The Applicability of Philosophy: Being and Time

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
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Time for a more speculative post. Our reflections on esoteric philosophical subjects like ontology and epistemology aren't the most popular because the are of limited interest. But they are the most fun to write - especially since so many "philosophical" thinkers are intellectually gelded by the self-inflicted idiocies of materialism, atheism, and secular transcendence.

OFF THE TRACK— A Blind Leader of the Blind, from The Ram's Horn, 1896 printed in "Blasts" from The Ram's Horn, 1902, Chicago, The Ram's Horn Co.

It's been eye-opening to see how many supposedly deep and intractable problems vanish when one is open to the full range of ontology, rather than running around with fingers in ears bleating "I can't hear you". 

The Ram's Horn was a journal from the 1890s that was already sounding the alarm about materialism and de-moralization in American society. A collection of their cartoons were reprinted in 1902 in Blasts from the Ram's Horn and are available on line. Evil and inversion have been playing a very long game, and "philosophy" hasn't exactly improved.









We've tended to toggle between a few categories, though not as quickly as we'd like. Part of it is life getting in the way, though big time-consuming speculative posts don't help. The slow march through the roots of Western art and the occult posts have been the most common, and we'll get back to them next.

Kip Rasmussen, Melian and Thingol, scene from The Silmarillion.

Then there is are the dives into more positive expressions of the True, the Beautiful and the Good, which up to now have consisted of takes on The Silmarillion. Although that was certainly a worthy cause, as this  painting of a rare happy moment in the story indicated. 

And we aren't done with that - a trusted collaborator has prepared a condensed version of the last Silmarillion post that we will probably share as the next positive post. And others are on the drawing board. Namely the absurdly underrated Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. As always, we just need more time. 











Then there are the speculative ones like the dismantling Postmodernism series that we started with. The first of those were take-downs of some low-hanging academic fruit, but they morphed into serious reflections on ontology, epistemology, and historiography. We recently got back to that with a reflection on time, but before that it had been quite a while. The most recent prior was probably the argument that when you adjust for allegorical mode, the Fallen nature of the material world is reflected in our limits of discernment and entropy (click for part 1 and part 2) We'll refer to these as "the fallen/finite posts".

George Grie, Bridges To The Neverland, 2019, digital art


The Band considers these posts among the most significant things we've ever come up with, but like the more recent post on time, we were relying almost entirely on our own reasoning rather than working off the writings of a philosopher. For that, we'd have to go back to the development of the ontological hierarchy, it's relationship to logos, and alignment with epistemological modes that we used to expose the incoherent idiocy of Postmodern "thought". This post will build off the finite/fallen ones by further considering the ontological nature of mathematics, and the post on time. But it also will examine the applicability of Martin Heidegger to our take on these topics.

Nicolas Poussin, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, 1658, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New  York

We prefer to use this platform for our own speculations and interests, but when dealing with theories of knowledge, semiotic limits, or concepts of Being, it makes sense - it is necessary - to draw on the thinkers who have addressed these questions. Hence our debt to the likes of Aristotle, Aquinas, Peirce, Kant, and others who have provided us with intellectual guidance and good ideas. Standing on the shoulders of giants.




This post is a return to that approach as we reflect further on the nature of time as a defining characteristic of human experience and material reality in general. The interrelated ontological-epistemological hierarchy is our formation, but our thinking has been influenced by the many others who have meditated deeply on questions of time and reality. But we not interested in posing on top of the uncredited work of other people. Especially not those to whom we are indebted in the development of our thought.

The point of the Band is to seek the truth and cut through the darkness of globalist, Postmodernist, satanic lies. 

What matters is clarity, and that starts with honesty in our own activities.









We link to simple sources so others can read further and also assess for themselves where we are coming from. This is not always practical with longer philosophical pieces, so in these cases we introduce the thinker then explain how we are reading and adapting their ideas. We may be wrong at times - everybody is. But if we are, it will be an honest mistake. And we will never claim credit for work that is not ours.

The Band does not consider itself a dealer in philosophy - at least not in the modern academic sense of the term. The original Greek notion of love of knowledge is obviously different, but Philosophy the discipline is a hive of arrogant mid-wits vainly attempting to address questions in ways that their means of address are incapable.

Dire Straits, Industrial Disease, written and produced by Mark Knopfler, Phonogram, 1982.

When it comes to Philosophy or Theology for that matter, we defer to Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits:

"Philosophy is useless, theology is worse"

This is correct because the theological stakes are so much higher, but both disciplines suffer from the same terminal sin of arrogant vanity, or what the Band calls auto-idolatry. 








Both philosophy and theology fall into the same trap: finite human minds declare certainty about things beyond the purview of human minds - like the nature of God or Being. You don't even have to read that again to see that it is inherently impossible, and therefore necessarily false. But it gets worse. They assert their impossible certainties in language, as if transcendental things are somehow reducible to the atomized components of man-made sign systems. It would be more credible to model quantum gravity with Lincoln Logs. 

But philosophy is flypaper for mid-witted "smart" boys who memorize bits of Textbook Learning and drop Philosopher's Names - to use some of our old terms - as a substitute for honesty about the human place in reality. Like this twaddle peddled at the Met gift shop. 

The first sentence is literally claiming to determine the nature of the superset from the subset. A product of cognition can't reach the precondition. We don't have the means to get there by definition, and patience has nothing to do with it. Big letters notwithstanding. 

Hegel was an arch-secular transcendentalist, who believed that Progress! would eventually reach the level of "spiritual" enlightenment through human means. We've seen how that turned out. 









This recursive irrelevance is unfortunate, because the endless parsing of the Lincoln Logs leaves out the one thing philosophy really is useful for - tracing ideas and thought patterns that actually can be applied to real questions.

Applied isn't a random word choice. Applicability is a concept that came up in a Silmarillion post - one that Tolkien used to describe how a fantasy story can simplify and clarify ideas and insights that are applicable to our world. He used it as an alternative to allegory, which is a more limited form of figural representation that stands for subjects in a tight, beat for beat way. Applicability is looser - the story isn't bound to an exact narrative structure, but still makes us aware of real truths by analogy.

The versatility of this concept has interested us - in one post we tried applying it to history rather than fiction and found that it worked pretty well. There is a saying that history doesn't repeat, it echoes. Now extend that to Tolkien's literary relationships and repetition is to allegory as an echo is to applicability. One has to stick to the same same symbolic structure while the other has much more freedom with its analogies.





Obviously the EU and the Soviet Union were different forms of globalist oppression, just as the corruption of the Medieval Church by aristocratic elites is not the same as the corruption of democratic systems by global ones. There are too many differences for strict allegorical repetition -  you have to force it like a cartoon caricature. But applicability is much freer. It highlights patterns and relationships in broad strokes and gives insight and understanding into things in our world without being exactly the same. Echoes rather than repeats.

This post is going to try applicability with philosophy. 

The premise is not to get caught up in the textbook summaries and Philosopher's Names of the smart boys, or the endless dithering over what Panjandrum X really meant in the 6th paragraph of chapter 32 of Dialectical Investigations Y and how it applies to Gasbag A's Nth Transcendental Analytic.  No, that's the fast-track to irrelevance - the same reductive spiral that reduced Philosophy from the "Queen of the Sciences" to whatever corner of the Arts Building that it occupies today.

This isn't really an exaggeration. Consider this "snapshot" into Princeton's Philosophy Dept. in the '80s - supposedly one of the nation's best. The burning debate they chose to highlight was whether to teach the history of philosophy. Presumably the alternative is whatever nonsense Team Gasbag made up at the time. Consider that the 90s added a "bioethicist" that argued newborns aren't sentient, 

Team Gasbag in 1988...

...and Team Gasbag in 2010.

A marginal uptick in diversity and looser dress code didn't do much for the cultural relevance. But the 00s did bring close ties to the lying globalist grievance peddlers known as the University Center for Human Values.








Princeton can coast on prestige and endowment, meaning that the philosophers don't actually have to do anything other than fluff discourse while continually eviscerating intellectual rigor. But if we aim to test and apply general ideas to reality, we don't have that luxury. We actually have to come up with extra-discursive insight that stands on its own without departmental letterhead.

Édouard Manet, The Reader, 1861, oil on canvas, St. Louis Museum of Art

This involves a couple of things. First, books have to be read and understood - not Textbook Learning precises or the malevolent projections of deranged SJWs and NPCs. But they can't be read with the myopic spirit of the typical academic philosopher, who can make a career endlessly spinning the same few sources. 















Applicability means understanding the texts with enough flexibility and extra-discursive erudition to apply them to reality. To take the ideas locked away in a tiny, inconsequential hermetic bubble and bring them into actual relevance. That's the idea anyhow. Let's see if it works.

In this case, looking closely at the relationship between time and material reality through Martin Heidegger - one of the more controversial figures in philosophy and someone often associated with the worst aspects of Modernism.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962.

Rare signed first edition of the canonical English translation of Heidegger's most famous work on sale at a Florida book dealer for $20,000.00. Plus they throw in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

Being and Time was an unfinished project and and Heidegger's first major work. It is also considered his most important, though his later career moved away from it in style and focus.

And the Joan Stambaugh translation, first published in 1996 and revised in 2010, Albany: SUNY Press. Arguable slightly clearer for the less experienced reader, the difference is pretty minor. But it does have leaves on the cover.

The problem is that Heidegger is very difficult to read on account of his constant creation of new terms, convoluted style, and major shift in perspective halfway through his career. And of all his works, Being and Time is probably the most painful. It's even worse in translation, since it can be impossible to pin down his exact nuances in German, let alone English. Stambaugh's biggest advantage is better explanatory notes, but the Band "prefers" Macquarrie and Robinson

Maybe Princeton wanted to do away with the history of philosophy to not have to read him...









Reading these comments, he seems an unlikely choice. But on the other hand, if there is something applicable here, than applicability wins another gold star. And it is our contention that he is very applicable to questions of time and ontology. You just have to get through the turgid prose. Because applicability isn't a point by point summary for its own sake that has to clarify every paragraph. It is an application of ideas to an understanding of reality "outside" those ideas. It is more fluid and general.

So let's set the stage then give Heidegger a few minutes to impress the judges.














First some general observations on time and ontology as we see it. Then we'll try and apply Heidegger's take and see what comes out.


Time complicates the simple ontological hierarchy graphic that came out of our earlier investigations because it has a different relationship to each level.

Ultimate reality can be thought of as super-temporal or above time, in that it is not only "timeless", but it precedes time.Time is sort of like a bubble in ultimate reality - ultimate reality was there "before", is outside of it now, and will be there "after" the end of time. .

Abstract reality is a-temporal. It is unchanged by the passing of time, but is within creation. If creation ends, abstract reality goes with it.

Material reality is temporal. It is defined by movement, change, and decay in time, and is inconcievable without it. Our temporal natures are so definitive that is is impossible to really conceptualize a super-temporal or eternal state.




But despite being fundamental to our experience of material reality to the point that questions like "what time is it" are ordinary to the point of banality, time is pretty mysterious. We experience it as predictable and uniform and can measure its passage as precisely as anything else in this blurry world. Yet we don't really know what it is in itself - or time qua time as the philosophers say.

Math and physics suggest that time is not as uniform and consistent as it appears to us empirically:

This formula shows how time moves differently in reference frames defined by differing velocities. This is called time dilation and allows us to calculate how time behaves differently on bodies moving at different speeds.








Time dilation is fascinating, but it doesn't tell us what time is either - just that is behaves differently than appears to direct experience. This is because the square of the velocity modifier is divided by the square of the speed of light, and at the sort of speeds we naturally encounter, the resulting change is too small to perceive. This only becomes relevant as the difference in relative velocity becomes large enough to still be significant, even when divided by the speed of light. Like in science fiction stories, where what the limits of engineering and material science can be ignored...

It's why it's both pathetic and comical when losers try and pretend space opera sci fi is somehow "more realistic" than fantasy. Actually picture the materials and power plant needed for this sort of velocity. And what the acceleration would do to the people, objects, and surrounding space. Then there's the time dilation. Magical transport is actually more credible as a plot device.


... or in the mathematical allegories of physicists and mathematicians:

Here's an abbreviated derivation of the time dilation equation. 

Click for a more thorough derivation with more explanatory graphics.

















The Band considered mathematical allegories in the Fallen/Finite world posts and observed that they have an interesting relationship to the ontological hierarchy.

Math itself seems to belong to abstract reality, since it describes ideal, infinitely precise, unchanging conditions that do not exist in the material world. That included measurements with uncertainties of exactly 0, imaginary numbers, and entities that aren't "imaginary" in mathematical terms but are physically impossible, like negative numbers and true infinity.

At the same time, mathematical symbolism is rooted in quantity, which was "discovered" through empirical observation of physical entities and recorded with arbitrary, man-made sign systems. 

Counting is the easiest form, but here we need to quantify mass as well.  

It works both ways: once we have a mathematical system, its calculations can be applied back to material reality in reliable ways. Like any number of word problems all the way up to complex equations.




So we have to account for something that is adjectivally present in the material, but able to move into a realm of abstract perfection that the material can't express directly. Using the terms of the ontology hierarchy graphic, we could say that math straddles the divide between the material and abstract levels - empirically observable quantification elevated to an abstract logic-based system with perfect repeatablity, precision, and changelessness that can't exist in material experience.

This abstract/material nature makes perfect sense when we consider that the connective axis across all levels is Logos. Logos manifests in the abstract as logic, and math is symbolic logic in its most refined form. The perfect precision and clarity of math represents the nature of abstract idealism.

Likewise Logos manifests in the material as the natural order - physical realities and patterns that are consistent and predictable, if more blurry and entropic than abstract ideals. Like patterns in the weather or the workings of genetic inheritance.





When math shows patterns and relationships that are unclear or too complex for direct observation, we are "seeing" the axis of Logos crossing from the abstract to the material - from Logic to natural order.

You can see this with time. Simple quantification and periodization measures it in a way that aligns with material conditions. But theoreticians can model scenarios where time does empirically odd  things under conditions that are materially impossible. Does it matter if time passes differently on a spaceship to Aplha Centuri going .9 the speed of light when that will literally never transpire for a host of materially real reasons?

But time dilation does appear to happen under conditions that are impossible for pre-technological human experience but not for modern material science, instrumentation, and engineering.

One example - the Hafele–Keating experiment that used cesium beam atomic clocks to note small deviations between the passing of time on planes and the ground. This has been repeated, though it is worth noting that the difference is not observable without instruments of this sensitivity. 










This is a great example of math straddling of the abstract / material line. To repeat: it can show patterns and relationships that are unclear or too complex for direct observation. You wouldn't notice time dilation on an airplane without math to predict it and modern instrumentation to confirm. It is not surprising that the direct experience of the material world as seen through a glass darkly with limits of discernment and the pure abstract logic of mathematics represent time differently.

We noted in the Finite/Fallen posts that ontology operates on an sliding scale, where the "higher" you go, you gain truth-value but lose direct accessibility. Because human experience and Truth/ultimate reality are opposite poles, proximity to one means distance from the other. When the math is mapping onto empirical observation it clarifies for us, but as it moves into pure abstraction, it leaves our experiential world behind. We can't experience abstractions directly by definition - they're abstract - but can only access them metaphorically, through semiotic allegory.

This is the key to the fake physics of sci fi time travel. The easiest way to think of it is that it takes the full range of mathematical abstraction and pretends it's all as applicable to material existence as basic quantification. It collapses the differentiation between semiotic/metaphorical and empirical/material, and turns straddling two states into one.



One might say that the distinction between empirical or material and abstract or mathematical corresponds with - or at least tends towards - a subjective - objective one. With the empirical understanding of the material world relying on personal observations of visible reality and the mathematical being more impersonal and constant. The problem with this is that both the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity have limits of discernment, because neither can bring us to Truth. Because Truth is a quality of ultimate reality and that lies outside empiricism or logic.

Gustave Doré & Kalki, color modification of Doré's Dante Alighieri and Beatrice Portinari gazing into the Empyrean Light of 1867, from Dante's Paradiso

Neither the subjective empirical observations of Dante or Beatrice or the objective mathematical of perspective can see the ultimate reality. Since neither material nor abstract reality reach Truth, why is it necessary to choose which account of time is "correct"? 

Embrace the power of "and" - time exhibits different properties under different conditions. Subjectively, it's material and consistent - the conclusions of the physicists are not directly evident to the senses. Objectively it is relative - the evidence of the senses is inconsistent with the mathematical models. Why can't we grasp two levels at once?



It is a characteristic of human vanity that the fullness of ontology and the richness of reality have to collapse into a single semiotic - as if linguistic reductionism is a measure of truth. There is a reason why we call it Flatland. It's myopic and self-limiting when you think it through. Which is probably the point, considering the extent to which modern secular transcendence involves making man feel ontologically inconsequential.

As an aside, putting the arbitrary linguistic expression over the complexity of reality is the basis of Postmodernism. It would like if we looked at our ontological hierarchy graphic and decided that since we diagrammed it that way, we are actually claiming that the material, abstract, and ultimate are literally stacked on top of each other in a vertical spatial relationship. Time is what it is, regardless of how we describe it. If our frames of reference can't capture it fully, the problem is with our frames of reference. Not the imbecilic Postmodern notion that things we can't articulate clearly don't exist. We do beat it like a dead horse, but every time it comes up we are bowled over by how retarded it actually is. The popularity is truly unfathomable. 

Salvador Dali, Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion, 1954, 

If time  appears differently under different conditions, perhaps that's because those conditions involve different modes of describing and understanding the reality around us.









But if we are going to consider time as manifesting differently according to ontological level, we need to be clearer about how that would work. And that brings us closer to the applicability of philosophy. Go back to the diagram and add in time so we can take up the differences between what we are calling super-temporal, a-temporal, and temporal.

In the last time post, we noted that despite their differences, neither abstract nor ultimate reality were subject to the movement and changes of time that we see in the material world. They are timeless and outside of time respectively. 

Mathematics shows a different "time" than we perceive materially, but does so with an abstract symbolic logic that is itself timeless. Time is relative. The mathematical rules that show this are not.

Only material reality is time-bound, that is defined by change, causality, and movement. 






The movement of time is essential to the nature of the material world. Referring back to our finite/fallen posts, both entropy and the Fall require temporally change to even be possible. Human experience is also defined by time, because we are all born at one moment, live our tale of years, then die. This finitude - this finite span of years - is one of our most fundamental characteristics. Just think how much total time and energy has been spent thinking about, preparing for, fearing, and resisting death. Our finite lifespans limit our discernment, our capacity for knowledge, our range of experiences, and make our understanding of the world subjective by necessity.

Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, 1st version, 1880, Kunstmuseum Basel

It's a material endpoint for all of us that we can't see past empirically.

Ans a note on applicability: Heidegger makes a similar case about the definitive nature of death in Being and Time, just way less clearly.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Regina Angelorum, 1900, oil on canvas, Petit Palais, Paris

Finitude is what puts universals out of reach, and why God qua God is so infinitely beyond us. The only way he can even reveal his presence is through some sort of temporal accommodation, whether theophany or scripture. Jesus is the perfect example - the Logos made flesh. That is, divinity entering into time, with a birthday, life, and death. In other words, He had to accommodate us because we can't reach Him.

Bouguereau was a technical genius and captures the divine nature of Jesus with his knowing, mature expression.

















In the most general sense, Heidegger's ontology is compatible. He doesn't refer to God or ultimate reality, because he isn't dealing with the creation of the world. His notion of Being is the ontological predicate that makes it possible for us to conceptualize entities - small-b beings - or even frame the question "what is Being?". And as the title of his most famous work Being and Time hints at, our existence as human beings in an interaction between the timelessness of Being and our limited, time-bound understanding. Being irrupting into time.

The fatal flaw in Heidegger's account is the intellectual constipation known as "atheism". A system of "thought" so moronic that it considers creation ex nihilo more sensible than causality. That criticized those with faith about ultimate reality with impossible fake certainty about ultimate reality. And may be correlate with mental illness.









Heidegger was raised Catholic and drifted to Protestantism before becoming a delusional self-idolator. This may be where the comparability between his ontology and ours came from. Had he remained Christian, he could access this mysterious ontological grounding of Being darkly, through faith. But he falls into the typical vanity of secular transcendence - that his inconsequential time-bound mortal intellect could possibly grasp ultimate reality, and that that could be spelled out in language.

Consider our ontological hierarchy. The boundaries are not hard - we saw how mathematics crosses between material and abstract. 

But note how Logos runs through the whole thing in an unbroken thread, manifesting in an appropriate way on each level. And in an appropriate way includes temporal state.

Ladislav Zaborsky, Supper at Emmaus, 1990, oil on canvas

At the ultimate level of God, it is the Logos of the Gospel of John - God the Son, the second hypostasis of the Trinity who we are told was with God and was God in the beginning. We are not going to say more on that, since the nature of divine relationships that precede the temporal universe are not penetrable. If the Bible doesn't elaborate further, that's good enough for us.

Luca della Robbia, Dialectic (or Philosophy), 1437, stone relief, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence

At the abstract level it is logic - the faculty that allows humans to extrapolate insights and observations into relationships that transcend the vicissitudes of time-bound material life. Like mathematical formulas, the necessity of causality, and the logical impossibility of atheism.

This carving was originally on the bell tower of the Florence Cathedral in the Renaissance, but was moved indoors to protect against the elements. It depicts dialectic by showing Plato and Aristotle arguing.

Detail of a poster of Gregor Mendel, 

On the material level, logos appears as natural order - simple physical truths, like the laws of nature or genetic reality. Mendel was an Augustinian friar who discovered rules of heredity and is considered the father of modern generics. 

That genes can mutate, and transmission has random elements is the uncertain, changing nature of material reality. Doesn't change that genetic inheritance is where our biological natures come from.

Because it extends across the entire hierarchy, Logos is the basis of moral reasoning -  the application of faith and logic to the uncertainties of the material world in reliable and coherent ways. Just take Christianity as a set of religious practices. It is socially and culturally dependent in its forms - ancient vs.  modern - but rooted in consistent dogmatic and moral principles. Applying these to different circumstances in meaningful ways requires a rational faculty that can reach beyond the here and now to some degree.

Material realities keep changing because they're temporal. Abstract and ultimate ones don't because they're a-temporal and super-temporal. Morality is where they meet.

John Pettie, Fixing the Site of an Early Christian Altar, 19th century, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries
They don't look or live anything like modern Christians because culture is material, therefore temporal, and therefore keeps changing. But the ultimate reality they know by faith and abstract principles known by logic don't. Understanding of these may evolve - material applications - our imperfect understanding had no impact on what they actually are. This means that the mechanics of moral reasoning faith and logic applied to the material - don't.


Earlier posts have explained how healthy material-level culture is formed by a bottom-up process - groups of people with a shared identity shaped by the same organic pressures and environments. But morality is top-down if it is going to be meaningful, because it needs an objective grounding or else it's just arbitrary authoritarianism. That's what we have now - Postmodernism is totally relative, so morality consists of who has the power to force their vision on everyone else.

Heidegger goes the opposite way. Because he denies Logos, his reasoning has no pathway for Truth  to flow into. He sets out to account for Being from observation - or a particular philosophical approach to observation. What his predecessor Husserl called transcendental phenomenology, modified by Heidegger's own take on Aristotle. So some explanations are needed.

In plain English, phenomenology is a philosophical approach that sidesteps theoretical questions of consciousness or how we can know and relate to things in the world around us. Think of those irritating questions like "how do you know the table is really real?".  It claims that our awareness of things - of phenomena - are given into our consciousness directly, through the senses, before we are even conscious enough to question how. The way a baby can pull itself upright with the side of its crib before it can formulate thoughts about standing or the nature of cribs.

In more technical terms, it investigates the idea of what is called a priori knowledge. This means "from the earlier", and traditionally refers to things we can know without direct experience. Things deduced from general principles. But Husserl argued that we have experience of phenomena before we have the reason to conceptualize them. 

Perceiving the cup is prior to any understanding or interpretation of what the cup is or does. We have to start with raw impressions of reality before moving to exceptions, principles, deductions.






Transcendental phenomenology means getting to those primordial experiences that come first rather than looking to establish "first principles" from reason or logic. If Cartesian philosophy would argue "I think therefore I am", the transcendental phenomenologist would reply that the concepts of "I" and "think" aren't basal, but dependent on prior, pre-reflective experience. It's the raw impressions that are a priori - and not generalized principles or concepts. These actually derive from the raw impressions, and come later, or a posteriori.

You could say phenomemological understanding is more inductive and not be completely off. 

See how much sense everything makes when you understand the the epistemology of faith?






The problem with this argument for Heidegger is that it doesn't explain how this phenomenological awareness is given. Not the biology of the senses, but the thought processes by which the phenomena are recognizable to us as phenomena. To extend our example - how does the pre-linguistic, pre-rational awareness of the crib get into the baby's head in the first place? How can it realize or conceptualize that this is something it can pull itself up on?

This leads into Heidegger's concept of Being and beings. Small-b beings or entities are things in the world like the baby or crib. But if we can understand and distinguish the different natures of things/beings the way the phenomenologists claim, there has to be some sort of backdrop or ground that informs them and through which they become intelligible to us.  This is capital-B Being.

Beings are anything we might encounter in the world - the phenomena of phenomenology. Being is what allows beings to "be".











Heidegger famously asked Leibniz' question "why is there something rather than nothing?" For Leibniz, God was the obvious answer, but Heidegger was pretending he had to answer from material observation. Which led him to conclude Husserl's "transcendental" phenomemology was a posteriori to some ultimate ground.

The study of that is the study of Being. It's sort of like ultimate reality in that it is the ultimate ontological prior that makes beings meaningful as beings but it isn't an entity itself that you find or identify. It's the precondition that makes them identifiable.

It's impossible to really illustrate, but we can try a metaphor. Without "something" to make them stand out as individuals, beings have no individual being. Capital-B Being is what does that. The problem with an illustration is that whatever depicts them as standing out or individuals is also a thing. A background, the sky, a light box, whatever. Being isn't also a thing - it's an ontological precondition, not a relational object. It's conceptual, if we recognize that conceptualizing it is treating it like a thing - like a being - which it isn't. 

Ontological Lite-Brite as a poor analogy. There is a reason why a lot of people dislike Heidegger. 






Even this attempt at explanation is convoluted - let's oversimplify for clarity. What he is wondering is how are understanding, consciousness, meaning possible? Husserl argues we are capable of intention because we are conscious of objects. Heidegger wonders how.

This is where the reading of Aristotle comes in. What he takes from Aristotle is that we don't really know beings in themselves - qua beings - but through some activity or action that they do. To use Heidegger's language, we know them by how they "present themselves" to us. This is clearer to represent.

William Edward Norton, Sailing Boats in the Mist, oil on canvas, ~1900, private collection

We are conscious of the nature of a boat because it floats and sails. We are aware of the nature of a knife because it cuts. Things become intelligible through action, or more precisely, instrumentality. 

We know them through what they do or how we use them and not some pure ontological essence shining through like Plato's Forms.





So Being isn't something we can conceptualize directly, but we can identify how it operates. Capital-B Being distinguishes the nature of beings through the expression of their natures in action. Not what they "are" in an absolute ontological sense, but what we take them for, or how they become present to us through "use". This is where it's important to understand the difference between "ordinary" and "philosophic" language.

Edward Henry Potthast, The Village Carpenter, 1898, oil on canvas, private collection

Heidegger isn't asking if you can point out a hammer on a carpenter's workbench. That's basic denotative language. He wants to know how the very concept of "hammer" can be known to us in the first place. Where the idea of a hammer as opposed to something else - say paperweight - came from so that the linguistic definition was possible. Think of it in essential terms. 

Implicit in any definition of "hammer"  is the notion of what a hammer does. Hammering. Suppose you drive a tent peg into the ground with a rock. You'd say you used the rock to hammer the tent peg. Used it like a hammer. Why? Because hammering is the essential condition that defines the word. We don't build concepts of Platonic ideals, we build them off how they work, what they do, why we use them. Hammers hammer. The idea of a higher, perfect form of hammer comes after. It is abstracted from the class of objects that do the act of hammering. The expression of nature through action. 





When you think about it, everything has this aspect of what it does, how we know it, how it makes itself present at the root of its identity.

If you squint, you can start to see the connection to the distinctions of the ontological hierarchy. We don't have pure knowledge of things-in-themselves because our consciousness is limited to temporal material reality. Being is a weird notion of ultimate reality but that's because of the pretense that you can reason your way there from phenomena. You can't. But set aside the flawed epistemology and it's clear that that which that underwrites all understanding - makes reality intelligible - is beyond us in an ultimate reality sort of way. This is like Kant's nouminal level in an earlier post.

George Inness, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1867, oil on canvas, private collection

We are in a shifting, changing, time-bound world defined by finite perspectives and inevitable death. A Christian connects to the nouminal by faith. But without that, we are stuck with how things make themselves present - contextual and contingent definitions that can never reach the essence of things. There is no other access.

Perhaps the easiest way to think of this Aristotelian modification of Husserl is grammatical. Being as it is accessible to us isn't a noun but a verb - or more accurately a gerund. It isn't something we can grasp in itself, but as a process. Be-ing rather than being-in-itself. This is what Heidegger means by making itself present - we can't grasp things in themselves, only how they operate in the finite world of our experience. Sorry for this, but the Being of beings is be-ing.

The problem for Heidegger is that by his reading, Aristotle is too fragmented. It explains how Being could act in the world, but there is no sense of unity - just endless clusters of beings coming into view. This is consistent with Aristotelian causality and it gives Heidegger a mechanism to get past Husserl's claim that things are just given to consciousness. But it needs something to tie it together into a universal account of how humans can become conscious of beings.

19th century carpenter’s workshop & original tools, Weald and Downland Museum, Singleton, Chichester, England

All these tools are conceptualized through some sort of usage or purpose. But what "is" it that allows us to recognize them through use in the first place? What is the a priori precondition that makes consciousness of their beings possible? 

It's a better definition then Husserl's but it doesn't get to the fundamental basis of human understanding. 




For Heidegger, it is time, or more specifically our condition of being in time - what the Band's been calling temporality - that is the underlying condition behind all our consciousnesses of individual be-ings. The common factor is that their different essential natures that are beyond us in themselves make themselves present to us in time. Which makes sense - the "ing" in beings implies action and action is temporal my nature. That's the gerund / essence distinction - Husserl wants us to be conscience of "things", but we aren't. And that opens the way to ontology. Because if you want to understand how we become conscious of anything, you need to address how our interaction with everything takes place in time.

Being is timeless but human consciousness of its effects are temporal. Becoming conscious of phenomena is an interaction between the timeless - Being - and things presenting themselves in time.

His consideration of time in ontology is why the Band was interested in testing the applicability of Heidegger. We've come to realize that temporality is a defining characteristic of material existence and that in order to have a coherent ontological hierarchy, we need to account for transitions from the timeless to the time-bound. Heidegger's very different outlook on the world means that his reflections will come from different angles, and we were interested to see if they reach applicable conclusions. 

Let's see:



The unique ability of humans to ponder being and consciousness - to connect this interplay of temporal and timeless leads to Heidegger's most famous neologism: Dasein or Being-in-the-world. That is, the being of humans - what it is that defines us through action or making ourselves present. And the action that makes us conscious of ourselves as beings is consciousness of ourselves as beings. What defines us is that we can form these questions about being and Being and are aware on some level of how it is that we do so. Or at least that we can do so. And as we just argued, becoming conscious of anything is temporal. It happens in time.

VintPrint, Fantasy, Clock, Statue, Light, poster

So our fundamental nature - like any being - is temporal. The difference is that we are self-aware, but that self-awareness itself happens in time. Dasein describes our limited, time-bound consciousness of Being as it unfolds temporally. We can contemplate it in a unique way, but can't get to its essence. We are literally Being-in-time.





The timeless is beyond us. The best we can get are temporal unfoldINGS of Being in time. How else can the eternal enter the temporal? There's obviously more to it. Part of this exercise was to see if we could make Heidegger intelligible, and readers will have to be the judge of that. But we can draw some applicable conclusions from what we do have.

The first is that the subjectivity of human experience is implicit.

Hans Dahl, Fjordlandskap, undated

Dasein is finite - we are born and die, creating beginning and end points to our lives. Perfect understanding is impossible because we don't have time. This means we will always be dependent on perspective and context. 






There is a distinction between physical time - which exists outside  of our awareness - and meaning in time or subjective time. Time marches on in the manner understood by physicists regardless of us. But for it to be meaningful - for it to create the condition where Being unfolds into consciouness - Dasein is necessary. We are necessary.

Ivan Shishkin, A Fallen Tree, 1879, oil on canvas, private collection

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to see it, it takes the same amount of physical time to hit the ground. It just doesn't mean anything because no one is conscious of the fall to give it meaning. The time is physical. The meaningful consciousness of temporal actions - of Being unfolding in time - needs Dasein.

And Dasein - being-in-time - leads him to his own versions of past, present, and future. This would be one of the many digressions that we are overlooking except for the terms he uses. Those make it applicable, in ontology and time from the opposite direction from ours way.

The past is defined by being thrown or thrownness - we are thrown into a preexisting world that shapes our limited understanding. This is the inherent subjectivity of Dasein and what led to critics accusing him of "cultural relativism". As if there was a way for our perspective or our culture not to be relative. The whole point of Being and Time is that meaning needs a condition to make it mean - it is relational from the jump. Morons. Anyhow.

Henry Bacon, Pay Attention, late 19th century, oil and canvas, private collection

This relates to the Band's emphasis on the importance of naturally-forming organic cultures to our well-being. If what we are thrown into - family, society, nation - determines how we be-in-the-world - then others in the same situation will most share our our frame of reference. They will be most relateable, empathetic, and compatible. 

This is obviously empirically - Heidegger just reiterates this truth from a different angle. The fundamental nature of a finite being in time. 

He uses a few terms for the present - the best are fallen or fallenness and discourse. Seriously. He doesn't use them in a Christian way - too blind - or a Postmodern way - too early - but the way he does use them is applicable to those contexts.

Fallen to Heidegger is fallen away from an awareness of Being into distraction - fascination is his word - with the material world for its own sake. This rejection of ontology for materialism is as close to an atheist version of the Fall that you can get. Empty, cat chasing a laser pointer obsession with stuff and entertainment while ignoring truth and meaning in your existence.




Discourse is language or some other mode of communication how reference is articulated. How we interact superficially in the state of fallenness. Like a Postmodernist he differentiates between discourse and Being, but utterly rejects the Postmodern conclusion. The Postmodernist pretends that the difference between language and meaning means that there is no meaning outside language. Heidegger concludes the opposite.

 The Postmodernist pretends language preceeds meaning and that there is no meaning outside of it. 

Heidegger would call discourse a projection that ties and limits us to the fascinations of the material world and obscures the awareness of Being in Dasein. 

One is realistic, the other an idiotic satanic inversion.

Future is defined by projection - expectations and anticipations that come from projecting the past and present forward. The future is always the future of the present - we can't experience it directly, only imagine it from our current, subjective position in time. By the time we get there to see how off we were, it isn't the future anymore.

Poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, directed by Stanley Kubrick

This is really clear when we look at old futurecasting. Like 2001 from the perspective of where people thought Progress! was going back in the 60s. The Band remembers 2001 - the year, not the film. It didn't look like this. 

It's not just the stagnation of engineering. Nothing dates futurecasting like some huge unforeseen paradigm-shifting change. 70's and 80s projections are so terrible because they missed the internet. 

As Heidegger would say projection of the past we are thrown into and the fallen present that fascinates us.










Physical time may be sequential, but human time - the time of Dasein - is more intertwined. Because we are temporal, our perspective keeps changing. We are always in the present - contingent on a lengthening past and projecting with a shifting sense of the future. The interaction of thrownness, projection, and fallen-ness create a limited, fluid, and subjective consciousness of temporality, the meaning of which can never be grasped in its fullness.

And his account of subjectivity is also applicable. It highlights the necessary connection between our temporal and material finitude. That what we call the limits of discernment in a fallen/finite world is a product of our experience of time as well as space. Physics tells us that the two are intrinsically related, but we perceive them as different. Dasein gives us an argument that doesn't rely on mathematical abstraction or complex instrumentation, or even awareness of God. So two big applicabilities:

that our ability to make meaning is temporally and spatially limited

and 

that faith is absolutely necessary when it comes to knowledge of ultimate reality. 

Some have attacked him as being a relativist, because Dasein is temporal and contingent. But if we do what he does and come from a purely material perspective, we are also temporally limited, subjective, and relativistic in our understanding. That's all we can hope for in such a frame of reference. And this brings us right back to the absurdity of secular transcendence - that finite human mind can directly access transcendent truths through its own power. 

Only the auto-idolatrous retards larding useless departments could think that "Philosophy" can reach a transparent of Truth qua Truth through the linguistic equivalent of Lincoln Logs. For the nth time, we can only know Truth through faith. Even the Bible tells us we see it as through a glass darkly - what hope does a dude who willfully limits his epistemological range have?






Heidegger's "relativism" is actually more honest than the usual Flatlander, because if we are temporal by nature and can only access Being through it's limited accommodation in time, then Being qua Being must be outside of time.

To which a Christian would reply,  Bingo.

Gabriel Loire, Glory Window, 1976, Chapel of Thanksgiving, Dallas. 

More applicability. We know that the ontological hierarchy includes temporal and timeless elements bound together by Logos. The problem is conceptualizing how this works. The mechanics by which the timeless comes into time. Heidegger visualizes it as an opening - perhaps irruption is the more accurate term - in any case, some finite expression of being projecting into the material. Even this is still pretty esoteric, but mapping the relationship makes it easier to come up with a clearer illustration.

Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland, 1st edition, London, Seely & Co., 1884

The way to picture is is like the story Flatland. Not in the way the Band uses it to describe how secularists, globalists, and other intellectual geldings pretend the fullness of reality can be compressed into material existence, but the actual book. This clever piece that attempted social satire with animate shapes of different dimensions and is much more interesting for the representation of polytope geometry. 

When an entity from a higher dimension - say a 3D sphere - visits a lower one - like 2D Flatland - only that number of the higher-dimensional entity's dimensions are visible. The sphere appears as a flat circle in Flatland, while the 2D square looks like a line in 1D Lineland. 

Still  from Flatland: The Movie, 2007, directed by Dano Johnson and Jeffrey Travis

The analogy with Being works because (n-1) dimensions of an n-dimensional figure isn't a conventional "fraction". It's the elimination of the entirety of the other dimension. A pure 1D line has precisely 0% of the a 2D figure's area. If it is expressed as a fraction, it is literally 1/∞, although a bounded one. A finite portion of a relatively infinite whole.

Being irrupting into temporal reality through Dasein would look a bit like that if the infinite was boundless and the visible portion was a temporal impression rather than a spatial one.

More applicability. If we set aside Heideigger's weird language and atheist delusion, he makes a case why ultimate reality in its fullness can't enter the finitude of a temporal world. And once again, working up from the material and complimenting the Band's Christian ontology.

Platytera Icon, 17th century, fresco, Archangel Michael Church, Benche, Macedonia

Even God had to incarnate, which is not a limitation of His, but of ours.

That ultimate reality which gives us and our world meaning is only known instrumentally, and that means in time. That sounds familiar...

That's enough. We can leave Heidegger after his "Turn" for another time. His later work does make some applicable observations about the nature of truth, technology, art, and thought, but this post has done what it set out to do. That is, use Heidegger to test the applicability of philosophy. The must useful insights have to do with the temporal nature of material reality and the inaccessibility of ultimate reality to finite intellects. It isn't as if we didn't know this - we worked out ontological hierarchy diagram some time ago. But it's interesting to see someone approach timelessness and temporality from the opposite direction and reach the same basic conclusions.

We accept faith and see the limits of time-bound human understanding. 

He rejects faith and sees the limits of time-bound human understanding. 

Looks like there are limits.








We see how subjectivity and cultural determination are also intrinsic consequences of this limit, and not something that can be overcome with "education", "sensitivity", or "progress". And his critics reveal the arrogant secular transcendence that poisoned modern philosophy. Dasein is a fine mechanism for thinking about the interaction of the temporal and timeless, even if the term is a bit clunky. But that's ok. We don't need his language to appreciate how the human brings a tiny slice of the eternal into a temporal package.

Body and soul works just fine.

Thomas Cole, The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of His Journey (study for The Cross and the World), 1846-1848, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum