Short thoughts

Anthropology -- between Dasein and (ontical) culture. The discipline of anthropology is troubled by descriptions of humanity which rely on fixed (and fixable) attributes to create laws of society. This is a good thing. But we don't realize that these ("sociological"?) approaches are wrong because they don't deal with the crazy self-interpreting freedom and infinite possibility inherent in Dasein (Heidegger would say we are anxiously turning away from this realization), and we wind up going through contortions to find an authentic description (in ontical terms) of something we can't pin down in those terms: *who* the natives are....

Psychologists and the use of the term "science". Somebody should count how many times a professor of psychology uses this word or its derivatives, somehow claiming scientific approaches. Then somebody should count the number of times a physics professor mentions science in his lecture. I haven't done this, but methinks they dost protest...

Time and language. Korzybski was a crackpot, but he did realize that language is what lets human span time. So, language is fundamental for the character of Dasein. I think without it we (1) can't have historicality, but also we can't have (2) the ability to refer to ourselves and cogitate (or semio-tate) within history.

"Constraint" and "force". Deterministic social scientists seem to think that force and constraint are all we need to explain human behavior. A constraint - no food means you die; a force might be the sexual drive. The realm of Dasein or hermeneutics or ethics that-which-might-be-otherwise or whatever, though, goes way beyond these, possibly to include perception, interpretation, the store of language, etc. Just consider how many have denied themselves sex for all sorts of interpretive rationales (the sins of the flesh, etc); consider how many people have (presumably) starved themselves because they mis-perceived the constraint of food and the coming winter (grasshoppers); consider how both desire and hunger get reworked through history. So constraint and force, while massively important, can never tell the whole story, though demographers are ever hopeful with respect to anthropological (ie hungry and unsophisticated) populations. Some forces -- like desire -- might have to be really, really strong in order to trump self-interpretation (and provide babies against everyone's better Dasein ish judgment). Forces/ constraints might be easier to see in rates, which aggregate a number of binary choices, than in individual biographies. Finally, the constraints and forces which are defined in a system will differ depending on the scale of the system -- population level forces/ constraints (e.g. demographic reproduction) are not the same as individual level forces/ constraints (old age).

Perhaps there is a continual battle, waged through processes like Darwinian selection, in which "nature" tries to reclaim humanity and trump our ability to self interpret.

Maybe a self-interpreting population without passion existed for a while, but died off for lack of reproduction etc (Coale, the psychologists who discovered emotion in the late 20th century).