Writing and Difference by Derrida along with Speech and Phenomena. Those are of course extensions of Being and Time by Heidegger. After studying philosophy in England I returned to the US to become a Software Engineer. It took me several years before I realized how Continental Philosophy related to Software Engineering part of which is computer programming which is just a euphemism for hacking. I wrote down my discovery in Wild Software Meta-systems. See http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer/1/ The upshot of this is that what Heidegger talks about as present-at-hand and ready-to-hand modalities of Being in Being and Time are the pointers and accumulators in the hardware of the Von Neumann machines on which we program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_machine But Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty separately discovered a third kind of Being which is called Hyper Being by MP, Differance by Derrida and Being crossed out by Heidegger. Programming Code is the only artifact in our culture that embodies Hyper Being. So basically no one understands the nature of the Code we write, and that it is actually a manifestation within a cultural artifact of this higher and very strange meta-level of Being that is always as Paul Simon says slip sliding away from us and from itself. If you do not understand the nature of programming code that you write and how it transforms the world, then ultimately you will never really know what you are doing. And these programming books mentioned do not tell you that because ultimately they are concerned with how to do it, and not what it actually is in its essence. But what is most interesting is that there are two other deeper kinds of Being called Wild Being and Ultra Being. Wild Being is the dual of Hyper Being, and where code that is the object of Software Engineering has the nature of Hyper Being the code that is object of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Artificial Societies has this deeper nature of Wild Being. There is the idea that the singularity is going to occur sold as snake oil by Ray Kurzweil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity. The truth that underlies that which is not known is that there is a kind of Being called Ultra Being that is at the core of software that is a singularity. Software is Hyper Being as automated writing. When it refers to itself it opens up Wild Being and when it points beyond itself it indicates Ultra Being. Programming is playing on the edge of this ocean which is the transformation of Being in our culture opening up these deeper levels and embodying them. In Continental Philosophy Deleuze opens up our understanding of Hyper Being. Delluze goes beyond this into Wild Being. And now Zizek and Badiou are wrestling with Ultra Being. All the while the Continental Philosophers are exploring these depths opened up by Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the Analytic philosophers are playing Legos in the corner by themselves not knowing what is really going on as the culture transforms itself globally by entering the age of software. The key point is that the singularity has already occurred. Giving an apocalyptic vision of it is just silly. It is not that computers are going to become smarter than us and take over the world as in old Science fiction movies. Rather the kinds of Being that have always been there latent in the culture are being realized in cultural artifacts in the technological age in which we live. Software is merely code that we think we can control. But Hackers and AI researchers know that code can take on a life of its own that we cannot control and then we see how Hyper Being transforms quickly into Wild Being. AI techniques are all obscure, we do not understand them and how they work. When we understand them then they just become other Software Engineering techniques. As long as we don’t understand them and the give unexpected results then they are AI techniques and what they do expresses Wild Being. But occasionally we get a glimpse of conceptual and cognitive singularities indicated by AI systems which are not just obscure but impossible to understand, and those are the advent of what Badiou calls the Ultra One in which the Multiple appears as an Event. Those singularities that Cantor was the first to encounter in a precise way and which we blithely use in our calculations as transcendental numbers that are meaningful such as PI, have always been there and are the representations of the Multiple, i.e. true heterogeneity. We now know that there are more transcendental numbers than any other kind. But we only know the meaning of a few of them. It is uncovering the meaning of these limits that are indicated by our computations that is the next step in the evolution of our understanding of Code and its impact on our world as it becomes ubiquitous. The Multiple which is the source of all the singularities are just now starting to dawn on us, and are just now starting to have an impact as we create global systems of hardware/software networks and enter a virtual world, or a mirror world as Gelertner was the first to understand. One way into this understanding of things is via De Landa’s interpretations of Deleuze.

The fact that this is a choice that is real is a problem. One should not accept this duality within the duality. The first duality is physus and logos. In our culture industry is physus and academia is logos embodied. Within academia there are many subjects one of which is physics. But in that we see that there is again a choice between physus (experimentation) and logos (theory). Where ever you turn there are manifestations of this primary nihilistic dualism in our culture. The nondual between them is nomos, i.e. order, i.e. math. To bridge the gap you need as much math as you can bear. So choose math. Then insist on taking both routes simultaneously not just one or the other. Without the experiments the theory is just philosophy dressed up as if it were physics. Without the theory there would be nothing to disprove by experiments. Even though it is said to be impossible be a Renaissance man (or woman) and master both.

First of all Heidegger’s Being and Time is not so different from other German Philosophers. Try reading Kant, Hegel, Husserl, really just pick anyone of them. They are demanding. The real difference is that for Heidegger language really matters and has something to say itself, via its word roots and the multiple meanings of words and the meanings of words that are close cognates even with other Germanic languages. So Heidegger is taking German root words and their meanings seriously and turning it into a technical vocabulary and allowing what language has to say to influence what he says in his philosophy. He has problems inherited from Kant, Hegel, and Husserl that he is working on and he takes seriously what the German language has to “say” about that. He uses the German roots he finds apropos and he converts them into a technical vocabulary to talk about his solutions to the philosophical problems he is attempting to puzzle though. Being and time is just the beginning. It only gets denser from there on in his work, as he listens more and more carefully to what Language has to say . . .

Thinking: How do I become a better thinker?

Read lots of books. Think about what is in  those books. Write working papers concerning your opinions on the subjects of the books you have read. Define your problematic. Try different approaches toward it. Formulate good questions. Not the sort of questions we find on Quora, real questions to which you really want the answers. Try out answers until you have exhausted all the possibilities you can think of, and then keep at it until you are at your wits end. Recognize it when you are given the gift of the answer unexpectedly from a direction that you would never have considered feasible. If somehow you are given an answer, then work to explore the new territory it brings with it, and formulate new questions that are more profound if you can. If you cannot then keep reading everything you can get on the subject until you have exhausted the tradition. When you have exhausted the tradition and yourself you are ready for real thinking, which as Heidegger says is related to Thanking. Ultimately as Nietzsche said IT thinks, we do not think, and we do not know what IT is that gives thought. It is a gifting without a giver, nor a receiver as far as  I can tell. As Heidegger says thinking is being in that draft of what he calls Ereignis, happening, appropriation, giving, etc. Get in that draft and stay there as long as you can.

Surprisingly I don’t talk about creativity any more but rather emergent events. We psychologize everything. Creativity is interesting, but more interesting is Emergent Events at a given scope like given, fact, theory, paradigm, episteme, ontos, existence or absolute. Emergent events can come from  the inside or outside but they are things we do not control that transform our world. if they come from the inside we think of them as creative. If they come from the outside we think of that as happenstance, luck, serendipity, synchroneity etc. But what is important is that the whole world  shifted in some way discontinuously. Emergence was defined by G.H. Mead in The Philosophy of the Future. What is interesting about it is that future, past and present are all transformed. Even the mythos is transformed. It is one thing for individuals to be creative, but it is quite another thing for the world to be creative. The deeper creativity of the world, that shows us its face occasionally is merely interesting than individual creativity, and if we understood the deeper creativity of the world it would probably help us to have a deeper understanding of the creativity of human individuals. Individualism of our culture appears to obscure the phenomena and lead in less interesting directions for investigation of the phenomena.

My interpretation which is not standard is that Nietzsche was the “Good European” and disavowed the importance of nationality for the free spirit, but instead believed that all of them were worthy only of his contempt which he granted liberally, especially when it came to the Germans. http://www.amazon.com/The-Good-European-Nietzsches-Sites/dp/0226452794 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nationalism Zizek is following Nietzsche I believe when he says that he is a racist against everyone especially the Slovs. This is the only way to avoid the pitfalls of Political Correct multiculturalism. Nietzsche made no bones about the bad character of the various nationalities among the Europeans. And he used those scoldings as a way to point a finger at the flaws that abounded in everyone including himself and his own people. In this way it is possible to get at a layer of truth that is just not accessible from Politically correct perspectives, because it plays off of and makes use of the prejudices we have, and express in private but keep to ourselves in public. For instance, we find the characterization of women somewhat shocking. But by expressing what everyone is thinking and not saying it is possible to reveal things about people and their biases that they would not know existed otherwise. Many comedy routines play off our stereotypes in this way. Showing us something about ourselves by voicing our biases, that we do not even voice to ourselves.

Idea of the Free Spirit is one who realizes that all values are relative and thus the free spirit is free to create continually their own values. The free spirit because it is intrinsically free has no intrinsic characteristics or qualities, but rather is continually undergoing self-overcoming and recreating themselves innovatively producing new values for themselves until they overcome those again. Thus the characteristics of the free spirit beyond their human finitude and their place in unfolding history has no intrinsic characteristics or qualities. An interesting example to consider is  Man without Qualities by R. Musil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Without_Qualities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Musil

What is meant by this “catch phrase” is the historical working out of the dialectics of consciousness, which in Hegel appears as Absolute Reason. Absolute Reason is the application of the principle of sufficient reason to everything that happens in history. Everything happens for a reason, i.e. all events that occur have some sort of causal sources if you look hard enough for them. Human events that occur in history take place within the context of the understanding of history that human beings have and their place in that context. For Kant human beings project the categories and space & time. For Hegel almost all aspects of thought are contained in the “categories” and history  and the development of consciousness, reason, and absolute spirit all are driven forward by dialectical self-overcoming called Aufhebung in which positions are generated and then overcome by a higher synthesis that then has an anti-thesis, produces a variety of responses and a pattern of relations between views at the next level which then again needs to be overcome by a new synthesis. So the dialectic of absolute reason works itself out in history, because history itself is a human construct, and we are projecting it and ourselves into it as we create our futures, and recreate ourselves anew continually.

Classically the purpose of education is to build character and to instill virtue and knowledge acquisition was seen as one means to this end. Our idea about what education was for has changed over time to emphasize knowledge acquisition. But actually as has been mentioned on Bloom’s scale acquisition of knowledge is just the beginning. One must be taught what to do with it once acquired, i.e. how to refine it. Unfortunately, academia does not bother to teach us as well how to make it useful in life, and that is why there is such a disconnect between the Logos (Academia) and the Physus (Industry). Many of us end up working in Industry for which we are ill prepared by an academic training. It seems that neither Academia nor Industry are interested in character or virtue. In fact, it appears that they are positively detrimental to “success” in either sphere.

My own take on it is that one must engage in education of oneself because one is not going to get what one needs in educational institutions these days for the most part. This self-education is often called now spirituality. They revolve around how to acquire not just knowledge but wisdom, insight and realization, and other higher qualities that serve to refine character and instill in oneself virtues. Since religion has failed in this regard due to unreasonable clinging to superstition and dogma which tends to undermine itself, what is left is spirituality as a way to appreciate how higher forms of self-refinement are possible and attainable.

Once you understand that knowledge serves wisdom and wisdom serves insight and insight serves realization and that these are emergent levels beyond knowledge, and that givens, data, and information are necessary prerequisites but not sufficient, then one begins to appreciate the magnitude of the problem one faces when one considers how one might educate oneself. In this education we learn about the building of the various socially constructed levels of understanding such as facts, theories, paradigms, epistemes, ontoi, existences and absolutes and this teaches us that knowledge itself and the ability to understand it transforms in our society and culture and its tradition. Knowledge is the most stable of all things in experience, and it is for this reason that it is emphasized in education. It is a stable foundation on which to base our further pursuit of character and virtue. But eventually on realizes that character and virtue are by-products and are not the goal itself. Very few ever realize what the goal is which is some wisdom, some insight into the nature of existence, some realization of how to embody one’s insights into ones own nature as a human being within ones social context and historical milieu. The problem is that even if one absorbs spiritual traditions one realizes that they cannot be taken as they are but transformed to be relevant to ones own life and the historical context in which one finds oneself. In effect one must really absorb multiple deep rooted spiritual traditions in order to compare and contrast them and to get a sense what the essence of spirituality itself is about beyond its manifestation in any given tradition, and really what one wants is that essence beyond all embodiments because that is what answers the fundamental human need and is applicable to all contexts and all historical periods or cultural and social milieus in which one might find oneself. It is that which gives nurture to the human spirit and buoys the soul in inevitable adversity. Here in line with the dual nature of the essence of the human being in most cultures and traditions there is the difference between what is breathed and the breathing itself. The spiritual tradition is what one breaths in, but the breathing process itself is what is within oneself that is dynamic in its seeking the nondual character of the foundations of life, consciousness, and the social.

Eventually one realizes that all the various foreign nondual spiritual traditions point back home and are only there so one can see that the kernel of ones own tradition, no mater how dualistic is fundamentally based on nonduality itself despite all the attempts to suppress it in every conceivable way in our own somewhat disconnected tradition. And this is perhaps the most surprising facticity of all. Because spirituality which I take to be synonymous with nonduality is ubiquitous, i.e. is literally everywhere and in everything at its core, it is also built in to the kernel of the Western Worldview despite all the attempts to rid the worldview of any vestiges of the nondual by continual violence over the centuries and ages. In fact all the major traditions have had their nondual moment of transformation and they dealt with it very differently. Confucianism had Taoism, Hinduism had Buddhism, and the West had Islam. The west fought nonduality to the death and attempted to kill it off within its borders in every way possible, but because nonduality is a feature of existence at its kernel it cannot be gotten rid of and is in fact only intensified by this act of superficial exclusion. By looking at China and India we can understand the transformative effects of realizing the nature of the nondual within a tradition, and we can catch on to what the West has missed so far but what is stored up for it even more powerfully when it is finally unleashed.

I call this unleashing of the transformative power of nonduality within the kernel of the Western tradition itself the Homeward Path, it is when everything comes back to roost which was avoided during the violent suppression of nonduality throughout its history. It is when the our dominant earth destroying worldview turns inside out. And this has very profound implications for education, especially self-education within our tradition. Self-education in our time in our place boils down to seeing the nondual everywhere within and underlying the duality and nihilism that plagues every aspect of our tradition, and thus gaining access to the meaning of things which everything bears within itself for us, including ourselves. I would venture to say that this is the heart of all education, especially self-education in which as Bateson says one does not just learn, but learns to learn, and learns to learn to learn, and learns to learn to learn to learn etc. Learning is essentially to replace ignorance with knowledge, but also to replace folly with wisdom that flows from spirituality oriented toward the nondual, but also to replace obdurate and opaque darkness of the soul with insight, and finally to replace the chaos at the kernel of ones self with the realization of how to embody what one has learned concerning the ultimate nature of existence rooted in comprehension of one’s own nondual nature.

Now this appears to be something difficult and complex and basically impossible but actually because existence is everywhere the bedrock underneath the veneer of Being, and because existence can always be seen nondual either as emptiness of Buddhism or void of Taoism, then it is merely a matter of seeing through the illusion of Being to the bedrock of existence that is necessary in every case. In Islam for instance, the nondual heresy of the Western tradition, this is called fitra. Instead of original sin every baby is born with an inner knowledge of nonduality which they embody purely and originally without any obscurities. So we know directly this from our always already lost origin in existence. In Buddhism that is called prajna. Getting back to that insight is what enlightenment is all about. Or from the point of view of Taosim we are already one with nature and if we realize the void within ourself that is the same as that within nature then we are purified completely as described by Lao Tzu. Knowing the difference between illusion and reality, between truth and fiction, between identity and difference, between presence and absence and acting on the understanding of those distinctions in every situation is the embodiment of this nonduality as the ability to make non-nihilistic distinctions. Knowing how to make non-nihilistic distinctions in life is what gives rise to character and virtue as a side effect of embodying nonduality. Of course, this is not easy. But it is possible for human beings to approximate, and to the extent we do approximate it we display in ourselves wisdom, insight and realization based on our knowledge.

Education is self-education and self-education is taking the homeward path to wisdom, insight and realization, which is making our own the resources embedded in our own tradition that give access to spirituality. This is the only way to transform ourselves and our dominant nihilistic worldview that is in the process of destroying the earth and ourselves, and all other species directly. To stop this process at its root, in ourselves, is character and is virtue in our time. But as Zizek says we are just so lost in ideology, because we think we have gotten beyond it, that all of this is obscured in every way possible. For what is most important we don’t even know how to frame the questions, less well have sources for the answers. So the true roots of self-education are lost, and for that reason education itself has gone completely astray as it merely enforces one side of the most fundamental dualism in the worldview which is that between logos and physus. What is nondual between these is the nomos (order). We cannot expect the enforcer of a duality to lead us to nonduality. And that is why we have to engage in self-education. Self-education means learning the traditions of spirituality so that character and virtue are motivated by something deeper. But when we get into that very depth we realize that it was all around us from the beginning and part of our nature as a birthright. All the dualism and violence of the West cannot suppress it no matter what lengths it goes to, even the destruction of the earth will not suppress it. As long as there are human beings it is possible for them to see though illusion into the inner nature of existence, their own existence and that of all things. And many people do glimpse this in their lives at special moments of insight that brings wisdom. But we are just so caught up in the dualistic illusions generated by our culture and society that generates the nihilism of our worldview. Ultimately, education itself must be educated as to what is profound and ultimate, and we do that in our self-education. And this transformation of education in ourselves is the real purpose of all education.

First chapter of All Things Shining by Kelly and Dreyfus

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age: Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Dorrance Kelly: 9781416596165: Amazon.com: Books