Mormon Metaphysics » Heidegger

Heidegger, Theology and Materialism

Clark — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:02:36 +0000

Saw this over at Enowning. Seems relevant here since Mormonism is such a religion about materialism.

John D. Caputo on Martin Hägglund‘s Radical Atheism, from The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11.2.

RA is organized around the assumption of the opposition, I might even say the “mortal” opposition, between religion and materialism. The question of whether there might be a religious materialism is never raised, although it is fair to say that that is today one of the most common subjects of theological debate, which is only one of the many times this books brushes up against theological issues with which it is completely unfamiliar. In fact, in my view and that of a good many other religious theorists today, religion is not opposed to time and temporality, but religion is a material practice, a mode of temporalization and historicization, of miserable and glorious bodies, of children and land, which are all primarily Biblical categories that rarely come up in Greek philosophy except as matters to be subordinated and governed. One sign of this is Heidegger‘s Being and Time which formalizes a mode of being-in-the-world that is at root, or structurally, Augustinian and Lutheran—or conversely, and this is the way Heidegger would prefer to put it, the way a certain Augustine or Luther is a “de-formalization” of the existentialia of Being and Time. Indeed, the very word déconstructionarises as a translation or gloss on Heidegger‘s Destruktion, which is itself a translation of Luther‘s destructio of scholastic theology back down to its Scriptural sources, which itself is traceable to the Septuagint apolo in Isaiah 29:14 (see I Cor. 1:19), and crucial to the analysis of time in Being and Time. Badiou‘s use of St. Paul, whom he interprets in terms of the truth-making event, while dismissing the actual content this event (the resurrected Christ) provides a more recent example. This leads to the question of which came first, the religious form of life or the philosopheme, the ontology or the “unavowed” theology. It was considerations of just this sort that led Derrida to speak of a religion without the doctrines and dogmas of religion, and this lay behind his musings on the relative priority of the messianic and the concrete messianisms or the “unavowed theologemes” that lay behind philosophy.

Peirce, Heidegger and Science

Clark — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:05:35 +0000

Joe Ransdell, who recently died and who started the mailing list Peirce-L, has a justly well regarded paper on Peirce as a phenomenologist. “Is Peirce a Phenomenologist?” is available online and it’s well worth reading. With regards to Husserl I pretty much agree with Joe. However I think he neglects Heidegger too much as it is there that I tend to see a bit more affinity with Peirce. I think, for example, that Joe gets Heidegger subtly wrong on science. Take for example his comment leading to footnote (6).

But Peirce did not conceive science in that way, nor would he agree that the “wasteland” of modern times is properly or profitably diagnosed as being due to the development of the sciences, though he might very well agree that the conception of science which has reigned in modern times–often shared alike by its opponents and its advocates–has more than a little to do with it. (6)

Footnote 6: As regards the way Peirce conceives the relationship of science and technology, I will only remark here that although it is true that, in his view, any successful theoretical science yields a technology of some sort as a by-product, Peirce does not equate scientific and technological (“calculative”) thinking in the way Heidegger does. I address this topic myself, from the perspective of the conception of objectivity, in “Semiotic Objectivity”, Semiotica 26:3/4, 1979, pp. 261-288)), reprinted in Frontiers in Semiotics (ed. Deely, Williams, and Kruse, Indiana University Press, 1986).

Now I have to confess I’ve never read this further paper of Joe’s. So I may be getting him (Joe) quite wrong. Still, let me address what I think ends up being a tad more complex than it first appears.

Heidegger’s conception of the essence of science (which isn’t necessarily the same as science of course) as gestell is quite famous. Science does reduce nature into a standing reserve and this is why the essence of science (gestell) is not something science can find. This standing reserve is calculative or “an economy” but what is key is that is something available for humans.

Now of course Peirce has a conception of science that attempts to divorce it from any sentimentality at all. To care is to cease doing science for Peirce. So at a first glance the interpretation of a huge gap between the two is understandable.

For Heidegger though gestell (enframing or the essence of technology) is a kind of gathering together that allows things to be revealed. It’s a revealing through a kind of framework or assembly. This is often taken in Kuhnian terms as a kind of paradigm. Yet Kuhn brings with him a kind of instrumentalism in which things are for uses. Heidegger, despite how he is often portrayed, just isn’t interested in this. Heidegger does not say that modern science is technological. (Which is what Joe claims) Rather Heidegger’s claim is just that science is a way of revealing the world. And the way science reveals is things as objects. This lets technology treat things as objects to be manipulated.

I’d argue though that Peirce’s conception of the sign with the distinction between immediate and dynamic object is very much caught up in Heidegger’s notion of enframing. Further I think that Peirce also ends up with a view more similar to Heidegger than some might think.

Let us look upon science — the science of today — as a living thing. What characterizes it generally, from this point of view, is that the thoroughly established truths are labelled and put upon the shelves of each scientist’s mind, where they can be at hand when there is occasion to use things — arranged, therefore, to suit his special convenience — while science itself, the living process, is busied mainly with conjectures, which are either getting framed or getting tested. When that systematized knowledge on the shelves is used, it is used almost exactly as a manufacturer or practising physician might use it; that is to say, it is merely applied. If it ever becomes the object of science, it is because in the advance of science, the moment has come when it must undergo a process of purification or of transformation. (CP 1:234)

Note the distinction between what science enables (which he presents as analogous to technology) and what he presents as the essence of science itself. The whole section on science I quote from above is quite interesting and unfortunately often neglected relative to Peirce’s phenomenology. It’s available online as well.

This isn’t to say we can’t see differences. For Peirce, “Science consists in actually drawing the bow upon truth with intentness in the eye, with energy in the arm.” That is it is wrapped up with a desire to unveil. For Heidegger it is much more about a way of organizing to let things unveil. That’s a subtle but I think important difference. For Peirce the difference between science and non-science is much more akin to Heidegger’s conception of authentic and inauthentic – especially as tied to Das Man.

The life of science is in the desire to learn. If this desire is not pure, but is mingled with a desire to prove the truth of a definite opinion, or of a general mode of conceiving of things, it will almost inevitably lead to the adoption of a faulty method; and in so far such men, among whom many have been looked upon in their day as great lights, are not genuine men of science;

However in order to know something not known one will in effect be restructuring the elements of knowledge. So I think a corollary to Peirce’s conception is Heidegger’s notion of gestell. But I don’t see much evidence that Peirce gets at anything like Heidegger’s gestell or even Kuhn’s paradigm. It’s true that Peirce adopts a semiotic that can be considered holistic. But a lot of the elements of this interrelatedness simply aren’t pursued that I can see.

Ultimately then what I think needs addressed in considering Peirce as a phenomenologist and most importantly how it relates to science, is the question of the holistic nature of phenomenology. I’d note Joe addresses this in paragraph 21.

This means, for example, that as you read the words on this page you are not “reading meanings into” the signs, as Peirce conceives it, but are rather perceiving the actualizations of the generating powers of the signs themselves. The power we have of “creating meanings” is not creational in that sense but only in the more modest sense in which we have the power of creating houses out of wood or pots out of clay: we take words–and, of course, other signs or representations–and put them together, i.e. arrange and rearrange them, just as we do other materials, and if we are good at this then of course we create unique artifacts, but there is no creation ex nihilo here. Given the frequent talk by phenomenologists about “constituting meanings” and the like, it seems important to stress here that one will find nothing like that in the Peircean philosophy. (This has important implications for the way in which intentionality is treated by Peirce, about which I will say only that it is not a topic of the first importance in his thought because he regards it as a conception to be explicated by more fundamental conceptions rather than as itself a fundamental explicating conception.)

Note though how close this corresponds to gestell. It is an organization that allows things to reveal themselves. It’s important that Joe contrasts this with phenomenologists of the Husserlian variety. But note that this is exactly what Heidegger’s reformulation of Husserl does.

Heidegger on Presencing and Nothing

Clark — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:22:50 +0000

Great quote I found over at Critical Hermeneutics that does a really nice summary of a key aspect of Heidegger’s Being and Time.

[Heidegger's] aim was to study the internal relationship between being and time. Because being and time, presencing and absencing, mainifestness and nothingness lack any phenomenal or empirical properties, they seem to be ‘nothing’ in the merely negative sense of an ‘empty vapor’ (Nietzche). For Heidegger, however, presencing and absencing ‘are’ that which is most worthy of thinking.

What evidence, we might ask, is there for the claim that humans are really this temporal nothingness through which entities can manifest themselves and thus ‘be’? To answer this question, Heidegger appealed in part to an argument taken from Kant: the best way of accounting for the possibility of our understanding of entities is to postulate that we humans simply are the temporal openness or nothingness in which entities can appear as entities. In addition to such an argument, however, Heidegger maintained that the mood of anxiety reveals the nothingness lying at the heart of human existence. While contending that anxiety is perhaps the most basic human mood, he also observed that it is such a disquieting mood that we spend most of our lives trying to keep it from overtaking us. Our unreflective absorption in the practices of everyday life — family relations, schooling, job activities, entertainment — keep us distracted enough that we manage to conceal from ourselves the weirdness of being human. Anxiety tears us out of everyday absorption in things; it reveals them to be useless in the face of the radical mortality, finitude, and nothingness at the heart of human existence.

This is from The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger which I don’t recall liking very much but I obviously missed that great little passage.

If I’ve only gained one thing from my philosophical study of the past 15 years it is an appreciation for the wide range of “nothings” that seem to lack empirical content. Yet these are in some ways the most important things to think yet when we treat them as a thing, property, state or so forth we do great violence to them and lead ourselves into heavily distorted positions. (Once again I can’t help but think of Derrida’s analysis of justice and law in “Force of Law”)

Overheard While Discussing Etymology Overreach

Clark — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:20:05 +0000

Etymologies are, in my opinion, one of the more overused tools of analysis. The history of a word is not always a terribly good indicator about meaning or origin. Take a common word like forgive. The word is from Old English where the “for” means complete. So the etymology of the word is “complete giving.” Its use arises more as a bad translation of the Latin perdonare by way of German. Thus the meaning of the term is better seen in the history of Latin rather than English etymology.

The funniest etymological overreach can be seen when translators struggle to translate Heidegger’s appeals to etymology — often with German words. While this can be explained in a commentary it’s pretty hard to capture in a straight translation. Further translators and commentators sometimes create these egregiously complex word breaks pointing to some etymological origin of an English word trying to capture some etymological German origin. Of course it’s hard to get too upset. It’s not like there are a lot of great strategies for the translator here.

While discussing this one comment was that all the best etymologies are the bad ones. Both a joke and an insight. After all what counts isn’t necessarily the real origin of a term but how one rethinks the phenomena of some concept.

The best comment though (speaker left anonymous although you’d recognize the name) was this one.

I hide a “grrr” when people make fun of Heidegger’s etymologies. Which,
curiously enough, points to the original meaning of “Heidegger”

Cognition: In the Head?

Clark — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 21:58:13 +0000

There’s a great review that gets at the issue of externalism of cognition being linked to alot. Note that the topic isn’t content externalism but whether cognition can be said to be all in the head. I think the arguments for content externalism have been remarkably strong and hard to overcome. Cognition is a slightly different beast, although plenty have argued for it. It’s the idea that the mind itself and thinking is extended beyond ones brain. One obvious example are the tattoos in Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. The tattoos act as part of the thinking of the main character. One can always draw a division between brain and environment but how natural a division is that?

An other obvious example of this way of thinking can be found in Heidegger where the mind/body divide is broken down. Thinking emerges against a set of background practices but these practices aren’t simply neurological processes.

Anyway, the review linked to above is very well worth reading if only to deal with some of the obvious criticisms. The issue here is more empirical evidence rather than necessarily philosophical argument. Although I should note that I think much of the issue boils down to a semantic one over what conception is more useful.

Nibley, Heidegger and the Goods of First and Second Intent

Clark — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 17:27:52 +0000

Enowning had up a link to an interesting interview with Ken Golberg who mentions a class on technology he teaches with Hubert Dreyfus.

…technology is really a “mode of being,” a sort of attitude or culture we are immersed in. It’s not something we can consciously adopt. It’s all around us, we’re engulfed in it. [Heidegger] says we’re in a technological mode of being that is all about making the world available. The key concept here is availability. For example he mentions the Rhine River. Rather than approaching the river as primitives, who might ponder how the gods created the river, or artists and poets, who would focus on the beauty of the river, our approach is that the river is a resource to generate power. He argues that we approach the world around us, nature in particular, as something that we should use to make other things available. Where it gets really interesting is that the availability starts to take on momentum of its own. So we don’t necessarily want anything in itself; all we want is everything to be transformable into something that we’ll need in the future.

Now a lot of Heidegger can be seen as a kind of appropriation of Aristotle. Sometimes turning him into a proto-phenomenologist but also sometimes merely using him in other ways. The relationship is always complex. I personally see a lot of Heidegger’s analysis and worry about technology as a kind of “standing reserve” arising out of Aristotle. In Aristotle we have the notion many call goods of first and second intent. (Aristotle doesn’t actually use the term himself, but it’s a common way of describing his analysis in Book 12 of Metaphysics) Immediately for a Mormon one thinks of Nibley and his famous talk “Goods of First and Second Intent”.

Russell Fox some years ago, like many, noted the connection between Heidegger and Nibley wondering if Nibley had ever read Heidegger. Their concerns are quite similar. Heidegger sees us so caught up in technology that we lose that connection to the primitive encounter with things. In Heidegger we see this in his four fold in which art is this tension and interconnection between the Gods and mortals, earth and sky. For Heidegger modern life in our technological comportment with the world has no divinities. Nothing is sacred and there is nothing for us to meausre ourself against. We end up in a kind of nihilistic economy in which we merely transform without any goal. This might be what Damon Linker called the dis-enchantment of the world. (There was a few years back an interesting back and forth on this topic between Damon Linker and Jim Faulconer over Heidegger, Mormonism and this question)

Nibley’s concern was quite similar to Heidegger. Looking at the contemporary world he says,

Today we have given up entirely on goods of first intent. The most eminent universities for the first time are now places where one goes primarily to buy MBA and law degrees. The full measure of the success of their graduates is the avoidance of criminal prosecution. I believe there should be more to education than that. Remember General Barrows, the president at Berkeley long ago? He used to say that the only reason anyone goes to school is to increase his earning power.

Nibley’s concern is ultimately education pedagogy. (And I think he is quite unfair to pragmatism – but that’s an other topic) For Nibley the goods of first intent are, somewhat like Heidegger, caught up with the image of the Muses.

The Muses are archaic, “primitive,” and universal. For those who knew them all, life was a school; the whole society sat at a Greek drama, a seasonal religious presentation, as critics and connoisseurs. Havelock Ellis in his book the Dance of Life notes how in such societies “life becomes all play.” Also life becomes all school. Loren Eiseley observes that in such societies, goods of first and second intent become completely fused; but of the few such communities he finds existing in the world today, he cites only the Hopis. Our pragmatic society, coveting first the Hopis’ uranium and now their coal, has fought with determination to obliterate that culture—it is so totally alien to what we are doing. It is actually a clash between goods of first and second intent, for we all know what the big corporations are after.

Alas, in the showdown between goods of first intent and second, the second will always win. The supreme Delphic wisdom of our day, “there is no free lunch,” excludes all but acquisitive activity as trivial, egghead, effete, what in the Utah school system is called frills, such as music and drama.

Nibley has as his type of dealing with technology his romanticized Hopi nation. Heidegger his romanticized rural German life. And, I think, each has their own respective blind spots because of that.

Being in the World

Clark — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 22:49:22 +0000

Mark Wrathall sent a note about the film, Being in the World.

“Being in the World” is heading for Northern California. Catch it at the Berkeley Film Festival at the Shattuck Cinemas on Saturday, Sept. 25th at 8:45 pm (http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org/) or on Monday, Sept. 27th at 4:00 pm at the University of San Francisco in the Harney Science Center, Room #232. I’ll be at USF, but not the Berkeley screening.

It looks good. Unfortunately when it played here last week I was just too swamped to be able to see it. (It played on the 17th – sorry for forgetting to put up a note. Hopefully this will make up for it) Hopefully it’ll be out on DVD before too long so us “shut ins” who have small kids can see it.

Trumpery, Heidegger and Derrida

Clark — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:51:33 +0000

Graham Harman has had up a few posts on what he calls trumpery. The latest includes some bits about Heidegger and Derrida. First let me quote the Derridean bit.

Orthodox Derridean: “…as in the shallow and naive charge that Derrida ‘reduces the world to a text.’”

Comment: But Derrida does reduce the world to a text. That’s the source from which he draw his strengths no less than his weaknesses, and Derrideans shouldn’t be so quick to saw off the limb on which Derrida himself is sitting.

That’s true to a point but, I think, misleading. I think Derrida clarified what he meant.

One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization. The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, so badly understood, (“there is nothing outside the text” [il n'y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about. . . .

. . . A few moments ago, I insisted on writing, at least in quotation marks, the strange and trivial formula, “real-history-of-the-world,” in order to mark clearly that the concept of text or context which guides me embraces and does not exclude the world, reality, history. Once again (and this probably makes a thousand times I have had to repeat this, but when will it finally be heard, and why this resistance?): as I understand it (and I have explained why), the text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference–to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other, since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible. Différance is a reference, and vice-versa. (Limited Inc, 136-37)

So to a degree Graham is right. However the Other to the text is what Derrida is most concerned with. When we speak of “world” we have to ask what we mean. Do we merely mean the set of experiences within contexts? If so, then there is nothing else. The question, as I see Derrida asking is the relationship between nothing and the Other. Now in one sense we can’t call that the world. Yet in an other it is very much our concern and very much a part of what in common vernacular we call the world.

The problem is, I think, that “world” is a very overloaded word with lots of different senses. It’s all too easy to equivocate. So when a Derridean objects to the claim that the world is reduced to text what they are objecting to isn’t the idea of experience and context but the concern with the Other to experience. (They also object to how people read the word “text” incorrectly, although I think it fair to say that’s a misreading Derrida himself is responsible for as the above quotation clearly shows him admitting) What we mean by “world” in common vernacular (rather than in technical jargon) clearly is more than text.

The other bit from Graham is targeting Heidegger and technology.

But Heidegger is anti-technology. In an effort to defend his position from all the various weapons that can be used against such conservatism, they posit in advance that any critique of Heidegger as anti-technology must always already be viewed as naive and simplistic.

This I’m much more sympathetic to. I do think Heidegger is needlessly anti-technology and overly romantic about the rural life. That’s not to say a lot of the analysis of technology isn’t correct. Just that the values he communicates about rural German life seems as ridiculous to me as some of his Nazism.

I tend to agree with Graham on Husserl. Graham on scientism is a bit harder to buy. I’m sure most of the scientists Graham speaks with are fascinated with philosophical questions. I know many who are myself. However I know many more who have a disdain for philosophy characteristic of Richard Feynman. Of course Feynman was probably burned on philosophy by taking a class on Whitehead at MIT. Hardly a great way to get introduced to philosophy in my opinion. Philosophy had its revenge when Feynman’s son became a philosopher.