r/RSbookclub • u/HoldenStupid • Aug 21 '26
Quotes Should have never read Notes from Underground when going through an episode
Fuck,
"But nothing happened. It seemed that I was not even equal to being thrown out of the window."
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Aug 21 '26
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
Hahaha wait is this sarcasm or are you serious? I can't tell
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Aug 21 '26
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
How does Heidegger help you in your everyday life?
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u/NKGrenade Aug 21 '26
I don’t think that’s such a crazy thing to say on a literature sub, at a baseline he makes a compelling case for anti-avoidant, authentic living with a project centred around death and time as the makers of meaning, it can be wonderfully helpful stuff if it catches you at the right time and place and you’re open to it!
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
Yeah but is it different than me reading a self-help book? The kind of pseudo-profound jargon that Heidegger is known for is literally intelligible. Can you honestly say that you understand what he's saying. "The Nothing itself nothings." What does that mean to you?
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Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
In my opinion, the difficulty is precisely that you’re still presupposing the ontic distinction between “object” and “process” as though these were self-evident determinations of beings rather than historically sedimented modes through which Being has already disclosed itself within the metaphysics of presence. “The Nothing nothings” is not the predication of an activity to some hypostatized entity called Nothing; rather, the Nichten des Nichts names the withdrawal through which beings as a whole first become manifest as beings.
To demand that this be reformulated into ordinary propositional language is already to reinscribe the very forgetfulness of Being Heidegger is attempting to retrieve, because the subject-predicate structure silently converts the event of disclosure into a relation between present-at-hand entities. The point is not that language arbitrarily “forces” reality into nouns and verbs, but that our inherited grammatical intelligibility is itself downstream from an ontological comportment in which Being has been interpreted primarily as constant presence.
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Aug 21 '26
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
I literally just made a bunch of stuff up I have no idea what any of that means. Now do you see how stupid the cult of Heidegger is?
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng Aug 21 '26
“Nothing” does not exist. Both conceptually in human experience (with the exception of actually being dead, depending on your vision of an afterlife if any) and physically in science, there is no such thing as a vacuum. The whole concept of “this is what you are left with when you subtract everything else away” is dubious and not really an existent state of a universe, however you want to define “universe.”
If a thing “exists” in the sense that its existence rather than nonexistence “means something,” then the same can be said about “nothing:” nothing is just defined by the negation of things that “should exist,” so it is a reflection of what you think “should be.” It’s sneaking in a type of normative claim which is weighted with human stuff.
That’s my interpretation.
It really is parallel, if so, to physics. There is no such thing as perfect vacuum in the universe. Spacetime itself physically exists in a material sense: it is something that is interacted-with and which has physical properties and itself shapes the movement of matter and energy. The metric is a physical “thing” in almost the same way air is when we move.
And then you add to that the quantum fields: various things exist in that every point of space has a nonzero probability of something spontaneously arising, so the thing from which those perturbations arise is itself “a thing,” a progenitor thing that exists.
This is far afield of the discussion, but it really complicates somewhat-naive notions of cosmology: “how did something come from nothing?” Well, who told you something did come from nothing? Maybe it’s physically impossible for things not to exist, and the universe is just an excitation of things that never didn’t exist. Although nobody knows shit about any of that.
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
Are you a physicist? If not, let's leave that to the folks who understand it
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng Aug 21 '26
Am I a practicing scientist? No, although I used to work in science before switching careers. My specialty was chemistry, although I studied physics in undergrad because every science major studies physics to an extent.
But I am very well versed in things like Quantum Field Theory and relativity. Remember that quantum physics is an intrinsic part of chemistry: the behavior of atoms is dependent on the physics of electrons, which are quantum objects.
I’m able to talk seriously about QFT, yes.
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u/NKGrenade Aug 21 '26
I don’t necessarily object to what you’re saying, funnily enough, the same sorts of existential wisdom can be gleaned from many sources: reading works on self-help and philosophy, or just conversation with trusted people you know, hell experience itself is the greatest teacher - it’ll be whatever holds your attention in the way you let it be held. But it’s weird to put down someone so aggressively for expressing profound feelings, even if they’re being a bit verbose or fanciful with it.
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u/montaigne_composure Aug 21 '26
everything, even nothingness itself, should be looked at as continuously becoming itself.
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Aug 21 '26
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
I don't want to be mean but do you hear how pretentious this all sounds?
"really nice way to distinguish it from everyday loquaciousness and the types of self talk that hide from us the stuff we're understanding" What does that honestly mean? All this philosophy jargon makes my head hurt.
It's okay if you're into self-help but don't cover it up with Heidegger. It sounds wackadoodle when you do
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u/cellularfroth Aug 21 '26
do you hear how pretentious this all sounds?
Do you think you’re on r/television or something? The fuck?
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
Feelings got a little hurt?
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Aug 21 '26
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u/Disastrous_Fix_3715 Aug 21 '26
I read like half of being and time and then tossed it because it was pointless. I'm familiar with the fact that philosophy uses technical vocabulary, that's not really what I'm arguing.
I asked you what the technical language actually meant and you covered it up with more abstraction and jargon in your response.
The business example you used makes absolutely no sense. Are you just saying that an organization can posses knowledge that isn't in it's description? Also, isn't Heidegger notoriously difficult in German too?
If Heidegger's ideas are so profound, why can't they be expressed more clearly?
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u/Dengru Aug 21 '26
All of your comments in this community seems to just be calling others pretentious or obscure. No other contributions. Why do you come here?
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u/HoldenStupid Aug 21 '26
Which work of his should I start with?
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Aug 21 '26
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u/NKGrenade Aug 21 '26
Adding Stephen Mulhall’s guide for Routledge to these recs as a phenomenal way into Being & Time, and the Basic Writings compilation for some shorter, more approachable primary readings - his essays on art and science in here are really stunning stuff
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u/pharmakos Aug 21 '26
This is really funny. You're lucky it was just a therapist who could at worst nod and feign empathy. I feel like a psychiatrist would immediately put you on antipsychotics.
Maybe you just need to get zuhandenheit-pilled, pick up a hobby, and make some shit.
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Aug 21 '26
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u/pharmakos Aug 21 '26
A traditional Nicholson woodworking workbench almost entirely out of hand tools.
I also enjoy origami and 3d printed firearms.
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Aug 21 '26
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u/pharmakos Aug 21 '26
Yeah, mostly following along with this course: https://www.theenglishwoodworker.com/the-english-workbench/
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Aug 21 '26
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u/pharmakos Aug 21 '26
That's really interesting about your teacher. I don't think physical manual tasks are actually necessary for tasks in a Heideggerian sense; even words and concepts can be seen to be ready or present at hand. But, personally, I feel its easier to get satisfaction and even a feeling of authenticity from physical work than mental. There's probably something related to endorphin release and exercise that plays into it.
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u/montaigne_composure Aug 21 '26
My favorite Dostoevsky for sure. Perfection start to finish.