goes without saying that one way or another, you fit your own "I" in here. Both in terms of your day to day interactions with others and, for some, in terms of one or another "transcending" font. God or No God.

Existential meaning and/or essential meaning.

And you all know how fractured and fragmented "I" am about it.

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Belinda
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Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

Does personal uncertainty include that the personal uncertain man is partisan to basic principles?

The alternative of no principles at all is worse than pro tem principles. The safequard against bad principles is not apathy but frequent revision in the light of increased knowledge, reason, and humanity. A man may be proud and also willing to learn.
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iambiguous
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Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by iambiguous »

Making Sense of Life: The Existential Self Trying to Deal with Personal Uncertainty
Kees van den Bos
Personal Uncertainty

There are many different types of uncertainties that people can encounter, and it is important not to confuse them. I focus on two important varieties here. One noteworthy type of uncertainty that people often face when forming social judgments is informational uncertainty, which involves having less information available than one ideally would like to have in order to be able to confidently form a given social judgment.
On the other hand, at least with information one may well be able to ascertain and determine if the information is actually accurate, true to fact, in sync with the world around us as it really is. How much certainty and uncertainty is there regarding the Supreme Court's recent abortion ruling? There are things everyone can agree on and there are things that are open to question.

For example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/opin ... n-ban.html

Michelle Goldberg at the NYT:

'At the end of Senator Lindsey Graham’s news conference on Tuesday proposing a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a woman named Ashbey Beasley stood up and asked him a question inspired by her own excruciating loss.

'“What would you say to somebody like me who found out that their son had an anomaly that was incompatible with life at 16 weeks?” she began. Beasley chose not to have an abortion, delivering her son at 28 weeks.

'“When he was born, he lived for eight days,” she said. “He bled from every orifice of his body, but we were allowed to make that choice for him. You would be robbing that choice from those women. What would you say to someone like me?”

'Graham had no real answer. His bill contains narrow exceptions for rape, incest and life-threatening pregnancies, but not for severe fetal anomalies or pregnancies that are otherwise nonviable. So, faced with someone insisting that he consider the consequences of his proposal, he defaulted to a duplicitous anti-abortion talking point about global abortion laws.'


And there are countless other contexts in which, in some respects, the facts are what they are and in other respects they are open to interpretation. With the question of when the unborn becomes a bona fide human being, the debate is rife with any number of conflicting arguments.

And, of course, my own argument that individual convictions here are far more the embodiment of dasein than from any argument [philosophical or otherwise] that can be made establishing that frame of mind which all rationally men and women are obligated to embrace.
For example, work on human decision making reveals that human judgments are often formed under conditions of incomplete information and that these conditions can lead to predictable effects on human decision and social judgment processes. Thus, when studying how people make social judgments a pivotal issue is what information people have available.
In other words, even in regard to those aspects of our interactions in the is/ought world in which sets of facts are available, it can often come down to which facts are emphasized and which facts are not. Think criminal trials for example. Not only biased sets of facts but incomplete sets.

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iambiguous
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Re: Dasein/dasein

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Dasein
from Wikipedia
Dasein is a German word that means "being there" or "presence", and is often translated into English with the word "existence".
And, of course, if you experience being or existence "there" then you may or may not grasp the experience of those who are not there. Those who are "here" instead. Or those who are not "here" but are "there" in an entirely different historical and cultural context.

And, in that Heidegger is construed by many to be an existentialist, to what extent did he take that part into consideration in regard to Dasein in the is/ought world?

Ought one to be a Nazi? Well, if one is born at a time and in a place where Nazis are completely meaningless, what then of Dasein the philosophical contraption?
It is a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. Thus it is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself.
Yes, all mere mortals in Heidegger's own No God world confront at least the possibility of becoming aware of their own existence in this manner. But not all of them do. In fact, some are entirely indoctrinated as children to subsume "I" in one or another God or No God dogma. Or, as adults, they latch onto one. They can literally go to the grave with nary a single dilemma or paradox troubling them. And they never really feel alone at all in a way that confronts them with the legendary "existential dread".

Any number of Nazis no doubt knew nothing of this.
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iambiguous
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Re: Dasein/dasein

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Dasein
from Wikipedia
Heidegger's reinterpretation

In German, da sein is the vernacular term for "existence", as in "I am pleased with my existence" (Ich bin mit meinem Dasein zufrieden). The term was used by several philosophers before Heidegger, most notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with the meaning of "determined being" (bestimmtes Sein), The union of Being and Nothing (Quality).
Precisely the sort of abstraction that basically allows anyone to say, "yeah, I know what you mean". Only they may not be pleased with their existence at all. In fact, they may be displeased with it because the manner in which you are pleased with yours is what displeases them most.

And how determined a being? And in what manner that determined is understood by each of us as individuals?

Finally, given death, Being and Nothing go hand in glove. Only right to the end, that can mean very, very different things to very, very different people.

Cue dasein as I understand it then.
It is derived from da-sein, which literally means "being-there"/"there-being"—though Heidegger was adamant that this was an inappropriate translation of Dasein. Dasein for Heidegger can be a way of being involved with and caring for the immediate world in which one lives, while always remaining aware of the contingent element of that involvement, of the priority of the world to the self, and of the evolving nature of the self itself.
This comes close to my own understanding of dasein. Given the particular world into which we are "thrown" at birth historically, culturally and circumstantially, how we are indoctrinated as children to be involved with and care about particular things out in the world around us is clearly contingent on countless variables beyond our control. And, even as adults, historical, cultural and circumstantial factors continue to have a profound impact on how we see ourselves in the world we live in as individuals.

Then the self evolves as circumstances evolve. Thus, if little changes in your life over the years, your sense of self can remain stable. Big changes, however, and anything goes.
The opposite of this authentic self is everyday and inauthentic Dasein, the forfeiture of one's individual meaning, destiny and lifespan, in favour of an (escapist) immersion in the public everyday world—the anonymous, identical world of the They and the Them.
Authentic self? Whether in how Heidegger or I construe the meaning of Dasein/dasein, what does that even mean in regard to one's sense of identity in the is/ought world? Instead, this seems to revolve more around the general existentialist critique that many lead "inauthentic" lives by not only objectifying others but even objectifying themselves.

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Belinda
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Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

iambiguous wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 7:12 pm Making Sense of Life: The Existential Self Trying to Deal with Personal Uncertainty
Kees van den Bos
Personal Uncertainty

There are many different types of uncertainties that people can encounter, and it is important not to confuse them. I focus on two important varieties here. One noteworthy type of uncertainty that people often face when forming social judgments is informational uncertainty, which involves having less information available than one ideally would like to have in order to be able to confidently form a given social judgment.
On the other hand, at least with information one may well be able to ascertain and determine if the information is actually accurate, true to fact, in sync with the world around us as it really is. How much certainty and uncertainty is there regarding the Supreme Court's recent abortion ruling? There are things everyone can agree on and there are things that are open to question.

For example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/opin ... n-ban.html

Michelle Goldberg at the NYT:

'At the end of Senator Lindsey Graham’s news conference on Tuesday proposing a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a woman named Ashbey Beasley stood up and asked him a question inspired by her own excruciating loss.

'“What would you say to somebody like me who found out that their son had an anomaly that was incompatible with life at 16 weeks?” she began. Beasley chose not to have an abortion, delivering her son at 28 weeks.

'“When he was born, he lived for eight days,” she said. “He bled from every orifice of his body, but we were allowed to make that choice for him. You would be robbing that choice from those women. What would you say to someone like me?”

'Graham had no real answer. His bill contains narrow exceptions for rape, incest and life-threatening pregnancies, but not for severe fetal anomalies or pregnancies that are otherwise nonviable. So, faced with someone insisting that he consider the consequences of his proposal, he defaulted to a duplicitous anti-abortion talking point about global abortion laws.'


And there are countless other contexts in which, in some respects, the facts are what they are and in other respects they are open to interpretation. With the question of when the unborn becomes a bona fide human being, the debate is rife with any number of conflicting arguments.

And, of course, my own argument that individual convictions here are far more the embodiment of dasein than from any argument [philosophical or otherwise] that can be made establishing that frame of mind which all rationally men and women are obligated to embrace.
For example, work on human decision making reveals that human judgments are often formed under conditions of incomplete information and that these conditions can lead to predictable effects on human decision and social judgment processes. Thus, when studying how people make social judgments a pivotal issue is what information people have available.
In other words, even in regard to those aspects of our interactions in the is/ought world in which sets of facts are available, it can often come down to which facts are emphasized and which facts are not. Think criminal trials for example. Not only biased sets of facts but incomplete sets.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Cognitive dissonance makes some but not all personal choices hard. It's a sorry fact that legislators are sometimes pushed by the circumstances of their jobs to make hasty choices. This is not an excuse for their stupidity.
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iambiguous
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Re: Dasein/dasein

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Dasein
from Wikipedia
In harmony with Nietzsche's critique of the subject, as something definable in terms of consciousness, Heidegger distinguished Dasein from everyday consciousness in order to emphasize the critical importance "Being" has for our understanding and interpretation of the world, and so on.

"This entity which each of us is himself…we shall denote by the term 'Dasein'" (Heidegger, trans. 1927/1962]
Himself, the Nazi? Himself, the Jew? Himself, the resistance fighter? Himself, the collaborator?

No, in my view, that revolves more around my own assessment of dasein. The actual existential parameters and experiential trajectory of the individual lives that we live. The "I, myself" that comes into conflict with others who insist that you must be more like them. The "I, myself" ready to send others to the gas chambers because the "they, themselves" are deemed inferior Beings, unworthy even to live.
Heidegger sought to use the concept of Dasein to uncover the primal nature of "Being" (Sein), agreeing with Nietzsche and Dilthey  that Dasein is always a being engaged in the world: neither a subject, nor the objective world alone, but the coherence of Being-in-the-world.
In other words, this profoundly problematic subjective frame of mind, in the mind of the "serious philosopher", gets reconfigured into this...
This ontological basis of Heidegger's work thus opposes the Cartesian "abstract agent" in favour of practical engagement with one's environment. Dasein is revealed by projection into, and engagement with, a personal world...a never-ending process of involvement with the world as mediated through the projects of the self.
It's ontological...just not in the manner in which those like Descartes encompassed it. And, unlike with Descartes, it does not revolve in turn around a teleological agent...a God, the God, my God.

So, the subjective, existential components of "I" are intertwined with the subjective, existential components of other individuals...but out in a particular "personal world" where your projects may or may not involve Nazis.

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Re: Dasein/dasein

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Dasein
from Wikipedia
Heidegger considered that language, everyday curiosity, logical systems, and common beliefs obscure Dasein's nature from itself.
The irony here being that, given my own understanding of dasein, it is precisely these things that create an existential sense of identity -- of reality -- in our interactions with others. Though the extent to which this is systemically logical is also subsumed by me in the points I raise in my signature threads.

The nature of "I" in the is/ought world is, in my view, something that philosophers have never been able to pin down in regard to "wisdom" and "rationality" and "virtue". Here philosophers themselves are no less the embodiment of the existential parameters of the life that they live.

But: the next thing you know, the existentialists of note are inventing or discovering this: authenticity.
Authentic choice means turning away from the collective world of Them, to face Dasein, one's individuality, one's own limited life-span, one's own being. Heidegger thus intended the concept of Dasein to provide a stepping stone in the questioning of what it means to be—to have one's own being, one's own death, one's own truth.
Like the world of Me in regard to moral and political and spiritual value judgments can only be authentic if we become, what, nonconformists?

On the other hand, show me a nonconformist who doesn't insist that in order to be authentic, others must not conform exactly as he or she does. One of Us against one of Them. Call it, say, The Satyr Syndrome.

And what of the historical and cultural connection between Heidegger's own truth and Hitler's own truth?

Each and every advocate of each and every God and No God Ism out there embraces authenticity, right? Only the few like me are willing to accept that even their own Ism -- nihilism -- is just one more existential contraption rooted in the particular life that they lived. That they continue to live.

That given new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge "I" may reconfigure into, well, who knows what, right?

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Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Agent Smith »

An exquisite & compelling concept, this dasein. Reminds me of goin' on trips, a rare occasion for me.
Belinda
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Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

Iambiguous quoted Wikipedia:
Authentic choice means turning away from the collective world of Them, to face Dasein, one's individuality, one's own limited life-span, one's own being. Heidegger thus intended the concept of Dasein to provide a stepping stone in the questioning of what it means to be—to have one's own being, one's own death, one's own truth.
Bearing in mind that Dasein theory carries an ethic the above is a reasonable outcome from Romantic individualism. The ethical question is whether or not the individual's welfare and rights are more important than those of the collective.

There's no reasonable doubt that humans are an aggregate of individuals, whereas the state and the ideology are reifications. Science is a reification of a particular sort of human activity, and is arbitrarily defined by its attributes.

Nobody knows what it's like to be a bat, but bats and humans are both experiencers. Idealism is a corollary of Romantic individualism, and Dasein.
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iambiguous
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Re: Dasein/dasein

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Dasein
from Wikipedia
Heidegger also saw the question of Dasein as extending beyond the realms disclosed by positive science or in the history of metaphysics. “Scientific research is not the only manner of Being which this entity can have, nor is it the one which lies closest. Moreover, Dasein itself has a special distinctiveness as compared with other entities; [...] it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.”
This is a classic example of where an assessment can be said to be applicable to all of us. Dasein and science? "Being there"/"existence" out in the either/or world where the factors revolving around our identity can be determined to either be true or not be true? Or metaphysically? Well, here things always get trickier. Why? Because even in regard to those things which are in fact true about us, we have no way in which to grasp them ontologically or teleologically going back to a definitive understanding of where the "human condition" itself fits into the existence of existence itself. Not in a No God world.

Instead, the far more significant conflicts revolve around the "ontic self":

"The ontological refers to the Being of a particular being, while the ontic refers to what a particular being can or does do."

The self as a philosophical contraption, and the self as an actual extant flesh and blood human being interacting out in a particular world understood in a particular way with other flesh and blood human beings.

Just note a context.
Being and Time stressed the ontological difference between entities and the being of entities: “Being is always the Being of an entity.” Establishing this difference is the general motif running through Being and Time.
And here all I can do is to ask those who think that they, in fact, are able to grasp Heidegger's point here, to note how it is applicable to the ontic Heidegger in regard to the Nazis and fascism. What he himself had done back then.
Some scholars disagree with this interpretation, however, arguing that for Heidegger Dasein denoted a structured awareness or an institutional "way of life". Others suggest that Heidegger's early insistence on the ontological priority of Dasein was muted in his post-war writings. 
Same thing. An understanding of this philosophically and an understanding of it in regard to Heidegger, Hitler and the Third Reich.
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Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

Iambiguous quoted , or he may have said it on hos own account:
Being and Time stressed the ontological difference between entities and the being of entities: “Being is always the Being of an entity.” Establishing this difference is the general motif running through Being and Time.
If H claimed Being is always the Being of an entity then H did not believe in eternity or the eternal now.
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Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Walker »

iambiguous wrote: Sun Feb 06, 2022 5:23 pm What could possibly be more obvious? And yet, clearly, depending on the individual, some will explore this in depth while others will barely consider it at all.
For good reason. No matter how long you stare at a navel, it's still a navel, even though for some folks it may be a foot deep.
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