Agamograph (art that produces changes based on the angle you look at it) by Yaacov Agam
I've been reading Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and really enjoying it. I'm enjoying it so much, I guess, that I want to try and write about it. Writing is weird - you might read something, or hear something, and be intensely moved; but when we move to the writing of it, the recording of it, the expressing of it, there can sometimes be a block, or a difficulty in transitioning from the receptive mode to the active mode of finding words for that experience. My experience reading Being and Time has so far felt very profound, and throughout my reading of it so far, I keep on discovering passages that seem to say things I never thought possible to say, to point to, somehow, to notice. So I want to use this blog post to try and pin down some of the things that have amazed me, and maybe when I finish the book I can write more.
I think the first thing that has amazed me in reading Heidegger is his vision, and the sense that this vision is "lighting up" areas of experience that have never been talked about. When Heidegger critiques the epistemological tradition, when he founds his argument on ontological insights, I feel I am witness a kind of path-breaking. What is the nature of this vision? The vision is like an alternate history, one that begins with being (not knowledge, not theory), and therefore with something that would seem impossible to even begin talking about. For where do we start when we talk about being? It seems so rudimentary, so obvious, and yet when we begin thinking about being, it seems to become invisible. As Heidegger would say, the nearness of being is its remoteness. It is so close to us that it is very far away. "That which is ontically closest and well known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all; and its ontological signification is constantly over looked." (69)
How do we talk about being? To put it in more Heidegereese, how do we let being be talked about? How do we meet being? Let me pivot to a different position, and start a different way.
For a long time, when I read philosophy, there was something mystifying about it that I couldn't put my finger on. It went something like this: there was mind, and there was world. Or, there was language, and there was world. Or, there was idealism, and there was realism. The mystery was how there was mind in world, or mind of world, or mind about world, or mind by world, etc. This was a perplexity that I found confusing. How did mind, through language, represent the world? How did bits of sound represent bits of world-stuff? What was language, and what was mind, and what was world? How was it possible to know anything about the world? Or in more Kantian terms, what were the conditions of possibility that made it possible to know the world?
When I started reading Richard Rorty, I was relieved. These were not the right questions to be asking. Epistemology was not the right course. We should drop the whole idea of language corresponding to the way the world is, to what is called the "correspondence theory of truth." Instead, we should ask questions about how things hang together in the widest possible sense, about cultural politics, about the ontology of the social. Mind and world should be understood evolutionarily. All this time people were doing philosophy, and no one was talking about Darwin. The perplexity could be put at ease, if not to sleep.
I loved reading Rorty, and still do, for many reasons, but one is that he eased that perplexity about mind and world. He scratched that itch, and I felt less perplexed. It was like a kind of wound being healed.
But then, over time, I realized the perplexity was still there. I don't know why exactly. There was something about the dynamic between mind and world that Rorty hadn't hit upon.
So I read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and I felt like he was doing something similar to Rorty, (or Rorty was doing something similar to Wittgenstein), that is, finding a therapeutic stance towards the mind and world so that the problem of realism and idealism dissolved, and doing this through the investigation of ordinary language.
My reading of philosophy is admittedly pretty beginnerish - I've read a few of Plato's dialogues, a good amount of William James, a lot of Rorty, some Wittgenstein, some Arendt, a bit of Aristotle, a bit of Sartre, and a lot of secondary sources. I"ve tried Kant a lot times, but just lose myself. But I'm fascinated by the Western philosophical tradition, in part because they are constantly scratching that mind/world itch, and Wittgenstein and Rorty did this, too, in their own way.
When I started reading Heidegger, I realized that he solved this problem for me, in a way that Rorty and Wittgenstein did not. He solved it by showing to me how the world disclosed itself through Dasein, and therefore how there was no idealism/realism problem at all, though in principle, as Heidegger remarks in the section about "Reality," idealism was more right, as we cannot know anything about entities without knowing something first about Dasein, through which the entities are seen. Heidegger saw that what we see, what we notice, what we experience, what we think, is the product of how we see, how we notice, how we experience, how we think. Dasein wasn't being so much as a way of being, and its way of being was care, a kind of primordial leaning-forward or leaning-towards, a stance. To not have a stance was to be worldless, but it was impossible not to have a stance, because Dasein's structure was care. The entire history of philosophy was bankrupt, in a sense, because there were using a lens - the lens of theory, the lens of epistemology - and then claiming that what they were seeing was Reality. But it was only a lens, and what happened when the lens shattered?
Theory, epistemology, were not the ways we lived. They were specialized ways of being, but they were not how we existed. At it became clear that the stare of epistemology, as Heidegger called it, was only one mode of being in the world, a mode that Heidegger called "present-at-hand," as opposed to "readiness-to-hand."
Readiness-to-hand is probably my favorite concept in Heidegger, if it is a concept at all. It captures something about how we exist - it lights up something about our existence - that I have never found articulated before, in either literature or philosophy, although Tolstoy comes closest for me. (I think Isaac Babel said somewhere that if the world wrote, it would write like Tolstoy.) What is readingness-to-hand? Have you ever seen those paintings where, if you walk to one side of it, you see something there, and if you walk to another side of it, you see something different? Readiness-to-hand is like the painting seen from the perspective of ontology instead of epistemology. It means that we live in a world that is not theoretical, but practical somehow (though the theoretical-practical dualism doesn't hold either in Heidegger's thought). We are surrounded by Things, (the world, "realism"), but these Things are not things we stare at and ask about their nature. These Things are "equipment," things we use. And we use them in a particular manner. Heidegger's famous example is a hammer. When we use a hammer, the hammer is invisible to us. The hammer is equipment, readiness-to-hand. We use it, we hammer, we are absorbed in hammering, we get the hammering done, etc. Only if the hammer breaks do we move into epistemology, do we enter into present-at-hand relationships. But the nature of hammering is the absorption of hammering, and that is how we typically use equipment. That is how we typically are.
As someone living with schizoaffective disorder, I find interesting parallels between some aspects of my symptoms and the mode of present-at-hand, since sometimes, like a hammer, my mind malfunctions. I experience delusions of reference for example, from innocuous statements. I have insight that these delusions aren't real, but they still feel real. When this happens, the readiness-at-hand of the world recedes, and the very worldhood of the world becames more present-at-hand, as something stared at, not something lived in.
I think it is this lived in quality of Heidegger's vision that speaks to me so much. But it's not that so much as the entire picture of his vision, or to use an auditory metaphor, the music of his vision. Descartes viewed space as a kind of empty container, with coordinates like a GPS system, through which we moved. Our minds were separate from our bodies, and our bodies were mostly not real, either because of Plato's reality/appearance distinction (the mind was real, the body was appearance), or some Christianized version of Plato that posited a real self inside the unreal flesh. These weird problems seem to set the stage for the thorny-seeming problems of idealism and realism.
But all of this thankfully vanishes, it feels like, with Heidegger, for whom space is in the world, rather than the world in space. We are being alongside the world, "in the sense of being absorbed in the world." (80)
The hardest thing for me to express is the profundity of Heidegger's notion of the way in which the world discloses itself to us through concern. This to me seems to catch something ultimate and everyday about human being, in a way that was never talked about before. Think about every moment of your life. What has it been? I think it's been, in Heidegger's terms, something progresively disclosed. But what is disclosed is not the world, and is not the self. It is, indissolubly, "being-in-the-world." The disclosure of the world is the disclosure of Dasein.
But it goes deeper than that. For what is disclosed is time, somehow, though I haven't gotten to this part of the book yet. Wherever we are, whenever we are, time moves, and the world discloses itself through Dasein. This seems to be so startling and original and plain a revelation as to be nothing but true. It is not emptily abstract, or so generael as to be meaningless. We are given in Being and TIme a thick descriptioin, an anlyasis, of Dasein, and it is deep enough to actually answer questions and pose new ones.
Comments