Husserl, Heidegger & Existentialism - Hubert Dreyfus & Bryan Magee (1987)

one philosopher active earlier in this Century who was much more important than his reputation outside the subject might suggest was the German hustle Edmund hustle who was born in 1859 and died in 1938. his acknowledged Masterpiece is a book called logical investigations published in two volumes in 1900 and 1901 and perhaps I might also mention a book called ideas published in 1913. hustle's basic approach went something like this for each one of us there is one thing that is indubitably certain and that is our own conscious awareness therefore if we want to build our knowledge of reality on Rock Solid foundations that is the place from which to start but as soon as we analyze it we find that awareness has to be awareness of something Consciousness must be consciousness of something and we are never able to distinguish inexperience between states of Consciousness and objects of Consciousness in actual experience however careful the analysis they seem to be the same thing now Skeptics down the ages have argued that we can never know whether the objects of our Consciousness have a separate existence from us independent of our experience of them Russell conceded that but insisted that they do indubitably exist as objects of Consciousness for us whatever other status they may have or lack and therefore that we have direct access to them as objects of Consciousness and can investigate them as such without making any assumptions about their independent existence thus he launched a school of philosophy devoted to the systematic analysis of Consciousness and its objects this school is known as phenomenology and one use of that word phenomenology continues to this day to refer to whatever is given in direct experience regardless of any question of independent existence and our direct experience of course encompasses not only material objects but all sorts of abstract things such as music mathematics not to mention our own thoughts pains emotions memories and so on one of hustle's followers Heidegger struck out on his own with a book called Being and Time published in 1927 and dedicated to her soul this book became the Fountain Head of modern existentialism though Heidegger never actually liked having the label existentialist attached to him he went on to produce a great deal more philosophical work in the course of a long life he died in 1976 at the age of 86 and much of that work was influential but Being and Time remains his masterpiece later existentialist thinkers especially Jean-Paul sultra became better known to the general public and did more to propagate existentialist ideas outside the confines of academic philosophy but Heidegger remained very much their Master the very title of satra's main philosophical work being a nothingness published in 1943 is a direct allusion to Heidegger's being in time so here we have a clear-cut line of philosophical development which we're going to discuss in this program from hustle to Heidegger and Heidegger to satra and perhaps we might mention one other figure Maurice Merlot ponti who published an important book in 1945 called the phenomenology of perception he and satra were great friends at one time together they founded and edited the journal Li tomoderma but Merlo Ponte died early at the age of only 53 in 1961. here to discuss this major tradition within modern philosophy is Professor Hubert Dreyfuss of the University of California at Berkeley Professor Dreyfuss I said at the beginning of that introduction to our discussion that hustle is is probably not well known outside academic philosophy how could does it come about can you explain this for us how somebody so little known generally is of such enormous importance inside philosophy well it was kosaro's own idea that he was important that helped and he was important in a reactionary kind of way that is he culminated a whole philosophical tradition the Cartesian tradition that thinks of man's relationship to the world in terms of subjects knowing objects in fact Jose thought he culminated the whole philosophical tradition from Plato on because he had discovered the indubitable basis on which one could ground an understanding of everything setting himself up like that he's similar to the way Hegel set himself up as the culmination of idealism so that Kierkegaard could rebel against hago in the name of the beginning of existentialism and Marx in the name of materialism so glycerol sets himself up as the culmination of cartesianism his last book is called Cartesian meditations and then other thinkers like Heidegger like Marlo Ponte can't understand what the tradition really comes to and then they can rebel against it now I tried to give a sort of Lightning sketch in my opening words of hustle's basic approach but I think we need something a bit more substantial than that to get our teeth into can you fill that out a bit yes visceral's basic idea was that the mind is always directed toward objects under some aspect so I am perceiving that table roughly I'm perceiving that as a table and from the top I can remember it I have beliefs about it I could have desires about it all my mental content is directed and hussarel thought that was in fact what the essence of the Mind the mind and nothing else in the universe has this kind of directedness toward something outside of it other than it and there is a mystery here isn't there how for example if I think about astronomical questions how events inside my head can relate to distant galaxies right hussaros thought that was a Wonder Bar phenomenon and he was ready to devote his life to trying to understand it and his way of understanding it was to say there must be some kind of content in the mind that accounted for this aboutness or directedness the aboutness or directedness is called technically intentionality in the tradition and not because it has to do with our intentions but because it has to do with this directedness and he said there was something which he called intentional content in the mind which was sort of like a description of reality and it was by virtue of that description that I could perceive or remember this table under some aspect now you said earlier that thinkers like heideka reacted against this how did they react well at first we should say whatever thought he got out of this he got out of it an amazing uh finished edifice that was so impressive that one would naturally want to react against it he thought and quite rightly that it didn't matter whether there was a table there or not that is it didn't matter to his philosophy he could just bracket the table in fact he could bracket the whole world all he needed to study was the fact that he took it that there was a table there he performed what he called the phenomenological reduction he reflected on his own intentional content and what was special about that according to him was he had an indubitable basis to start from it wasn't just that he had some kind of evidence that he took that to be a table as he put it he had indubitable evidence that he had himself produced taking it to be a table was just taking it to be a table he couldn't be wrong about that secondly he had absolute grounding because I couldn't experience anything music other people tables galaxies as you mentioned I couldn't experience anything thing at all except by virtue of my directed mental content so he thought he had discovered the indubitable foundation which is the condition of the possibility of our being able to encounter anything and he found it in this relation of subjects directed toward objects now that is as you say the culmination of a whole tradition of philosophy stemming at least from Descartes if not from before of see of seeing man's situation is that of a subject confronted by objects now it's that that really Heidegger reacted against that's right that that Cartesian tradition became so clear and in a certain way so persuasive in hospital that Heidegger was driven to see whether that really was the true description of the phenomena because Jose kept saying we must go to the things themselves and let them show themselves as they are in themselves and when Heidegger actually looked at the way human beings are related to the world he found that it wasn't the subjects related to objects at all that awareness and Consciousness didn't play any role now that seems very strange how could it be well he took as his example and he was good at going to simple examples uh hammering when an expert Carpenter is simply hammering if the hammer is working well and he's a master at what he's doing the hammer becomes transparent for him it isn't as if he's a subject contemplating the hammer maybe he's paying attention to the nails but if the nails are going in well and he's really good and it's he's been doing it all day he doesn't even have to pay attention to that he can think about lunch or he can talk to some fellow Carpenter and everything is going on with what I would call transparent coping Heidegger calls that the ready to hand when you look at our ready-to-hand relation to things you just don't find subjects contemplating objects this is such a a contrast with the traditional approach to philosophy that I think it's worth going over it again perhaps in slightly different terms that from uh Descartes onwards philosophers had thought of the human being as a subject relating to objects and therefore because of that the central philosophical problems were seen to be how do we as subject have knowledge of these objects and the central problems to which philosophers addressed themselves were about perception about whether we have any certain knowledge at all if so how we got it how we knew we had it and so on now Heidegger isn't saying that these problems don't exist but what he's saying is that this is not what is Central to the human situation we aren't as it were separate subjects looking through some invisible plate Class Window at an objective reality which is out there and to which we try to relate or of which we try to get knowledge we are from the beginning beginning in amongst it all we are in there in the world so to speak coping with it so that we are not primarily observing or knowing beings at all in the way that traditional philosophers are treated us as being we are we are coping beings or we're even he might have been inclined to say we're being beings and it's from there that we start that's right it's a relationship of uh for instance as Gilbert Ryle put it when he reviewed being in time he reviewed both being in time and hospitals logical investigations he thought they were both good but he thought Heidegger was really on to something interesting riled distinguished knowing that which is what the tradition always been been interested in from knowing how which is what he took Heidegger to be interested in and that isn't just to claim the Primacy of practical activity though that's radical enough the pragmatists have claimed that too it was to have an analysis of practical activity that didn't need to bring in mental content chance like Desiring believing the following a rule you could you could try to explain hammering as in more mental activity but Heidegger said if you really observe it or to take another of his favorite examples he said to his students when you come into the classroom you must turn the doorknob but you don't observe the doorknob believe that you have to turn the doorknob to get in try to turn the doorknob all you do all we know is here you are in the classroom and you couldn't have got here without turning the doorknob you have no memory of it because the whole activity was so transparent it didn't even pass through Consciousness a driver has the same experience shifting from first to second they do a lot of fancy footwork with the clutch but they can be carrying on a deep philosophical conversation it doesn't even have to be conscious although these although these examples are mundane and trivial what they actually illustrate is of enormous importance isn't it because what they show is that our conscious act or that even that is begging the question that our activity is not characteristically determined by conscious choices and aware states of mind at all and that is of great significance that's right now Heidegger didn't want to deny that there was a place for that he said in his language first and foremost we are coping beings uh already involved in the world but if something should go wrong for instance in the hammer case if the hammer is too heavy then I will notice this aspect too heavy and I'll become a problem solver like the tradition thought human beings would all become a rational animal and I will say for this task it's too heavy if I take another Hammer then it might work better the kind of Aristotelian practical syllogism all of that has its place the same as the doorknob sticks then I have to try to turn the doorknob Heidi recalls that the unready to hand and he thinks that's the level I presume that he thinks that's the level at which hospital came into the story one crucial step too late and there is is another level while we're at it which Heidegger calls the present at hand which is important too we can get in a stance of just staring at the object if the hammer the head flies off the hammer for instance or if the nails are missing or if we're just feeling in a relaxed attitude of Wonder we can see the Hammer as a wooden shank with an iron blob on the end then we see it as a object with properties we it weighs say one pound if that's the level two that philosophers have always studied there's a whole logic of subjects and predicates discussed in What's called the predicate calculus that has its place Heidegger would say but that's a third level down the line after you've left out the everyday coping and even left out the Practical situation in which things can break down because that hammer isn't even a broken down Hammer it's just a piece of wood with metal on the end but that's important too Heidegger would say because it's by relating those kinds of predicates with laws that we get science and theory and and Heidegger thought science and theory was very important he has what he calls an existential account of Science in being in time but what's important to him is to realize that to get to these predicates and laws of science you have to leave out the whole level of practical coping in the world so you shouldn't have the idea that scientific theory that can explain causal things very well could ever explain the everyday meaningful world of significance that Heidegger wants to talk about that's what he's saying in the effect is that we only become conscious of things in most cases when something goes wrong when there's a specific problem but that for most of the time we are kind of moving in a medium we're swimming in a medium that we take utterly for granted and are not conscious of and don't direct our attention to at all and one consequence of that is that unlike traditional philosophers he sees the world as being not as being something that's inferred I mean the the traditional philosopher told talks as if what I have access to is my mind with its contents and from these Contents I infer the existence of a world external to myself and Heidegger is saying no no that is not actually what the situation is at all the world is not something I infer I start with it and in it is that that's right the way he put it was that philosophers since Descartes had been trying to prove the existence of the external world and Kant said that it was a scandal that no one had successfully proved the existence of the external World Heidegger says in being in time it's a scandal that people are trying to prove the existence of the external world as if we were stuck with this internal world and couldn't get out whereas we are as he puts it being in the world I think I should explain that a little bit further because we've only talked so far about the directedness being not the kind of mental directedness that hussarel was interested in but any particular directedness of my mind toward the hammer I'm using from my me not my mind toward the hammer I'm using this Hammer takes place on a whole background which he calls the world the hammer only makes sense in terms of nails and wood and houses and other a totality of equipment which he calls significance and my skill of hammering only makes sense in a whole background of other skills of standing and moving and wearing my clothes and talking and so forth so it's on the background of the world and my capacities for being in that world or really being of that world you might say that anything gets encountered at all so as you say you can't call that into question and this launches him into forming a view of human beings which is radically different from the traditional philosopher's view of human beings isn't it now can you begin to tell us what that is well it certainly he can't talk about subjects or persons or minds or the and and he he needs a completely new word to even talk about this ongoing activity on a background and he chooses brilliantly to you as as a word dazon in German design means simply existence like you earn your daily bread you would earn your daily dozing and but it also means if you take it apart being the there and so he thinks that this activity of human being which he sees as an activity is an activity of being the there which for him is being the situation in which this coping is going on so when I'm driving there is if we're looking at that aspect of me which is coping not in my body it's just identical with the driving situation so that being the there is actively being a situation in which directed activity is going on and that's a completely new understanding of what it is to be a human being and Dawson also gives them the possibility as we have with the word human being of either talking about that activity human being or to talk about a human being an instance of that activity and he does both and he actually offers us an analysis doesn't he of this particular kind of being or way of being that we are which relates it directly to time and hence the title of his most famous book can you explain what that relationship is yes we better spell that out the relationship of another word that's handy here this relationship of of opening a clearing because another word for the situation is a clearing and there is this activity of clearing this clearing which we are and he says this activity has a three-fold structure first he says we that is design has what he calls disposition the best example of which is moods that is thanks to a basic characteristic of us we are things show up for us as mattering as threatening or attractive or stubborn or useful and so forth well just important in some ways or important in some way and the tradition has generally overlooked that he thinks because it doesn't easily fall into these knowing uh interests but he says of course rightly that it's very important that things show up for us as mattering and they do because we have this basic characteristic called disposition and we're always already in a situation and it always already matters some way we don't ever get behind our moods and start from no mood and then step into one the second structure he calls a discourse which is a little bit misleading but it grows out of a kind of interesting hun that is he says the world is always articulated that is right now everything is already laid out in this what he calls context of significance all pieces of equipment fitting together so that we can use any particular one and I'm always articulating the world that is breaking it up at its joints by using a piece of equipment if I take out of this total which he calls A referential or a totality of significance a hammer I can articulate it by hammering with it as a hammer or I can articulate it as a nail puller under different aspects and then of course I can talk about what I'm doing I can say the snail is hard to pull then I will be articulating even further what I had already articulated and that's constantly going on that's called discourse and the third aspect which has been implicit in what we've been saying is the design is always pressing into the future if I'm hammering with a nail it's in order to say repair a house in order to do my job as Homemaker say or Carpenter Dawson and Heidegger talk is using equipment in order to pursue some goal which he calls towards which for the sake of some ultimate let's say Life Plan uh which he calls for the sake of now it's important not to speak about goals and life plans his funny language is necessary because a goal is what you have in your mind or a Life Plan whereas he just says Dawson is always oriented toward the future doing something now in order to get to do something later and that all of this makes sense as oriented toward something which is what that person is up to and that threefold structure which is being already in amidst things and always ahead of itself pressing into the future is as you let the cat out of the bag the structure of time in the second half of being in time lo and behold the threefold structure of being in the world or being in a situation turns out to be mappable on past present and future and he ends up saying almost that being is time that's right anyway we are embodied time and so it does design in his language is care and the structure of care is temporarily yeah now we've talked up to this point just about the individual human being what uh Heidegger calls dazine and it's positioned in the world and all these various aspects of it that you've been spelling out but of course Heidegger doesn't suppose that he's the only being that exists and you and I when we talk about this don't suppose that you or I are the only beings that exist the world is full of people how do all the other people or the other darzans come into this picture well it's very important that they come in from the very start in fact it's a big problem for cartesians like Descartes and visceral they have the same problem about other Minds that they have about the external world because they start with an individual atom Anonymous isolated subject Heidegger starts an entirely different way closer to the phenomena and saving him from this problem he says we all already do what anyone does I hammer with a hammer because one hammers with hammers in our culture I eat the way one eats I pronounce words the way one pronounces words in our country and you have to or you wouldn't be understood that's right and in fact people subtly constantly people can't stand distance Heidegger says meaning people subtly lead other people to correct their pronunciation or whatever and they don't have to be coerced into it people are eager not to deviate from the norm it's just a basic fact about human beings so we grow up Heidegger doesn't talk genetically but we could say it helpfully a baby gets socialized into a bunch of shared public practices and starts doing what one does and saying what one says and at that point this baby has Dawson in it to talk like Heidegger and of course this one doesn't mean just the masses as Heidegger says in one point we flee from the crowd the way one flees from the crowd but even when we flee from the crowd we do it the way one does it so finally Heidegger says about dazan that normally dazine is what it does and or one is what one does or does on itself isn't any is a oneself if one takes together various aspects of what you've set up to this point they could be rather disquieting I mean you've just said that no one does what one does and lives the way one does because that is how we are socially conditioned and we have to do it for the most part uh you were saying much earlier that Heidegger rejected the idea that most of our activity is directed by conscious choices and decisions and mentally aware reflection if you take these things together doesn't that rather reduce the human agent to a sort of zombie I mean somebody who is merely responding to pressures on him from outside in an unreflecting way that's quite right this this anyone this self that just does what one does in an unreflective way sounds pretty much like a very uh zombie-like character but Heidegger is trying to do things the other way around he now will show you how we can get free individuals to crystallize out of this rather amorphous public us and that's the subject of division two of being time the subject of authenticity what the part of Heidegger which is really existentialist so far we haven't said anything very existentialist but in division two Heidegger talks about guilt and about death which I don't have time to go into here but guilt and death all turn out to be versions of anxiety which we better talk about for a minute a Dawson according to Heidegger and he does on anywhere is always dimly aware that this the way the world is is ungrounded by that I mean there's no reason why one has to do things this way it there it isn't because it's rational to do things this way it isn't because God ordered us to do things this way it isn't because human nature requires we do them this way Heidegger is as an existentialist says at one point that the essence of dazzling is its existence meaning there is no human nature we are what we take ourselves to be how we interpret ourselves in our practices but that is rather unsettling and that's exactly his word for it anxiety is the experience is the disposition that is our response to the fundamentally unsettling character of being dazine and the question then is what do you do about it well what you have to do about it is you can either flee it in which case one goes back to the kind of Conformity which is required just to be intelligible I have to do what one does and talk like one talks but you become a conformist you try even more to shape up to the Norms to pronounce things the right way and dress the right way and everything that's how you could flee into inauthenticity literally that would mean something like disowning what it is to be done or you can own up to what it is to be designed to own up means for Heidegger to hold on to anxiety and not flee it and if you do that you will be catapulted into an entirely different way of Being Human now what you do needn't change because you only can do what one does whether or you just be kooky and insane so you go on doing probably the same thing you did but how you do it changes completely you no longer expect to get any deep final meaning out of anything so you don't Embrace projects with the conviction that now at last this is going to make sense of your life so and you also don't then drop all your projects because they fail to make the ultimate meaning you're looking for as one of my students once said you are able to stick with things without getting stuck with them in in authentic in this authentic activity Heidegger says you no longer have to respond to what he calls the general situation you can respond to what he calls the Union unique situation he doesn't give any examples but I take it to be something like this take his Carpenter that he's always talking about with his hammer when he puts his hammer down for lunch he could just have his sausages and sauerkraut but if there's beautiful flowers blooming outdoors and he's authentic he doesn't have to do what a respectable Carpenter does he can go out and wander in the flowers and but it's important that he can do only what one does he can't take off all his clothes and roll in the flowers one doesn't do that but there's a little space for authenticity namely doing the sort of thing that one does enables you to respond to the unique situation without concern for respectability and Conformity and that kind of life not trying to get absolute meaning and responding to the current situation makes you an individual Heidegger says makes you flexible alive gay fro in in in German and that is his idea of how one should live put that way you make it sound like a sort of philosophy of personal Liberation but here's this phrase philosophy of Liberation used about a lot of political philosophies but this is as it were an individual Liberation philosophy is it not but it's an existentialist Liberation philosophy which makes it a sort of last and strangest Liberation philosophy we don't Liberate say our sexual drives or our repressed classes The Liberation comes from realizing that there's no deep truth to liberate no deep meaning in daising accepting the ungrounded and unsetleness is itself liberating yeah now in the whole of this discussion you've been forced to use some very strange terms like like darzene and to use ordinary words in some unusual ways and when one reads being in time because everything we've talked about so far is is what's contained in Being and Time the early Heidegger um when one reads this book it this vocabulary really does become very difficult to cope with in fact I think it's one of the most difficult books to read and understand that I ever have read but you've actually in spite of that difficulty succeeded in making a lot of these ideas clear why didn't Heidegger do that why did he have to be so obscure well it's implied in what I did if he could have done what I was just doing namely using the wrong word and then backing off and using the right word that probably would have been the best thing to do for instance I talked about goals and then said but of course they're not really gold because that's too mental and life plans but they're not really plans and then I introduced his funny language the towards which and the for the sake of and I said we had to use dazine because we're a way of being but not a a mind directed toward things in general he would say the whole philosophical tradition has passed over the world and our usual kind of involved coping with the world not only because it's something you don't notice if everything is going well but also because we have no language for it since we don't need any language for it we need language for how to repair the doorknob and how to get a lighter Hammer if the hammer is too heavy but we don't need language to describe the way everything is when it's going transparently well and the kind of being we are when everything's going transparent really well so Heidegger would say he has to make up a whole new vocabulary for this and once you get in it it does seem to be the right economical vocabulary and he uses it rigorously so that when he's taken up a new word like ready to hand unready to hand or present at hand he sticks to it so once you get in this language it's really a very elegant and simple language being in time was published was presented when it was published as being the first volume of what was to be of a two-volume work but Volume 2 never came out did it because uh Heidegger in fact changed his views and that made him unable to finish the project and this changes itself very frequently referred to in the literature about Heidegger it's it's called the term decala the German word now in what way does the later Heidegger differ from the earlier Heidegger what what are the real grounds of the difference there are a lot of different views of this and it's not a subtle question in idea scholarship people say it he got he went from a Resolute sort of grasping of things to a kind of openness and so forth that's probably true but I don't think that's the essence of it there's at one point I think he says it clearly where he says that he has changed to thinking being historically and that that's what he wasn't doing before you can see that he wasn't doing it before because everything I've explained so far was supposed to be about the structure of all human beings anywhere anytime even anxiety was supposed to be this what any human being experienced and fled from or faced up to but now Heidegger gets the idea that there is something special about each Epoch of our understanding of being and that he had been talking only about the modern Epoch without realizing it and he begins to try to describe these various epochs for the Greeks they felt rooted they weren't unsettled and things showed up for them as natural and they appreciated them and for the Christians they felt that they were creators created and that the all the things they dealt with were creatures and that they could read God's plan out of the world and for us we have another understanding of being an understanding of being where everything is objects for us to control and use and we're subjects with with desires to satisfy so that these are all different understandings of what it is to be a thing what it is to be a person what it is to be an institution Heidegger would say different understandings of what it is to be and if you have a different understanding of what it is to be then different sort of things show up for the Greeks Heroes showed up and and beautiful things in Homer for the Christians Saints and Sinners showed up you can't have anything since it is in Greece they would just be poor people everybody walked all over you can't have any heroes in the Middle Ages they would be proud people who were damned so different sorts of peoples and things show up and Heidegger now thinks he should talk about the kind of peoples and things that show up in our understanding of being now one of the ways you can point out this change just for an example is he thinks anxiety isn't a universal structure when he gets to later Heidegger thinks this anxiety the Greece didn't have it Christians didn't have it he thinks we have it because we have what he calls a technological nihilistic understanding of being and that that is a distressing rootless anxious-making understanding of being if he's moving from something which is perennial or at least which he regards of being a perennial Universal in Human Experience to considering something which he regards as being as it were topical to our age and for that reason ephemeral so that in 200 years time when we're all dead that this will all be past history and something else will be the case isn't his philosophy ceasing to be a concern itself with the permanent and just concerning itself with the superficial well if this were any old culture or even any Old Stage of our culture he would say yes and what he was doing would then be soon passe as you're saying but he thinks that this is a very special culture and that we're in a very special stage of this very special culture it's a special culture for him because we're the only culture that has history I mean in any culture events follow one after another but only in ours does the understanding of being change from the Greek to the Christian to the modern and that's that's his historicity in Heidegger language and we happen to stand in a special place in our culture an understanding of being that started with Plato two thousand years ago has gone through all sorts of philosophical and practical Transformations until it is now finished in Heidegger terms that means all the philosophical moves have been tried and played out completed and now it's done for it's a sort of pun unfinished it's does he gets this idea from Nieto and him a lot we're in we have reached the stage of planetary technology where we are now taking over the whole planet our understanding of being is dominating every understanding of being and our understanding of being has come to a dead end which Heidegger calls nihilism one aspect of the late Heidegger which we haven't touched on and we must I think before we move on uh to the thinkers after Heidegger is is concerned with language the later Heidegger is not just concerned with language he's almost obsessed by language isn't he why is that well we're in a way set to see that because since there's no way the world is in itself language isn't there to correspond to reality nor is language there just to be made up arbitrarily for Heidegger a vocabulary or the kind of metaphors one uses name things into being when in California somebody said that everybody was laid back there were already people with hot tubs taking it easy and taking drugs but now they discover that that all fitted together and they were laid back so there was more of it so language is a marvelously powerful way to change the practices focus them and add new practices to dasan way of life so it's the poets not the philosophers or the priests or the scientists who are the Vanguard of humanity and the hope of some new understanding of being now I think we've been quite right to develop almost the whole of this discussion to Heidegger because he has found a way the most important uh 20th century existentialist philosopher but I did say in the introduction to this discussion that we would touch on others and I think we must do so now before we bring the discussion to a close uh what I mentioned specifically satra and Merlo Ponte let's take them in that order the chronological order um how would you characterize sultra's relationship as a philosopher to Heidegger well starts out as a hosarian and becomes a phenomenologist writes a good novel called nausea which is a phenomenological description of a world breaking down but then he read Heidegger and he was converted to what he thought was Heidegger but he felt he had a fix up Heidegger as a Frenchman and make it Cartesian so he starts with the individual subject and tries to get and to talk about death and guilt and all the things that Heidegger talks about but that's a disaster because if this story we've been telling is right that's what Heidegger is trying to free us from in fact when I went to visit Heidegger he had being and nothingness on his desk in German translation and I said oh you're reading sard and he said how can I even begin to read this muck his word was dreck and that's pretty strong and I think that's accurate because what happens if you treat uh Heidegger as if he were talking about subjects is you really pushing back to hussarel it's difficult to believe actually that culture will survive as a philosopher at all though he might survive as a novelist and a playwright what's your view of merlot Ponte I'm very much more impressed with mayoralopanti I think he's a great philosopher and Will Survive his great contribution was to bring in the body as our way of being in the world there are two big gaps in being in time one of them is that Heidegger never talks about the body or even about skills or practices I put all that in to explain the ready to hand and the understanding of being now marilopanti because he does talk about the body and it's the body that acquires skills he answers sart for one thing he says we're not free we're restricted by having the same sort of bodies everyone has and by the fact that what we do becoming habits in our bodies and skills in our bodies which we're not arbitrarily free to change and this both answers start and in a way oddly enough Merlot Ponte answering sart who was like hussarel reinvents Heidegger but filling in the gaps the other gap is perception Heidegger talks about perception as if it was just staring at things and that is unfortunate because it does seem as if we spend a lot of time not only using things but seeing things but marilopanti has an analysis of perception as a embodied activity in which we move to get an optimal grip on things which makes it more of the ready to hand therefore completing the Heidegger picture now all of the uh four named philosophers that we've been discussing hustle Heidegger Jean-Paul sultra and uh Merlo Ponte They're All Dead uh Sartor only recently dead do you regard the this whole tradition of philosophy that we've been talking about as something that's now closed or do you regard it as very much an alive and ongoing Enterprise I think it's very much alive even the phenomenology the visceral side which heideker was trying to kill off is very much alive the hospital was alive in two ways one is that if you want to describe the phenomena the what it's like to listen to music what it's like to have sexual desire any phenomenon gives you a license to do it and a method for doing it and we have young philosophers in Britain who are doing precisely that sort of thing now and in the United States too the other side of hasrow is if anything even more alive and active namely he was interested in the structure of the intentional kind content of that in the mind that enables us to refer to things now there's something called cognitive science actually trying to investigate empirically the structure of our mental representations as they would say and pleceral has laid down the general guidelines that anybody doing that investigation will follow or if you're trying to build a mind as people using computers in artificial intelligence are doing glycerol is also the father of artificial intelligence many of his ideas that the Mind follows hierarchies of strict rules are now being cashed out into computer programs so cholesterol is doing fine Heidegger is doing fine too early Heidegger being in time is not perhaps as as much followed now as it should be I'm using it the way I use it is as I've been using it here if you if you actually get back to the phenomena of our engaged everyday activity you can criticize the linguistic analysts who either trust their intuitions or trust our linguistic categories Heidegger would say and I think a description of skills shows it that if you trust our intuitions you talk always about beliefs desires and so forth and that that's not an adequate description of what's normally going on it's only a breakdown description and likewise we talked about how our language mirrors not the everyday coping but the breakdown so there Heidegger phenomenology it gives us a good point for criticizing some un unquestioned assumptions of contemporary anglo-american philosophy and finally in Europe now particularly in France later Heidegger is the great father of those who want to as he already put it deconstruct the tradition for instance Michelle Foucault and Jacques derida are trying to follow out the Heidegger project of defining exactly what our understanding of being is in order to help us get over it so I would say that there is hardly any area of intellectual activity these days in which the concerns of these thinkers don't play a large role well thank you very much for that Professor Dreyfuss

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 41,380

Keywords: History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy Overdose, Metaphysics, Social Philosophy, Bryan Magee, Husserl, Heidegger, Existentialism, Hubert Dreyfus, Sartre, Continental Philosophy, Absurd, Meaninglessness, Death, Authenticity, Dasein, Intentionality, Cartesian, Being and Time, Descartes, Consciousness, Merleau-Ponty, Subject-Object, The Self, Subjectivity, Nihilism, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir, Foundationalism, German Philosophy, Philosophy, Martin Heidegger, Modernity

Id: H4_Tsjmqxak

Length: 45min 32sec (2732 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2023