Heidegger

This post is on Heidegger, therefore it is already over my head.

But I want to address the question of what it is I like about Heidegger. Not that I really know Heidegger, first of all. I've read a few things by him, and a few things about him. Often I have no idea what he's talking about, really. In some of his later stuff, I roll my eyes at the pomposity of his language and the sense of cleverness he has in his homebrewed mysticism. [does one "brew" mysticism? it seems like a little too intoxicating to be baked or stewed...] So please do keep that disclaimer in mind. I am not speaking about HEIDEGGER as such but my (embarrassingly simple) impressions of Heidegger according to our limited contact.

And second as a disclaimer, Heidegger is not my favorite. Yes, I do tend to go by the username HeidegGURL but that is only because it is such a silly name, transposing to a wholly nerdy dimension all the "SephirothGIRL777" and "MrsTimberlake0806" screen names you will find out there. And I hate having to add numbers at the end, so I do need a screen name like this that is never already taken. And SocratesGURL really doesn't work. End of story.

Those disclaimers in mind, let begin with a commercial that keeps popping up on hulu:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOowgs4F1Gc
"Because what are you without your stuff? Or better yet, who are you?"

Very philosophically provocative for a commercial. Your first instinct might be to say, "I am a human being with intrinsic worth, whether I have stuff or not." I will tell you to get off your Cartesian soapbox. This is the first thing you have to do to understand Heidegger. The subject/object divide is one way of looking at the world, but it's not a very helpful one. In fact, it blinds us to the way things actually are. Think more carefully. I dare you to find me a human being without stuff. Better, a human being who has no interest in stuff. Such a person would not be psychologically healthy. The fact is, humans are not isolated individuals who decide to step out of their interiority to enter into the world, and who then decide to get involved with things. we always already are in the world and we always are involved with things, whether we like it or not. We are relational beings, and we're involved in very complicated webs that tie us to things. Sure, maybe Norton is pushing a little hard on the idea that electronic records of your stuff are the most important thing to you, which might be going a little far. but still, we are the kind of being who doesn't just survive like an animal, we live, and not just that, but we carve out a space for ourselves. We appropriate things to our own use. We personalize our environment. Taking a raw world and cultivating it is what we do. Heidegger talks about this in his later works (but with a lot more weird mysticism) as "dwelling," which is a very different thing than simply surviving.

This is what I think Heidegger does really well - give an everyday phenomenological account of what it is to be human. Not just in an abstract sense, "we have reason and free will" and all that. But what it looks like to be a human, which for him involves being-with-others-in-the-world. Blah blah, big German words, whatever, Heidegger. But to be a human means precisely to be in a world where we live and interact with things, and he describes this a lot in Being and Time. One of the most primary ways we interact with things is as tools. A good tool is essentially invisible to us until it stop working. This is brilliant - and there was another commercial that captured this well, but I can't find it. What we want in a pen is something we don't have to worry about - we want it to work so flawlessly we don't even have to think about it at all. We just need to write something and it's available at our desk to do precisely that. Of course, we can change the mode in which we think about tools. We can, as we're doing right now, consider the pen in itself. What is it, really? Who came up with the idea, how does it actually work? That's a different mode of being than the being of the tool. This is the mode of objective being, but notice how it doesn't come at the beginning, it only comes when we decide to think of it this way (or when it stops working, etc). This means that there are all sorts of other things that we may not be able to objectify right now just because we're never going to get to the end of what we're taking for granted. (Once again showing how Descartes is inadequate.) Also, a tool is not by itself. Tools are a part of networks of use organized according to the things we concern ourselves with. To put it in a different way, we are driven in life according to our particular concerns, and these concerns will make other things appear to us in particular ways.

He also has a good description of authenticity and inauthenticity of relating to others. We most easily slip into "the They," the anonymous sense of public opinion and culture that we live in. Heidegger calls the kind of autopilot existing this leads to "fallenness", not in the sense of sin, but in the sense of gravity. We slip into it. In order to resist it, we have to take the effort to really think authentically, according to "our ownmost possibilities" and not just be a sheep. This idea of gravity is absolutely fascinating to me. But we should save that for another post, because it moves beyond just Heidegger anyway.

Heidegger also links our concerns to a greater sense of uncanniness, that the world is not quite our home, and ultimately a fear of death. But to live authentically, you have to deliberately live towards death as the moment which is most essenitally yours and no one else's. This is kind of where Heidegger gets problematic for Christianity. In Being and Time he's not trying to make the world friendly and happy - it is kind of scary and foreign, but there's no possibility for anything better. In his later works he moves past that to a more welcoming place. Again, neither really suits Christianity.

Finally, to be even less precise, Heidegger's later works spend a lot of time talking about space. He goes into some really weird things I don't fully understand, but at at the same time, his mode of consideration really influences the way I think. My goal is no longer just reading and comprehending, but I am led to deep reflection on thinking, and how to be open to the right space for thinking. He's not the only thinker who does this. But he is certainly one of them. Sometimes metaphors can open up new possibilities for seeing things as they are, and I think this is certainly the case in Heidegger, the fruit of his constant struggle to think in an originary manner, instead of easily falling back on old patterns. I find him at times confusing, at times annoying, at times completely wrong, and not a thinker I want to specialize in uniquely, but still one who opens many new horizons of thought for me. These are the kinds of thinkers worth entering dialogue with.

In conclusion, he has an awesome theme song.

Death and Thinking, part 2

Last year I was thinking a lot about distance and thinking. It seemed so clear to me that to think about something is to remove yourself from it, abstract away the beating heart of the world to consider the colorless ghost of its idea. For this reason philosophers were in danger of removing themselves from life, and becoming cold, calculating robots. Thus graduate students should be rightly afraid, because a life of pure thought is a life tainted with death.

I still think there are dangers to thought, but I realize I've been taking the wrong angle. Instead of asking how thinking makes us distant from the world, I should have asked: what is the most human way to encounter the world?

It is certainly not to try to step out of the world and view it from a disembodied Cartesian way - even if we do view systems at times in such a theoretical way, that's not really the best expression of the "most human" approach to the world. (There is a reason we don't place mathematics under the "humanities".) Nor then again does a human encounter require us to plunge headfirst into immanence, mute our reason, and live like an animal. When we do this, we are also distant from the world, because even if our bodies are immersed in it, our minds aren't really there in their truest capacities - the only way we can even do this is to repress our deepest faculties.

So it seems that some kind of thought is necessary to live in the world in a human way. But what kind of thought? Or maybe we should be careful about the word "thought", because we don't want any Cartesian connotations sneaking in - we still haven't talked about what "thought" means.

Four small paragraphs and I'm already in over my head. I'm not really going to solve anything, just propose an idea. Perhaps the most human way to encounter things is not to know individual things or isolated systems of properties, but to recognize their real value. By recognizing an object in the way that it is good, we can't just strip it down to properties in a system. The good isn't just a concept in our minds we can consider or ignore without consequence, but a powerful, living force that draws us - it is our deepest desire. By seeing the the good in whatever we study - numbers, cave paintings, acids, the theory of theories, or even God - we don't have to be so alienated and distant from it. When we recognize the good, we are naturally drawn into love, and I believe this is the most human - and most divine - way of encountering the world.