Nietzsche, on Reddit:
I have been thinking lately, in lieu of conversations with friends, about where thinking starts and stops, the grounds and the ends, with the means in the middle. Just as Lee Braver says in his book Groundless Grounds, we do not examine the grounds from which we start as we use them, giving them a kind of nothingness underneath rather than turtles all the way down in an infinite regress. Wittgenstein’s child at the blackboard is a perfect illustration of this point. Children learn math as a regular practice, not as a complete and coherent set of rules. Rules are only called in when there are misunderstandings in following the regular practice, just as road signs are employed when one does not know the way to San Jose. If we need rules to understand things, then we need rules to understand the rules, and so on, and we have an infinite regress again, this time without turtles.
Similarly, the mundane and meaningless has a nothingness to it for the opposite reason. Consider the things around us that are serving no purpose, which we barely notice. While we proceed from grounds towards ends, the mundane serves no ends, and thus it recedes as nothing important, bringing us nowhere and to nothing. Similarly, our ends have a nothingness to them because, in spite of giving things their importance, we do not think beyond them as to where they lead. When I think about pouring myself another cup of sweet, satisfying coffee, I am not thinking about what caffeine will do to my body, and if I am thinking about what caffeine will do to my body, I am not thinking about what significance this may have for scientific studies. One has to move in thought from one to the other, shifting grounds and ends, to put each end in sight.
A friend of mine recently brought Lee Braver’s book Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (2012) to my attention, and I must say, it is so far an incredible book. In the introduction, Braver sets out the overall frame of the book, which should be of some interest to anyone concerned with the similarities of the early work of Heidegger and the later work of Wittgenstein:
Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein argue that philosophy that suspends our activity in the world, taking a disengaged theoretical stance, is a problem (Ch 1). Both argue that this problematic view comes about by conceiving of things as changeless, self-contained objects (Ch 2). For Heidegger, this is the “present-at-hand”. For W, it is atomism and private language. Such bare inert objects do not give us a proper and full view of human life and meaning. Both argue that we need to see things as holistic and interdependent (Ch 3). While reality has been primarily understood in terms of knowledge, thought rests on non-rational and unjustified socialization, which includes our spontaneous and responsive activity (Ch 4). This new conception of thought has particular ramifications, calling into question the Law of Non-Contradiction (Wittgenstein) and the Principle of Reason (Heidegger) (Ch 5). Our lack of justification in thought does not make thinking worthless. Rather, it shows us what we take as “groundless grounds”, what we rely upon even if it is always somewhat and in some ways unreliable.
Thought Itself 