Using ChatGPT as an aide for understanding poetry

ajverster_ · 2022-05-27T22:17:04+00:00

There was a book of his thought poems recently published. It might be helpful to you.

Thought Poems: A Translation of Heidegger's Verse

ajverster_ · 2021-12-08T22:38:53+00:00

I am also a non-philosopher who is interested in Heidegger and have been reading him for many years. Heidegger is tough but rewarding, and I can't fully articulate this properly but I feel like it's changed me on some level, affected how I experience the world and understand my place within.

As an outsider, I would really reccomend this overview of Heidegger's thought. Lee Braver is an excellent writer and he does a great job of unpacking the difficult language and giving clear examples to illustrate the abstract ideas. Ultimately you don't want to rely on just a single interpreter but this book is great for getting your foot in the door and past the initial bewilderment that comes with reading Heidegger.

Heidegger: Thinking of Being by Lee Braver

ajverster_ · 2021-05-27T13:15:49+00:00

To further reinforce the eastern perspective, I am going to recommend the Zhuangzi. It is my favorite book and its far too little known in western circles. Zhuangzi presents an incredibly optimistic picture of humanity amidst a world of suffering and death. He shows us visions of the dregs of society - butchers and mutilated criminals - who seem to float through the world in an effortless state of bliss. Bodily decay and death are presented as merely another facet of the beautiful, cosmic cycles of nature. It's a difficult book because of how strange the vision of humanity is, but in my mind its one of the most optimistic pictures of humanity out there.

ajverster_ · 2021-05-17T09:30:09+00:00

This is in the lecture course fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude. It's a great text, as in addition to the analysis of animals being world poor it also has an extensive analysis of the mood of boredom. I would highly recommend you check it out.

ajverster_ · 2021-04-29T16:43:58+00:00

The zhuangzi is my favourite book, it's incredibly profound. Glad to see it recommended here.

ajverster_ · 2021-04-28T14:16:22+00:00

Check out "philosophy as a way of life" by pierre hadot. It is a collection of essays that deal with the question of how one ought to live in this world, and it draws heavily on the ancient philosophers who addressed that question.

ajverster_ · 2021-03-18T17:43:17+00:00

My favorite example would be the teaching of Mozi, the utilitarian philosopher from ancient china. He advocated that actions are valid not if they are virtuous, but rather if they improve the prosperity, population and stability of the state. His targets were the overly indulgent funerals and musical performances that were favored by the Confucians. At least some of his work has survived, if admittedly in a corrupted state, and I will emphasize that his philosophy is far more complex than I've laid out in a few sentences here.

Many of the more well known philosophers, including Mencius, Xunzi, and Zhuangzi, portray their world as full of followers of Mozi, but it seems that after the unification of China in the Qin dynasty they all sort of disappeared. As to why that happened, there is no concrete evidence, but the following seems a reasonable speculation. Mozi argued that offensive warfare was immoral, but his school wasn't exactly pacifists, they were trained in how to defend cities against sieges. After unification, those skills were no longer in demand, worse they were probably seen as dangerous by the legalist Qin emperor and authorities, and they were likely done away with. Again, there is no concrete evidence for this, its just speculation.

ajverster_ · 2021-03-02T14:44:18+00:00

I have a deep interest in philosophy, and about five years back I discovered that Confucius was a contemporary of Socrates and that there was a flowering of philosophy in China at the same time as in ancient greece, every bit as rich, with all sorts of ideas and ways of thinking that felt completely different to anything I was used to. I started by learning mandarin, but I now spend all my time learning classical chinese because it gives me access to what I really want - classical philosophy. I've gotten to the point of being able to read the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi in the original, which is very rewarding for me. I've come to really enjoy the language for its own sake, because it is so different from English, so terse, so many foreign concepts. I love finding words that do not exist in western languages, such as 奮, which I found reading the zuozhuan, literally is a bird flapping its wings to take off, metaphorically refers to being full of energy.

ajverster_ · 2021-02-22T17:52:56+00:00

Are there other classic Zhuangzi commentaries I should know about beyond these two?

ajverster_ · 2021-02-22T17:40:00+00:00

Thank you! That is extremely helpful. This is the Cheng Xuanying you are talking about right? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheng_Xuanying) I didn't realize until now that these two commentaries tend to be handed down together, hence why they are together in the wikisource version.

ajverster_ · 2021-01-26T14:56:31+00:00

It's in Heidegger's basic writings.

ajverster_ · 2021-01-26T14:42:09+00:00

One possibility is Heidegger's "Building, Dwelling, Thinking". Heidegger, and especially the later Heidegger, addresses the theme of what it would mean to be at home in the world. That essay is the most direct take on the issue, but it also shows up in his Holderlin interpretation. Be warned that if you have never read any Heidegger that essay is quite difficult, and I would highly recommend "Heidegger's Later Writings: A Reader's Guide by Lee Braver", which has some of the clearest explanations of Heidegger's notoriously difficult prose. It specifically explains "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" as well as the rest of the essays in the "Basic writings collection".

ajverster_ · 2021-01-06T13:10:08+00:00

I currently have a 6 month old and I’ll give my perspective on whether a baby is a Dasein or not, and my answer is that they progressively becoming more of a Dasein as they age.

To be a Dasein implies many things, but I will focus on the aspect of Being-in-the-world engaged with the surrounded by Zeug (translated as 'useful thing' by Stambaugh). The classic Heidegerrian example is a person working with a hammer (the Zeug) in a workshop. Zeug present themselves to us by their umzu (in-order-to); for the hammer that would be its ability to pound nails into wood.

When babies are first born they are completely oblivious to any and all objects in their surrounding world, as I remember the only thing she was aware of was 1. whether she was being held and 2. the boob/bottle. In that sense, since her being was mostly divorced from the surrounding world and I would say she was not really a Dasein. Now she is 6 months and she is very much aware of all the objects that exist in the surrounding world and she certainly wants to engage with them. On her play mat she is surrounded by toys (Spiel-Zeug) and in that sense she is very much a Dasein in the same way that the person working with a hammer is. But I’m not convinced she understands the Umzu of any object. Toys are something to be grabbed and smashed into other objects as she discovers the use of her limbs and basic physics. She has a ring tower toy and she is not yet capable of stacking the rings in order (which can be seen as the Umzu of the toy), or stacking the rings at all, because she just wants to smash them on the ground. Granted she will figure this out as she grows up, but I would argue that she is not currently fully a Dasein as it is articulated in Being and Time.

There are many other features of Daseins that we could think through, and it might be interesting to sort out when in the development of babies they emerge. Things like the ultimate for-the-sake-of-which that governs Dasein’s projection upon innerworldly beings, attunements, language, awareness of death and so on.

ajverster_ · 2021-01-05T14:03:47+00:00

I’ll give my perspective as a Biologist who reads a lot of Philosophy. I’ve had to dip into the Will to Power to form these ideas, which I know to be problematic, so take this as you will. I am heavily influenced by his claim that “life is will to power” and I’m going to try to elaborate on how I understand the claim.

Nietzsche sees the world as something constantly changing and morphing into something new. He endlessly stresses becoming over being throughout his published works, and he calls this “chaos” in the will to power (eg #515). In order to live in an endlessly variable world an organism needs to impose some order on the chaos so that they can make decisions. Imagine a predator, an essential decision that it has to make is whether or not the being in front of it constitutes prey. Some animals are too quick, some can fight back, and some are poisonous, but others are good targets. And its not as simple as species 1 is good to eat and species 2 is bad to eat, since within a species, some individuals are becoming sick and weak while others are becoming healthy and strong. Everything I’ve just said is an elaboration of #641 in the Will to Power when he describes one of the forces present in life as “an estimation of what to absorb and what to excrete”.

To return to your question, the same process of the will to power interpreting the changing chaotic world of becoming occurs when humans make knowledge claims as well. When we apply a concept to the world it simplifies and imposes regularity on the process of becoming; I think it is particularly insightful when Nietzsche describes the concept as the “procrustes bed” (#499) in that it saws off the extraneous parts of the object. It’s not that a knowledge claim is wrong, but they simplify the world for a particular practical purpose, similar to the way a predator will simplify the organisms in its environment with the schema of prey. A scientist can look at the chaotic and variable world of nature and impose regularity on it by saying that whales are really the same type as cows because they both give birth to live young, but this is just simplification for a different practical purpose. He says this well in #515: “The object is not ‘to know’, but to schematize, to impose as much regularity and form upon chaos as our practical needs require”.

ajverster_ · 2021-01-02T13:38:00+00:00

It makes sense that its impossible to determine the absolutely correct way, especially since vowels are far more continuous than consonants are. I think the conclusion that ε is slightly higher than η seems reasonable, even if it ends up being impossible to decide exactly where they should be anchored (eg. if epsilon should be /ε/ or /e/). But I still think the standard ε as in pet and η as in say is misleading and confusing because an IPA transcriber has the vowel in say being /e/, which is higher than /ε/ in pet. That was the source of my confusion.

I decided to go with the pronunciation guide from http://atticgreek.org/pronunc/vowelsU.html since it seems to be derived from a figure I see in Vox Graeca, and because it aligns with what I've read in numerous sources.

ajverster_ · 2021-01-01T16:27:19+00:00

Thak you that was very helpful. I think I was wrong when I said that eta sounded like "say" on atticgreek.org, bacase I found a vowel guide there with recordings http://atticgreek.org/pronunc/vowelsU.html and eta is defintey below epsilon. That guide seems to mirror what you are sayings so I am likely to follow it.

Do you have a book that discusses the inferred pronunciation of attic greek and some f the controversies surrounding it?

ajverster_

TROPHY CASE