We must realize that Gandalf’s real name is Mithrandir, which means that Tolkien saw him as being related to Mithra of Mithra and Varuna fame that appear in the Vedas as the Asuras, and which causes us to think who the other asuras are in the story. Asuras are basically Titans who are also equal to the gods of the Mesopotamians like Enki and Enlil etc. What is happening in the Lord of the rings is a Titanic struggle. In Mithrism a greek mystery religion indistinguishable from Christianity by Constantine, and which gives much of the form to Christianity as it is supplanted later and stamped out. Mithra was seen as the leader of the forces of light against the forces of darkness, and Lord of the Rings tells the story, much like that of the Hobbit of a small group that is weak that stands against great evil powers and wins in the end after great hardship. Mithra was for Tolkien an Indo-European model for Christ complete with death and resurrection.

I have written about this numerous other places on Quora. What makes Achilles character compelling is that he is an archetypal example of the confrontation of nihilism within the Western worldview. He realizes that Trojans and Achaeans are basically the same, they both steal women, and that the whole war which the Achaeans are involved with against the Trojans is meaningless. Thus he refuses to fight, but that leads to Patroclus being killed in his armor, which sends him into a Berserker rage which is the nihilistic opposite of doing too little, enraged he becomes inhuman doing too much, and is only brought back to his humanity in the encounter with Hector’s father, when he realizes that he like Hector will never see his own father again. The Iliad puts its focus on the human being caught up in a nihilistic situation which when it is realized that it is nihilistic sucks meaning out of their world, and this is the situation we all find ourselves in within this worldview, and so the Epics are a manual on how to live in a worldview that at its core generates nihilism continually and causes both alienation and anomie in its inhabitants.

I recommend you read W. Van Dusen’s dissertation on A dimension Theory of the Nature of Mind.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CD0QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ruor.uottawa.ca%2Fen%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10393%2F20911%2FDC53485.PDF%3Fsequence%3D1&ei=Ib0VUcW4M4qaiAKe2YCoDQ&usg=AFQjCNECUERV0xAnGCMkeTD1T2PjoG6F-w&sig2=mYaUD-sVr_nfbPPz-Jz8SQ&bvm=bv.42080656,d.cGE

Summarized in http://www.ifpe.org/Conference/2007_Presentations/Silvestro_Presentation.pdf

See also http://instituteoftheology.org/PDF/vandeusen.pdf

First of all concepts do not exist in isolation.

Second words and concepts are different, and you can have the same concept with different names, even in different languages.

Concepts are the semantic referent of symbols and signs.

M. Schlick distinguishes between concepts and precepts and sees them as distinct.

Husserl distinguishes between noesis and noema and sees them as a spectrum with various mixtures of intentional morphe (meaning form) and hyle (content). Pure Noesis has mostly meaning with a little sensory content, and Pure Noema is mostly sensory content with some meaning.

A noematic nucleus is the outward combination of phenomenological characteristics of something whether concept or percept. Even almost purely noetic objects have a noematic nucleus associated with them.

But the inward coherence and constraint envelope of the noematic nucleus of a concept or percept is called an essence. Husserl is famous for saying that abstraction and essence perception are different. Essence perception is synthetic and Abstraction is analytic. These turn into Ready to hand and Present at Hand in Heidegger’s Being and Time, and ultimately they are associated with different kinds of Being in the Continental Tradition of Philosophy with others kinds or meta-levels of Being such as Hyper Being (DifferAnce) and Wild Being etc.

Concepts are different at different meta-levels of Being and in Existence.

Pure Being they are frozen IDEAS of Plato who is following Parmenides in saying that these ultimate ideas are categories and are static. Schlick wants to find a set of concepts unmixed with percepts that form an axiomatic platform from which reasoning can take place.

Process Being they are in Heraclitian flux and are more like tattvas and dharmas in Shavite or Buddhist philosophy.

Hyper Being they are all about distinctions between the concepts not concepts themselves, and the fact that the semantic fabric is not stable, and the interface with language is complex, and thinking is hard when it comes to making stable distinctions which keep slip sliding away.

Wild Being concepts are reduced even further from distinctions to tendencies, propensities, dispositions, what Deleuze and Guattari call Lines of Flight. See their What is Philosophy?

Ultra Being concepts are singularities that are utterly non-representable, like mantras in Tantra

Existence concepts are the natural meaning of things that spontaneously arise which are not fabricated from the natural world and in consciousness. This is the actual realm of meaning, while all the other levels are dealing with higher orders of signification and relevance.

So Nietzsche says that we do not think our thoughts they think us. This fundamental revolution in thinking was taken up by Heidegger with his concept of Dasein (Being There, being-in-the-world). The whole notion that concepts are our property and they can be controlled and used as instruments is flawed from the point of view of existential philosophy. Heidegger goes on to say that given a thinker and his thoughts we only can say we understand them if we can go beyond his thoughts in a way that is true to his thoughts ourselves, thinking the unthought in his thoughts. And one of the rules of dealing with concepts is that you do not define them, but rather you allow them to express themselves in different contexts as much of the significance of concepts comes from the context in which it appears. And concepts may be in a passage without there being any name of that concept in the passage because concepts can be expressed implicitly rather than merely cited explicitly, and this is why hermeneutics is so hard and so important.

So there is a lot to say about this, but basically we do philosophize a single concept, but aggregates of them that have significance mostly through their relations with each other. Here we enter the place where Peirce’s Philosophical Principles come into play which he calls Firsts (isolata), Seconds (relata), Thirds (continua), which we can extend with B. Fullers further principles of Synergy, Integrity etc. Concepts are not just isolated units made up of other sub-conceptual elements as even Deleuze and Guattari say, but they can also be isolata, or relations, or continuities (ideas) or synergies, or integrities etc following a geometrical like unfolding of sign systems and marks such as we get in Euclidian Geometry which can be called a semiology because the word for point is sign.

This brings us to the fact that concepts may be parts of higher dimensional thought structures, and this means that the 7+-2 limit of working memory is for  independent concepts not a linear stack. So we are always thinking multi-dimensionally and having to bring that down to 2 and 3 dimensional representations in which we lose fidelity. This is part of what happens when we linearize thought in language.

So there are no good ways to learn to philosophize a concept because we only reify them when we think of them as isolates and try to define them. Concepts primordially only exist in context, and usually in the context of a thinkers thought which we get a synchronic view of in a book say. So the advice is to understand the thought of the philosopher as a whole and go beyond it to fully understand it yourself, and then come back to see the continua (ideas), relata, (relations between ideas) and isolata (concepts, or semantic nuclei with a meaningful essence). This is hard because philosophy is sophisticated, but can be very rewarding to work to understand as fully as possible a whole philosophy book that fascinates you, or the work of a philosopher, and then eventually be build up one at a time to an attempt to understand schools of philosophy, and even the philosophical tradition itself.

The best way to do this conceptual analysis is to diagram the relations between the concepts as you read the book, then write working papers that capture your understanding of what you are reading in your own words, and then iterate the digrams and working papers until you think you can extend the thoughts of the philosopher you are studying to subjects he did not consider, when you can do that with some assurance of not distorting the philosopher’s ideas then you are ready to start thinking yourself about the same ideas as you evolve the diagrams and working papers of thoughts toward what you think on your own about the subject. Then pick another philosopher that fascinates you and do it again, putting yourself as completely as possible in their thought system, until you can surpass it naturally, and then relate it to the previous thought system you studied doing compare and contrast, and then develop your own ideas on the subject extending the second, and then the first together. And so on until you have mastered the Western tradition, which is of course impossible, so you must also read summaries, secondary works, history of philosophy, etc to fill in the gaps and get the insights of others into the works of the philosophers who interest you.

All the time you are doing this, you must be developing your own independent view, not just adopting the views of those you are reading, joining their school of philosophy, but attempting to relate what they are saying to your own experience everyday and trying to see the world differently through the conceptual lens they are giving you. A fun philosopher to do this today with is Zizek because he comments on everything. So he is an excellent example of taking philosophical ideas and applying them to everyday phenomena. Another example that is good is Borges who takes idealistic philosophies to and extreme and writes absurd short stories about them.

One thing you should practice is seeing through the phenomena to the conceptual web that drives the phenomena behind the scenes. This conceptual web is not of our making completely but a lot of it is projected as Kant says a Priori as a synthesis, and we don’t know how we do that unconscious projection but much of what we see in the world is just telling us about what is going on in our own selves. So distinguishing your projections from what is out there that is not a projection is a good exercise. Questioning all distinctions that you or others make to see whether they cut through the joints of phenomena rather than through the bones as Plato says is always important. Also apprehending not just abstractions but also essences of things is important because many times abstractions cut through essences abnormally destroying their natural order.

The basic idea is that you have to start with the thought of the philosopher as a whole and work toward understanding the concepts without fully defining them but allowing the context in which they show up to inform their meaning. Same words may mean completely different things in different philosophies. Concepts when rearranged in a different philosophy may mean something completely different. Concepts are even more fluid than language, and if you look at language as John_McWhorter [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joh…] does you can see that there is nothing stable in language, and so there is even less stable at the conceptual level that is only tangentially related to language in the semantical realm which is nebulous, amorphous, ambiguous, vague etc compared with other things like mathematical symbols which are conceptually fairly discrete. From Math as we go through the sciences and into the social sciences things only get more and more confusing and the ultimate refuge of this confusion is Philosophy which has this very odd idea called Being that is only in Indo-European languages which messes with our mind due to its absurdity. It is hard to get out of that down to something existentially core and to think at levels beyond the meta-levels of Being, because here we are entering realms of non-representability not just loss of higher dimensional synthetic content. However, this is what Buddhist Philosophy is all about, so they have worked fairly well producing a tradition of existential thought that rejects Being. But you have to be aware that things are pretty strange within the Western tradition due to the over influence of the Accursed Share (Bataille) of Being.

only know of the work of José Ortega y Gasset through secondary sources. José Ortega y Gasset worked in the phenomenological tradition and tried to humanize it basing it on Life, more or less like Nietzsche had tried to do when he made Life the fundamental value by which to value all values.

Moritz Schlick promoted the work of Wittgenstein even though he was the senior central member of the Vienna circle. But his ideas were in some sense more interesting in some ways because he was basically taking the ideas of Hilbert about axioms in geometry and using them to think about philosophy. He wanted to split concepts from percepts and have an axiomatic platform of concepts as the basis of reasoning, more or less like the axioms of set theory, but higher concepts. I talk about him in my dissertation at http://about.me/emergentdesign.

Wittgenstein basically went off the deep end in Tractatus with a very reductionist approach of everything to facts stated in propositions and attempted to systematize those rather than concentrating on the conceptual level, but I guess when the Hilbert program fell apart that effected Schlick’s approach too. Wittgenstein eventually migrated from language facts to language games and other interesting ideas, to me the most interesting of which are his concentration on the schemas. I like his Philosophical Grammar better than Philosophical investigations.

But essentially we can see Wittgenstein taking a wrong turn into Language Philosophy which is the source of all Analytic Philosophy, that is basically an anti-philosophy. Schlick instead wanted to make philosophy precise like geometry and axiomize it, which if possible would give a stable basis for thought. But of course, this program was not followed up due to the impact of Godel’s undecidability proof. But I try to explain the generality of the axiomatic platform approach in my dissertation, and how that hooks into other aspects of the Western tradition. The closest thing I know to this approach is the ideas about conceptual lattices. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_lattice

This brings up a point which I make over and over, which is to say that “IS” is a parochial Indo-European concept not shared by other languages and worlds, many of which we have wiped out by colonialism, but sufficent other languages and worlds exist that we should not get the idea that Being is a universal as we have thought for centuries, but rather it is very specific to our worldview which has become dominant and foisted it on others over the last few centuries.

So when we say “What IS” about anything we are talking about the essence or the What of something that has Being projected on it over the existential core. Our idea of essence is caught up in our concept of Being, and we talk about the essential being of something, which normally indicates the kind or sort of thing that something is. However, in Husserl’s phenomenology he identifies ‘essence perception’ as different from abstractions. So the essence of something in this case is the limits and coherence of its attributes and thus about the multiple constraints on something that makes it what it is and not something else at some level of family resemblance between like things. So we talk about genera and species of things, like animals for instance. As Heidegger shows in Being and Time Pure Being (present-at-hand) is mostly ruled by abstraction, while Process Being (ready-to-hand) is mostly ruled by essence perception which he calls circumspective concern and relates to the totality of the things that support existence, and many of those things are part of the technological infrastructure that supports actions toward goals which are seen in terms of static abstractions.

What IS is usually revealed by the processes that operate on something, so for instance evolution operates on species, and defines their what in relation to their niche in an ecosystem that is itself evolving over time which pushes the organisms of a given kind to evolve as well with a dollop of randomness just to add a bit of interest to the proceedings. So essences tend to be seen functionally in terms of the dynamics of the thing in relation to other things, and the things with their essence keeps much of its content which might otherwise be washed away by abstractions that are static illusory continuities concerning the thing, for instance when we represent something by a name. The name may capture the abstraction but has nothing to do with capturing the essence of something which needs more detail in terms of the characteristics and the coherence and limits of those characteristics and many times also including the lifecycle of the thing. So for instance we go into a Forest and look around at the trees and realize that we are seeing trees at all points in their lifecycle and so we see playing itself out around us in the various examples we see around us the various stages of growth of a given kind of tree. The constraints on the essence of the tree thus are a dynamic envelope of possible changes over time as well which we now normally relate to the genetic structure within the DNA of the cells of the organism which then we relate to the Epigenetic landscape that is produced when the cell develops in a given environment. So the term essence not only relates to constraints in terms of whether something stays the same if the limits or arrangement or presence of characteristics change, but also it relates to the constraints on the development of the thing in line with the norms of that species given its genetic makeup and the interaction with the ecosystem.

But there is another level of Essence that I talk about in my dissertation on Emergent Design [http://about.me/emergentdesign] which is at the Hyper Being level and which is related to Derrida’s ideas of Differance (differing and deferring). At a certain point we must consider the discontinuities between kinds of things, and the discontinuities in development, and how distinctions are made in the first place between things in space and time and how fragile that process is. I will leave it to the reader to explore this level by themselves but it has to do with how the discontinuities come to be in space and time given representations and repetitions within things and the interplay between these distinctions and what that says about the relation between the species and the individual, in other words the individual differences can matter, and the essence at the level of species is not everything, but there is a peculiar essence to individual things that is unique and singular and goes beyond what is just at the level of kind or sort. And many times when we look at all the individual differences say in trees of the same species there is a wide variety of differences and there is a spectrum or field of possibilities that are actualized many times with striking anomalies that are instructive.

I don’t really mention it in my dissertation but we can also see essence at the level of Wild Being as well. But here we are talking about the field of propensities by which probabilities are transformed into actualities. In other words even beyond individual differences there is the realm of possibility and the adjacent possible that renders potentials that may or may not be actualized into specific viable individuals. And this is the level where the Chinese talk about Chi and Li. Essentially their culture is the reverse of ours because they posit that Chi, Li and Shu are the fundamentals and the other levels are degeneration from the rich reality that is seen for instance in Jade Carvings. Jade is more priceless than gold in China because the individual piece of Jade has subtle coloring and texture, and pattern laid down in time as the crystals formed which can be brought out in carving to sublime aesthetic effect. Chi is the subtle energy flows that form the crystals, what Adrian Bijan calls flow architecture within a stream of flow like that which builds up Jade cystals. Li is the precise patterning laid down in that process that shows subtle natural ordering of the crystalline content along with the impurities that we see as a pattern. But when we see that pattern we are witnessing the propensities that the individual particles had which were realized in the fractal patterning of the Jade material. A good book about this is http://www.amazon.com/The-Propen…. Shu is the numerically distinct object which exhibits the Li based on the flow of the Chi. But Li also means principle in as much as there are different sorts of propensities that things might have at this greatest possible level of granularity where the content and its specific givenness matters. Knowing the Li of things allows one to recognize the patterns that are forming when they have not yet become set in stone, and then we can recognize what we see set in stone (i.e. the actual Jade patterning) as just one possible realized potential from a host of possible ones that could have occurred but didn’t. But the one that did form the pattern we see expresses the propensities, dispositions, tendencies at play in the moment when the crystal was actually forming that gave rise to its suchness and thatness which is beyond words but seen immediately in the thing itself before our eyes. We can think of Li as viablity developmental channels which are direcelty expressed in the specifics of the patterning we see in something.

Essence can function at all the meta-levels of Being (Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild, Ultra) and takes on a different emergent meaning at each level. What something IS is always just about as deep a question you can ask about something. The only thing deeper is Why.

Shiva / Dionysus are personifications of time.

Nietzsche had a lot to say about this. But it would be difficult to summarize his normally caustic analysis of the motivations for various philosophies, but let us just hint that it has something to do with affirming death rather than life in too many cases (Schopenhauer for instance).

But in general ones view of the cosmos is a reflection of one’s self and that does not just go for philosophers. And the reason this has to be so is that what we see as our world is conditioned by our internalization of that world and so there has to be a reflective as well as a reflexive quality to between self and world of philosophers, not to mention poets, artists and everyone else.

But what do you mean by personal life? Many times it is not the actual events of daily life that have an effect, but more ones spiritual life in the sense of the inner drive to know in relation to what is known during ones time, and how one reacts to that and takes a course toward the cutting edge of the tradition in which one finds oneself. More interesting still are the unconscious motives that come out in ones philosophy of which the philosopher themselves are unaware, and paying attention to that started with Nietzsche.

I think the key point is this. Philosophers who reach any depth in their thought find themselves completely out of kilter with their time and those around them within their society and culture, and are lucky if they have a few close friends which Nietzsche did have, in spite of making enemies of almost everyone, so that he ended up being fairly lonely in the end. But he celebrates that solitude and distinguishes solitude from loneliness. Like as not philosophers find themselves in solitude if they think deeply about the nature of existence because most people just never make it to a place where they can see the world in any deeper way.

Basically philosophers like Nietzsche who reach some depth in their thought that goes beyond the cutting edge of the tradition live in a different world than everyone else, they see things that others do not see, and the world has meaning in ways that others just do not understand. How this comes about is that what they have done is to have learned the tradition and then in the context of a problematic asked questions the pursuit of the answers to which takes them beyond that tradition. So the ability to see what others do not see comes from the unique synthesis of the tradition as a whole which others do not know well enough to synthesize consciously. We all synthesize the tradition unconsciously and that is what allows us to negotiate the world around us in our daily life. But the way things are in our world are conditioned by how people saw things throughout the development of the tradition the societies and cultures from which we drew our own society and culture. Philosophers are the ones who synthesize their world in a cognitive way in a discursive manner, unlike the synthesis of artists and poets. We really need all these different syntheses, and philosophers often take as their subject matter the arts and poetry as well and more and more the science of their day attempting to get a comprehensive integrative and synergistic view of the entire world and its inner potentials and outward possibilities that are hidden to most who live in those worlds.

The world really is a wondrous place in which everything is exemplified down to the finest detail which Hegel calls Absolute Reason. In other words there is actual structure to the world that is hidden from view, which determines how things work within the world and set the limits of the possibilities within the world which few realize, and this hidden or invisible structure of transcendentals is exemplified in almost everything within the world so once you have reached a synthesis of the world, then it starts making sense in a new way and allows you to see new possibilities that hitherto were impossible to perceive. We are now used to this occurring in the narrow realm of technology. But it can also occur in a wider realm that encompasses the entire world and that is what the deepest philosophers pursue with ardor because they find the mutual mirroring of everything in the world fascinating.

So let me give you an example taken from Nietzsche and Heidegger which is Nihilism. Stanley wrote a book called Nihilism which is the best definition of the phenomena I have found. Bascially nihilism is when you think there are two things that are different that are in conflict and one is good and the other evil from a limited perspective, but then you find that they are really exactly the same thing. This is what Achilles discovered about the Acheans and Trojans in the Iliad, they both take women. And his response was nihilistic in that he withdrew too much and then when Petrocles was killed he went into bezerker mode and then was too active becoming inhuman in the process. So it has been known since antiquity that our world produces nihilism at its core and this is the main thing characteristic of the worldview that it generates nihilism. Nietzsche’s final book that was never finished called Will to Power was all about this nihilistic core to the worldview, and Heidegger took it up attributing it to technology. But this is a general thing about the worldview, it generates nihilism where ever you look, and you can find it everywhere in your own life and in the lives of those around you and throughout the culture and our society. Everything is driven by the production of nihilism by the worldview. And if you know that, which is something that most people do not know, then you will see it everywhere. And that changes how you see things like the relations between democrats and republicans for instance. It is really incumbents that rule. Party is even in these times of lack of compromise really an irrelevant detail, and those caught up in the us vs them of the political system are living in an illusion, not recognizing where the sovereign power resides that drives actual decisions. Sovereign power now resides with the corporations who control the senators via lobbyists and their contributions to the extent that the people do not wrest that power back to themselves by voting against corporate interests whether championed by democrats or republicans. Corporations are the seats of sovereignty within our society. They extend their influence on us through the manipulation of congress. Our attention is drawn away from this by the apparent conflict between the dying Republican Party and the resurgent Democratic Party, but the corporations will work with and contribute to who ever is in power, and their lobbyists will craft legislation for the Congressmen for them to pass into law to specifically help them continue to exploit the public in any way that they can. But we do not have to talk about politics. Look at any level of society and what ever scale or phenomena you choose to look at the marks of nihilism will be there operating in some way that is unique to the phenomena that you have chosen to regard.

Once you see that nihilism is everywhere and organizing everything within our worldview, then you realize that the whole question becomes how do you make a non-nihilistic distinction. how do you make a distinction that does not generate more nihilism. And you see that this is almost impossible. What ever decision you make is probably going exacerbate nihilism in the situation, and not doing so is nearly impossible. It is only when you start to understand nonduality that there seems to be an answer to this most pressing of problems that no one knows even exists. Focusing in on Nihilism as an essential feature of the worldview did not happen over night, but it has been refined by many philosophers over time, in different ways. For instance Kant’s Critique of Pure reason is precisely addressed to exactly this problem of the Antinomies of Reason. Hegel addressed it with his idea of Spirit and Absolute Reason. But Nietzsche saw it a much more concrete and pervasive problem and really the key problem to be dealt with within our tradition.

One way to characterize this problem is the way that we see in Achilles. He realizes that the conflicting opposites in the war in which he is engaged are really the same. This takes meaning out of his world, but his reaction is also nihilistic which was to withdraw completely and then to go berzerk once his friend died, who actually he killed by allowing him to wear his own armor making himself the target of the enemy when he did not have the strength of Achilles to defend himself. Achilles actually was responsible for his Friend’s death by his inaction, but that caused him to go berserk and become inhuman in his killing rage until Paris asking for Hectors body brought him back to himself and rehumanized him because he knew he would never see his own Father again, and that Hector and he were alike in that, one living and the other dead. The Iliad is like a manual on how to live in a nihilistic society and how the illusory artificial extreme opposites that govern our society tear us up between them as we overreact in one direction and then the other through our hubris. The whole question then becomes how can is see through the nihilistic extreme artificial opposites given to us by society, and thread the needle by finding a golden thread which is non-nihilistic so as not to fall into any of the traps that society offers us on every side to entice us to become caught up and completely overwhelmed by the nihilism.

So this is just one example based on Nietzsche and Heidegger of how philosophers see the world differently. So for instance Heidegger never admitted that his Nazism was a mistake. And that is because in his time the nihilistic opposites for him was capitalism and communism, and fascism was suppose to be an alternative to these two ideologies. His fascism was brown shirt fascism which was purged by Hitler because they believed in continuous National Socialist revolution. Heidegger distanced himself from the Nazi movement after the pusche in which the Brownshirts were massacred and he lost power. So when we say he was a NAZI what we do not realize that there was two kinds of NAZI and he was the kind that lost out in the power struggle that established Hitler as a dictator bent on world domination. But the reason that Heidegger never admitted his fault was deeper than that even. The central concept of the Nazi ideology was the concept of the “folk”. For Heidegger Nazism was a romantic return to the German origins, and this concept was key in Nietzsche as well. That is one of the aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that was misused by the Nazis, basically through the work of his sister in reediting his work to make it appealing to the Nazi establishment. Heidegger worked throughout the pre-war years to prove that his philosophy was a better basis for Nazism than Nietzsches. But by that he meant Brown shirt continuous revolution returning to the folk basis of german nationalism. To admit that his involvement with Nazism was wrong was tantamount for Heidegger to separation from his own roots in his own country which he valued more than anything else, it would mean Sparation from his folk roots on which his whole philosophy was based as a kind of Romanticism. From his point of view Brown Shirt Nazism never lost its force to give his life meaning, and Black Shirt Nazism was an aberration which did not put the folk first but in fact ended up destroying the folk basis of german society. But beyond that Heidegger came to see that there was no difference between Black Shirt Nazism, Capitalism, and Communism. And I think this has actually become true. By their fighting with each other over a century they absorbed the characteristics of the other into themselves. So now we have something called global corporatism which has aspects that are like each of the proceeding ideologies that warred with each other in the last century. So for Heidegger all the ideologies were totalitarian and nihilistic and to admit he was wrong would be to accept the unholy union between corporatism and technological imperialism which was destroying the earth. For Heidegger the romantic concept of folk origins identification is the only real alternative to the technological and corporate domination and transformation of the world into an ever smaller and more alienated place. Folk is just the larges of the series that encompasses faimily, neighborhood, community, village, cultured society, folk (Volk). In other words it is precisely what is being threatened and stamped out by developers, and corporations, and franchies, and Walmart, and the finance industry gone out of control. It is the natural thresholds of human organization in which we are fated to be together that Heidegger believes is one of the few things that can save us from the pervasive nihilism of our modern culture and society. Thus he would council us to cultivate our extended families, our neighborhoods, our communities, our villages, our cultural heritage and healthy traditional social norms as well as our origins in a certain ethnic group with a specific genealogy and that is what we must protect at all costs from the global corporatism that threatens to engulf us in a world that is all the same, where there are no independently owned shops but only Walmart, where there are no bookstores any longer, because books are the essential lifeblood of human freedom, where there are no independently owned restraints because there are only chains left with sanatized corporate environments. There is something deep in Heideggers refusal to distance himself from Nazism, because to him what was good in Nazism which was its roots in the german folk origins is still pertinent to us today in a time where we lost the battle with the nihilistic effects of corporate technologization of society and culture. To him we would have lost that battle no matter who had won the ideological wars of the twentieth century. But of course we disagree with him in as much as the fact that since our society is not yet totalitarian that the outcome was much better, even though the danger of corporatism is still very much alive and the possibility of falling into totalitarianism is ever with us as we oscillate between ideological extremes. Basically the only thing that saves us is the constitution which we still revere because it gave us our freedom from state sovereignty. But what it did not contemplate was the rise of corporate sovereignty where corporations (imaginary people)  are given the rights of citizens. We have returned to polytheism only our gods (invisible people) are embodied on sheets of paper with signatures that were based on laws created to give run away slaves their rights that created imaginary people who did not die, and who could hold property. No one could have imagined that the worship of the gods could be called work, and the adherents would be called employees, shareholders and customers. Now we live in cities that all look the same. Where ever you go there are the same stories, and where ever you are it is now basically the same place, and this is how mening gets sucked out of the world through the homogenization of experience in a world ruled by corporations. We thought it was governments that would do that, but it turne out that governments have merely become servats of corporate interests. And as we become corporate people we loose some of our humanity.

Philosophers are the ones who say what is obvious but is not said because it is taboo and search for a way out of the conundrum that we placed ourselves in which made humans second class citizens after corporations within our society. For instance we do not put corporations in prison but we put citizens in prison. Corporate crime goes unpunished, while trivial human crimes are punished severely. Corporations have the money by accumulation of resources to bend the legal system to their will and they can destroy others just because they can afford to litigate indefinitely. Corporations control the congress via their lobbyists and their campaign contributions. And it is basically Corporations that are actively destroying the planet as we speak. There is no one in corporations to take responsibility for the evil they do. Their CEO, CFO, CTO, CxOs are the 1% who own most of the wealth and for whom the tax code is tipped in their favor only partially redressed by the recent fiscal cliff deal.

Corporatism is merely an example of how the nihilistic nature of the worldview has transformed in our time, but the nihilism is the same, it is merely manifesting in a new form. But it is pervasive effecting all aspects of our life. Zizek is a good critic of the seemingly benign aspects of corporations and how they trick us into thinking we are doing something for the planet when we buy their products giving something back to assuage our guilt. Zizek is the philosopher who is calling us today to reexamine how the corporations have taken away all the commons and are engulfing us with a new kind of economic totalitarianism, and how we play into their hands. Corporations are transcendentals because they are immortal. And the call of Nietzsche to abandon all transcendentals and instead affirm life and the earth would lead to the abandoning of the imaginary transcendentals that allow Corporatism to flourish. Nietzsche is still radical in our time. And that is the mark of greatness of a philosopher, they become more and more relevant as time passes because they saw far ahead by thinking deeply about the world they were embedded in and like us overwhelmed by. They made sense of it for us, and now we have to make sense of it ourselves in even deeper ways. And this becomes for the philosopher a personal challenge and taking up this personal challenge determines the nature of the philosophical response to the world as it appears to us. And it is in this way that the personal life of the philosopher informs their thought and abiding ways.

What determines the boundaries of physical objects?

Why do we perceive only some combinations of atoms as objects?

I call the answer to this question General Schemas Theory.

If you take a Kantian perspective then space and time are projected and then the categories of objects are projected within the singular of spacetime. Schemas are the different templates of understanding of objects of different scopes within that projection. So what you are calling the dots (monads) and the objects (forms) are two of the different schemas that exist within the set of possible schemas. The set of possible schemas according to S’ theory is:

Pluriverse
Kosmos
World
Domain
Meta-system
System
Form
Pattern
Monad
Facet

And these are related to dimensions such that there are two dimensions per schema and two schemas per dimension and thus these schemas stretch from -1 to the 9th dimensions. Projection means basically that you are producing those objects out of sensory data unconsciously within the brain, and we don’t really understand how that occurs yet, but what we do know is that unitary phenomena we see are distributed into different processing areas in the brain so that different parts of the brain are processing different aspects fo the objects we see. There is a very complex functioning algoritm in our brains that produce the illusion of integrated unified objects that we see in our perception within consciousness and that illusion is the schemas. We are presented in consciousness with objects already schematized by the schema recognition apparatus that we are born with and that develops as we develop in our interaction with the world. Hopefully we will eventually understand how this actually works. But the key is that we can see by studying the models of things in science that there is a finite set like the one identified in S’ which has various scopes which are seamlessly nested to give us a continuous experience of the world without unschematized gaps. For more about the history of schemas theory see Umberto Eco Kant and the Platypus. The type of schema I am talking about he calls Mathematical and Geometrical Schemas which are the most basic kind of schema.