Being in the World (full, award winning, Heidegger/Hubert Dreyfus documentary)

[Music] so [Music] it doesn't occur to most people to worry about this but philosophers are very concerned to understand how it is that we engage with objects in the world [Music] we philosophers have always been interested in what's unique about human beings and how it is that humans engage with and make sense of the world around us what if anything gives meaning to our lives most of us don't think about it we just sit down in the chair at the table and pick up the fork and the spoon and work with them [Music] philosophers are very interested in thinking well how can that happen how is it that these minds appear somewhere in us managed to get out there into the world and grab a hold of these physical objects [Music] i'm ryan cross and i'm a bass player cellist composer i started playing when i was nine years old started playing cello and uh started playing after my brothers they all played classical instruments and so i decided to go on and follow in their footsteps but uh then i took it a step farther after high school picking up the bass and then starting to figure out that a bass was a lot cooler than the cello [Music] for me connecting to my instrument being connected to myself i have to be connected here so i have to be in touch with myself [Music] myself meaning the instrument becomes you you know so you're in touch with this [Music] i started playing the instrument and it felt like it had a character of its own the sound directed me where to go and it felt like i was better because i was playing the instrument [Music] so if you go all the way back to ancient greece to the 5th century bc in athens you find one of the most important philosophers in the history of the west namely plato and plato was famous for articulating a story about what it is for anything to be anything at all and in particular what it is for us to be the kinds of beings that we are what's important for plato is truth correctness theoretical understanding he was drunk on theory it was so amazing to him one of his big contributions to philosophy was the theory of forms and that was the idea that we understand things and recognize things and and can use things only to the extent that we have an idea of what they are plato thought things are as they really are when they're abstracted away from all of their particular details and that's really been a dominant influence in philosophy so philosophers have thought that we understand the world by getting clear about the way we think about the world [Music] on the platonic model the most important and most interesting thing that we can do as human beings is to sit back and think rationally about the nature of the universe that's a classical philosopher's account of what's special about us as human beings we're rational beings we're intellectual beings we're thinking beings then comes another move a long time later around 1650 rene descartes who was a mathematician and also a very interested in science descartes said and he meant this as a sort of definitive description of himself and other entities like him is i am a thinking thing and a thinking thing is a mind which has in it ideas and in it experience and in it a representation a kind of picture of the world especially since descartes philosophers have thought about us as subjects standing over against objects and what you get is this incredible idea of what i call disengaged subject right but the subject of knowledge is not engaged in a in a society on the contrary the count is asking people each one to go back into their own mind and see how they can be certain of anything in the world right so disengaged from the society of others were fellow speakers disengaged from the body disengaged from tradition and history don't simply take anything on the fact that you've got it from your preceptors or work it out for yourself it's an incredible act of total disengagement the really proper human mind knowing things is utterly outside of the society the body and any kind of tradition right descartes was obsessed with the idea that we couldn't get off the ground if we couldn't find something certain to reason from and naturally the only thing he could be certain of is that he was a thinking thing because he said even if he doubted it that he was a thinking thing he was thinking so there you could get started and from there you can deduce everything and every philosopher afterwards big deal philosophers like kant was working within that framework and spinoza and leibniz and so forth they all just took that for granted and then a philosopher came along with high-powered enough to resist and overthrow the whole plato descartes tradition and that was heidegger [Music] martin heidegger was a german philosopher in 1927 he published a book called being in time which was a landmark in 20th century philosophy one of the most influential works in philosophy in the last 100 years and maybe ever heidigrass's idea was that the platonic model has got the story completely backwards that in fact the most important thing that characterizes us isn't our ability to sit back and think rationally and logically about any entity or any set of situations in the world the most important thing about us is our ability to become involved in worlds and to develop skills for acting in those worlds that at root are not intellectual skills but very practical kinds of skills skillful coping is being able to do things with your hands like painting or handwriting or woodworking oh sports is another swell example that you learn how to do but when you are asked how you do it you can't actually say well i just you know i'm trying to hit the ball how am i trying to hit the ball i don't know i'm just swinging the bat but not just swinging the bat you may be talking to somebody who's really good at it so heidegger is really confronting the entire tradition of western philosophy going back to the ancient greeks and um from the earliest times philosophy was uh well let me start over again that was terrible [Music] my name hiroshi sakaguchi i'm a carpenter [Music] i thought japan is all the house the countryside and also i make a new building too [Music] if you think about a hammer in a philosophical way or what people would call a common sensical way you'd look at the properties the hammer has the shape it has the color it has and heidegger said that's wrong if you want to see what a hammer is you don't think about the properties you don't describe it you don't explain it you pick it up and you start driving nails and you really only see what the hammer is when you have the skills to hammer well and without those the hammer will never really show itself to you the japanese word for tool is dogu translates into the way of carpentry and that's a very sensitive description of what a tool is the tool isn't an instrument that you focus on the tool is literally a way the carpenter has of engaging with the world [Music] so he's shaving shaped money you know by tool you know one play i hold asleep sleep together under my brain so rough your ability and your skill for hammering with a hammer although when you acquire it it might require a little bit of thought so that you don't bang your thumb every once in a while and that kind of thing when you've got the skill as a real skilled carpenter the last thing that you want is to be thinking about or rationally analyzing or stepping back from the activity that you're involved in he's done it for so long like he started apprenticing when he was 15 so so it's so much in his body the way he moves and it's it's really like a martial art it's very much a movement like a dance you want to allow the activity to go through your body because your body has a certain kind of know-how for operating in this domain that thought about the domain will typically get in the way of this most fundamental way of interacting with our world other people in our world uh other objects or tools in our world and so on had been completely neglected for 2500 years of western western history because of the influence of plato [Music] i'm lead chase and duke at chase's restaurant in new orleans louisiana she is the grand dumb of creole cooking in new orleans she is the girl who has the nerve to chastise president obama for putting a little hot sauce in his gumbo before he tastes it never did i think i would be good enough to serve a president when i came here i knew nothing i'd never been in the inside of a restaurant in my life at 18 years old never i went in this woman's restaurant she taught me everything but one thing i learned to love that restaurant i learned to love food i learned to appreciate it and i always said this is what i want to do she has 60 plus years of experience cooking people think of recipes she is the recipe you know when we're back there cooking we're never looking in cookbooks is just out the head what we want to cook today we want to cook tomato and basil soup and i think we want to add some popcorn in the middle and then you'll get the butter flavor of the popcorn it's just amazing the different dishes that we come up or she comes up with just off the cuff because i have no idea we put beef tops we put turnip tops we put mustard greens we put kale we put cauliflower the great thing about being a philosopher is it's very hard to test what we say you can say anything you want we're usually dealing in such abstract general things that you never have to prove it the theories of the mind have been put to the test with the development of the computer [Music] using computers we were finally in a position to test thousands of years of philosophical theory about how the mind works to a lot of people it seemed like the computer finally offered us a chance to construct a mind using as our model all the philosophical theories we've developed bert dreyfus's genius was recognizing that this was what was going on the climate at the time was one of great excitement with regard to the prospect of artificial intelligence there were these people in the ai lab artificial intelligence lab claiming that they had found the rules and symbolic representations that would soon enable computers to be intelligent bert was a junior faculty member at mit in the humanities department not the most prominent department at mit they were saying look we know how the mind works you philosophers have missed it he was going up against very prominent researchers at his own institution who were in the more prominent departments at mit the engineering and computer science kinds of departments they were saying we don't have to care about what dreyford says he's just a philosopher what programmers were doing was trying to make a computer intelligent by giving it the kind of thoughts that they thought humans had so you'd make an exhaustive list of there's a table in the room the table is brown the table is hard the table is this size and you can see that this could go on for a very very long time and it's got to do a lot with understanding what's relevant what's relevant right now is that i'm sitting here talking to you and there's the lights are relevant cameras are relevant if there's any dust on the floor under this this chair it's not i mean you just can't take account of all the facts in this room there's an infinite number of facts about this room the systems would get hung up on metaphors or hung up on inferences that were dependent on knowledge of ordinary things in everyday life like if you pick up this piece of weed here and drop it it will fall right and when it will fall it won't make a sound because it's soft things like this that everybody knows uh how much stuff like that do you know right 100 things a thousand things maybe a million things right and i think the hope was that that once we got enough of those facts into the computer that the computer would start acting like we do if heidegger was right and bert dreyfus was right you couldn't do that burt really thought that the artificial intelligence community was basing their research program on a bad understanding of what it is to be the kinds of beings that we are philosophy had finally discovered that this rationalist atomistic rule-following understanding of how the mind works is wrong they had the platonic idea that the kinds of beings that we are rational computing mechanisms we are logical uh sort of characterizers of the universe and they thought that they could therefore replicate all of the things that we do just by writing computer programs which after all are very logical and very rational and follow rules very very well and moreover sort of laughing and at the philosophy classes where they say look you philosophers have been trying to understand perception and action and skill and all that for two thousand years and you've got nowhere we already have a very important clue and in another eight to ten years we'll we'll have intelligent computers there was a lot of derision of bert and his work their name for me was the weasel apparently and bert pardoned my putting it this way it's kind of amusing looking character had brilliant orange hair and petite little guy sort of moved moved around you know like a i don't know an insect or something they said drivers doesn't know anything about programming i have the clue they're right about programming how can he be telling us that we can't do this in his view it was sort of the emperor had no clothes there was no support for this idea at all so he started trying to show how implausible it is once i was really brave they said we've got a car that will drive on the street in traffic from here to there with that because it has end with no human driver and i said i doubt it and they said we're telling you we've got it and i'm i said i'm telling you that you haven't got it you're lying and they we and i was right i mean it was just the reality was on my side [Music] there was this huge effort to suppress this criticism because mainly because there were millions of dollars at stake darpa gave the money for the research defense research and they were afraid they would stop giving the money and then when i was at mit they were even more afraid because the ai lab got about a million dollars a year from darpa for ai research and they were afraid that if they ever read my paper they would take away their their money and in the end that's sort of what happened ultimately i think it's it's fair to say that that criticism has has won out the claim was you could build such and such a machine and you could test that claim by seeing whether you can build such and such a machine and it couldn't be done in the 1950s or the 60s and it hasn't been done even now perhaps i can reach to the one of the most fundamental aspects about the difference between human beings and machines by adverting to something about each of us with which we are all deeply familiar and that is that it matters to us what happens in the world what matters it matters to us what happens to us it matters to us what happens to our friends it matters to us the progress of science and philosophy all of those are desinarata those are things to build a life on that one can summarize in the phrase giving a damn and if you have that phrase then you can say in a word what ai has so far failed to come up with by saying the trouble with computers is that they don't give a damn what we are at bottom much more fundamental than our being thinking subjects is that we care about something something matters to us [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] mega [Music] [Music] [Music] is the really important ends of human life are ends that are only perceptible if you let yourself be within the human situation totally i mean take love what is it to have a really loving relationship what is to have real communion what is it to have a really meaningful bit of music you can go on and on [Music] nobody could lose touch with that aspect of being human entirely but they always denatured it so of course people were moved by music people were moved by art people were moved by love and so on so they invented various ways of describing that i mean some kind of animal type sympathy bonds people so that's can explain why love is important and then they explain that certain kinds of emotions that we find pleasurable or are awoken in us by listening to kind of music so you get incidentally very interesting shift where people talk about the validity of art in terms of this notion of aesthetics in other words in terms of our reaction a stasis is our sensation rather than in terms of the profound truth that you can find in a great work of art find truth about human beings [Music] moods don't happen without our heads but that doesn't mean they happen in our heads the analogy i like to use is a radio right a radio gets tuned into different radio stations and as you turn the dial you get different songs playing on the radio that doesn't mean the stations are all inside the radio it just means that without the radio getting tuned to them you're not in a position to pick them up the traditional philosophical way of understanding the world and thinking of kind of in inside subjective uh stuff thoughts inside of us and then facts objects out in the world one thing that that way of thinking about the world does is it makes all sorts of things inside of us moods emotions right those are kind of subjective things that we project out on the world onto things so you want to say the world's not happy or sad we're happy and sad and we project our happiness out onto the world when the this phenomenological tradition uh started to undercut the distinction between subjects and objects what that did was allowed us to in a much more natural way make room for moods emotions uh to be out in the world when you talk of something like a joyful mood in the room it's plainly not a creation of my mind or your mind what it is if you like is a creation of our interactions [Music] [Music] [Music] and i think this matches our common sense way of talking about it so we talk about the mood in the room there was a happy mood as we walked into the party or the mood of the nation is downcast right now we're depressed as a nation now i think that that's capturing something real about our experience of the world and the way that the world isn't just these sort of neutral facts but that um it lines up in particular ways it's illuminated in particular ways and when we get in the right mood it's a way of getting in tune with the world so that it can show certain features to us so when you're happy the world looks different and it's not just that you're interpreting the world through a different filter but it's so your happiness tunes you into features of the world that you weren't paying attention to just as skills allow things to show themselves they also allow people to show up and be the people that they are as a craftsperson as they learn how to work with wood how to hammer how to use the equipment they'll start to see things that someone without those skills doesn't see they become someone who inhabits a world differently can you describe the process of choosing the piece of wood how do you tell if it's the right piece of wood or the wrong piece of wood the same human being personality you can see the color some horrible personality that kind of wood you can use twist some stores say other kind of wood same price you work on all the time you know color difference grain tight grain loose grain big grain oh heavy wood very beautiful yellow color dark brown color unbelievable if you come very good nice word of your girl you can't find a good wood a couple of days not fun it's not fun our bodies our ways of being get attuned to the world and there's a kind of understanding there that we can't explain we're very poor at articulating rules work by ignoring details what anyone who's very skilled in a domain knows is that being very skilled means responding not just in general terms to the situation but responding very specifically to what the situation demands so a chef working in the kitchen can't go by the rules in the cookbook let me tell you about brews and cooking you know i had a book written by a woman and she put the recipes in the book that her housekeeper or at that time was the mammy of the house you know but she was the lady who ran the house so naturally all her friends when the lady wrote the cookbook somewhere about 1910 or something they asked her well why don't you give her all your recipes and all your things so her answering was a good one she said you know cooking is like religion ruse don't normal make a cook then sermons make a saint so you can have all the recipes all the rules you want and you you can take the same things i'm doing here and maybe you can't do the same things i do [Music] risk is absolutely important in becoming a master in fact in acquiring any skills at all because you have to leave the rules behind and stop doing what one generally does and doing the standard thing and you push out into your own experience of the world you have to take risks you have to do something that the rules don't tell you to do so that you can start to learn to get tuned into the particular features of the situation what are the uh most important things to master learning to read ocean conditions knowing your boat practice experience and uh i guess there's an element of luck and then probably have some balls too just the human element and controlling one of these boats when they take off they won't do this they'll they'll they'll climb this way like a plane the next thing you know you are going swimming the question then arises whether the people who are running speed boat races are bringing out something important about the boats or about the water that they are sensitive to and nobody has ever been responsive to before or whether the water and the boats are just means to achieve some particular goal like being the fastest boat it may be that some of them are doing one and some of them are doing another and some of them are doing both so the willingness to take risks is a very important stage in moving beyond just competence and following the rules and doing what everyone else does to getting into the position where you learn what you're supposed to be responding to what distinguishes the kind of risks we're interested in from just bravado is whether the risks are done taken in the interest of what somebody is committed to what they've defined themselves in terms of and what makes the meaningful differences in their lives that kind of risk is a special kind of risk that is a necessary part of becoming a master in anything heidegger calls this fairly dramatically running forward into death and what that means i think is being willing to embrace a particular kind of possibility and let other possibilities die off risks of looking ridiculous for example risks of genuinely losing things you might regret losing later on taking risks is important it's an essential part of jazz improvisation is supposed to be the element of freedom venturing into space that hasn't been seen before you're supposed to always be trying something new instead of playing patterns or just playing something that everybody's heard before [Music] sometimes i'm surprised myself sometimes i listen back to something i played and be like oh man did i play that in a good way you know and then other times i'm like oh man did i play that why do you do the things you do i like what i do but i've learned i don't care how old you are you take a risk you do what you have to do and keep going in addition to the fact that you can't ever get beyond a rule-governed behavior without taking risks there's also a kind of exhilaration or joy in human existence leaving the rules behind going out on the edge letting the world show something new to them the risk takers are the ones who disclose new worlds disclose new ways to be human new ways to behave discover new things about the world so i started this man he teach me and how to sharpening but you don't teach it though and i look he what he does so i i saw and how to do it many times your teacher you don't teach you anything sometimes couldn't happen on the floor or a couple years jesus they clean up and uh in the sawdust they go they clean up sodas you commit yourself and it's through your commitment that all of a sudden the world is organized in terms of things that are meaningful to do and things that are irrelevant to do i don't stop you know just the money to quickly to make the job done i'm not i just i like to do so [Laughter] sometimes i rather lose money by an estimate over buying material sometimes very very angry what happens when you have this commitment to a particular something that's finite and that you could lose and that's risky and you hold yourself open to it completely what happens in that situation is that you get a sort of meaningful existence and the meaningful existence is the one that identifies who you are it's your meaningful existence it's the one that picks you out as an individual because nobody else understands the particular hierarchy of meaningful differences the way you do [Music] the issue is what is it to be the kind of being that we are and you want to explore that issue by asking what is it to be the best version of us when we're operating at our best we're precisely not detached from the situation that we're involved in rather we've opened ourselves up to being called to act in a certain way in the situation so you find examples of this all over the place i i read recently um a book by john mcphee called a sense of where you are which is a book about bill bradley who was an extraordinary college basketball player and went on to be a great basketball player in the nba he says the most amazing thing about bradley when he's taking the ball down the court is his vision he says he doesn't seem to be looking at anything rather he's a glaze of panoptic attention he has this there's a kind of gla he's not focused on anything but he's ready to be drawn into whatever it is that's calling him to act at the moment [Music] authenticity means owning up to the situation you're in confronting the situation and doing just what needs to be done it's a responsiveness to the unique particular situation you're in when you're authentic you're resolute you're confronting the situation you're in as this particular situation not just as an example of a kind of situation i call it the teenage boy phenomenon that you know when when when boys often are trying to figure out how they ought to act and what it's cool to do and what it's uncool to do in particular situations you often find some of them who do what they're sure one ought to do in a particular situation and they do it because they're sure they ought to do it and it's always a disaster when kids are coming up and they're learning to play in schools and they're in that sort of formal environment where they're in front of a teacher playing music you know they have to they're forced to bring something to the table and they're told to get better and better you know you're not playing well you need to play better today what's lacking is like listening to everyone else in the room and sort of understanding that i don't have to rely on just everything that i know if i listen to the other guys at the moment i can come up with new things on the spot that's when i'm really like in tune with it or in touch or channeling if you want to say [Music] so the authentic person is the one who will confront this concrete situation who will do what needs to be done who's responsive to it attune to it and who therefore has a certain kind of spontaneity that you don't get if you insist on falling back on rules principles procedures generic um formulas for how to act and what to think and what to say and how to be when i was only playing classical i would just read what was on the page learn it and memorize it and play it with jazz when i'm in that zone i'm not even thinking about what am i playing or what note it's just what's going on at the moment with the other musicians and this is what i'm bringing out it's really hard to describe it's a very common quality for people that are learning how to play jazz to be very introverted with their music when you're practicing every day it's something that you do by yourself you open up your your practice book and you read your your notes or whatever you you practice your rudiments on the drums stuff like that and these are things that you're doing all by yourself and so when you get to a performance setting when you're around other musicians there's a huge tendency to sort of get in your head and to just go back to what you're used to doing every day six hours a day is just playing by yourself and not really listening for the ways to react to what's going on outwards and as you grow older and as you get more experience and as you learn to master your instrument master music making uh you learn to to include the other musicians and then even further include the audience and also include the nuances and the different sort of aspects that are around the room and bring that in and use that to help you create the music that that you're creating for because you're always creating music for somebody actors actually have this wonderful expression it's very high targaryen though i don't think they know it which is that when you're on stage and you're acting you have to as they say you have to own it that's a beautiful way of describing you know going for it and really putting yourself into it and not wanting to step back and distance yourself from what you're up to it's very tempting to want to sort of keep the back door open so that you can you can step out of your actions and disavow them or rethink them or play the scene all over again and so on but if you're on stage and acting you can tell when an actor is is reticent in that way in these kinds of situations they experience themselves as having the action drawn out of them and you'll find it in sporting events i'm sure that you'll find it in in music you'll find it in any domain where operating in the domain requires a sophisticated kind of skill and requires a kind of openness to what's going on at the moment and that goes also for the domain of living a life this is something weird about this tea i don't know why but it doesn't pour so let's not worry about it go ahead it's pouring it's just pouring slowly very slowly i'm going to give it artificial respiration i never did this before see if that saves it aha i could become a tea doctor [Music] there's a real tension in societies between conformism and individualism [Music] in order for society to function there has to be a considerable amount of regularity in human behavior there is what heidegger calls the one which is his name for the social norms that is you do what one does you drive on the right-hand side of the street you wear clothes you stand the distance that one is supposed to stand in your culture when you talk to people and so forth there is a sense that mindless conformism is dehumanizing and destroys what's great about us and unique about us so we value uh individuality as well but you know there's a tension there if everybody's an individual then you lose the benefits that come from shared adherence to rules and shared norms and values so there's always a tension going on there so if you did something that was really totally radically new and had no continuity with the traditions of the of the culture you're in it would be unintelligible and it wouldn't just be unintelligible to your friends it would be unintelligible to you if you throw off all your clothes and roll in the flowers at lunch time when everybody else is eating their sauerkraut and wurst or something that's that isn't it no there's a certain romantic conception which is that you just burst out of all conventional constraints all norms and received opinions and you just become your own person we're thoroughly conditioned by the world we're in and that world is a world of customs traditions practices that we're just so immersed in we can never see our way out of it so the only way to do anything skillfully and with innovation and insight and sensitivity and authentically is to be appropriating traditions practices customs that are all around us in the world that we've just absorbed when the south american teams about two years ago realized that they could they could gain some space over the germans by pulling the ball back to right on the on to the sideline right they'd pull it back to the sideline and the germans were afraid the germans really respect the rules and the boundaries they wouldn't come in so it gave them a little room right so they used the superior skill that they had to really manipulate the lines it gave them space and they start beating the german teams again the example of an athlete i think is a good illustration of this athletes are rule-bound we're all governed you can't play the game unless you're you're following the rules but the great athletes see a way to express something about the game within the confines of the rules but in a way that other people hadn't thought to do or aren't able to do a real innovator changes the way the game is played and the game takes on a new style and people start playing it differently even though they're following the same rules there's the famous example the fuzzberry flop he jumps with his back to the thing he's jumping over everybody else went sort of dived over and everybody thought it was crazy but he won gold medals at the olympics the same rules are governing the game but now the game has a whole new look there's a way of doing things it's all together new heidegger had to work out a new notion of world because it was clear that that it's not the ideas in another realm that plato was thinking about and it's not the sum total of objects which is what descartes was thinking about well then what is it what is it to be open to the world the kind of the way we are what sort of is what is it that we're open to when we're open to the world what is it to have a world at all they're all possible lots of worlds there's the world of jazz the world of carpentry the the the world of cooking the their sports worlds and uh then there's our world that ours meaning the academic world heidegger thought that our highest dignity as human beings what really set us apart from everything else in the universe was our capacity to disclose whole new worlds to open up whole new possibilities [Music] [Music] leaving it [Music] heidegger coined this idea of disclosure to capture something that we're not used to thinking about and that is the way that things only show themselves when all the conditions of skill and all the relationships between them are possible and then the experience there is of something opening up a space of possibilities opening up a way of inhabiting the world opening up and it's not like it was there all along it's not like the world of jazz music was somewhere there in the middle ages say or in the greek world just waiting to be discovered it was something that had to have a space provided for it [Music] these worlds these coherent whole organized ways of being humans in activities at objects in the world all of that requires something to open it up [Music] is [Music] foreign [Applause] [Laughter] [Music] heidegger especially in the last few decades of his life became obsessed with what he called the hidden history of the west it wasn't the sort of history that historians usually talk about things happening battles being fought instead it was the history of changes in worlds heidegger saw that there were epochs in what he called the history of being in which they were whole not a whole different style of of coping and and a whole different style of everything everything is we don't usually think about what is-ness means but in his view the history of being is a is a series of three to five different fundamentally different ways of conceiving of is-ness and because you know it's not like people walk around thinking is-ness is this or it's that it's just they're socialized into it they they grow up learning to deal with things through practices in different ways there was this early greek epoch and that was an epic in which the name for being was fosus and it means nature they hadn't sensed that to be was to sort of emerge to open up or blossom or dawn into the light into the opening and then to sort of wither away and to fade away things were whooshing up lingering a while and then going away important things emotions well up and linger and go away moods swell up and go away great athletic performances do that and that's exactly what you lose a sense of if you think that to be is just to be an object of knowledge then what happened after that the current understanding of being in greek was poesis and poesis means bringing things out but this is like growing crops this is nurturing it was what craftsmen do so like hiroshi they were helping the grain in the wood come out and show itself at its best and of course cooks do the same thing they bring out what's best in the food and they bring out what's best in the people eating the food and they bring them all together something of oasis is still left from that epoch and it's kind of marginal for us now i mean the big banquets were the central thing for the homeric greeks and the craftsmen were the central thing for the poesis uh epoch but but we still have a sense of that and just as we still have a sense of things whooshing up the moods for particularly uh now then what's the next one is very interestingly different than poesis instead of bringing out what's in things the roman understanding of being was to impose form on matter and instead of bringing things out you hammered it into shape you imposed an order on everything their favorite thing i would imagine would be bricks you've just got this mud you can't bring out the form in the mud by poesis you just make the mud in the bricks you make the bricks into roads you make the roads into bridges and you minister the whole roman empire you kept down the crowd as virgil says the great person does then that sets up the christian one and finally there's only one big producer god he imposes all the forms on everything everything has its proper place in a hierarchy and everybody knows what to do because they've got that place the king does what kings do and the bishops do what bishops do and nobody has to ever worry about whether they should be a soldier or a peasant or bishop because that's all settled for them in their given tradition and their family and their location in in the scheme of things what are all things then well we have a word for it we just don't notice it they're all creatures creatures created by this supreme being and they thought that all the things were ordered by how close they would approach to god's nature they had a notion in the christian world of what they called noble medals things like gold and silver these were noble because the christians thought they were more like god they were incorruptible they weren't rust and so when you looked at gold you thought that gold is much closer to god than just an ordinary rock and it was all organized around god as as the highest and greatest thing in the universe it's a very closed world if as heidegger thinks human beings are there to open worlds this is about as far from where we should be as we can get the way heidegger understood it the modern age lasted from roughly the 16th century to the 20th century the modern subject has taken the place of god it's us who give everything its meaning what humans in the modern age were all about was dominance dominating the world subjecting it to their will and so if you think about the great heroes of the last several hundred years they were explorers and conquerors bravely encountering new situations scientists who cracked the code and figured out how to manipulate things and use things or cowboys who had this sort of deep inner will and they could go out and break down any obstacles in the path to achieving what they desired now we're in something entirely new what he calls the technological understanding of being heidegger wants to use the word technology to talk about uh our uniquely contemporary way of experiencing the world everything is interconnected everything is exchangeable and all meaningful distinctions have been gotten rid of except this one sort of empty distinction to be efficient and optimized and you see it all over the place we're so used to it that we don't even notice it that's what great philosophers are supposed to do is help us see what what's going on in our understanding of being efficiency demands a kind of standardization you have a few ways that you become very very good at and then you repeat them over and over and over and over and over again you have these sort of frightening subdivisions that you see as you drive in from the airport usually where all the houses on the side of the hill are the same shape the same color they just discovered that's the most efficient way to build a house and they just build them all that way and everybody manages to live that way and so everything is totally standardized [Music] everything is just resources to be optimized the most efficient way to feed people is to have a few ways of doing it and then you impose it everywhere [Music] the most efficient way to make a broad range of goods available to everybody is to do it on a big scale like walmart does and right and make everyone indistinguishable and have everything organized and efficiently laid out it's just to get the world as organized as possible and to bring more and more into this total organization it's really systems thinking everything is a system the airplane is no longer an object when it's sitting on the runway it's a cog in the transportation system and you might think well at least you're going to be there to either take the plane or not take the plane that no the tourist industry has been set up for it to make you a filler of this potentiality for running around that's on the runway and why will people go just to get a rest and get more energetic so that they can plunge back into the rat race in which they're all replaceable they're just doing some job efficiently and if somebody comes along and does it more efficiently they can be replaced one of the dangers of technology is it relieves us of the burden of having to develop skills technology is always sold as a labor-saving device when you buy the latest technology for cooking the promise is that you can cook as well as a master without any of the skills that the master has and that goes for everything with music as well so all of us now today can enjoy music of equality unimaginable to most people in the history of the world in the comfort of our homes with very little cost and very little effort that's a great promise who would who would give up on that that pleasure of hearing music in that way but the danger is that we give in to the seductions of technology to the degree that we lose all of these skills the internet is actually a much better example because what the internet is doing is it's basically transforming all reality into information everything on the internet is equal you can have the most important information right next door to the most trivial you can find out on twitter what your friends had for breakfast and you can find out also that there were 100 people killed in iraq that day with google and find anything and you can go on wikipedia and get any facts about anything and that in a certain way is terrific if you but if if you just use it for something relevant but if you think that that's just the best thing in the world just to have more and more information more and more transformable stuff more and more applications for your iphone that make it able to do more and more things and that that's just what it's all about everything gets leveled there's no meaningful differences anymore between what's important and not important what's trivial and what's uh crucial what's uh relevant and irrelevant it's all reduced just to more information if you want to really be efficient you don't want this kind of you know interference that hey this is sunday or this is uh christmas or something you kept to stop that or this is the middle of the night what do you think you're doing no 24 7 is the one of the great great achievements of our civilization things some things go on all the time are available all the time and it's very handy you know three o'clock in the morning i rush to my computer and i can google and nobody's going to say to me on the screen this is not available this page is not available because you're supposed to be sleeping no they're gonna they're gonna give it to me so it's absolutely great i benefit from it myself but you can see what this is doing what is it doing is making us look at time as something that is infinitely uh usable and extensible doesn't matter when it is i can access right as against being we're forced back into understanding that there are times that are just different that have a different quality it's not appropriate to use them in this way and it's true that it changes us so we have to become the kind of people who are satisfied with the sort of commodities that are delivered to us you could imagine people who really are connoisseurs of jazz music who really understand that one of the great things about jazz music is the way the musicians are responding to the performance hall and the audience and the particular musicians that are there and and and the weather and whatever accidents are happening the jazz musicians are incorporating it into their performance responding to the other musicians is one of the most important things in playing together you'll hear that in the music where the piano plays something the bass are reacting the drums are playing and then the trumpet will jump in you're interacting with everything everything is a part of what you're trying to get to anything can change what's happening the cell phone goes off and then all of a sudden it's like oh you know the cat might make fun of it on the piano or even on the trumpet or whatever it is and it all becomes a part of the performance and if you as a listener are a skillful listener and have the the bodily dispositions to pick up on that you'd never be satisfied by listening to a recorded jazz performance on cd because that's not the performance that would be optimal for your bedroom or living room but technology makes us also the sort of flexible people who uh are satisfied with a sort of cheap imitation of all the goods that that deeply skillful practices deliver [Music] i've heard that flamenco artists have a deep aversion to even being recorded for this very reason that they they have just an intuitive sense that recording them and making their performance reproducible in all sorts of foreign contexts is is distorting what flamenco is really all about [Music] is [Music] [Music] technology is something to be grateful for we have to learn how to not be seduced by technology to keep this this drive alive this desire alive to be humans in his last years heidegger was trying to figure out how to resist the technological understanding of being and fi and have a meaningful human life in spite of it we're speaking to a melees that a lot of people feel but they may feel well i feel this malaise but i mean i have no right to because this is progress right this is civilization or this is modernity or this is you know we we've made this tremendous leap ahead from all those united peasants in the middle ages so who am i to complain this sense of being of being sort of morally compelled not to protest which a lot of people have alongside the feeling something's wrong here but i can't believe the feeling because reason tells me the contrary we can explode that myth the problem is how to respect technology appreciate technology use it to get rid of all the dumb stuff that we used to have to do and yet not let it get rid of what matters and what is local and what is unique and what is significant and meaningful for us if i think nature around me is nothing but meaningless stuff waiting to be optimized then why shouldn't i just put a nice big hotel here make a lot of money all the people can see the ocean the idea that there's something there independently of me is something you have to cultivate and develop a sensitivity to and i think that's what a poet does the poet is sort of the paradigmatic instance of the person who's learned a receptivity to things independent of us we can all learn that you don't have to be a poet or an artist you know you can be a cook or a carpenter or a soccer player life is made most meaningful when you respond to meanings that are independent of you right i mean this is a point that goes back to kierkegaard kierkegaard said that if you think all meaning comes from you then you can just take it back you're a king without a castle right you'll you're uh you're a sovereign of a land of nothing there has to be something in the world that pushes back that has some force over you or else you'll never experience anything as really mattering to you allah um [Music] [Music] [Music] the standardization that's required for efficiency rules out those sorts of practices and and and what characterizes all of them is that they're not terribly efficient they require a real sensitivity and receptivity to what the particular world requires japanese carpenter doesn't have the focus on efficiency it's the quality that's really important and the feeling and so some projects for instance hershey did this project that took seven years after he selected the wood it took two years for the wood to dry and then it took 18 months for him to cut everything out in his shop you have to be patient if you want a japanese structure the way in which michelangelo saw david in the marble there was like the incoet possibility of david and he brought it out for me that's the that's what we all have to do in our lives in whatever way you know and it's a little mysterious to talk about it like that but i think anybody who gets really good at things has some sense for what it means to bring out what's there that nobody's seen for me it was sports when i was younger now it's teaching right so and that means interpreting texts so i get incredible um joy out of showing that a text that's been read for 2000 years there's things there that nobody's ever seen that are really there and that once we you know articulate them together we can all see that they're really there right the great texts are inexhaustible in the same way that reality itself is inexhaustible i think that's the lesson that there's this kind of mysterious source that continues to offer humanity meaning you can call it god if you're religious it's religious in the literal sense of religion everything's interconnected [Music] a focal practice reverses all the bad things we've talked about it draws a group of people together around some specific thing that matters that requires a kind of skill and mastery in order to be done and which brings the people out in their own uniqueness at their best i tell my students you can't buy the meaning of life you can't borrow it and you can't manufacture it you can only discover it and then i invite them to search their experiences and their hopes and aspirations for occasions where they are in a position to affirm four propositions the first is there's no place i would rather be the second is there's no one i'd rather be with the third is there's nothing i'd rather be doing and the fourth is this i will remember well there are moments when i'm juggling and they're my favorite moments when i just get lost in what i'm doing and when it happens to me on stage i get to share that moment with my audience i will juggle in a crowded bar and i know it's working when people go silent and everyone stops and everyone looks because they can't help it and those are magic those are magic moments and that's why i do it with jazz you know you're able to interact with the stars of jazz somebody like when marsalis or brantford or ray brown which was my teacher you could just go up to him and say hey it's a community and that community is what really drew me to jazz music there's those times where you'll get to inside and those jazz masters will be sitting in the audience those jazz legends they'll come out and like hey man connect you have to see and partly watching this movie you're seeing how people can resist it [Music] with the community a sawmill and store carpenter and the owner and now just mostly japan the whole country there's some money just for sales doesn't matter any kind of wood [Music] if i would not be back here how many african-american restaurants you see none and if i had not stayed here all the time i did the community would have gone down to nothing to nothing you stay in a community and you build it and you make it work i have to do what i have to do i had to go to that park this morning and cook these 20 gallons of gumbo before i go and serve it out there and that's the fun thing about today look how many people you made happy just with a little cup of gumbo why is it that it's something so powerful about eating together i mean you know we could all go and just take a quick hamburger and then talk yeah sure we could but there's something about eating together about experiencing together the you know really good taste of this this meal the experience of sipping the wine together but also it goes deeper than that i mean humans need to eat to live so we are in a collective act we're sustaining life our life together [Music] especially see buenos foreign [Music] centuries ago in the deserts of north africa people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours until dawn and they were always magnificent because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific right but every once in a while very rarely something would happen and one of these performers would actually become transcendent and it was like time would stop and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done you know a thousand nights before but everything would align and all of a sudden he would no longer appear to be merely human you know he would be like lit from within and lit from below and all like lit up on fire with divinity and when this happened back then people knew it for what it was you know they called it by its name they would put their hands together and they would start to chant allah allah allah god god god that's god you know curious historical footnote when the moors invaded southern spain they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from allah to oleo leolae which you still hear in bull fights and in flamenco dances in spain when a performer has done something impossible and magic [Music] [Music] [Music] skillful practices can focus they can draw things together and become focal practices it will depend on the particular people there it'll depend on the particular kind of music and the particular talent of the master musician and the particular instrument and the particular place and time all of that gets expressed in the music itself and by focusing things i mean they focus different activities right they draw different activities together different things you could be doing so again think about making music the practice of making music depended on all kinds of other human activities and human practices you'd have skills for playing the violin and you'd have skills for creating a hall where music could be played and you had skills for composing the music and so on and those all would come together on this moment when the music would be performed [Music] focal practices would also gather people and they'd bring people together to focus on this one event so the whole community if they wanted to hear music would come together and and they'd uh be drawn together and and they'd focus on this moment of great mastery when someone was again exhibiting this amazing feature of human life that we can become skillful and disclose and show the world in a way that most people aren't capable of doing [Music] looks like a god you know in the camisole made it god made it kind of a beautiful word make beauty make more beauty you know and i got to connect to me and i got to connect the world that god connected me so i try to honor its best give to technique [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] and this is the way i would like everybody to come to the table sometimes at their houses sift your people down to the table if they're gonna eat just ramen noodles sit them there and let them eat it and enjoy and you enjoy talking to one another and enjoy life you know that when we finally understand mastery and a responsiveness to the richness and the calling in the world then we understand that the source of meaning in our lives isn't in us that's the cartesian tradition and it isn't in some supreme being but it's in our way of being in the world being in the world is a unified phenomenon when people are at their best and most absorbed in doing a skillful thing they lose themselves into their absorption and the distinction between the master and the world disappears seeing what masters can do and seeing that we can do it too that everybody can in their way bring out what's best in themselves and in the world that we can re-experience what people called the sacred ah [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Tao Ruspoli

Views: 70,901

Keywords: heidegger, documentary, hubert dreyfus, mark wrathall, sean kelly, leah chase, manuel, molina, manuel molina, dasein, being in the world, being-in-the-world, tao ruspoli, philosophy, continental, phenomenology, mastery, technology, existentialism

Id: fcCRmf_tHW8

Length: 80min 35sec (4835 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022