Robert Tulip wrote:Like Someplace to be Flying, Carlos opens a hidden reality. The Yacqui ontology of the tonal and the nagual maps to Heidegger’s distinction of being and nothing.
I am not sure I would say they open hidden realities as much as either invent them or more exactly, expose metaphorical connections that exist unconsciously and with the aid of the human narrative imagination and our tendency toward projection and anthropomorphization, act as if we have opened a previously hidden reality. Regardless, though, it is one hell of a fun ride.
Robert Tulip wrote:Carnap said there is no meaning outside science, rejecting Heidegger’s openness to existential anxiety.
Ceasar is a prime number: Carnap's argument with Heidegger was that he used language in ways that were literally meaningless. That is the sentence "Ceasar is a prime number" is neither true nor false; it is meaningless. Carnap argues that Heidegger's logic was based on a number of statements like this and so his argument is linguistically meaningless. I don't think that is the same thing as saying there is no meaning outside science. However, while I agree that many of Heidegger's statements in that particular lecture are meaningless in this way, they are meaningful if read like one reads poetry. I can create a whole series of images based on the sentence "Ceasar is a prime number" that create new ways of perceiving the all the things that are metaphorically connected to "ceasar" and "prime number" in my head. So I can gather meaning from the sentence even though it is also meaningless. This points to another problem with language and with Heidegger's use of it that Carnap points out...that the same apparent word can carry very different meanings. Like Being. The fact that we can manipulate it to be a noun like Tree and make the connection that maybe Being and Tree are linked, and get a new way of perceiving the world from that, doesn't make Being existant, nor even if it is existant, does it make it a noun-like entity like a Tree.
And I think you can have openness to existential anxiety without making category mistakes "real" even if those very mistakes are meaning producers.
Having said that, I do think that Carnap does not go far enough in trying to understand what Heidegger is trying to do.
Robert Tulip wrote:For Heidegger, openness to anxiety is the source of care, anticipating the future through the context of concern arising from being with others. It almost suggests an evolutionary sense of mutual aid, as discussed by de Waal from Kropotkin.
I agree about this as a possible sorce of care (sorge). And I agree that there is an evolutionary tale to be told here.
Robert Tulip wrote:The abyss for Heidegger is a problematic thing – almost the terror of the unknown. Carnap’s assertion that human rationality can stare down the abyss of being has a certain arrogance, claiming a level of understanding for empirical science that it does not really possess. These positions seem to me to illustrate the conflict between linear and cyclic theories of time. Carnap interprets time as linear progress, while Heidegger sees cyclic return. Heidegger’s effort to enframe the cosmos in the fourfold of earth and sky, man and gods indicates his sympathy to an older cyclic method of thought, attuned to the natural rhythms and harmonies of the universe.
I'm not sure what I think about this terror of the abyss. I have written stuff on other writers who contemplate the abyss with existential terror. I have a hard time understanding it. I'm thinking specifically of Simone Weil at the moment. I think that with Weil, the fact that she read the abyss as "real" - that is, as a noun-like entity - was part of the source of her terror. By constituting it that way, the nothing becomes (like Heidegger says) a counter-part of being. Just as the devil is a counterpart of the god. Of course the human body responds to that with terror. But if one doesn't constitute it that way, if the abyss is more like the space between particulate matter, then the body doesn't respond the same way, fear is not generated, but rather a kind of awe, and so looking at the abyss becomes something profound but not impossible to sustain.
For me, this is part of what sorge is - how we constitute our attachment to the things in themselves. It matters what stories we tell to explain the world because they constrain how we experience our lives. So we get a choice - the abyss or the space between (and myriad other possibilities.) I think both Carnap and Heidegger missed the choice-bit of experiential meaning, although Heidegger did have lots to say about doingness.