Heidegger on technology:
I just read (in rush) Heidegger's essay "What are poets for?", and I have the impression that he is suggesting that technology will bring the end of the "Open" which pertains to humanism --or to human ability to counterpose nature/universe. In a few words, it seems to me that Heidegger is saying that technology will bring an end to humanity as we know it. What I did not grasp, however, is why Heidegger thinks so?
Does anyone here have a broader knowledge of Heidegger's views on technology and its effects on humans and history?
Thank you.
Does anyone here have a broader knowledge of Heidegger's views on technology and its effects on humans and history?
Thank you.
Comments (140)
Heidegger cares a lot about the way people examine things. He cares a lot about how problems are framed; how questions are asked. Specifically, he thinks ways of asking questions can be occlusive of the subject matter. The easiest example of this is how Heidegger differs methodologically from Husserl.
For Heidegger, Husserl's phenomenology starts in terms of contemplating perceptual objects. Like rotating an apple in your head or seeing the colour of something; from considering those kind of things, Husserl attempts to draw out the essential nature of experience. One example of this essential nature of experience Husserl highlights is intentionality. Consciousness is always consciousness of something; it is directed towards a specific object or task.
Heidegger thinks this is a bit wrongheaded. Specifically, he questions the way Husserl is arriving at answers; should the essential nature of experience be highlighted through abstract mental operations, or by attempting to draw out the essential character of how people experience stuff on a day to day basis? Heidegger concludes (with a lot more words and nuance) that intentionality isn't just direction towards a specific object or task, but of being in a situation.
Say Eric Clapton is freestyling on his guitar, he's damn good at it, he's performing and composing at the same time, it's badass. This is formed from an interplay of attending to how the situation was (the previous bit of improv), how the situation is (the previous bit of improv being extended by playing appropriate notes) and how the situation could and should develop (expressing whatever theme Clapton is experimenting with). It's also an awareness that has a sense of normality to it - if one of his strings breaks the situation changes. This is a very open ended sense of intentionality; lots of things and relations of things are attended to when Clapton's playing the guitar.
So, Heidegger's derived a different sense of intentionality by asking how humans do purposeful activity vs underpinning constancies in how humans perceive objects. This is to say, he approached the question in a different way.
Heidegger thinks technology, fundamentally, operates on a similar level to intentionality. It's a banality to say that technological advance has changed how people relate to each other; like Tindr, Facebook, Twitter and even the phone. Heidegger wants to reveal what underpins this banality - in what ways has technology changed how people approach doing every day tasks, and what conceptual structure does this change in approach have?
A pretty good analogy, in my book, is that Heidegger thinks technology is like Tindr. Romantic partners are reduced to a standing reserve of sexual partners, and people on Tindr are reduced to their attractiveness for the person; that is, people have become instrumentalised; put to work, appraised in usefulness with regard to a task.
Tindr is a model of instrumental intentionality applied to people. Technology, for Heidegger, is fundamentally a way of seeing things in terms of their usefulness. Apply this to the entire world, and you get the start of the homo economicus myth: the world is a competition over finite resources.
Technology, then, is this attitude applied everywhere. Things start to look like goods and resources. Again, it's pretty banal that most things that we encounter on a day to day basis can be seen as goods and resources; but that's precisely the point Heidegger is raising! Technology is an instrumental framing of our relationship to the world, one in which we see people as subjects for resource allocation (or as 'cogs in the machine').
'The Question Concerning Technology', 'The Age of the World Picture' and 'The Origin of the Work of Art', are three essays of Heidegger that deal with the different parts of this account.
The Question Concerning Technology sets up this account of instrumental rationality.
The Age of the World Picture deals a bit with instrumental intentionality as a conceptual foundation for a scientific worldview.
The Origin of the Work of Art deals with how Heidegger wants to get around the constraints of a technological worldview for a more 'fundamental' interpretation of our relationship with the world (of which instrumentality is one possibility).
The introductions to Being and Time deal with his methodology more generally (even though it arguably changes a bit in his later works). I think they situate in what register Heidegger is asking questions pretty well (but they're very dense, especially the second one).
IOW, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with instrumental rationality; the problems come when instrumental rationality becomes the only way of relating to the world, and squeezes out the more embedded, related, particularized way of living in the world.
Related but distinct. Heidegger is quite silent on ethics, even though he makes use of normativity in his account of making sense of the world.
Technology is treated as an obstacle to forming a deeper understanding of being. This is because it is a way of interpreting being. A reasonable analogy here is being asked to give an account of sight if everyone wore blindfolds all the time and weren't aware of it; you'd have to remove the blindfolds before the account could be made.
The Heidggerian move is: since technology is one way of relating to being and, as a framing device, invites us to view things in some ways - like as goods, resources and instruments - it must be dependent on a less conditioned sense in which we relate to being. This fundamental sense is that being itself is a concern for humans. Humans can't help but care about it.
In the every day life, Heidegger attempts to show how this care for being; which is intimately linked with intentionality; generates contextualised interpretations of our environment that automatically prescribes what it means to be in that environment. Like the sense of being at home while relaxing there, or of being in good company when with a close friend.
In terms of philosophy, this care is orientation towards a problem whose contours are circumscribed by adopting sufficiently precise framing devices and sufficiently illuminating examples to study the problem. This might not seem like a particularly advantageous methodology for doing metaphysics with, but it certainly suits a type of being (humans) who is always concerned with being. What is the problem? The problem that we are always concerned with, being... This iterative refinement of framing devices zooming in on a series of conceptual presuppositions is called the hermeneutic circle, and attempting to describe things in a way to exhibit their conceptual presuppositions is called formal indication.
Technology is an obstacle for that method, as it becomes difficult to see past the constraints it places on developing an ontology; questions of how and for what applied to specific entities, properties of assemblages of entities. Inquiry guided by 'how' and 'what for' questions can never raise the question of the being of those entities; the existence they share in.
I read your replies. Thank you.
Heidegger's pretty hard to skim read. You really have to pay attention to how the sentences follow from each other until you get used to how he thinks and writes. He's also expressedly not a humanist (see the 'Letter on Humanism') like you stated in the OP.
By the way, could you share with us some cliffnotes about the role poetry holds in Heidegger's philosophy?
I finished reading Heidegger's "Poetry, Language, and Thought", and I am amazed with the many things Heidegger seems to derive from poets. To tell you the truth, I am distrustful to the many conclusions one can draw from poets and poetry (although Heidegger seems a great reader and interpreter of poems). But before, I have a say on whether it is right or wrong to derive so many conclusions from poetry, I need more info about the scope of poetry in Heidegger's philosophy.
Does Heidegger think that from poetry you can explain the whole universe, or does he hold the other view according to which poetry shows the role of humans in this universe?
Thank you again for your time!
Heidegger's central commitments throughout his work, at least as I see it (which should be taken with a pinch of salt), are the relationship of humans to being/the world and of truth to humans and language/the world. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that Heidegger sees truth and untruth as ways of relating to being. Heidegger's use of poetry and poetic language is adopted largely because he sees it as a way of relating to his topics of interest in a manner which exhibits them well.
Heidegger accuses most philosophy since Plato as thinking of truth as the correspondence of matter to language about it. Like 'the cat is on the mat' is true if and only if the cat is on the mat. This can be termed adequation or likening; when the words are determining the thing through truth and the thing is determining the words as their accompanying state of affairs.
Heidegger prefers to think of truth as unconcealment or illumination. A good example here is that of a statue sculptor. The sculptor has a block of stone to work with, it has some properties and shapes which the sculptor can use to work with the block to bring a shape about. If the sculptor chooses to sculpt in way X, she cannot choose to sculpt in way Y; once the marks are made the shape arrives.
This is similar to how Heidegger thinks of truth. Bringing out the nature of a topic by relating to it adequately. But also, relating to it in some way always curtails relating to it in other ways. As things are uncovered by adopting a framing device, so too are some things concealed. Illumination also casts shadows.
Since he sees most philosophy since (and including) Plato as an obfuscation of the truth of things and a forgetting of the question of being, it's quite natural to try to adopt a different method which illuminates in the right way and casts shadows over the irrelevances.* He sees this in poetic language; it's very expressive, metaphors function similarly to plain language, suggestiveness is incorporated explicitly in how line follows line. It is use of language without annoying methodological constraints on expression.
Heidegger sees this use of language and its accompanying orientation towards illumination as very fundamental and basic, I agree with him here. As an example; consider as a model of truth rather than the statement like 'the cat is on the matter', the exegesis of an idea. Does how illuminating my exegesis of Heidegger is turn on the truth of the statements in it? Somewhat, certainly, but more importantly it's the use of truths to paint a picture of Heidegger's position on poetry. What matters is how readable it is, how accessible it is, whether the examples are good, whether the terminology I adopt is good and so on.
I think I'd achieve a worse exegesis if I wrote things like:
'poesis is close to the originary operation of alaethia in language, in some respects poesis is the use of language aimed at the hermeneutical rather than propositional as-structure; where proposition is the adequation of a concept or statement with its object'
despite it being a more precise description using the right words. :P
edit: * his views on technology and his nationalism about the German language slot in about there.
Ok, thank you for your reply.
Neither of the EJ works have been translated, and I haven't read them, but a few write-ups on the subject make it pretty clear. Translated volume of their correspondence was interesting, chummy, but somewhat disappointing. One or two essays they "exchanged" were better.
The way I read it, from an entirely personal and "non-philosophical" viewpoint, it's a bit hyperbolic; a useful and maybe call it metaphorical description.
Husserl goes further after questioning the view of “logic” as a “technology”. He says that the normative is dominated by the practical valuations then ...
Note: bold is my emphasis. Taken from sections 11 and 15 of Husserl “Logical Investigations” which Heidegger studied prior to writing B&T so it is probably worth considering in regards to the below ...
So:
This is a reiteration of what Husserl thought NOT something Heidegger thought up in opposition to Husserl.
@Eros1982 it is worth noting I appear to be less of a fan of Heidegger compared to the majority of people on this forum so keep that in mind too ;) I am by no means an expert of either Heidegger or Husserl. I don’t honestly think either knew what they were talking about (the difference being Husserl was aware that he could never reach a ‘conclusion and repeatedly acted out his thoughts with skepticism and attention to what he called ‘obvious’.)
I've never seriously studied Husserl. So pretty much all I 'know' about Husserl is Heidegger's straw Husserl.
Regardless, whether the idea came from Husserl or Heidegger, Heidegger still thunk it.
Good posts, fdrake. A lot of stuff to question in them insofar as Heidegger goes, though (unsurprisingly enough from me, haha). For example:
"should the essential nature of experience be highlighted through abstract mental operations, or by attempting to draw out the essential character of how people experience stuff on a day to day basis? "
People actually experience stuff in a wide variety of ways on a day to day basis. It would probably be just about impossible to give anything like a comprehensive list of that, and it wouldn't be surprising if anything we can imagine would be on the list.
"Say Eric Clapton is freestyling on his guitar, he's damn good at it, he's performing and composing at the same time, it's badass. This is formed from an interplay of attending to how the situation was (the previous bit of improv), how the situation is (the previous bit of improv being extended by playing appropriate notes) and how the situation could and should develop (expressing whatever theme Clapton is experimenting with). It's also an awareness that has a sense of normality to it - if one of his strings breaks the situation changes. This is a very open ended sense of intentionality; lots of things and relations of things are attended to when Clapton's playing the guitar."
I doubt that most people doing something like playing guitar typically have anywhere near all of that stuff in mind when they're playing. I certainly don't when I'm playing.
That's the point. So much of what we 'know' is not consciously known. At the same time such skill is fundamental to our success or failure at a task. From this point of view, Socrates (in Plato) is misguided when he tries to humiliate poets or others who are skilled by revealing their inability to give an explicit account or justification of that skill. To be sure, this kind of insight is already in Nietzsche, and I think it's implicit in the empiricists.
You're highlighting something that happens a lot on the forum, but ironically not in real life. Once you've mastered Heidegger's jargon and have an overview of his system of ideas, it makes people make posts consisting entirely of jargon and Heidegger references. A focus on the richness of the everyday and the personal and their unique structures turns into an endless Heidegger exegesis.
This isn't to say he doesn't have insights; he opens lots of doors for philosophical thought - about the link between norms, their understanding, and personal behaviour, about what metaphysics is and should be, about logic. There are a lot of commonalities in emphasis with late Wittgenstein; but Heidegger ends up concluding that there's a dire need for good philosophy, whereas W wants to burn most of it to a crisp.
He deserves careful study, especially if you're a Cartesian (which most posters here are and don't realise!); the critique of how Descartes (or Heidegger's version of Descartes!) thinks about experience and the subject/object distinction is especially devastating.
Intentionality can't be unconscious.
I don't buy unconscious mental content in general, but even if someone did, it wouldn't make any sense to posit unconscious intentionality.
Excellent cliff notes there, by the way. I'd like to add that I think Heidegger was trying to get to some sort of original stance the human consciousness takes towards the word (which you already alluded to). That is to say, how does the human interact with something like a tool for an intended purpose versus, examining its make-up, how to improve it, what are minute details that go into producing such tool and its relation to other objects of the world. My question to you is, how do you think Heidegger thinks we jump from ready-at-hand to present-at-hand thinking?
That's matter of how you want to play 'intentionality.' If I trip and start to fall, I don't consciously decide to put my arms out between my face and the ground. Yet my hands find the ground.
Quoting Terrapin Station
As you seem to use the words, I don't buy unconscious mental content either. If mental == conscious, then of course unconscious mental content is absurd. I get that Heideggerized gobbledegookers tend to wonder around in the fog on their 'profundity.' I think we both object to that style. I notice on your profile that you like Mach. So do I. That said, one piece of Heidegger continues to ring true for me.
[quote=Heidegger]
[The] less we 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 … If we look at things just ‘theoretically’, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific thing character …
The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in order to be ready-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work – that which is to be produced at the time.
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What I also like here is that to grok what's great about the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations we need only think of language as the hammer. All of that said, I think these insights are a footnote to thinkers like Hume, Hobbes, and Bacon.
Heidegger discusses this in Being and Time. When we go from experiencing a world in terms of our significant, concernful, involvement 'for the sake of which ' we do or think something, to making an object AS object the focus of significance, we transition from ready to hand concernful relevant understanding to the 'objectifying' present to hand, which forgets this larger context of relevance in refiying things. .This reification is the essence of the subject-object propositional 'statement'
"How does the statement become a derivative mode of interpretation? What has been modified in it?" Heidegger says predication points something out in a way that we sheerly look at it. By transforming the circumspective 'something "as" something' into 'this subject "as" this object', "the 'as' is forced back to the uniform level of what is merely objectively present. It "dwindles to the structure of just letting what is objectively present be seen by way of determination."When we just stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more." Heidegger recognizes the theoretical as an impoverished, 'cut-off' modification of understanding. But because, ontologically, it originates from and never departs from heedful circumspective care, it is not in-itself devoid of transformation.
I gotta admit that that post was hard to unpack- perhaps you can put that in more clear everyday English :chin: .
It sounds like RAH is about concern for getting something done and PAH is about an object in itself.
I always took RAH to be a sort of flow-like use of an object. It is how we encounter things in our natural state before we analyze them. Thus if RAH is more original to our being, tool-use is our natural state. Analyzing the tool and the world itself is not a natural state.However, being that we are very inventive creative beings, they seem to go hand-and-hand (no pun intended). RAH and PAH are two sides of the same coin. But, I could be interpreting this wrong.
The hammer is consciously recognized as an object distinct from its environment when it malfunctions and we have to consider it as an object.
from my understanding "to hand" refers to conscious focus. One can see the pragmatic coloring here.
'Pomophobe' is just a word that amused me when I chanced on it. If I seem a little aggressive toward a certain style, then that's yet another style (one that Heidegger himself sometimes used.) I'd never try to censor anyone. I might just ask who's calling when I hear being, being, being, being, being. Turns out that Eckhart Tolle uses 'Being' in The Power of Now. I opened the book expecting to annoyed and was not disappointed.
[quote=Amazon]
In the first chapter, Tolle introduces readers to enlightenment and its natural enemy, the mind. He awakens readers to their role as a creator of pain and shows them how to have a pain-free identity by living fully in the present. The journey is thrilling, and along the way, the author shows how to connect to the indestructible essence of our Being, "the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death."
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Lots of fun.
[quote= Heidegger]
Thus four ways of owing hold sway in the sacrificial vessel that lies ready before us. They differ from one another, yet they belong together. ... The four ways of being responsible bring something into appearance. They let it come forth into presencing. They set it free to that place and so start it on its way, namely into its complete arrival.
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The problem might be translation, since
[quote=Heidegger]
The German language speaks being, while all other languages merely speak of being.
[/quote]
OK then. Maybe I'll justify my preference for Hume and the gang in terms of English being the one true language of philosophy.
Basically he's a shady guy who still really nailed it at times. Given some of his indulgences, I'm surprised that his fans are surprised that he and his ilk inspire some humor at their expense. Science doesn't think. Reason is the stiff-necked enemy of thought. Them's fightin' words. (Not really. But let's not pity poor earnest pomo.)
[quote=Hume]
But this obscurity in the profound and abstract philosophy, is objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. Here indeed lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science; but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these intangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness. Chaced from the open country, these robbers fly into the forest, and lie in wait to break in upon every unguarded avenue of the mind, and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices. The stoutest antagonist, if he remit his watch a moment, is oppressed. And many, through cowardice and folly, open the gates to the enemies, and willingly receive them with reverence and submission, as their legal sovereigns.
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Hume:
"But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of
mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeeded
each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perceptual flux and movement."
James:
"Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician as Thomas Aquinas. No wonder he can discover no ’hypothesis.’ The unity of the parts of the stream is just as ’real’ a connection as their diversity is a real separation; both connection and separation are ways in which the past thoughts appear to the present Thought; - unlike each other in respect of date and certain qualities - this is the separation; alike in other qualities, and continuous in time - this is the connection. In demanding a more ’real’ connection than this obvious and verifiable likeness and continuity, Hume seeks ’the world behind the looking-glass,’ and gives a striking example of that Absolutism which is the great disease of philosophic thought."
Heidegger followed and radicalized James and Nietszche in placing intersubjective becoming before either subjective idealisms or objective reifications.
I dont like reading later Heidegger because of the looseness of the terms. Many might say the same of Being and Time but I find it profound and as precise as anything Hume wrote.
When something is missing or malfunctions and it disrupts our seamless ready-to-hand involvement with tools , we don't revert to a present to hand mode of understanding unless we explicitly thematize what was missing , which means to point to it and define it as an object , in isolation from what we need it for. Normally, when our seamless involvement is interrupted by a missing tool, the way in which what was missing played a role in terms of the totality of relevance of the context of our involvement is what becomes explicit, not as a thematized 'object'. It's not a distinction of conscious vs unconscious but of whether we are understanding a thing in terms of its relevance to our purposes and activities or simply as a defined entity with properties and attributes, independent of the way it matters for us in a particular context.
"When something at hand is missing whose everyday presence was so much a matter of course that we never even paid attention to it, this constitutes a breach in the context of references discovered in
our circumspection. Circumspection comes up with emptiness and now sees for the first time what the missing thing was at hand for and at hand with. Again, the surrounding world makes itself known. What
appears in this way is not itself one thing at hand among others and certainly not something objectively present which lies at the basis of the useful thing at hand. It is "there" before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection insofar as circumspection concentrates on beings, but it is always already disclosed for that circumspection." Being and Time
I read Heidegger as saying that that the idea of the present to hand object is a contrivance. In 'What is a thing' he talks about how it has become ingrained among people in the modern era to assume that self-identical persisting objects with attributes and properties exist , independent of the activities, thinking and purposes of individuals who encounter them. He calls this the "natural conception of the world". He goes on to say that what people today assume as natural and universal was in fact an invention of the West , beginning with the Greeks, and would have been considered an ailen notion to many cultures. Heideger argues that RAH underlies the PAH conceptualization, as well as all other possible variations of it. Why can there not be an 'object in itself? Because the notion of 'in itself' for Heidegger already implies a self-transcendence. His whole project begins from rethinking the 'is', attempting to show us that the simple copula is not just an inert glue between subjects and objects, but transforms what it articulates. This is a strange notion, but the upshot is that to experience is to alter. The meaning of anything is in the way in which it is an alteration with respect to our current situation. To point to a moment of experience and say 'object' is to do violence to this dynamism at the heart of meaning by attempting to freeze what was mobile, and thus actively significant and relevant, and make it inert , dead, meaningless. This PAH thinking which underlies our logic and empirical science allows us to do many things, but runs the risk of making us forget its basis in pragmatic involvement with the world.
I agree that the empiricists sometimes tried to bolster their spirit or attitude with an obsolete metaphysics. That's where the footnotes to the empiricists become valuable. But this spirit or attitude is anti-metaphysical and directed toward engagement with the world and experience. Their style is part of that. It's aimed at active personalities who take life or experience as the primary authority. It expects revision. So I agree with James against Hume on that point. James is taking the empirical attitude and giving a better description of experience. Still, he's ultimately on my team.
[quote = James]
There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means.
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.
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[quote=Bacon]
Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.
...
Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.
...
It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech … that are the true ends of knowledge … but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.
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The 'true names' are those that command --ideas that work and don't only make promises. The 'general root of superstition' is 'that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.' When I look at Heidegger on technology, the general feel seems to be a kind of hippy rejection of Bacon's pragmatism. To be clear, I do understand that the world is indeed in some trouble. All I'm saying is that Heidegger looks pretty vague and spiritualist on these matters. 'Only a god can save us.' OK, then. Thanks for playing.
[quote=Heidegger]
Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that it is itself not technological.
[/quote]
While this is far too fuzzy initially to either hit or miss, my suspicion is that it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. These days we look at reality as a resource. If we were more religious, we'd be standing in God's beautiful garden. We'd stop using one another and raping nature. Only a 'god' or explosive shift in our understanding of Being can wake us up from our nihilism. Something more like this:
[quote=Heidegger]
Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don't know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] -- the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long [209] dialogue in Provence with Rene Char -- a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.
...
As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition.
...
If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor.
...
The essence of technicity I see in what I call "pos-ure" (Ge-Sull), an often ridiculed and perhaps awkward expression.28 To say that pos-ure holds sway means that man is posed, enjoined and challenged by a power that becomes manifest in the essence of technicity -- a power that man himself does not control. Thought asks no more than this: that it help us achieve this insight. Philosophy is at an end.
[/quote]
On the importance of tradition he sounds like Jordan Peterson. I think he's right on that point, but also that the point is obvious. We're all embedded in a culture. The uprooting of man reminds me of the Romantics and Marx. Again I agree, but it's fairly standard stuff. Our technology is running away with us. Our power is increasing faster than our wisdom, etc. The fatalism is 'only a god can save us' is also familiar. I sure don't see any obvious solution. Our species may just not be able to deal with running out of frontier to exploit. The spooky 'thought' that's supposed to help us see this looks like a pretentious faculty that's just philosophy with a new green coat of paint. In short, this is all reasonable but not profound. Take away the ghastly prose style of
[quote=Heidegger]
Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that it is itself not technological.
[/quote]
and apparently there's nothing profound. I venture that most of us these days share the hippy complaint while also seeing that some return to tradition is not going to work. I like the Green New Deal. It seems like a start. But it's not metaphysical. Reducing carbon emissions and rethinking energy policies are concrete proposals. We will want to quantify the success of our experiments, and our goal will be the Baconion power over an environment that we must obey in order to control. Critics might say that this attitude will subvert the project, but then why should they mind unless they share the project and ultimately want to control nature --however greenly they want to phrase it.
Empiricism is not necessarily anti-metaphysical. Abandoning subjective idealism for subservience to the real can end up trading off one form of metaphysics for another.
Quoting pomophobe
Yes, but what kind of revision, and what is presupposed in what we assume about how our theories are revised? Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? What I am asking you is whether you adhere to a Popperian falsificationism, which is consonant with Kantianism, or a Kuhnian approach ,which abandons the idea of empirical knowledge as corresponding to an independent reality, and the vector of science as toward an assdymptotic approximation of reality. Kuhn takes his philosophical cues from Quine, Donaldson, Putnam and Rorty, who recognized that all empirical facts are value-laden, and that any fact makes sense only in relation to an overarching account. This value-laden basis of factuality is not someting that Bacon or Hume understood.
Heidegger radicalized this idea of primordial subject-object interpenetration by deconstructing the basis of logic undergirding the empirical sciences. His rant against technology is really a rant against forgetting the foundation of empricism and logic in a a more fundamental inrersubjective experiential structure. What we forget when we begin from objective thinking is that objectivity and logic are contrivances invented over a period of millennia, beginning with the Greeks and solidified with Galileo and Descartes. We create the presuppositions out of which calculative thought is possible(objects as persisting self-identities with assigned properties and attributes) but the generating process out of which such abstractions emerge is invisible to us.
As Evan Thompson argues :
"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that
calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn’t
conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that
such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential.All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."
“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic
facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the
conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical
things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I
wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied
mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there’ independently of how we configure or constitute it as
an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as
experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete,
canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of
the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of
consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an
additional, non-natural property of the world.
One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can
make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which
is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are
attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this
transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent
metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive
dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world."
Maybe you agree with this. If so, would you not also agree that this is far removed from Bacon and Hume?
I basically agree with you, but I don't like the word 'metaphysics.'
Quoting Joshs
Must we commit to a position here? How has our species accomplished so much already without settling this issue? We mostly get by just fine without top-down theories. We mostly use 'truth' effectively. For me it's part of the empiricist attitude to not get lost in the spiderwebs of theory. Which kind of theory is worth our attention is one more thing we can put to the test.
On the other other question, Popper and Kuhn are both great. If we are wrong, we were right, because we tried something specific enough to recognize its failure. But none of this is possible in the first place without some paradigm that makes the situation intelligible. Paradigms come and go.
Quoting Joshs
On this issue I'd say look to politics. The distinction between fact and opinion isn't some random mistake. Nor is the distinction between mind and matter. These distinctions have their limits. Their utility can blind us to what they cover up. This is what I like in Heidegger. Being-in-the-world, the hammer being used versus the hammer just being stared at, etc. I think know-how is utterly prior to know-that. For me this insight adds to empiricism. Practice makes perfect. Knowledge is largely embodied which is to say not made of thought in the first place. Hinton makes some fascinating points on machine translation. He calls the vectors of floating point numbers 'thoughts.' The input is sentences and the output is sentences, but what goes on in the middle has nothing to do with words. It's a mesh of millions or billions of floats, each of which is meaningless in isolation. And these are our best machines for translation, inspired by what's in our own skulls.
Quoting Joshs
I agree that if commonsense realism is vacuumed up into the ether so that it becomes metaphysics that it indeed breaks down. But isn't this spiders eating spiders? The bees are out there, perhaps in different departments and perhaps outside of academia altogether. And maybe someone like Hinton who gets his hands dirty with cutting edge science/invention is even preferable to yet another exegesis of Wittgenstein. If the distance from facts and concrete challenges is what empiricism criticizes, then perhaps the best empiricists are too busy practicing what they don't have time to preach.
And that is why Heidegger is a chore to read. His work is best read in reverse. ;)
It sounds to me like you've already committed to a position, that being the recognition of the interprenetration of fact and value. Posting an independent 'out there' would seem to contradict the sort of pragmatism you want to defend.
Quoting pomophobe
Francisco Varela elaborated something similar with his neurophenomenological model. It draws from the idea of a living system as self-organizing. In this view, the origin of cognition is the enactive nature of organismic functioning, the fact that a living system shapes the very environment that it is affected by. This approach doesn't require us to choose between subjectivism or empiricism. It makes the formal and empirical sides of things into poles of an interaction in which neither self nor environment, neither mind nor world , have any coherent sense or existence apart from their interaction. So no top-down theory, but also no bottom up empiricism. This is the meaning of embodiment.
pomophone has exclusively quoted from Heidegger's post 1920's writing. I would agree that this later period of Heidegger's career consisted of mostly obscure and impressionistic poeticizing language. I don't view Being and Time and earlier works this way. There's no question Being and Time is an extremely dense and difficult work, but for me it is no more obscure that Kant.
As to the claim that , I defy pomophone to effectively summarize Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time.
It only appears to be saying something pretty simple to the extent that it is confused with older philosophical ideas that it superficially resembles.
Do you mean the reading the sentences backwards? Or?
My first quote was from Being and Time (1927) and I praised it. I've mostly read 20s Heidegger and mostly not read post-20s Heidegger. I've also read some great secondary sources, including all of Kisiel's Genesis, Steiner, Polt, Sheehan, others. For a few months he was my favorite philosopher. At the moment I might pick History of the Concept of Time as my favorite. I like Kisiel's English. Another favorite is Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity. van Buren also writes well.
While the authenticity theme is flattering to us who aren't phony and crumby, it hasn't aged well for me. But I could never much get into Kierkegaard, except I did like Fear and Trembling. But then that's a dark book. Abraham is a monster for God, and that's the point. 'If you phonies we're actually religious,...' And maybe this connects to this letter from Heidegger to his brother.
[quote=Heidegger]
18th of December, 1931
Dear Fritz, dear Liesl, dear boys,
We would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. It is probably snowing where you are, inspiring the hope that Christmas will once again reveal its true magic. I often think back to the days before Christmas back at home in our little town, and I wish for the artistic energy to truly capture the mood, the splendor, the excitement and anticipation of this time.
[…]
It would appear that Germany is finally awakening, understanding and seizing its destiny.
I hope that you will read Hitler’s book; its first few autobiographical chapters are weak. This man has a remarkable and sure political instinct, and he had it even while all of us were still in a haze, there is no way of denying that. The National Socialist movement will soon gain a wholly different force. It is not about mere party politics—it’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos. Thinking about these things is no hindrance to the spirit of Christmas, but marks our return to the character and task of the Germans, which is to say to the place where this beautiful celebration originates.
[/quote]
'It’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos.' I'm not even trying to shame or judge Heidegger here. But perhaps you can see why a fact/value distinction is useful. I think Heidegger had some insights of independent value from his grandiose cultural concerns. For my money Being and Time is already contaminated with something not quite 'scientific.' Is the forgetfulness of Being an essentially political-spiritual point? Is authenticity really a technical term? What's with all the talk of death? Does he make himself clear? How much of Being and Time is better expressed in earlier works that were not yet available when his big book was published -- without the shakier elements?
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/18/in-his-own-words/
I have been slapped with a glove, sir.
I do think it is better reading from last section to first (and often enough each section is better read by reading the final paragraph FIRST). There were a few instances in my reading that I felt time was wasted by pointless blocks of text that could easily have been omitted.
All said and done I’d still recommend it to anyone interested in phenomenology and/or consciousness in general. Some bits are more useful than others; enough so for me to occasionally dip back into it.
Ah, but is the inauthentic for Heidegger a matter of being phony? That sounds like an existentialist reading of him. Beware of secondary sources. Many in the American Heideggerian community of scholars embraced him becasue they assimilated his thinking to Kierkegaardian religious themes dear to their heart(Sheehan, Dreyfus, Caputo, Sallis). This interpretation of Heidegger misses everything that is profound and original about him, in my view. If Heidegger were offering nothing more radical than what authors like Sheehan and Dreyfus make him out to be saying , I would join you in proclaiming that it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. At the very least, one could learn as much from Kierkegaard, Gadamer and Levinas. My favorite readers of Heidegger are the poststructuralists, particularly Derrida.
Doesn't any 'scientific' theory already imply a valuative stance implicating poltical ,spiritual, ethical considerations? That's the difference between the concept paradigm understood in Kuhnian vs Popperian (or Kantian vs Hegelian, modernist vs post-modernist) terms. The Popperian asks 'Must we commit to a position here?' whereas the Kuhnian says there is no value-neutral scientific paradigm.
I don't think we can really do justice to Heidegger without first delving more deeply into your comment that a" fact/value distinction is useful".
If what you are saying is that you don't quite agree with the arguments of Putnam-Quine-Rorty-Goodman , then perhaps you identify more with the 'pre-Hegelian' branches of analytic philosophy, cognitive science and philosophy of science.
Didnt mean to sound snarky, but it would be fun to go through it briefly and see what we come up with.
I've read plenty of the man himself. I still don't think it's clear. Of course you can give me your interpretation, but you'd be one more secondary source.
I also thought there were many pointless blocks of text. I'd also still recommend it to others as worth looking at, but I'd be upfront about what I don't like about it.
Well at least Derrida is crystal clear. (Not really.) I've read some Derrida too. Some of it is great, but I found it overall less relevant than what I like in Heidegger. To put it bluntly, at worst we have the philosophical tradition crawling up its own ass, exaggerating its importance to those who aren't tuned in.
As to whether Being and Time is clear or not, the challenge is to find a reading of it we find plausible that is itself clear, coherent and powerful. If we take up Sheehan's or Derrida's interpretation of Heidegger and, try as we might, we are not able to see the logical consistency and clarity that they claim to see in it, then i guess it s time to put Being and Time in the closet. I've had to do that with Lacan and some of Deleuze.
For me the radical core of Being and Time is not about authenticity or death, it's in the first half of the book where Heidegger introduces the equiprimoridal modalities of temporality, attunement and care. I studied experimental cognitive psychology and my central focus was affectivity. In the past decades, affect, feeling and emotion have been lifted out of the shadows to which they were consigned by the behaviorists and positivists for years.With the rise of embodied, embedded and enactive approaches in cognitive science , affectivty now takes center stage as an organizing principle of cognition, rather than the peripheral disorganizing distraction it was considered to be in earlier thinking. In this regard, Heidegger has been taken up by Matthew Ratcliffe and others in the cognitive community for the way that he views affective attunement as framing the meaningful of all experiencing. For me the key to understanding Heidegger is via his treatment of affect in relation to cognition.
I don't think we have to drag in all the academic heroes to tackle the issue of how the fact-value distinction is useful. I've read some of those guys closey, others not all. Other thinkers not mentioned have also been important to me. But I don't see the value in parading these ghosts when we could just discuss the issue. Indeed, it may be that all the academic hustle and bustle actually obscures precisely the point I'd want to make.
The fact-value distinction is utterly familiar to us. Yes we can question it theoretically, but we shouldn't ignore its ordinary function. We know how to use it, and it exists differently in use than in the books of philosophers. Language itself is the hammer. That's where Heidegger and Wittgenstein meet. Philosophers tend to just stare at language and ignore what they 'know' in their everydayness. From my point of view, as I said before, Heidegger enriches something I've been calling empiricism. There is something 'anti-intellectual' in this empiricism, and a move toward the 'authenticity' of being in the world.
I actually like Bennington's Derrida. He writes strong English. Sheehan also writes strong English. I respect what both writers were trying to do. Sheehan had the proper arrogance. Better to be wrong than unclear. I'm not saying he's wrong, if we can even talk of wrong or right in the interpretation of difficult texts. I agree that we want a strong reading, even if it's a misreading. Kojeve is great on Hegel, though it's really Kojeve presenting Kojeve through the voice of a hero, just as Plato often used Socrates. Bloom's translation is also first rate. To me that's one of the great books 20th century philosophy that isn't much talked about.
I've dabbled with Lacan and Deleuze and it didn't take. Zizek does some fascinating stuff with Lacan, and I think he's pretty readable. And then Zizek's live persona is great. Heidegger and Lacan in the few videos available come off pretty humorless and square. Derrida is likable on video. Some of his ideas are impressive. A less cutesy and more focused book than Bennington's could really sell Derrida to skeptics, I think. Pomophobia is largely a rejection of a certain tiresome cuteness or tendency toward mystification and exaggeration. The style is decadent, late, precious. The purple velvet jacket says it all.
Instead of debating Kant vs Hegel, how about we compare Hinton with Dennett, Gallagher, Hutto, Thompson and Varela? In terms of topics of active debate in cognitive science these authors represent clear divisions within the field concerning understanding of the capacity of empathy, theories of affect, representationalism vs post-nonrepresentationalism, accounts of autism, the nature of consciousness, etc., and these differences parallel larger philosophical rifts. The journal phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences gives us a point of entry for I=integrating Heidegger with empirical work in affect and consciousness.
Bennington is one of the best interpreters of Derrida and is able to correct many of the grossest misreadings(like the common misinterpretation of 'nothing outside the text' as nothing outside the bounds of formal language). But Bennington never puts away the Derrida impersonation in any of his writing, right down to the idiosyncratic French inflections(Bennington is a Scot, for God's sake!).
This is not the mark of a writer confident in his originality.Not that I'm saying he has to be original. I imagine Bennington is reconciled to his role as Derrida's bulldog.
Yeah Bennington is still a little cute for my taste, but the prose is clear. His book is crammed with ideas. I like summaries, even if they are difficult to do well. There is so much out there to read that's it good to be able to tell quickly whether a thinker is worth the time.
Quoting Joshs
I have read some Dennett but not the others. I'd probably like them, if I can get around to them. My real job is in science, which I often neglect for philosophy. I should be working on a dissertation (early stages). Much of my attitude is influenced by training in mathematics. The gap between pure math and its application is a nice metaphor for the gap between theory and practice in general. Intuition is decisive. Proofs are largely important as communicators of this intuition and to some degree as hygiene. Also successful application is IMV the actual ground of mathematics. This is of course a dark foundation, a framework that is not essentially made of thoughts.
In the new AI paradigm, it's looking to me like our best models are going to be black boxes. We'll have tools that work that don't really make sense to us. I haven't studied QM closely, but I get the impression that that's the situation there, too. If I object to metaphysics, it perhaps because I think that systems often exist to cover over a darkness. We mostly push buttons that have tended to give us what we want. Our ignorance of final things looks fundamental to me, as if the mind wasn't built to address such questions with any kind of consistency or clarity. So there's a humility in empiricism (as I intend it). At the same time there's bravery and pride that is biased against whatever inspires fear and poverty. While indulgent language is sometimes justified, I also think a suspicion against anything foggy is also justified. When pomo gets a little too eager to through out the notion of objectivity, the pushback is sensible.
Don't you think there's a difference between theory in the metaphysical sense and what Nietzsche, Heidegger and the poststructalists were trying to do? Put differently, isnt it possible to to talk philosophically about the way that our moment to moment relation to the world and to our self transforms the nature of both the subjective and objective side of experience, without having to be accused of falling back into the same trap one is trying to critique? On this forum, such accusations take the form of 'Isn't pomo relativism asserting a truth in claiming that objective truth is impossible?' A post-realist argument isn't meant as a replacement theory but as a move toward practice itself. Its way of thinking sees itself as no longer theory at all in the old sensed but as activity and interaction. Heidegger's Being isnt meant as a concept but as placing difference, activity, practice, transformation relation and becoming prior to subjects and objects. That's why temporality is so essential to Heidegger(and Husserl).
Philsophers used to be in the forefront of introducing new mathematical concepts(Aristotle, Leibinitz, Descartes). Then they stopped, or at least the continental thinkers did, other than a few odd attempts like that of Badiou. Given that I view mathetical concepts as arising out of the cultural contingency of language generally, I see the the articulations of thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger as the direct continuation of the tradition of mathematical thought. Their formulations ARE a form of mathematics in the most sweeping sense. They are what mathematics had to become.
Quoting pomophobe
A thoroughgoing pragmatism applies not just to means but also to ends..
If our tools don't really make sense to us, then what it means for them to work for us also wont make much sense. That is to say, the way in which we will understand what it means for something to be useful will be contingent and arbitrary, intelligible in relation to local norms, which is in fact how Deleuze and other pomos already tend to understand our relation to the immanent world. The meaning of empirical success, workablity, validation, truth are well on their way to becoming such evanescent entities, as Nietzsche envisioned.
This is not a loss with respect to the old Cartesian ways of thinking about empirical truth. The price the realists paid for their belief in a world of reductive causation was an even more profound sort of arbitrariness(a unified theory of physics to be run on a computer, but in which everything important to human culture is assigned to randomness) .
I came across the work of Joseph Rouse recently, who writes in a field called 'science studies', which I find fascinating. It places empirical endeavors smack dab in the middle of a complex milieu of political and socio-cultural practices. It has connections to social constructionism but doesnt restrict itself to a focus on language. It give a window into what scientists are doing as they make their way around black boxes.
Indeed, but I think it's easy to be so dazzled by insights that we actually forget to apply them to our own inquiry. It's one thing to grasp finitude abstractly, for instance, and another to feel and affirm it. You've mentioned lots of names, names, names. Many of them surely belong to thinkers I'd enjoy. And I could also mention names that you'll probably never get around to. As individual mortals we are condemned or privileged to make our way through our own brief lives with the torches we find along the way. Beyond that there's the recognition that know-how is prior to knowing-that. This is a profound insight, and it connects to Hegel's owl that always arrives to late.
Perhaps you've studied science yourself. For me it was of extreme value philosophically. The person working on post-quantum cryptography is up against some right-angled facts about algebraic structures and computational complexity. That's the sharp part of the work where Nietzsche would be useless. On the other hand, navigating the academic hierarchy via politics and the choice of what to research is something else. The philosophical problem of what we should value also melts away when their are clear metrics for performance. At work in that context, there is no substantial ambiguity about the goal or the standards.
On the cultural level, we are clearly on philosophical terrain, and then philosophy is something like high grade politics. Of course scientists can use philosophers for insight, just as Einstein used Mach (and then put him aside when he got in the way.) A society is something like an organism. Philosophers are an important kind of cell, but they never were the only brain cells. I don't deny that philosophy is important. I think it's less than obvious that it remains central. Figures who aren't philosophers proper (like Hinton) are going to think philosophically about their work. Look at Hinton's inspiration for using 'dropout' regularization. In short, I'm not against theory. I'm not just sold on its centrality. That theory has taught me its non-centrality. The true ground is successful application. Yes, we reflect on it. But sometimes we figure out how to do something before we figure out how we figured it out.
Quoting Joshs
I don't find this plausible. To this attitude I reply: go try to master using some complicated software. Or fix your car by yourself the next time it breaks down. These mundane things are what theory likes to forget, but they are what non-theoretical life is largely made of.
Quoting Joshs
As I read it, these 'realists' are just more philosophers. That indifferent-to-us nature has regularities which can be exploited is not so wild as all of that. IMV a good scientist knows that he mostly doesn't know. Look at the spiderweb of powerlines that keep our computers humming. Look into the codes that allow for the efficient, error free transmission of this very post. I don't pretend to profound truth about the thing-in-itself or 'the Real.' Am I authentic or worldless? That's a religious-spiritual-political question. I'm saying that non-theorists tend to use these words ('real', 'true', etc.) as a way to point to the stuff they depend on, the stuff they can't get away with ignoring, the stuff that will punish their ignorance-blindness --whatever it 'really' or metaphysically is.
Most of us/them don't have some metaphysical theory of our linguistic know-how. 'But what do you really mean by real?' 'But what is being?' These questions have their charm and maybe even great spiritual value, but leaving them unanswered in not a practical problem (not at that level of generality, anyway.) Any foundation that arrives after the fact is too late. The framework was already up and running for that artificial construction to be delivered in the first place. This is not to say that we can't learn more about how we are intelligible to one another. I do suggest that we'll favor theories about this that can themselves be applied to further this intelligibility.
I understand that frameworks 'invisibly' determine entities as entities. It's as if we are convolutional neural networks that come pre-trained with features. I can't remember when the world wasn't a system of objects and people I could talk to about those objects.
For me this is part of Kant's point. We are thrown into an intelligible world, into nature that already makes a lot of sense for us. These frameworks offer us uncontroversial entities and a language in which we can talk about them. Without these frameworks, science would be impossible. So science depends on these frameworks. I like Mach's philosophy. Much of science looks like the discovery of functional relationships between uncontroversial entities. We can find a relationship between the use of the word 'red' and the readings on a scientific instrument. I'm not a Mach scholar (I only have so much time), but I remember thinking that he cut through lots of noise and confusion with his approach.
Indeed, Kant showed us the dependence of science on formal conditions of possibility for such grounding concepts as logic, causality and objectivity. But Kant believed in a static universe, a single integrated gestalt that it was our challenge as puzzle solvers to penetrate and represent through incremental trial and error. His frames were set in stone as a priori categories. Hegel asked why we shouldn't think of these frames as themselves contingent and changeable. This led eventually to the idea that science at its most relevant and creative doesn't just rearrange the pieces on a chessboard, but upends the rules of the game. Newtonian physics already 'worked', but modern physics worked in a different way, by turning the Newtonian world on its head. You could say that the quantum explanation works better than the classical account, but its important to note that it works better by reinventing the game, redefining the terms. The same can be said of Darwinian biology with respect to the model it upended. Evolutionary theory didnt solve a puzzle within the bounds of the old framework. In fact, it can be argued that there was no puzzle at all to solve within the terms of the old model. Only within the bounds of the new framework offered by Darwinism did it make sense to talk about a problem of origin of species.
Steve Jobs said :“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
I think problem solving doesn't capture the genius of science. Rather , science first creates a new space of possibilities, upending the old framework and all its rules and definitions . Only when this is done can what didn't appear before as a problem emerge as an issue.
As Heidegger said "The real "movement" of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself. A science's level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts."
The historical movement of science is one of revolutions in ways of knowing how.
Quoting pomophobe
Yes, and this perceptual and cognitive know-how, being perceiver-dependent , consists in our assimilating the world into our already-structured processes of understanding. But at the same time, we must accommodate our patterns of organization to the novelties of our environment. This assures that any frame of understanding we use to interpret the empirical world is always in the process of transforming itself subtly. We normally dont notice this. Thus , you can claim that : Quoting pomophobe
Just because you don't notice substantial ambiguity concerning the goal or standards doesnt mean that you are not performing an interpretive function every time you sit down to work on a narrowly defined empirical puzzle safely within the bounds of a conventional framework. And the fact that interpretation is necessary in the act of engaging your know-how means that in subtle fashion you are re-envisioning the bounds of that framework in even the most conventional project,and with it your criteria of valuation , purpose and standards.
Recent work on enactivist cognitive science shows that we engage the world in a unified manner. Know-how is holistic. We don't consult an interior script or theory, we engage directly, bring our embodied understanding as a whole to bear on tasks. As we experience the world moment to moment, our frames of understanding shift as a whole, very subtly.
Quoting pomophobe
Mundane life is non theoretical if theory is understood as a canned abstract database we consult. but It is theoretical in the sense of an embodied holistic pattern of meaningful engagement. Such patterns, as ways of sense making, manifest themselves on a cultural level as the evolving worldviews that define our potentialities and limits as ethical,political and scientifically inforrmed people. Affectivrty is a sensitive barometer of the extent to which our system of know-how is confronted with an event it cannot effectively assimilate. Observe your affective response next time you engage in a project, or even as you read my comment . To the extent that your ongoing sense making capabilities
are not being challenged inordinately, your emotive register will hover somewhere between boredom and mild interest. If , however, something in what I say appears incoherent or challenging in a way that you are not prepared to process adequately , irritation, anger, frustration or anxiety will alert you to a potential reorganization of your system of understanding. In such a situation, could we say that your philosophical scheme of understanding underwent a minor crisis of validation? Not if philosophy is understood as an inert and formal construction. But if we acknowledge that know-how implies that all of us walk around with a stable ongoing interpretive sense-making potentiality, and that this functions in a holistic way in our engagements with our world, then it seems to me that all of us function as naive philosophers(and scientists), regardless of what our skill set consists of.
Quoting pomophobe
Yes, and that 'stuff' they can't ignore is deeply embedded within and dependent on the very framework of thought that it impinges on. There is always an alternative to solving a problem, and that is transcending the very terms of its formulation. Within certain fields of endeavor the conceptual terms are so broadly drawn as to make it appear that there really is such a thing as 'indifferent-to-us nature'.
To a growing number of philosophers, and empirically minded types as well, this is an incoherent notion.
I think this was more systematically taken up, especially as it is relevant to cognition, by Merleau-Ponty in his reflective/pre-reflective distinction.
From Heidegger, you get the insight that the 'present at hand'; our mode of being when observing objects standing out from a background in cognised and cognisant engagement, usually emerges out of our ready-to-hand autopilot when something goes awry. Most of the time we're on auto-pilot. When we're on autopilot there doesn't seem to be much difference between myself and the tasks I'm doing in my environment, especially when you constrain it to practical labour.
For cognitive labour, or labour that often requires reflection, especially systematic thought, the present at hand/ready to hand distinction doesn't capture any of the oscillatory character between the readiness to hand of exegesis or understood intervention and stuck, problem solving thought. It doesn't get at how for this type of activity presence at hand and readiness to hand both superimpose, contradict, and behaviourally entail each other.
Think about finding what is broken in a car by indicative sounds, or using a voltmeter to assess if an appliance is working correctly, or writing a line of code in a familiar programming language, or pausing to think how to articulate a concept. When you are reflecting, it usually pauses the autopilot until an opportunity to resolve it presents itself.
I think Heidegger is right to construe present at hand framings of concepts an their topics as easily assumed because reflective pauses typically engender a separation from a flow state, and reflection itself can easily take this as a framing device. It makes a lot of sense to populate your ontology with separated subjects and objects and activities as connections between the poles of the subject object relation; this is part of his critique of Descartes. But he does not, at least not to my knowledge, provide a detailed phenomenology of cognitive labour, or make comments that allow us to infer what it would be, at all.
Merleau-Ponty is much more critical of the importance of reflection in philosophy, and tries to point out limitations in uncritically framing things from a merely reflective and contemplative stance; with reference to the previous discussion of the importance of framing questions for Heidegger, treating philosophical issues as intellectual puzzles which will reveal their essence given sufficiently precise articulations/solutions is itself a type of rationalist bias to approaching the issues. A corresponding empiricist bias would be to insist upon the necessity of distinct units of objective evidence which must ultimately be synthesised into an understanding of a philosophical issue; rather than heuristic conceptual relation. Both of these approaches pay insufficient attention to the theory-ladened-ness of experience and the experiential/expressive character of theories upon their topics. Reading a reflective given illegitimately back into the world allies its analysis with one sided framings of the origins of that reflective given.
So I'm quite tempted to Mearlu-Ponty-ise Heidegger's present-at-hand/ready to hand distinction here, while the distinction was noticed through creative synthesis of descriptions of transcendental structure (existentialia) out of the experiences suggestive of it (existentielle), construing the 'present at hand' as merely an obstacle or aberration from all usual functioning in the world is precisely a framing error. In phenomenological/Heidegger terms the error is in taking how something is thematised within a particular reflection as constitutive of its essence rather than formally indicative of it! The present-at-hand gets downplayed because Heidegger needed it to for his account, in other phenomenological contexts it's incredibly important to attend to.
You might like Ray Brassier's 'Concepts and Objects' for an interesting corrective about how to think about conceptual, specifically philosophical, labour.
Edit: @StreetlightX in case they want to rip my limited understanding of Merleau-Ponty apart.
Yes, like troubleshooting a technical problem. You may know some of what to do, but it's not a flow state by any means, but grueling attempts to match known heuristics with the new problem or find a possible other cause and solution.
Quoting fdrake
Agreed.
Quoting fdrake
Well that's just it. Why does the present-at-hand get downplayed at all? It seems a false and unnecessary dichotomy. Any troubleshooting with a problem of the world is reflective. Any easy-use of an intended tool is more of a flow state. Both are necessary and entailed to live in the world as human beings. In fact, if present-at-hand is equated with reflective capabilities, it is indeed the primary way we humans engage and survive in the world (contra Heidegger). One of my themes in another thread is the decoupling of instinctive programming with cultural learning. To troubleshoot is to take intuitive guesses based on past learning and applying it to new situations, running scenarios of similar use-cases or intuiting new approaches that might fit. These approaches are based on abduction/induction, intuition, inference, iterative thinking, and generally discursive, haltingly painstaking thought-processes. This to me, is all present-at-hand. A new tool gets created or an existing tool gets fixed through these aforementioned painstaking, non-flow-like mental states and attitudes. Sure, we are at ease in the use of a tool, but we also have the capability to be not at ease troubleshooting or creating new tools, deemed appropriate or necessary for human living.
Quoting fdrake
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into that.
Quoting fdrake
When something is missing or malfunctions and it disrupts our seamless ready-to-hand involvement with tools , we don't revert to a present to hand mode of understanding unless we explicitly thematize what was missing , which means to point to it and define it as an object , in isolation from what we need it for. Normally, when our seamless involvement is interrupted by a missing tool, the way in which what was missing played a role in terms of the totality of relevance of the context of our involvement is what becomes explicit, not as a thematized 'object'. It's a matter of whether we are understanding a thing in terms of its relevance to our purposes and activities or simply as a defined entity with properties and attributes, independent of the way it matters for us in a particular context.
"When something at hand is missing whose everyday presence was so much a matter of course that we never even paid attention to it, this constitutes a breach in the context of references discovered in our circumspection. Circumspection comes up with emptiness and now sees for the first time what the missing thing was at hand for and at hand with. Again, the surrounding world makes itself known. What appears in this way is not itself one thing at hand among others and certainly not something objectively present which lies at the basis of the useful thing at hand. It is "there" before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection insofar as circumspection concentrates on beings, but it is always already disclosed for that circumspection." Being and Time
Quoting fdrake
Calling the ready to hand 'autopilot' or flow implies suggests, even if you dont mean it that way, that objects 'in themselves' are there and we are simply not paying attention to them when we are focusing on a task. But this isn't how Heidegger understands the distinction between ready to hand and present to hand. The present to hand does not stand on equal ontological footing with the ready to hand. It's a derivative and impoverished mode of the ready to hand for Heidegger. . It s not that in pointing out an object we are attending to something extra, something we ignored during our labors. The opposite is the case. In moving from the ready to hand to the present to hand mode, we are ossifying, freezing , flattening and distorting the beings we are involved with.
Quoting fdrake
These all seem to me good examples of continuing within the ready to hand mode without having to make recourse to objectification. Indicative sounds, using a voltmeter as a tool, thinking how to use language in ways that matter to the situation, are all relevant articulations that move a stuck situation forward by involvement with contextually meaningful tools rather than thinking of them explicitly as objects. If one were to stop ones activities and merely say or think 'this is a voltmeter, this is a sound, etc. that would be an example of reverting to the present to hand mode.
Quoting fdrake
Heidegger isn't just faulting those Cartesian types who believe that empirical or conceptual objects are essences. He is deconstructing the concept of a formal indicator by showing how it is derived from the ready to hand , that is, how the concept of a material or theoretical object as a self-identical predication emerges as an impoverished mode of understanding our relevant involvement in the world, Heidegger doesn't want to do away with logic or empiricism . He recognizes their value. But he also recognizes the danger inherent in not recognizing how the present hand is generated from the ready to hand.
Gruelling and non-flowing, yes. But this paragraph is also an excellent example of contextually relevant ready-to-hand thinking. The ready to hand is not a proxy for 'flow' or 'at ease' situations.It applies equally to the oppsite situation of interruption, crisis, puzzlement. Being stuck or interrupted doesnt mean that the larger context of significance suddenly vanishes for us. Even the flailing about for new solutions is informed by ,and takes its sense and significance from, that context. Its not present to hand objects that we have the need for in this circumstance.. We don't need to call out to ourselves or others the names of tools at this point unless we are asking for something for a particular purpose it may serve. Even if we are making use of mathematical or logical language, the way we are able to benefit from it is seeing the relevance in it for our immediate purposes.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The present to hand is not equated with reflection by Heidegger, it is equated with subject-object predicative statements(the basis of formal concepts as well as objective determinations of physical things). There is nothing particularly problematic for Heidegger about reflective thinking unless it cuts itself off from relevant contexts of involvement by narrowing itself down to theoretical or logical analysis. He would not want us to simply reject such forms of discourse, but to understand its derivation. so that we can use such forms in a more knowing and ethically effective manner.
Heidegger: "For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances.But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them. The approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning
and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being.
Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive."
That's the thing, I never quite understand Heidegger. Ok, so present-at-hand is not reflective thought, it is "theoretical or logical analysis". Well, isn't that something often used in troubleshooting and heuristics for fixing technology and improving it? What is an example of this "not as good" way of thinking he labels "present-at-hand"? Is it literally just Descartes sitting in his room, ruminating about metaphysical matters a priori? Does it have to touch a "real world application" for it to be considered the "good" ready-at-hand?
Well of course the objects in themselves are there. And in Heidegger's analysis the present at hand is a degenerate case of the ready to hand. For the average kind of being that Dasein is supposed to represent, it's an appropriate move. But when specifically you're talking about contemplative labour, requiring that:
Doesn't make much sense. The transcendental priority of the ready to hand is legitimised through an appeal to everyday Dasein, not to specific modes of comportment. Dasein is a poor description of someone staring at a screen, someone feeling lactic acid in their muscles, someone contemplating the mysteries of life.
I forgot to say, I found an interesting paper recently here. It's quite a comprehensive 4E behavioural theory of consciousness. Though I have a sneaking suspicion it was written by @apokrisis.
Edit: the discussion about the agent 'factoring out' in tool use is very similar to how Heidegger's notion of the equipmental totality being 'free' or having its being 'freed' through circumspective concern (or intentionality in the diffuse sense) undermines the subject object distinction. It's also an interesting phenomenological corrective to correlationism 'putting the transcendental subject in the way of the world', so to speak.
Let me flesh out what I mean by 'object in itself'. Forgive for quoting myself from an earlier comment on this thread.
I wrote " I read Heidegger as saying that that the idea of the present to hand object is a contrivance. In 'What is a thing' he talks about how it has become ingrained among people in the modern era to assume that self-identical persisting objects with attributes and properties exist , independent of the activities, thinking and purposes of individuals who encounter them. He calls this the "natural conception of the world". He goes on to say that what people today assume as natural and universal was in fact an invention of the West , beginning with the Greeks, and would have been considered an alien notion to many cultures. Heideger argues that RAH (ready at hand) underlies the PAH(present at hand) conceptualization, as well as all other possible variations of it. Why can there not be an 'object in itself? Because the notion of 'in itself' for Heidegger already implies a self-transcendence. His whole project begins from rethinking the 'is', attempting to show us that the simple copula is not just an inert glue between subjects and objects, but transforms what it articulates. This is a strange notion, but the upshot is that to experience is to alter. The meaning of anything is in the way in which it is an alteration with respect to our current situation. To point to a moment of experience and say 'object' is to do violence to this dynamism at the heart of meaning by attempting to freeze what was mobile, and thus actively significant and relevant, and make it inert , dead, meaningless. This PAH thinking which underlies our logic and empirical science allows us to do many things, but runs the risk of making us forget its basis in pragmatic involvement with the world."
Quoting fdrake
But all inauthentic modes of comportment for Heidegger belong to average everydayness, and there is no room for the present to hand in authentic Dasein.
Quoting fdrake
Why would contemplation, reflection, feeling be modes that require the notion of self-identical object-things for their unfolding? I should add that for Heidegger, in doing something like performing a formal logical proof it isnt even a question of abandoning heedfully concernful relevant comportment. There simply is no activity that doesnt presuppose such relevant relating to beings.
Heidegger talks about what it means to see something 'as' something: "In the first and authentic instance, this “as” is not the “as” of predication qua predication but is prior to it in such a way that it makes possible the very structure of predication at all. Predication has the as-structure, but in a derived way, and it has it only because the as-structure is predication within a [wider] experience. But why is it that this as-structure is already present in a direct act of dealing with something? The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act’s so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure. Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be
found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood.
I repeat: The [primary] as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like.
Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so
original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it’s possible at
all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a
pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an
as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as
an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the
privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by
prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is
primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122)
And as Derrida showed better than Heidegger did, in the midst of our pointing at, labeling, formalizing the world into thingly objects(res extensia) that we say are 'simply there', we are unknowingly remaining within radically contextual relating. This doesnt make the concept of an object 'false', it makes it a notion that doesn't fully understand the dynamics of its structuration with respect to the phenomenal unfolding of experience.
IS there such a thing as a hammer? Yes, but not as a meaning that adheres in itself independent of what we are doing with it, why we are accessing it. And furthermore, just staring at it amounts to staring at something that only remains the same by transforming its specific sense for us in subtle ways every moment of our apprehension of it. To be an 'it' of any kind is always to be a certain kind of change. To continue to be that 'it is to continue to change in a certain subtle kind of way that we naively call 'self-identical persisting'.
In my view, there are lots of things Heidegger didn't make clear about the limits of science with regard to his notion of the present to hand. For one thing, his critique of science should really have clarified itself as a critique of a certain era of scientific thinking that most scientists, especially those in the hard sciences, remain within. But science's understanding of itself changes over the centuries.
This brings up a number of questions. In what ways does one's philosophical understanding of the nature and genesis of mathematics and logic affect how one uses such tools?There are mathematical platonists(Roger Penrose) and social constructionists(Arthur Fine) within the scientific community these days, yet both groups continue to rely on logic and mathematics. I think the difference between these groups is in how they interpret the meaning of their empirical results, as well as how s scientific method operates.The social constructionist will argue that mathematics doesnt give us a mirror of nature, and that it wasn't divinely ordained to fit the world. It is, instead, just a useful tool of language. Heidegger would mostly agree with the social constructionist.
As a semi-Heideggerian myself, the way I see present to hand theoretical concepts and mathematical schemes is that they are abstract devices whcih are designed to be general enough in their meaning as to mask the differences from person to person, and from moment to moment, in the meaningful sense that we get from them. Planes stay up in the air despite the fact that there is a certain play in the engineering language we rely on to build them.
As I write these lines on this page right now I could treat the letters and words in a present to hand way by believing that I perceive the meaning of each of them as bits of self-contained data, If I'm a Kantian I will believe that the data in and of itself doesnt form conceptual meaning until I as subject construct such meaning out of the data, but this would remain present to hand for Heidegger. Understanding the text in a ready to hand way, I perceive each letter and word as framed by and emerging out of the context of the ongoing meaningful thematical background, in Wittgensteinian fashion to some extent. So I don't first register the words in terms of some general dictionary definition and then connect them to the current narrative, Accessing some generic present to hand definition of the words would be a secondary, derived act. And in reading the same word over and over again, it is not the identical meaning that comes back to me but a meaning that is very subtly changing its sense in accordance with the subtle changes in the context of my activity of thought.( the major challenge here is to understand how something we perceive or think can appear to remain identical to itself over time not just in spite of, but because of its moment to moment changes in meaningful sense)
Basically, converting the present to hand back to the ready to hand doesn't require that we abandon logic, math and theory. It is a matter of enriching our thinking in the following way.
Whenever we are tempted to perceive a meaning as a 'thing-object' , a persisting self-identity,
we can make note to ourselves that what we are really encountering when we take something 'as' something-in-itself is a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, [and] at the same time takes apart what has been put together." Transcendence locates itself in this way within the very heart of the theoretical concept. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It "understands, interprets, and articulates", and thereby "takes apart" and changes what it affirms by merely pointing at it, by merely having it happen to continue to 'BE' itself from one moment to the next.
In a way, this is a subtle modification of the usual way of treating objects. For everyday purposes it wont alter our comportment toward the world very much. Realizing that the allegedly persistng self-identicality of a thing only remains the 'same' by very slightly changing its sense in alignment with our unfoldling context of activity and purposes wont make the apparent moment to moment intelligible stability of our world collapse into chaos. But it may make the world appear a bit less arbitrary than it otherwise would. It reminds us that what we really want when we reflect creatively is not to nail down a self-identical content, but to find in the ongoing and unceasing flow of experiential change thematic unities and regularities
This ignores why we evolved to do such a thing in the first place. Such 'violence' is necessary for our survival and sanity. Who's willing to deny that our thinking is an organization of chaos? Some philosophers want to call the organizing concepts 'real' and others want to call the chaos 'real.' Still others prefer to call the mundane organized chaos 'real.' Yet others question the importance of the game of deciding what is 'real' in some lusted-after context-independent sense of 'real.'
The penultimate perspective is great for practical life. The last perspective is good for chatting with philosophers.
Yes. There is a distinction in Heidegger between propositional/predicative/apophantic as-structures and primordial/hermeneutic as structures. I know why Heidegger wants to move from the propositional as-structure to the hermeneutic as-structure, because one is transcendentally prior to the other; in the sense of existential understanding. Taking the categories and applying them to an existentielle understanding; an actual self aware comportment rather than a formally indicated synthesis of the transcendental structure of the self aware comportment; I think you'll see that it whether it makes sense to emphasise the transcendental priority of the hermeneutic-as structure and thus treat the apophantic as structure as a degenerate case turns on whether one is considering the coupled operation of the two in a self aware (reflective) comportment; when the comportment itself is thematised; or whether the transcendental structure of Dasein is thematised. Transcendental hierarchies don't remove ontic feedback loops.
Or, prosaically, forum Heideggerians (sorry, you included in these posts) never learn to apply the methodology to other things. This is why everything ends up in a discussion of the transcendental constitution of the subject in Heidegger, rather than... y'know. Talking about reflection on its own terms.
You will say 'but I am talking about reflection on its own terms! Because the formal structure implicates...' - take off the Heidigoggles for a second and constrain the space of inquiry. Be inspired by his methodology and terms rather than his conclusions.
Another way of putting it; the present at hand has interesting ontical relations with the ready to hand. Instances of the apophantic-as relating to the hermeneutic-as can have much different ontic structures; they can be in a feedback loop, one can pivot from one to the other giving life to 'ossified flesh'; except it was never ossified to begin with. The emaciated skeletal structure of the subject Dasein is is not a full account of human being; it falls silent on the specifics by design.
Great quote. I agree, and it's great to point out that pure color or pure tone are constructions. But we can also defend the utility of such choices. They weren't a madman's ravings. They were presumably inspired by noticing that humans have eyes and ears. Let experts jump in, but even a non-expert like myself can pretty safely assume that the brain synthesizes messages from the sense-organs into the world as we experience it.
[EDIT]
Those who started talking in terms of pure sensation were self-consciously analyzing 'being-in-the-world' with a particular purpose in mind. They didn't need to emphasize 'being-in-the-world.' I'm not saying that they noticed everything that Heidegger pointed out in his works, but I am saying that they had some version of pre-theoretical experience. They knew that their constructions were artificial. They came up with them in the first place.
What do practical engagement . usefulness and achievement require? It used to be believed by most philosophers and scientists that the universe was a puzzle with fixed rules to be solved. More recently, we came to believe that knowledge of the world was not a matching of inner theory with outer independent reality, but a co-construction of a self-transforming universe. To discover the rules of the world was to invent a means of interacting with the world in adaptive ways. In this view, objects are contingent and temporary products of subject-object interaction.Heidegger is not far from this view. He just wants to clarify that they are even more temporary than we think. His approach doesn't abandon us to chaos. On the contrary, it show the arbitrariness in fixing objects as self-identities with attributes and properties, and offers a less arbitrary alternative thinking .
.
Heidegger is a great philosopher. But like many great philosophers he emphasizes one important theme at the expense of other important themes.
FWIW, the 'co-construction of a self-transforming universe' is something I understand pretty well. I've argued for that myself in more metaphysical moods. We can even call that the 'speculative' truth.
[quote=Hegel]
...everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.
The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realised and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite. As subject it is pure and simple negativity, and just on that account a process of splitting up what is simple and undifferentiated, a process of duplicating and setting factors in opposition, which [process] in turn is the negation of this indifferent diversity and of the opposition of factors it entails. True reality is merely this process of reinstating self-identity, of reflecting into its own self in and from its other, and is not an original and primal unity as such, not an immediate unity as such. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out, and by the end it involves.
...
What has been said may also be expressed by saying that reason is purposive activity.
[/quote]
Note the repetition in our 'speculative truth' of metaphysics at its most grandiose. And what was Hegel concerned with? Basically religion. Philosophy is just religion done scientifically for Hegel.
Now maybe we have a twist where history never goes anywhere to die but just keeps leaping into the unknown. And I find it plausible that 'forms of life' are neither predictable nor stable.
Note also the for-dummies version: reason is activity with a purpose. It is a directed doing. Is that what's left when the holy smoke clears?
It's not that the speculative truth of Heidegger/Hegel can't be defended. But it's a questionable leap from phenomenology to newfangled Hegel. If we criticize artificial constructions with even more grandiose artificial constructions, ...
Finally I admit that this is largely a matter of taste or fashion. Maybe I've put my velvet sportcoat in the closet for now and grabbed my Carharrt chore coat for some variety.
Note for wearers of the chore coat who are curious about Heidegger:
Ontology : Hermeneutics of Facticity is a genuine pleasure to read. It's short, focused on the good stuff, and beautifully translated.
https://books.google.com/books?id=I9vsCQAAQBAJ
You seem to be referring here to phenomenological practice The best we can do is to articulate how our lives seem to us, in the most open and general sense we can discover. The "traps" are to be found along the two opposite vectors of over-objectivification and over-subjectivification. I see it as an ultimately pragmatic endeavour; the only "truths" consist in the most-informed individual reasonableness and responsibility and the inter-subjective consensus they may lead to.
Quoting Joshs
I don't think this is a good analogy since mathematics is strictly rule-based and phenomenological inquiry is not. There are elements of art in mathematics but it is ultimately a science, just as there are elements of science in phenomenology, but it is ultimately an art, as Heidegger came to realize.
Let's zoom in on this. When will we know that we have fully understood such a glorious thing as 'the dynamics of its structuration with respect to the phenomenal unfolding of experience'? Why would we need to know? This too would be scooped up in our directed doings. Or/also it would be the old metaphysickal seduction. The 'cool' teacher can wow his young students. They can slap some pseudo-scientific jargon on their preferences.
Attacks on science and correspondence are like attacks on dad for not actually being God but only a reliable, imperfect dad. It's not the the stoner son is talking nonsense. He's just mostly arguing against his own misunderstandings of pop. Pop never promised him a rose garden. To be fairer, I have seen some scientism. Some thinkers go too far in the other direction.
I apologize for being lazy, but I've linked to an article I wrote in which I explain why I care about all this arcane stuff, and what relevance I think it has to the understanding of psychological phenomena such as affectivty , empathy, metaphor and social conditioning. https://www.academia.edu/38392024/Heidegger_Against_Embodied_Cognition
Awesome. I'll check it out. I respect that you offer an answer to the question (which I think is fair.)
So what is your definition of science that differentiates it from phenomenology? Here's my definition. Science is a name with changing meanings over time. It can be traced genealogically through cultural history in terms of these changing self-understandings which transform themselves in parallel with changes in philosophical worldviews over the past centuries . There is Greek science and philosophy, Scholastic science and philosophy, Enlightenment science and philosophy, Modernist science and philosophy, and post-modern science and philosophy. The difference within any era between the two is nothing that exists outside of that era, not science's understanding of its method, goals, tools, language. All of these are contingent. All that differentiates it from philosophy in any trans-historical sense is that it is more 'pragmatic'. And what does that mean? It uses a vocabulary that is less comprehensively self-examining. In one era that means it has privileged access to 'truth', in another that means it is a social construction which is as much art and politics as it is fact.
Quoting Janus
Yes, but the reason that the rule-based nature of mathematics was so central to the philosophical projects of Aristotle, Descartes and Leibnitz was becasue the metaphysical grounding of logic and math was considered by them to also be 'rule-based'. They believed in a world that was grounded in such a way that it could be described as consisting of precisely defined rules of relationship.
Most philosophers no longer believe that the rules of relationship that ground ontology have fixed content. So the role that mathematics once served to model the metaphysical grounding of philosophy has been taken over by verbal description. Even when mathematical description is used, it is recognized as just being a species of language( all language implies a rule-based function) rather than a platonic essence. There is no longer agreement on the role of proof.
Husserlian phenomenology is very much rule -based, in that it consists of apodictic certainties. But these are no longer certainties of specific content, but certainties of the structural nature of temporal change. Husserl had no need to make use of mathematical description to model his grounding of phenomenology, since for him the mathematical, as a product of logic, is secondary to what grounds meaning.So my point is that the role that mathematics used to play in philosophy has been taken over
by a form of description that reflects the new way that ultimate precision is now understood. In that sense phenomenology, Nietzschean polemics, post structuralism , hermeneutics and pragmatism carry forward the tradition of mathemtics as the language of ultimate precision, but via a new type of discourse.
I skimmed the paper. It's well written, and (FWIW ) I get the impression that you know what you are talking about. It is indeed thick with Heidegger and Derrida.
The paper does live at a high level abstraction. It'd be nice to hear how you'd apply your ideas to contemporary AI, just as Dreyfus once did.
[quote=Wiki]
Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalised (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that intelligence is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality.
[/quote]
It seems that Dreyfus was right. Or that Heidegger/Wittgenstein were right. Or that Hegel was right. Or that some 'idealist' was right....
Is that really the gist of 'pragmatic'? Why would people trust scientists more on certain issues? Certainly not because they are less comprehensively self-examining. They are reliable prophets and good at making stuff that gives us what we want.
If the distinction between philosophy and science is illusory or merely a useful fiction, then fine. But we can accuse any distinction of being a useful fiction. Unless the utility vanishes, the distinction won't either.
I see what you mean. Our pragmatic, mundane ways of talking are cheap models, good enough for government work. But this is a stretched metaphor! Actual applied math is going nowhere. I think only someone who doesn't have their hands in the numbers would use that metaphor.
All human disciplines and activities have their own methods and concerns and their unique evolutions of those and historical origins. Science, in its various guises, is concerned with understanding the cosmos, the natural world. Phenomenology is concerned with understanding the nature of human experience as such.
Regarding what you say about the reasons for mathematics being rule-based: I don't think it matters to the practice of mathematics whether you are a Platonist (as apparently many mathematicians still are) or a formalist or a contructivist or whatever. The practice of mathematics is rule-based; it is the rule-based discipline par excellence. You can't dispense with the rules and still claim to be doing mathematics.
Phenomenology, on the other hand, may be thought of as, and practiced as if it were, rule-based or it may not. I see poetry and literature, for example, or even the visual arts, as pursuits which it is possible to consider as forms of phenomenology. I don't see any reason to think that there are apodeictic certainties of the "structural nature of temporal change"; it all depends on perspective, unlike mathematics, which does not, as far as can see.
I mean, I suppose it could be said that sciences are phenomenological inasmuch as they study various kinds of phenomena; but phenomenology itself is concerned with human experience, with life as it is lived, specifically.
That's true, but consider it in the context of the Platonic epistemology of the Divided Line, from The Republic (reproduced here from Wikipedia):
I think the underlying motivation was the search for what is not contingent - necessary, or, if you like, eternal truths, as distinct from knowledge of the sensory domain, which was deprecated by the rationalist tradition. And that search or quest was in some important sense spiritual-religious - not in the sense of 'dogmatic belief' which likewise was classified by the philosophers as the domain of 'pistis' or 'doxa', but nearer to 'noesis', which is direct intuition or vision of the fundamental nature of reality. About which Thomas Nagel says:
So in the Platonic view, mathematical certainty was valuable, because less subject to change, so, further from the temporal, and nearer the eternal. And I think that's true of the classical or pre-modern tradition of philosophy, generally - that the truths of mathematics and logic were of a higher order than sensory truth, but not as of high an order as metaphysics, the 'first philosophy'. Whereas, since Galileo, the presumption of philosophy has shifted precisely to a 'detached understanding' in the sense of 'objectively absolute' - or as near to it as possible - and the 'reign of quantity'. But what has entirely gone, is the sense of there being a vertical dimension, some axis along which the judgement of what is 'higher', in a qualitative sense, is intelligible.
Quoting Joshs
My point has been simply that mathematics, and science in general, considered as disciplines, are necessarily rule or procedure-based in ways that phenomenology is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology
it sounds like you're saying there is a real realm of physical nature and a real realm of human subjective experience, or what we colloquially call 'phenomenological', and that the two are different in their contents and methods of study but equally primordial. We can study the nature of human experience naturalistically, using objective empirical methods of the social sciences, or phenomenologically, via non-empirical philosophical modes of inquiry.
The meaning of Husserl's phenomenology, which served as the jumping off point for Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, among others, is quite different from this colloquial understanding of phenomenological. As Dan Zahavi puts it " Husserl is not concerned with finding room for consciousness within an already well established materialistic or naturalistic framework. The attempt to do the latter assumes that consciousness is merely yet another object in the world. For Husserl, the problem of consciousness should not be addressed on the background of an unquestioned objectivism. Frequently, the assumption has been that a better understanding of the physical world will allow us to understand consciousness better and rarely, that a better understanding of consciousness might allow for a better understanding of what it means for something to be real.
The positive sciences are so absorbed in their investigation of the natural (or social/cultural) world that they do not pause to reflect upon their own presuppositions and conditions of possibility. For Husserl, natural science is (philosophically) naive. Its subject matter, nature, is simply taken for granted. Reality is assumed to be out there, waiting to be discovered and investigated. And the aim of natural science is to acquire a strict and objectively valid knowledge about this given realm. But this attitude must be contrasted with the properly philosophical attitude, which critically questions the very foundation of experience and scientific thought."
As Evan Thompson concurs "I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn’t conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential. We can see historically how
the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same
time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be
post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as
not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually
involving the mental)."
So I would correct your claim that science is concerned with studying the natural world and phenomenology with the inner world of experience. Scientific approaches which are ensconced within a naive realist worldview believe that what they do is study the natural world. Empirical perspectives, such as 4ea(enactive, embodied, embedded extended affective), which have absorbed Husserl's lessons, do not make such claims for studying something called nature that can be thought independently of how the world appears for a subject. They don't study a natural world but an intersubjectively enacted world. And this isn't just psychologists I'm talking about but also biologists and physicists.
Quoting Janus
How is mathematics rule-based? A mathematical operation assigns a procedure.These procedures organize actions in a particular way. That is how they act as rules. But constructivist mathematicians know that we cannot logically derive one procedure from another in terms of formal proof. Addition, multiplication and more sophisticated procedures ,therefore, act as all other linguistic concepts. They are formal abstractions. Their precision and power resides not in their being rules, because a rule in its essence is simply a way of proceeding. What give them their usefulness is the fact that they are supposedly unambiguously understood. The command 'move to your left' is a rule, but it is imprecise, subject to interpretation. What gives the meaning of a mathematical rule its suppose freedom from ambiguity? Mathematics, resting on logic, begins from the thought of a pure, ideal object , devoid of all content but that it exists in itself as object. This would seem to be obvious but the idea of pure object had to be formulated as such by the Greeks. Once the idea of ideal object was established , the possibility of calculation became possible. Calculation makes no sense without objectivity. Mathematical rules are operations on ideal objects. One counts two or three or four of 'this' . IF there is no self-identical 'this' to remain itself , then there is no basis for calculation. Even if one counts different things, one is abstracting a common property to be counted..
Husserl argues that what we actually experience are continuous flowing adumbartions of perceptual modifications, aspects, variations, not objects in themselves. We synthesize the idea of an object out of this constantly changing flow of experience, but we never end up with a simple conceptual form, because it is in the nature of experiencing to continually modify itself. Our objects are relative , always incomplete , ongoing syntheses, They are ongoing activities of consciousness.
The supposed pure self-identicality of objects, the basis of the power and precision of math, is in fact a self-changing process instead of a solid fact.. Thus means that the rule-bound nature of math amounts to the assignment of a procedure of action whose dependability is no more assured than the stability of meaning of the objects it seeks to organize via its rule. so the most fundamental precision grounding phenomena of experience(including 'nature') inheres in a discourse that is indeed rule-bound(in that it prescribes a procedure of thought) but a rule that takes into account self-reflexively the self-transfomational nature of nature. That is to say, such a rule takes into acdcount that the irreducible basis of the world is not objects in themselves, but intentional activities of subject-object correlation. So we can see why recent philosophers are no longer interested in grounding or buttessing their theories in formal logic/mathematics.
They have found more clarifying discursive rules.
Wouldn't that higher dimension still be operative for a Kantian and neo-Kantian empiricism? The 'reign of quantity' needs its proper form to organize it, otherwise it becomes blind. We laugh at the idea that the secret to the universe is the number 44, because it points to no organization, no gestalt to animate it meaningfully. Unlike classical and scholastic Platonism, Kantianism doesnt believe in an eternal content that mathematics can reveal to us, but it does believe in eternal form. In a way this leaves mathematics in a more subservient role than it played in earlier philosophical eras. For the eternal form that represents the Kantian ideal, and is manifested in the transcendental categories, is not something that any given mathematical structure can approximate. It is simply the formal idea of mathematical objectivity itself.
The present-at-hand could be seen only as an extension of ready-to-hand. (Prior it has become pure theory of what is this? Thing is seen as fallen from the sky.) Present-at-hand has often its roots still in pragmatic-technical-being and it merely theorizes some ready-to-hand relations so that theoretical relations are consequently embedded as ready-to-hand relations. For example, (in our hyper modernized global world) "improving" some tool requires that its properties are analyzed "abstractly" so that the device would work optimally in so general circumstances as possible. Here some general abstract properties tend to replace the adaptation or customization to individual situations. When this new improved device is commonly deployed we have ready-to-hand-being which is actually in part orientating itself according to present-at-hand-being. The more some thing or "state of affairs" in general is adequate or "closer" (intrinsic) to some other, the more there is authentic ready-to-hand-being and the less there is abstract present-at-handness. Abstract generalization means the estrangement from the concrete self-hood i.e. being as appropriate as possible in its own context. Abstraction/generalization broadens (or eventually destroys) the context so that the "fulfillment of the sense" (phenomenological concept) is experienced only with regard to some general properties. Dasein/existence orients itself towards property-significance as present-at-hand theoretical reality. New model of hammer with new improved properties makes Dasein/Existence hammering in a certain way in all situations.
But can generalization ever really destroy context?(I think of Derrida's famous adage 'there is nothing outside context'). Even if a concept is experienced only with regard to some general properties,
aren't these so-called general properties made relevant for an individual in relation to their particular contextual situation, without their being explicitly aware of this? In other words, is there any way to ever escape the particularizing effect of context, even when we lose sight of this?
Indeed, and again, to refer to the Platonic epistemology, this is because mathematical and logical proofs are apodictic, immediately evident to the intellect, without reference to sensory perception. That was the reason why, for Greek philosophers, they belonged to a higher or different order to the sensible. And, as you imply, the contribution of Greek philosophy here is seminal.
A footnote, however, is the way in which Galileo interpreted the significance of dianoia. He too understood the sense in which mathematics captured a higher level of truth - 'the book of nature is written in mathematics' - but regrettably, the other, more noetic and aesthetic elements of Platonic philosophy were relegated to the domain of the 'secondary qualities' by virtue of their association with the mind.
Quoting Joshs
Does it? The categories, according to IETP, were adapted pretty well wholesale from Aristotle. I am interested in your comment that they can be equated with the forms.
Quoting Joshs
:clap: :clap: :clap:
Naturalism: 'what you see out the window'. Phenomenology: 'you looking out the window'.
Great post, by the way. I really like the way you're developing these ideas. I have the Kindle preview of the Thomson book and am going to buy.
This is precisely the problem here, it could be the problem of "fallenness". To be as close or adequate as possible to the matter or case itself. What is the true experience or description of something? Differentiation, not unification, would make something appear as itself. Nature of natural sciences would be the realm of the technical unification though. After all, Dasein/existence has a physiological body which is often a technical object. Here Dasein is in principle exchangeable with any other Dasein.
Can you explain that? I think that is the crux of your critique, but a lot of Heideggerese is lost on me- mainly because more specialized jargon is used to explain his specialized jargon.
Yes I know, it is frustrating. Basically what I'm saying is that Dasein describes the subjectivity of the everyman in a general situation; it's set up that way. Heidegger's analysis is aimed at revealing deeper and deeper 'grounding' structures of the everyman in every day situations.
Some things to note about this everyman; it's bodiless, it doesn't have contextual constraints like 'a person reflecting' or 'a person with chronic pain', it's sexless, genderless, mentally typical...
I mean the "What are poets for?" essay mentioned by OP.
Heidegger defines truth as simply the unconcealing of beings (letting beings be), not whether that unconcealing is accurate with respect to some standard of comparison.
Quoting waarala
Heidegger would say that Dasein does not 'have' a body in the sense of possessing an object, Dasein 'bodies forth'.
"There is actually no phenomenology of the body because the body is not a corporeal thing . With such a thematic approach, one has already missed the point of the matter. I myself am the relationship to something or to someone with whom I am involved in each case. However, "relationship" is not to be understood here in the modern logical-mathematical sense of relation as a relationship between objects. The existential relationship cannot be objectified. " Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars
I just meant that Kant's transcendental categories of perception and understanding (space and time,quantity, quality, relation, and modality) are apriori formal organizing principles. They are , of course, contents also, but contents which cannot be modelled mathematically(mathematics does't describe them because it presupposes these categories. They are the formal conditions of possibility of doing math and logic. One could say Kant is the first modern deconstructer of mathematics and logic
BTW, I am grappling with how to treat Thompson's(and Varela's) attempt at integrating Buddhist-inspired contemplative practices with phenomenology(and cognitive neuroscience). In partrticular , their articulation of the not-present-to-itself ego in terms of bliss, compassion, generosity, etc. How can they justify such positive affective characterizations of primoridal being-with? Notice that Heidegger thinks Dasein via ambiguous and equivocal affectivities like primordial guilt, angst and uncanniness,
Here's a more straighttforward critique of Levinas's reading of Heidegger from your favorite writer:
According to Levinas. "the thought of the Being of the existent would have the propositional logic of the truism, placing ethics under the heel of ontology. Being as ontological difference is the concept of an abstract predicate, seeking to cover the totality of existents in its extreme universality." Levinas interprets "the thought of Being as a concept of Being", but Being is not a concept or theory or existent.
"Heidegger is emphatic on this point: the Being which is in question is not the concept to which
the existent (for example, someone) is to be submitted (subsumed). Being is not the concept of a
rather indeterminate and abstract predicate, seeking to cover the totality of existents in its
extreme universality because it is not a predicate, and authorizes all predication.
"By making the origin of language, meaning, and difference the relation to the infinitely other,
Levinas is resigned to betraying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse. But the true
name of this inclination of thought to the Other, of this resigned acceptance of incoherent
incoherence inspired by a truth more profound than the "logic" of philosophical discourse,
transcendental horizons of language, is empiricism. The profundity of the empiricist intention
must be recognized beneath the naivete of certain of its historical expressions. It is the dream of
a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference. Empiricism
is its philosophical name, its metaphysical pretention or modesty.(Derrida, VM189)"
These are good observations. One could add that in the mode of average everydayness of 'Das Man' (which is what I assume you're talking about), social experience is treated as generic, unreflective, consensus, conventional. "The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar".
Interestingly, average everydayness is not a present to hand mode but related to the ready to hand.
And it should be mentioned that it is not that the experience of Das Man is genuinely generic, conventional and public. It is that one believes it to be so, and doesnt notice the way that one's encounters with others is contextually particularized. We believe we are talking about the same things, understanding our shared words in exactly the same way, even though that is never the case. In the mode of average everydayness we understand this implictly but not explicitly. And because it is not explict, we are not able to make use of what particularizes our experiences and therefore tend toward following the herd.
The way I see it, when Heidegger wrote Being and Time, his culture, his small town community, did believe such things about the veridical nature of the shared meanings of social life. If he were writing today, I wonder if he would find the concept of Das Man useful in a culture where more of us have become accustomed to interpreting each others words and actions in contextual terms,and where convention and conformity are disdained.
BTW, I'd like to hear more about what you mean by ontic feedback loops.
Bliss is an intrinsic attribute of being which is usually ‘obscured by adventitious defilements’. It's just there and at some point in yogic practices it simply arises or manifests. There's a Hindu (not Buddhist) term, sat-chit-ananda, meaning, roughly, 'being-mind-bliss', and the suffix, 'ananda' is often found in Hindu names (e.g. Satyananda, Muktananda, and others like it.) In any case, it's experiential, not a theory, not a consequence of intellection.
(There's an anecdote that Heidegger was once found by a friend reading D. T. Suzuki. He was said to have remarked "If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings". However he didn't believe it possible or prudent to try and adopt Buddhist ideas or culture, generally, so it never overtly figured as part of his corpus. )
No, I'm not making any claims about separate realms or anything like that. I'm just saying that what the various sciences typically deal with as compared to what phenomenology typically deals with are subject matters produced by significantly different kinds of perspectives with their attendant disparate methodologies of inquiry.
Quoting Joshs
I don't know who you think has such a "colloquial" (nice bit of condescension there, btw :up: ) understanding, but as far as I know Husserl's "epoché" or suspension of judgement concerning the question of the existence of an objective or external world is certainly no secret and could even be said to be notorious.
Quoting Joshs
It's not the job of the sciences to reflect on such things; science's job (broadly speaking) is just to investigate nature as it appears to us. It's not the job of science to make pronouncements as to whether what it deals with is the ding an sich, the world in itself or the world for us. Science does not need to assume that "reality is out there, waiting to be discovered and investigated".
It would really make no difference to her practice of science if the scientist were, for example, to assume, as some Quantum theorists do, that when we discover the fossil remains of plants and animals, carbon-date them, then hypothesize about them and so on, we are "collapsing the wave function" and literally objectivizing or making determinate, where it was previously indeterminate, the story of their evolution.
Science is not philosophy, and it is not phenomenology either, they are all different disciplines with different starting assumptions and methodologies, which was the original and only point I made. Your responses have mostly consisted in putting far too many words in my mouth, and most of them inapt! I recommend writing less and arguing more if you want to engage in fruitful discussion.
I don't disagree with what you say in the rest of your post about mathematics, and none of it is new to me. I'll just point out that what you say only demonstrates further that mathematics is more strictly rule or procedure-based in precisely dealing with determinate abstract objects, than is any 'living' inquiry such as phenomenology or the even the natural or social sciences. As far as I can see what you say there only goes to further support that contention. So I remain convinced that your analogy in this passage:
Quoting Joshs
is, as it appears at first glance, not a good one because it is unargued; and you have offered no cogent grounds for thinking any such thing, at least as far as I have been able to tell.
FWIW, I agree. And that's some of my beef with oceans of jargon that would rather obscure this with speculative truths like the body not being a corporeal thing, as if that perspective or frame didn't have as many limitations or as much superstition as the plumber's view it's meant to replace.
So it describes my annoyance at the maddening creaking and stomping sounds I hear everyday from my inconsiderate upstairs neighbor?
As I mentioned above, Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity (lecture notes from 1923) is a great text for those who don't want to drown in Being and Time. It's less than 100 pages and just a genuine pleasure to read. His early stuff wasn't printed when Being and Time came out, so maybe it tends to be overlooked, despite being more likable in many ways.
If anyone out there has also read this text, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I find Heidegger's thrownness, idea sort of useful- the facticity of what is already-there, and what has been shaped historically. Also, the idea that Dasein is sort of a mix of the past, present, and future. Okay, so he brings in the time aspect. But I think my own conception of what essentially comprises and shapes the individual human being is more accurate and to the point. It lacks that obscurantism that so entices people to Heidegger though. My conception is thus:
Each action we take, is a decision we have to make and choose within the motivational constraints of survival, comfort-seeking, and entertainment mediated by genetically and environmentally created personality filters, that are themselves carried out and partially informed from a broader linguistically-based, socio-cultural context with a historically-developed set of institutions.
I pretty much agree with your conception, which I'd even say is already in Hobbes. (The first part of Leviathan ('Of Man') would make a great standalone paperback.) Probably Heidegger would too, but he'd stress all the sub-conceptual habits or doings as part of that context. And he'd shine a light on how artificial and contingent some of our ways of talking are.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Like I said, go back and it's not obscure. I mention the text that I keep opening up again, and that means going from Bacon to Heidegger without becoming dizzy.
That's fine but I'm also trying to make the point that, with a philosophy like Heidegger, what makes his insights any greater than mine? Is it credentials? Degree? The voluminous amount of writing? Essentially, his philosophy is akin to theology, or one's own insights into the nature of what is the case. Because he thought of some of his own jargon and had some nifty ideas of human relations to the world and language, does he deserve more attention? Other philosophers have their own jargon, and have different conceptions. So it is just hermeneutics.. picking one that agrees more with your sensibilities at that point. What makes one's insights into the human psyche more insightful? It jives well? Those in certain circles just thinks it makes sense? It's usefulness? Many philosophies can be useful if people took them as seriously, but certain philosophers gain traction and others do not.
Often these philosophers are used because of the weight the name carries. Sometimes I'll refer to Schopenhauer, even though I have my own similar idea, simply because people respond to the dead philosopher more than schopenahuer1 idea. So be it, if it is taken more seriously, even though it shouldn't have to be necessary. I also do it as it shows I'm not alone in my thinking- there is some historical precedent. But again, doesn't mean more insightful just means that a species with 5,000 years of writing is likely not to have too much new under the sun into thoughts of the human psyche.
@Janus,@ghostHere is some jargon I made up that I find useful:
1) Minutia mongering- our focus on the particular, especially as it pertains to technological mastery. Some type of people think that by "mining" existence- that is to say, by knowing/mastering all the minutia of life (minutia mongering), that we are somehow fulfilling a higher goal of some sort. Even if they say there is no higher goal to work towards, de facto by being wrapped up in the minutia, by trying to master it, they are regarding the fact that we are able to mine some understanding that can be useful for prediction/functionality from the materials/universe as being something of value. The value comes in the output of more mining. For example, if I show you a really complex and extremely detailed math formula or proof, and then go about solving it, and then applying it to some world event that it maps to, I must be doing something of meaning because of its very complexity and its use in a functional application. I have mined the information and presented it and solved it and used it in a complex tool. That in itself must mean something. The very fact of my understanding and solving the complexity or that I advanced a functionality.
To sum it up, all the information needed to maintain a complex technology, is minutia mongering. Our culture relies on people to be experts in minutia- to monger it, in order for our mode of survival to continue. Because of its use-value in our culture, the minutia and its mongering, are seen as valuable and to have meaning because of its useful functionality. The minutia mongerer is the modern man extraordinaire to those with a scientific bent. The minutia mongerer is an expert about how a piece of technology works- right down to the bits and bytes, or the quarks, and electrons.
2) Survival/comfort-seeking/entertainment Motivations- these are the three main categories for which humans strive. We keep ourselves alive through socio-cultural, historically-developed institutions, avoid discomfort/maintain our environments (e.g. clean our environs because it feels more comfortable/society expects it maybe), and flee boredom (entertain ourselves).
3) Circularity Argument for Non-procreation- Any X reason for a parent thinking a future child should be born becomes a circularity when compared to the fact that no one had to be born to carry out that X reason in the first place. For example, no one needs to overcome challenges, if they weren't born to experience those challenges in the first place.
Addendum: it is wrong to foist unescapable set of challenges for another person when there did not need to be those challenges in the first place.
Etc. Etc. insert more schopenhauer1 jargon here.
They are more original?
I agree with the spirit of this. But I'd frame it in terms of what makes The Rolling Stones a good band? If you don't like them, nothing! If you do, then maybe you'll try to convince someone that they are worth listening too, despite their shitty, latest album. Do you listen to the band Heart? Their old stuff kills. 'Little Queen' is great, and it's never on the radio. That's where I'm coming from.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I wouldn't say deserve. Basically some names get famous and a person naturally wonders what the hype is all about. FOMO. And then there is just male vanity. If someone plays the 'ontological' card in an argument, it's nice to be prepared for that. It's perversely glamorous to be versed in this theology. Personally I think we all end up in love with some kind of theology, perhaps negative or anti- but theology all the same (the basic shit we tell ourselves to feel noble or at home in the world.) As I see it, we cobble this together from what's around us, as birds build nests from nearby junk.
The fashion opportunity for us is positioning ourselves publicly by spouting our evaluations of those more famous than us. Is there some phony fame worship involved? I think so. But these creeps and maniacs, the gallery of sages, are also great abbreviations. I know you know this. I'm trying to mostly agree with you and yet add what you are maybe leaving out.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yeah I think we are drawn to those who tell us what we want to hear. But sometimes they simultaneously say some weird stuff that we don't like along with that. 'Jives well' is probably the essence. It seduces us. We build our own faces from pieces of faces we find pretty. Utility? I'd say spiritual utility. It's like conceptual religion. But also like pre-science.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I agree. But that's part of the fashion opportunity, calling out the fad. I also really like finding that I'm not alone in some of my wilder thinking. Beyond all the public performance of our wit and education, there's a genuine private response to these dead spirits. You are the 'real' Schopenhauer as you read and understand him. And I am Hobbes in the dark joy of his clarity.
I agree that there's not much new under the sun, but the reader-writer in me loves the potent expression. So I take that as another creative opportunity. And as a reader I give quite a few fucks about the translation or the original English prose. Returning to Heidegger, I was disgusted by the first translations I picked up. There are some gross jargon choices in both translations of B&T. Far better I say to prioritize a lovable English and take some risks. That's another reason I point to books that might be downplayed as not the 'official' works that one must project oneself as having oh so thoroughly assimilated (modern scripture) and yet are actually a pleasure. A move in the fashion game but also a sincere move, sincerity or 'authenticity' being an old-school position that keeps on chugging.
By popularity, this is the consensus, or Janus thinks so only, or is it up to the individual?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'd say it's hard work and luck if one can be original. I'm happy with a fresh metaphor or paraphrase. The great thing about the philosophical passion IMV is that it lifts one up above giving a damn. To me it makes sense that the magic monkey will return again and again to same insights, the same images of virtue. Give me that old time religion, but let me rip open a glossy new way to package it.
I'd pay actual money for a book written by you fleshing out your posts in this forum.
That's how that works.
Thanks Inyenzi. Hmm :chin:
Thus Spoke Janus just doesn't sound as good.
Quoting Janus
I should also have pointed out that they are more comprehensive and systematic.
Slow your roll there. I'm just suggesting that certain types of philosophy are extremely detailed pictures of that person's interpretation of what is the case, sometimes requiring its own self-contained jargon/neologisms to get the point across. They have some really useful and interesting insights, and in a poetic/aesthetic sense can be very powerful. But it is still someone's interpretation of the world and other people's reaction to that interpretation. What makes it philosophy proper is how it relates itself to previous known philosophers, and how subsequent philosophers reference it for their own work. Similar to how Google works with its heuristics, the more other philosophers reference a previous philosopher, the more weight that philosopher has. However, I don't necessarily think something is of great insight just because a philosopher is referenced more. And what makes a philosopher itself can be quite hard to define, other than, you know, be credentialed from a higher institution with a degree, but c'mon... does that make a PHILOSOPHER? Ha
You overestimate the extent to which Husserl has been effectively understood . Zahavi, one of the foremost Husserl scholars, has found the 'colloquial' misreading of Husserlian phenomenology to be widespread.
Quoting Janus
Science needs to assume the conditions of possibility that make the notion of objective causality, and therefore calculability, intelligible. This doesnt mean that the quantum physicist mediates on these conditions of possibility, these notions that were established and elaborated over centuries by philosophers and scientists-philosophers like Galileo and Newton. It means that physicists implicitly assume such conditions of possibility. Put differently, a scientist works within a worldview that makes the questions that they ask, the puzzles that they see, the discoveries that they make, coherent to them. And when they innovate within that worldview, their discovery elaborates and subtly transforms that worldview, even if their contribution doesnt explicitly make this apparent . Physicists today don't need to know phenomenology at an explicit or an implicit level, because their worldview hasn't evolved in that direction yet.
But they do need to know the general ideas that Aristotle Descartes, and I would argue, Kant, contributed to the establishment of the modern concept of empirical objectivity, at an implicit level , whether they have actually read the work of these figures or not.
Just as this is the case, eventually physics will move on from its Cartesian framework . My belief is that they will make their way into the worldview that phenomenology has constructed. They will not, of course, find it necessary, or even be able to articulate explicitly,this new worldview, except for a few philosopher -physicists. But they will indeed depend on the new worldview in order to make their 'natural' subject matter intelligible to them implicitly , just as they now depend on a Cartesian-Kantian worldview. This was Thompson's point about the need for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way. It's not that scientists will have to sit down ans talk about how to change their orientation from physicalist to post-physicalist, They will simply continue to devise experiments and create new theoretical models as they have done for centuries, and at some point it will become apparent that they have made the move out of the older worldview into a new one. A few of them, like Lee Smolen, will take it upon themselves to wax explicitly philosophical, as he has done concerning the need to incorporate temporality into physics. His argument is that the current generation of physicists is anparticularly non-philosophical generation unlike that of Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg, and physics has suffered as a result. Their leaving time out of physics as as a central organizing principle has held back their ability to tie together a number of loose ends in cosmological understanding.
Quoting Janus
My point was that mathematics gets its precision from its grounding in supposedly determinate self-identical abstract objects . But Husserl, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty , Heidegger, Derrida and others, believe the notion of a determinate self-identical abstract object to be an illusion, a fiction, the imperfect product of intentional activity. It s not simply that they are subjective constructions, but that even understood as mental objects they do not have determinant self-identicality in the way that Enlightenment thought presumed. This is one of the central insights of that 'llving' inquiry called phenomenology.
Well generally I agree. But I'm interested in 'anonymous meme forges.' I learn from others on this site. The informality and anonymity offers new possibilities. Academics probably can't get away with much slang or profanity in the middle of high-grade jargon. Think about Zizek. That's a big part of his charm, the fusion of high and low.
* A sad little story. On my own I came up with 'by any memes necessary.' I thought now that's a zinger. Then I googled it to see if it had been thought of already and of course it had. Tears of a clown. Ours is a world of 'soy boys' and 'power donuts.' I say embrace the times, assimilate.
Well said. Rorty thinks of philosophy as a genre of creative writing. We philosophers have a taste for theory over novels. We may read novels, but I bet most of us like this kind of language. We just tell it like it is.
I think Rorty is right. But where would philosophy be without the extreme minutia mongering of all forms of logic? The logicians and philosophers of math (and maybe some types of science) would scoff at the notion of being thrown in with the creative writing folks.
I guess I have the same response to you as ghost:
But where would philosophy be without the extreme minutia mongering of all forms of logic? The logicians and philosophers of math (and maybe some types of science) would scoff at the notion of being thrown in with the creative writing folks.
The problem is, logic has as its backing, things like technology. For example, boolean logic is the basis for how electrical signals get turned into logical gates that allow information to calculate and be stored. This is the basis of a computer. Computers use millions of instances of logic. Logic is also behind many of the physical events that can be predicted and harnessed for technological use. Looks like certain forms of logic start to point to a kind of realism, or at least a usefulness that can't be ignored. Then we get the typical debates of realism and social constructivism, yadayada.
Well I love philosophy. We can call science, philosophy, religion, etc. various forms of coping or flourishing. My point would be that as individuals we have more fear and trembling when it comes to religion or philosophy, in this culture at least where they are private matters.
I reject scientism. I don't care about science as some source of grand truth. It's persuasive primarily in terms of its worldly power and its reliable prophecy. I guess we both want to tell the truth. Well I focus on what I'd choose as the fundamentals. Mortals in a familiar world together, talking and using tools. I love that part of Heidegger. He's a poet of 'the world' as the people intend it that word. Try to imagine how someone like me might want to assimilate him, as a powerful anti-theorist, pointing out how much metaphysicians betray the way it really usually is in their obsession with certainty, for the spiderwebs of systems. So I don't like when this stuff becomes its own massive spiderweb, even if I believe the spiders are talking sense like earnest existential mathematicians (and I do.)
Quoting Joshs
The air conditioner that kicks on when I need it and cools the room is more like it. Philosophy of science is fascinating. Maybe it helps some people. But I need and most of us need the air conditioner. All of this stuff is entangled. I get that. All distinctions are useful lies. Reality is one. That holism-idealism is true in an important sense. I can grasp the speculative truth or some version of it.
Quoting Joshs
I agree. I understand. But that's not the only thing worth doing. Our ignorance is a vast ocean. But then the question cannot be asked, so the riddle does not exist. Still, we all row our individual boats here or there with our own little torches, calling out what little we see of ultimate things. Or calling out the poetry that has delighted and seduced us.
As far as ultimate stories go, I think I prefer myths. The longwinded conceptual tales of ultimate reality are a little dry for my taste.
It depends on how you read M&V. You could interpret it as saying that Heidegger is not a utilitarian means-ends kind of guy, but Levinas is forced to construe him that way because of his own inclination to absolutize difference., So its not that Dasein is never hungry, but that enjoyment and suffering, and all other being-affected-by-the-world, matters to me becasue mattering belongs to a continuity of mattering, not as a means to an end(or as an end in itself) but as a means to a means to a means ad infinitum.
Can you explain the practical implications of the difference between Heidegger's "mattering" and Levinas' "end in itself"?
Indeed, their usefulness cannot be ignored. Even Heidegger has a healthy dose of respect for the power of logic. All he's saying, really, is that he thinks it would be helpful to yet again, but from a bit more radical perspective that is neither subjective nor objective but a peculiar 'not yet' of either, reexamine the way we understand the genesis of logic in our thinking. We can then look back at all these wonderful things that logic allows us to do, and see more penetrating what it is that is really at the heart of its so-called precision. One day, maybe a century from now, all those devices which depend such languages as boolean logic, will be producible via a completely different operating language, that may appear at first blush to be devoid of the requirements of logic(non-contradiction, etc). In other words, I envision a kind of technological langauge that is not itself 'logical' , but that nevertheless underlies all logics.It will allow us to continue to produce logical machines if we wish, as well as machines which do much more useful and interesting things via this new language, including the kinds of things that we now lump into the amorphous category of subjectvism, irrationality and affect-feeling-emotion..
Most vague, I know.
Levinas says we enjoy (or suffer) things for their own sake, not because they are means to an end.
In this sense, they clearly matter to us. But as ends in themselves, the way they matter is different than it is for Heidegger. How so? For Heidegger, having something matter to me, caring about it, having concern for it, its having significance for and affecting me; these are absolutely primordial for my experience of all aspects of the world as a Dasein. there is nothing I can encounter that does not have significance for me in relation to some ongoing concern. But the way in which I encounter beings, objects , people, is such that they always appear within an implicit nexus, a rich integrated context of a totality of relevance. So I am always immersed in and involved in a particular sort of experiencing in which everything that I am engaged with emerges out of that background totality of relevance. I type these words with a given purpose in mind which is always shift its sense, then I am distracted from my writing by my phone. But even in being distracted, the larger background context of relevance isnt broken. The possibility of my phone ringing was implied by that context.
Even the most surprising events emerge out of a larger context of relevance so that I can only be surprised by those things that at some leveI I anticipated. What does this imply about mattering for its own sake via an ongoing nexus of mattering? Heidegger, given his way of seeing contextual significance as an endless flowing continuity, would say that the enjoyment of things in themselves must also imply an anticipating beyond those things also, toward further modifications of enjoyment or suffering. But not as Levinas seems to accuse him of, as making hunger and enjoyment matter only becasue there is some overarching utility in mind. The contextual nexus is not over arching for Heidegger, it is more temporally unfolding. What I am affected by this moment totally engages me, in itself, for what it is in itself, not becasue of some overarching scheme.
I'd have to agree with them both here, but in different contexts. Heidegger gets right the overarching picture- we are a striving animal (pace Schopenhauer). We are mainly deprived in the departments relating to survival, comfort, and entertain-related needs at almost all waking hours (at least for most socially-normalized humans).
However, Levinas has a point too, in that amidst our deprivation, we have the capacity for what I call, absolute "goods" (they are good in and of themselves). I can think of 7 categories at least of experiences that are absolutely good in and of themselves that being: relationships, physical pleasure, aesthetic pleasure, accomplishment, esteem, learning, and flow states.
Of course, overall are these goods worth the costs? I don't think so. We are always deprived in some way, and that is universal/structural (pace Heidegger?/Schopenhauer). We also have many varying contingent negatives that affect our individual lives (in various different contingent ways depending on the individual). To be born, is to give someone debt- even in the most material wealthy, well-adjusted, contingently-low suffering individual. To force challenges of the individual, to give them the need for need, and to provide them opportunities to be prey of contingent harms, and then have to avoid/overcome/navigate them is not good. Hence, in the final outcome, the best ethic is to realize the situation (see the pessimistic aesthetic) and rebel against the existence (antinatalist).
According to at least a few of the more philosophically minded physicists of recent times, Rovelli, Greene, Wheeler and De Witt, for example, time is a kind of illusion. The equations of QM do not incorporate time; the so-called "arrow of time" is irrelevant in that context. According to current Quantum theory time simply cannot be an "organizing principle" for physics.
So, what do you think would be the practical difference that a posited future physics working under the paradigm of phenomenology would have form the physics of today?
Quoting Joshs
Right, so it seems you do agree with me that phenomenology cannot be as precisely rule-based as mathematics. The question as to whether mathematical objects are, understood as "mental objects", determinately self-identical would seem to be an incoherent one. They are certainly, logically speaking, determinate; whether they are so from some imagined phenomenological or experiential perspective would seem to be undecidable even assuming that it makes sense to ask it, and in any case could have no bearing on mathematics as a discipline that I can imagine. If you can imagine a possible difference then I am open to hearing what you have to say about it.
Sure, I'm not denying that we may be able to offer some original insights and perspectives or that there is value in what happens here. But all of it is against the background of the greats, just as all of modern science rests on "the shoulders of giants". It is also true that the greats may have incorporated insights from lesser figures who never achieve any notoriety.
I don't think that the number of references to philosophers is an arbitrary matter, but that it is determined by what new insights they have to offer. I don't believe it has anything to do with being "credentialed", though, even if most referenced philosophers today do happen to be professional academics. If you love something to the degree that you want to make it your life's work, then of course you will avail yourself of any institutional opportunity to earn a living from doing what you love. Same goes for artists and musicians. This doesn't mean that it is impossible for an autodidact, working outside of any institutional context, to produce some valuable work, but it would seem to be rare..
Beats the hell out of me. Seriously though, the primordial ground for Husselian phenomenology is time, More specifically time consciousness as the tripartite structure of retention, presencing and protention.
Quoting Janus
It seems to me this view of time is in tune with Kant. Temporality and history only take on a fundamental explanatory role for philosophy with Hegel, Marx and Dilthey, and for science with Darwin.
Can a future physics put the arrow of time at the center of its thinking as Smolen, Prigonige and other envision? i think it will have no choice if it wants to avoid stagnating. This will likely mean that physics will morph into an evolutionary science in accord with the biological and social sciences. Just one persons's opinion.
Yes, I do understand that, I just can't see what relevance that could possibly have to quantum mechanics.
Quoting Joshs
I don't think it is really "in tune with Kant", beyond a superficial semblance; Kant asserts that time is an empirical matter, one of the pure forms of phenomenal experience, the other being space. In claiming that, he agrees with Leibniz and disagrees with Newton. The modern understanding of spacetime is a kind of synthesis of Newton and Leibniz; it is a relativistic understanding, according to which spacetime is the real (in the sense of 'mind-independent') fabric of the cosmos.
But then QM seems to suggest that that "reality" itself is a matter of perspective, not of any particular perspective, but perspective per se, that is it obtains only when perspectives obtain. Perspectives obtain only in our familiar "macro" world; in the pre-perspectival "micro" world of QM there are no perspectives because of its indeterminate nature. (Perspectives in this broadest sense should not be thought of as being unique to humans).
It isn’t meant to. Husserl’s phenomenology is a science of consciousness/subjectivity NOT a science of physics. Physics is the science of physics. Husserl makes no facts about the material world in the manner that physics does and he certainly doesn’t dispute physics and/or stand in opposition to it. He was educated in physics and mathematics prior to his work on phenomenology (which he viewed as a science rather than as a philosophy).
His underlying goal was to improve/discover the grounding for the physical sciences and, for want of a better word, to ‘rescue’ psychology from empiricism - which he saw as a denial of the investigation of subjectivity.
It would be unfair to equate Husserl’s work as having anything to say about quantum phenomenon directly. It is of import today? More so in the relevant field of study if anywhere (neuroscience).
Some people seem to think it suggests this. I imagine academics in the field that think that are few and far between though? There are plenty of wacky interpretations out there, but the layman (myself included) often mistaken the mathematical model, probabilistic or otherwise, as being the physical reality. My uneducated view is that we’ve simply not become accustomed to certain concepts in common parse well enough to develop further paradigm shifts ... not just yet at least. Much in the way that the vast majority of us still don’t appreciate what Einstein did and how such ideas inevitably shift current perspectives. As a more tangible example many people refer to mere calculating as doing mathematics.
That's right it isn't; and I was responding to Joshs' apparent assertion that it is.
Quoting I like sushi
I don't think it is a "wacky" interpretation at all. It is not a matter of "mistaking the mathematical model", but a matter of trying to ascertain what the experimental results of QM, along with the mathematical models that have been so extraordinarily successful at predicting what will be observed, suggest about the 'fundamental' (micro) physical nature of reality. We already know, directly by experience, what the phenomenal (macro) nature of reality is.