PREVIOUSLY

(INDEX) Education, Philosophy, Religion: The Dog Days of Summer Posts

NOW:

“Faith has no place in thought (Martin Heidegger, ‘Anaximander’s Saying,’ in Off the Beaten Track, 280).”

What follows are some background ideas and contexts that may be helpful in thinking about Heidegger’s Being and Time.

“Being” is a concept we always have with us but tend not to question because we focus on entities (since Plato: beings of thought/noeton and aestheton or sensed beings).  Our first philosophical treatment of Being seems to be Anaximander with his words adikia (disorder) and dike (jointure), which we later see treated in literature like Robert Browning Lucy Maude Montgomery “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”  Something splendid happens and everything falls into place for a little while.

We know of Being from the conspiracy saturated beings of the schizophrenic’s world, or how a stomach ache causes beings to appear irritatingly.  We mean beings as a whole.

Being is historical, and Will to Power stamps becoming with Being (e.g., truth as certainty – free from doubt, because what had to be certain in the sense of free from doubt beginning in Thomas and realized in Luther was the salvation of the soul.  Descartes’ understanding of truth as certainty free from doubt was born in this context)

Heidegger’s is interested in disclosing from hiddeness: “Aletheia (un-hidden)” with the alpha privative = disclosing from hiddenness.  Heraclius: “physis kryptesthai philei” (Being loves to hide)

Hegel, in his inaugural address, Heidelberg, 1816, says “The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the seeker — to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.”

Heidegger notes: “Both scientific and prescientific comportments are a knowing in the sense of uncovering what is previously concealed, of revealing what was previously covered up, of disclosing what so far was closed off.”

For Heidegger the idea of phenomenology is disclosing Being from hiddenness.

“In order to understand, Heidegger says, one must see phenomenologically. He thus invites us to the first exercise of phenomenological “kindergarten.” To tear apart [zer-reissen] means: to tear into two parts, to separate: to make two out of one. If a sock is torn, then the sock is no longer present-at-hand—but note: precisely not as a sock. In fact, when I have it on my foot, I see the “intact” sock precisely not as a sock. On the contrary, if it is torn, then THE sock appears with more force through the “sock torn into pieces.” In other words, what is lacking in the torn sock is the UNITY of the sock. However, this lack is paradoxically the most positive, for this Unity in being-torn is present [gegenwärtig] as a lost unity.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars p. 11)

“Twice the audience laughed over the “torn sock” saying. At first Heidegger answered pedantically, “I do not know why you are laughing. You must learn to endure the scope of a sentence such as the one I have cited.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars  p. 100).

Being comes from the word Ousia (property), and refers to the general sphere and criteria we operate according to like the traditional understanding of marriage, which may encounter something that can’t be appropriated (epeikene tes ousias) = justice / unjust with our treatment LGBTQ+ rights and how we redefine ourselves and our world to lessen literal and figurative violence is the very definition/personification of justice, defines justice. 

For Aristotle, according to Heidegger it is ousia, beingness. Aristotle was the first one to use the term ousia as a philosophical term. The ordinary meaning of this word is “house and home, holdings, financial means; we might also say ‘present assets,”property,’ what lies present [at hand].” (Heidegger, PA, Phusis, 199).  Beingness (e.g., feels like houseness appearing incarnate in the mansion), suggests a characteristic of Being is movement, appearing, and a static something against which moving is recognizable.  Christians hijacked Aristotle’s prime mover and reinterpreted it in terms of Judeo-Christian theology. 

Homer said the gods don’t appear to everyone enargeis:  Wonder of the worldness of Niagara Falls to the tourist, vs it as background scenery for the commuter, and noise pollution for the local resident.  This was the appearing of the Greek world.

Calasso notes:

Yet there was a time when the gods were not just a literary clich?, but an event, a sudden apparition, an encounter with bandits perhaps, or the sighting of a ship. And it didn’t even have to be a vision of the whole. Ajax Oileus recognized Poseidon disguised as Calchas from his gait. He saw him walking from behind and knew it was Poseidon “from his feet, his legs.”

Since for us everything begins with Homer, we can ask ourselves: which words did he use for such events? By the time the Trojan War broke out, the gods were already coming to earth less frequently than in an earlier age. Only a generation before, Zeus had fathered Sarpedon on a mortal woman. All the gods had turned up for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. But now Zeus no longer showed himself to men; he sent other Olympians along to do his exploring for him: Hermes, Athena, Apollo. And it was getting harder to see them. Odysseus admits as much to Athena: “Arduous it is, oh goddess, to recognize you, even for one who knows much.” The Hymn to Demeter offers the plainest comment: “Difficult are the gods for men to see.” Every primordial age is one in which it is said that the gods have almost disappeared. Only to the select few, chosen by divine will, do they show themselves: “The gods do not appear to everyone in all their fullness [enargeis],” the Odyssey tells us. Enargei?s is the terminus technicus for divine epiphany: an adjective that contains the dazzle of “white,” argos, but which ultimately comes to designate a pure and unquestionable “conspicuousness.” It’s the kind of “conspicuousness” that will later be inherited by poetry, thus becoming perhaps the characteristic that distinguishes poetry from every other form.

But how does a god make himself manifest? In the Greek language the word theos, “god,” has no vocative case, observed the illustrious linguist Jakob Wackernagel. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful example of this in Euripides’ Helen: “O theoi. theos gar kai to gigno’ skein philous”–“O gods: recognizing the beloved is god.” Kerenyi thought that the distinguishing quality of the Greek world was this habit of “saying of an event: ‘It is theos.’” And an event referred to as being the?s could easily become Zeus, the most vast and all-inclusive of gods, the god who is the background noise of the divine. So when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.”

“Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. And we also hear a great familiarity, almost a recklessness, in the way the divine is mentioned, as though to encounter divinity was hardly unusual, but rather something that could be expected, or provoked. The word atheos, on the other hand, was only rarely used to refer to those who didn’t believe in the gods. More often it meant to be abandoned by the gods, meant that they had chosen to withdraw from all commerce with men. Aratus was writing in the third century b.c., but what became of this experience that for him was so obvious and all-pervasive in the centuries that followed? How did time affect it? Did it dissolve it, destroy it, alter and empty it beyond recognition? Or is it something that still reaches out to us, whole and unscathed? And if so, where, how?

We examine our world and examples/analogies, counter examples/counter analogies are to be uncovered as we interpret the world. Please excuse the humor of who’s saying the below, lol. 

Analogies are ways of translating, such as translating characteristics of one thing or event to become characteristics describing different things or events. The brain makes sense by translating, like how there is extensive interconnectivity and cross translation between the various sensory areas of the brain (e.g., Our mirroring nature like the baby mirroring the expressions of the mother allows metaphors, e.g., I’m boiling mad) – a union of inner and outer: like the boringness (stretching out of time) of the book which both is and is not caused by the book.  The next person needs not experience the book as boring.  The stretching out of time here implicates the reader, and as Aristotle said, if there is no counter there is no time. As opposed to physical causality, human causality is called causality of freedom because like conditions don’t necessarily produce like results. Triplet can grow up in an abusive home: one with terrible PTSD, one unaffected, and the third stronger for it (that which does not kill me makes me stronger – Nietzsche).

Causality points to an interesting unity of inner and outer.  On the one hand, we don’t sense effect following cause according to a rule, but rather this, followed by this, etc.  On the other hand we do experience a rule of irreversibility where ball hitting ball is positively one directional, a comparatively greater temporary change of state happens when we freeze water, and we have complete one directionality when we cook an egg that then can’t be uncooked. 

We don’t just encounter the world but interpret it: apophansis = taking something as something else – eg., mis-taking rustling dead leaves at your feet as a living thing show we encounter the world taking-as, and this allows error.

For another example, during the first world war, it was reported that a certain fort had been taken, and looking through binoculars at the fort it was confirmed that friendly soldiers were indeed perched on the wall and friendly flags were flying. The outcome was disastrous because the fort was later approached as though it was friendly, and it turned out the fort had not actually been taken, but that the person looking through the binoculars saw friendly flags and soldiers because he had seen them there in advance – since he had been previously told they were there. The initial mistake “became the hupokeimenon for the apparently ‘incorrect’ seeing (Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, 60).”

Kant’s idea was that his philosophy was applied to appearances, not things in themselves.  The appearances point to the things in themselves, are signs of an interpretive framework (which may be substantial like Deep Time vs the mental gymnastics of Young Earth Creationism).  This is manifested when the connection between sign and framework won’t connect.  For example, The Michelson-Morley Experiment (1887) is an experiment where results were interpreted as supporting rival frameworks is the Michelson-Morley experiment. It aimed to detect the Earth’s motion through the “luminiferous aether” (a hypothetical medium for light waves, like air for sound), which was central to 19th-century physics.

They used a sensitive interferometer to measure differences in the speed of light in perpendicular directions, expecting an “aether wind” due to Earth’s orbit.

Result: A famous null result—no detectable difference (to high precision).

Competing interpretations:

Some aether theorists (e.g., those favoring “aether drag” where the aether moves with Earth, or partial dragging) could accommodate or even claimed it supported modified aether models.

Others saw it as evidence against a stationary aether.

Later, it was reinterpreted as strong evidence for Einstein’s special relativity (1905), which postulates the constancy of the speed of light in all inertial frames and eliminates the need for a classical aether. Einstein himself noted the experiment contributed to the crisis that relativity resolved, though his thinking was also influenced by other factors (like Maxwell’s equations).

Such competing paradigms contextualizing appearances occur across disciplines, and so for instance in Religious Studies we have the historical Jesus interpretive paradigm vs The Christ Myth Theory, and as subsets of the historical Jesus paradigm we have many subset interpretive paradigms like apocalyptic prophet, cynic sage, etc.  

Heidegger, whose minor was in science, thus says the greatness and superiority of natural science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based upon the fact that the investigators were all philosophers; they understood that there are no mere facts, but that a fact is what it is only in light of the explanatory concept and always in accordance with the range of such explanation.   What is crucial in this genesis lies in the fact that Galileo gave a direction to natural sciences by asking (when not literally, at least intentionally) how nature as such must be viewed and determined in advance, such that the facts of nature can become accessible to the observation of facts in general. How must nature be determined and be thought in advance, so that the entirety of this being as such can become accessible to calculative knowledge in a fundamental way? The answer is that nature must be circumscribed as what it is in advance, in such a way as to be determinable and accessible to inquiry as a closed system of the locomotion of material bodies in time. What limits nature as such—motion, body, place, time—must be thought in such a way as to make a mathematical determinability possible. Nature must be projected.  It is only in light of the mathematical opening and projection of nature, i.e., by delimiting [nature] through such basic concepts as body, motion, velocity, place, and time, that certain facts of nature become accessible as facts of nature. It is only on the basis of disclosing the mathematical constitution of nature that the knowing determination of nature obtains meaning and justification according to measure, number, and weight.  What was crucial and consequential about the achievements of Galileo and Kepler was not observation of facts and experimentation, since ancient science did this too, but the insight that there is no such thing as pure facts and that facts can only be grasped and experimented with when the realm of nature as such is circumscribed.  Thus, underlying all natural sciences from the beginning are propositions and cognitions, like, e.g., the principle of the permanence of substance: “In all change of appearances substance is permanent; its quantum in nature is neither increased nor diminished.”  Moreover, the principle of causality: “All alterations take place in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect.”   These propositions state something a priori about nature. More exactly put, these propositions state what belongs to nature as nature. These propositions contain a knowledge of what nature is, while at the same time this knowledge is not grounded in experience. 

Willing is having the source of our actions in concepts, such as a teacher teaching out of the concept of scientifically educating students.  We operate according to criteria:

Since progress is the criterion employed by ordinary understanding, such understanding finds any circular movement objectionable and considers it a sign of impossibility. The fateful thing, however, is that this argument about circular movement is employed in philosophy itself, even though it is but a symptom of a tendency to reduce philosophy to the level of ordinary understanding (Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 187).

Philosopher: We reason by avoiding contradiction. Comedian: We joke by embracing contradiction. We know the logic of the “syllogism,” but what might be the logic of the “silly-gism?” For instance, a reductio ad absurdum can be both impossible and hilarious. Is there a deep connection between reasoning and humor?

Yes, there is a deep and well-explored connection between reasoning and humor. Both operate on the shared substrate of expectation, pattern, and violation—logic tames it, humor celebrates the crack.

Core Link: Incongruity and Contradiction.  The dominant modern account of humor is the incongruity theory (traced to Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and later refined by psychologists like Thomas Veatch and evolutionary theorists). Humor arises when something violates a mental pattern or expectation in a way that is safe or playful.

• Reasoning (especially deductive logic) treats contradiction as fatal: A cannot be both A and not-A. We resolve or reject it via tools like reductio ad absurdum (assume P, derive contradiction → ¬P), modus ponens, or consistency proofs. The goal is coherence and truth.
• Humor treats contradiction as fertile. It embraces the clash—juxtaposing incompatible frames, scripts, or categories—and resolves it not by elimination but by reframing. The pleasure comes from the sudden shift (“Aha! That’s not where I thought this was going”) combined with the recognition that no real harm ensues.

Our “silly-gism” is a perfect coinage. A syllogism enforces valid inference:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

A slapstick random silly-gism might run:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is dead

A sarcastic silly-gism might be

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man

Man is the singular of men

Therefore Socrates is mortal

The structure mimics logic but detonates the conclusion into absurdity. The humor depends on the audience recognizing the logical scaffolding first—then delighting in its gleeful sabotage. Without the underlying pattern, there’s no surprise.

Philosophical and Cognitive Parallels

• Reductio ad absurdum as comedy: In philosophy, it’s a weapon against error. In stand-up or satire, it’s the punchline generator. Monty Python sketches, The Hitchhiker’s Guide (“42”), or Lewis Carroll’s nonsense frequently use extended reductios: follow an idea with ironclad “logic” into ever more ridiculous territory. The form is logical; the content is anti-logical. Aristotle himself noted comedy’s relation to the “unexpected” while discussing tragedy and rhetoric.
• Frame-shifting and bisociation: Arthur Koestler (The Act of Creation, 1964) called it “bisociation”—the creative mind (or humorous mind) joins two habitually incompatible “matrices” or associative contexts. Scientific discovery, artistic invention, and jokes all use this. A joke is a mini-“Eureka!” with a safer payoff.
• Evolutionary view: Humor may be a signal of cognitive fitness—detecting and playing with pattern violations without being undone by them. Logic is the survival-grade version (avoid real contradictions in the environment); humor is the social/play version (bonding, status, creativity). Both require good theory-of-mind and pattern recognition.
• Zen and paradox: Some traditions (Zen koans, Taoist paradoxes, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy) deliberately use contradiction to transcend ordinary logic. The “joke” is on the rigid mind. A reductio can be enlightenment or a punchline depending on delivery.

Examples of Silly-gisms in Action

• Puns: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” Grammatical parallelism collides with semantic mismatch.
• Observational comedy: “I told my therapist I’m afraid of commitment. She said we should see other people.” Logical implication of therapy inverted.
• Absurdist philosophy as humor: Camus’ Sisyphus is tragic-absurd; the same premise in a cartoon (Sisyphus shrugging and opening a beer) is comedy.
• Math/logic jokes: “There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” The contradiction is in the base.

Limits and Asymmetries

Not all contradictions are funny (some are horrifying or boring). Humor usually requires:

• Benign violation (Veatch): Wrong enough to be incongruous, safe enough not to threaten.
• Timing and shared knowledge: The audience must hold the logical expectation to feel the violation.

Reasoning seeks resolution toward truth. Humor seeks resolution toward delight (or critique, relief, superiority). They are complementary: the best comedians are often rigorous thinkers who weaponize logic against itself. The best philosophers have a sense of the absurd (see Kierkegaard on irony, Nietzsche’s aphorisms, or Wittgenstein’s “language games”).In short: Logic is the art of not falling into holes. Humor is the art of pointing at the holes, pushing you toward them, and making you laugh when you notice you’re still standing. They are two sides of the same cognitive coin—pattern mastery, one serious and one playful. The universe is full of contradictions; reason navigates them, humor dances on them.

I think sarcasm would make good silly-gisms. A syllogism follows where the first two propositions/premises point, uncovering what is hidden (All men are mortal – Socrates is a man – therefore Socrates is mortal).  Aristotle in Prior Analytics (Book I, Chapter 1, 24b18-20) defines it as “a discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.” Sarcasm and satire play with plain meaning to humorously conclude something hiddenly implied but unexpected. Political satire like The Daily Show works like this lampooning political contradictions and especially hypocrisies.

Sarcasm is an excellent example of a “silly-gism” in action. It hijacks the form of straightforward reasoning while subverting its content, creating humor through a deliberate, winking contradiction between literal statement and implied meaning.

How Sarcasm Functions as a Silly-gism

A classic syllogism is transparent and cooperative: Premise 1 + Premise 2 → inevitable conclusion. Everyone follows the same path.

Sarcasm mimics this surface structure but inserts a hidden inversion:

• Literal (surface): Follows the “logic” in an apparently straight line.
• Implied (hidden): Derives the opposite or an absurd/hypocritical extension, often with a tone that signals the flip.

Example:

• Straight: “Politician X promised transparency, delivered secrecy, and now criticizes others for opacity.” (Plain observation of contradiction.)
• Sarcastic silly-gism: “Wow, Politician X is a real champion of openness—truly an inspiration to us all.”

The “premises” (what the politician says vs. what they do) point one way. Sarcasm “concludes” by pretending to follow praise-logic, landing on the ridiculous opposite. The audience supplies the missing step: the hypocrisy. It’s reductio ad absurdum disguised as endorsement.

This fits incongruity theory perfectly: the violation isn’t just logical inconsistency—it’s moral or behavioral inconsistency (hypocrisy). The humor lands because we recognize the contradiction and the speaker’s feigned ignorance of it. The “silly” part is the pretend-cooperation with flawed reasoning.

Political Satire as Institutionalized Silly-gisms

Shows like The Daily Show (especially under Jon Stewart, and later iterations) thrive on this. They don’t just report contradictions—they construct sarcastic syllogisms around them:

• Premise 1: Politician claims Principle A (fiscal responsibility, family values, anti-elitism, etc.).
• Premise 2: Their actions reveal the direct negation of A.
• Sarcastic conclusion: “Therefore, they are the perfect embodiment of Principle A. What a hero.”

This lampoons hypocrisy by amplifying the contradiction until it becomes absurd. It’s humorous reasoning applied to reasoning failures. Satirists often use:

• Deadpan delivery (pretending the logic is sound).
• Selective editing or montages (literal “premises” stacked to force the ridiculous conclusion).
• Analogy escalation (“It’s like a vegan opening a steakhouse and calling it ethical eating”).

Other strong examples:

• Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” bit or his character on The Colbert Report—a sustained sarcastic persona that “logically” defended absurd positions.  Truthiness is the concept that a claim or statement is true if it feels right or aligns with an individual’s personal beliefs, regardless of supporting evidence or factual reality. Coined by comedian Stephen Colbert in 2005, it describes knowledge that comes from the “gut” rather than facts or books.  Colbert introduced the word on the premiere episode of his political satire program, The Colbert Report, during a segment titled “The Wørd”. In character as an arrogant, conservative pundit, Colbert defined it by contrasting facts with emotion: “I don’t trust books. They’re all facts, no heart”. He argued that a “gut feeling” about how the world should be matters more to some people than empirical data demonstrating how it actually is.
• Classic literary versions: Swift’s A Modest Proposal (deadpan “logical” solution to famine via cannibalism) or Orwell’s satirical essays.

Deeper Connection to Reasoning

Sarcasm and satire are “meta-logical.” They require:

1. Sharp detection of actual contradictions (the philosopher’s tool).
2. Playful embrace and exaggeration of them (the comedian’s tool).

A good sarcastic silly-gism exposes unacknowledged contradictions in power, ideology, or behavior that plain logic might describe dryly. Both are weaponizing the principle of non-contradiction: something cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same way (Kant omits the at the same time reference.) It makes the audience complicit in the reasoning: “Yes, those premises should lead there… but obviously not, so the whole thing is rotten.”

There is risk, of course. When the audience doesn’t share the hidden premise (the recognition of hypocrisy), sarcasm falls flat or looks like mere meanness. It can also reinforce tribal reasoning—our side’s contradictions are “nuanced,” theirs are hilariously absurd.

Overall, sarcasm is reasoning’s mischievous twin. Where the syllogism builds coherence, the sarcastic silly-gism performs incoherence for effect, forcing us to laugh at how poorly reality follows its own stated rules. It’s one of the sharpest tools for making contradictions not just visible, but viscerally entertaining.

Humor and philosophy were entertainment for the ancient thinkers, like crosswords or sudoku today.  Heraclitus called the destiny of Being a child playing a skill game (draughts)

And the Being of the person?  Thinkers are not close to life, e.g., sports, gossip, etc., and so we have the ancient image of the thinker Thales lost in thought falling in a ditch.  Heidegger notes

“Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, relates at one place (Nicomachean Ethics, Z 7, 1141b 77ff) the basic conception determining the Greek view on the essence of the thinker: ‘It is said they (the thinkers) indeed know things that are excessive, and thus astounding, and thereby difficult, and hence in general ‘demonic (daimonia)’- but also useless, for they are not seeking what is, according to the straightforward popular opinion, good for man.’ … The Greeks, to whom we owe the essence and name of ‘philosophy’ and of the ‘philosopher,’ already knew quite well that thinkers are not ‘close to life.’ But only the Greeks concluded from this lack of closeness to life that the thinkers are then the most necessary -precisely I n view of the essential misery of man (Heidegger, Parmenides Lecture Course, 100).” 

Nietzsche likewise said “Without music life would be a mistake/error  (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows” (aphorism 33).  Try going on a long pointless car drive you’ve been on a thousand times before by yourself with no music or audiobooks.  Nietzsche is saying life would be fundamentally wrong or flawed without music.  In other words, music distracts us from something fundamentally wrong and flawed.  This is what Nietzsche means by the death of God, finishing aphorism 33 with “The German imagines even God as a songster.”  Nietzsche says in Human All Too Human: “He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being.”  In a letter to Overbeck Nietzsche describes himself in a small rainy cottage with friends who were suffering terrible cabin fever while he joyously wrote his 2nd Untimely Meditation.  Nietzsche imagines the Übermensch as a creator of new values who overcomes nihilism after “God is dead.” Nietzsche contrasts this with “higher men” (exemplary but still human, all-too-human figures) and “last men” (complacent moderns). He saw figures like Goethe or certain Renaissance types (e.g., evoking Cesare Borgia) as approximations or precursors, but not the full ideal.

A particulary instructive example of the ancient experience of this horror loci is Horace:  Horace’s boredom has him restlessly switch between town and country, turn against friends, and switch between philosophical standpoints from Cyrenaic hedonist, to indifferent stoic sage, to apathetic Epicurean, to unbending cynic, to accommodating Peripatetic. His positions are opportunistic and fickle, unable to remain with one set of beliefs.  Horace calls this a kind of boredom and restless desire for change insanity (insanire).  Horace has intellectual horror loci, just as he does in his regular life.

Similarly, we see Seneca’s “nausea,” seasickness, which means profound boredom:

26.  Some people suffer from a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things. Theirs is not contempt for life but boredom with it, a feeling we sink into when influenced by the sort of philosophy which makes us say, ‘How long the same old things? I shall wake up and go to sleep, I shall eat and be hungry, I shall be cold and hot. There’s no end to anything, but all things are in a fixed cycle, fleeing and pursuing each other. Night follows day and day night; summer passes into autumn, hard on autumn follows winter, and that in turn is checked by spring. All things pass on only to return. Nothing I do or see is new: sometimes one gets sick even of this.’ There are many who think that life is not harsh but superfluous. (Seneca ep. mor. 24. 26)

We see a similar thought about this eternal return of the same expressed in the Jewish tradition by Ecclesiastes: Ecclesiastes in the bible makes the point about the tedium and pointlessness of life because there is just a circular bad repetition  ad nauseam of “the same” with the consequence that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9), that life becomes inherently meaningless in the face of eternal recurrence:

All things are wearisome;

    more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

    or the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,

    and what has been done is what will be done;

    there is nothing new under the sun.

Seneca says the rich are especially prone to boredom.  In Epistle 24 Seneca says boredom can be such a problem that it leads to suicide.  Life is seen not as bitter but superfluous, and one is prone to the libido moriendi or death drive.

Like the historical analogy with Ecclesiastes and The Stoics, Nietzsche seems to very much have Schopenhauer in mind with eternal tragic temporal repetition. Schopenhauer said in On the Sufferings of the World:

“Boredom is a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are domesticated; whereas in the case of man it has become a downright scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers a singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a punishment by delivering them up to misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will rush about in all directions, traveling here, there and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they are anxious to know what amusements it affords; just as though they were beggars asking where they could receive a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles of human life… [And in his essays on Pessimism Schopenhauer summarizes] “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”

 To which Nietzsche responds to Schopenhauer regarding the performance from the point of view of the creative and artistic individual:

“56. Anyone like me, who has tried for a long time and with some enigmatic desire, to think pessimism through to its depths and to deliver it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and naivete with which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely in the form of the Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking – beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion of morality –; anyone who has done these things (and perhaps precisely by doing these things) will have inadvertently opened his eyes to the inverse ideal: to the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance, and not just to a performance, but rather, fundamentally, to the one who needs precisely this performance – and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself – and makes himself necessary. – – What? and that wouldn’t be –circulus vitiosus deus? (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

Eternal return wipes away meaningfulness from beings, and so this is tragic for the eros of the sick and weakly like Achilles, but an opportunity for creation for the transfiguring godless agape of the artistic and healthy.  Circular time devastates, like a favorite gospel song can go from presencing numinously to presencing irritatingly just by playing it on continual repeat.  Hence, Heidegger quotes Nietzsche twice: “To stamp becoming with Being, that is the highest form of will to power.” 

This relates to Ecclesiastes’ “nothing new under the sun,” and Nietzsche’s eternal return, and the Greco-Roman tradition whereby, for example, Toohey notes Horace’s description of Bullatius’s boredom and restlessness as deinon/horror loci woes in Epistles I. II were countered by philosophy (verses  25-30), with the exercise of logic (ratio) and prudence (prudential) that brought about a calm mind (aequus animus).  Restlessness being brought to repose with a calm mind seems to be what Heidegger and Holderlin see as the purpose the Greeks had for philosophy. Plato noted the restless soul should strive to achieve the constancy of the stars, a condition Aristotle called athanatizein/godliness/deathlessness, noting only beasts or gods were at home in solitude.  Consider our hidden “being out of joint” which becomes conspicuous in a rainy cottage with nothing to do in shack wacky cabin fever.

There is a direct conceptual and etymological relationship between acedia (the “lack of care”) and cura in the Christian monastic tradition.  Acedia fundamentally represents a lack or absence of care—spiritual apathy, indifference, or torpor toward God, prayer, ascetic discipline, and the soul’s welfare. This “lack of care” directly contrasts with cura, the Latin term for vigilant care, concern, solicitude, or attentive diligence.  Monastic writers frame the spiritual life as requiring ongoing cura (careful attention and commitment) to divine things, which acedia undermines by fostering restlessness, boredom, or aversion to such efforts. The Desert Fathers and later tradition saw acedia as a vice that erodes the very cura essential for perseverance in prayer, manual labor, and communal obligations.

The Greek akēdia (ἀκηδία) literally means “without care” or “neglect” (from a- “without” + kēdos/kēdia “care”).  When transmitted to the Latin West via figures like John Cassian, the term acedia (or accidia) was retained as a transliteration, but medieval glossaries and etymological explanations explicitly linked it to cura. For instance, around the 12th century and earlier, sources gloss it as “Acci grece, cura latine” (akēdia in Greek, cura in Latin), interpreting acedia as the negation or absence of cura.  This reflects a folk etymology common in medieval theology: acedia as “a-cura” or “non-cura” (without care).  Key Thinkers include Evagrius Ponticus (Greek tradition): Describes acedia as a “lack of care” for the soul’s pursuits, opposed by epimeleia (diligent care). 

John Cassian: Transmits this to the West, portraying acedia as negligence in spiritual duties, implicitly requiring cura as its remedy. 

Thomas Aquinas and later scholastics: Define acedia as sorrow or disgust toward spiritual good, which withdraws from the cura (care/action) owed to God.  In summary, acedia and cura are antonyms in the monastic spiritual vocabulary: one embodies the perilous “lack of care,” while the other represents the attentive care that counters it and sustains the path to holiness.

Horror loci (Latin for “horror/fear/revulsion of place” or “dread of one’s location”) is an ancient Roman concept describing a form of restlessness or boredom tied to dissatisfaction with one’s physical surroundings. It involves an inability to settle happily in any one spot—whether urban or rural—leading to constant movement in search of relief that never comes.

Key Features and Origins

• Core Meaning: It is a psychological or emotional state of taedium (weariness or boredom) specifically triggered by place. The person feels revulsion toward their current location and flees to another, only to experience the same feeling there. It manifests as chronic restlessness, where no environment satisfies or holds attention.
• Ancient Sources: The idea appears in Roman writers like Lucretius (in De Rerum Natura), who portrays wealthy individuals who rush between city homes and country villas but remain miserable everywhere due to inner discontent. Similar themes show up in Seneca and Horace, linking it to a lack of inner freedom or contentment.

It is often contrasted with taedium vitae (weariness of life itself), as one of two major Roman expressions of boredom. Horror loci is more situational and spatial, while the other is more existential.

Context in Philosophy and Culture

This concept ties into broader ancient discussions of boredom, restlessness, and the pursuit of happiness. Romans saw it as a vice or affliction of the privileged or those lacking philosophical self-mastery—external changes (like travel or changing homes) fail to fix an internal problem. It parallels modern ideas like “the grass is always greener” syndrome, wanderlust gone pathological, or even elements of depression/anxiety involving place aversion.

It is distinct from:

• Genius loci (“spirit of a place”), a positive or numinous guardian deity/atmosphere of a location in Roman religion.
• Horror vacui (“fear of empty space”), an unrelated artistic or philosophical idea about filling voids.

In modern scholarship on the history of boredom (e.g., works referencing Peter Toohey’s analysis), horror loci is cited as an early Western description of this emotional state, appearing alongside concepts like acedia (spiritual sloth) in later traditions.

In short, it captures an ancient insight that true discontent often stems not from where you are, but from how you are—making “changing places” an ineffective cure for inner unease.

Heidegger will argue in Being and Time that Care is one of the fundamental characteristics of people, so we’ll see if the above is helpful in understanding care.

Conclusion

Every judgement is also a claim of being-true, since to say ‘the dog is grey’ is, when the copula ‘is’ is emphasized, really little more than a short way of saying ‘it is true that,’ or it is in fact the case that the dog is grey.  Likewise, when I describe phenomena using examples, analogies, allegories/metaphors, etc., I am not just making a claim about what the phenomenon is like for just me, but aim at what it if for the “anyman,” the person “as such” long ago, now, or in the future, eternally present at any time, or about the human condition.  Thereby when Husserl concludes we know the other only through her behaviors and so by analogy to my own inner life, this is not exactly right, since we are always already with the other.  If I experience the roof is mended, if it is in dispute whether it is mended we appeal to a shared world – the roof at hand for both of us. 

In this regard, we are idealists.  When Kant derives his table of categories, this applies to him but is not aimed at him personally, but rather the human condition as such.  Fichte likewise says our discussion about my self ultimately intends the social self and is realized in the national self.  They are “always already” in place allowing us to describe the personhood of the person.  Analogously, we say the idea of justice neither never was not nor will be not but simply “is,” and we do not invent it but uncover what it is and always was in an ever more rigorous way.

SO, THAT’S SOME BACKGROUND.  NEXT, LET’S DIVE INTO BEING AND TIME.  SEE YOU AUGUST 7^th.