Episode #100 ... Heidegger pt. 1 - Phenomenology and Dasein

hello everyone I'm Stephen West this is philosophized this thank you to all the people that support the show on patreon thank you to the people to go through the amazon banner by the way if you're one of the people who have been having trouble with your browser and the link to the banner on the website finally got tired of waiting for the web person to fix it and I just paid somebody else to fix it so it's back up now look I understand Amazon banners down things can get a little lonely for you right look I get it may have been hanging out with some other Amazon banners in the intro I get it but you know what I'm back now and I'm not leaving you again it's time to come home thank you again I hope you loved the show today so I want to begin the episode today by telling you all a very famous story from the history of philosophy it's an old story passed down from generation after generation from one philosopher to another and Here I am today passing it on to you it's a story about a day way back in antiquity in Athens Plato and his fellow philosophers are all sitting around talking about stuff as they normally would questioning the definitions of things popular thing to do if you're a philosopher back then I mean after all how can you ever philosophize about something meaningfully if you don't have a solid grasp on the definition of the thing now the topic of this particular day's discussion what's the question what is a human being what does it mean to be a human being how can we define that well they sit around they talk about it for a while throw some theories around and eventually they come to a conclusion if they're all pretty satisfied with sitting there nodding at each other yes as jolly good their answer to this question was a human being is a bipedal animal that doesn't have feathers after all and Oscar tests feathers a toucan has feathers a human being seems to be the bipedal animal that doesn't have feathers so they're all sitting around patting each other on the back love in this definition soaking in the glory when all of a sudden Diogenes the cynic bursts through the door with a chicken he just plucked he says hey everyone look I present to you a human being everybody starts screaming Diogenes I miss that guy remember he did he's kind of a character from around this whole time lived in a tub Alexander the Great famously took a liking to him so some you know what if I were not Alexander then I would want to be Diogenes Diogenes says back to him you know if I were not Diogenes I would also want to be Diogenes anyway this whole story depicts one of the first times philosophers started asking questions and what would eventually become a massive branch of philosophy known as ontology ontology is the branch of philosophy that when asked the kind of question what does it mean to be a human being not just that though ontology would ask what does it mean to be a thing at all what is existence what does it mean for something to be at what point does something exist vs. not exist like for example let's say one day you went down to the petting zoo you met a goat there and you fed it some alfalfa pellets now there's a lot of people out there that would look at that goat and they would take the existence of that goat to be a self-evident thing it exists and for the sake of the discussion today let's just say fine that goat definitely exists it is but then ontology steps in what does it even mean to exist what do we mean when we say that something exists what criteria do we use this leads to other questions what is the nature of existence itself is existence a property of that goat this leads to even more questions what foundation if there even is one makes it possible for that goat to be able to exist in the first place these are examples of common ontological questions but even this is far from the end of ontology like how about this what if what if you leave the petting zoo and later on you're thinking about that goat you know what if you really like thinking about this goat what if you fell in love with this goat and now gosh darn it you're daydreaming about it all the time matter what you do you can't get that goat out of your head now would you say that that thought about that goat exists when you're no longer having the thought does it not exist anymore our thoughts just patterns of you know fleeting electrochemical activity or do thoughts exist as beings in the same way that a goat is a being or a rock as a being I mean think about it what really is the difference between that thought and that goat may say okay well they're different to me because I no one's just a thought and that it's not real okay well what if you took PCP and you hallucinate it that you and the goat ran off to Vegas together to get married and when you're walking down the aisle with that goat it feels as real to you in that moment as it did back at the petting zoo question is we eventually stopped hallucinating and in your harkening back to your memory of your honeymoon in Guam with your new goat companion can that whole experience be said to have existed in some capacity we've all been here before not the goat we've all been up in our heads asking these kinds of questions about what constitutes something existing or not and philosophers all throughout history I've been here as well in this field of ontology now there's definitely some of you out there that hear these sorts of questions being asked and they just don't really do much for you look I love learning about the existentialist and their approach to life I love learning about the Nicomachean ethics that's interesting but ultimately I like learning about philosophy that's actually going to enrich things in my life what possible benefit can I get from from waxing poetic about whether this hypothetical goat exists or not look personally it is this is weird thing about me I like to learn about stuff that's actually going to be important to me well the guy we're going to be talking about today thought that these ontological questions are not only important they are the most important and simultaneously the most neglected questions in the history of philosophy his name is Martin Heidegger and for me to explain to you why he thinks these questions are so important it's going to take an entire series but I promise you by the end of it you won't just have these obscure questions to think about you'll have an approach to life that he lays out that some consider to be the greatest existentialist approach to life ever produced but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step question is where do you put that foot first and it make sense to me to begin where Heidegger began at the beginning of his career because to understand where he's coming from with all these innovations in the area of oncology we have to understand the revolutionary method that was invented by his teacher a guy that couldn't have cared less about ontology his name was Edmund Husserl and his revolutionary method that he invented was called phenomenology Husa rule was like a mad scientist this mad scientist that emerges at the beginning of the 20th century just wreaking havoc on everything in philosophy I guess technically that makes him a mad philosopher but make no mistake he is to philosophy and traditional philosophers what a mad scientist would be to science and traditional scientists he's like a mad scientist because yes he still gets dressed up in the lab coat he still conducts experiments but they're not the same kinds of experiments that a traditional scientist would conduct he's conducting these experiments in this in this bizarre place deep within his own mind almost like his own personal underground lair and I guess most of all he's not doing these experiments for the same reasons a normal scientist would be doing them one of the things I love most about Edmund Husserl just as a character within philosophy is the way that he approaches his work he's not concerned with things like what is the meaning of my life or how we should be behaving or what the best form of government is no whose role is a mathematician turned philosopher and while he thinks ultimately his work is going to go on to give answers to these kinds of questions he's personally interested in one thing and one thing alone in his work certainty see who's role noticed something he noticed all these philosophers throughout history trying to find a way to get objective truth about things yeah how's that going for you guys I haven't checked in in a while how you guys doing over there he realized that they all have basically the same strategy for doing this they all come up with their own unique creative ways of looking at the world and a slightly different way in the last guy did the goal being to correct the assumptions of the past and get us a little bit closer to certainty but maybe their lack of success can be explained by the fact that their strategy for accomplishing this massive task has been wrong from the very beginning maybe instead of looking at the world differently we should be looking differently at the way that we look at the world here's where he's coming from labour can't remember Hume we're talking about how we get to our human experience of the world the senses pick up a flurry of seemingly random raw phenomena that by themselves would be pretty chaotic but we filter those phenomena through various mental faculties categories of the mind that help us categorize and make sense of them things like space-time cause and effect many others this is what makes up our subjective human experience but one thing's for sure if you're who's wrong if we ever arrived at some method that does give us the truth about things it's ultimately going to have to be filtered through this very narrow subjective human experience that we have who Searles method of phenomenology is not about looking at the world differently it's not about looking at the world at all necessarily it's about taking an exhaustively close look at the lens that these objects of our experience are always seen through human consciousness or our subjective experience of the world phenomenology is a method designed to better understand the underlying structure of human thought the hoping that one day we can you know not just merely have an understanding of these objects and our thinking that we typically call the world the strategy of so many philosophers before him but instead maybe we can arrive at certainty about these raw phenomena and how they relate to each other by understanding all of the ways that our human experience of the world distorts reality in other words all these philosophers over the years have tried to arrive at objectivity by sitting on the sidelines approaching it like there's some objective third party looking at the world but human experience is not objective here's who Cyril saying that you're never going to be able to arrive at certainty about anything unless you have a much deeper understanding of that subjective lens that you're looking at everything through the big maximum here that I want to underscore the question central to phenomenology that's going to help us understand why Heidegger did what he did is the question is it possible that we're so familiar with this daily process of just perceiving the world that that familiarity is clouding our ability to see the world clearly now thinking about that possibility not really the default state we find ourselves in as human beings right I mean most of us don't sit around thinking about the underlying structure of human thought we just think about stuff most of us aren't searching for the objective truth about things like a philosopher would we just sort of have beliefs if they work they work if they don't well what really happens as a consequence of them not working what you go into your thinking closet turn off all the lights stupid stupid stupid and then what happens you emerge from the closet and revise your beliefs into another flawed interpretation of the world and go on about your life until you have to revise them again this whole idea of just sort of blindly accepting from bar that there's this other world out there separate from us that it's our job to uncover the truth about that world by reading more books and having more conversations and many other base assumptions that go along with this default attitude that we seem to have of taking so many things for granted this whole approach is what justo refers to as the natural attitude this is where most people spend their entire lives but it's not a death sentence don't worry who Cyril thinks it is possible to develop over time a phenomenological attitude of the world we can do this by suspending our belief in the natural attitude he calls it bracketing but the main point is to recognize the natural attitude for what it truly is it's a belief a set of beliefs he's not saying to not believe the natural attitude he's just saying put it in check for a bit and recognize that this default state this natural attitude might not be the only way of looking at things and realized the very serious possibility that this might be an area where we're coming to the table with a lot of assumptions about beforehand this is where who's role starts to sound like a mad scientist right this is where his hair starts to stick up like he's bows or the clown who Cyril thinks that when you examine the natural attitude closely enough you start to see a lot of biases and assumptions assumptions that stem from the way the human mind categorizes and makes sense of everything when you find these biases he's a fan of noticing them acknowledging them and then marking them but the sort of philosophical reflector tape to help draw attention to them the next time you're thinking about things and he says he'd do this for two reasons one you're much less likely to make the same sort of natural attitude mistake the next time and two when you start to get enough of this philosophical reflector tape cordoning off areas of these raw phenomena into different portions of thought in your mind that we're trying to look at eventually what happens is the reflector tape starts to show a pattern it starts to show you the boundary of where the natural attitude ends and the raw phenomena begin it's inside of these cordoned off areas whose real things that we can more closely focus on the stuff we're really concerned with the aspects of our experience that are necessary and unchanging in other words the essence of our experiences devoid of all the value judgments we place on experience after the now when you're in this place deep within your own mind when you're in the lair of the mad scientist many methods whose real uses to try to arrive at the essence of any given human experience can't really go through all of them here though if you do want a series on who's from phenomenology please don't hesitate to reach out actually know what I don't want to say this for over a year let me just ten seconds please here's the way I look at the show I'm not making this show for me I'm making it for you guys and the episodes of this show that end up getting produced look it's not like I'm sitting at home spinning a giant wheel to decide what episodes to do I don't have any other method to decide what episodes to do other than democratically just based on how many emails Facebook messages and Twitter things that I get asking for a particular person or topic you know a common email that I get from people are them asking me a question and then apologizing to me because I must get a ton of emails like seriously no no like look I do get a lot of emails but also consider the fact that you know I'm an extroverted person that spends the vast majority of my days in a one-bedroom apartment alone you're not imposing upon me here you're not inconveniencing me at all in fact I see it the opposite this is a conversation I get to have with the very people that love what I've decided to dedicate my life to so please please do not hesitate to reach out if you want more of something but I digress anyway can't go through all of who's girls methods here but I do want to talk about one of them because I want you to feel what you to feel this this strange world that whose rules operating within when he does his philosophy this bizarre method he's using to arrive at certainty that would eventually go on to deeply influence Heidegger in the way that he conducts his work one tactic is called using an eidetic reduction an eidetic reduction is just one type of strategy whose role would use to try to arrive at what the essence is of any given experience now how do we search for the essence of a human experience well we've searched for the essences of things on the show before right we just did it with objects not human experiences like who strolls duel let's talk about the process famous example passed down from Descartes is to try to find the essence of a piece of wax you can imagine in front of you a red cylindrical piece of wax sitting on a table now let's break it down what is the essence of a piece of wax well this particular piece of wax has certain properties right it's red it's cylindrical in shape it may be shiny it could get spotted at the store then again it may not be shiny it could be one of those Korean war surplus candles your grandma has up in our attic this wax has a certain way that it smells it has a certain way that it tastes but are any of these properties necessary and invariable two words that are incredibly important in phenomenology necessary and invariable components of that wax well we could take away the redness still could be a piece of wax without being read right the wax could smell different it could still be a piece of wax right I mean what if it wasn't a gift to your grandma from you know General Douglas MacArthur still would be a piece of Wax it just wouldn't smell like the 1950s you could apply heat to the wax and it would melt down into a shape that wasn't the cylinder anymore still would be wax to find the necessary and invariable components of this wax is to find the essence of the wax in an eidetic reduction is a particular technique where you use something known as imaginary variation or the act of creatively varying different components of something say the wax in order to get closer to those necessary and invariable components for example asking questions like what if the wax was blue Stoll's a piece of wax what if the wax smelled like a gingerbread man still wax what if the wax was made of water okay there stops up something changed there about the wax now it doesn't appear to be wax now can we try to figure out what specifically needs to be replaced for to be classified as wax again ie the necessary and invariable components now imagine conducting this whole process not on a piece of wax something we're all very familiar with imagine conducting it on an experience that human beings have and instead of considering things like color and shape and how it smells things again we're all very familiar with changing imagine the equivalent are the ways that your brain organizes and make sense of that experience you imagine that you can get a rough idea of this strange mind bending world that people like who Cyril and Heidegger used to operate with it and you can definitely get an idea of why it would take an entire series to fully explain what who Cyril thinks he's doing here but all that doesn't matter well that doesn't matter all you need to know to be able to understand where hide coming from our the basics of this newly introspective way of approaching philosophy and phenomenology keyword introspective again instead of trying to find a new creative way of looking at the objects of our experience like so many philosophers have done in the past instead let's take a deeper look at what that experience is at its most fundamental level but along comes Heidegger student of Edmund Husserl begins his career a a card-carrying phenomenologist but it's right here that he sees phenomenology eventually running to a lot of very serious problems first of all what exactly is it that you're trying to do phenomenology you're trying to get an exhaustive understanding of these structures of human thought you're going to arrive at the structures of human thought Heidegger thought isn't that kind of an extension of a mistake philosophers have been making all throughout history like David Hume you know when David Hume writes an inquiry concerning human understanding who really is to say that if David Hume lived for another few years and could post another book this one called an inquiry concerning squirrel understanding or raccoon understanding who's to say that it wouldn't have been the exact same book in other words how can we know for sure that the underlying structure of human thought is not the underlying structure of mammalian thought or all conscious thought for that matter but it goes the other way - what are we using to be able to arrive at these conclusions about the architecture of human thought oh yeah our subjective experience of the world let's say we arrived at a conclusion how can we ever say that we're positive that this is the way every human being that's ever going to live structures or thought or even every human being alive today for that matter I mean is it that inconceivable to think that maybe something like your level of intellect affects the structure of your thought or even the culture you were born into where the values you possess is it crazy to think that those might have a drastic effect now if these weren't problems enough Heidegger thinks there's an even bigger mistake who feels making and that you know even though he's an undeniably brilliant thinker and recognized a mistake that so many philosophers have been the past even though he recognized the fact that we shouldn't be caring so much about the objects of the world before we have a true understanding of the lens that we view those objects through Heidegger thought there was something massive who throw himself was overlooking because justo may have understood what underlies the objects of our experience but what underlies the ability to be able to study the structures of human thought at all existence what does it mean to exist what does it mean to be a human being these ontological questions we were talking about Heidegger realized the answers to these questions drastically inform these other two areas that philosophers engage in like just imagine for a second if every philosopher we've ever talked about on the show wrote their work from the ontological perspective of Plato and his buddies that we talked about at the beginning the episode like what would cost for the beginning that a human being is just a bipedal animal with no feathers what if there was no Diogenes to embarrass everyone and keep the conversation going with the plucked chicken no question about it things would look very different now when Heidegger takes a look at the history of ontology in the Western canon of philosophy of course there's variation among the philosophers but he notices something on one issue in particular there seems to be this mutual consensus among practically every philosopher that's ever lived and man does a consensus like that start to look rather suspicious to Heidegger this concept goes way beyond philosophy by the way I mean if you're somebody that's interested in making you know novel social commentary or even just being the person at the party that has the most interesting take on the world here's a tip from your uncle Steve you don't want to focus your time studying the things that everybody's arguing about no don't do that you want to focus your time studying the things that everybody pretty much agrees on because it's in those areas that people's ideas are the least challenged I mean everybody knows their position on abortion and why they feel that way about it but it's when you start to ask questions that people tend to agree on like like why do you structure your relationships the way you do or why does this never-ending task of finding somebody to love you seem to be an imperative in your life these are the kind of questions that create progress in our understanding of the world the questions you never think about because what happens is you and your group of friends all agree on X Y & Z so you end up never really examining your beliefs that much about X Y & Z I'm talking about the beliefs that we just sort of offhandedly spout off at a party not even really thinking about it because people all around us just pulled their red cups and smile and nod in agreement well guess what folks Heidegger is throwing a party and practically every philosopher that's ever lived is on the guest list right now smiling and nodding at each other about a certain ontological bedrock that they've all built their systems on top of and hi diggers here to stop smiling and nodding what is it to be a human being it's always been some variation of generally the same thing it's a we're a rational animal a conscious agent temporarily and recklessly navigating this realm this external world that's existed for billions of years and will continue to exist with or without us now - so happens that in this realm having a more comprehensive understanding of this external world leads to a lot of very real benefits so philosophers traditionally from Descartes to Locke to Conte all the way up to whose role they've all dedicated a considerable amount of time to trying to understand this external world but what if this whole idea this idea that we're this human being thing this conscious agent navigating this realm that's separate from us this subject an object relationship that exists what if that's been a giant assumption philosophers have been making from practically the very beginning what if that's the case Heidegger things yeah that's weird people also seem to be agreeing on that so he goes back and he looks at all the arguments people give to justify this sort of ontological position people like Descartes for example Descartes we all know the story tries to doubt everything he possibly can about his existence and he famously arrives at the conclusion that although you can initially doubt pretty much everything about the existence of the external world one thing is for certain by virtue of the fact that I'm thinking I am a thinking thing of some sort that's the fundamental thing that you can know about your existence that he's going to use as a foundation for this entire philosophical system but Heidegger says hold on a second Descartes you skipped over something massively important there the first thing you experience about your existence is not the ear a thinking thing to even be able to make an abstraction like that about what you are presupposes that something has to come before that know the actual first experience that you have when you exist it's just sort of being there like Here I am guys existing being there Heidegger has a word he uses to describe the state design now the literal German translation of design is being there though it should be said Heidegger creates a lot of words all throughout his philosophy and he's not doing it because he gets some some creepy pleasure from people using the words he invented he's creating words because he's literally talking about things that no person has ever talked about before and he doesn't want the biases and connotations that come along with conventional words to cloud people's understanding of the concepts he's talking about that said even with something as simple as the concept of design so many different interpretations of Heidegger's work I think my job here is not to lay out every possible interpretation of Heidegger in existence it's to hopefully pique your interest about his ideas enough that you go on to read more and have your own interpretation of his work but anyway this concept design being their existence here's where he departs from all the other philosophers see because who Cyril makes a claim that he's studying the underlying structure of thought we use to experience this world that's separate from us but Heidegger thought what if this whole notion that were subjects navigating objects that were conscious agents navigating an external world what if that's wrong after all our experience of the world before we even arrived at an idea like that were a thinking thing navigating something it's just being their design being in the world well how about this idea guys what if being and the world are a united thing that being can't exist without the world and the world can't exist without being in the English translations of Heidegger being in the world is hyphenated together because he sees these two concepts as fundamentally inseparable this is an odd thing to consider at first for a lot of people but just like in phenomenology where we become so familiar with perceiving the world every day that it's inhibiting our ability to see it clearly is it possible that we become so familiar with being that that familiarity clouds our ability to see it clearly - so you even try to begin to describe this concept hydrators talking about while using Western languages that's an uphill battle in its own right because the our languages typically structure sentences are in terms of subjects acting upon objects that's how deep this goes in fact Heidegger and his later work actually advocates poetry as the best form of communication not these sentences that continually reinforce this distorted subject object false dichotomy these sentences reinforce the idea that being in the world is existing within some spatial dimension that's separate from us Heidegger often talks about the overemphasis so many people place on the idea of something spatially being what if being in the world is not being within a spatial context what if it's more like being in love being in love is its own thing right maybe being in the world are inseparable from each other for them to be what it is being is something that were engaged in when you remove the languages when you remove the intuition when you look at being in a phenomenological way this is what you find being is something that we're engaged in and by the way being is something that we're all engaged in every person every animal every tree every rock we're all united under this larger umbrella of being we're all on the same team and Heidegger thinks we should think about it that way hashtag team being people now this is kind of tough to initially wrap your mind around don't worry more explanation next episode we're going talk a lot more about what it means to be beings engaged in a world as such but just know this I've talked to a lot of people about Heidegger a lot of fans of philosophy all the way up to philosophy professors and a common experience that people have when they first hear about this concept of design is they have this sort of strange moment where they think how in the world did nobody ever think of this before and what's even more interesting to think about is what if being in time ideas primary work early in his life relays out these ideas what if that was the magnum opus of dailies what if this was the initial ontological starting point that philosophy began on how different would philosophy look to how different would the world look today how different would the world look today it's a nice segue I guess because if this series is me ultimately trying to convey why Heidegger thinks these ontological questions are so important that question sort of brings me to make us the first point Heidegger would make about these kinds of questions you know it's so easy for us as individuals as individuals that don't write philosophical treatises but just people that look to philosophy as a practical guide to life and how to think more clearly it's so easy for us to think of these questions like what does it mean to be was made to be a human as again sort of these redundant self-indulgent exercises right like sort of you being a professor that's going through some sort of rocky style training to become the most obscure and unrelatable professor on the face of the planet why would you ask these questions why not ask some real questions one that asked questions like how do we get the ice caps to stop melting or how do we fix widespread poverty or how do we get people to stop killing each other real questions Heidegger would say those are all really great questions to ask but are we sabotaging our ability to ever be able to arrive at an accurate answer to them by ignoring questions that make those questions even possible not only that is it our lack of answers to these ontological questions that's responsible for creating all those problems in the first place the state of the world is contingent upon the state of human thought that came before it and when you really consider that again think of how much change is about for example Nietzsche's philosophy if he spends his entire career with the ontological outlook that we are agents of God's will think of how much changes about every single question he thinks is worth asking and every answer he thinks is reasonable think about how much change is about the political philosophy of John Locke if for his entire career he holds the ontological position that a human being is a featherless biped all animal see because Heidegger would point out that whether you're asking geological questions about rocky beings or anthropological questions about cultural beings or scientific questions about scientific beings we're all ultimately asking questions about beings and that may be if we took a closer look at these seemingly meaningless questions and we all understood what it means to be a human being a little bit better maybe we better understand why we have these sorts of problems or even whether they're problems at all thank you for listening I'll talk to you next time

Channel: Philosophize This!

Views: 48,989

Keywords: philosophy, heidegger, dasein, phenomenology

Id: xXUmVLJ6i4o

Length: 31min 5sec (1865 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/MuslimSJW]

CuckPhilosophy's Heidegger video was really good but it got copyright striked

[u/Dawk19]

1 of 3 but thought it was cool how questioning something like being and existence can affect our everyday lives and not just be some irrelevant to most people topic.

[u/SlamsMcdunkin]

I did my thesis on Phenomonology in Architecture and often cited Heidegger since he most closely related it to art/design. You have to be careful because Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party and even though later he was overheard stating it was the greatest embarrassment of his life, he never apologized. That said, it can be seen as a personal error and not a philosophical one.

[u/4n0m4nd]

This sub needs more Wittgenstein, for the actual private language argument, which refutes the Christian God.