I think the most interesting thing about the body without organs is Zizek’s talk about the organs without body.

There is an argument that online resources are actually dumbing us down.

The real online resource is your brain thinking. When your brain is thinking it is “online” and provides amazing resources that you will never find on the internet.

When I started out I thought that the internet would provide a marvelous opportunity for those of us interested in philosophical questions who are in our own communities isolated and fairly sparsely populated across the planet to discuss things of mutual interest, and to find the communities we lacked close at hand.

But I must say that it seems to me this has not happened. What we find is that people even if they are interested have very little to say, and the promise of sustained conversation is almost impossible to achieve. Here we have the first global interactive medium and it seems that we don’t know how to use it to talk about anything serious. So sad. What a missed opportunity.

So I have come to the conclusion that what we need is not more online resources, but actual learning and human contact amongst those interested in learning and delving deeper into things. Having the online resources really do not help us learn to think for ourselves, express our ideas, listen to others, and work toward mutual understanding. What the internet seems to produce is actually more alienation and anomie. What we call social networks are in fact anti-social as it gives us an excuse for not paying attention to those we are with.

So I suggest forgetting about Online Resources, and to concentrate on inner resources, like ones capacity to think for oneself. We need to bring the thinking capabilities “online” in our selves first, and then perhaps we will find it possible to help others discover the intellectual adventure of thinking things through at a bit deeper level than usually happens in a place like Quora for instance, which is full of chatter, and does not take kindly to those who want to go a bit deeper than chatter to talk about something of significance for a change.

So my suggestion is to put down your computer, and read a book from the library, and then write down a few thoughts on paper with a pen. And then communicate those thoughts to someone you actually know and can talk to face to face. And when you completely exhaust your offline resources, then you might frivolously participate in some online discussions, just to confirm that there is nothing happening there that is worth wasting time on. Of course, you might find someone who says something engaging, but it is rare that it would be possible to engage them in prolonged conversation about anything significant. Sometimes I think it is rarer online than offline because the noise and chatter have been turned up and there are myriad distractions. And you can basically waste a lot of time messing around online when you could have leaned by going to the library, finding the most fascinating book, and actually reading it. And then, heaven forbid, thinking about what is said in that book. and then reading another one. Using online resources is like grazing of cattle. It appears that one is eating all the time, but that is forced on us by the fact that the food is so hard to digest. Ultimately it is books that are made for the digestion of the mind, and one should just keep track of how many actual books one has read lately and that is still the best gauge of ones intellectual growth. That and how many papers or books one has written oneself. Want to know something? Read a paper book with your computer turned off for a change. Want to remain superficial and ignorant, read  a lot of things online, and use a lot of online resources. It is not that the resources are not great. The problem is that we do not know how to use them properly in the context of our own study regime. Fortunately, I started out when the only way to find anything interesting was to go to the library and search the stacks. And as far as I can see that is still the only way to actually learn something significant. It appears that one is doing something when one is scanning questions and answers on Quora, but for the most part one is wasting time that would be better spent reading a book about a subject that fascinates you, and then writing something about it. Now you may end up posting that to your blog or as an article online. But basically if you write for a blogpost that is normally not a good sign that there is any depth to what is being written. Normally 99% of what is written in articles and books are worthless. Most things written on the internet only make the 99% bigger and thus the 1% smaller. Almost all of it is utterly worthless as far as actual thinking is concerned. So it does not matter how many wonderful resources are made available on the Internet if we don’t know how to use them to think ourselves and together. Online resources are not what we need, what we need are offline reading and thinking time without distractions.

Heidegger has so many interesting ideas that it is almost impossible to enumerate them. Heidegger has become an indispensable to philosophy.  We know now that some of his essential ideas that seemed novel came from Husserl, but he had so many ideas of his own that this does not take anything away from Heidegger’s contribution.

For me the most interesting ideas in Being & Time is the difference between Present-at-hand and Ready-to-hand modes of being-in-the-world of Dasein.

Also there is the existentialia structure of Dasein itself.

We have to understand that Heidegger is operating within the Kantian episteme and is answering questions that arose in the philosophy of Husserl. But in order to distinguish himself from his teacher he is going back to Aristotle and Hegel’s phenomenology in order to distinguish himself from Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl expected him to be a close follower, but instead Heidegger developed his own approach by concentrating on Ontology rather than Phenomenology.

The best thing to do is to read commentaries on Heidegger. There are not commentaries on almost every aspect of his philosophy so it is fairly easy to find out about it, and find the part of it that interests you.

Unfortunately Speculative Realism of Harman of Tool-Being fame is based on a really monumental misunderstanding of Heidegger in Being and Time. As with many interpretations of Heidegger, some fragment of the philosophy is seized upon as if it were everything and pushed to a limit that cannot be ultimately supported. Harman it appears wants to push to the limit the ideas of withdrawal of objects into themselves and thus discounts relations between objects and our access to them. We might think this just silly if it were not so painful to watch someone make such a fool of themselves in public. Could we just read the whole book and place it in the tradition. Do we have to seize on one thing, a way of speaking and pretend it is everything that Heidegger has to say?

In order to understand this we must go back to square one. Heidegger is a phenomenologist. That means that his philosophy is based on what appears to us. He is operating in the limits set by Kant, and held in common with Hegel and Nietzsche. He does not present us with a noumenal philosophy like Monadology of Leibniz for instance which really does have a philosophy like that which Harman is trying to pin on Heidegger. For Kant the noumena is just a marker for what we cannot know. It is a limit concept. By establishing the limit Kant thinks he is going to save us from uncritical metaphysics that would go beyond that limit. Well here we have Harman going beyond that limit with the idea that objects have their own life beyond the noumenal limit. I have no problem with that, it is just outside the bounds that Kant has laid down and that Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger have respected. Harman is just a ungrounded metaphysician like so many before Kant. He just does not get the copernican turn. We can speculate all we want about the noumenal but there will never be any evidence to support such speculation, and Kant would say then that it is useless speculation. But have at it if you don’t have anything better to do. But don’t pin this lapse onto Heidegger the phenomenologist. He would have written a letter on Speculative Realism like his letter on Humanism disavowing these ideas just as he rejected Sartre’s interpretation of his philosophy. It is a gross misunderstanding of the idea of the modes of being-in-the-world. Both present-at-hand and ready-to-hand are modes of being-in-the-world, i.e. phenomenological not noumenal. How Harman can think ready-to-hand is noumenal is really beyond me. Seems to me he is taking the most interesting part of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein and willfully misunderstanding it just for rhetorical effect. It is uninteresting. It should not be mixed up with actor-network-theory of Bruno LaTour which is a different kettle of fish and does not suffer from this kind of willful ignorance, but is instead a very interesting extension of the tradition. Somehow these various trend are conflated.

The withdrawal that Heidegger is talking about is a phenomenological dynamic not something that objects are doing behind the scenes themselves as noumena. When Heidegger later talks about withdrawal on a more global scale after the turning he is still talking about something phenomenological. Heidegger is very clear that signs both show themselves and withdraw pointing to something that is absent. Showing and hiding is a dynamic of consciousness not some mystical life of objects behind the scenes. Someone who does talk about his is Michael Henry in The Essence of Manifestation. He criticizes Heidegger’s ontological monism because he realizes that Heidegger is talking only about what manifests and not something hidden behind the scenes in a nominal realm. Henry believes in this noumenal realm which he calls the Essence of Manifestation. Henry basically has everything that Harman lacks, for instance he understand what Heidegger is saying, and then critiques it showing its weakness with respect to the understanding of the noumenal which he relies of Meister Eckhart a great mystic to supply. There is plenty that is hidden beyond the Ontological Monism of Heidegger that is worth talking about. But it is again addressed in a phenomenological context, not in terms of individual objects have a life of their own beyond the noumenal limit. The way Harman puts it is embarrassingly naive. It just does not take us anywhere to confer a life of their own to individual objects beyond the noumenal limit. It makes me think of the comedy of the Cratylus which makes fun of both the nominalists and those who think roots of words give us a mystical insight into the real nature of things. This is an even more ludicrous comedy where objects are scuttling around in the dark having relations with themselves that no one knows anything about and withdrawing from us. Withdrawal of Being in later Heidegger is a global phenomenological occurrence. It is not a local object by object production of black holes. Even for Sarte it is the whole of consciousness that is the black hole hovering over Nothingness not individual objects. Whether individual objects are blackholes or not is irrelevant to us since we cannot know them. All we can know is the showing and hiding dynamic of consciousness. Withdrawal of some aspect of things in relation to some other aspect of things that consciousness emphasizes  is something that happens in us, not in things. That since Kant is fundamental in our tradition. Knowers are active projecting on the world causing dynamics that appear as coming from objects but which are really coming from us. Harman seems to think he can go back to before the critical turn of Kantian philosophy and give us mysticism instead of philosophy, and we are going to take that lying down. The whole tradition is against him. He can do that but he is going off on his own back to the bad old days before Kant where people just dreamed up what ever they thought was interesting without submitting it to reason and phenomenology as judges of the validity of statements about the nature of things. Kant tied reason to experience. If it does not appear in experience then it just does not exist. What does appear in experience is greatly modified by our own faculties before we even see it, so it is impossible to say what is happening beyond the noumenal limit. So if we are smart we do not try. Objects do not withdraw on their own. Consciousness has a dynamic that pushes some to the fore and others to the background, or makes them absent to us. Transferring the agency to the objects in this way is not what B. LaTour and actor network theory is doing. B. LaTour is transferring human agency to things but in a phenomenologically sophisticated way following the tradition. All the nonhuman objects with agency appear phenomenologically in Actor-Network-Theory it is just how they appear is not how we expect. Noumenal Agency on the other hand is silly because we could not know about it, and so why speculate about it. It does not add anything to our understanding of either ourselves or the objects. It seems that the idea is almost the dual of projection, it says that the objects themselves are de-projecting themselves.  It says that there is an active noumenal agency that we can never know about. This is sort of like the idea of the Matrix in which humans are batteries that keep machines going. It is like the ideas of Monadology of Leibniz which is similar which has a strong noumenal soup within which monads are trapped, yet still with oracles that allow them to know what is going on with other monads virtually. Leibniz was merely trying to come up with something, anything to counteract the philosophy of Spinoza which systematically explored the ideas of Descartes taking them to the limits that Descartes himself avoided. Now because Leibniz was a genius his Monadology was a very interesting solution to the problem Spinoza posed for catholics who wanted their Descartes but God as non-pantheistic too. But Harman is no Leibniz. Leibniz and Hume set the basic context for Kantian philosophy, and the noumena is the vestige of the separation and isolation of the monads in a noumenal soup. There is something to be said for going beyond phenomenology after it has been exhausted, but Heidegger was not suggesting that as for instance Henry has and to an extent Sartre did. Heidegger conflated Being with thinking, with intelligibility following Parmenides. The non-intelligibility of noumenal objects having their own life in the darkness beyond our purview had no enticement for Heidegger. He was not a purveyor of the unconscious dynamics like Jung for instance or say Hillman. To the extent we want to posit an unconscious of objects in physical reality outside us we can do that although it should be called Speculative Irrealism rather than Speculative Realism. Realms is supposed to imply more that just figments of our imagination. And for Kant Transcendental Idealism is the royal route to Realism. Anything that did not appear to us in our experience could not be real because it is relegated to the unknown unknown and will never be known. The only way to understand the unconscious is to think about it in terms of the entire panoply of the dynamics of consciousness and the underlying mechanisms that make consciousness possible that are themselves unknown. But this is not to say that the things-in-themselves have an unconscious. Even if it were true what do we care because we can never know the answer to that riddle. Philosophy is normally about what can be known. Speculative Irrealism does not shed any light on that question as far as I can tell.

Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects: Graham Harman: 9780812694444: Amazon.com: Books

By the way Harman himself says that is interpretation of Heidegger was radical on page 1. He claims that Heidegger’s account of tools gives rise to an ontology objects themselves. He says, “Quite the contrary: readiness to hand refers to objects insofar as they withdraw from human view into a dark subterranean reality that never becomes present to practical action any more than it does to theoretical awareness.” This is a patent misreading of Heidegger’s idea of ready-to-hand. But he goes on to say that when things withdraw into the dark subterranean reality they distance themselves from each other as well, not just from humans.

What has withdrawn into a dark subterranean irreality is the mind of Graham Harman. The fact that he his not recognized as a crackpot is evidence of the depths to which the tradition has sunk in its nihilism.

Another point is that the term “object oriented philosophy” is rather unfortunate as this term means something significant in Software Engineering. I think noumenally oriented speculation would have been better, or just noumenal mysticism, perhaps.

See Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Posthumanities): Ian Bogost: 9780816678976: Amazon.com: Books

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

Basically they say that his work was really the beginning of the Postmodern age before Nietzsche, and the first really important expression of the disillusionment with Monotheism and its devastating effects on  our worldview.

What is the structure of the Western Worldview?

> Michael Fogleman was kind enough to ask “How are you going about answering this question, Kent?”

I have been working on the problem since the days of my first Ph.D. at the London School of Economics which was called “The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence” which was about how discontinuities, and thus emergent events happen in the Western worldview, such as paradigm changes (Kuhn), episteme changes (Foucault), and epocal changes in the meaning of Being (Heidegger).

Since then I have refined my problematic, somewhat and wrote The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void which is available atPage on Bepress.

This lead to the discovery of the Special Systems and the relation between those and the various kinds of Being that occur as a face of the world in an Emergent Event. You can see various presentations about this atArchonic.net, but also they are mentioned in my second dissertation called Emergent Design which is at Page on About.

Most recently I have begun to consolidate the results of my research in a book at bout the structure of the Western worldview. I am on chapter 10 of that now, but have gotten busy with other more pressing matters and so may not get back to it for a while.

In the current book the approach is to go back to the four civilizations that contributed to the western worldview which were the Indo-Europeans, Semites, Egyptians and Sumerians and to understand as best I can their contributions to the current Western worldview which is in terms of the existential that they have in their language, rather than Being which is only in Indo-European languages. For a long time I only studies Indo-European contributes to the worldview, but later realized that was too narrow an approach.

From the underlying existential basis of the worldview I go on to describe the actual structure of the worldview that I discovered, and then on to describe the field out of which it arose which I call the Pleroma. Right now I am stuck in an analysis of Hesiod’s Theogony as an example of the genealogy of the structure of the worldview, which I have found fascinating. This is a little studied work even though it is recognized that it is very important because it is one of the major intact sources of the actual structure of the gods and their unfolding and various dramas along the way.

I was taken off my track by writing a few books on Agile and Lean approaches to Software Development, and some research into Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that I hope to compare to Jung’s Red Book. Having other interests sometimes precludes me working on the prime directive of solving the problem of the structure of the Western worldview. You can see recent papers on Agile and Lean at Kent Palmer’s Resume. This is a life long project so I don’t expect to be finished until it is over. But the current study probably needs only a couple more chapters and then I will be done with this version of the solution to the problem, probably the most far reaching of the various solutions I have proposed and written about over the years.

Sartre is famously said to have misunderstood Heidegger in Being and Nothingness and Heidegger rejected Sartrean Existentialism in Letter on Humanism. However, given the fact that Being and Time essentially goes back to Hegel in order to escape Husserl’s overwhelming presence in Heidegger’s mind along with the phenomenological reading of Aristotle, it may be that Sartre was closer to the truth than many admit when he uses quasi-Hegelian terms to interpret Heidegger. The reappraisal starts with: Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century: Bernard-Henri Levy: 9780745630090: Amazon.com: Books.

What is interesting is that Sartre’s inversion of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being into Nothingness was very prescient in as much as it predated the frenzy in Physics over black holes but essentially builds a philosophical model of a black hole at the center of consciousness. We can think of Being-in-itself as what is within the black hole. Being-for-itself as the event horizon, and being-for-others is what is outside the blackhole. The ground of consciousness is groundless and that produces this dynamic of nothing called nothingness. This is like the Process Being (ready-to-hand) of Heidegger. But for Heidegger Pure Being (present-at-hand) and Process Being form a monolith because the different modes of Being are eqi-primordial. M. Henry criticizes this ontological monism of early Heidegger.

Sartre has a radical dualism between what is within the blackhole underlying consciousness (bieng-in-itself) and what is out-side the blackhole which is (being-for-others) and the dynamic of nothingness by which experience is a falling into this black hole creating the being-for-itself of consciousness in the process. As things become nothing they are a dynamic nothingness which is the negative self-ungrounding of consciousness, which Sartre takes as the meaning of existentialism, i.e. that existence comes before essence. For Heidegger on the other hand the ecstasy of exi-stance (standing outside of oneself) is precisely what defines dasein. Exi-stance is the projection of the a priori prior to the split between subject and object for Heidegger. Dasein is at first lost in the mists of the Mitsein and has to separate itself from that in order to Be what it is, i.e. the source of the meaning of being for itself. We could naively equate being-in-itself with Sense Certainty in Hegel, and Being-for-itself with Self-consciousness, and Being-for-others with Spirit. But that skips over the creative use of the Hegelian terms that Sartre appears to employ. Schopenhauer, contra Hegel, recognized that the Wille is the noumena in man himself. And this profoundly changes the simple equation by introducing the unknown into the equation. Sartre sees being-in-itself as materiality. But it can also be seen as the unconscious which is a deep well underneath consciousness. Once we see that we have being-in-itself both inside us and outside us, then we are ready to think of our relation to the mitsein differently. The mitsein supplies what we need to be human as Heidegger recognizes, and Sartre emphasizes and it is also the source of inauthenticity and false consciousness. We come to treat being-for-others as if it were being-in-itself which is a fundamental mistake of objectifying others producing alienation.

Existentialism is about radical freedom in each instance and how we create the meaning in our lives and we don’t have to take that meaning from anyone else. In a sense it is a radicalization of Nietzsche’s idea of free-spirit. Everyone is already a free spirit but just does not know it yet. We reify by being too immersed in Being-for-others and by reifying others into material objects. These are like the two Parmedian failse ways. The only true way is being-for-itself which is self-consciousness but that is ungrounded, but also unverifiable, because consciousness is not just founded over an abyss of groundlessness but is in fact the implosion of that groundlessness as nothingness, the infalling into the black hole at the center of consciousness which renders things to our self-consciousness.

It is really an amazing and tantalizing picture as things that are nothing fall into the groundlessness of consciousness and vanish within it into the being-in-itself which is our materiality. They are subject to our self-consciousness for only a moment as they realize their nothingness which is self-negating dynamic. Positive meaning is realized in the moment of the dynamic nothingness of everything being realized on a moment by moment basis. This dynamic negation is what frees us from the chains of convention, and prior interpretations of things. In a way we could see this as a precursor to the deconstruction of Derrida. It is this nothingness as a dynamic that destroys meaning which is for Sartre the thing that allows us to create our own meanings giving us radical freedom to at any moment change who we are. This is the antipode of the Process Being of Heidegger, as recognized by Merleau-Ponty who defines Hyper Being as the Hyper Dialectic between Being (ala Heidegger) and Nothingness (ala Sartre). Hyper Being is Differance seen as an expansion of Being-in-the-world. Being-in-itself is closure to the world. Being-for-itself is a reflexive move that makes us aware of what is closed  in the context of the intersubjective immersion, i.e. Being for others. We stand naked before the gaze of others. But they cannot see our Being-in-itself. Our own materiality hides the nothing within us from the materiality of others outside us which are also nothing. Only in the moment of self-consciousness are we released from that materiality momentarily by the realization of the groundlessness of everything which makes nothing though a dynamic nothingness of everything. But for that very reason we can positively create meaning ourselves, and thus the negative moments and their dynamic relation are just there to define he positive moment of creativity which is positive but remains groundless because it is merely a spark over an abyss.

This is from memory, in a far away time when I studied Sartre fairly deeply. This may be just a fantasy, now. I often thought that Sartre needs to be reconsidered based on the Hegelianism of Heidegger. Sartre’s misreading of Heidegger may be closer to the mark that we have imagined so far. But by far the better book by Sartre is Critique of Dialectical Reason and his discussion of the fused group as the substrate beyond all reified institutions. Merleau-Ponty was truer to Heidegger in his rendering present-at-hand as pointing and ready-to-hand as grasping in Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty goes on to discover the other two kinds of Being: i.e. Hyper and Wild. Sartre’s attempt to make Marxism relevant by crossing it with this strange reading of Heidegger, as caused him to fall from favor. But he could be read as a proto-deconstructionist.

We could read the in-itself as Ultra Being. If we did that we would take Heidegger seriously when he says that Being is no-thing, and so what is inside or outside is no-thing, but the falling into the black hole of the Abyss of groundlessness would be the dynamic of Process Being inverted as its antimony. This would make Being for others into Pure Being. The differance would be between the two false paths of Being-in-itself of materiality, which is unconscious as well. and Being-for-others. So Hyper Being would be the difference between Being-for-itself and Being-for-others. We are either immersed in the Mitsein or we are reified and alientated as objects by others. This is like the difference between the It and Thou of Buber. Wild Being would then be what separates the two kinds of false path from the real path of self-consciousness (being-for-itself) which is reflexive. It lifts us out of the Mitsein and at the same time allows us to de-objectify ourselves which is the projection of others on us. So the whole basis of Sartre’s philosophy is to give us freedom to change things radically. He attempts to reconcile materiality and the unconscious and show us that self-consciousness is the path of liberation.

As I remember there is also the synthesis of being-in-and-for-itself. This brings up the question why there is not being-in-and-for-others as a counter synthesis? And of course it brings up why there is no being-with as in Heidegger’s mitsein. See Being-In, Being-For, Being-With: Clark E. Moustakas: 9781568215372: Amazon.com: Books. As I remember there is no being-in-the-other for Sartre. And Being-with does not play a role which is the important intermediary position that Heidegger recognizes. Thus there is an asymmetry in relations in Sartre who concentrates on two sorts of alienating relations rather than just inauthenticity that Heidegger discusses. There are then without the asymmetry six relations when you pair up the in, for, and with to the division between self and others. Better to explore the whole field. We are literally are “in” others when we are in the womb. Being with is an intermediate category between materiality and the unconscious of the In-itself and pure For-itself of self-consciousness and reflexivity. Heidegger is always trying to get to the point prior to the subject-object dichotomy as a dualism arises. Sartre does not get this at all. For Sartre the individual as existential being is always self-conscious. But can fall into materiality/unconscious of the in-itself, or into being-for-others where we are alienated by their gaze. What he misses appears to be the fact that there is a being-in-others literally, and then a being-in-the-family which is close knit and organic immersion when we are children. But then there is also a looser immersion of being-with. What is normally missed is the idea of Being-with-ourselves as the opposite of Being-with-others, that Moustakas is sensitive to, when we are with ourselves in solitude rather than alone.

One good way to get a picture of the underlying assumptions of existentialism is to look at Existence And Love;: A New Approach in Existential Phenomenology: William Alan Sadler: Amazon.com: Books. Sadler notes that existentialism concentrates on the individual and visual perception is taken as the primary metaphor. On the other hand if we take sound as the primary analogy then we can see that there are states in which individual isolation is not the major theme. Of course, Sadler uses romantic love as his example which is unfortunate. See Coming to Our Senses: Morris Berman: 9780553348637: Amazon.com: Books for a critique of Romantic Love. AlsoLove and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love: Dorothy Tennov: 9780812862867: Amazon.com: Books. Note also Eros the Bittersweet: Anne Carson: 9781564781888: Amazon.com: Books.

So we can see that Sartre’s existentialism has many distortions built in and although it was exciting at the time, it has lost favor as time has gone by due to the extreme position that it took toward meaning production by individuals who realize in their self-consciousness that they are utterly free to create themselves as they see fit so as to break from society and also to de-reify themselves so that they are not objects. The pure for-itself of self-consciousness as complete freedom in existence beyond the projections of Being as essence is seen as a negative dynamic of the in-falling of experience into the black hole of the in-itself from the for-others. It is really quite an amazing vision, especially when you pair it up with the fascination with Black Holes in physics which was to come later as a philosophical precursor. Another way of looking at it is via The Stone Monkey: An Alternative, Chinese-Scientific, Reality: Bruce Holbrook: 9780688006655: Amazon.com: Books. All illness in the Chinese medical system occurs when we depart from the natural rolling over of opposites in the combinations of Yin and Yang, through the generation of Yang Splendor or Closed Yin. We can see the self projection of the a priori of Dasein as yang splendor, and the falling into nothingness within consciousness as a version of closed yin. As Merleau-Ponty recognizes these are antimonic duals. It is out of these two antimonies that he generates Hyper Being as the possibility of the expansion of being-in-the-world. Which then makes possible the idea that being-in-the-world could also contract giving us Wild Being.

As you can see there is confusion about the distinction between these terms.

First of all this series is must larger than suggested by just these three terms.

Lets try this larger series:

—->suchness
given
—->facticity
data
—->theory
information
—->paradigm (Kuhn)
knowledge
—->episteme (Foucault)
wisdom
—->ontos (Heidegger)
insight
—->existence
realization
—->absolute

The indented interleaved elements are the scopes of emergence which are social and cultural.

The bold items are our ways of processing or relating to the various thresholds of emergence.

Givens are what comes directly from experience.

This is turned into Data by representation that collects some data from some source that is given.

Information must relate at least two variables to each other, one of which is usually what Klir calls a background or reference datum like space, time or population. Information must contain surprise, i.e. some significant  and relevant change in the data to be meaningful.

Knowledge is the fulcrum of this series and it is the one thing in experience that is fairly stable. Knowledge is normally the recognition of some pattern in the information changes that has meta-stablity and which is transferable to others via language.

Wisdom is knowing what is right, or good and what is the right or good time to do what is right or good depending on the level of nonduality that we are speaking of in a given situation. Wisdom has to do with Virtues and knowing how to avoid vices and what virtues to exemplify in a given situation. Wisdom is usually gained by applying knowledge to experience and seeing what worked and what did not work in give circumstances.

Insight is called Prajna in Buddhism. It is insight that is the source of Wisdom. Insight is a deeper understanding that reveals the inner coherence of experiences and this is what generates the criterion by which one knows what is the right time and what is the right thing to do or not do at that time, i.e. how to act with wisdom. For instance, Insight is understanding non-action Wu Wei [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei].

Realization is when we actualize our insights in the world and embody them. This of course is very rare. However, a good example of this is when we are able to follow the golden thread of our existence and to make nondual non-nihilistic distinctions, or when we go off track find our way back to a way to make these distinctions again within our lives.

However, we notice that these individual ways of dealing with data, information, knowledge, wisdom, insight are the interstices between the socio-cultural scopes of emergence. So for instance it is theory that turns data into information. It is on the other hand a paradigm (Kuhn) that turns information into knowledge.

Recently at the INCOSE-LA mini-conference I saw a talk by Richard Burton which one of his colleagues of San Louis Obisbo Polytechnic on Mental Models, and it was proposed that there was an iceburg in which mental models produced structures that then produced behavioral patterns that finally gave us visible events above the surface of the iceburg. I am not sure where this model comes from. But paradigms are mental models that have assumptions that we unconsciously and unthinkingly project on experience unquestioningly. Paradigms are these assumed root metaphors that we assume without thinking about it such as Lakoff talks about. [George Lakoff]. All knowledge is based on assumptions that have deep metaphorical roots upon which we depend for its expression.

It is our epistemic categories that allow us to transform knowledge into wisdom. These categories change discontinuously in the history of our tradition. In this case we are talking about received wisdom, not necessarily the wisdom of the individual in the moment. Received wisdom is even deeper than the mental models because they are social models that are culturally instilled which determine the fundmental categories that organize knowledge. An example of this is in Durkheim where he says that the Kantian Categories are socially constructed. It is fairly obvious that the social comes before anything the individual might produce on their own, as we are immersed completely in the social even before we know who we are as individuals, and as wolf children show we cannot become fully human without a given social milieu that precedes us and from which everything we are as individuals proceed from.

We might argue in the Western Tradition (Indo-European) that it is the unique idea of Ontos (Being) that transforms received wisdom into a deeper insight. For the Greeks this deeper insight was called phusis which Kelly says was the whooshing up, lingering and fading away of experiences that later were attributed to nature (NTR gods of the Egyptians). This insight was that there was a substratum to experience that was univocal as Aristotle says and which Deleuze still echos. Insight is seeing into the depths of experience and finding patterns there, and for the Indo-Europeans that pattern was the structure of Being (which by the way was fragmented and not unified or totalized despite what you may have heard). Being has meta-levels as has been noted in other answers to questions. The interpretations of Being changes throughout the tradition as we know from All Things Shining of Kelly and Dreyfus. Being is the root of all the metaphors, the underlying substance that allows us to say Odysseus IS a lion as Homer does.

But the meta-levels of Being (Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild, Ultra) undergo a phase transition at the fifth level into Existence (Wajud or ‘what is found’ in Arabic). [As an aside this appears in Thus Spake Zarathustra as the zany ode to the dancing grils in the desert an orientalist ode to the mystique of existence.]  It is existence that allows us to transition from insight to realization. Insight is the door to existence (via prajna). Realization is the finding of the other side of existence, i.e. the deeper nonduals. [gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate; Heart Sutra]

The absolute is the limit of realization, sometimes called for instance in Meister Eckhart the Godhead, or in Hinduism Nirguna Brahman.  But of course this is equivalent to the suchness as such. So there must be another moment on the scale between absolute and suchness which has no name in this schema. As the Tao Te Ching says the tao which is named is not the Tao. Wang Bi calls this the Great Dark. There are many absolutes that are named but the ultimate absolute is never named. However in revelation it may speak and say I am I as to Moses in Tuba or refer to itself in the royal we and say He as in Quran. Here we find the limit and the source of revelation. The Greeks had a name for the way of knowing what was absolute but at the same time present in all phenomena which was called nous. Nous is the comprehension of the nondual supra-rational limit of the Divided Line of Plato. The other limit is the Paradoxical. The Divided Line encompasses Ratio and Doxa and spans all of experience.

The whole idea that there should be a reward in exchange for changing ways is the problem. The question is ambiguous as to whether it is Humans in General or specific humans. But we will assume Humans in general. I recommend the book Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robins which brings up the whole question of Death  and Immortality and oddly connects it to Perfume in a wild romp through human history and the decline of human beings as they become more “civilized”, etc. It posits that what is necessary is a change in the attitude toward death. That might not be such a bad idea as a place to start.

Nicholas Rescher