For me it is just advertisement for more substantive works I have written. There might be someone out there is something a bit more . . . shall we say . . . substantive.

But then I learned that people do not like to have substantive answers to questions. They vote them down. So then my answers turned contrarian attempting to provoke thought. Especially thought about the inadequacies of Quora itself. Nothing like a bit of reflexivity to stir things up. But of course people do not want to be reflexive about the medium they are using either.

So I more or less have given up now. I answer questions that people ask me if I feel they are significant, relevant or perhaps even meaningful.

What is tangible is when answering a question on a subject that you might not have explored you discover something that you would not have known otherwise in the process of tying to answer the question. Those insights are valuable.

It is very easy to write long answers. You actually think about the question, and then you provide an in-depth and substantive answer. Which is worse, torturing humanity though ignorance or though knowledge? Torturing though ignorance is what is most common. This is when you give a quip answer that has no meaning. It seems easy but it is really just another example of nihilism. The nihilism builds up and you realize that almost all answers are superficial, because they only tell you what you want to hear, what is cute, what is common, what titillates. Then occasionally someone writes a long substantive answer to a question, attempting to make it meaningful. Sure it is painful to read it, try to understand it, and there is the danger you might learn something, but hey what the heck you can try anything once. And perhaps it hits a chord and you think about the answer, and maybe go so far as providing a meaningful response. And then something strange happens . . . meaningful dialogue . . . do you think it is possible on the web? Actually using the possibility of interaction to interact, to say something relevant, significant perhaps even meaningful to ones fellow-man (or woman as the case may be). You are right this is all too painful. Better to stay with being what Nietzsche calls the Last Man . . . blinking . . . blinking . . .

Dialectics are a way of seeing what happens, it is not necessarily what happens itself. The best thing to do is to read Phenomenology of Mind because the dialectics in that book are not so reified as we get in Hegel’s logic. The basic point is that what ever different ways of looking at things that arise together in relation to each other all in a sense cancel each other out or contradict each other so that the only way to see your way out of the situation is to rise to a higher level of understanding that at once accommodates the contradictions and rises above them. This move is called aufhebung but then it eventually causes a proliferation of viewpoints at the next level that are irreconcilable. Maybe we could call aufhebung the reconciliation of the irreconcilable.

It is one of those things you can see everywhere if you are keyed into looking for it. This is because our lives are full of contradictions and impossibilities that we continue to live with everyday To the extent that the various contradictions and impossibilities balance each other and we can take a higher view of them such that they actually fit together with each other, then we get the effect of aufhebung, i.e. the production of a higher synthesis that encompasses thesis and antithesis. But when the higher synthesis is produced then it merely spawns a lot of differentiation at the new level that again needs to be reconciled.

So I have often spoken in different answers that by struggling with fascism and communism we have become like them. Our current globalization economic policy is in many ways an aufhebung of the disparate tendencies between capitalism, communism and fascism. Communism and Fascism did not go away but by reacting to them and fighting them we became somewhat like them. And what we have now is an amalgam of the reactions to communism and fascism in the last century. I call that synthesis corporatism. It leads with the doctrine that imaginary legal “persons” set up as a facade to protect wealth and allow accumulation of wealth across generations should have the same rights as human citizens. This results in a de-facto oligarchy. The state ends up serving the corporate interests rather than those of the human citizens, for instance with its too big to fail policy for large banks. What is that but socialism for corporations. Corporations deserve welfare but not citizens. Representatives serve special interests instead of the people. Lobbyists write the bills that the Representatives pass without reading them. Political Action Committees work to sway local elections to serve their own interests.  This system we have is nothing like what the founders of the country envisioned and is a far cry from what we had prior to the end of WWII. How did it get the way it is? In reaction to struggles overseas with big powers both fascists and communists that caused changes at home and we are still living with the fall out of those social structures and institutionalization today. Capitalism, Fascism and Communism struggled with each other throughout the last century and our system still bears the signs of that struggle which we claim to have won. Gorbachev said to Reagan roughly, I am going to do the worst possible thing to you, I am going to take away your enemy. Zizek talks about how we think we live in an age in which we have overcome ideology, and he rightly says that such an age is the most ideological, because other ideologies do not exist to restrain the dominant ideology from hubris, like  we saw in the Iraqi war for instance.

The Western Tradition even though it has taken over the world and studied foreign cultures remains relatively isolated in itself in as much as it only takes itself seriously. Thus thinkers from other traditions are not well integrated into our overall understanding of intellectual history. Therefore not only are there thinkers not well known because they are not part of our cannon who are from within our tradition, there are many thinkers from other cultures that were colonized who are even more obscure.

So for instance someone from within the tradition that is not known well but should be is Michael Henry who wrote The Essence of Manifestation which is a Critique of Heidegger based on the work of Meister Eckhart. This is just one example. There are myriad lesser lights who did not make the Canon in the Western Tradition that are important.

Someone on the other hand from outside the Western Tradition is Mipham who lived in Tibet in the 1700s I believe who in my opinion is probably the greatest intellectual of all time. He wrote commentaries because he was ordered to by his teacher, but his commentaries are some of the best work done in the Tibetan Tradition. Only now is his work coming to light and being translated by Tibetan scholars. Important in this tradition is Dzong Ka Pa who was probably the ultimate analytical philosopher of enlightenment. Mipham was answering his work and attempting to establish again the true basis of DzogChen from the Nyingma point of view. Tibetan Buddhism is the natural extension of Buddhism as a living tradition which was reabsorb into Hinduism in India. And as the continued living tradition of Buddhism it reached even more amazing heights than were achieved in India and China, but of course had its degenerations as well. But this is an intellectual tradition to be reckoned with because it combined meditation practices leading to higher realms of consciousness with philosophical sophistication.

Another person in the Chinese Buddhist tradition of great import is Fa Tsang who was the greatest of the intellectuals in the Hua Yen tradition. To my mind this tradition is the most sophisticated intellectual tradition on earth ever and their work became the standard interpretation that lay behind Zen Buddhism. In Soto Zen there is Dogen Kaigen who is an important intellectual who wrote the Shobogenzo. important in the formation of Buddhism is of course Nagarjuna who established that Emptiness was part of logic. My favorite Chinese poet who combined the Zen and Taoist traditions is StoneHouse, one of the great masters of the later period of the development of the Chinese Tradition.

In China apart from Buddhism my favorite is Lo Chen Shun who wrote Knowledge Painfully Acquired. He was trying to recover the essence of the original Chinese tradition before the onslaught of Buddhism.

A good book to see all these lesser known philosophers is The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change: Randall Collins: 9780674001879: Amazon.com: Books. Someone made a Visio diagram of the entire tradition mentioned in that book which sought to display precursors and teachers and the chains of influence all over the world and it was really long and intricate and it was amazing to see it when it was printed out, because it has many of those lesser known or unknown characters who played an important role in the development of the world-wide intellectual tradition which due to our insularity are unknown to us.

But I must say that when I look at the Western Cannon the amazing thing is that for the most part within it are those works that should be there, and the good thing about the Western intellectual tradition that many are forgotten or do not make the canon but they are still for the most part available to be read if one so chooses, and the causes of many of these lesser lights get taken up by scholars and their works are translated into English in many cases, but of course so many writers from other languages even in the western tradition are not translated and so their influence on English scholars are then less than they would be otherwise. Since for the most part we are not multi-lingual in our tradition now at least in America much of the richness of the tradition is lost due to the fact that not everything has been translated that would be good to have translated. But things are getting better and more and more important things are being translated into English and because English has become the common language many works are first written in English these days so that they can have wider impact within the overall tradition that is now forming around English as the universal language (for better or worse as the case may be).

My own view which is limited by being only a reader of English is that it is difficult to exhaust what is available in English, but of course I wish I had the facility with language that used to be the standard in European education. But this is a great time to be a scholar such as myself who is limited to English because so many of the works that are important in Europe are being translated into English if not written in English in the first place. And so we are seeing more of the tradition than used to be the case from the vantage point of English. So we are indebted to those scholars who spend their time in the painstaking work of translating important works into English.

Be that as it may, the key is that one can get a pretty wide view of other traditions or the western tradition itself from the vantage point of what is in English now. And so if we are diligent in seeking out these other works in other traditions we can have a much wider view of the intellectual tradition than was available even 50 years ago. And so it is a good thing to do to explore these other resources and not to limit ourselves just to the Western Canon but to explore the lesser lights in our own tradition, but I think more importantly to explore the other traditions that are now available in English and to become as much as possible familiar with the wider intellectual history of humanity which is the context for the Western tradition. When you do that you find that the Western tradition is fairly limited, and is not necessarily the height of human achievement that it believes it is.

The defining characteristic of the philosophers of the Western tradition starting with Thales and the pre-Socratics is Wonder at Nature, and it is no accident that Physics we have today came out of that along with all the other sciences of nature. Socrates sought to change that and turn the interest of philosophy to study human beings, and his work was a major turning point in philosophy, and the legacy of that development was wonder at human nature. If we were to boil that down to a characteristic it would be the capacity for wonder at nature, including human nature.

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.