Heideggerian Denken

The Paranoid Style in American Science

2008-04-18T20:24:00.001-05:00

Clark, at Mormon Metaphysics, has a Sideblog to a very interesting article: The Paranoid Style in American Science. It's a fascinating discussion of what happens when doubt becomes the guiding principle in politics, PR, philosophy, and science.

Malpas on Heidegger and Nazism

2008-04-17T20:21:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning to go through Jeff Malpas' Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World and just barely got to his section on Heidegger and National Socialism. He makes an interesting point about the notion of place in Heidegger's thought and when it took prominence, decidedly after his fiasco with Nazism. Here's an extended quote:

Thus the addresses from the early 1930s in which Heidegger seems to align himself with elements of Nazi ideology combine the vocabulary of Being and Time with ideas and images also present in Nazi rhetoric, including notions of "Volk" and of "Blut und Boden," but they do not deploy any developed notions of place or dwelling as such (and the distinction is an important one, both within Heidegger's own thinking and within thought, politics, and culture more generally). Talk of "Blut und Boden" seems to feature in Heidegger's vocabulary in only a few places, and although the notion of "Volk" does have a greater persistence and significance, it too is almost entirely absent from Heidegger's postwar thought. Significantly, it is in his engagement with Hölderlin, immediately after his resignation of the rectorate, in 1934-1935, that ideas of place and dwelling begin to emerge more explicitly (though still in a relatively undeveloped form) as a focus for Heidegger's thinking. Moreover, the influence of Heidegger on contemporary thinking about place does not stem from the work in the 1920s and early 1930s, but rather from that of the middle to late 1930s and, especially, of the period from 1945 onwards, particularly essays such as "Building Dwelling Thinking." In this respect, the strategy that appears in Harvey, Massey, and Leach [which he just analyzed] seems to be one that attempts to discredit ideas explicit in the later thinking largely on the basis of the political engagement apparently present in the earlier. (20)

I will admit, the question of Heidegger's relation with Nazi ideology is not a topic that interests me, so I am not someone who can speak about the issue in an informed way. However, the above does seem to present a decent case for how to distinguish Heidegger's thought on place from Nazi ideology by situating the former in Heidegger's developed interest in Hölderlin in his post-Nazi period.

More Online Books

2008-04-13T13:08:00.000-05:00

I've recently stumbled on Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance by way of Continental Philosophy and found a huge assortment of books that will be of interest to anyone interest in Husserl, Heidegger, and Deleuze (among others). As with the previous post, most of these are in RAR format, so try to get your hands on WinRAR to take advantage of this great selection.

Also, Continental Philosophy has a link to a site that has a number of texts on religion, philosophy, and philosophy of religion. The Cambridge Companion series' should be of particular interest.

Enjoy!!!!

Heidegger Reexamined, 4 Vols.

2008-04-13T00:55:00.000-05:00

This is probably one of the most important posts on Heidegger I have given to date. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall got together and created an anthology of, in their mind, some of the best and most important works on Heidegger's thought. Normally you would have to pay a small fortune (at least on a student's income) to get your hands on this set. I've been searching for online copies for some time and, with one failure, I've finally located them! They are in RAR format, so you need to download WinRAR or another program that unpacks it, but you can get a trial version. So enjoy!!!!

Merleau-Ponty on the History of Philosophy

2008-04-11T17:38:00.000-05:00

I recently acquired Merleau-Ponty's The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, the notes from a lecture course he gave at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and the University of Lyons to prepare students for the qualifying exam for the agrégation in philosophy. In it he has an interesting statement on how one does the history of philosophy:

The objectivity of the history of philosophy is only found in the practice of subjectivity. The way of understanding a system is to ask of it the questions with which we ourselves are concerned: it is in this way that systems appear, with their differences, and bear witness whether or not our questions are identical to those which their authors themselves posed.
The history of philosophy is a confrontation, a communication with systems, analogous to that which we are able to have with persons. Even though philosophers may choose, their choice is always accompanied, as if in the margins, by a suspicion of what is overlooked. All consciousness of a thing is, at one and the same time, consciousness of what is not this thing. Each philosophical choice stands out in relief against the background of what was not chosen, and it is in this way that philosophers communicate; it is the residue which maintains the dialogue among persons and, consequently, the history of philosophy.

My Thesis Prospectus

2008-04-02T20:58:00.004-05:00

Part of my absence the last few months has been my initial work on my thesis. After much work with my primary thesis advisor, this is the mostly-finished prospectus:

Embodying Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy of Depression:
A Phenomenological Critique of Aaron Beck

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (hereafter CBT) is one of the dominant therapeutic paradigms in our time. With its focus on cognition, however, CBT virtually ignores the body and its role in human existence. My thesis will be a philosophical critique of CBT through the question of the body’s role in human existence. While it is admitted that CBT is a clinical and not a philosophical discipline, I believe that every method in every discipline is grounded by (sometimes implicit) philosophical theories and that an examination of those theories should be a vital aspect of psychology (Gadamer, 1960/1989; Slife & Williams, 1995). I will focus on Aaron Beck’s CBT model and will use depression as the target psychological phenomenon by which to compare Beck’s model with my phenomenological alternative. My analysis will primarily be informed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. This thesis is not meant as a refutation of CBT, but an attempt to find those structures of active embodiment that essentially undergird and give meaning to cognition as understood by CBT.

The first section of the thesis, essentially the first chapter, will be my literature review of CBT followed by a brief look at the body’s place within that literature. Aaron Beck’s (1976) cognitive-behavioral therapy combines cognitive psychology’s focus on meaning with behaviorism’s theory of learning (Rupke, Blecke, & Renfrow, 2006). Beck (1976) proposed that “[p]sychological problems…result from commonplace processes such as faulty learning, making incorrect inferences on the basis of inadequate or incorrect information, and not distinguishing adequately between imagination and reality” (p. 20). The behavioral aspect of cognitive-behavioral therapy provides a theory of learning and action. Psychological disorders develop when we habitually pair objects, people, events, and actions to certain values, beliefs, and/or consequences (Farmer & Chapman, 2008). With this understanding, depression is grounded in various beliefs: “I am unworthy,” “I am/life is hopeless,” or the unrealistic and ultimately futile belief that “I must be perfect” (Riso & Newman, 2003). These beliefs are “maladaptive schemas” through which the depressed person interprets the events in their lives, essentially filtering out those things that don’t cohere with the belief and emphasizing those things that do. The goal of the therapist, then, is to help the patient correct their maladaptive schemas through vigilant reflection and evaluation of their beliefs, reality testing, and the development of cognitive skills to similarly evaluate and work past future maladaptive schemas, possibly supplemented by medication (Beck, Emery, & Greenberg, 1985, Chapter 11).

The body is rarely mentioned in works on CBT. Naturally, the body is implied in the very notion of behavior and one can easily find discussions of the brain in relation to the usefulness of medication. Beyond these, the most prevalent use of the body is in reference to the “body image”: “one’s perceptions, attitudes, and experiences related to one’s body, especially his or her physical appearance” (Cash & Hrabosky, 2003, p. 255). The body, then, can be said to have a two-fold significance in CBT: first, it is the physical (what I will call the objective) body; second, it is the body as represented in the mind (what I will call the cognitive body).¹

The second part of the thesis will be an extended exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. The first chapter will be a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s notions of “form” in Structure of Behavior (1942/1963) and the figure-ground structure of experience in Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1958). These concepts form the background from which to understand the motile structure of the body. The second chapter will be an analysis of the arguments and evidences given by Merleau-Ponty and others (e.g., Gallagher, 2005) for the “body schema” —“a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, of our hold on them…[a] system of possible movements, or ‘motor projects’” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1964, p. 5)—in contrast to the “body image” of either objectivistic or cognitive models of the body. The final chapter of this section will be an analysis of the temporal structure of embodiment, including the encultered nature of embodied action and experience (Ingold, 2000; Bourdieu, 1980/1990).

The final section will consist of an analysis of depression through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. It will attempt to answer the following questions: how is depression situated within the motile body? What is the relation between the temporal structure of embodiment and the most common symptoms of depression? Why is it important to examine depression by way of the objects that we interact with in an embodied way? How does the above account for the success of cognitive-behavioral therapy? Finally and tentatively, what potential therapeutic techniques can help in developing a therapeutic approach geared to the motile body?

Notes:
1. Bennett and Hacker (2003) point to a propensity within cognitive science and neuroscience to equate the brain with the whole person. Though pertinent to the issues discussed in this thesis, neural reductionism is not going to be explicitly addressed, though I believe the critique I will give can also apply to this approach.

References

Beck, A. (1976). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. New York: International Universities Press.

Beck, A., Emery, G., and Greenberg, R. (1985). Anxiety disorders and phobias: A cognitive perspective. New York: Basic Books.

Bennett, M., and Hacker, P. (2003). Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bourdieu, P. (1980/1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cash, T., and Hrabosky, J. (2003). The effects of psychoeducation and self-monitoring in a cognitive-behavioral program for body-image improvement. Eating Disorders 11(4), 255-270.

Farmer, R., and Chapman, A. (2008). Behavioral interventions in cognitive behavior therapy: Practical guidance for putting theory into action. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Gadamer, H-G (1960/1989). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. Marshall, Trans.). New York: Continuum.

Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1942/1963). The structure of behavior (A. Fisher, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/1958). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962/1964). An unpublished text (A. Dallery, Trans.). In The primacy of perception (pp. 3-11). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Riso, L., and Newman, C. (2003). Cognitive therapy for chronic depression. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 59(8), 817-831.

Rupke, S., Blecke, D., and Renfrow, M. (2006). Cognitive therapy for depression. American Family Physician, 73(1), 83-86.

Slife, B., and Williams, R. (1995). What’s behind the research: Discovering hidden assumptions in the behavioral sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Malpas on Heidegger's Topology and Later Heidegger

2008-04-01T20:50:00.000-05:00

Jeff Malpas provides a critique of Edward Relph's critique of his Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World. The last four paragraphs are particularly interesting:

Heidegger’s Topology attempts to provide an account of the way in which place provides a starting point for Heidegger’ s thinking as well as an idea toward which it develops. Indeed, it is only in the very late thinking, from perhaps 1947 onward, that Heidegger’s topology emerges in a fully developed form (although a form that can only be appreciated when viewed in terms of the problems in the earlier thinking to which it is also a response).
If we are to take Heidegger as making a significant contribution to the philosophical analysis of place in the 20th century, then it must be primarily on the basis of the later thinking rather than the earlier. But the later thinking also makes demands on the reader that are much greater than those of the earlier work—demands that follow, in part, from Heidegger’ s own attempts to think topologically—and as a result the later thinking is more prone to being misread and misconstrued.
I had hoped that Heidegger’s Topology would go some way toward correcting this tendency, but if Relph’s comments are taken as an indication, the work would seem to have fallen short of at least one of its objectives. On the other hand, if the sort of topology or topography in which I take Heidegger to have been engaged and to which I take my own work to be a contribution does constitute a different, if not entirely unprecedented, mode of thinking, then perhaps one simply has to accept certain inevitable difficulties in the communication and elucidation of that thinking.
Heidegger’s Topology does not, however, stand alone. Not only does it seem to me to be supported by the work of others in the same field, most notably, by that of Ed Casey, but it should also be read against the background of my other work. In this respect, Heidegger’s Topology is only the second book in what should be a sequence of works that will together, I hope, provide a more fully elaborated account of the philosophical topology that is adumbrated in Heidegger.

I believe the second book is his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. I'll be getting both soon (for my thesis) and look forward to reading his insights.

A Chance Discussion of Existentialism at a Buffet

2008-04-01T07:06:00.003-05:00

Jay Wilkinson, at Twin Cities Daily Planet, talks about dining at Kim Huoy Chor and overhearing a conversation:

Two 45-50 year old guys ate and skipped back and forth in matching books and discussed Heidegger, existentialism and other such things well beyond me. At one point one of them mentions “Schlomo Levin (or some such name) – he was a German Jewish philosopher in the last century.”

This, along with a few chance relationships, ends up uniting a few tables for discussion. Why can't this happen in my town?

"Brains Are Overrated"

2008-03-25T08:07:00.000-05:00

The Times UK has an interesting article on a British author I have never heard of, Ramond Tallis. In his younger years, as an "angst-ridden adolescent, preoccupied with suffering, death and a fear of the meaninglessness of life," Tallis got interested in philosophy, including "Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza and his favourite, Heidegger." His latest work, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head sounds rather interesting. Has anyone else heard of him and/or can tell me more about his work? His publications sound interesting and the topics he addresses seem to have a Heideggerian feel about them.

In a 2006 interview, Tallis makes a good Heideggerian claim when, in the paraphrase of the interviewer, he says, "it is the metaphysical dimension that makes us human - brains are not computers, they don't process "information" in the limited and technical sense that computers do, instead they support the existence of a person in a world of meaning and value." He may be someone to look into.

New Dreyfus Being and Time Lectures

2007-10-04T11:08:00.000-05:00

About a week ago Kestrell wrote an entry on new Podcasts available from Berkeley, including Hubert Dreyfus' 2007 lectures on Being and Time. The semester, of course, is still going so I imagine more will be added as time goes on. I've listened to a few of them and they are quite good. Also check out his Existentialism in Literature and Man, God, and Society in Western Literature. Enjoy!

NOTE: new lectures have been put up, so take a look!

The Situated Body (Janus Head)

2007-09-20T10:27:00.000-05:00

The latest edition of Janus Head (9/2) is on the situated body with contributions by Shaun Gallagher, Jonathan Cole, and Andy Clark, among others. Some good ideas from various perspectives for those who are interested in the question of the body.

Don't forget to take a look at the book reviews section which includes works like Andy Clark's Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, and Jaegwon Kim's Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Also take a look at the available Symposia.

Genes Cannot Debunk Heidegger

2007-09-19T10:08:00.000-05:00

An interesting quote from a review of Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age:

It might be possible someday, using genetic engineering, to give a child a brain smart enough to understand why Heidegger is wrong, but there is no getting around the fact that he will have to undergo the experience of learning about Heidegger first. There are no genes for Heidegger debunking.

Three Good Dreyfus Works

2007-09-18T09:19:00.002-05:00

Recently Hubert Dreyfus published a paper in Philosophical Psychology 20/2 (2007), 247-268, titled "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian." It can be found online here. It is an excellent summary of Dreyfus' thinking on this topic that also takes into account more recent work, like Michael Wheeler's Reconstructing the Cognitive World.

Another is an interview for Conversations with History titled Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology. The text can be found in the previous link and the interview can be found here.

The last is Dreyfus' Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise. This is a good defense of the relevance of phenomenology to modern philosophy. Enjoy!

Concise Statement of Dasein's Essence

2007-07-29T08:26:00.000-05:00

In his first day in Burghölzli Auditorium of the University of Zurich Psychiatric Clinic, Heidegger provided the most concise definition of Dasein than I have yet to find in any of his other works. Dated September 8, 1959, this definition also includes many developments in Heidegger's later work, which makes it all the more fascinating and, I think, useful.

[T]o exist as Da-sein means to hold open a domain through its capacity to receive-perceive the significance of things that are given to it and that address it by virtue of its own "clearing".
Zollikon Seminars, 4/H4.

I will address each part of the quote in turn.

"To hold open a domain": Dasein, as being-in-the-world, is always already holding open a world. The active nature of 'world-opening' was recently accentuated to me by a statement by Merleau-Ponty in The Primacy of Perception: "We must say that at each moment our ideas express not only the truth but also our capacity to attain it [i.e. the idea] at that given moment" (21). To be able to think implies the opening up of a particular world wherein that thought is meaningful and, hence, possible; to be able to speak meaningfully, then, is to remain in (or sustain) an opened domain at the time one is thus thinking. We see the tight relation between ideas and the opened world in various phenomena: when someone says something in one domain that we are not presently open to, what they say is alien, enigmatic, or perhaps humorous when situated within our current domain. So it is a matter of remaining within an open domain and, indeed, having a grasp of when particular domains are relevant and/or appropriate for our context. Either way, to be Da-sein is to actively "hold open a domain."

"Through its capacity to receive-perceive": as the being that is in-the-world and that dwells in its openness (Offenheit), Da-sein has a capacity to "receive-perceive" (Vernehmen-können) things. Heidegger uses this term to differentiate it from the psychological approach of "seeing [things] in a sensory fashion with the eyes" (ZS, 35/H44). In relation to perception, Heidegger has been quite clear: first and foremost we see beings, things, not bare sensations. The dominant psychological theory of perception requires a distinction between sensation, understood as bare sensory stimulation, and perception, understood as the cognitive ordering of sensations into meaningful objects. Whatever may be said of the physics and physiology behind this understanding of perception, it is not primarily where human beings dwell and insofar as psychology is the study of human beings it must be grounded in an understanding of the human mode of being if it is to be relevant.

The capacity to "receive" speaks of the relation between Da-sein as the opening and beings as that which comes into the open. The metaphor of the open can be easily misunderstood: Da-sein's openness is not merely present-at-hand such that it passively sits and waits for things to be deposited in it, like an empty box that we use to store things. Rather, Da-sein's openness, as constituted by practices, attunements, and a totality of inter-involved beings, is more like a filter that polarizes the world such that beings that are relevant to my current projects may appear if present.

While the opening is not a present-at-hand thing, similarly it is not a subjectivistic attribution of value and meaning onto a meaningless objective thing. As Heidegger states in the "Letter on Humanism," man does not unilaterally decide how beings appear, but it is always a question of man creating and sustaining an opening appropriate to the kind of beings that man is concerned with (paraphrase; Basic Writings, 234). This "receiving" is particularly important in relation to the "given to it" in the original quote, to be addressed below.

"To receive-perceive the significance of things": as early as Being and Time, Heidegger claims that we first see the significance of things for our projects, according to our world, not the thing itself with its present-at-hand properties. We are ecstatically open to beings because we care about things, thus they can appear in a significant and meaningful way (in the least as either relevant or irrelevant for our concerns). For a being who literally "does not care," things would not appear as things. This would be the highest expression of the so-called "objective" viewpoint where, at best, one would see bare sense data if one would not simply be catatonic and thus not 'see' anything at all. But Da-sein does not exist in such a state; even in the case of depression, where all beings and events get reduced to the same meaningless level, our mode of being-in-the-world is a deficient mode of concern, not the absence of concern. That we first and foremost see significances, rather than bare sense data that must be constructed into meaningful things, is one of Heidegger's great insights.

"Things that are given to it": things are "given" to Da-sein. As in "Letter on Humanism," man does not force beings to appear, does not bring them to presence by mere force of will; they are gifts. Being is that which gives, es gibt (it gives). Man creates and sustains the opening by way of his cares and concerns, thus giving a space for being to enter in; being gives that which man can bring to presence given his concerns, yet essentially exceeds that presence. This is the clearing where the event of appropriation (Ereignis) occurs: man's opening and being's giving, both of which are co-necessary. Technology is a danger because it forgets this receiving/giving, uncovering/covering, but sees things as merely present resources that are only available as resources. The same may be said for every appropriation: when our concern is appropriately interacting with beings, the way in which beings come to presence (as the dynamic relation between presence/absence) will be covered over and necessarily so. When our concern is getting about in the world, the mode of presencing cannot be of concern; the latter is necessarily reflective in nature and must be its own matter of concern. Philosophy, as fundamental ontology, brings Ereignis to remembrance.

"And that address it": in the realm of technology "man [is] the master of being" ("The Turning," in Question Concerning Technology, 39). Being is the mere presence of endlessly interchangeable materials that are understood through man's calculating concerns, that exist solely for those concerns. In this view, beings cannot "address" Da-sein since beings are merely present as materials. When Da-sein properly dwells, however, beings address man as this particular being in this particular context with this particular use. Mark Wrathall put it well:

Rather than increasing the universal and uniform availability of everything, we need instead to learn how to let things be things rather than resources, and develop practices attuned to the things that are peculiar to our local world with their own particular earth, sky, mortal practices and divinities.
How to Read Heidegger, 111.

Beings must condition us in their particularity rather than us merely conditioning them as resources for our own concerns. We should let them address us as much as we address them.

"By virtue of its own 'clearing'": I have yet to discover if Heidegger is using "opening" and "clearing" as synonyms, but this part of the quote re-emphasizes the human aspect of being-in-the-world. Heidegger often uses the word Geschick in reference to man's clearing. The common translation is "fate" or "destiny" (see above reference to "Letter on Humanism"), but it can also mean "skill," "aptitude," or "aptness." Man's clearing sets the stage wherein beings can appear as meaningful; it, in a sense, sets up in advance (makes fateful) the possibility of beings appearing within a particular world. But this is also skillful insofar as our worlds are constituted by practices of which we must gain aptitude, whether at an everyday level or as masters. Similarly, these practices must be enacted appropriately; they must be properly geared to our current context such that we are not enacting, say, a world of competition when we should be enacting a world of care or love. Beings, if they do appear, appear by virtue of man's clearing a space for them to appear (and by virtue of being's gift of being).

Lived Embodiment and Addiction

2007-07-23T16:52:00.000-05:00

I just jumped on to Media Fire, the free file-sharing site that Continental Philosophy tends to use. About three months ago I mentioned the acceptance of one of my papers for the ISTP Conference in Toronto. I've just uploaded that paper, titled Lived Embodiment and Addiction, and would welcome comments, criticisms, etc. Here's the abstract again:

A common assumption in much of psychology is that the body is best (if not solely) understood as a physically deterministic entity, even when the existence of a mind/psyche is granted. Here I wish to explore an alternative conception of the body—that of lived embodiment—and make a modest proposal on its ramifications for how we understand addiction. I begin by discussing some of the important assumptions of the physicalistic model, namely linear temporality, causal determinism, and the notion of "habit" implied in those assumptions. Next, I will discuss an alternative conception of embodiment, drawn particularly from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and supplemented by the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. The lived body, as found in our everyday movement in the world, exhibits a non-linear temporal horizon through which the world is habitable. I do not act from the temporally punctualized t₁ to t₂, but I act 'during the lecture,' 'as I cook,' or 'during the conference'; the temporal horizon is spanned. Similarly, it does not follow the if-then logic of causal determinism or rationality, but is based on "motivation"—rather than if I do this, then that will be the result, bodily motility is structured as if I am to do this, then I need to or must do that. For the body to act in a motivated way means its being "geared" towards the world according to specific intentions and, thus, it acts meaningfully. Lastly, "habit," rather than being a learned response to stimuli, is a "style" of being in the world, a particular way of dealing with various contexts. With the above in mind, I propose that the embodied aspect of addiction cannot be fully understood in causal terms, but must include the body’s circumstantial grasp of the world, motivation-based actions, and stylistic modes of being in the world.

Dukkha is Not Merely Suffering

2007-07-23T15:12:00.000-05:00

Recently Douglas Groothuis, on his blog The Constructive Curmudgeon, offered to email the outlines of his recent sermons on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam to anyone interested. As I have something of a vested interest in and am personally fascinated by Buddhism, I want to address a number of issues that I see in his outline (while I wait for the mp3 of the sermons themselves to become available). So, for those who have been interested in my thoughts on Buddhism, here's a start. I promise to intersperse these posts with phenomenological commentaries on various Buddhist concepts.

In order to properly grasp Buddhism one must understand its basic terms. This can be difficult as Buddhism teaches and close study reveals that every basic concept implies the others. This makes a brief account of Buddhism difficult as to talk about, say, suffering is to talk about the Five Aggregates which is to talk about the Twelve Links of Interdependent Coarising, both of which include the Path of liberation from suffering. But as we must all start somewhere, I will begin with the First Noble Truth, often quoted as "Life is suffering." While a common translation, this is also slightly misguided, as practically all 'common' understandings are. The Pali term dukkha can be translated as suffering, in the sense of pain, but it also extends beyond mere negatives. In fact, dukkha contains or, perhaps, enables joy and pleasure, but also neutrality, those experiences that are neither "good" nor "bad." Hence, if the common understanding were to merely be added on in order to make it more accurate, we would say, "Life is pain, pleasure, and neutrality." But even this is inadequate. A better translation would be "impermanence," "transitoriness," or "insubstantiality." Hence, "Life is transitory and impermanent."

Walpola Rahula (a Buddhist monk in the Theraveda/Hinayana tradition), in his work What the Buddha Taught, differentiates between three forms of dukkha: (1) as ordinary suffering, (2) as produced by change, and (3) as conditioned states. The first two, dukkha as suffering and as produced by change, constitute the common understanding. They consist of "birth, old age, sickness, death, association with unpleasant persons and conditions, separation from beloved ones and pleasant conditions, not getting what one desires, grief, lamentation, distress" (Ibid, 19). Left on its own, the first two meanings of dukkha can give the impression that Buddhism is inherently pessimistic, which is why the overarching, in my mind central, third meaning must be understood. But, as stated in the second paragraph above, this will require a foray into other concepts.

To be continued...

Student Paper Award!

2007-07-09T19:06:00.000-05:00

I was just informed that my paper, "The Ethical-Ontological Foundations of Modernity" (see the abstract here), was accepted for APA Division 24's Student Paper Award. You can find the Convention program for Division 24 here; I'm in the first paper session titled "New Work by Students." I'm quite excited! It's always nice to be recognized.

The Essential Belonging Together of Man and Being

2007-07-08T00:12:00.000-05:00

My paper for the International Conference on Persons, titled The Essential Belonging Together of Man and Being, is now available at the Conference webpage. It is a very brief historical look at Heidegger's understanding of being, starting from Being and Time and moving into his later work, with applications to how we understand personhood. Though generally inadequate, as such a short paper must be, I do think it turned out to be a decent paper and it could be seen as a very concise introduction to Heidegger's thought and its development. As always, thoughts, comments, and/or constructive criticisms are welcome.

Siris on Clarity

2007-05-10T09:12:00.000-05:00

Siris has an interesting post on clarity. Following from Nigel Warburton's claim that "[c]larity is expressing yourself in a way that allows readers to follow what you are saying," Siris raises the important question: who are the readers? Can I take any clear account in analytic philosophy, walk the streets, give it to any randomly chosen passerby, and expect them to say, "Yeah, this is clear; I know exactly what they are saying!" No, since understanding and seeingly clear what another is saying depends on the background familiarity of the reader.

Ricoeur talks about this in terms of mimesis₃: "the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or reader; the intersection, therefore, of the world configured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds" (71). It is the point where the understanding of the reader, including the kinds of texts, disciplines, and ways of thinking that they are familiar with, comes to bear on the text and influences how it is seen. This is seen particularly in literature, but also in the sciences: a proponent of string theory will approach a text on quantum physics quite differently from one that follows a Copenhagen-type approach; a philosopher of science and scientific history will read the same text in a different way, as different aspects of the text will be more salient than others.

Siris brings up the question of taste, which I think is relevant. Gadamer, in Truth and Method, gives a similar account (also relying on the Scottish philosophy): "The concept of taste undoubtedly implies a mode of knowing. The mark of good taste is being able to stand back from ourselves and our private preferences. Thus taste, in its essential nature, is not private but a social phenomenon of the first order" (36). Gadamer then goes on to recount how taste became a "subjective" thing, particularly through Kant. The essential tie to both ethics, epistemology, and, Heidegger and Gadamer both argue, ontology is lost in the wake of modernity's subjectivism and individualism.

Many readers decry Heidegger's enigmatic writing style, stumbling over neologisms and such. But once you really dwell with his writings and get a feel (or a sense) for both what he is saying and, perhaps more particularly, how he is saying it, then it is much clearer (though still not easy). The same must be true of analytical texts: it takes time, it takes developing (literally) the skills to see what the author is saying so that, even if the sentence structure is not spot on, you can still understand what they are saying. Then, when asked to demonstrate that we are reading correctly (that we really have this sense of the text), we will eventually be pushed to (a variation on) Wittgenstein's claim: "This is simply what I [sense]."

Another Misunderstanding of Heidegger

2007-05-10T08:38:00.000-05:00

In a piece for The Conservative Voice, writer Albert Brenner attempts to expose the myth of the Noble Savage. In the course of doing so, he quotes and comments on Peter Winch in the following:

Be that as it may; following from Martin Heidegger’s notion that ‘language is the house of being’, Winch comes to the following conclusion; “Reality is not what gives language sense. What is real and what is unreal shows itself in the sense language has”. Brutally summarized; what Winch is saying¹ is that the respective discourses (i.e. language games) of disparate societies are what give sense to their approximation of what constitutes reality, in their disparate ‘realities’.

To put it bluntly, this is not "following...Heidegger"! Language is that which brings beings to light in their being, not some mere language game² that follows the whims of society. The quote comes from Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" that, strangely enough, argues against this kind of an interpretation. He speaks of the "dominance of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity" that would submit language to the "mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings" (Basic Writings, 222-223). While he then immediately applies this to the technological understanding of beings—as mere resources for human consumption—it applies equally well to Winch's subjectivist interpretation. "Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by being" (223). Perhaps the most apt response would be the following quote:

Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of being, come to presence and depart. The advent of being lies in the destiny [Geschick: suitability, capacity, or enabling {see 220}] of being. But for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such destiny [Geschick]; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting [as essentially open to beings] has to guard the truth of being. Man is the shepherd of being. (234)

Man is not the dictator of being, either as the being that absolutely determines the real (as in Winch's interpretation, or Brenner's misinterpretation of Winch) or the domineering technological man. He is the shepherd, the one who must preserve and watch over being (see "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 143-159).

Notes

It is unclear on whether this is actually what Winch is saying or whether it is simply another bad attempt of the media to understand what an academic is saying. In any case, Brenner is wrong in thinking that what he says follows from Heidegger.
Though I am not familiar with Wittgenstein's work, I do not think this would be an accurate understanding of what he is trying to say either.

Malpas' New Book, Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World

2007-05-02T07:42:00.000-05:00

Gary Sauer-Thompson posted yesterday on Jeff Malpas' new book, Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World. The book sounds fascinating and the works he consults merely add to that fascination, moving from Being and Time to post-Turn works (e.g., "The Thing" and "Building Dwelling Thinking"). Here's the blurb on the MIT Press page (don't miss the sample chapter):

This groundbreaking inquiry into the centrality of place in Martin Heidegger's thinking offers not only an illuminating reading of Heidegger's thought but a detailed investigation into the way in which the concept of place relates to core philosophical issues. In Heidegger's Topology, Jeff Malpas argues that an engagement with place, explicit in Heidegger's later work, informs Heidegger's thought as a whole. What guides Heidegger's thinking, Malpas writes, is a conception of philosophy's starting point: our finding ourselves already "there," situated in the world, in "place." Heidegger's concepts of being and place, he argues, are inextricably bound together.
Malpas follows the development of Heidegger's topology through three stages: the early period of the 1910s and 1920s, through Being and Time, centered on the "meaning of being"; the middle period of the 1930s into the 1940s, centered on the "truth of being"; and the late period from the mid-1940s on, when the "place of being" comes to the fore. (Malpas also challenges the widely repeated arguments that link Heidegger's notions of place and belonging to his entanglement with Nazism.) The significance of Heidegger as a thinker of place, Malpas claims, lies not only in Heidegger's own investigations but also in the way that spatial and topographic thinking has flowed from Heidegger's work into that of other key thinkers of the past 60 years.

Heidegger and Sponge Bob Square Pants

2007-05-01T06:23:00.000-05:00

In a final comment in an article on labor in Australia, we find an unrelated, but utterly profound comment on the true significance of Sponge Bob Square Pants through the lens of Heidegger:

Science is a wonderful thing, is it not? According to the latest research, the origin of the human species is to be found at the bottom of the sea, not in an octopus's garden, but in a sponge bed. So Sponge Bob Square Pants is more than just a cartoon. Heidegger was right: In art, the truth.

ISTP Conference in Toronto

2007-04-12T13:45:00.000-05:00

Another official announcement about my presentation at another conference. The International Society for Theoretical Psychology is having its annual conference at York University. They've recently put up the preliminary program. My presentation is during a paper session titled "Psychotherapy, Addiction & Intervention" on Thursday, June 21^st somewhere between 4:00-5:55pm. The paper title of my paper is "Lived Embodiment and Addiction." Here is the abstract:

A common assumption in much of psychology is that the body is best (if not solely) understood as a physically deterministic entity, even when the existence of a mind/psyche is granted. Here I wish to explore an alternative conception of the body—that of lived embodiment—and make a modest proposal on its ramifications for how we understand addiction. I begin by discussing some of the important assumptions of the physicalistic model, namely linear temporality, causal determinism, and the notion of "habit" implied in those assumptions. Next, I will discuss an alternative conception of embodiment, drawn particularly from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and supplemented by the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. The lived body, as found in our everyday movement in the world, exhibits a non-linear temporal horizon through which the world is habitable. I do not act from the temporally punctualized t₁ to t₂, but I act 'during the lecture,' 'as I cook,' or 'during the conference'; the temporal horizon is spanned. Similarly, it does not follow the if-then logic of causal determinism or rationality, but is based on "motivation"—rather than if I do this, then that will be the result, bodily motility is structured as if I am to do this, then I need to or must do that. For the body to act in a motivated way means its being "geared" towards the world according to specific intentions and, thus, it acts meaningfully. Lastly, "habit," rather than being a learned response to stimuli, is a "style" of being in the world, a particular way of dealing with various contexts. With the above in mind, I propose that the embodied aspect of addiction cannot be fully understood in causal terms, but must include the body’s circumstantial grasp of the world, motivation-based actions, and stylistic modes of being in the world.

Admittedly, I have not written the paper yet, but I'm pretty certain it will work.

There is so much going on I don't know which sessions I will attend. However, the following definitely stick out at me: Relationship Between Language, Mind & Culture, The "Costs" of Being Dialogical: Assuming the Theoretical Consequences of the Dialogicality of Psychological Knowledge, Hermeneutic and Phenomenological Explorations, Constructing the Self and Identity (I and II), History Without Theory is Empty & Theory Without History is Blind, Exploring Ontological Relationality: Ricoeur, Buber, MacMurray, and Girard, and Embodied Subjectivity. It looks like this will be a really interesting conference and a great chance to network with like-minded pyshologists. So, if you just happen to be in Toronto at the time, come on over and see what theoretical psychology is like.

The Ethical-Ontological Foundations of Modernity

2007-04-06T14:31:00.000-05:00

Since I just got the final information in the mail, I think this a good time to announce that I will be presenting at the American Psychological Association's 2007 Convention in sunny San Francisco from August 17-20. My presentation will be during a session titled "New Work by Students," sponsored by Division 24, the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, between 12:00-12:50 PM on Friday, August 17 in room 2000 of the Moscone Center. My paper, titled "The Ethical-Ontological Foundations of Modernity," attempts to examine the ethical (via Taylor) and ontological (via Heidegger) foundations of modernity in an attempt to see beyond the typical epistemological approaches that such discussions tend to take. Here is the abstract:

Modernity is the guiding ethos of our day, not only in the broad scope of our culture but also within the discipline of psychology. Traditionally, scholars have understood modernity as the rejection of Medieval authoritarianism and a new dependence on reason, namely as an epistemological revolution. But modernity’s roots extend deeper than a reliance on rationality. The abysmal failures of the Thirty Years War in the wake of sectarian violence aptly demonstrated the need for a non-sectarian ground for discussion. Above and beyond the need for a universal ground for discourse, the rejection of an inherent cosmic order that informed the Catholic and Protestant cultures cleared that path for the development of a non-sectarian valuation. With this rejection came a new valuation of certainty, not in the sense of epistemological certainty, but in the sense of ontologically securing in advance how beings will appear—e.g., as particles in motion. This prevailing ontological attitude set the stage for modernity’s homogenization of temporality through a linear metaphor with its inherent homogenization of space. By establishing in advance how beings will appear in the scientific project, modernity also inaugurated a new valuation of the world: the valuation of objective, third-person experiments over subjective, introspective descriptions, of calculative utility over inherent goods, etc. These analyses are meant to elucidate the ethical and ontological foundations of modernity in order to understand how psychology, as a discipline, should respond to the culture of modernity. When psychology is viewed in light of this ethical/ontological interpretation of modernity, we may deduce three important implications: 1) that we must examine modernity’s valuations more than its dogmas, 2) that these valuations are contingent and not sufficient for psychology’s existence as a discipline, and 3) that alternative valuations and ontologies must be adequately understood before being used to substantiate non-traditional claims, that zeal should not step beyond understanding.

Granted, this presentation is specifically geared towards those who do not accept modernity as an acceptable approach to psychology (which, incidentally, is a stark minority in psychology at the moment), so it will have limited appeal. But since I'm going into this knowing that fact, hopefully I can present the material in such a way as to defuse at least some of the objections that I don't doubt will come up. On that point, I'm glad to send my paper in its current state (I need to cut it at least in half in order to get within the 10 min mark for the presentation) for comments, suggestions, and criticisms to anyone who requests it.

I'm excited and hope this will be a good learning experience.

Heideggerian Denken Gets 5,000+ Hits

2007-04-06T13:53:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to post this for a few weeks, but at the time of this post, Heideggerian Denken has received 5,399 total hits with 10,627 page views since its inception on May 3, 2006. I don't know how that compares with other blogs, especially since some near that number every week. Either way, as a relative nobody in the sphere of Heideggerian scholarship, I'm more than fine with that. I owe a number of those visits to my post on Monty Python's International Philosophy Soccer Match, which at one time was the most often viewed entry on the blog (might still be, but it's not as noticeable). Here's the current summary report:

Visits
Total	5,399
Average Per Day	17
Average Visit Length	1:32
Last Hour	2
Today	8
This Week	117

Page Views
Total	10,627
Average Per Day	28
Last Hour	2
Today	10
This Week	199

Heidegger as the Greatest Philosopher?

2007-04-06T13:33:00.000-05:00

The previous post about the BBC segment on Heidegger got me to searching and I found a link to BBC's poll on the Greatest Philosopher. Stephen Mulhall stood in as Heidegger's advocate and the site includes a 1:40 sound bite on his reasons for suggesting Heidegger. Unfortunately, Heidegger didn't even make it into the top ten, first place going to Marx! They also include a section on various UK celebrity votes on this matter, none of whom chose Heidegger. Well, there's one more reason to despair over the current state of the media! ;o)

Heidegger Documentary

2007-04-06T13:14:00.000-05:00

HT to enowning who HTs Continental Philosophy for posting BBC's Human, All Too Human segment on Heidegger, titled "Thinking the Unthinkable" (see here). Very interesting. I particularly liked Gadamer's place in the interviews, both for his insight and for my ability to see him for the first time. Most of the segment focuses on Heidegger's Nazi involvement, which I think is fitting for the title of the program. I also like George Steiner's response to those who claim that Heidegger is not doing philosophy: "And to those who say, 'Look, this isn't philosophy,' I say fine. I'm not terribly interested in the supermarket label; call it what you will. Are you able to cope? Are you able to live with its completely new, radical grasp on the world?" Enjoy!

The Tao/Da (There) of Truth--Trungpa

2007-04-01T20:45:00.000-05:00

While I'm still unconvinced of a strong coherence between Eastern thought and Heideggerian phenomenology, I thought this quote from Chögyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is good food for thought:

If we really want to learn and see the experience of truth, we have to be where we are. (70)

Where else can truth appear than from my being-here, Da-sein?

Heidegger's Existence and Being and Nietzsche

2007-02-24T11:24:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, Continental Philosophy gave a link to an e-text of Heidegger's Existence and Being (1949). I've been meaning to put it up for those who do not look at Farhang Erfani's blog (or just missed this one). It has an extensive introduction by Werner Brock and then four Heidegger texts: "Remembrance of the Poet," "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry," "On the Essence of Truth," and "What is Metaphysics?"

Not too long ago, Erfani posted a link to an e-text of Heidegger's Nietzsche, in German. It only has the first three volumes, thus missing the last volume on Nihilism. Still a very good find. I wonder how he locates all of these.

Fonds Ricoeur

2007-01-22T11:19:00.000-05:00

There's a new Ricoeur website in town: Fonds Ricoeur (HT Newsletter of Phenomenology). Unfortunately, the English section is still under construction so all the information is currently in French. Here's their blurb on the purpose of the site:

Paul Ricœur is a major twentieth century philosopher, because of the wide range of his thinking and the world wide impact of his work. This Web site helps to discover or to go deeper into his life, work and thinking, and to continue research on subjects he was interested in. It gives a virtual access to some documents from the “Fonds Ricœur” : so you may sometimes feel you are entering the philosopher’s personal library! This exploration of Paul Ricœur’s thinking leads up to dialogue and research, which this site encourages.

P.S. "Fonds," from what a few online searches show, means "melt." I'm not sure I understand the significance...

Sein und Zeit Lectures

2007-01-17T14:09:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to Enowning for stumbling on Benjamin Waters' Lectures to Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Also of interest are his Lectures on Philosophical Hermeneutics, which includes a section on Heidegger and Gadamer. Waters apparently teaches at The University of Sydny as a tutor.

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

2007-01-06T16:31:00.000-05:00

I found this a few months ago and then promtly forgot about it before I could get to mentioning it here. The Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Division 24 of the American Psychological Association (APA), has a few journals available from its primary publication, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology: 21/1, 21/2, 22/1, 22/2, 23/1, 23/2, 24/1, 24/2, and 25/1. Take a particular look at Charles Guignon's Hermeneutics, Authenticity, and the Aims of Psychology, Edwin Gantt's Rationality, Irrationality, and the Ethical: On Saving Psychology from Nihilism, Jack Martin's What Can Theoretical Psychology Do?, and Brent Slife's Taking Practice Seriously: Toward a Relational Ontology. There are, of course, other good papers, but those are the ones that stuck out at me.

Psychology for the Other

2007-01-06T03:57:00.000-05:00

Doing some surfing this morning and stumbled on the following: Psychology for the Other: A Seminar on Emmanuel Levinas. It is a series of conferences on the application of Levinas' philosophy to psychology and psychoanalysis. They have the 2006 papers/abstracts and an archive for 2003, 2004, and 2005 conferences. I don't know if these are related to Gantt and Williams' Psychology for the Other: Levinas, Ethics and the Practice of Psychology, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

More Dreyfus Lectures

2007-01-05T12:07:00.000-05:00

Over the break, as I was playing around with my new mp3 player, I found some audio lectures by Hubert Dreyfus and Ken Goldberg for their class Questioning Efficiency: Human Factors and Existential Phenomenology (Spring 2006). I haven't had the chance to listen to them all, but the lectures on "The Thing" are quite interesting. The lectures primarily focus on Heidegger's middle and later thought.

¶4. The Ontical Priority of the Question of Being

2006-12-19T15:20:00.000-05:00

We may provisionally understand a “science” as “the totality established through an interconnection of true propositions” (32/H11). Heidegger corrects this later by seeing science as “a way of existence and thus a mode of being-in-the-world” (408/H357), which is a precondition for both “interconnection,” “truth,” and “propositions.” As said earlier, a science can exist only insofar as it is “capable of a crisis in its basic concepts” (29/H9). There must be something more fundamental than interconnected propositions, than the collection of facts, which points to the ontological hermeneutical foundations of all ontical sciences whereby the basic concepts are understood and challengeable. Thus, the possibility of crisis, which defines science, is fundamental ontology—”sciences have the manner of being which this entity—man himself—possesses” (32/H11). This again illustrates Dasein’s priority as the being that we will examine.

Dasein is peculiar in that Dasein is that being that, “in its very being, that being is an issue for it” (32/H12). This implies that Dasein has a particular relationship with being that relationship is itself Dasein’s being; to use Heidegger’s later language, Dasein’s being is constituted by care, that it cares about its being. Lastly, this means that Dasein understands its being in a particular way and that this “[u]nderstanding of being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological” (Ibid). Let me restate this more succinctly: ontically, Dasein has priority because it is that being whose being is an issue for it; ontologically, Dasein has priority because this very ‘being an issue for it’ is an ontological (i.e. not merely ontic) mode of its being. But if we understood “ontology” in the way it is traditionally understood—as “that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities”—then Dasein’s being and its understanding of that being must be “pre-ontological,” or pre-theoretical (Ibid). These two modes of being are what define Dasein as “being in such a way that one has an understanding of being” (Ibid).

That towards which Dasein directs itself in its being we will call “existence” [Existenz], which later will be understood as Dasein’s futural temporal mode of being—projection. Because of this, Dasein understands itself “in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself” (33/H12). The possibility of not being itself is Dasein’s inauthentic (uneigentlich) mode of existing—where one’s possibilities are defined by what one (das Man) does and are not “one’s own” (eigen).¹ The possibility of being itself is Dasein’s authentic (eigentlich) mode of existing—where one’s possibilities are taken up as one’s own. This will be exemplified, within B&T, in the discussion of death which is “that possibility which is one’s ownmost [eigenste]” (294/H250). Death is an example of that which is necessarily Dasein’s own, it cannot be ‘shared’ by das Man, though even this ownness is possible only on the background of Dasein’s being-in-the-world and, hence, is not “subjective” in the usual sense; something ‘beyond’ Dasein’s ‘inner’ world is essential to the possibility of authenticity. Dasein’s concrete (ontic) understanding of itself will be termed “existentiell [existenziell]”—the specific modes of being that Dasein can enact—while the (ontological) understanding about the “structures” that make Dasein’s ontic being possible—that allows Dasein to be in a particular way—will be termed “existential [existenzial]” (33/H13). It is through an examination of Dasein’s ontic (existentiell) being that its fundamental ontological (existential) structures will be made transparent. It should be restated, however, that this understanding must move within an understanding of being, not in terms of some ‘inner’ essence, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s appropriation of Heidegger’s thought.

Dasein’s understanding of being essentially entails 1) “an understanding of something like a ‘world’” and 2) “the understanding of the being of those entities which become accessible within the world” (Ibid). The examination of being-in-the-world that will happen later in this work is an attempt to bring to light these two entailments: of how “world” and “entities” are co-necessary in man’s essential relationship and understanding of being. As said earlier (see ¶3), B&T fails in moving beyond this analysis to being itself—it is ultimately too concerned with discussing how beings appear—but a proper grasp of the being of beings is needed before we can understand being itself.

With the above we have made clearer Dasein’s ontical and ontological priority in the question of being. “Therefore fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein” (34/H13). To restate, Dasein has three levels of priority: ontically, Dasein is that being whose being is an issue for it and thus “has the determinate character of existence,” of possibility (Ibid). Ontologically, Dasein’s “existence is…determinative for [its being]” (Ibid); you cannot separate Dasein’s ‘essence’ from its ‘existence,’ nor should one even accept the duality.² In fact, Heidegger will argue that the traditional categories of ‘essence’ and ‘existence’ are themselves ontologically inadequate because they are ontic categories that continue to hold force because of the historical forgetting of the question of being—we have become entrenched in one mode of disclosure. Lastly, what might be called a methodological priority, Dasein, because of its understanding of beings/being, is the “ontico-ontological condition for the possibility of all ontologies” (Ibid). Ontology, as an articulation of being, requires a being with Dasein’s constitution, hence Dasein has methodological priority—it must be understood before we can better understand being.

Dasein’s relationship to entities has not been ignored even within more traditional ontologies, and Heidegger quotes Aristotle to that effect: “Man’s soul is, in a certain way, entities.”³ Similarly, Thomas Aquinas saw the priority of Dasein (the “soul”) as “an entity which…is properly suited to ‘come together with’ entities of any sort whatever” (Ibid).⁴ Contrary to many existential and so-called postmodern approaches, Heidegger is quick to point out that “[t]his priority has obviously nothing in common with a vicious subjectivizing of the totality of entities” (34/H14). This is due to Dasein’s intentional character and the transcendence of beings: that beings (including Dasein) necessarily escape any way we bring them to light; beings cannot be made completely transparent. The later Heidegger will refer to this as the essential belonging together of man and being, the essential belonging together of subject and object, which belonging together necessarily recasts those categories in a non-traditional way that has not yet become transparent. This warrants Heidegger’s statement: “Dasein then [in ¶2, as the being who’s questioning is an ontic mode of its being] revealed itself as that entity which must first be worked out in an ontologically adequate manner, if the inquiry [about the meaning of being] is to become a transparent one” (35/H14).

Heidegger ends this section with a good summary of Dasein’s priority:

If to interpret the meaning of being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already comports itself, in its being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. But in that case the question of being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-being which belongs to Dasein itself—the pre-ontological understanding of being. (35/H14-15)

Dasein already comports understandingly with being; it is always already in a relationship with being, which relationship is a positive constituent of Dasein’s being. What fundamental ontology attempts to do is to address this relationship in a more radical—i.e. more fundamental—way than our everyday understanding. But before we can do that we must start with Dasein’s everyday (inauthentic) mode of being with beings, after which we will be in a position to better understand Dasein’s authentic mode of being with beings.⁵

Notes:

M&R translate das Man as “the ‘they,’” which has a wrong connotation, as in us vs. them. In German one says, “Wie spricht man…” (How does one say…), or, “Wie tun man…” (How does one do…), which does not translate as well into, “How do they say…,” and, “How do they do…”
Nor should we think of pairing existence and essence with the ontological and ontic. Dasein’s essence is its existence; one is not derived from the other, nor does one have priority over the other. Furthermore, Dasein’s ontic facticity is not its essence, if we understand essence as the possession of the necessary and sufficient properties that make something what it is. The substance/property metaphysic on which most of our discussions of essence and existence rests subsists on an all-too-limited temporal priority—the present. Dasein, as an essentially temporal being, cannot be understood in terms of its pure presence in an abstract atemporal space (nature at an instant). This point will be accentuated throughout B&T.
De Anima Γ 8 431 b 21. Richard McKeon translates it as “the soul is in a way all existing things” (“De Anima,” Richard McKeon, trans., in The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), 595).
Questiones de Veritate, q. I, a 1 c.
For Heidegger, fundamental ontology and authenticity are intimately tied together. Our inauthentic relation with being remains inadequate due to its fallenness in das Man: my relation with being is mediated and delimited by ‘what one does’ and does not have the clarity that our phronetic grasp of the situation has (see ¶60). But when one has a phronetic grasp of the situation, one is then in a position to see that the understanding of das Man is fundamentally ungrounded, that beings exceed any given articulation. It is this ungrounding—the ‘nothing’ on which man’s being-in-the-world rests—that will preoccupy Heidegger’s thoughts into his later works. See Hubert Dreyfus, “Can There Be a Better Source of Meaning than Everyday Practices? Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II,” in Heidegger’s Being and Time: Critical Essays, Richard Polt, ed. (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 141-154.

Paul Ricoeur on the Cogito

2006-12-13T12:31:00.000-05:00

Let us in fact reflect upon what the self of self-understanding signifies, whether we appropriate the sense of a psychoanalytic interpretation or that that of a textual exegesis. In truth, we do not know beforehand, but only afterward, although our desire to understand ourselves has alone guided this appropiation. Why is this so? Why is the self that guides the interpretation able to recover itself only as a result of the interpretation?
There are two reasons for this: it must be stated, first, that the celebrated Cartesian cogito, which grasps itself directly in the experience of doubt, is a truth as vain as it is invincible. I do not deny that it is a truth; it is a truth which posits itself, and as such it can be neither verified or deduced. It posits at once a being and an act, an existence and an operation of thought: I am, I think; to exist, for me, is to think; I exist insofar as I think. But this is a vain truth; it is like a first step which cannot be followed by any other, so long as the ego of the ego cogito has not been recaptured in the mirror of its objects, of its works, and, finally, of its acts. Reflection is blind intuition if it is not mediated by what Dilthey called the expressions in which life objectifies itself. Or, to use the language of Jean Nabert, reflection is nothing other than the appropriation of our act of existing by means of a critique applied to the works and the acts which are the signs of this act of existing. Thus, reflection is a critique, not in the Kantian sense of a justification of science and duty, but in the sense that the cogito can be recovered only by the detour of a decipherment of the documents of its life. Reflection is the appropriation of our effort to exist and of our desire to be by means of the works which testify to this effort and this desire.
Paul Ricoeur, "Existence and Hermeneutics," Kathleen McLaughlin, trans. in The Conflict of Interpretations, Don Ihde, ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 17-18.

Man's essence is his essential belonging together with being, which is enacted through appropriation (Ereignis), a hermeneutic process of gathering beings into a context in which meaning can appear (or beings can appear in a meaningful way; can they "appear" in any other way?). Thus, his identity, his existence, is intimately tied to the "documents of [his] life" through which his gathering, his appropriating, is incarnated.

¶3. The Ontological Priority of the Question of Being

2006-10-31T13:17:00.000-05:00

In the previous section it was argued that the question of being is peculiar because "a series of fundamental considerations is required for working it out, not to mention for solving it" (29/H8). This was seen in the circularity of dealing with "first principles"--being fundamental, they must be invoked in the questioning itself. Our motivation for raising this question deals both with its "venerable origin" within Greek thought, but also the lack of a satisfactory answer (see ¶1). But we are still tempted to ask: what is the aim in asking this question? Doesn't the question fly into the highest realm of abstraction and generality that only philosophers in their ivory towers would consider (implying that the question is empty of meaning), or is it in fact "the most basic and the most concrete" fact we can consider (29/H9)?

Heidegger's answer moves in steps: "Being is always the being of an entity" (Ibid). All entities are capable of being organized in such a way that they become the basis for a particular kind of study, such as "history, nature, space, life, Dasein, language, and the like" (Ibid). But before the sciences (used broadly) can stake out their areas of study and decide beforehand what kind of entities they are going to ask about, there is already a basic grasp of being in "our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of being in which the area of subject-matter is itself confined" (Ibid). A simple way of putting this is that mankind was related to beings (and, hence, understood being) long before any particular science (as either defined by the Greeks or us moderns) came on the scene. Not only this, but even the progress of the sciences stems not from collecting and collating facts, but when "their basic concepts undergo a more or less radical revision which is transparent to itself" (Ibid). To use an example, the major advancements in physics have not come from merely gathering facts, but in the irruption of paradoxes that made physics reexamine its founding principles. Newtonian physics in many ways breaks down on the quantum level, which fact cannot be illustrated simply by looking at the data. It is only by fundamentally reinterpreting the being of subatomic particles that the paradoxes can be meaningful and any advancement can be made. This is why a genuine science must be "capable of a crisis in its basic concepts" and why such a fact makes problematic the relationship between "positively investigative inquiry" and the "things themselves" that are its aim (Ibid).

Heidegger gives specific examples: the formalist/intuitionist debate within mathematics, relativity (and quantum mechanics) in physics, the movement beyond mechanism and vitalism in biology, historiological and literary ("humane") sciences seeing their objects of inquiry as "problems" rather than objective historical facts, and the question of man's relation to God in theology. All of these "crises" deal with the being of the objects examined in these sciences--their being can no longer be understood within the understanding of their being had by previous generations and the sciences themselves must change in relation to this difference (not the other way around). In doing fundamental ontology we are searching for the "basic concepts" that "determine the way in which we get an understanding beforehand of the area of subject-matter underlying all the objects a science takes as its theme, and all positive investigation is guided by this understanding" (30/H10). Put another way, our understanding of being is the basis on which beings can appear in their different modalities within the sciences--as Newtonian sensuous atoms or as Heisenberg's "partial differential equation in an abstract space of many dimensions."¹ It is also the basis on which beings can appear different than our preconceptions--we can be 'surprised' by something only on the basis of a prior understanding that cannot 'make sense' of this new aspect. It is because of this priority of our understanding of being that "[s]uch research must run ahead of the positive sciences, and it can" (Ibid).

Heidegger's project is that of "laying the foundation," which he understands as disclosing the foundations that make possible the understanding of being within a particular world--the world of physics, of art, of literature, etc. This, in turn, will require us to examine Dasein in its historicity insofar as its historicity (or temporality) is constitutive of its mode of being. By doing so we will make clear the apriori grounds on which beings appear in their being. In Heidegger's use, however, apriori doesn't simply mean 'prior to experience,' but rather the fundamental ontological grounds on which any notion of 'prior' or 'experience' is possible, what he referred to in the previous section as "first principles" (see ¶2). In this inquiry we must be careful to not be content with simply elucidating beings--if it is not to be "naive and opaque" our inquiry must "discuss the meaning of being in general" (31/H10). Incidentally, this will prove to be a failing in B&T itself--it never moves beyond beings to being. This failure is not without its positive contributions, however, as B&T still contributes to "laying bare the grounds for [answering the question about the meaning of being] and exhibiting them" (28/H8; from ¶1).

Heidegger summarizes his aim:

The question of being aims therefore at ascertaining the apriori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and, in so doing, already operate with an understanding of being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundation. (31/H11)

When a science has failed to make the being of its entities clear it can fall into all sorts of errors, like assuming that its understanding of being, as seen in the entities that it interrogates, can be generalized to other modes of inquiry. It also makes that science "blind and perverted" in that it does not properly grasp how its entities are constituted and thus it becomes incapable of "crisis" as it is thereby incapable of questioning its foundations. This is the ultimate failing of Western philosophy, on Heidegger's understanding--it has thought the question of being (ontological) answered in terms of its understanding of beings (ontical). This has been exhibited in various ways through history, but it all comes down to Heidegger's central claim--that the question of being has been forgotten. Thus, the question of being does not have priority merely because of its "venerable tradition and advancement" (see the first part of this section), but because it is foundational to all ontic understanding of beings.

Notes:

Heisenberg in 1945, quoted in Alan A. Grometstein, The Roots of Things: Topics in Quantum Mechanics (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenium Publishers, 1999), 62.

¶2. The Formal Structure of the Question of Being

2006-10-26T11:29:00.000-05:00

In the second section of the Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger addresses the nature of the question as question. By doing so he is trying to show how the "question of being" has a particular character that it does not share with other inquiries (24/H5). Every question is a seeking and every seeking is "guided beforehand by what is sought." Thus, every question is about something, but it is also a questioning of that something which, at present, remains indeterminate. Beyond this questioning we have the goal of the questioning: "that which is to be found in the asking" (Ibid). When we ask a question in an explicit way, as we are in the question of being, the question itself does not become transparent until we become clear about these different aspects of the question as question.

As something that must be guided before, the question of being must start from the fact that "being must already be available to us in some way" (25/H5). In fact, this understanding of being is necessary for even our most everyday activities within the world--opening doors, driving cars, eating food, etc. We cannot currently say that we "know" what being means, even if we use the copula (is) every day in various circumstances (see ¶1). Furthermore, "[w]e do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed" (Ibid), hence we do not even know where to start. However, we must realize that this understanding of being, however vague and imprecise, is a fact.

The indefiniteness of our understanding of being--that we use it and understand it every day but we cannot make it transparent--is itself a positive phenomena that we need to account for. But before we can understand how it is we are to clarify this common understanding of being, we need to examine the historical understandings of being as a concept. By doing so, we can gain a preliminary understanding of what our common understanding of being is; we can also locate possible obscurations that may hinder a more illuminated understanding. We may find that our average understanding of being is partially informed by various theories and opinions that simultaneously illuminate and obscure our common understanding. It will be necessary to make these theories explicit.

"What is asked about" in our inquiry is being--"that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood, however we may discuss them in detail" (25-26/H6). Here Heidegger brings in the ontological difference (taken from Aristotle), which should be quoted in full:

The being of entities 'is' not itself an entity. If we are to understand the problem of being, our first philosophical step consists...in not 'telling a story'--that is to say, in not defining entities as entities by tracing them back in their origin to some other entities, as if being had the character of some possible entity. Hence being, as that which is asked about, must be exhibited in a way of its own, essentially different from the way in which entities are discovered. (26/H6)

Because of this, "what is to be found out by the asking"--the meaning of being--must be seen on its own, "essentially contrasting with the concepts in which entities acquire their determinate signification" (Ibid). Being, as that which "determines entities as entities," cannot itself be an entity as, for every entity we can name, the question of its being still remains. Even modern discussions of 'necessary' and 'contingent' beings (as they relate to God or mathematical propositions) still pass over this point--the being of beings, whether they are necessary or contingent, has not been addressed but merely assumed (see ¶1).

Since it is being that we are asking about and being is understood as the "being of entities," we must initially turn to entities; entities are "what [are] interrogated" (Ibid). But if we are able to use beings as our basis for interrogating being, then it must be the case that beings are accessible to us "as they are in themselves." Thus, in asking about being, we must understand how it is that we access beings. But this raises a question: what being are we to interrogate, when everything (or every thing) that we speak of is a being? In looking at every being, there is one that has priority: Dasein, that which each of us is.

Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it--all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry, and therefore are modes of being for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves. Thus to work out the question of being adequately, we must make an entity--the inquirer--transparent in his own being. The very asking of this question is an entity's mode of being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about--namely, being. (27/H7)

It might be immediately objected that this approach is circular: we are trying to understand an entity in its being so that we can "formulate" the question of being? This supposed circularity is inescapable when we are trying to find "first principles," but the charge is equally groundless. Heidegger has two reasons for making this assertion: first, it must be accepted that "first principles" will be in effect in any endeavor we make, so we cannot even raise the question of their meaning without invoking them (in this he is quite close to Kant). Second, as argued in the first section, our understanding of being is currently deficient and, hence, cannot be used circularly. He succinctly states this:

One can determine the nature of entities in their being without necessarily having the explicit concept of the meaning of being at one's disposal. Otherwise there could have been no ontological knowledge heretofore... The 'presupposing' of being has rather the character of taking a look at it beforehand, so that in the light of it the entities presented to us get provisionally articulated in their being. (27/H7-8)

An understanding of being, no matter how provisional, is a positive constituent of Dasein's being as seen in the fact that Dasein is that being that intelligibly speaks of being. Thus, there is no "circular argument" in raising the question of being in this way: we are not assuming a concept of being and then proving it by examining Dasein; rather, we are "laying bare the grounds for [answering the question about the meaning of being] and exhibiting them" (28/H8), which ground is that being that understands being. To quickly restate the argument: Dasein is that being that has an understanding of the meaning of being, hence it is important to understand how that being comes to this understanding so that we can unearth the grounds on which its understanding rest.

We may speak of our questioning of the meaning of being as a "'relatedness backward or forward' which what we are asking about (being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of being of an entity [Dasein]" (Ibid). We relate "back" by examining our currently vague understanding of being; we relate "forward" by interrogating a being in its being (Dasein) in order to further clarify our current understanding. We have already seen this in Heidegger's exposition of the mode of being of questioning: it is constituted by "what is asked about," "that which is interrogated," and "that which is to be found out by the interrogation." Not only does this mode of being have an explicitly temporal character, but it also exemplifies an intentional character that will later be seen in Dasein's "care structure" (see Part I Chapter VI). But we have yet to make explicit Dasein's special relation to the question of being--why Dasein itself has a privileged position in our interrogation--though we have already spoken about it in terms of Dasein's understanding of being.

Heidegger and Nazism

2006-10-25T22:06:00.000-05:00

I will admit to being quite ignorant of the Heidegger/Nazi debate; it simply doesn't interest me. However, I was struck by a quote taken from What is Called Thinking?. In this passage, Heidegger is discussing Nietzsche's Übermensch:

Nietzsche's thinking gives expression to something that already exists but is still concealed from current views. We may assume, then, that here and there, still invisible to the public eye, the superman already exists. But we must never look for the superman's figure and nature in those characters who by a shallow and misconceived will to power are pushed to the top as the chief functionaries of the various organizations in which that will to power incorporates itself. (Ibid, 59-60)

At the end of that lecture, Heidegger asks: "Is the man of today in his metaphysical nature¹ prepared to assume dominion over the earth as a whole?" His answer: "Man as he is today [being the 'last man'] is not prepared to form and assume a world government" (Ibid. 65).

What is Called Thinking was taught after World War II and was, in fact, the first course that Heidegger was allowed to teach after his involvement with the Nazi regime. While Heidegger never publicly renounced his decision to join the Nazi party, statements like these seem to imply the failure of that party's attempt to seize up its own existence in the way Heidegger had hoped. I think it also significant that, following these statements, Heidegger quotes an apparently oft-missed statement by Nietzsche:

[I]n Human, All Too Human I, 349 (1878) I already characterized modern democracy, together with its mongrel forms such as the 'German Reich,' as the form of decline of the state. If there are to be institutions there must be a kind of will, instinct, imperative, anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations forward and backward ad infinitum. ("Twilight of the Idols," found in The Portable Nietzsche, 543)

This is a Nietzsche that most have never heard: the call to tradition, authority, and responsibility. In fact, the Nietzsche who opposed "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" (Ibid, 506) and who despised the "brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service" (Ibid, 510) is rarely heard. Thus, I think it important that Heidegger, following his involvement with National Socialism, would quote one of Nietzsche's statements against such a regime.

Notes:

Here Heidegger is referring to the "last man" who is "about to assume dominion of the earth as a whole" through a "technological transformation of the earth and of human nature" (Ibid, 57 and 59). The last man, then, is technological man.

Sein und Zeit Online

2006-10-02T07:16:00.000-05:00

Maybe I've been blind, but every time I've looked at Ereignis' section on Written by Heidegger I did not see Sein und Zeit in PDF format. It is not the latest printing by Tübingen and it is missing Heidegger's marginal notes, but everything else seems to be there. Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how long this has been available? This will definitely speed up my work on the interlinear Being and Time/Sein und Zeit I've been slaving over.

This online delight is provided by Hudson Cress (though I don't know how he got past any copyright issues; get it while it's still available). Cress also has a decent collection of other Western Philosophy texts; check it out or simply browse through his whole online Library.

How to Do Good Philosophy, With Help from Dogbert

2006-09-27T18:51:00.000-05:00

Something to always keep in mind when discussing philosophy:

¶1. The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being

2006-09-08T10:06:00.000-05:00

This was my first (and last) post at this summer's Being and Time reading group. I don't think we had a clear enough plan on who was posting what and when, which slowed down the blog and lead to its (generally) quick demise. As I've been wanting to closely work through B&T, I thought I'd place it here as a beginning of a set of entries that summarize that important text.

Throughout I will be using mostly Macquarrie and Robinson's translation. I do have electronic access to Stambaugh's translation, but do not think that I will use it much. So, unless indicated otherwise, the translation that I am working with will be Macquarrie and Robinson. All in-text references will begin with the page number in the translation followed by the page number in the German text, designated by an "H" (e.g. 81/H55). Today I will finally purchase Sein und Zeit (I've been trying to find a way to get a copy without paying outrageous international shipping costs for a few years), which I hope to utilize throughout. Feel free to ask questions, give non-B&T references, etc.

Heidegger begins with his infamous claim that "[The Question of being¹] has today been forgotten" (M&R 21/H2). This should be strange to us as this question is not just any question, but the one that motivated Plato and Aristotle as the primary question of philosophy. Since then the question has gone through many "alterations" and "retouchings" after which "what [Plato and Aristotle] wrested with the utmost intellectual effort from the phenomena, fragmentary and incipient though it was, has long since become trivialized" (21/H2). Heidegger believes that there are three "dogmas" about being that have contributed to this decline:

Being is thought to the "most universal concept."
Being is thought to be indefinable.
Being is thought to be self-evident.

For the first, quoting Aquinas: "An understanding of being is already included in conceiving anything which one apprehends in entities" (Summa Theologica 11:1 Q.94 Art.2; 22/H3).² Thus being applies in some sense to everything. But here the universality is not thought in the sense of a class or genus, but transcends any genus. Aristotle himself saw the 'universality' of being to be analogous to the universality of a genus/class, but not reducible to one. This "put the problem of being on what was, in principle, a new basis" (22/H3). This, as Heidegger will later put it, is the "ontological difference"--the difference between being and beings, or, rather, the claim that being is not a being and should not be treated as one. This idea continued , though in an imprecise way, in philosophy through the Thomists, the Scotists (probably the two greatest early influences in Heidegger's thought), and even in Hegel, "except that he no longer pays heed to Aristotle's problem of the unity of beings as over against the multiplicity of 'categories' applicable to things" (23/H3).

So if it is said that 'being' is the most universal concept, this cannot mean that it is the one which is clearest or that it needs no further discussion. It is rather the darkest of all. (23/H3)

For the second, if it is the case that being is not the same thing as beings, then it cannot be defined or understood as beings are. Furthermore, as the most universal concept, we cannot understand being in terms of anything else; it is the ground of things and, thus, should not be thought of in terms of them. I think Heidegger puts it best:

We can infer only that 'being' cannot have the character of an entity. Thus we cannot apply to being the concept of 'definition' as presented in traditional logic [i.e. in terms of properties], which itself has its foundations in ancient ontology and which, within certain limits, provides a justifiable way of characterizing "entities". The indefinability of being does not eliminate the question of its meaning; it demands that we look that question in the face. (23/H4)

Here is the first intimation that we must move beyond logic and the traditional metaphysic in asking the question of being: it must transcend our usual ways of discussing things. As the Western tradition has focused so exclusively on beings instead of being, we cannot depend on its formulations. This does not make it useless, by any means, but we cannot simply refer to the usual formulations and constructions as if they were self-evidently true.

For the third, it is readily recognized that we constantly use the copula (i.e. "is") in our interactions with and discussions about beings: it pervades our language and we cannot help but use it. Thus we start this investigation with some understanding of being, but this understanding is "an average kind of intelligibility, which merely demonstrates that this is unintelligible" (23/H4). This demonstrates an "a priori...enigma"--that we understand being but view it as unintelligible.

The very fact that we already live in an understanding of being and that the meaning of being is still veiled in darkness proves that it is necessary in principle to raise this question again. (23/H4)

From the above we see that appealing to the self-evident nature of being is "a dubious procedure" since that which is self-evident is to become "the sole explicit and abiding theme for one's analytic--'the business of philosophers' (23-24/H4). Because of this we cannot simply let the matter lay where it is in its self-evident obscurity and calling it self-evident does not negate this obscurity. Simply looking at these three common conceptions of being demonstrates that the question of being has remained unanswered. If we are to revive it, "we must first work out an adequate way of formulating it" (24/H4), as the traditional formulations are obviously lacking.

Notes:

I will not follow M&R's pension to capitalize "Being." There is a danger in using the title case for being in that one might then think of it in terms of beings (perhaps as the greatest being--God, Nature, etc.), which is one of the central mistakes in Western thought according to Heidegger. Regardless, it should be obvious when I am referring to "beings" and when I am speaking of "being."
M&R quote an alternative translation: "For that which, before aught else, falls under apprehension, is being, the notion of which is included in all things whatsoever a man apprehends" (Thomas Baker, trans.; see here for the full reference). Aquinas, in the same reference, states, "'being' is the first thing that falls under the apprehension simply."

Some Clarifications on Heidegger

2006-08-23T11:25:00.000-05:00

Not too long ago, C Grace, asked a series of questions that I've been meaning to get to. So, here is a response (sorry for the lateness):

It seems that Heidegger takes an approach to philosophy that uses an intuitive, observational approach rather than a rational, logical approach. Is this right?

That might be a provisional way of putting it. Phenomenology is primarily a matter of describing the appearing of beings (or the lack thereof, in Heidegger's later thought). It does not try to create arguments for the existence of beings or about their essence, but tries to accurately describe how beings appear prior to any propositions or logical constructs. This, of course, is difficult because, for us philosophers, we already inhabit a world of propositions and are at least minimally trained in logical thought; for the non-philosopher these conceptions (and misconceptions about these conceptions) are still important for our social context. These affect how we inhabit our world in many ways and will inevitably influence the appearing of beings (for better or worse). Because of this, phenomenology is no simple empiricism or a naive 'perspectiveless' viewing of the world. Rather, phenomenology tries to see the world from where we already are, biases and all, because even there beings appear. It is a mistake to believe that beings appear only in the realm of apodictic certainty.

Descriptions cannot be argued; the only proper response to a description is a counter-description. One of Heidegger's primary descriptions is that beings must appear prior to any proposition; in other words, we cannot make true propositions about beings without those beings first appearing before us. Furthermore, we cannot make propositions unless we ourselves are in the truth; if we were perpetually in 'falsehood' we could not utter truth (compare this with Han's treatment of Nietzschean truth and Guignon's treatment of authenticity). The fact that he calls this a 'truth' (aletheia) is secondary to the description: is this an accurate description of our access to beings? Hence, one cannot 'refute' phenomenology with logical argumentation; rather, all that one can do is give a counter-phenomenology, a counter description of how beings appear. This is an important aspect of my claim, given to Tim earlier, that there are things we can talk about that are prior to logic and rationality, even things that ground logic and rationality.

This does raise the question of the utility of phenomenology. It actually is quite simple: if there is some connection between how beings appear and how beings are in their being (and do we have any reason to think otherwise? Any such thinking will itself gain its meaning from the need for it to be so), then having an accurate description of how beings appear is vital for having a cogent philosophy. If it is the case that beings do not appear as substances with properties (or at least do not at first appear as such), then we must find an alternative way of describing beings, as the substance/property mode of description will be inadequate, incomplete. Heidegger's description of the substance/property metaphysic as a de-worlded understanding of beings has important consequences for ontology: we cannot privilege one mode of understanding above another, especially if the currently predominant metaphysical trend (i.e. substance/property metaphysics) is understandable only on the backdrop of a subject within the world. The question, then, is not that of arguing for or against Heidegger through logic or reason, but providing a counter-description wherein the de-worlded understanding is seen as prior to (and fundamental for) the worlded understanding.

"a thing's essence is at least partially constituted by its relations with other beings and intentions."
I would totally agree with this. I have noticed that when I observe things essence is a unity. No one thing is separated from another, the objects that we observe are not independent of one another. We observe a differentiated unity, not distinct objects. Does this approach what Heidegger means by "pre-essential essence,”?

There are a few things that need to be clarified: a being's essence is constituted in a context, which context necessarily requires other beings, purposes, motivations, and such. The Rook's unity is not found in some 'objective' world, apart from certain norms and motivations, but in the engaged context of chess. Simply having chess pieces 'objectively' laying by a chess board is not sufficient for the pieces and board to have meaning; neither is its meaning fully constituted by the rules of the game. What is needed is a being who can unify them within the 'game' that we call chess. The rules have their meaning because they are informed by the motivation of winning, of "gaining the upper hand" in the game, etc. Hence, it is not quite so much that "[n]o one thing is separated from another," but that a being is unintelligible without it having some context in which it is disclosed. Beyond that clarification, I think you are heading in the right direction (assuming, of course, that I'm right).

The question of the "pre-essential essence" is not quite the same issue, though. That term comes from Heidegger's "On the Essence of Truth." A being's pre-essential essence is the practically unlimited ways that it could be disclosed, both by beings with Dasein's mode of comportment or otherwise (some alien race, perhaps, or animals). It is not understood as some essential 'nature' that we can 'see' in its 'properties,' as this is a de-worlded and, for that reason, diminished grasp of beings. The pre-essential essence of beings lies in its transcendence, its excess that cannot be captured in any given disclosure of that being, the object's ability to be disclosed in an indeterminate number of ways and, by such, its ability to surprise us. To put it one more way, the pre-essential essence is the admittedly negative description that we give of beings prior to any given disclosure of beings (see again here). In the latter we find a given being's relational character with other beings, purposes, motivations, etc., whereas a being's pre-essential essence is non-relational, it has not yet been articulated within a context. If we accept this description, then there is an important distinction between a being's relational character to other beings within a context and the pre-essential essence of that being, one that is incredibly important for Heidegger's later work.

However, when we think about what we have observed, this essence is broken up into objects of thought. (I would propose this happens because the essence is infintie and we are finite) When we think about these objects we cannot completely reproduce the context that they were in (ie the unity of essence) so we choose from this essence what is important for the moment. Is this what is meant by presencing here?

I guess I don't quite know what you mean by "objects of thought," but what you describe does fit into the notion of presencing. To presence an object in terms of, say, its color is to make its color salient and cover over its other (irrelevant) aspects. But even this 'breaking up' of the object's unity as found in another context (such as a game) will still bring the object to light in a context--that of colors, which includes luminosity, tints, shades, ambient lighting, etc. But in doing this it is not quite right to say that we "choose from this essence [or pre-essential essence] what is important for the moment." A better way to put it is that we open ourselves to the relevant aspects so that, if they are present, they can appear. Here is a useful quote from Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism":

Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being. But for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of Being. Man is the shepherd of Being. It is in this direction alone that Being and Time is thinking when ecstatic existence is experienced as "care" (cf. section 44 C, pp. 226ff.).
"Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, 234.

What man does is find a "fitting" affectivity in relation to being by putting himself in such a state (bodily, emotionally, socially, etc.) wherein beings can appear in a particular way. Obviously, in some contexts this receptivity may take much time and practice, as in the master's grasp of relevant moves in a chess game or an art critic's grasp of good art: they cannot clearly codify their modes of seeing and judging objects, but they can tell you when they see them. In short, my primary issue with your description is the ambiguity in the "choosing": the master does not choose what appears, as if he is trying to force his will on beings, but attunes himself to what he wants to see so that, if it is there, it will be presenced. After writing that I see that there are actually a few levels going on here (including a rather intricate interplay between 'conscious' and 'unconscious' [though I don't care for that word at the moment] aspects of this description), but I do not have the time to examine that further.

I am just trying to get a feel for the unfamiliar vocabulary and for Heidegger's main points to see if the ideas he has would be worth wading through the obscure writing style.
Any suggestions on good clear commentators that could provide an introduction would be welcomed.

I don't know how clear the above was, but I feel, in my admittedly bias view, that it is worth it. The best move you could make is to become familiar with clearer descriptions as found in some of Heidegger's commentators. Understand that Heidegger was trying to do something new (or at least new to him; Clark Goble has written a few times on how Heidegger is not entirely novel, which is to be expected), he stumbles a lot, which he readily admits to in his later critiques of Being and Time, and his use of terminology, while perhaps unfortunate, also serves a purpose. I hope the above was helpful to you; it certainly was for me.

Settling Down in Georgia

2006-08-06T08:17:00.000-05:00

I'm finally back from a few weeks hiatus. We're in Georgia, I'm starting up school at the University of West Georgia next Monday, and things are overall going well. I'm quite excited for this semester. Not only am I starting into school again, but I'm taking some interesting classes that should prove interesting, both for my own studies and for the blog. I'm taking Foundations of Humanistic Psychology, Phenomenology of Social Existence, and Advanced Existential Psychology (note: these syllabi are a little old and may not reflect the texts used for class). I've already started the course readings and I think it will be an interesting semester, particularly with my background in Heideggerian studies. I'll post on one of those readings (J.H. van den Berg's A Different Existence: Principles of Phenomenological Psychopathology) shortly.

State of the Blog

2006-07-10T22:33:00.000-05:00

First, let me thank those who have participated for their, well, participation. I apologize for those comments that I still have not gotten to. Most of my blogging was done at my old job (yes, my boss was aware of it; he knew they didn't have enough to keep me [and the rest of the team] busy). Now, with my new job (that I will have for three weeks before I move to Georgia), I do not have that luxury. So, things will be quite slow for the next three weeks, and will probably be slow once I start graduate school (though hopefully not as slow as they are now). But I am still thinking about this blog, the questions asked, and the things that continue to interest me. Just don't expect very much in the next three weeks.

Failed Philosophical Enterprises

2006-07-10T22:19:00.000-05:00

And now, for a bit of humor (well, I hope they're funny): philosophical enterprises that are doomed to failure.

Descartes and Associates
Company Motto: Guilty until proven innocent.

Nietzsche Construction
Company Motto: We build without foundations.

Berkeley Medical Association
Company Motto: It's all in your mind.

Whitehead Pharmaceuticals
Company Motto: We don't deal with substances.

Hobbes' Dating Connection
Company Motto: Connect with those who are solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.

Spinoza Dating Connection
Company Motto: Connect with yourself.

Being: The Positive Nothing

2006-07-06T16:02:00.000-05:00

First off, let me thank Tim (and others) for his comments thus far: they have been great food for thought and I am making every effort to take them seriously (as he is, thankfully, trying to do with me). In line with that, I want to expand my discussion of the illusory thing-in-itself with a short commentary on the 'nothing.' In Being and Time, the nothing was seen in its traditional garb: the groundlessness of mankind's mode of comportment; the absolute nihil that makes possible man's resolute authentic mode of being. In short, here Heidegger saw the nothing as the mathematical nihil, the empty set, the lack of beings/being.

Later, at least starting from On the Essence of Truth, the nothing began to take on a new significance in light of the history of being. Let me start from the latter in order to properly ground the former. The history of being is, in short, the history of man's comportment of being, of his modes of disclosing and bringing beings to light. As his paradigmatic example, Heidegger refers to "technology"--the disclosure of beings as reserves and resources that can be used or exploited. Within technology, I see objects in terms of their utility, of what I can do or make with them in order to accomplish some goal. Metals become resources for automobiles and computers, time becomes something that is 'used,' 'wasted,' or 'invested,' I read a book in order to become 'cultured,' etc.

The technological mode of comportment is the prize of the Industrial Age: we will eventually 'conquer' nature, 'subdue' it for our own goals and purposes, or 'facilitate' great technological wonders through our 'mastery' over it. There is indeed some truth to this understanding: metals are, in fact, quite useful for making various objects; time can be seen as something to use or waste; etc. The problem is the tyranny that this mode of comportment lays on being: everything that is disclosed must be disclosed as a reserve for use. Heidegger feels that this is one of the faults of philosophy at least since Plato, exemplified well in the Medieval theology: that beings are best understood in terms of God's overarching plan for them in his divine intentions. It also made philosophy into a mere technique or methodology:

When thinking comes to an end by slipping out of its element [i.e. the question of being] it replaces this loss by procuring a validity for itself as technē, as an instrument of education and therefore as a classroom matter and later a cultural concern. By and by philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest causes. One no longer thinks; one occupies oneself with "philosophy." In competition with one another, such occupations publicly offer themselves as "-isms" and try to offer more than the others. The dominance of such terms is not accidental.
"Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, 221.

Reduced to a useful resource, philosophy becomes a discussion of thoughts, ideas, or worldviews, including their viability according to some transcendent logic. Lost is the question of being as the technological outlook just seems 'obvious' or 'natural'; surely the natural world is meaningful only insofar as it is exploitable for our (or God's) aims. There is also a hint of criticism for Heidegger's own earlier understanding of the 'nothing' in B&T: what is meaningful is an object's utility, its being-at-hand for me in my concerns within the world (a nascent technological disclosure of beings). It is this nihilism that Heidegger's later thought attempts to 'destroy'--to break apart in order to see the dominant horizons and hermeneutical/disclosive attunements assumed in philosophy (see James Faulconer's useful discussion of Heidegger's Abbau ["destruction"] here). It is only through such a destruction that technological attunement can be understood in its essence, through which its tyranny can be overcome.

As I have tried to argue earlier (see here and here), every disclosure of beings and, hence, every understanding of beings requires a context in which it becomes intelligible: the Rook in the game of chess, the baseball bat in the game of baseball, the electron in the parlance of physics, etc. The bat, then, can be disclosed as something with which to hit a ball (bat_h), as a weapon (bat_w), as a museum piece (bat_m), as a work of art (bat_a), as a doorstop (bat_d), as a particular object for punishment (like a belt or a wooden spoon; bat_p), as a musical instrument (bat_i), etc. Every understanding requires a certain context with its rules, norms, intentions, and motivations that make the bat salient in a particular way, that make use of its many modalities. Each is a particular mode of attunement that brings the bat to light in the relevant ways according to the context.

What then can we say when we try to either take the bat out of all contexts/relations or, perhaps better, to disclose it simultaneously in all possible contexts (i.e. the bat as seen 'objectively')? Two problems present themselves: first, we cannot know all possible contexts. The number of ways that the bat can be disclosed, by both human and non-human entities, is unknowable and potentially infinite (at least indeterminable). Thus, while we can claim that an 'objective' understanding (thought of in either non-contextual or omni-contextual terms) is possible, it is an essentially meaningless claim, which raises the second problem.

Given the different modes of appearing of any given object in various contexts and in relation to various kinds of beings (that may be different from human modes of being), a bat-seen-from-everywhere is not an object, is not a thing, is nothing. The question is this: what would a bat_{h-w-m-a-d-p-i-etc.} look like? How would it appear? All beings that we understand, that we can say anything about, that we disclose are understood in relation to a context; they are meaningful only within their respective contexts. The all-contextual-bat, in contrast, has no such conditions of intelligibility: it is seen in-itself as something to look at as well as an object to be used for some purpose (and hence not seen); it simultaneously disappears in our active utilization of it and appears in its particularity as something to be looked at and appreciated. But in some odd sense, the bat is both: it is simultaneously bat_h and bat_a, despite their incommensurability. But this simultaneity is not so specific, just as that which is not being disclosed is not so specific.

This points to one of the most fascinating aspects of Heidegger's later thought: the mystery of being as the 'nothing.' As I've argued here and elsewhere, every disclosure of beings is a simultaneous covering over of beings: to disclose the bat as bat_h is to simultaneously cover over (though not consciously, as will become obvious later) the bat as bat_{w-m-a-d-p-i-etc.}. That which is covered over is the "mystery of being," the non-essence of disclosed beings.

But surely for those of us who know about such matters the "non-" of the primordial nonessence of truth [i.e. disclosure/uncovering], as untruth [i.e. non-disclosure/covering over], points to the still unexperienced domain of the truth of being (not merely of beings).
"On the Essence of Truth," in Basic Writings, 131 (see also here).

Being, as that which is undisclosed, as that which remains hidden in every disclosure of beings, is the nothing. We cannot treat being simply as one being among others; we must maintain a difference between being and beings. Thus, being is not something-or-other, we cannot say being is this-or-that, as doing so will bring being into a context when it, by its very essence (or non-essence, as the case may be), escapes all contexts of disclosure. The 'nothing,' then, is understood by the later Heidegger as the 'excess,' as that which escapes every disclosure and yet makes them possible. We cannot understand it, or even the being of an entity (e.g., the bat), in terms of some determinable essence or set of properties because no such set of properties are available, nor is the mode of disclosure of properties (as a contextual attunement) the only nor the most essential mode of disclosure.¹ Put another way, there is no fundamental mode of disclosing beings (including a so-called dispassionate cataloguing of properties) as the modes of disclosure themselves are probably just as numerous as the modes of disclosing any given being, meaning they are at least indeterminable. But neither can it be the mathematical nihil: its essence is that of indeterminable excess, of a positive overflowing of any finite disclosure.

This is the basis of Heidegger's claim that philosophy has forgotten or ignored the question of being: as the excess of every disclosure, explicating being through notions such as substance and property forgets the other modes of disclosing beings. To use terms reminiscent of Derrida, by reducing being to one of its modes of disclosure, we do violence to being. This is why a proper grasp of the phenomena is essential: if Heidegger's phenomenological descriptions are correct, then the traditional understanding is inadequate. Again, what is at issue here is Heidegger's phenomenological analysis: it is not an issue of whether Heidegger misuses etymology or refuting some logical argument, but on the adequacy of his description of our disclosure of beings. If we disclose beings in the manner Heidegger attempted to bring to light, then the notion of 'essence' as traditionally understood is fundamentally inadequate. What is needed, then, is a counter-phenomenology, not an abstract argument. Notes:

To return to the issue of physics, perhaps the classic double-slit experiment also demonstrates a similar fact in relation to the physical world: the electron can be disclosed either as a wave or a particle, but not as both at once. I'm not certain how closely this resembles Heidegger's understanding as given above (i.e. it may not be a pertinent parallel), but I'll throw it out there for your consideration.

Essences Again

2006-07-05T18:15:00.000-05:00

In my Presencing and Essencing, Tim comments:

Suppose Heidegger had said this:
"I know what you guys mean by 'essence,' which is the intrinsic, non-relational properties that make a thing the kind of thing it is. But you have also adopted the position that what is, in this sense, essential is all that is important. And that latter claim is what I want to dispute."
Then we'd all be on the same page and we could get into an interesting discussion. And a lot of analytic philosophers would be lining up on both sides.

Heidegger's point is that there are no "intrinsic, non-relational properties." Another way to put it is that we cannot give meaning to the idea of "intrinsic, non-relational properties." Let me return to one of my examples: the Rook. If we accept the substance/property metaphysic, then there must be essential properties that define Rookness, that make a Rook what it is. It cannot be the materiality of the Rook: it can be made of wood, plastic, or pixels on a computer screen. It cannot be the form of the Rook: it can be a tower, Darth Maul, or Lisa Simpson.

Rather, we understand the Rook in terms of how it moves: in a straight line. While this may be necessary, it certainly isn't sufficient; it is an impoverished understanding and fundamentally inadequate. A straight line in relation to what? The chess board. But this still isn't enough: it moves in a straight line either horizontally or vertically; it cannot move in a straight line diagonally, as can the Queen. This is certainly better, but already at this level we have understood the Rook relationally in terms of the board: its movements can only be adequately understood in terms of movement on a chess board, including constraints on that 'straight line' movement.

There is still more, however: the Rook can move in a straight line (horizontally or vertically) only where there are no other pieces. When there is an opposing piece, the Rook can 'capture' it by replacing its position, which then removes it from the board; when there is an ally piece, the Rook cannot capture it, but it can move in a straight line from its originating location to a square adjacent to that piece's square. Lastly, in relation to its movements, the Rook is capable of castling, with its respective rules. This, as far as my understanding goes, exhausts the movements of the Rook, which even on a fundamental level requires relations to be what it is in its 'Rookness.'

This is still a barren understanding, one that even a novice such as myself can possess. Beyond this, through countless hours of practice, the chess player learns the specific advantages and disadvantages of the Rook, including a feeling for when some moves are more appropriate or inappropriate than others (see Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus' From Socrates to Expert Systems for one good analysis of this move from novice to expert). At these higher levels the Rook's essence is not further divorced from the context, but further embedded in it; a feel or attunement for the context--which can vary up to thousands of possible contexts--is absolutely essential and constitutes a richer understanding of the Rook's being. I haven't even started on the chess master's grasp of the utility of the Rook against a particular player whose strategy might make the Rook more or less advantageous than usual.

This brings up a very important point in relation to Heidegger's understanding of beings: they are best understood, not in terms of their 'objective properties' (whatever those may be), but in terms of their possibilities. Let me use a more 'physical' example: an electron is not understood in terms of whatever properties it may 'possess,'¹ but in what it can do in relation to other entities. For example, it allows for chemical bonding, it can pass through a conductor, it can exhibit wave-like and/or particle-like aspects, etc. Perhaps in some contexts the electron can be the final trigger for the onset of cancer or the potentiality of exploding a bomb. These are not context-independent properties that the electron 'possesses' of its own accord; they are context-dependent possibilities that give content to 'electron.' The question then comes up: does an electron have 'properties' if it is not interacting with other entities? Heidegger, as far as I know, has no answer to this; it lies in the realm of philosophy of science (see, as one of my favorite possibilities, Alfred North Whitehead; see also here). What is important, however, is that this is how we understand electrons: through their possibilities, not their actualities.

To end, let me return to the question of 'objective reality': our understanding and presencing of beings will necessarily do so in a context. To even understand what an electron is requires a whole background understanding of modes of experiment, experimental devices, hermeneutic practices for interpreting the 'data,' etc. Apart from this background we do not have meaningful entities; the electron is something-I-know-not-what rather than, well, an electron. Apart from an 'I' that can bring it into a context, it is not even some thing; any attribution of a property or mode of being to the entity would of necessity bring it into a context. But if we look at the Rook (as a more practical example for this argument) and its possible uses in wider non-chess contexts (like as a work of art), then we have a potentially infinite (or at least indeterminate) number of ways for understanding it, each requiring a different context in which to be intelligible.

This has at least two important consequences: first, if an object's 'essence' is at least partially constituted by its possibilities, then the substance/property metaphysic is inherently incomplete (which is one of Heidegger's main points in Being and Time). Essential properties by their very nature are actualities (actually, they are necessary actualities for the essence of the being), not possibilities. We may turn to 'relational properties,' but it is unclear whether they could actually fulfill the notion of possibility that Heidegger's phenomenology requires. Heidegger's phenomenology may be wrong, but then the substance/property proponent would have to provide a counter-phenomenology. Second, attaining an 'objective' non-contextual understanding of objects is impossible: it is not possible to simultaneously be in all possible contexts for a given object. Every understanding, though possibly true, is still finite, situated, contextual. It is unclear what a non-contextual object would appear as, or if it could appear at all.

In order for human beings to truthfully see beings, to see beings as they are, there must be a connection between our mode of seeing (or, as I am putting it here, our mode of presencing) and the 'constitution' of the being. Thus, if Heidegger is right, an epistemology/ontology/logic of substances and properties is fundamentally inadequate. Though a property analysis of an object does reveal something about the entity (as one context of intelligibility), it is intelligible and possible only on the background of a more fundamental understanding of beings in terms of their contextualized possibilities. It is only in refining these contextual possibilities--i.e. learning what is the best course of action for which contexts, how the entity acts in a given context, etc.--that we refine our understanding of the entity. Plato was wrong: we are not seeking the eternal unchanging entities, but an appropriate understanding of entities within their various contexts.

Notes:

Some physicists would have issues with this Newtonian concept:
The atom of modern physics can be symbolized only through a partial differential equation in an abstract space of many dimensions. All its qualities are inferential; no material properties can be directly attributed to it.
Werner Heisenberg in 1945, quoted in Alan A. Grometstein, The Roots of Things: Topics in Quantum Mechanics (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenium Publishers, 1999), 62.
See also Yves Gingras' "What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?," in History of Science 39, 4/126 (2001), 383-416 (can be found online here).

Creationism/ID vs. Evolution

2006-07-05T10:36:00.000-05:00

I know this doesn't get to the heart of the debate (Addition: I don't personally endorse the views expressed on either side of this comic), but I thought it was funny (Addition: so please read it in that spirit):

Philosophers' Carnival #32

2006-07-03T12:08:00.000-05:00

The Philosophers' Carnival is back, this time hosted by Janet Stemwedel's Adventures in Ethics and Science blog. My post, Presencing and Essencing, got accepted in the "Continental Philosophy Beer Garden." Kudos to Janet for her interesting and imaginative presentation of the Carnival.

Presencing and Essencing

2006-06-28T17:55:00.000-05:00

[NOTE: I have made a few modifications since the original posting, though the substance of the entry remains the same. (KW 6-30-06 11:09 AM MST)]

Man's mode of being is being-in-the-world. In its essence, this means that man is related to beings and being; not only that, but man is essentially (not contingently) related to beings/being. In Being and Time, Heidegger discusses many equiprimordial characteristics that make up man's being-in-the-world, as exemplified in the care-structure. The German term for equiprimordial is gleichursprünglich, literally translated as "equally primordial." Moving away from the tendency for 'simplicity' in earlier philosophies, Heidegger is proposing (or bringing to light) multiple grounds for man's being, each of which is equally essential in Dasein's ontological constitution.

The phenomenon of the equiprimordiality of constitutive items has often been disregarded in ontology, because of a methodologically unrestrained tendency to derive everything and anything from some simple 'primal ground'.
Being and Time, 170/H131.

I'd like to begin with the question of presencing, or making present. As a being-within-the-world, I am at or exist as a 'here' (Da-sein, "being-here"). It is by virtue of my being a 'here' that there can be a 'yonder' or a 'there.' Within so-called 'objective' space, as constituted by absolute coordinates, there cannot be a 'there' as there are no privileged points in space; there are only objective distances between points in homogenous space. But with Dasein, as the being that is concerned with being, including its own being, there is a privileged place that is Dasein's 'there.' Every being is a certain direction and distance from a given Dasein: (pointing) "It's that way (from here)," "When you reach the corner take a right (your right)," etc. Even in the case of objectified space--i.e. North, East, West, South, 30° Latitude, 145° Longitude, coordinates (3, -5)--there is still a reference to Dasein, but in a modified sense: each objectified spatiality is enveloped within Dasein's concern (Dasein's world) and each is, in some sense, arbitrary in their measurements. Because of this, they cannot be fundamental.

Dasein's spatiality is dominated by presencing, or by making beings present in its concern in the world. This making present has little to do with objective space, as that which is 10 feet away--say an approaching acquaintance--is 'closer' in Dasein's world than the glasses through which they are looking. One other way of putting it is that the acquaintance appears, is present in Dasein's concern, while the glasses are not--they are that through which I see my friend, they are not what I see. This also applies to beings that are not in sight, according to the intentionality of Dasein's activities: when I am concerned with my wife, though she is out of sight, she is more present to me than the objects in my cubicle. It is because she can be so present that I am 'in my own little world' or that I 'just didn't see' my co-worker enter my cubicle, even though they were in my visual field. When I am 'somewhere else' I am no longer actively engaged with that which is objectively closer and, thus, I do not 'see' such things, they are 'far from my mind.'¹

Heidegger's later thought added an element to this notion of presencing: that every presencing is also a non-presencing. Using his later terminology, every uncovering of entities is also a covering of entities. One example I've been toying with recently is a baseball bat: when I am in a baseball game, I presence the baseball bat in a particular way. Within that context, it is something that I use to hit the ball, it is a piece of equipment used in-order-to do something else. This understanding is further embedded in the game of baseball: the purpose of hitting the ball is to give myself enough time to run bases in-order-to eventually get to home base in-order-to score a point for my team. Included in this context are also other readily understood rules: I cannot hit other players with the bat, I can only use regulated bats, etc. The bat's meaning appears in this context: because of the rules, constraints, and intended purposes inherent in the game of baseball, the bat is presenced in a certain way.

But consider the bat in another context: that of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. For example, here is Walter "Arlie" Latham's bat:

When you are at the batter's box, the bat has a peculiar presence: you can feel it in your hands, but it is not the object of concern. What is most salient is the pitcher's movements that indicate he is about to pitch and then the movement of the ball. At that point one's muscular gestalts, developed through hours upon hours of practice, kick in as you swing at the ball. Throughout this scenario the bat doesn't really appear, it isn't present in itself. In fact, you could just as well use another bat with the same general physical composition, so the bat in its particularity is inconsequential and does not need to appear. Instead, the bat is absorbed into the context that includes myself, the pitcher, the ball, and the context. Quoting Heidegger:

Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occurring Thing [merely objectively present], nor is the equipment-structure known as such even in the using... In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the "in-order-to" which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is--as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific 'manipulability' of the hammer.
Being and Time 98/H69.

Within a museum context, by contrast, the bat is allowed to appear in its singularity, in itself. Rather than being seen as something used in-order-to do something else (and hence not really being 'seen' at all), I notice the bat itself: I see its imperfections, the wood's grain, the way the lighting in the museum plays off its polished surface, perhaps those features that differentiate it from other bats. Within this context there are also various practices/rules: the bat is not seen, for example, as something that I can pick up and start hitting things with, which would cause screams of outrage from patrons and owners. Furthermore, in this case the bat is seen differently than the bats I could find at any sporting goods store: it has a history that is tied to various individuals and events that make it Latham's bat, it is Latham's bat. This is the same reason why we value originals in artwork: the copy, even the perfect copy, lacks a historical relation such as being the object where the moment of creation came to fruition (there are stark phenomenological differences between creation and copying).

In understanding the bat as something used to hit a ball, or understanding the bat within the baseball game context, some aspects of the bat come to presence (i.e. its utility) while others are covered over (i.e. its singularity). Beyond the above examples, other aspects of the bat are also covered over, like its utility as a weapon to protect oneself against an intruder, or as a door stop, or as a hammer, or as a trophy (which is slightly different than as a museum piece), or any other possibly limitless ways. In relation to the first case, when my life is threatened the bat has a particular salience as a weapon that is missing when I am engrossed in trying to hit the pitch. Each presencing of the bat as something in particular does reveal the being of the bat, but each also covers over other aspects, giving us an indeterminable excess of meaning that any given articulation cannot capture. This is not due to ignorance or the simple lack of information, but it is an essential aspect of every appearing/presencing.

Inherent in the above is another aspect of presencing: its circumspective character. The bat appears as an object with which to hit baseballs only within the context of the game of baseball. Without the rules, regulations, and practices inherent in the game, the baseball would lose some of its content through, Heidegger would argue, covering up aspects of its being that the context does not bring out. Another cogent example used by John Haugeland, in his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, is a Rook. Divorced from the game of chess, with its inherent rules and objectives, a Rook loses much of the meaning (or being) that it had within the game. While we may still ascribe certain movements to the Rook on a coordinate plane that mimic those found in an actual chess game, we lose other aspects of the Rook in the process: that it is useful for certain purposes and strategies, that in certain circumstances it is either wise or unwise to use the Rook, that it is weaker against some chess pieces, etc. (Wikipedia has an entry on Rooks, for those of us who are chess challenged, that mentions such matters). The Rook and bat, then, gain meaning depending on the context in which they are found. This requires a different kind of presencing.

To better illustrate this, consider a common literary point: inherent in every story is a context which makes the story intelligible, normally called the plot. The plot is that which unifies the otherwise disparate events within the story. These disparate events can occur in multiple stories and in various orders: the protagonist could (1) fall in love with the girl, (2) lose her to the antagonist, (3) valiantly fight to save her, and then (4) marry her; similarly, the protagonist could (2) lose the girl to the antagonist, (1) fall in love with her (3) in the process of valiantly saving her, and (4) then marry her; or the protagonist could (4) marry her, (2) lose her to the antagonist, (3) valiantly fight to save her, and then (1) fall in love with her; or the protagonist could (3) valiantly save the girl, (1) fall in love with her, (4) marry her, and then (2) lose her to the antagonist. What the plot does is organize these disparate events and (hopefully) connect them into a whole; it makes them coherent. Furthermore, it makes salient specific aspects of each event that are important for the movement of the plot itself, such as the personality quirks of those involved, how the protagonist and the girl fall in love, etc. What features are made salient within the individual telling are incredibly important, but are not determined or contained within the general events themselves.

This is what is needed in our intelligible actions: we need to gather together disparate beings according to certain purposes and motivations to make a context wherein they can become relevantly intelligible. This is Heidegger's "circumspection," or Umsicht ("looking-about"). By being receptive (or, to use another Heideggerian term, open) to what is needed in each circumstance, including how to presence beings and how to best respond to the contingencies of the situation as it unfolds, we come to understand beings in their essence. Perhaps the better way to put it is that we essence (as a verb) beings by bringing (or presencing) them into the proper contexts, which include various norms, intentions, and motivations, that make them meaningful. It is not that we somehow find essences 'out there in the world,' but we bring beings into their essence by presencing them in a context.

As a final point, this aptly indicates one of the Heideggerian problems with supposed 'objectivity'--a thing's essence, that which it is, is not found in a thing-in-itself completely separated from other beings. Rather, a thing's essence is at least partially constituted by its relations with other beings and intentions. This also requires a being that can presence the disparate beings and intentions into a context. Furthermore, every presencing simultaneously entails an excess that is covered over. Thus, every presencing will essentially be incomplete and cannot fully describe the being in question. This also implies that there is no privileged way to presence beings, whether it be through science or literature. Hence, objectivity itself becomes problematic, if not impossible, as it is traditionally understood.

Notes:

See, for example, Arian Mack and Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness (London: MIT Press, 1998); Simons, D.J., and C.F. Chabris, "Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events," Perception 28 (1999), 1059-1074; Lachter, Joe, Eric Ruthruff, and Kenneth I. Forster, "Forty-Five Year After Broadbent (1958): Still No Identification Without Attention," Psychological Review 111/4 (2004), 880-913; Susan Hurley, Consciousness in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Alva Noë, Action in Perception; Steven B. Most, Brian J. Scholl, Daniel J. Simons, and Erin R. Clifford, "What You See Is What You Set: Sustained Inattentional Blindness and the Capture of Awareness," Psychological Review 112/1 (2005), 237. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued for this when he claimed that we "polarize the world," bringing out those aspects of the environment that we set ourselves to see (see Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith, trans. (London and New York: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1958), 129). Heidegger makes a similar claim with his discussion of "moods" (Stimmung) and "state-of-mind" (Befindlichkeit); see Being and Time, 29-31, 172-188 (H134-148) and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, trans. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 78-167.

Han on Nietzschean Truth

2006-06-27T13:40:00.000-05:00

As I do more work on Heideggerian authenticity, I've recently finished (for the second and a half time) Béatrice Han's "Nietzsche and the 'Masters of Truth': The Pre-Socratics and Christ," in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity, 165-186. Han's analysis is useful because she provides a convincing account for how Nietzsche does not delve into either nihilism or contradiction in his understanding of truth by grounding his view in a pre-Socratic understanding of truth. This has direct ties to my summary/commentary on Guignon, which should be kept in mind, particularly his distinction between a "means-end" approach to actions and a "constituent-end" approach to actions. It also has a few thoughts relevant to the question of the supposed primacy of logic and reason by directing us to something that is prior to both.

Han begins by bringing up the usual interpretations of Nietzsche:

Nietzsche's position would be threatened either by a nihilistic and generalized leveling of all values, or by the argument used against the Skeptics from Antiquity: any proposition that denies the existence of truth reasserts by definition the reality of what is negated by it--either a universal relativism, or a contradiction between the propositional content and the very existence of the proposition. (165-166)

One common tactic by Nietzsche's interpreters is to distinguish between different levels of truth. Heidegger, however, is the first to propose that Nietzsche was not arguing against metaphysics, but was bringing it to its fruition. Still, Heidegger agrees with the other commentators that Nietzsche implicitly assumes the correspondence view of truth, which he is opposing. The other assumption, in discussing Nietzsche's understanding of truth, lies in Nietzsche's denial of the existence of a 'thing-in-itself'; all truths are found solely in one's active living and are true in virtue of their pragmatic value. But even this doesn't work as Nietzsche denies any pragmatic understanding of truth: even if something works, that doesn't mean that it is right.

In fact, the real meaning of genealogy is to denounce the unconscious pragmatism of science and of metaphysics, precisely by unveiling its original occultation by the adequationist understanding of truth: what we see as (adequationally) true is, to take up William James's favorite expression, what "works."

This is something that hasn't quite occurred to me: that the adequationist/correspondent view of truth might actually have a pragmatic basis. From a Heideggerian perspective I imagine that this could be interpreted in the following way: some notion of correspondence works in various situations, particularly those of scientific categorization; because it works in this way, then the correspondence view must be adequate. If we cannot understand Nietzsche's notion of truth through either correspondence or pragmatism (on which the former seems to rest), then how can we understand it?

Han proposes that we understand Nietzschean truth, not through invoking different notions of truth, but through Nietzsche's analysis of the rise of metaphysics and the adequationist understanding of truth. By doing so, Nietzsche sees truth in its prehistory in pre-Socratic thought: as founded in ethics, in the personal greatness of the individual.

I have selected those doctrines which sound most clearly the personality of the individual philosopher, whereas the complete enumeration of all the transmitted doctrines, as it is the custom of the ordinary handbooks to give, has but one sure result: the complete silencing of personality.¹ (168)

Here Nietzsche's psychological side comes through: one integral part of any philosophy is the personality of the philosopher; the two cannot be separated, even in principle. As such, one important part of the truth of any claim lies in the speaker's identity, not necessarily on some 'objective' state of affairs. "There is no impersonal access to truth: aletheia depends on ethos" (169). Drawing from the pre-Socratics, this ethical dimension is found in the "severe necessity between their thinking and their character."² The pre-Socratics were integrated individuals who have harmonized the various drives/humors and thoughts that are part of their lives: what they have is theirs, they exist authentically. Furthermore, for the pre-Socratics this harmony occurred naturally, without will or conscious decision. Modernity, by contrast, is driven by conscious reflection; any harmony that may be possible must occur through thorough self-reflection and conscious change. Furthermore, the modern scholar sees no necessity in the continuity between their being and their thought: that relationship is seen as arbitrary and inconsequential to their claims. This is a natural consequence when truth is thought to be found within propositions, such that one can speak truthfully regardless of one's personal excellence. Nietzsche is revolting against this view: "The man is the incarnation of what he thinks, and his thought, the necessary expression of his character" (170).

With this ethical element, the philosopher is the incarnation of his word, he embodies his work. Rather than the philosopher's system being metaphysically abstract and 'objective,' the genuine philosopher's system is grounded in their being: "Far from being abstract, the systematization now becomes organic, its totalizing aspect being referred to the individual as a living, concrete totality (they 'bring themselves into a system')" (171). The modern self, in its reflective attitude, is divided in this regard: they cannot ground their propositions in truth and thus are fundamentally ungrounded, disjointed, and unintegrated. In their ethical excellence, the Greek philosophers are "tyrants of truth": being self-secure in their possession of truth and fully integrated in their being (having integrity), their authority and command is sufficient for their words to be believed because they are truthful. This self-assurance would soon be replaced by the Socratic/Platonic dialecticians, whose focus on the abstract theoretical world as divorced from the philosopher's being transmuted the tyrannical element--being believable because one exists truthfully--into a poison. Being incapable of grounding their truth in their mode of being, they grasp for whatever 'external' justification they can find.

In discussing the historical precedence of Nietzsche's understanding, Han brings in Marcel Détienne's The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. There Détienne also addresses the adequationist understanding of truth: "In archaic Greece, [the Masters of Truth] have the privilege of dispensing the truth simply because they are endowed with the qualities that make them special."³ The poet and the king are to be believed because of their exceptional qualities, not because they can adequately argue for their beliefs through some application of reason. Han points out that, according Détienne, the individual's position was functional according to socio-cultural institutions, but still the connection between the character/being of the speaker and what they speak is a necessary element in the truthfulness of their claims. This is an important point: Nietzsche was not simply pulling a new view of truth out of thin air, but he drew on a genuine understanding of truth that existed prior to the adequationist/correspondence view.

Nietzsche describes the decline of the archaic understanding of truth in three stages. First, "the 'great concepts' seem to benefit from the metaphysical turn in that they are freed from the magisterial relationship (they become 'liberated ideas')" (173). Thought becomes separated from the individual to some intelligible realm, but in doing so they lose their "local source," they are like plants taken out of their soil, leading to a "phony autonomy" (174). Second, concepts become the "foci of truth," which Han describes as "the reactive character of Platonic nihilism" against the archaic understanding of truth as grounded in one's integrity (174). This reversal of nihilism--where Platonism is seen as nihilistic, despite its professed realism--is interesting: it is because of the way that Platonism seeks to ground meaning in some transcendental realm that it is nihilistic, that it loses its meaning and cogency. Third, and lastly, a new world wherein these falsely liberated concepts is created. Because of their inauthentic living and the disconnect between their personal excellence and their philosophies, truth needs to find a new home elsewhere, so the transcendental world was created to ground their nihilism. Most philosophy textbooks characterize this change as the move from a world steeped in authority to a world where reasons and arguments are needed to be believed. Nietzsche's point is that such a focus on reason and argument as an improvement on 'blindly' following authority in fact misses (and in fact buries) an important part of ancient authority--its being grounded in the excellence of the individual speaking.

This covering-up dynamic, which insensibly transforms the concrete deep-rootedness of values in the contingency of a spatio-temporal set of conditions (the "soil") into a transcendent foundation, is thus the hallmark of the slowly emerging metaphysics. (174)

Han quotes Nietzsche (174):

This degeneration of the archaic model is accompanied by the birth of a new type of man, the "abstractly perfect man," who is the ethical counter-part of the "theoretical man" already exemplified by Socrates in the Birth of Tragedy.
One had need to invent the abstractly perfect man as well--good, just, wise, a dialectician--in short, the scarecrow of the ancient philosopher: a plant removed from all soil... The perfectly absurd "individuum" in itself!⁴ (174)

The individuum in itself is absurd because, as with the universalized concept, it loses its nature by being so universalized: its particularity (its alterity) is lost and the magisterial relationship is covered up or even denigrated. Dialectic essentially spoils the magisterial relationship by disassociating the speaker from what is spoken and focusing exclusively on the latter. The truth had by the "Master of Truth," by comparison, is accepted because of his authority by virtue of the kind of person he is. Socrates, incapable of attaining the level of integrity had by the Master of Truth, becomes tyrannized by the abstract reason that he has 'released.' No longer able to naturally harmonize his life, he is dominated by his need for rigorous thought rather than the natural authenticity, majesty, and nobility that the Master possesses.

Nietzsche sees the same opposition in Christ and Paul. Here it would be good to state the common truism: you often learn more about the interpreter of a thinker than you do about the person interpreted. I, for one, think that Paul does not ignore the existential aspects in his writing, as Nietzsche proposes, such as in Romans 8. Still, Nietzsche's analysis is useful for accentuating his claim. It is also informative to show Nietzsche's relation to Christianity: he had enormous respect for Christ, but little respect for the abstract understanding that traditional Christianity developed, which he first sees in Paul.

Nietzsche sees three magisterial aspects of Christ's life: first, "one of the Messiah's most prominent characteristics is the impossibility of dissociating the content of his teaching from his person and from his life" (176). Christ did not present theoretical reasons or analytical demonstrations of his authority; rather, he showed us a way of being, a way of living, he performed good works and essentially answered arguments with, "What fault do you find in my life?" Second, "Christ is endowed, like the ancient Masters, with the internal harmony that allows him to ground in his personal ethos the truthfulness of his words" (176). In short, Christ knew how to live a divine life, a life which is lived and not argued for. Thus, he possessed the magisterial and noble mode of life that made him believable: he was, or existed as, the Truth, the Way, and the Life. Jonathan Erdman has an interesting paper, titled Aletheia and the Correspondence Theory of Truth, where he discusses the Gospel of John's multiple uses of aletheia, one of which has affinities with the magisterial understanding Nietzsche is espousing. Third, quoting Nietzsche, "Dialectic is equally lacking: the very idea is lacking that a faith, a 'truth,' might be proved by reasons"⁵ (177). One more useful quote by Nietzsche: "Christ's faith is not set in formulas--it lives, it is diffident of formulas... The experience of 'life,' as he alone knows it, is adverse to any kind of letter, formula, law, faith, tenet"⁶ (177). This is particularly seen in the Gospel of Mark, where knowledge is only possible from divine sources, from inspiration rather than argument, from regeneration rather than syllogisms.

Christ is the incarnate Word (Logos) and thus his being and his words are inextricably combined and fully integrated--he is to be believed because of who he is, of the excellence he exhibits in his life. This has two consequences: first, Christ is incomparable with anyone else and, thus, his words have more credence. Not because he can give reasons for his words, but because of the excellence of his being. Second, Christ's life is exemplary. Like the famous book by the same title, the imitation of Christ is our goal: "For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps" (1 Peter 2:21). Hence Nietzsche's claim: "Christianity is a way of life, not a system of beliefs"⁷ (177). By thus imitating Christ (imitatio Christi), the disciples are then able to be "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), thereby partaking in the magisterial relationship. Put one more way, Christ's true disciples exemplify Christ's ethos and thus dwell in the truth, are the truth incarnated in their lives. It is because of this exceptional existential mode of being that they are to be believed, not because they are skilled dialecticians (see Acts 4:13; see also Ephesians 4:16, 18).

Paul, in comparison, is described by Nietzsche as "passionate" and "violent," demonstrating the unintegrated nature of his being. As a paradigm Modern, he is introspective and sees himself as preyed upon by his natural desires rather than finding harmony in them. As with the Dialecticians, Paul then seeks to validate his views by demonizing that which is out of his grasp. Furthermore, according to Nietzsche, Paul becomes "obsessed" with a single question: "what is the Jewish law really concerned with? And in particular, what is the fulfillment of this law?"⁸ (178). Rather than seeing Christ's death as something to be imitated, Paul sought to explain it, to give reasons, thus giving it a formal meaning divorced from the ethos of the individual. By taking this approach to Christ, Paul "proceeds by inventing 'counterfeits of true Christianity,'⁹ formal counterfeits that are best characterized by their impoverished existential content" (179). By thus formalizing Christianity, Paul betrayed the life of Christ by making it into an abstract "motif."

By reversing the former priority of the practical over the theoretical, or more precisely by abolishing the necessity of grounding an individual's ability to speak the truth on his ethos, Paul--ironically enough--"annulled primitive Christianity as a matter of principle."^[10] (180)

The above shows the reasons behind Nietzsche's disrespect for his contemporaries: the lack of respect for individual philosophers (rather than just their thought) has led to a lack of respect for philosophy as a whole. "The main evil that Modernity suffers from is the loss of the magisterial relationship" (180). Philosophy is now reduced to a theory of knowledge, a theoretical web of propositions and beliefs, which itself lacks genuine efficacy. In such a state, "the exaggerated manner in which the 'unselfing' and depersonalization of the spirit is being celebrated nowadays as if it were the goal itself and redemption and transfiguration"¹¹ (180). I should point out that this is not merely taking account of a philosopher's moral or immoral actions, but rather in reuniting the primordial relationship between what a philosopher thinks and the kind of person they are. Eclectically bringing together ethics and epistemology/metaphysics is not sufficient as the tie needs to be seen as essential.

Nihilism has now come into its own: "the individual, instead of being the living proof of the virtues expressed by his discourse, becomes the point in which these virtues, unable to root themselves in his ethical substance, degenerate and perish" (181). Against this depersonalization of thought, we must regain the magisterial relationship and understand that truth is, in fact, rare. "This ideal of a scarcity of truth...is the only way truth can recover its value: the greatness of philosophical conceptions must become again the reflection of the achievements of the individual... Theoretical comprehension must be rooted in existential experience: understanding something means living it" (181). Correct beliefs do not allow for ethical living; rather, ethical living must proceed and ground correct beliefs. Thus, rather than proclaiming, as does Descartes, that I will endeavor to not be deceived, I should endeavor never to deceive anyone, myself included. It is only from this determination that truth can be spoken.

This return to a magisterial relationship between ethos and truth requires a self-making: "one must become worthy of truth in order to be able to found it as true" (183). As with the pre-Socratics, one must integrate all aspects of one's life into a harmony wherein truth can appear and dwell. Reminiscent of my own thoughts, we must enter into a receptive state whereby we can see properly; this existential ground for the appearing of truth needs to receive again the importance that it lost after Socrates.

Thus, Nietzsche's reconstruction of the pre-Socratic understanding of truth plays an architectonic part in the Nietzschean corpus: going back to the very origins of our history, it enables us to grasp the common point between such diverse events as the invention of metaphysics and of adequationist truth by Socrates, on the one hand, and the reformulation/betrayal of Christ's teaching by Paul on the other. In both cases, the truth-speaking power that the Master derived from his personal excellence is brought down. In both cases, the principal cause of this fall is ressentiment: because they were by definition unable to enter the magisterial relationship, Socrates and Paul turned against it and replaced it by an abstract, impersonal understanding of truth. Moreover, the ideal horizon outlined by the possibility of recovering the archaic conception of truth allows for a better understanding of the importance devoted by Nietzsche to the theme of self-creation and to such heroic figures as Goethe or Zarathustra. (184-185)

To summarize, it will not do to force Nietzsche into one of the traditional theories of truth: each option still lies within the stark dissociation of what is spoken from the speaker. It is because we try to force Nietzsche into one of these moulds that his views appear relativistic or contradictory. Instead, we should see Nietzsche as a champion of an older view of truth: the magisterial relationship wherein someone speaks the truth because they are truthful. We are asked to reverse our 'common' conception: one is not truthful because they give true propositions; rather, one speaks true propositions because one is truthful. Given our modern reflective attitude, we cannot fully return to the pre-Socratic understanding, nor is such a complete return desirable. What is needed, however, is a new emphasis on the existential relationship between what is spoken and the speaker, of seeing the importance of this relationship in tandem with our modern reflectivity.

Notes:

Early Greek Philosophy, quoted in Leslie P. Thiele, Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 25.
Ibid, 79.
Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque, 7.
The Will to Power §430, 235; emphasis supplied.
The Antichrist, §33, 607.
Ibid, §32, 606.
The Will to Power, §212, 125.
Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, §68, 40.
The Will to Power §169, 101.
Ibid, §167, 101.
Beyond Good and Evil, §207, 122-123.

On the Essence of Truth--Untruth as Concealing

2006-06-26T11:40:00.000-05:00

6. Untruth as Concealing
Concealment does not allow aletheia to have full disclosure of beings; “concealment preserves what is most proper to aletheia as its own.” This concealment does not occur simply because the “knowledge of beings is always fragmentary” as unconcealment “is older than every openedness of this or that being” and “letting-be itself, which in disclosing already holds concealed and comports itself toward concealing.” In order for a being to unconceal beings there must be concealment, it must preexist any particular unconcealing of beings that let’s them be as they are. That which is ‘conserved’/‘preserved’ is exactly that which is concealed--“beings as such.” Since every comportment is a comportment of beings (see 121-122), “beings as such” are “what [are] most proper to aletheia as its own.” Hence, untruth/unconcealment is also that which is “most proper to aletheia as its own.” This is “the one mystery” that “holds sway throughout man’s Da-sein.”

Concealing at first appears in what is concealed. Da-sein, through ecstatic comportment, “conserves the first and broadest undisclosedness, untruth proper” in every unconcealing of beings. This is the mystery--the “nonessence of truth.” Here nonessence is not seen as something inferior, as in the distinction between being and becoming, necessity and contingency, actuality and possibilitas. Rather the nonessence is taken to be a “pre-essential essence,” the essence that is both prior to and part of every essence (every being as something).⁶ But we should at first understand the nonessence of truth as a “deformation of that already inferior essence” since this nonessence, unlike the traditional understanding of nonessence, will always [131] be essential for (it belongs with) the essence--the uncovered (unlike the traditional understanding of essence and nonessence) “never becomes unessential in the sense of irrelevant.” This is an unconventional way of speaking about nonessence/untruth and “goes very much against the grain of ordinary opinion and looks like a dragging up of forcibly contrived paradoxa.” But this understanding of the nonessence directly follows from our path--we first examined the claims of the traditional understanding of truth (i.e. correspondence) and found that it required the appearing of beings; this appearing of beings furthermore required ecstatic (ek-static) comportment towards beings. From here, so that beings may be the “standard” for our true statements, freedom for beings was needed--the freedom to let beings appear as they are. Lastly, freedom required that we allow for untruth, for the nonessence of truth as concealing “beings as a whole,” which occurs with every unconcealing; the nonessence of truth must be understood positively in terms of being covered over, hidden. Thus, understanding the essence of the nonessence of truth is needed in order to understand truth; understanding the covering is needed to understand the uncovering. Because of this, it is more prudent to reject “ordinary opinion” than to reject where the phenomenon of truth has led us--that “the primordial nonessence of truth, as untruth, points to the still unexperienced domain of the truth of Being (not merely of beings).”

This may require a little more explication: every unconcealing of beings as something necessarily conceals other aspects of those beings, those aspects that are unimportant for the given comportment. When kicking a soccer ball, its scuff marks or even its design is irrelevant to the activity, thus they get covered over. This covering over is an important part of our experience of the soccer ball in that comportment: it drastically reduces the aspects of the soccer ball that we must take notice of, that we must focus on in our activity. Thus, in the activity of kicking the soccer ball, the fact that some aspects of the ball do not become salient is important in that it allows for those salient aspects to come to light and be relevant in the situation. If we needed to take explicit notice of every aspect of every being that we come upon in the world we would be incapable of action; we would be too engrossed in trying to ‘register’ everything in our environment and the objects we are interacting with. It is because we can in a sense ignore those aspects that are irrelevant to our current purposes that beings can appear as this or that. It is because of this that every unconcealing requires concealment, that every truth requires untruth.

Freedom, in letting beings be as they are, is the “resolutely open bearing that does not close up in itself.” This is a strange way of putting it: to be resolute usually means to be closed off, not to be open. John Sallis, the translator, provides the following note that is informative:

”Resolutely open bearing” seeks to translate das entschlossene Verhältnis. Entschlossen is usually rendered as “resolute,” but such a translation fails to retain the word’s structural relation to verschlossen, “closed” or “shut up.” Significantly, this connection is what makes it possible for Heidegger to transform the sense of the word: he takes the prefix as a privation rather than as indicating establishment of the condition designated by the word to which it is affixed. Thus, as the text here makes quite clear, entschlossen signifies just the opposite of that kind of “resolve” in which one makes up one’s mind in such fashion as to close off all other possibilities: it is rather a kind of keeping un-closed.

Heidegger’s use of “resolute” here is emphasizing the pervasiveness and active character of this openness: it must be sustained as an event of uncovering/covering. All possible comportments are made possible by and grounded in this resolute openness; it is because I am resolutely open to beings (because I am free for beings), because I have a ‘here’ whereby I can direct myself towards a ‘there,’ that comportment is possible. But as we saw above, this bearing towards what is concealed (in order to unconceal it) is also concealed in every unconcealment, “letting a forgottenness of the mystery take precedence and disappearing in it.” In this forgottenness man still “takes his bearings [verhält sich]” through comportment, but in forgetting the essential relationship between unconcealing and concealing he allows himself to comfortably dwell in a particular way with beings. He takes up those particular modes of comportment--those particular ways in which he unconceals beings--and remains in that mode of unconcealment. To use one historical example, philosophers and scientists have long interpreted beings in terms of properties, thus when they disclose beings (at least consciously; if Heidegger is right then they disclose beings in other ways all the time) they see an object in terms of its properties and categorize it accordingly. When it is suggested that there are other ways to disclose beings, other ways that a being is, they are often incredulous--how can beings be other than as a substance with properties? The dominance of metaphysics, then, is sustained in this forgetfulness of beings as a whole, of the nature of comportment and unconcealing/concealing. Heidegger put it aptly:

Man clings to what is readily available and controllable even where ultimate matters are concerned. And if he sets out to extend, change, newly assimilate, or secure the openedness of the beings pertaining to the most various domains of his activity and interest, then he still takes his directives from the sphere of readily available intentions and needs.

Already confident that we know what we are talking about (see 115-117), we rely on those modes of comportment that we are familiar with and thus constrain how beings can appear by limiting our modes of bringing them to light. By doing so we forget our own disclosing of beings through open comportment and, hence, forget the nonessence of truth that is the mystery of being itself. Despite this forgetting, we commonly express this phenomena, for example those times when we say, “He thinks like an engineer,” or, “Can you stop being a philosopher for just a moment!” We all naturally deal with things in those modes of comportment with which we are familiar; the key is understanding the nature of comportment to beings as a whole, including the relation between unconcealment and concealment.

By remaining in our common modes of comportment, we are not letting “the concealing of what is concealed hold sway.” Instead of retaining the concealed as the pre-essential essence of truth, we reduce it to mere puzzlement and [132] ignorance of some of the beings that we come in contact with; it is a mere deficiency in our knowledge/understanding of things, a temporary stopping point on our way to better understanding them through our already established modes of unconcealing. In doing so we do not allow the nonessence of truth to have its peculiar sort of presence.⁷

Wherever the concealment of beings as a whole is conceded only as a limit that occasionally announces itself, concealing as a fundamental occurrence has sunk into forgottenness.

This forgetting of the mystery of being/the concealed does not annihilate the mystery, but gives it a “peculiar presence [Gegenwart].” By forgetting the relationship between our unconcealing of beings and the excess that remains concealed in that unconcealing, man is left to his own devices, appropriating the world in terms of “the latest needs and aims” in terms of “purposing and planning.” In the modern age this is seen in technology: everything is reduced to a resource or reserve that can be used for thus-and-such a purpose, whether it be time, materials, or people that are ‘contracted’ for their work. When this occurs, it is the needs and aims that determine the “standards” for beings (compare 125-126)--beings are disclosed in terms of these needs and their ‘worth’ are determined according to how they can fulfill them; utility becomes the standard, not beings. This implies an inherent pragmatism: beings of all kinds are useful because they can be used for some purpose, they ‘work.’ Because of this, man “persists in [needs and aims] and continually supplies himself with new standards, yet without considering either the ground for taking up standards [freedom through open comportment] or the essence of what gives the standard [the nonessence of truth].” By being left to himself man mistakes the “genuineness of his standards,” projecting his standard onto beings themselves rather than on its ground (see 118-119).

By thus unconcealing beings according to our own desires, man can then quickly assume that they are the standard for beings: that beings are for his use and consumption and must continually be referred to himself. Here he is again forgetting that being--the unconcealed--is our standard. This phenomena demonstrates that man, while ek-sistent, is also in-sistent--“Dasein...holds fast to what is offered by beings, as if they were open of and in themselves.” While the mystery of the unconcealed (i.e. being) still holds sway, it is forgotten and seen as “unessential” to truth proper. The primary fault, then, is not in disclosing beings in a particular way--as technological resources for our use and manipulation--but in forgetting the nonessence of truth, namely being. Here yet again we find Heidegger returning to his primary question: the question of being. This is simply one more way that the question of being has been forgotten, including the consequences of that forgettfullness.

Notes:

In his later thought Heidegger often speaks about ‘essencing’ in terms of a verb, not as a noun or property of entities. Man, in disclosing beings, essences them, partially constitutes their being in relation to how they are disclosed as something, how it is gathered into a context. This “partially” is seen in the essential relatedness of unconcealing and concealing--being/physis enters or upsurges into the open comportment that is man; as it relates to the ‘correctness’ (Richtigkeit) of the uncovering of beings, being/the concealed pre-essential essence itself limits what I can truthfully disclose. This imposes some specific restrictions on the claim that ‘everything is interpretation,’ while not denying the claim itself. For Heidegger, this understanding asserts it more essentially and authentically.
This expresses a common theme in Heidegger’s thought, first given in Being and Time, that the ‘nothing’ has a particular presence; primordially it is not simply the empty absence of things, but a positive phenomena, whether it relates to anxiety or truth’s nonessence. To put it one more way, it is a felt absence, such as when we lose a loved one who nevertheless remains an important part of our everyday activities.

Essencing vs. Essence

2006-06-23T11:12:00.000-05:00

One of the questions that has been central to traditional metaphysics is that of essence--those properties and/or relations that either define or constitute what an entity is. Within the dominant substance-property metaphysic, an essence is the necessary and sufficient properties that make a thing what it is. In contrast, traditional metaphysicians speak of those contingent properties that are only accidentally 'attached' to the substance or property. One of Heidegger's primary concerns was to qualify this metaphysical dogma that has never been phenomenologically grounded. This, I believe, is one step closer to answering the question of logic's primacy, either in epistemology or metaphysics.

Consider, to use the ubiquitous Heideggerian example, a hammer. For the substance-property metaphysician, the essence of the hammer is understood in terms of its properties--hammerness, steelness, brownness, greyness, hardness, etc. The essence of the hammer must be understood apart from any contingencies such as history, culture, or the existence of any other being. Furthermore, there may be other things that are attributed to the hammer, but which do not ontologically belong to the hammer-itself: it may be valued as an heirloom or perhaps have security value, like Linus' blanket.

These valuations, however, are 'subjective' properties that a mind 'attaches' to the object, not objective constituents of the object-itself. It is from the objective standpoint, devoid of valuations and contexts, that the 'true' constitution of the object is understood. The essences and properties that define the hammer, as 'universals,' could just as well belong to another object at another time or place and their meaning is uinvocal in every individual instantiation--it is non-spatial and atemporal. This has two consequences: first, the best understanding of an object will consist of understanding its necessary properties in their essence. This means understanding them in their universality, their non-contextual and universal meaning. Second, all things that exist--be it an object, a person, or a discipline--can be grounded in these non-contextual entities. This is the assumption that drives attempts to explicate 'objective' realities--truths, morals, etc.

This will no doubt seem natural to many, even to be 'common sense': of course objects are best understood from an 'objective' (i.e. non-contextual/non-situated) standpoint and of course values are 'subjectively' attached to objects by human minds. Lastly, of course objectivity is preferred to subjectivity, as we want to be grounded in what objectively is, not in what minds subjectively attach to objects (which may have no basis in 'reality'). How could anyone doubt such obvious facts?

The historian of philosophy would be quick to point out that this hasn't, in fact, been such an obvious view within history. Even as late as Descartes, 'objectivity' is attributed to ideas and representations, not mind-independent objects (see the third meditation in Meditations on First Philosophy). It was perhaps with the empiricists, but certainly by the time of Kant, that the exact opposite was thought to be the case--the objective concerns mind-independent objects/entities. This probably doesn't mean that the pre-Kantians simply used the same categories but applied them to the opposite kinds of entities than we do, which leads to the second point: the obviousness of the modern understanding is, in fact, not so obvious.

From the beginning of his philosophical journey, Heidegger thought that "the genuine problematic" of philosophy has been deformed by "the general domination of the theoretical."¹ By focusing on atemporal/non-spatial universals such as Forms, properties, or a universal Being (God, the Good, etc.), philosophy has forgotten the contextual and hermeneutical foundations of philosophy and science. As argued within Being and Time and moving on to "Time and Being," these philosophies have forgotten the essential connection between being and man, or between being and Da-sein, being-there. As I will argue below, an alternative way of understanding Da-sein is that of being-a-context.

Consider an alternative account of the hammer: to understand the being of a hammer is not to summarily make note of its properties, but to see how it appears within our concerns in the world. Consider, for example, our understanding of its physical constitution: having an adequate grasp of the hammer first and foremost deals with the hammer's serviceability. This is not a matter of knowing that the hammer weighs this much, has its center of gravity here, and is this dense. Rather, it is a question of how 'hefty' it is for the user, how adequate it is for the given purpose, and how skilled the individual is in hammer use. Understanding the hammer in this way requires that the hammer be situated with other objects and people: with the objects that are hammered, the conglomeration of objects with which the hammer is associated (wood, nails, a workshop, etc.), the physical capacities and skills of the hammerer (which will vary from person to person), the needs that the hammering fulfills (building houses, toys, or equipment), etc. Long before the hammer was weighed to the gram, before its density could be measured, and before precise mathematical formulas were used to describe them, carpenters were industriously making objects and distinguishing between useful woods and metals. In short, the more 'scientific' understanding of the hammer, the one that is ontologized in categorization through its properties, is not a necessary component for the skilled hammerer's correct understanding of the being of the hammer.

In fact, it is on the basis of this practical and contextual understanding that we can begin to scientifically measure weight, density, and such. It is because I am skilled at taking up and using a hammer, at hitting other objects, and noticing that some objects are dented or augmented when hit by more dense objects that I can begin to think of and test scientific/mathematical density. It is also through such a practical understanding that I can then test whether the scientific understanding is accurate. The scientific enterprise itself is dominated by such practices: by methods, ways of setting up tests, and ways of interpreting data. The current crisis in fundamental physics seems to stem from the failures of these practices--particularly of the hermeneutic kind--and the need to find new ones (see also Yves Gingras' What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?).

At this point the traditional metaphysician will display their trump card: It must be the case that these practical concerns and uses of the hammer are dependent on the objective properties of the hammer. Why? Because the hammer exists apart from human minds and there must be some content to this existence without mankind's concerns and needs. But is this the case? As with any good phenomenology, let's examine the phenomena itself: what is density? Mathematically, density is expressed by the following formula:

This is a good start; but what does it mean? First, the notion of equality requires a mode of comparison of the kind A = B. This particular sort of equality is very precise, not of mere similarity but of exact correspondence: e.g., 2² = 4. One more precise way of putting it (as used in transfinite set theory) is that every unit on one side of the equal sign can be matched up to a unit on the other, with none remaining. This is thought to be objectively true: it is true in all possible worlds and requires no context to be intelligible. But this isn't the case. As Lakoff and Nunez have cogently argued, our understanding of this equality depends on certain metaphors, in this case Number as Collection of Objects. To see that two numbers are equal, you collect as many objects as correspond to the numbers in two locations; if we collect the same number of objects in both locations, then the numbers are equal.

It is also dependent on my ability to 'collect' objects. This 'collection' has a peculiar character: it is not dependent on spatial proximity or object similarity. In seeing how many yellow objects there are in a given room, the object that is in my hand is just as relevant as the object that is 10 feet away. As such, the object that is 'objectively' furthest away is in a sense brought 'just as close' in my collecting as the object that is already in my hand: they are both 'near' in my collecting. This is seen by the fact that the red objects in the room, the ones that are irrelevant to my current collecting, are 'far away'; they are not relevant, perhaps even not seen. For a better example, in 'collecting' the 7 wonders of the world, their 'objective' distance from me is inconsequential in my collecting/counting them. Similarly, I can collect various objects that have very little in common: they can have various shapes, sizes, weights, colors, or uses. How the objects are collected is also important.

Psychological findings on categorization of objects might be useful here. I'm reminded of the military's attempt to create AI that can identify enemy tanks: with apparently enormous success in identifying pictures of enemy tanks and differentiating them with ally tanks, the program failed miserably in a public demonstration because it was categorizing the tanks according to when the pictures were taken. All of the enemy tank pictures were taken during the night and all the ally tank pictures were taken during the day; the AI program was accounting on the wrong aspect of the picture for identification. Other categorization tests with children also yield interesting results: the children will often come up with rather intricate methods of differentiating and categorizing objects that are surprising to their testers, but in fact have a reason about them. But the most important aspect of categorization for our purposes is its contextual nature.

Robert Goldstone and Yvonne Lippa, for example, have an interesting article that discusses how discrimination of objects alters how the objects appear, in this case as increasingly dissimilar. From their abstract:

By a strategic judgment bias account, the categories associated with objects are explicitly used as cues for determining similarity, and objects that are categorized together are judged to be more similar because similarity is not only a function of the objects themselves, but also the objects’ category labels. By a representational change account, category learning alters the description of the objects themselves, emphasizing properties that are relevant for categorization. A new method for distinguishing between these accounts is introduced which measures the difference between the similarity ratings of categorized objects to a neutral object. The results indicate both strategic biases based on category labels and genuine representational change, with the strategic bias affecting mostly objects belonging to different categories and the representational change affecting mostly objects belonging to the same category.

Wenchi Yeh and Lawrence Barsalou, in The Situated Nature of Concepts, argue for a broader understanding of how our background (not only of concepts, but practical understanding of the situation) influences concept comprehension, creation, and categorization. A relevant quote from their paper:

Across these diverse areas, background situations are fundamental to cognition. By incorporating situations into a cognitive task, processing becomes more tractable than when situations are ignored. Because specific entities and events tend to occur in some situations more than others, capitalizing on these correlations constrains and thereby facilitates processing. Rather than having to search through everything in memory across all situations, the cognitive system focuses on the knowledge and skills relevant in the current situation. Knowing the current situation constrains the entities and events likely to occur. Conversely, knowing the current entities and events constrains the situation likely to be unfolding.

This is a fact that has been focused on in much of the current literature on philosophy of perception: the world appears only in terms of our goals, intentions, and, as later Heidegger would put it, our openness to beings.² This is an important phenomena in that the hammer can appear as a hammer only if some of its aspects are covered over. In actively using the hammer, It is only because I am a being that cares about beings, that is concerned with them in some way (e.g., to fulfill my needs, desires, or intentions), that beings appear at all. Otherwise why would I even care that 2² = 4 or that there are 3 yellow objects in the room? There is no motivation, no reason to attend to such things and thus no reason for them to appear as such. As something that I will argue later, understanding this openness as the precursor to every logical statement provides the non-logical basis for logic, or that which makes logic possible but cannot be encapsulated in it.

Returning to our question about the equation for density, the meaning of the equation only comes to light on the background of certain skills, practices, and motivations that can bring things to light as valuable or meaningful/relevant. When divorced from those skills, practices, and motivations, the equation is meaningless: someone who is incapable of collecting objects (i.e. counting), bringing their relevant attributes to light (as objects, differentiable from other objects in the environment), and who, quite frankly, cares about what on earth is happening (i.e. what is happening matters to me) will see nothing (or no-thing). As the research in the philosophy of perception seems to demonstrate, without such engaged concern the equation would not appear to begin with nor could the relevant skills and practices develop whereby the equation gains its meaning. All of these are necessary factors for the initial appearing and understanding of the equation. Far from being a context-less entity or description, the equation is intelligible only on the background of these skills, practices, and motivations.

The substance proponent, in defense of their views, will now quickly respond (almost repeating their first objection, but not quite): but these skills, practices, and motivations are simply bringing to light what was already meaningfully, objectively there! In other words, even if these skills, practices, and motivations are needed in order for us to see things like objects or relevance, they are simply discovering what is already there. But does this follow in the case of the hammer? The hammer is understood in terms of its relation with certain practices and objects, but do these relations happen 'naturally' or 'objectively'?

The answer I would like to propose is, no, they do not: seeing the hammer as something with which to build requires non-objective (in classical terms) relations. Hammers do not appear in nature, nor do the hammer's relations--with nails, wood, contracts, etc.--occur without a peculiar kind of being. Building itself is meaningful only in terms of a being that needs or desires something to be built for some purpose; in an impersonal, 'objective,' and non-contextual world, such needs would not exist. Futhermore, it requires a being who has the relevant embodied skills with which to build. These skills are not dominated by explicit rules, perhaps by rules of thumb, but even rules of thumb require a receptivity to when those rules do not apply and an understanding of what to do instead. But most importantly, it requires a being that is open to beings: it requires a receptivity to beings that is necessarily prior to our ability to say anything about those beings. It is only because beings appear that I can say anything about them; divorced from beings, any possible saying would have no referrent and, hence, would not be language. It is this receptivity that escapes 'objective' analysis: I have concerns and intentions that essences beings, that bring them into the relations with other objects, skills, and practices (i.e. the context) whereby they can be something to begin with. Within such a world, there is no need to appeal to some transcendental objective intelligible sphere; what is needed is a being who is concerned with its world, that is open to beings, and that is able to disclose beings. Notes:

Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 87; quoted by Charles Guignon, "Philosophy and Authenticity: Heidegger's Search for a Ground for Philosophizing," in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity, 82.
See, for example, Arian Mack and Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness (London: MIT Press, 1998); Simons, D.J., and C.F. Chabris, "Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events," Perception 28 (1999), 1059-1074; Lachter, Joe, Eric Ruthruff, and Kenneth I. Forster, "Forty-Five Year After Broadbent (1958): Still No Identification Without Attention," Psychological Review 111/4 (2004), 880-913; Susan Hurley, Consciousness in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Alva Noë, Action in Perception; Steven B. Most, Brian J. Scholl, Daniel J. Simons, and Erin R. Clifford, "What You See Is What You Set: Sustained Inattentional Blindness and the Capture of Awareness," Psychological Review 112/1 (2005), 237. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued for this when he claimed that we "polarize the world," bringing out those aspects of the environment that we set ourselves to see (see Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith, trans. (London and New York: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1958), 129). Heidegger makes a similar claim with his discussion of "moods" (Stimmung) and "state-of-mind" (Befindlichkeit); see Being and Time, 29-31, 172-188 (H134-148) and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, trans. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 78-167.

Online Philosophy Lectures

2006-06-22T12:37:00.000-05:00

Tanasije Gjorgoski, at A Brood Comb, has provided a list of possibly interesting philosophy videos he found at Google Video, most of which I've missed in my searches there. Of particular interest is the IBM Research’s Almaden Institute Conference on Cognitive Computing. Take a look!

Guignon on Authenticity, Values, and Psychotherapy

2006-06-16T14:17:00.000-05:00

I've been going through a number of articles in the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, trying to return to the Heideggerian basics, having spent most of my time lately in the later Heidegger. One of the concepts that I haven't done much reading in is that of authenticity. As such, I decided to take some time and read through Charles Guignon's "Authenticity, Moral Values, and Psychotherapy," the last aspect being of interest due to my entering the UWG Psychology program in August. Here is a summary and commentary of Guignon's paper:

Psychotherapy and the Question of the Good Life
Guignon begins by noting the high regard that Heidegger often has in existential psychology, with particular mention of Medard Boss. Unfortunately, "what one usually finds is a Heidegger refracted through the lens of the far more accessible writings of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus" (215). I've also noticed this in my interactions with those who claim some understanding of Heidegger: he is more often than not seen as an existentialist with a morbid fascination with anxiety and death (drawing on a Sartrean interpretation of Being and Time). But as existentialism is now held in less regard, psychologists often think that Heidegger has nothing to contribute, understood as he was through an existentialist lens. Guignon conjectures that the decline of existentialism is largely due to its inability to "capture the concrete realities of actual existence" because of, for example, notions like the "terrible freedom" that denies our being embedded in a social and physical world and an amoral notion of authenticity (215-216).

Even with the decline of such existentialist views there still remains a conviction that "scientific" approaches to psychology similarly lack the resources to capture the concrete application and theory of psychotherapy. "One way to describe this gap between theory and practice is to say that standard theories fail to make sense of the rich and complex forms of moral discourse that characterize therapeutic dialogue" (216). Appealing to Ira Progoff (The Death and Rebirth of Psychology), it was the scientific/technological paradigm that created the space wherein our modern psychological problems could develop. Pre-modern societies had recourse to their religious and social traditions, rituals, and practices for their values; in a world where such traditions are put into question and individualism becomes the norm, the individual is cut off from his past and forced to find his own way in his future. Because of this the therapists are called upon to be the moral authorities: "the theological priesthood has lost much of its authority...the scientist practicing counseling and psychotherapy assumes a new moral authority. He is asked to make moral pronouncements in the name of science in the way the clergy was called upon for religious directives" (C. Marshall Lowe, Value Orientations in Counseling and Psychotherapy: The Meaning of Mental Health, 16-17; 217). Left in a moral vacuum no longer filled by traditions and accepted authorities, individuals are less likely to come to the therapist with classic Freudian neuroses and more likely to have pervasive feelings of meaninglessness and alienation.

This new role that the therapist is asked to take on might be too much given the dominant paradigm: science is often felt to be amoral; it does not work from basic values, but only seeks to objectively describe states of affairs (or so it thinks; Guignon will help disabuse us of this illusion; see also Charles Taylor on modernity). Given the dominant view (discussed by Taylor in his contribution to this work, which I will go through later)--of bare causal inputs that are then 'given' meaning by the mind--morals are thought of either as the concern of the patient herself or in terms of whatever dominant "self-evident" norms are generally accepted by the professional community. Within an eclectic or pluralistic society, the therapist's desire for 'objectivity' and not wishing to 'force' his beliefs on the patient places him in an even harder position. I would also add that this is exacerbated by the current drive to sue that seems to be so prevalent in our society, perhaps in terms of being 'religiously oppressed' or some other such thing.

The importance of addressing and making explicit this moral dimension of human existence that seems to be so important with the increase of patient's neuroses of 'meaningless' should be clear. Guignon feels that Heidegger's understanding of authenticity (eigentlich) "has a great deal to offer" (218). For those who have read Being and Time this will seem like a strange claim--Heidegger himself strongly denied any moral significance to authenticity, that it is morally 'better' to be authentic than inauthentic (though it still does creep in, against his explicit claim). I'm not sure if Guignon has convinced me otherwise, but he does make a good argument. Here is Guignon's thesis:

By working out Heidegger's alternative view of human existence and authenticity, I hope to show that moral concerns are an inescapable part of any project of understanding humans, and that they quite naturally will be central to any meaningful therapeutic dialogue. In trying to display the evaluative dimension of psychotherapy, my aim is not to propose a new technique, but to provide an ontological basis for understanding what always goes on in therapy though it is never fully comprehended in standard theories. (218)

Underlying Assumptions of Psychotherapy Theories
Guignon sees naturalism as the dominant paradigm in modern psychotherapeutic theories--"because humans are a part of nature, we understand them by applying the same canons of explanation used for other parts of nature [i.e. physics]" (218). Guignon identifies three general assumptions that appear to give content to this paradigm: first, following 17^th century physics, it rejects the view that the world consists of inherently meaningful entities. The cosmos, at its core, is a valueless mass of particles in motion. Included in this view is the self as a physical object, though with some sense of "inwardness," of an inner self that is only contingently related to the outside world (the disengaged Cartesian subject).

The second assumption is a view of agency as a means-end calculator; humans consider the options before them, do a cost-benefit analysis (of some sort), and then make a decision according to what will potentially yield the greatest benefit. Within a causal world, what other view could there be: we exert causal force on the causal world in order to bring about some effect; the result is the primary aim, the telos of our actions, as our cause sinks into nonexistence in the linear temporal order. This temporal assumption will be addressed partially by Guignon, but there are other accounts that are also useful (I'll post about them soon). This led to a technologizing of self-improvement--with the guidance of an expert (the therapist) the individual could learn to structure their lives according to pure rationality and become expert calculators. Guignon refers to programs that give "procedures of self-transformation described in a vocabulary of reworking the self to achieved particular ends" (219). Though he does not mention them, this rationalization of agency also includes the 'inner' self--the 'think-it-till-you-are-it' techniques that give so much importance to our 'inner will' or 'inner self.' The remarkable thing about this approach, Guignon notes, is its inability to give value to the things in question--the patient is often called to either fulfill their basic needs/drives or are given no counsel at all, left to their own devices. For these methodologies, psychotherapy remains indifferent to the ends achieved, as long as they are achieved with the proper methodology.

The third assumption is what Guignon refers to as "ontological individualism"--"the view that human reality is to be understood in terms of self-encapsulated individuals who are only contingently aggregated into social systems" (220). I am, essentially, a self that is only contingently related to my culture; in my 'inner' world, which is where I am 'located,' I give meaning to the 'outer' world, which includes others. By virtue of such contingency, the 'inner' is both temporally and epistemologically prior to the 'outer,' including my culture. This view almost inevitably leads to a view of human relations as conflict--when every individual is seeking to achieve their particular ends through whatever means possible (as no means can be more or less valuable in an objective world), others will be seen either as help or hindrance to my goals and are treated as such. Every relationship, then, is seen as a tentative truce held until the other is no longer 'of use' to myself.

In the 50s and 60s, humanistic/existentialist psychology came to the fore of psychological discussion. Eschewing the 'scientific' approach to man, they accepted an "expressivistic" approach, reminiscent of Romanticism--"the self contains an inner seed of potential that is capable of self-fulfillment through artistic creativity, communion with nature, and intense relationships with others" (220). Unfortunately, one inherent presupposition of this paradigm is the individualism assumed by the scientific approach, thus tacitly assuming that which they sought to overcome and unknowingly taking on its consequences. Guignon then discuses how this individualism, including the lack of an ability to posit non-technologically (means-end) based values, weakens the theories of Rollo May, Medard Boss, and Ludwig Binswanger. Ultimately these approaches are faulty, if only for the fact that our "seed of potential" includes not only goodness, but also selfishness, hostility, hate, and oppression. May/Boss/Binswanger's dictate to fulfill one's possibilities provide no basis on which to reject these possibilities, raising the question of whether they are also included in the 'authentic life.'

Central to both Boss and Binswanger is their belief in what is the core value of modern individualism: freedom understood negatively as freedom from constraints. It may be the case, however, that this ideal of unbounded freedom is self-defeating. For where all things are equally possible, nothing is really binding, and so no choice is superior to any others. Freedom then becomes, in Rieff's classic line, the "absurdity of being freed to chose and then having no choice worth making" [The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, 93]. (223)

With this, the humanistic/existentialist views revert back to that which they were arguing against--the meaninglessness of life and the essential loneliness of the individual in the world. By trying to overcome the meaninglessness of modern scientific approaches, the existential psychologist falls prey to the same fault--the inability to posit values. What we need is a new way of conceiving human existence itself, rather than a mere modification of the currently dominant view.

Everydayness and Inauthenticity
Heidegger, in his phenomenology of the human mode of existence, tried to ignore the presuppositions of the modernistic view of the self and, instead, vigorously pursued the phenomena itself to see what it has to say. Man, in his being, is more of an "event or happening" (in his later thought, Ereignis) than an object. Because of this, it is wrong to say that man is essentially 'inner,' either in consciousness or experience; similarly, we cannot say that we 'find' our selves as we find our keys, as one object (albeit a personal or reflexive one) among others. As an event, Dasein finds itself only in what it does, which essentially (i.e. not contingently) includes the transcendent--the world, one's family, one's culture. Quoting Heidegger, "Even one's own Dasein [is] something it can itself proximally 'come across' only when it looks away from 'experiences' and the 'center of its actions,' or does not yet 'see' them at all. Dasein finds 'itself' proximally in what it does" (B&T 155/H119). This is a common phenomena: I am a student because I participate in student activities (go to class, write papers, talk with professors, pay tuition, etc.) within a student context (a university); I am a husband because I do husband actions (I love my wife, perform husbandly duties, planning my life with someone, do her laundry with mine, etc.) within a husband context (civic/religious marriage ceremony, living together).

There is no 'human nature'--the essential list of properties that determine what I am--but only our essential relation with beings and the possibilities that we enact in that relation. Our 'essence,' in a classical view, consists in this active relationship and is inherently dynamic, as opposed to static (hence, not a traditional 'essence'), as seen in the later Heidegger understanding of Dasein as Ereignis--the event of appropriation. For the existentialist/humanist I am striving to recover my "true self" that lies hidden 'within' me; my actions are valued as better or worse only to the degree that they fulfill this inner self. We can see the classic dichotomies between mind/body and inner/out, where the mind/inner instrumentally determines the body/outer. For Heidegger, on the other hand, there is no clear demarcation between an inner and outer. Guignon coins this a "'manifestationist' view of human agency," saying that "to say that we are what we do is to say that our very identity as agents--our being--is defined and realized only through our ways of becoming manifest in the world" (224). As an example, Guignon suggests that we look at a blunt person--it is not the case that her straight-forward responses come from some inner property called 'bluntness,' but her bluntness itself is her being blunt, her acting blunt. In the same way, I am angry, I am happy, I am suspicious when I act within (or interact with) the world in that way.

As an aside, this 'externalist' view of mind (if it can be termed that) has a ubiquitous presence in our lives. In his work, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson gives story after story of how we are ignorant of ourselves, even of those things that are supposedly 'closer' to us than not--our thoughts, desires, feelings, etc. In a few particularly interesting case studies, he provocatively demonstrated how others often know us better than we do--they can see when we are worried when we can't, they know the kind of person we are better than we do. Unless we posit some sort of mind-reading of the alleged 'inner' aspects of our self to our friends/associates, the connection between the 'inner' with the 'outer' is much stronger than traditionally thought, if not (as Heidegger argues) inseparable. Of course, to view them as inseparable is to present a different understanding of the 'inner' and 'outer,' so perhaps to think of it in those terms will import too many traditional assumptions that are not coherently importable. Heidegger's being-in-the-world and being-there (Dasein) express the connection better than the traditional inner/outer distinction. Again, we must unrelentingly pursue the phenomena rather than dwell on modern conceptions.

Heidegger revealingly describes "being-a-self" as a "process of realization" (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 139; 224). Drawing on Ricoeur, our identity is not stable, but is enacted throughout our lives in narrative form. The upshot is that we can only understand another (and ourselves) by understanding where they have come from, where they are, and where they are going. As with any narrative, any given action is understandable only by being found within a context--that person A performed x in context s which is situated in plot h. To use one historical example, to understand that WC had an affair with ML includes WC's history of infidelity, the professional relationship between the two, and the aftermath of the event's coming to light. Every contextual addition enriches to our understanding of "WC had an affair with ML" and makes it more intelligible. For Heidegger this three-fold temporality expresses itself in Dasein's temporal mode of being. Dasein is essentially "ahead of itself" in that it is always projecting itself into various possibilities. Every action I perform involves enacting some possibilities rather than others, with each enactment determining my identity, determining what kind of person I am. How I relate to my wife, my work, my personal studies are all determinative for me and my future, of whether I will be a bad husband, a lazy worker, or an exceptional student. This is Heidegger's "being-toward-death"--"everything we do contributes to making us people of a particular sort" (225).

As human beings, we are essentially related to a past, we are "thrown" into a culture, a family, a set of values (explicit and implicit) that informs our lives. My religious commitments, how I am raised, the cultural climate of my childhood, the ways of being that I learn (again, explicitly or implicitly) from my parents, siblings, and other authority figures, the dominant stories (be they Biblical, Buddhist, or fairy tales) that were commonly reiterated all give content to my present. Furthermore, they also in part determine my possibilities--within my religious context the possibility of killing someone is seen as 'impossible,' within my familial context the possibility of using a woman and then dismissing her is not a genuine possibility, etc. In every case, some possibilities are 'acceptable' and others 'unacceptable' because 'we don't do that,' 'that's not what a Winters boy does,' 'I can't, I'm Mormon.' Heidegger describes this in terms of what Macquarrie and Robinson translate as "the 'they,'" which has also been (in my mind better) translated as "the 'one.'" It comes from the German das Man, as in "Wie spricht Man..." and "Wie tun Man..." ("How does one say..." and "How does one do..."). Thus, as a student I go to classes because "that's what one does when one is a student"; as a husband I love my wife because "that's what one does when one is married"; I eat with a spoon because "that's how one eats food"; etc.

In its inauthentic manifestation, we do these things because they are natural, they are taken for granted, that's just how things are done! One eats with a spoon, one opens doors for women, one shakes the other's hand when introduced, one stands a certain distance from the other when speaking (i.e. respects 'personal space'), one drives on the right side of the road, one raises one's hand before speaking in class, one has tea every day at noon, one turns off their cell phone during a movie, one attends their children's activities, one avoids certain language in certain contexts, one burps after a meal to show approval, one wears a shirt and shoes inside a store, one shows respect to one's elders/superiors, etc., etc., etc. Our lives are informed by an indeterminably large number of norms for action/being, most of which we do simply because that is 'what one does.' It is against this background that our actions are intelligible, it provides the context or plot wherein our thoughts, feelings, and actions have meaning. This is even the case when I deviate from these norms, as my actions are 'deviant' only by virtue of occurring against the background of 'conformist' behavior/practices; thus I can never escape my background, even as my horizon's expand into new contexts. By providing the basis of our possible ways of being, our past is a positive constituent of what/who I am.

Our thrownness, however, also has some negative possibilities. Our average understanding of how things are and what one does is a leveled understanding, brought down to the lowest common denominator. Our norms and average language must be understandable by anyone, or else we could not even communicate; we thus must share a basic understanding of things, both from direct experience and from 'idle talk.' But this understanding must, of necessity, be vague and undeveloped, which fact is seen by any expert when they attempt to discuss their work with a layman--there are many things that are lost on the layman due to their level of understanding, many things that they do not see or distinctions that they are unaware of. Also, when things are seen as 'obvious,' we have a tendency to simply "go with the flow," unthinkingly following common norms in any given aspect of our lives. By doing so we limit our understanding of our possibilities--they are restricted to what one does, what one expects from life, and they become "the only game in town" (226-227). We need to understand, however, that this isn't necessarily bad--our basic abilities to converse with one another, to do many things (eat with utensils, drive a car, etc.) naturally, and to not get bogged down in excessive Humean doubt are made possible by our thrownness. Its consequence, though, is giving us a poor sense of our possibilities, of what we can do and become, which includes a sense of our selves, though it is a positive sense (however vague). But it is only against this background that I can become authentic, that I can take up some possibilities genuinely.

The third temporal aspect of Dasein's mode of being is that of "falling." In our projection into possibilities based on our being thrown into a context, there is the possibility of becoming bogged down in our present. By assuming that the average everyday understanding of our possibilities are "the only game in town," one becomes unconcerned with one's future--one simply expects what one should expect and thus one gets lost in what das Man has already dictated. When this happens we have a non-genuine relationship with our possibilities, with our selves--we accept and enact possibilities simply because that is what one does. Heidegger has two different levels of forgetting--in the first, we lose ourselves in our actions. When we are running to catch the bus there is no explicit or implicit "I am running" or understanding of it as one possibility among others; we are simply engrossed in the situation, in the bus and our attempting to catch it, and no "I" or "I could be doing something else" invades. This first kind of forgetting is necessary for any effective action within the world as we direct ourselves toward beings. In the second kind of forgetting, however, we forget that we have forgotten--we relinquish the possibility of remembering our temporality, of our ability to project in ways that are not already dictated by das Man (this kind of forgetting is further discussed in the latter half of "On the Essence of Truth," which I haven't gotten to yet in my summary/commentary). By continually catering to what das Man dictates in its average everyday understanding of things, we lose site of the fact that we are the ones projecting our possibilities, not the amorphous "one" or "everyone." This is seen in the linguistic signifiers "one," which can refer to anyone, and "I," which designates a specific beings (myself). The forgetful Dasein thus gets bogged down in "more of the same," loses itself in das Man and their leveled expectations. What else can result from such an existence than a feeling of alienation, meaninglessness, and being ungrounded? When your life is essentially determined by 'what one does' rather than, say, 'what I do,' feelings of powerlessness and alienation are inevitable.

Authenticity
In contradistinction with inauthenticity, we have authenticity. Within Heidegger's thought, authenticity is not to be confused with the Romantics or Sartre's (mis)interpretation of Heidegger's work, the consequences of which have already been discussed. Being authentic does not remove the individual from their background (their thrownness), but more genuinely involves the individual in it: "since our own life stories are inseparable from the wider text of a shared we-world, authenticity can be nothing other than a fuller and richer form of participation in the public context" (228). It might be good, before proceeding with Guignon's analysis, to understand the illuminating etymology of authenticity, or eigentlich. Eigen, in German, can be translated in terms of what is "actual" or "appropriate," but the meaning Heidegger is directing us towards is that of "what is one's own" or "what is mine." An authentic life, then, is one that makes something one's own. What this something is will naturally depend on your views of Dasein, of man's mode of existence. Within Heidegger's view, where one is actively and concernfully situated within a culture and world, it is making that world and the beings within it your own. The hermeneutic (hence, narrative) parallel should be obvious--making the alien familiar through translation and interpretation.

What is altered in an authentic existence is not necessarily the specific actions that you perform; thus, to be authentic does not necessarily mean a change in behavior or practice. Rather, what is changed is how you relate to your own temporality, to your own possibilities. In inauthenticity we evade this ownness: we allow ourselves to be thrown into the everyday and what das Man expects of us in order to forget that we have to take a stand on our existence, on our mode of being (the second forgetting). In being inauthentic it is not the case that I haven't taken a stand on my existence, as I am still appropriating the world; but what that stand is happens to be determined by something other than myself and I forget my essential relationship with my possibilities. Granted, das Man is also essentially related to my possibilities, das Man is not itself sufficient for my possibilities; Dasein must be being-with, being-alongside-others which entails Dasein's temporality. By being before death, by understanding our utmost ability not to be (or not to be Dasein), we can take a more engaged role in determining who and what we are, on becoming active in that determination rather than passive in das Man's dictates. By taking this authentic stand on our existence, our lives are transformed in a subtle way: we no long depend wholly on das Man to understand our possibilities (either as limited or infinite) and we have a clearer view of our possibilities. This view is not perfect, by any means, but it is more genuine, more true to man's constitution as an individual, or, better put, as an-individual-with-others.

In this authentic life, our possibilities take on a new crispness or lucidity. Within das Man there is always the dumbed-down understanding of possibility that is dominated and even constituted by a vagueness; even where the extraordinary is spoken of, it is shrouded in an averageness that allows for no foreseeable limits. In the context not spoken of by Heidegger or Guignon--that of being given extremely limited options ("you'll never become anything," "no one ever leaves [insert name of location here]," etc.)--the extraordinary is not spoken of at all, or if it is it is made into some unattainable ideal that is better ignored than attempted with supposedly inevitable failure. In these cultures, das Man continues to determine the possible and the inauthentic Dasein takes them up rather than relating to its own possibilities, what its own context, abilities, and potentialities allow. By taking an authentic stand on our existence, then, we give coherence to our lives: our actions can be understood in terms of our own temporal way of being rather than the vague 'what one can do.' As stated earlier, the events in a story are intelligible only in terms of the wider plot; similarly, one's actions are now intelligible because they are genuinely situated in a more precise context.

To better understand this, Guignon makes an important distinction between a "means-end" approach to actions and a "constituent-end" approach to actions (230-231). In the first, our life is seen as an attempt to find means to particular ends, whatever those ends may be (recall the view of causation spoken of in the second section). Actions, in this case, are valuable only in terms of their ability to help us reach our goals, i.e. they are instrumentally valuable. Within the "constituent-end" approach, I understand that my actions are intimately connected to who/what I was, who/what I am, and who/what I will be and, as such, they are valuable in themselves. Thus, instead of running in order to be healthy and helping another in order to assist them, I run as part of being a healthy person and I help the other as part of being a helpful person. In the first, I do something in order to accomplish something; in the second, I do something in the context of existing in a certain way. Though the actions are the same in both cases, the grounds for their instantiation are substantially different: with the instrumentalist, life is seen as periodic events constituted by actions that can get me something; with the constitutionist, life is a temporal whole (past, present, and future, even towards death) wherein the actions are situated, which actions constitute who/what I am. Guignon put it nicely:

Where the means-end attitude trivializes the present by keeping us preoccupied with the carrot at the end of the stick, the constituent-end approach, by making us realize that what we are doing at this moment just is realizing the goals of living, throws us intensely into the present moment as the arena in which our coming-to-fruition is fulfilled. Running and being a friend are not just impositions I could as well do without; they make me the person I am. What is important is building myself as this kind of person, not scoring points or getting rewards "down the road." (231)

The upshot of this is that the inauthentic existence is simultaneously a misunderstanding of human existence itself: it misunderstands the ontological function of means and their deeper ontological/temporal foundations in Dasein's existence (i.e. projection, thrownness, and fallenness/forgetting). By thus misunderstanding man's mode of existence, the instrumentalist further perpetuates a limited understanding of man, insofar as man does act instrumentally, but only on the basis of constituent modes of being. This should clarify the fact that authenticity is not a question of discovering our 'true inner self' nor is it merely 'doing what I want.' Rather, it is a concept that is intimately tied to existence, to the question of being, or the being of Dasein (which is a preparatory question on the way to being). Also, authenticity does not reject the instrumentalist view per se, but only questions its supposedly fundamental nature.

The Self as a Moral Agent: Implications for Psychotherapy
From the above, Heidegger's view of Dasein sees a direct correlation between who we are and what we can become. Contrary to early Heidegger (but perhaps correctly), Guignon sees in this an ethical imperative--that we are called to be authentic--showing a necessary ethical aspect to human existence that both the modernist/scientific and existential psychoanalysts cannot account for: "Heidegger's account of life gives us a way of seeing substantive moral questions as an unavoidable part of any attempt to understand human beings" (231). I, for one, think that Guignon would do better to tie the ethical aspect of authenticity to Heidegger's later thought, or perhaps with Levinas, as it is not clear at all in his earlier works--we are obligated to being and the appearing of beings through appropriation (Ereignis) and, hence, have a responsibility (or response-ability) to being and (for Levinas) the Other. Through technology we 'challenge' and even do violence to being by constraining beings to appear within its frame (Ge-Stell) instead of releasing it to its own being; the former is inauthentic while the latter is authentic. In the former beings can only appear through the lens of technology; in the latter beings can appear as technology, but are also free to appear as something else. In Levinasian terms, it is letting the Other (in this case being/beings) be Other in its alterity even as it appears as something familiar. But that is for another entry.

Guignon next addresses the possible objection that Heideggerian authenticity still does not address how we are to bring these ideas up in a therapeutic setting. If we are to respect the diversity in modern society, any appeal to some moral values might be seen as an imposition on the freedom of others. This, however, itself assumes the relativity that it attempts to preserve--it assumes, but does not argue for, the value of pluralism. As such, far from being value neutral, naturalistic and psychoanalytic approaches themselves value the objective valueless stance; in Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, this objective approach (starting in Augustine and culminating in Descartes) is seen as the Good, the methodology or mode of being that is considered better than a 'subjective' approach. Far from lacking a moral or valuative stance, the appeal to objectivity itself presupposes and thrives on a value judgment--that the disengaged approach to life/the world is 'better' and more valuable than the engaged/subjective approach to 'get at the real, the really real, the really really real, the REALLY really really real.' What we should realize, given what we've said above, is that this value judgment could very well be a prime cause of the disorders that people are paying the therapist to address--their lives are groundless, they have no authorities, no dominant narratives that give their lives meaning, they dwell in a meaningless world, they feel alienated. The patient, then, comes to the therapist with this feeling of alienation only to be told, or at least to be assumed in the therapist's methods, that that is just the way things are; buck up and courageously take up your life's meaninglessness in whatever way you want. To re-quote Reiff from earlier in the paper, we can safely speak of the "absurdity of being freed to chose and then having no choice worth making" (The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, 93; 223).

This self-defeating approach, seen in terms of what the therapist assumes and what the patient is suffering from, should make us reevaluate our presuppositions. Guignon ends his article by giving four ways that he thinks Heideggerian authenticity can help us better see the necessary moral dimension of therapy. First, Heideggerian authenticity, while not giving us a method, does give us "metavalues" such as "resoluteness, steadiness, courage, and, above all, clear-sightedness about one's own life as a finite, thrown projection" (232). While these metavalues are also assumed in the existentialist approaches, Heideggerian authenticity adds the further element that these are not means to ends, but are ways of being, ways of becoming the person I am and will be; they are valuable in themselves as constitutive elements of my identity. As such, we are answerable for our choices, not merely their consequences. This also makes us responsible for our self-deceptions--if we are authentic, if we own up to our thrownness, projecting, and fallenness, we will hold ourselves accountable for what we are and will not transfer blame to das Man. With a better grasp of and more accountability for our possibilities, we can have a truer understanding of ourselves.

Second, Heidegger's understanding of authentic Dasein allows us to see what role moral reflection plays in our self-understanding. Dasein's being is partially constituted by our being thrown into a culture that provides the basic possibilities of being that we can realize in our lives. As we do so we get a sense of what is valuable to the community, we become 'attuned' to what the community values as the Good (borrowing again from Taylor). This attunement in part constitutes how the world and the beings within it appear--our elders appear as people worthy of respect, certain places (Churches, temples, or gardens) appear as holy spaces, articles of clothing appear as either the latest fad or 'so last year,' etc. As constitutive aspects of my being, these attunements are an important facet of who and what I am--I am respectful, I am reverent, I am fashionable. As positive constituents of my identity, reflection on these values/attunements is itself valuable, not because it leads to some useful result, but because it improves our vision of ourselves.

Heidegger would have us understand, though, that the values appropriated from our fallenness and past das Mans are products of history--the Enlightenment das Man, the humanistic das Man, the Puritan das Man, the Mormon/Catholic/Buddhist das Man etc.--which have strongly influenced 'what one does' and 'what one is': an individual with God-given rights, that one should have their own opinions on matters, that women have their place in raising children. Our moral sense (our moral attunement) is shaped by these historical contingencies. In authenticity we enact a new relationship with these historical facts, we see their contingency and realize that there are other possible attunements (though we may not know what they are at the time). By seeing this contingency, the authentic Dasein "chooses its hero" (B&T 437/H385), it chooses its authorities whereby it can develop its basic attunements to beings. In being authentic, Dasein does not transcend das Man and thereby find its morality 'within' its 'inner self' nor 'without' itself in transcendent reason, but rather immerses itself in its context and chooses its authorities, either within its own tradition or finding new traditions. By finding exemplary stories and heroes/figures, Dasein finds a ground on which to find and choose its possibilities by relating to its history, the history of its culture, and perhaps in interacting with new cultures/attunements. As said earlier, any new culture/attunement that one discovers does not negate Dasein's thrownness, which continues to inform the Dasein's life, but it does establish a more genuine relationship between Dasein and its thrownness.

Third, authenticity further grounds our essential relationship with others. As essentially being-with (mi-Da-sein) and being inevitably thrown into a culture, authenticity helps us see better the connection between the Other and ourselves, of our fates being intertwined. Being human is not being alone or being only contingently related to others, but being Dasein, having a 'there' that is also inhabited by the Other whom we interact with; and how we interact with them is essentially constitutive for our being, as well as theirs. The authentic understanding that being human is essentially a being-with that also partially provides a context, a Da for the creation of the Other's being, by necessity introduces an ethical element. Because of this, we no longer see freedom as freedom from constraints, but rather as freedom for beings and the Other. As stated above, this is seen better in Heidegger's later thought and in Levinas where we are essentially responsible for the Other, be it being or another Dasein. Our freedom expresses itself in freedom for beings and the Other, from which we are able to constitute our being/identity; it is only against this background that we can also be free from things.

Heidegger's language of "loyalty" and "authority" shows that his concept of authentic freedom, far from pointing to some existentialist conception of "terrible freedom," as designed to bring out the role of those bedrock loyalties and commitments that already inhabit our lives, though often in a form distorted by ontological individualism. (235-236)

Fourth, authenticity can "clarify and expand the conception, found in certain recent theorists, of therapy as the renarrativizing of a person's life story" (236). As actions and thoughts only make sense within a context, authenticity can assist in gaining further clarity on that context and the dominant narratives that we have inherited from it. By finding continuity between disparate events in one's life through understanding the contexts in which they occurred, including the dominant values/attunements within those context, one is better situated to understand one's past, find resolution, and reinterpret one's identity. Seeing the continuity, for example, between mom's alcoholism, dad's temper and occasional beatings of mother and self, the dominant narratives and attunements found in one's culture and home, and one's current feelings of inadequacy, one may see the historically contingent nature of one's own narratives and find other narratives or grounds for narratives that engender different meanings than the inadequacies one feels. It could be argued that one primary reason that we see our current narrative with its inherent attunements as 'the only game in town,' that we are stuck, that we are 'in a rut,' that we 'can't escape from our inadequacies' is because we cannot see any other context/attunement within which to interpret the events. The therapist, here, will help guide their patient to see better his inherited values and attunements for what they are--contingent historical creations that might be distorting their understanding of themselves more than bringing it to light. Guignon is quick to point out that this narrative approach has a necessary moral element--protagonists, antagonists, suffering, injustices, lessons learned, etc. all are integral to a plot; they are what give the story meaning and life. Every narrative emerges from a world with its norms and practices; as such, narrative therapy must engender moral reflection, the reflections that shape how the world appears.

Guignon concludes with the following:

We began by looking at how naturalistic and third-force psychotherapy theories tend to presuppose a picture of the self as an essentially isolated individual in a morally neutral, objectified universe. What is troubling about such theories is the possibility that their picture of the self might be a major source of the emotional and behavioral problems that many people bring to therapists today. If this is so, then modern therapy risks perpetuating the problem in the cure. Heidegger's conception of authenticity, in contrast, can help us make sense of dimensions of therapeutic practice not fully accounted for in most forms of theorizing. Its value lies not in offering recipes for new types of technique, but in providing a basis for understanding our embeddedness in a wider context of meaning, the role of constraints in genuine freedom, and the fundamental role of moral commitments in our ability to be humans in any meaningful sense. In this way it provides a counterweight to conventional therapeutic ideals of effective behavior and self-actualization, and it can open up therapeutic practice to an understanding of life that is left unintelligible by prevailing theories. (236-237)

After all is said and done, I do believe that Guignon has shown a nacent ethics in Heidegger's conception of authenticity. Not an ethics of categorical imperatives or laws, but of man's essential relationship with and responsibility for the Other and being. I think bringing Levinas into the picture, as well as aspects of Heidegger's later thought, is particularly informative--one constitutive facet of Dasein's being is its responsibility to the Other and being, the latter being seen in the dangers of technology. By wallowing in the world of das Man where our temporal constitution is covered over, and with it a realization of our ontological relationship to our past, present, and future, this essential being-with is forgotten in the wake of the vague 'one.' By authentically taking up our possibilities, with its clearer understanding of this essential relationship, ethics is a necessary consequence.

Taylor on Modernity

2006-06-15T14:32:00.000-05:00

[NOTE: I made a few changes to this from my posting it yesterday; a few things just didn't feel quite right. Mostly an issue of terminology that didn't convey the right ideas and might have implied a few wrong ones. (KW, 6-16-06 9:10am)]

As I was surfing the net, I found an article by Charles Taylor, titled Two Theories of Modernity. There Taylor discusses two conceptions of modernity, either as a difference between civilizations or as the demise of "traditional" myths and the emergence of "modern" discoveries. Taylor understands society as "the picture of a plurality of human cultures, each of which has a language and a set of practices that define specific understandings of personhood, social relations, states of mind/soul, goods and bads, virtues and vices, and the like" (1). The second understanding, which he terms "acultural," sees the change "in terms of some culture-neutral operation," such as "the growth of reason...the growth of scientific consciousness, or the development of a secular outlook, or the rise of instrumental rationality, or an ever-clearer distinction between fact-finding and evaluation" (2). In these cases the change to modernity is seen as a result of increased technology, ease of living, mobility, etc. These, it is thought, are indifferent to our notions of personhood, the Good, or society and could occur in any culture regardless of their norms and practices.

When it comes to explanations in terms of "rationality", this is seen as the exercise of a general capacity that was only awaiting its proper conditions to unfold. Under certain conditions, human beings will just come to see that scientific thinking is valid, that instrumental rationality pays off, that religious beliefs involve unwarranted leaps, that facts and values are separate. These transformations may be facilitated by our having certain values and understandings, just as they are hampered by the dominance of others; but they are not defined as the espousal of some such constellation. They are defined rather by something that we come to see concerning the whole context in which values and understandings are espoused. (3)

Generally speaking, most explanations of modernity are of the acultural type, describing it as the rise of reason against Romantic irrationalism. Even those beliefs that see modernity as a negative occurrence provide acultural reasons, as "the loss of the horizon; by a loss of roots; by the hubris that denies human limits and denies our dependence on history or God, which places unlimited confidence in the powers of frail human reason; by a trivializing self-indulgence which has no stomach for the heroic dimension of life, and so on" (4). Here, then, the move to modernity results in a clash of worldviews, of beliefs, of propositional affirmations. Taylor disagrees with these assessments and even thinks that they are dangerous. By seeing the changes as merely institutional, it ignores the ground from which modernity sprung, namely a change in values and norms, a change in culture.

The motive for the cultural approach, Taylor muses, is probably due to the partisan nature of the debate: we simply grapple for whatever is readily available to make things understandable.

Now nothing stamps the changes as more unproblematically right than the account that we have "come to see" through certain falsehoods, just as the explanations that we have come to forget important truths brands it as unquestionably wrong. (6)

Given the dominance of Christendom in the beginning of modernity, there is little surprise that a cultural approach to the question wasn't given--it is the only cultural game in town, as it were, and all other civilizations were "barbarians, or infidels, or savages" (6; this description equally applies to the views of most civilizations before Christendom as well). Given the attempts to squash pluralism from the 16^th century and beyond (Taylor goes into this in his contribution to Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science), searching for cultural causes would be unthinkable. Similarly, for those who wish to decry modernity, the greatest self-condemnation would be to realize that the vilifiers similarly take part in the culture of modernity, even if they do not accept its theoretical conclusions (more on this later). Taylor also attributes the paradigm of "materialism" for the acultural approach: it is better to account for social changes in terms of more concrete developments, such as industrialization or increased mobility, rather than some vague realm of spirituality or values/morality.

There are two particular problems with the acultural approach: first, modernity appears to have arisen more from a moral outlook than in terms of "coming to see" truths. "[S]cience itself has grown in the West in close symbiosis with a certain culture in the sense I am using that term here, namely, a constellation of understandings of person, nature, society, and the good" (8). By seeing this general constellation of values, modernity appears in a different light--not as a doctrine, but as a culture. Hence, one can misunderstand modernity in one of two ways: first, one can characterize the change to modernity as the "product of unproblematic discovery of the ineluctable consequence of some social change" (as the proponents of modernity do), or, second, one can ignore important aspects of the change in modern civilization, including notions of individualism and "the affirmation of ordinary life" (8; as the opponents of modernity do). We assume that others in history held similar (though perhaps undeveloped) views that we do, not seeing the central role that such distinctions as the "inward/outward" have had in shaping post-Augustinian Western culture/modernity.

The second, and more damaging, way of misunderstanding modernity through an acultural approach is how it affects our understanding of other cultures. Reducing modernity to some "universally applicable operation" that is indifferent to culture, such as reason or technology, "imposes a falsely uniform pattern on the multiple encounters of non-Western cultures with the exigencies of science, technology, and industrialization" (8-9). As the supposedly primary causes for modernity, we will assume that the newly industrialized culture must now "come to see" certain truths and, hence, make some cultural changes, "such as the 'secularization' or the growth of atomistic forms of self-identification" (9). As I've said elsewhere, this further accentuates the tie between technology and ontology--we think that having the former will instrumentally change the latter, that we "come to see" the latter in the 'correct' way when we accept the former. The acultural understanding, then, levels off all cultures, making them simply 'less advanced' versions of ourselves who will eventually "come to see" as we do once they see the success of instrumental rationality and technology.

In short, exclusive reliance on an acultural theory unfits us for what is perhaps the most important task of social sciences in our day: understanding the full gamut of alternative modernities in the making in different parts of the world. It locks us into an ethnocentric prison, condemned to project our own forms onto everyone else and blissfully unaware of what we are doing. (9)

For those unaware of his work, this is the basic thesis put forward in his magnum opus, Sources of the Self: our view of "the Good" integrally shapes our views. There he examines how people have viewed the self throughout history, tying it into their/our moral outlook. Most relevant to the above is his examination of the rise of modern individualism and the valuation of the 'common life,' finding its roots in Augustinian Christianity and the Reformation, respectively. Prior to Augustine's ruminations on the self, individualism was practically non-existent; one's tie to one's culture and traditions trumped any reflexivity. The reflexive approach itself was practically non-existent; what was important was one's tie to one's culture, one's traditions/history, one's family/clan. But with Augustine, and later in Descartes, the self was atomized and the detached observer became "the Good"; the self was no longer essentially tied to its history and culture, but only contingently so. Through the exercise of rationality one can transcend their particular context, finding universal truths that are divorced from such contingencies as history.

Subjectivity was strongly denounced and approaching the world as a valueless mass of objects in motion (the 'outer') to which the individual mind attributed meaning (the 'inner') was seen as valuable, as 'the Good' that one should strive to achieve. To put it in terms that us moderns can understand, taking a subjective approach to the world of objects is "intellectually dishonest," it "violates logic," applying what are obviously moral judgments to supposedly amoral/non-contextual reason. God himself, as Heidegger and I have both argued, is the great 'meaning giver' in a meaningless cosmos, the Being that is merely contingently attached to the world, the mind that is purely rational (recall how God alone could save Descartes from his doubt, could allow him to rationally affirm meaning). The affirmation of the common life allowed for the development of democracy, of the universal rites of all mankind, and of the overthrow of the 'upper class.' Unfortunately, this also (perhaps paradoxically) led to capitalism and the currently large (and growing) gap between socio-economic classes--the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer. These were the goods that partially inform modernity and, as such, many forms of modern Christianity are just as guilty of modernity as their atheist counterparts. In fact, it was the views of Christianity as it developed that set the stage for atheistic modernity, without which the latter probably would not have developed.

I think there is much merit in Taylor's conception of modernity. Here are some preliminary musings on the idea. If modernity is best understood through a cultural analysis, this should have important ramifications for how one views post-modernity. I need to be careful here as Taylor himself rejects postmodernity and attributes to it views that many do, relativism being the prime example. I should also say that I think the term itself is now meaningless and should just be rejected (but see how I continue to use it?). Either way, I would disagree with Taylor on his interpretations of some so-called postmoderns (such as Derrida), as do a number of his peers (Dreyfus being one that immediately comes to mind). What values, then, does postmodernism espouse? First, the self as culturally embedded and spatially/bodily concerned with its world; in other words, postmodernism values culture over reason, seeing in the former the grounds for the latter. The disengaged self of Augustinian/Cartesian thought with its inherent valuation of the disengaged perspective is not a good, but is in fact destructive on many levels (though not all; there is still something to say for it). Rather, the individual and their thinking are at least partially (but essentially) constituted by their historical, culture, spatial, embodied, and socio-economic situatedness and finitude. This is not the self that attributes meaning to a meaningless cosmos, but the one who grows up in a world of meaning and values of various kinds, that cannot help but find meaning in even the most trivial event. This "cannot help" is not meant in a negative way, but in terms of an excess--human beings, in their embeddedness with other humans and being/beings and their necessary concern for their being, are inherently meaningful and can no more 'attribute' meaning to a meaningless cosmos than it can be meaningless in the traditional sense. Perhaps we can say that human beings are meaning par excellence.

Second, but related to the above, postmoderns appreciate and attempt to understand the historically contingent nature of their culture, including that of modernity; one need not accept modernity's evaluative judgments nor must one "come to see" rationality as basic by affirming logic or technology. The world is driven by more than calculative reason, as seen in Taylor's cultural approach: our values precede and are instantiated in our practices and propositional affirmations. Heidegger would state this in terms of our attunement to beings--it precedes every rationality, every reason, every formality, and in fact makes them possible. Taylor himself does take a Heideggerian approach here, as elsewhere. Someday I will have to bring up Tim Ingold's criticism of something like the acultural approach to anthropology, as it is similarly instructive.

This second point naturally leads to an openness to other cultures, to other ways of valuing the world. This does not mean the uncritical acceptance of other cultures, cultural practices, or religious beliefs but it does mean that one should strive diligently to understand the Other and not simply reduce them to some version of our selves. This requires a principle of charity--that we be charitable in our conversations because it may be the case that we are simply not attuned to the Other's culture and, thus, may seriously misunderstand their practices (the Conquistadors in Mesoamerica come to mind). This principle of charity, of course, is part and parcel to hermeneutics--we assume that the other actually has something to say instead of assuming from the start that what they are saying is either meaningless or incomparable to what we already possess (much of modern Evangelical apologetics comes to mind).

Postmodernity is not a doctrine or dogma, but a culture, a stance on certain values. The usual squabbles over 'analytic' and 'continental' thought miss this point by focusing on the difficulty of prose, the affirmation of logic/reason, or the incompatibility of various claims. Even most proponents of continental thinkers miss this: they interpret postomdernity through an acultural lens and thus end up being little more than warmed-over modernists. Postmodernity cannot be defined (if it can at all) by referring to doctrines or beliefs, but by a more ambiguous attunement to the world. "Ambiguous" not only because it is hard to pin down, but also because it is what allows any 'pinning' to begin with and thus escapes that which it makes possible.

New Philosopher's Carnival

2006-06-13T11:39:00.000-05:00

My post, The Way of Phenomenology, got accepted to the latest Philosophers' Carnival, hosted by Kenny Pearce. In his introduction to my piece, Kenny says:

While I am generally sympathetic to the idea of arguing first and foremost from phenomena/experience (see my own contribution below), I must say that I can't see how Kevin can claim that "logic is not ontologically fundamental" and then talk about "presenting a coherent case." I would like to hear why he wants to, and how he can, present a coherent case (by which I assume he means a logical argument) if experience is more fundamental than logic. Of course, such is the nature of continental philosophy, and those of us more in the analytic tradition have always had difficulty comprehending it (when we have bothered to take the effort, which hasn't been often enough).

I'm currently working through this and will post on it in the not too distant future. The basic point, though, is that a phenomenological explication is different than a logical explication--the latter seeks to order that which has already appeared while the former is concerned with the appearing itself. Someone might think that this is a distinction without a difference--if there is an appearing it will, of necessity, follow a logical form. This, however, is what Heidegger is arguing against (well, one of the things he is arguing against). More on this later. Till then, enjoy the other posts that got accepted to the Carnival.

The Way of Phenomenology

2006-06-09T14:20:00.000-05:00

Over at Douglas Groothuis' blog, Culture Watch: Thoughts of a Constructive Curmudgeon, I got into the usual discussion about the supposed faults of postmodern/continental thought from hardcore analytic philosophers. There I promised one of the posters that I would discuss my claim that logic is not ontologically fundamental. I do not think that I can address this directly, as a few waypoints need to be discussed before I can present a coherent case. As such, I'm starting with a brief look at the "way of phenomenology"--what it is, how it is done, and what we can expect from it. Naturally, this isn't meant to be a description of all phenomenological schools of thought, but a short meditation on how I have come to understand phenomenology through my own reading of Heideggerian thought.

What is Phenomenology?
Phenomenology, simply put, is the examination of phenomena--the cultural and the historical, the scientific and the literary, the spectacular and the everyday. It follows the dictate of Husserl's famous phrase--"to the things themselves." What does this dictate demand of us and what does it say about "things"? Phenomenology demands that we closely examine how beings appear--as meaningful, edible, facile, silly, demeaning, commendable, mundane, or extraordinary. When a being appears we are to describe it in its appearing, examine its structure, and see how it appears and as what. By doing so we let the phenomena guide our thinking, we attempt to surrender our preconceptions and expectations to that which the phenomena presents to us. Naturally, we cannot surrender all of our preconceptions and expectations--questioning itself would be impossible without them--but we must be willing to put those preconceptions and expectations to the question, to let them also be molded, changed, or abandoned in light of the phenomena. To many this will look like classical skepticism and phenomenology runs the risk of not being able to say anything at all, as everything we can say can then be questioned. This is a real danger, but it does have a safeguard in the phenomena itself.

In saying "to the things themselves" we put our faith in the phenomena, in that which appears. To quote Merleau-Ponty, "If the philosopher questions, and hence feigns ignorance of the world and of the vision of the world which are operative and take form continually within him, he does so precisely in order to make them speak, because he believes in them and expects from them all his future science" (The Visible and the Invisible, 4). But to say that we "believe" in the world/beings is too weak, as we realize that our ability to think and speak requires this discourse between man and phenomena, between man and being. Thus, it is not that we merely believe (or 'assume') that the phenomena can speak back to us, but that we are 'always already' in this discourse, which discourse makes questioning possible.

One question that may come to mind is, "But aren't you assuming something about things in the dictate, 'to the things themselves,' such as that they exist or that we have access to them?" The best response would be to refer to the hermeneutic circle: examine your experience of beings and see where the phenomena lead you. You will already have some understanding of the being, some of which may be true, but by moving from that obscure understanding to the phenomena itself you can improve that understanding, only to again spring back to the phenomena to see what else it can say. This is not circular reasoning whereby we simply prove what we originally thought, but rather the dialectical movement between our understanding and beings. One thing that is learned early on (as stated above) is that we do not 'assume' the existence of phenomena and the world, but they are a necessary aspect of our questioning, that without which questioning would be impossible. The question of 'demonstrating' that the world exists, then, is a foregone question, one that is essentially answered in the questioning itself. A famous quote by Heidegger:

The 'scandal of philosophy' is not that [a proof for the existence of the external world] has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. Such expectations, aims, and demands arise from an ontologically inadequate way of starting with something of such a character that independently of it and 'outside' of it a 'world' is to be proved as present-at-hand [merely spatially present]. It is not that the proofs are inadequate, but that the kind of Being of the entity which does the proving and makes requests for proofs [i.e. man] has not been made definite enough.
Being and Time, 249/H205.

It is because we have not properly attended to the phenomena of human existence and the 'being of beings' that we are not properly grounded ontologically to answer the question (or see its ungrounded basis). To put it in other terms, we have not adequately brought the phenomena of 'human being,' 'world,' and 'beings' to light so we are left with explaining something that we have not adequately disclosed. Heidegger believes that much of the Western tradition has done this: they have merely assumed a general theory about being human based on limited phenomena without adequately examining the phenomena itself, without letting that phenomena guide their theorizing. Thus mankind is thought to be a rational animal, a mere collection of biological processes, a socially constructed/determined entity, etc. and conclusions are made from this theoretical basis. Also of significance is the fact that mankind often understands itself in terms of its current technology--in terms of gears/levers, phone lines, and, modernly, computers. This brings to light the ontological connection made by many between technology and ontology--that we tend to understand the latter in terms of the former. As with the scientific process, these theorists attempt to find data to 'validate' these metaphors, letting the theory guide their research. The precarious nature of this endeavor (despite its being commonplace in modern research) should be obvious, like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, disregarding all non-square phenomena as mere 'aberrations,' 'irregularities,' or 'discontinuities' that eventually (just around the corner, in just a few years) will be seen as manifestations of the grounding theory. Which brings us to the question of how one does phenomenology.

How Does One Do Phenomenology?
There is no single way or 'methodology' for doing phenomenology since doing so by its very nature attempts to force phenomena into a predisposed theory, which has the real danger of not letting the phenomena appear as it is. Because of this, phenomenology is not a science; it does not follow anything like a 'scientific method' nor can one be taught to do phenomenology through established criterion. Even in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, where Heidegger saw phenomenology as "the method of scientific philosophy in general" (3) and speaks negatively of those philosophies that "not only imperil but even negate its character as science pure and simple" (4), he says that "ontology has nothing in common with any method of any of the other sciences" (19). A few years later, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he disavows the connection between philosophy/phenomenology and science, referring instead to phenomenology as an "attunement," as a state of openness determined by "homesickness"--a desire to be "at home everywhere" when, instead, we find "restlessness" (4). Within this homesickness beings are enigmatic: "At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny" ("The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 53). It is because of the enigmatic nature of every being that philosophy's task is to make things difficult--as the open attunement to beings, philosophy tries to bring the hidden in every positive disclosure of beings to light, thereby making things difficult for any established theory (which is also one possible way of understanding deconstruction).

So how does one do phenomenology? By continuously interrogating and being open to beings. By not being content with any given success in explicating how a being comes to light or with one particular way of bringing them to light. This cannot be thematized--first, sit back, close your eyes, and try to clear your mind; second, open your eyes and examine the phenomena; third, describe what you see. Even if the above were an adequate beginning (the first might be guilty of a theoretical detachment that is inimical for phenomenology, the second may not adequately question the nature of seeing itself and, thus, might assume a theory of vision, and the last could be done in so many different ways as to be useless as a method), it really tells you little: what do you look for? How do you know it when you see it? The best answer, for all its lack of clarity, is, "to the things themselves." For Heidegger this means addressing ordinary objects, those things that we do not give any particular significance, as they occur in ordinary situations. We must address not only how beings appear in extraordinary situations such as in the laboratory, but also in art, literature, moods, or drinking from a mug; nothing must escape our examination nor does any particular activity or being have prominence as beings appear in every situation. If the same structures--be they apriori unities of apperception or some biological decoding of neurochemical signals--constitute how beings of every kind come to light, then no particular being nor any particular way of approaching beings should or can have priority.¹ It is not only in the laboratory or in the systematic categorization of species or arguments that we find truth, but even in such simple activities as getting out of bed, opening the door, and walking somewhere.

The question of how to do phenomenology, of how to become attuned to beings, must be left open. On the one hand, we are already attuned to beings in some way; on the other, this attunement may be ambiguous and, thus, stands in need of further clarification. To assume a methodology is also to assume something about beings, to jeopardize how they can appear by forcing them into a theoretical construct. I may, however, suggest three particular ways that may help in developing this sensitivity--first, read the works of the good phenomenologists. Become familiar with Heidegger, Levinas, Gadamer, or Ricoeur, including their commentators, Dreyfus, Kelly, and Taylor. No one familiar with Heidegger's work will say that it is easy, but the thinking of those who came after Heidegger's revolution might (and often do) have clearer ways of speaking about his work than Heidegger himself.

Second, go and do thou likewise. As you struggle with understanding these difficult thinkers you will start to get a feel for how they approach beings, how they interrogate them and let them speak. Start doing the same thing, whether it is a phenomenon that they didn't examine or perhaps in an attempt to gain a better grasp of a phenomenon that they did examine. Do not assume that the phenomenon of boredom has been exhausted just because Heidegger spent more than 100 pages interrogating it (and reading those pages might give you the opportunity to examine boredom itself); examine the phenomenon and see if it appears as Heidegger says it does.

Third, try to find those whom you can discuss these things with, preferably someone who is familiar with phenomenology. For those of us who have blogs, I think I can safely say that we do not mind queries from our readers, if only for the reassurance that people actually read what we write. I've consistently found that discussion helps just as much, if not more, with comprehension than sustained reading. Given the nature of phenomenology, this shouldn't be surprising--not only must we be open to what beings may have to say, but also to what others may see that we currently do not.

What Can We Expect from Phenomenology?
From the above it is quite tempting to answer this question with, "Not much." After all, what can you do with a philosophy that doesn't attempt to create all-encompassing worldviews/theories that can be clearly described and logically argued? Also, as a non-science, phenomenology gives us nothing with which we can do something; it is impractical. Heidegger himself said of phenomenology,

It is of the essence of phenomenological investigations that they cannot be reviewed summarily but must in each case be rehearsed and repeated anew. Any further synopsis which merely summarizes the contents of this work would thus be, phenomenologically speaking, a misunderstanding.
History of the Concept of Time, Theodore Kisiel, trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 26.

Other than what I have already said on this topic, I would add that phenomenology helps us get a better grasp of what it is our theories are trying to describe. Phenomenology does not present itself as an all-encompassing worldview, or the "only game in town" for understand beings. What it attempts to do is ground phenomena, to see the limits of what we can and cannot say, and even to understanding saying itself (an important question that is addressed by every Heideggerian phenomenologist in relation to different fields--ethics, hermeneutics, psychology, etc.). Only from such a proper understanding can our theories have real force, for fear of positing things that cannot be grounded in how beings appear.

The call of phenomenology might be summed up in such catchphrases as, "See things more clearly," "To the things themselves," or perhaps even, "Disclosing the Other." But, as with every slogan, these statements themselves are meaningless when divorced from the thing that they are describing; as summaries of phenomenology, they are inherently inadequate. So what is phenomenology? It is an attunement to beings, a way (not a map or destination), or an attitude (not a theory or dogma).

Notes:

Here I am speaking about beings other than man (Dasein). As the being that asks the question, that has access to beings, and that speaks of being/beings, Dasein does have a priority in that if we misunderstand his access to beings then we will likewise misunderstand how beings come to light. This claim, then, applies only to non-Dasein beings.

File Sharing Sites?

2006-06-09T13:00:00.000-05:00

I'm currently trying to find a file sharing site where I can put some of my papers and pictures that I want to link up here at Blogger. Currently I'm going through Angelfire.com, where I have my old blog and website, but they do not allow me to directly link to papers or pictures. At the moment, given the changes in location and beginning graduate school in August, I cannot afford a payed service. Does anyone know of any free file sharing sites that I can look into?

Being and Time Reading Blog Started

2006-06-09T12:12:00.000-05:00

Just thought I'd drop a note and say that the Being and Time reading blog was begun with a summary of ¶1 by me. As I want to increase reading for that blog, I won't post them here, though I am keeping each summary and might post them here at a later date. So come on over and comment!

The Emerging Mind

2006-06-09T11:12:00.000-05:00

The British Broadcasting Corporation has made the 2003 Reith Lectures available. This series, under the title The Emerging Mind, was given by the world-renowned neuropsychologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. You can also find a number of his publications on his website (here). Be sure to check out the other Reith Lectures, including Bertrand Russell's 1948 Lecture, "Authority And The Individual," and Sir Bernard Lovell's 1958 Lecture, "The Individual and The Universe."

Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom

2006-06-08T17:25:00.000-05:00

In 2004, Juan Galis-Menendez of Critical Vision published a book titled Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom. Though it is currently sold at Amazon.com for $7.90, you can get it for free from Lulu. From what I've read it is a very interesting piece and should start up some discussion.

NYU Tribute to Jacques Derrida

2006-06-08T15:25:00.000-05:00

As I was searching for those rare videos on philosophical topics, I discovered this tribute given in honor of Jacques Derrida by various faculty members from NYU and a few other universities. Here is the blurb put on Google Video:

A tribute to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) hosted by NYU's Center for French Civilization and Culture, the Department of German, and the faculty of Arts and Sciences. Video includes segments of tributes given by scholars including Richard Foley, Tom Bishop, Peter Goodrich, Shireen Patell, Anselm Haverkamp, Ulrich Baer, Mary-Ann Caws, Michel Beaujour, Emiply Apter, Gil Anidjar, Drucilla Cornell, Judith Friedlander, Béatrice Longuenesse, Gayatri Spivak, and Avital Ronell.

Also of interest is the University of California--Irvine's Remembering Jacques Derrida, which includes rebuttals to the New York Times' unflattering obituary for Derrida.

I will admit to general ignorance of Derrida's work, but from all the tributes and stories about his life that I have heard/read from those who knew him and understanding his work through Heidegger's later philosophy, he was a caring man with genuine concern for the Other, hardly the nihilist/relativist that his often rabid opponents characterize him as. So, with that, enjoy this tribute:

Outline for "Origin of the Work of Art"

2006-06-08T14:53:00.000-05:00

Timothy Quigley, Associate Director of the General Studies Bachelor's Program at New York's The New School, provides a good outline of Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art." You might also want to check out his blog, Asymptote, that deals mostly with art/aesthetics; quite interesting.

Levinas, Phenomenology, and Ethics

2006-06-07T11:42:00.000-05:00

Gary Sauer-Thompson, over at Philosophical Conversations, has written up a series of posts on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas is an important figure in Heideggerian phenomenology particularly because of his phenomenology of ethics, a topic that Heidegger consciously never addressed. By examining our encounter with the Other and their particular mode of appearing, Levinas proposed an 'ethics as first philosophy,' eschewing the Cartesian emphasis on epistemology and the (early) Heideggerian emphasis on ontology. It is a fascinating view that deserves examination. Take a look.

On the Essence of Truth--The Essence of Truth

2006-06-06T12:38:00.000-05:00

5. The Essence of Truth
“The essence of truth reveals itself as freedom.” Freedom, we may recall, has an ek-sistent character--it stands outside itself by disclosing beings. Every comportment “flourishes in letting beings be” and is always going to be concerned in any particular instance with some particular being. But comportment itself goes beyond any particular being; it is “attuned” (Stimmung) to “beings as a whole.” It is from this more basic (or, for Heidegger, the most basic) attunement that any given disclosure of a being as a being occurs. As such, attunement can never be reduced to some “experience” or “feeling” as such particular (ontic) designations cover over attunement’s (ontological) essence. By reducing attunement to such things [129] attunement is understood in terms of something other than itself, which understanding can prevail only by sustaining this distorted understanding of attunement. This can easily be seen when we understand that any particular “experience” or “feeling” is possible only because man is essentially attuned to beings as a whole. What has been lost (or “forgotten,” as Heidegger will later put it) is our understanding of this attunement. This is because “[t]he openedness of being as a whole does not coincide with the sum of all immediately familiar beings.” In fact, it is often where beings are not familiar that our essential openness to beings as a whole “can prevail more essentially.” When we are dealing with everyday objects we do not question their being; their use is obvious and we see no reason to question or see the openness in which they appear as common objects (compare 116).

Precisely in the leveling and planning of this omniscience, this mere knowing, the openedness of beings gets flattened out into the apparent nothingness of what is no longer even a matter of indifference, but rather is simply forgotten.

Freedom, as an attunement to beings as a whole that lets beings be what they are, “prevails throughout and anticipates all the open comportment that flourishes in it.” As the ontological/existential essence of the appearing of any particular being, freedom as openness enables the appearing of beings and continually sustains each appearing, thereby making correctness/accordance possible. The “as a whole,” as it is understood here, will seem to be “incalculable and incomprehensible” to our modern conceptions; we cannot understand it in terms of how beings are revealed today, for “[a]lthough [comportment] ceaselessly brings everything into definite accord, still it remains indefinite, indeterminable; it then coincides for the most part with what is most fleeting and most unconsidered.” While this is true, the indeterminable aspect of comportment as openness to beings as a whole cannot be reduced to “nothing” or some empty formality (as in a transcendental unity of apperception), but must be given a positive meaning (as with “letting be”): every comportment of a being is also “a concealing of beings as a whole.”

Precisely because letting be always lets beings be in a particular comportment [130] that relates to them and thus discloses them, it conceals beings as a whole. Letting-be is intrinsically at the same time a concealing.

Every unconcealing of a being as something in particular conceals other ways that that being can be unconcealed. By doing so it conceals “beings as a whole,” or the open comportment that lets beings appear (see 127), forgetting the manner of its showing as presencing through unconcealment in preference to what is shown. By doing so man forgets the basis of every appearing and takes as self-evident a given mode of comportment and a particular way of appearing (see 115-116). As every unconcealing is a concealing, every aletheia is a lethe, untruth must be part of our analysis and cannot simply be ignored (see 119). We must, then, understand untruth positively as concealment/concealing.

Heidegger's Terminology and the Everyday

2006-06-02T13:53:00.000-05:00

One of the primary difficulties with coming to understand Heidegger's thought is his terminology. Here's an instructive excerpt by Dorothea Frede concerning the methodological reason behind his unorthodox prose:

Since Heidegger disagreed with Husserl's assumption that there is an impersonal ego providing us with incontestable truths, he had to work out who that entity really is that in its very nature has a concern with the question of being [i.e. man]. Because he did not want to foist yet another artificial construction on this entity in his own interpretation, Heidegger started his phenomenological investigation by capturing the phenomenon that all philosophers before him had "passed over" as trivial and not worth the theorist's attention, namely, everyday existence. The vocabulary he introduced to characterize the various features of everyday existence and its structure was designed to avoid all associations with common philosophical terminology; it was not designed to turn it into a secret doctrine only open to the initiate. His terminology, though often unusual in German, is much easier to understand than its English counterpart, because Heidegger plays with easily comprehensible etymological family relationships that often do not exist in English.
"The Question of Being," in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles Guignon, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 54.

Heidegger's concern with the "everyday" is quite transparent in his work: instead of examining scientific taxonomy or worldview construction, he examined such everyday occurrences as opening doors, using hammers, boredom, and jugs/bridges. Rather than turning to the Platonic ideal of abstract thinking that had been recently reemphasized by Descartes' detached self, Heidegger got into the dirt and grime of common activities. And why shouldn't he? We speak of and understand being just as much in eating food or being in our 'own little world' as we do in doing science. This is aptly seen in a story by Aristotle that Heidegger discusses in his "Letter on Humanism" (Miles Groth trans.). Men come to see Heraclitus and are surprised to see him warming himself by his stove. Heidegger comments:

Instead of [finding some spectacular or interesting thing] the sightseers find Heraclitus by a stove. That is surely a common and insignificant place... In this altogether everyday place he betrays the whole poverty of his life. The vision of a shivering thinker offers little of interest. At this disappointing spectacle even the curious lose their desire to come any closer. What are they supposed to do here? Such an everyday and unexciting occurrence--somebody who is chilled warming himself at a stove--anyone can find any time at home. So why look up a thinker? The visitors are on the verge of going away again. Heraclitus reads the frustrated curiosity in their faces. He knows that for the crowd the failure of an expected sensation to materialize is enough to make those who have just arrived leave. He therefore encourages them. He invites them explicitly to come in with the words, Einai gar kei entautha theous, "Here too the gods come to presence."
"Letter on Humanism," Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, trans., Basic Writings, 257.

It is, in fact, the fixation on the 'higher' world of the sciences and abstract reasoning as the basis for metaphysics that has caused the Western tradition to go astray. By returning to the everyday, to that which is most near to us and is most likely to be passed over (it is so...common), Heidegger allows beings to speak to us as they always already do, not as our ideological desires for scientific or mathematical precision would have them appear. "We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already" ("Language," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 188). If this requires a new terminology so this new appearing of beings is not immediately pigeonholed into an already-existing philosophy before we allow them to speak, so be it. Such is the danger of letting beings lead our thinking--they just might appear in ways that are not allowed by our preconceptions.

Being and Time Reading Blog

2006-06-02T13:36:00.000-05:00

Jon Thysell and Rufus just started a Being and Time reading blog for the summer. Anyone interested in joining should! I'll be there.

My New Philosophy

2006-05-31T16:36:00.000-05:00

Ever since I heard the soundtrack to You're a Good Man Charlie Brown I was hooked. It catches so many aspects of Charles Schulz's comic in music that, for someone who loves musicals and Peanuts, it is a good piece of work. This clip of "My New Philosophy" is from the Tony Awards and includes part of "Happiness" and Kristin Chenoweth's acceptance of the 1999 Tony Award for the Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Enjoy and remember...clearly, some philosophies aren't for all people. (NOTE: it gets a little out of sync, so ignore that.)

Resonance and Rice

2006-05-31T14:33:00.000-05:00

What kind of patterns would emerge if you placed rice on a metal sheet that was vibrating because of progressively higher sound waves? If you've ever asked yourself this question check out this video:

CRVP Books Online

2006-05-31T02:17:00.000-05:00

I once stumbled on this site, promptly forgot it existed, and now stumbled on it again. So, instead of inevitably forgetting it until the next time I happen to stumble on it, I'll post it here for future reference/use. The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy has a book series titled Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change that is available online. The site describes the aim of this series as follows:

Today there is urgent need to search out human wisdom regarding the nature and dignity of the person, the goal of the transformation of our environment, and the relation of both to the quality of personal and social life.
Such studies must draw deeply upon the cultural and religious heritages of all peoples and develop new and creative modes of cooperation, marked by trust and justice, honest dedication and mutual concern.

The series is composed of 7 sections: Culture and Values, Africa and Islam, Asia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and North America, Latin America, Foundations of Moral Education, and International Society for Metaphysics. I don't know the quality of any of the works on this site, but here are a few that caught my eye:

So, enjoy and feel free to report back if you've found something interesting and worthwhile.

On the Essence of Truth--The Essence of Freedom

2006-05-30T16:49:00.000-05:00

4. The Essence of Freedom
From the analysis already given we have little reason to give much credence to these criticisms, though we must be prepared for “a transformation of thinking” as we address what is lacking. Addressing the essence of freedom demands that we now examine “the essence of man in a regard that assures us an experience of a concealed essential ground of man (of Dasein) [this “ground” being freedom], and in such a manner that the experience transposes us in advance into the originally essential domain of truth.” One of the surprising claims Heidegger will make is that, if anything, freedom possess man, not the other way around: freedom is the ground upon which man must stand or, better put, man is freedom (later, Ereignis). Freedom allows for “the [125] inner possibility of correctness” because its own essence is found in “the more original essence of uniquely essential truth” which is open comportment that presences beings (see 122).

Recall that freedom was first spoken of as “freedom for what is opened up in an open region.” That which is “opened up” are beings (see 121-122) and these beings appear only within an open comportment that ‘creates a space’ wherein beings can appear.³ As the ground of this opening, the essence of freedom consists in “letting beings be” as they are. We usually speak of “letting be” in a negative sense in terms of relinquishing action; we do not ‘deal’ with something, but simply ‘let it be.’ But the notion of freedom we’ve given here, in terms of presencing beings (i.e. making beings present in an opening), does not allow for this negative definition: “To let be is to engage oneself with beings.” By letting beings be, we are open to beings in such a way that the beings can appear as they are. In other words, freedom is the capacity to allow beings to appear as they are, not as we would want them to be or as some preconceived theory demands. No other ground would allow us to make beings “the standard for the presentative correspondence” (122) as any predetermination on how beings can appear would, by definition, not let them appear as they are. The necessity of this should be apparent.

In the beginning of philosophy, the term used for the “open region” was ta alethea, or (literally translated) the unconcealed (a-lethea). Our use of a literal translation is not capricious; rather the literal translation “contains the directive⁴ to rethink the ordinary concept of truth in the sense of the correctness of statements and to think it back to that still uncomprehended disclosedness and disclosure of beings.” Disclosing beings through open comportment is to engage with beings in such a way that one’s preconceptions (see 118-119) withdraw so that beings can “reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are, and in order that representative correspondence might take its standard from them.” If it were the case that beings could only appear as they are constrained by our preconceptions (perhaps in a Kantian sense), then we would be incapable of letting beings be and we could not allow beings the privilege of being the “standard” for propositions. This “letting-be,” then, is [126] “intrinsically exposing, ek-sistent,” it is essentially tied to that which is transcendent from itself--being/beings.

With this understanding, freedom is not mere capriciousness or the absence of constraint (negative freedom); “[p]rior to all this...freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such.” The disclosing itself, in its ek-static character, is preserved in comportment and even defines what it is, as “the ‘there’ [‘Da’].” By being Da-sein (literally, there-being, or being-there), by being and establishing a “there” (a context), man is able to exist, not in the sense of simply being present at a spatiotemporal coordinate nor as “man’s moral endeavor on behalf of his ‘self,’ based on his psychophysical constitution” (possibly alluding to Sartre’s appropriation [or mis-appropriation] of Heidegger’s thought), but being “rooted in truth as freedom” through openness to the disclosure of “beings as such.” On this primordial ground, “the ek-sistence of historical man begins at the moment when the first thinker takes a questioning [i.e. open] stand with regard to the unconcealment of beings by asking: what are beings?” By thus opening himself up to beings and by directing himself to the world around him, “unconcealment is experienced for the first time.” Within this openness, “Being as a whole” is seen in terms of physis, but not yet understood in the sense of a “particular sphere of beings” through mathematics/science, but beings in their “upsurgent presence.” The openness that man is can only be efficacious if there is something that enters into that opening; being/physis, then, is that which exudes, that upsurges, that flows into the opening.[127]

If “ek-sistent Da-sein” is grounded in freedom as the essence of truth and letting beings be, then caprice has no place in freedom. Freedom is constrained by beings, by our ability to disclose beings as they are. Similarly, we cannot say that man “possess” freedom as the opposite is the case: as the “there” (Da) of its being (Sein), openness “possess man” as it “secures for humanity that distinctive relatedness to being as a whole as such” which makes man what he is. Freedom, as disclosure (as Heidegger will later put it, as appropriation [Ereignis]) of beings, makes man what he is; he is understood in terms of his comportment with beings--as a teacher among students, blackboards, lessons, assignments, etc.; as a construction worker among buildings, power tools, foremen, engineering, etc.; as a Christian among rites, scriptures, beliefs, etc.--and cannot ‘be’ anything apart from this comportment, apart from some context (Da). This contextuality is what binds together everything we’ve already discussed:

Freedom, understood as letting beings be, is the fulfillment and consummation of the essence of truth in the sense of the disclosure of beings. “Truth” is not a feature of correct propositions which are asserted of an “object” by a human “subject” and then “are valid” somewhere, in what sphere we know not. Rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds [west]. All human comportment and bearing are exposed in its open region. Therefore man is in the manner of ek-sistence.

Every comportment of man has this openness and directedness toward beings, which thing is possible only through “the restraint of letting-be”--freedom. Similarly, it is only on this ground that correspondence is possible: only if we can let beings appears as they are can we give them the priority needed in correspondence. If man is currently ek-sistent (and he cannot be any other way), then he now possesses man’s “essential possibilities” through “the disclosure of beings as a whole”; the basic openness to beings, found in comportment through freedom, is available to all and is even the ground of history itself. It is the manner in which truth is unfolded through comportment at various points in history that creates an epoch, but the essence of comportment remains the same (which has been forgotten in technology). It is because things have been unconcealed as ‘resources’ that the ‘atomic age’ came about through such things as the Industrial Revolution (though, as we have seen, this manner of unconcealing began at least in the theism of the Middle Ages [see 118-119]).

If we understand truth’s essence as freedom, we must also admit to the possibility that “man can, in letting beings be, also not let beings be the beings which they are and as they are.” In this case, beings are covered (lethe) and mere “semblance” is made possible--a being can appear like something else in its appearing. “In [freedom] the nonessence of truth comes to the fore.” Since “ek-sistent freedom” is not [128] a property of man (see 127), as this ecstatic (etymologically--being outside oneself; ek--out--and stasis--place) freedom is itself what facilitates his historical mode of being, truth’s “nonessence” does not first appear because of man’s “incapacity and negligence” but derives its very essence from truth itself. In fact, it is because truth and untruth “belong together”⁵ that we can compare a true proposition with a false proposition. We now begin to see truth in a more essential way by including untruth in its essence; untruth does not fulfill this essential role by filling in gaps, but it plays an important role in “an adequate posing of the question concerning the essence of truth.” We have moved in our discussion from correctness (as the “usual concept of truth”) to the need of ecstatic (ek-sistent) comportment (which essentially includes man and being) to the place of freedom (which allows beings to appear as they are) and now we need to examine how untruth belongs to truth and freedom. Heidegger gives us a hint: “If the essence of truth is not exhausted by the correctness of the statement [requiring, as we have seen, presencing by open comportment which is made possible by freedom], then neither can untruth be equated with the incorrectness of judgments.”

Notes:

A comment from “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” might help us understand Heidegger’s point:
We call this openness that grants a possible letting-appear and show “opening.” In the history of language the German word Lichtung is a translation derived from the French clairiere. It is formed in accordance with the older words Waldung (foresting) and Feldung> (fielding).
The forest clearing (or opening) is experienced in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung in our older language. The substantive “opening” [Lichtung] goes back to the verb “open” [lichten]. The adjective licht “open” is the same word as “light.” To open something means: To make something light, free and open, e.g., to make the forest free of trees at one place. The openness thus originating is the clearing. What is light in the sense of being free and open has nothing in common with the adjective “light,” meaning “bright”--neither linguistically nor factually. This is to be observed for the difference between openness and light. Still, it is possible that a factual relation between the two exists. Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness. However, the clearing, the opening, is not only free for brightness and darkness, but also for resonance and echo, for sounding and the diminishing of sound. The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent.
Joan Stambaugh, trans., in On Time and Being (New York: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 65.
Light cannot penetrate a dense forest; a clearing, or opening, is needed for the light to appear. As such, man is the opening in which beings appear, the clearing that being can enter.
Heidegger is not dabbling in ‘word mysticism,’ but is being consistent with his own philosophy: he is letting language direct him towards being. Aletheia is one term that the ancients used to discuss truth (or, as the later Heidegger viewed it, the essence of truth [i.e. open comportment]) and perhaps, as is the nature of language, it is directing us towards being in a certain way, allowing us to see being more primordially. A critic, then, must not focus on Heidegger’s drawing upon ancient Greek itself and his (often) poor etymology, but either on Heidegger’s understanding of language or what the Greek shows (i.e. makes present) in relation to beings and truth.
In “The Principle of Identity,” Heidegger differentiates between “belonging together” (Zusammengehören) and “belonging together” (Zusammengehören). In the former we understand the “belonging” in terms of the “together,” as in just about anything can be placed in the vicinity of each other and hence can be “together.” On the other hand, when we understand the “together” in terms of the “belonging,” we see a tighter essential connection between the two, that they “belong” in their togetherness, or perhaps that they are ‘at home’ with one another (Identity and Difference, Joan Stambaugh, trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 29-30). It is the second essential belonging together that Heidegger means here--truth and untruth essentially belong together.

On the Essence of Truth--The Ground of the Possibility of Correctness

2006-05-23T11:05:00.000-05:00

3. The Ground of the Possibility of Correctness
Heidegger next asks the question: “How can something like the accomplishment of a pregiven directedness [i.e. comportment] occur?” The answer lies in freedom: “To free oneself for a binding directedness is possible only by being free for what is opened up in an open region... The essence of truth is freedom.” This is a notion of freedom that has thus far been “uncomprehended” in the history of philosophy; most discussion of freedom is spoken of in terms of ‘freedom from’ (or ‘negative freedom’), leaving us with the question of what is freedom for (‘positive freedom’)? For Heidegger, this means that existential freedom is an ubiquitous but ‘unthought’ ontological assumption within philosophy. As an existential ground for truth, freedom in this sense must be present in every truthful utterance or proposition. But Heidegger is not claiming that freedom is “an unconstrained act” of giving or receiving a proposition, as if freedom were restricted to such actions. Rather, “freedom is the essence of truth”; just as comportment grounds the possibility of accordance, freedom is the ground for the possibility of comportment. Hence, “essence” means “the ground of the inner possibility of what is initially and generally admitted as known [i.e. correctness].”

Does Heidegger mean that truth is merely a subjective whim based on “human caprice”? [124] It appears as if truth has been “driven back to the subjectivity of the human subject,” losing its connection with the world. This possibility is strengthened when we readily admit that all sorts of falsehood--“deceit and dissimulation, lies and deception, illusion and semblance”--are attributable to humans. Previously, though, we defined truth in relation to accordance, so referencing the human basis of error seems irrelevant: “This human origin of untruth indeed only serves to confirm by contrast the essence of truth ‘in itself’ as holding sway ‘beyond’ man,” perhaps in some “imperishable and eternal” world. Truth seems to exist in some extra-human world, perhaps in the intellectus divinus or, as more recent theorists propose, in independently existing propositions/universals. But this resistance to freedom as the essence of truth “is based on preconceptions, the most obstinate of which is that freedom is a property of man.” Since “[e]veryone knows what man is,” any further questioning seems unnecessary. Here we see the same roadblocks that we had in relation to truth: stubborn “common sense” and an indifference to the question.

A Plethora of Online Books

2006-05-22T16:46:00.000-05:00

My wife, wonderful woman that she is, found this site: The Online Books Page, sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Library. The topics range from Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion to the Social Sciences to Education to Language and Literature to Science. You can find works by Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Mill, Confucius, Bergson, and on and on and on. You can find books on logic, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, the Bible, Buddhism, physics, and on and on and on. This could be a useful resource.

I'm in the Philosopher's Carnival

2006-05-22T13:57:00.000-05:00

The Philosopher's Carnival "aims to showcase the best philosophical posts from a wide range of weblogs." My post, What Good is Philosophy?, got accepted into Carnival #30, hosted by anniemiz. Check it out!

Merleau-Ponty Resources

2006-05-22T12:20:00.000-05:00

Given my interests in psychology, philosophy of mind, and embodiment, I have found Merleau-Ponty's thought to be incredibly thought provoking and useful. However, it can sometimes be hard to find good Merleau-Ponty sources. I attribute this to at least two reasons, the second stemming from the first: people tend to 1) emphasize his Husserlian roots and 2) forget his Heideggerian roots. I will admit that my own acceptance of these reasons stem from a claim given by one of my old professors, Mark Wrathall, who's class introduced me to Merleau-Ponty. Wrathall thinks that Merleau-Ponty's attribution of primacy to Husserl in his Introduction to Phenomenology of Perception is more of a political move than not, showing his distaste for Heidegger's Soviet Socialist affiliations. My own reading (siding with Mark Wrathall, Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Kelly, etc.) seems to validate this belief: Merleau-Ponty is thoroughly Heideggerian, and secondarily Husserlian. This is a point of contention in some circles of Merleau-Pontian scholarship, so I will leave it at this and let the reader decide for herself/himself.

Here are a number of links and online papers that I've personally found useful in understanding and applying Merleau-Ponty's thought in my own studies:

Bernard Flynn, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)¹
Jack Reynolds, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) (The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Brent Dean Robbins, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Mythos and Logos)
Charles Taylor, Merleau-Ponty
Hubert Dreyfus, Intelligence Without Representation (Cognitive Sciences Initiative)
Hubert Dreyfus, The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment (The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996))
Hubert Dreyfus, Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise (APA Pacific Division Presidential Address 2005)
Hubert Dreyfus, A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition as the basis for a Merleau-Pontian Non-Representationalist Cognitive Science
Sean Kelly, Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty (appearing in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty)
Sean Kelly, Merleau-Ponty on the Body: The Logic of Motor Intentional Activity (in Ratio (new series), vol. XV, no. 4 (Dec. 2002), pp. 376-391)
Sean Kelly, Grasping at Straws: Motor Intentionality and the Cognitive Science of Skillful Action (in Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 161-178)
Sean Kelly, What Do We See (When We Do)? (in Philosophical Topics 27/2, 107-128)
Taylor Carman, Sensation, Judgment, and the Phenomenal Field (appearing in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty)
Taylor Carman, The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (in Philosophical Topics 27/2, 205-226)
Mark Wrathall, Motives, Reasons, Causes (appearing in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty)
Mark Wrathall and Sean Kelly, Existential Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996))
Shaun Gallagher, Phenomenology and Neurophenomenology: An Interview (in Aluze: Revue pro literaturu, filozofii a jiné (Czech Republic) 2: 92-102)
Shaun Gallagher, Phenomenological and Experimental Research on Embodied Experience (a presentation at Atelier phenomenologie et cognition, Phénoménologie et Cognition Research Group, CREA. Paris (December 2000))
Shaun Gallagher and Andrew Meltzoff, The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies (in Philosophical Psychology 9, 213-236)

In addition to the above, I believe that Alva Noë's work on embodied cognition is quite close to what Merleau-Ponty is trying to say. I would also suggest Samuel Todes' Body and World as a good advancement on certain aspects of Merleau-Ponty's thought.

NOTES

Flynn appears to accept Merleau-Ponty's acceptance of Husserl over Heidegger. This is a particularly telling statement that simultaneously diminishes Heidegger's influence and misunderstands Heidegger's claim: "Unlike Heidegger, he does not have a dismissive attitude towards science, namely, that it 'does not think' or that it is merely calculation." Practically every mention of Heidegger is made to differentiate his thought from Merleau-Ponty's. Again, there is disagreement on this matter.

Heidegger Lexicons

2006-05-19T11:43:00.000-05:00

One of the initial difficulties of understanding Heidegger is his rather cryptic neologistic terminology. With terms like Ge-Stell and Er-eignis that have strong etymological bases but are foreign to even an extensive German lexicon, Heidegger can be just as frustrating for a native German speaker as an English speaker (I honestly don’t know who has it easier, if either does). So, here are a few lexicons (taken from Ereignis) on Heidegger’s terminology to consult as you mine his difficult works:

Glossary of Terms in Being and Time by Roderick Munday
Some Terminology in Being and Time by William Blattner
Terminology in Section 7 of Being and Time by William Blattner
Heidegger’s Greek by Ereignis

You can also find lexicons in various works, like at the end of Inwood’s Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction, A Heidegger Dictionary, the Index of Greek and Latin terms at the end of Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, and lexicons at the end of his translated works, such as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and Introduction to Metaphysics. Lastly, there are various papers written on different terms, like Stimmung/mood, Eigentlichkeit/authenticity, aletheia/truth, etc. There are a wealth of resources available to the novice and advanced student of Heidegger, you just need to know where to look.

Monty Python's International Philosophy Soccer Match

2006-05-18T18:04:00.000-05:00

Was just browsing the videos at YouTube and found this fun Monty Python clip--philosophers playing soccer, the Greeks against the Germans, with Confucius as referee. Enjoy!

Online Works by Paul Ricoeur

2006-05-18T15:23:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to find online texts from Paul Ricoeur for some time. One day, a few weeks ago, I decided to try again and, despite previous failures, found a small selection. First, though, some introductory links:

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) (from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Paul Ricoeur (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Paul Ricoeur (from Mythos and Logos)

With that, here are the works that I have found:

Becoming Capable, Being Recognized (Ricoeur's acceptance speach given at the Library of Congress for the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities [a cyber-cast can be found here])

Essays on Biblical Interpretation (a book published in 1980 and made available online by Religion Online)

An excerpt from The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)

Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi (published through Janus Head)

Response by Paul Ricoeur: Philosophy and Liberation (a response to Enrique Dussel's Hermeneutics and Liberation; Dussel responds here)

If anyone else knows of other online works by Ricoeur, please let me know and I'll add them to the list.

Omitted Translation in "The Principle of Identity"

2006-05-18T12:36:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been working on an interlinear version of Heidegger's “The Principle of Identity” (found in Identity and Difference, Joan Stambaugh, trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969)). In the process I discovered that Stambaugh did not translate two sentences (in bold):

Der Name für die Versammlung des Herausforderns, das Mensch und Sein einander so zu-stellt, daβ sie sich wechselweise stellen, lautet: das Ge-Stell. Man hat sich an diesem Wortgebrauch gestoβen. Aber wir sagen statt «stellen» auch «setzen» und finden nichts dabei, daβ wir das Wort Ge-setz gebrauchen. Warum also nicht auch Ge-Stell, wenn der Blick in den Sachverhalt dies verlangt?
“Der Satz der Identität,” 99.

The first sentence is translated as follows:

The name for the gathering of this challenge which places man and Being face to face in such a way that they challenge each other by turns is “the framework.”

As my German is sub-par, I emailed one of my old professors (who asked to be anonymous). He proposed that Stambaugh probably didn't translate these sentences because “they are a reflection [on] the neologism Ge-Stell that is very difficult to render into English” (Anonymous (personal communication), Thursday, May 18, 2006 10:15 AM). Stambaugh admits as much in the following footnote:

Framework or Frame (Ge-Stell) and event of appropriation (Er-eignis) are perhaps the two key words in this lecture. They are extremely difficult to translate. “Ge-Stell” in the sense in which Heidegger uses it does not belong to common language. In German, “Berg” means a mountain, “Geberge” means a chain or group of mountains. In the same way “Ge-Stell” is the unity (but not a unity in the sense of a general whole subsuming all particulars under it) of all the activities in which the verb “stellen” (place, put, set) figures: vor-stellen (represent, think), stellen (challenge), ent-stellen (disfigure), nach-stellen (to be after someone, pursue him stealthily), sicher-stellen (to make certain of something).
“Introduction,” in Identity and Difference, 14.

With that, my professor proposed the following “rough translation”:

One takes exception to this use of words. But we say instead of “place” (stellen) also “put” (setzen) and think nothing about the fact that we use the word “Ge-setz” (law). Therefore why not also Ge-Stell, when the view into the facts demands this?
Anonymous (personal communication).

Here, then, Heidegger seems to be making a case for his use of the neologism Ge-Stell, despite its non-existence in German. Then again, what else can he do when the idea that he is proposing cannot be adequately understood with already-existing terms that themselves are probably infused with the metaphysical worldview that he is critiquing? Such is a danger of letting “the matter speak for itself” (“The Principle of Identity,” 29)--it might speak something that is quite foreign to our usual concepts.

On the Essence of Truth--The Inner Possibility of Accordance

2006-05-18T11:49:00.000-05:00

2. The Inner Possibility of Accordance
We speak of accordance in a number of ways: two coins on the table can be said to accord because they materially resemble each other, both in composition and form. But we also speak of accordance when we say, “The coin is round.” But how does the proposition accord with the object? It obviously cannot be like the first correspondence, that they are materially similar:

Now the relation obtains, not between thing and thing, but rather between a statement and a thing. But wherein are the thing and the statement supposed to be in accordance, considering that the relata are manifestly different in their outward appearance? The coin is made of metal. The statement is not material at all. The coin is round. The statement has nothing at all spatial about it. With the coin something can be purchased. The statement about it is never a means of payment.

We then ask the question: “How can what is completely dissimilar, the statement, correspond to the coin?” [121] The proposition could not become the coin without changing its nature; we must retain the proposition as a proposition. So, the relation must consist in something else; unless we can make this relation explicit then all talk of correspondence is meaningless.

The proposition “relates ‘itself’ to the thing in that it presents [vor-stellt] it and says of the presented how, according to the particular perspective that guides it, it is disposed.” “[T]o present” means to let the thing stand out as an object, as something (or some thing)--as a dog, as a mathematical equation, as a piece of art, etc. As it stands out, the object also “withstands” or is “opposed” to me: it is there, opposite me, and presents itself in its solidarity, singularity, and presence.² Furthermore, this object only appears “within an open region” that precedes the appearing, which region is defined as “a domain of relatedness.” Within this domain entities are related and contextualized in terms of human comportments: the hammer is intelligible in the domain of construction, nails, wood, needs/desires (for shelter, convenience, as a job), etc. from which it gains its identity and meaning. From the above, the relation between the proposition and the thing is “the accomplishment” of the presencing (or making present) of the being through comportment.

Comportment is understood in terms of its ‘adherence’ to something, [122] namely what is made present, or “being.” Unlike Husserlian comportment that is related to subjective sense data, Heidegger sees comportment as being essentially towards beings that transcend the individual and her consciousness. “Every relatedness is a comportment,” or every relatedness is a gathering together of beings into a context whereby they are not made merely spatially present (spatial coordination to the other objects is not even necessary), but they are related in their manner of being--the hammer’s hardness is related to the hardness of the nails and wood, which is related to the nature of construction/building, etc. How man comports towards beings depends on the beings he is directing himself towards and the manner of his comportment. For example, hammers and pens each allow for different uses, hence they each determine how I can use them; similarly, the mode of my comportment will vary if I am playing soccer rather than playing chess, as each requires a different way of relating to the world (and confusing them will cause problems in doing either). It is only in this “open region” of comportment that beings first appear, which itself is a necessary precursor to saying things--making propositions--about beings.

This can occur only if beings present themselves along with the representative statement so that the latter subordinates itself to the directive that it speaks of beings such-as they are. In following such a directive the statement conforms to beings.

A statement can be “correct” only insofar as it opens up a region (and occurs within an open region; one must inhabit an open region in order to open up another region), through comportment, in which beings can appear in the manner prescribed by the statement. “Open comportment must let itself be assigned this standard,” even prior to any “pregiven standard for all presenting” (compare 117-119). Since this open comportment is itself the ground for the appearing of beings, of making propositions about beings, and the correctness of a proposition, then comportment itself “must with more original right be taken as the essence of truth.” Not only this, but open comportment also aligns us with the privative meaning of aletheia--the active un-concealing of beings, the presencing of that which is remote--which is missing from the usual understanding of truth. With this more primordial understanding, the traditional assumption that truth essentially deals with propositions is fundamentally faulty: “Truth does not originally reside in the proposition,” but necessarily comes both before and after it; before, because beings must appear prior to our propositions, and after, because the truth of the proposition itself depends on comportment making beings present (presencing beings). But this raises another question concerning the ground of this “inner possibility of correctness,” whereby it itself is made possible. [123]

Notes:

This is the resistance of the “earth” to being controlled by a “world,” or the excess of beings in terms of any way we can make them “present” (see “Origin of the Work of Art”). It withstands any attempt to dominate it, or subsume it under a single interpretation. Within this lecture, this shows itself in terms of “untruth” and the “mystery of being.”

Alva Noë's Action in Perception

2006-05-17T10:07:00.000-05:00

Over at Psyche: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness they have a Symposia on Alva Noë's Action in Perception. Included is a précis of the work by Noë himself and comments by Andy Clark, Pierre Jacob, Jesse Prinz, and Mark Rowlands (with Charles Siewert coming soon). I personally find Noë's work to be very informative and philosophically interesting; certainly a must-read for those who are dissatisfied with traditional approaches to philosophy of mind.

On the Essence of Truth--The Usual Concept of Truth

2006-05-16T16:43:00.000-05:00

1. The Usual Concept of Truth
We ordinarily understand truth as “what [117] makes a true thing true.” From this, “[t]he true is the actual.” For example, we can detect true gold from fools gold because the latter is “merely a ‘semblance’,” it only looks like gold, whereas true gold actually is gold. But we cannot base our understanding in terms of ‘actuality’ since the fools gold also is also something “actual,” even if it is not “genuine” gold. What, then, do the terms “genuine” and “true” mean? It is often spoken of in terms of “accordance”--that the object conforms to our understanding of what “gold” is.

Genuine gold is that actual gold the actuality of which is in accordance [in der Übereinstimmung steht] with what, always and in advance, we “properly” mean by “gold.” Conversely, wherever we suspect false gold, we say: “Here something is not in accord” [stimmt nicht]. On the other hand, we say of whatever is “as it should be”: “It is in accord.” The matter is in accord [Die S a c h e stimmt].

This raises another issue: we do not only call facts/objects (“the matter”) “true,” but also “our statements about beings.” Thus, a proposition is true if “what it means and says is in accordance with the matter about which the statement is made.” But in this case, contrary to our previous exposition, it is the proposition, not the matter, that is “in accord.” Whereas before we were concerned with whether an object itself is genuine or false according to some established criteria, now we are concerned with whether a proposition that is about an object is genuine or false. Truth, then, is seen in a double relationship: first, that an object accords with a previously understood meaning, and second, that a proposition accords with an object.

Understanding this double nature, truth is that which “accords” in two senses: “on the one hand, the consonance [Einstimmigkeit] of a matter with what is supposed in advance regarding it and, on the other hand, the accordance of what is meant in the statement with the matter.” This is seen in “the traditional definition of truth: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectūs.” [118] While this is traditionally translated as “truth is the adequation of intellect to thing,” this translation only makes sense on the basis of the “adequation of thing to intellect” (the more literal translation). Either way, both conceptions about “the essence of veritas have continually in view a conforming to... [Sichrichten nach...), and hence think truth as correctness [Richtigkeit].”

We need to understand that these two notions of truth are not mere inversions: depending on which translation we focus on the intellectus and res have different meanings. In its medieval manifestation, the adequation of thing to intellect is not a Kantian transcendental unity of apperception, but the Christian notion that the object, as a creation (ens creatum) of God, “corresponds to the idea preconceived in the intellectus divinus, i.e., in the mind of God, and thus measures up to the idea (is correct) and in this sense is ‘true.’” For the God who micromanages, as he does in traditional Christian thought, this means that everything--every object, event, being, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential--accomplishes some divine intent, some divine telos by virtue of being created by God. The human mind, as a gift from God, must also be adequate according to God’s intent and this intent is only realized in “the correspondence of what is thought to the matter” which, ultimately, returns to the ideas of God. In this way, the human intellect must be able to correspond to the matter in the same way as God’s ideas/intents, “on the basis of the unity of the divine plan of creation.” An object’s ‘true’ meaning depends on where that object fits within God’s plan; it is ordered in terms of the divine intention. With this understanding, “veritas essentially im-[119]plies convenientia, the coming of beings themselves, as created, into agreement with the Creator, an ‘accord’ with regard to the way they are determined in the order of creation.”

This, then, can be generalized: the theologically motivated understanding of creation can be replaced by “the capacity of all objects to be planned by means of a worldly reason [Weltvernunft] which supplies the law for itself and thus also claims that its procedure is immediately intelligible (what is considered ‘logical’).” With this teleological interpretation of the medieval conception of adaequatio rei ad intellectum, truth itself needs no more elucidation: correctness is essentially established by the intent of the agent; even material entities are correct only as they accord “with the ‘rational’ concept of its essence.” This interpretation seems to be far removed from questions of “the Being of all beings” and, thus, it seems to have a self-evident (or fundamental) feel to it: it apparently occurs prior to the question of being (it certainly does in its theological basis) and thus seems to escape any ontological commitments. This is seen in many modern approaches to rationality: it is the formal gateway through which all ontologies must pass, hence it is temporally and logically prior to all existence(s). Furthermore, it seems to account for the fact of untruth: untruth is “the nonaccordance of the statement with the matter.” Since truth is defined by its accordance, any discussion of truth itself can safely ignore the question of untruth. This notion, as Heidegger will later argue, misses the fundamental connection between truth and untruth, concealing their ontological intertwining. It is also worth pointing out the precursors of ‘technology’ in the above: the reduction of the essence of beings to their telic use, as ‘resources’ that are utilized through ‘planning.’

But where can we go from here when this conception of truth [120] seems to be fundamental and “obvious”? In seeing the theological ground for this notion of truth, even “the philosophical definition completely pure of all admixture of theology” is seen as “an old--though not the oldest--tradition of thinking.” With such a pedigree, what is still “worthy of question”? Fundamentally, we have yet to question the notion and nature of the “accordance of a statement with the matter.”

What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?

2006-05-16T16:13:00.000-05:00

When I was looking for information concerning anschaulich views in physics, I stumbled on Yves Gingras’ “What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?,” in History of Science 39, 4/126 (2001), 383-416 (can be found online here). It examines how the mathematization of physics (begun by Newton) revolutionized how physics was done. Here is his conclusion:

In this paper, I have tried to show that the mathematization of physics had long-term social, epistemological and ontological effects on the discipline. A similar analysis could be made of the famous debate concerning the non-visualizability of quantum mechanical phenomena in the 1920s. One would then see that it was strictly analogous to the debate over vortices or the ether, for the disappearance of these substances had the effect of making gravitation and light propagation hardly anschaulich: their understanding depended essentially on mathematical formalisms.¹⁵⁵ Thus it is not very surprising that David Bohm, a strong advocate of a ‘realist’ (a better word would be ‘substantialist’) interpretation of quantum mechanics, wrote in the mid-1980s that “the current emphasis on mathematics has gone too far” and that “physics may have taken a wrong direction in giving so much emphasis to its formalism”.¹⁵⁶ Though Bohm’s views were very marginal at the time,¹⁵⁷ they remind us, in the end, that the question of the relationship between physics and mathematics is still being debated¹⁵⁸ and one could fruitfully follow its effects in contemporary physics.¹⁵⁹ And since there is no reason to think that these effects were limited to physics, the framework of analysis suggested here could be used to look at the effects of mathematics on other disciplines like chemistry and biology. From J. J. Sylvester and A. Cayley in the 1870s, who used advanced mathematics to understand molecules and isomers, to the emergence of quantum chemistry and mathematical biology, mathematics has had the tendency of redirecting the focus of inquiry towards the relational character of the elements, thus contributing to the transformation of concepts and practices.¹⁶⁰
But only a more detailed analysis could show that the desubstantialization of matter was directly related to the mathematization process itself which distanced the meaning of the concepts from their original intuitive referents. Through their formal manipulation as mathematical symbols, concepts thus acquired a relational definition and lost their original substantial quality while gaining in generality.¹⁶¹
---Notes---

Arthur I. Miller, “Redefining anschaulichkeit”, in Abner Shimony and Herman Feshbach (eds), Physics and natural philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 376–411; Daniel Serwer, “Unmechanischer zwang: Pauli, Heisenberg, and the rejection of the mechanical atom, 1923–1925”, Historical studies in the physical sciences, viii (1977), 189–256.
David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, order, and creativity (New York, 1987), 7, 9.
Bohm’s view are now undergoing a revival; see Peter R. Holland, The quantum theory of motion (Cambridge, 1993), and Russell Olwell, “Physical isolation and marginalization in physics: David Bohm’s cold war exile”, Isis, xc (1999), 738–56.
For a recent critique of the lack of physical explanations in the modern mathematical approach to physics, see Daniel Athearn, Scientific nihilism: On the loss and recovery of physical explanation (Albany, 1994).
For very recent examples, see Nature, cccciv, issue of 2 March 2000, 28–29; Science, cclxxxvii, issue of 7 January 2000, 49–50.
See, for example, Karen Hunger Parshall, “Chemistry through invariant theory? James Joseph Sylvester’s mathematization of the atomic theory”, in Paul H. Therman and Karen Hunger Parshall (eds), Experiencing nature (Dordrecht, 1997), 81–111; Ana Simoes and Kostas Gavroglu, “Quantum chemistry qua applied mathematics: The contributions of Charles Alfred Coulson (1910–1974)”, Historical studies in the physical and biological sciences, xxix (1999), 363–406, and idem, “Quantum chemistry in Great Britain: Developing a mathematical framework for quantum chemistry”, Studies in history and philosophy of modern physics, xxxi (2000), 511–48; Giorgio Israel, “The emergence of biomathematics and the case of population dynamics: A revival of mechanical reductionism and darwinism”, Science in context, vi (1993), 469–509.
Yves Gingras, “La substance évanescente de la physique” (ref. 16).

I do not doubt that someone other than myself will find this incredibly interesting. It is quite pertinent to understanding the development of Western thought.