Why Heidegger?

Posted on June 3, 2009
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | 5 Comments

OK, yes, still very busy. (I’m holding down the fort here at work alone which is a tad overwhelming) I thought I’d address a shorter question. Why do I find Heidegger interesting now? I have to admit that what I once studied 10 or even 5 years ago just isn’t what I’m interested in. Once I tended to study the bigger issues of transcendence and Being. While I still touch on those issues they tend to be complex and subtle. (When I return to a topic in these areas I find I have to check out my crib notes as often as not) So why is Heidegger practically relevant?

I think there are a few ares. First I think he talks about how things “withdraw” better than almost anyone. Even if you can’t quite handle reading Heidegger directly, check out someone like Dreyfus who is a good popularizer. This phenomena of withdrawal often gets overlooked. But we encounter it every day. When I’m using my computer successfully the mouse and keyboard “disappear” and I just am thinking about what I am doing. When something goes wrong (say a bit of dirt on the mouse or a loose cable) it is then that I really see the mouse or keyboard as objects.

This is really important not just to understand how objects appear for us. It’s also practically important in things like computer interface design. Paul Dourish wrote a great book on this, Where the Action Is a number of years back. If you write software I think Heidegger is simply very important to understand on these points. But honestly it applies to design in general. (I think one of the big reasons GM and Chrysler failed is because they missed these issues – it was the small things that kept the car from withdrawing as you drove it that made the vehicles often unsatisfying)

The second issue is related. It’s the idea of The Background. That is that our intentions can’t be fundamental. Rather our ability to have intentions isn’t a connecting of a closed off “mind” to a closed off world. Rather we are essentially embodied in our world. This is pretty important and really changes the way you think about intentions. The attempt to think intentionality in terms of initially closed off spheres is a fundamental mistake.

The final one that I think keeps me coming back to Heidegger is his conception of technology and framing. I know how often I write that I hate the term “framing.” The way it gets abused, especially by political strategists on the left, really bugs me. Heidegger’s term, gestell, is subtly different. Sometimes Heidegger speaks about it in ways that are a bit hard to understand. But he’s reaching for a sense that is similar to but subtly different from how one might often conceive of the frame. Framing (or perhaps better put en-framing) is the essence of technology and technological thinking. All that comes to be revealed in the world for me is enframed. Thus enframing is essentially tied to the notion of truth. To be revealed is to be revealed as something in a certain way. To be revealed is to be revealed as a way of ordering and is a gathering together. That is it is a part of a whole. (One wants to say part of an apparatus – but that has some misleading connotations)

What’s important about this notion of enframing is that we can find ourselves in many worlds, each of which entails a different way of comporting with the world. Objects have a way of existing in the world that varies from culture to culture (or even subgroup to subgroup). So the way a physicist looks at something is different from how a baker does.

The problem is that when we are trapped in a certain way of enframing (this mode of disclosure) we become distanced from the things themselves. That is because we limit how they can show themselves to us. Rather than being things they become mere resources or material. This becomes very bad when the things are people. And we encounter people in this way all the time. Say a waiter who is serving us. We don’t think of them as a person but merely as a resource we use to get our food. Even nature itself becomes nothing more than a resource with value only in the sense of a means to some other ends (often commercial).

There are other aspects of Heidegger I find practically useful. But I think those three are my biggest ones.

Related posts:

  1. Heidegger’s Transformations of Husserl
  2. Levinas, Heidegger & Objects
  3. Heidegger and Kuhn
  4. Heidegger on Art
  5. Heidegger and Science
  6. Heidegger vs. Levinas

Comments

5 Responses to “Why Heidegger?”
1 Michael Dorfman on June 3rd, 2009 12:19 pm

In terms of Heidegger and Computer Interface Design, I’d strongly recommend Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’s “Understanding Computers and Cognition”, and the work of Albert Borgmann.

Borgmann I’ve only read a little of. He becomes much more pragmatic with time turning to a lot of semiotics. So he’s definitely up my alley in many ways. Somewhat coincidentally I’d come upon a full issue of Techné devoted to his work.

Understanding Computers and Cognition I’d read a long, long time ago. Before I was introduced to Heidegger formally. I probably ought reread it one of these days.

3 Rich Knapton on June 6th, 2009 8:24 am

With regard to withdrawal, Miyamoto Musashi, in the Book of Five Rings (1635), wrote that the samurai was to practice until the sword became no sword and intention became no intension.

Rich

4 Rich Knapton on June 6th, 2009 8:36 am

When you talked about Heidegger and ‘enframing’ Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’ came to mind (without the technology of course).

Rich

Yes, withdrawal is very similar to the Zen notions of no-mind.

Kuhn and Heidegger are, in some ways, quite similar. In other ways they differ – especially over how a single experiment can be paradigm changing. Heidegger allows for a single event to completely shift the enframing. I wrote a post about this back in the days when I had more time to devote to the blog.

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