-
NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
Free episodes:
- Status
smcder
Paranormal Adept
From the Wikipedia entry:
"Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism," in which people become completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. Rorty tied this brand of philosophy to the notion of "social hope"; he believed that without the representationalist accounts, and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would behave more peacefully. He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation (Bernstein 1971), constitutes the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism.
"Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism," in which people become completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. Rorty tied this brand of philosophy to the notion of "social hope"; he believed that without the representationalist accounts, and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would behave more peacefully. He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation (Bernstein 1971), constitutes the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
We have a convert.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
"It is interesting to see that you find "familiar terms" to precede the "idea of consciousness" -- this makes me think that our "idea" or notion of "consciousness" is in this respect not so familiar or intuitive. "
No, that was my re-statement of your position. I asked if this re-statement was correct - see original post.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
A hodge podge of ideas today
The Importance of Clarity in Philosophy – a short interview with Nigel Warburton « Humanities « Cambridge Core Blog
The Importance of Clarity in Philosophy – a short interview with Nigel Warburton « Humanities « Cambridge Core Blog
- **Care about being understood.
- Read George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). It has excellent practical advice about writing to be understood.
- Use examples. These can be highly imaginative and creative. This will force you to think through what you mean by generalisations and will also help your readers to understand what you mean. If you want your writing to be impressively obscure, don’t descend from abstraction and use as much jargon as you can.
- Know what your conclusion is, how your reasons and examples support it and your response to obvious counterarguments and counterexamples. If you don’t know that, how can you expect your readers to work out what you are saying?
- Don’t bullshit. Most people know when they are doing it. If you don’t, you are probably in the wrong subject.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Excellent analysis and diagnosis by Orwell. Didn't you and I discuss here a while back a more recent analysis and critique of similar prevalent forms of obscurantist language use in the U.S. by Richard Mitchell in Less Than Words Can Say? Here's a link to that text:
http://www.sourcetext.com/sharetext/ug/less.pdf
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I don't remember ... But I'll have a look!
I think you'll appreciate Mitchell's analysis and his wit as well. He primarily critiques indirection and obscurantism in written expressions in education, government, psychology, and the social sciences, but what he identifies in those fields also applies to similar practices we've seen in other academic disciplines in our time.
Last edited:
smcder
Paranormal Adept
You might ask Ufology for clarification:
"Okay. Perfectly understandable. He's a deep thinker. Probably one of the real geniuses we are fortunate to have here on the forum ( apart from myself of course
)."You might ask Ufology for clarification:
"Okay. Perfectly understandable. He's a deep thinker. Probably one of the real geniuses we are fortunate to have here on the forum ( apart from myself of course
Good idea. Can you help out, @Usual Suspect?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I look forward to this as I think I follow @Michael Allen. What I'm not sure of is what he is trying to say by saying what he says ... i.e. is the game worth the candle?
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
I'm not sure. I don't see all the posts because I still have a couple of people on ignore, and I'm hesitant to change that or even get too involved on the site again. But thanks for thinking I might be able to contribute something useful.
Millican is very good. I'm reading a clarifying paper by him concerning the interpretation of Hume's argument for inductive thinking in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, linked below.
Hume’s Argument Concerning Induction:
Structure and Interpretation
Peter Millican, University of Leeds
Extracts
"Hume’s argument concerning induction is the foundation stone of his philosophical system, and one of the most celebrated and influential arguments in the entire literature of western philosophy. It is therefore rather surprising that the enormous attention which has been devoted to it over the years has not resulted in any general consensus as to how it should be interpreted, or, in consequence, how Hume himself should be seen. At one extreme is the traditional view, which takes the argument to be thoroughly sceptical, leading to the sweeping conclusion that all “probable reasoning” or “reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence” is utterly worthless, so that Hume is portrayed as a negative Pyrrhonian intent on undermining the credentials of all our would-be knowledge of the world. But at the other extreme a number of very prominent commentators, particularly in recent years, have put forward a strikingly contrasting view, that Hume’s intentions here are entirely non-sceptical, and that so far from advancing a negative thesis himself, he is merely intent on showing the implausible consequences of the “rationalist” position taken by some of his philosophical opponents."
. . .
"The point of Hume’s investigation, then, is to examine the foundation of all our beliefs about “absent” matters of fact, that is, matters of fact which are not immediately “present” to our senses or memory (he sometimes speaks simply of “matters of fact”, but clearly means to refer only to those which are absent despite his omission of the explicit restriction).7 Hume will argue that such beliefs are founded on inferences from things which we have observed to those which we have not, these inferences operating on the assumption that the latter will resemble the former. Such inferences, which Hume himself refers to using phrases such as “probable arguments”, “moral reasonings”, or “reasonings concerning matter of fact [and existence]”, are now commonly known as “inductive” inferences, and hence Hume’s argument is generally referred to as his argument concerning induction.
There is a potential source of confusion here, because the term “induction” has a rather different traditional Aristotelian sense, according to which it denotes not reasoning from observed to unobserved, but rather reasoning from particular cases to general principles or from effects to causes (with “deduction”, correspondingly, denoting reasoning from general to particular or from causes to effects). Moreover the word continues to retain some of this connotation, and perhaps for this reason various commentators on Hume, notably Antony Flew (but also more excusably many writers of introductory books on the philosophy of science), have presented his argument about “induction” as primarily focused on inductive inferences to universal conclusions, that is, inferences of the form “All observed A’s have been B’s, therefore all A’s whatever are B’s”. It should, however, be clear from the extended quotation above that Hume’s concern is with all inferences from observed to unobserved, including singular inferences of the form “All observed A’s have been B’s, therefore this A (of which I now have an impression) is a B”. In the Treatise , indeed, such inferences about particulars are taken as the paradigm, as indicated by the title of the section in which the famous argument occurs: “Of the inference from the impression to the idea”. And in the Enquiry, too, most of the examples which Hume gives are of singular inferences. We should avoid, therefore, drawing any conclusions about Hume’s intentions from the historical accident that the topic of his famous argument is now generally referred to as “induction”.8 For he himself never uses the term in this context, and anyway seems to understand it not in any technical sense but merely as a synonym for “inference” (T27, 628, ME170)."
http://www.davidhume.org/papers/millican/1995Induction.pdf
Last edited:
Here is illuminating essay concerning Heidegger's later thought as expressed in "The Origin of the Work of Art." The concluding paragraphs provide a good orientation to what is discussed here concerning H's idea of 'techne' relative to the meaning generated in works of art:
Conclusion: Art's "appearings" and Knowing-Handling
Historically, what began as a desire for originality in modern art and discourse can be used as a medium or technique for interpreting the impasse between a dematerialised hyperculture (an uncritical virtual reality), and the kind of artist who seeks an authentic utterance over against a pervading societal unoriginality. Here we can begin to establish a gestalt-like pattern at the heart of creative thought and practice; for only where perception and experience meet do we invest ourselves wholeheartedly in cultural meaning. And we may yet come to a deeper awareness of some Heideggerian appearing: a kind of in-sight that is granted to us that we may see what we do not ordinarily see. The theme of appearing proposes a guiding premise or intuition for carrying out works of art; but one which as Jean Francois Lyotard tells us, "is still limpid for thought."[55] Any limpidity for thought is a metier born of seer and seen: a testing yet solicitous communication between art and its recipients through the expressive range which the enigma of appearing opens up.
What are the lessons to be drawn from philosophy's engagement with modern art? And has art gained from the exchange? Firstly, I would suggest that both Heidegger's originary truth-telling and Klee's materialising gestalt can activate, even refine and redirect, the appreciative faculties: our aesthetic senses. Secondly, Klee encourages artistic createdness to be exuberant in its reach and scope, thus making available a working consciousness at once self-corrective and self-assertive. This is a labouring aesthetic born of the body-constant: a silent discourse of arousal wherein an artist's judgment freewheels as to technical means and compositional ends. Thirdly, just as Paul Klee's graphic and painterly vision marks out our humanity at some secret scale, inscribing a life-image of itself in our retinal memory, even so does Martin Heidegger's mythos of art and truth infuse our imagination with the wonder of being. Indeed, here we contemplate the very possibility of seeing itself: for through the evocation of Klee's supernal world and Heidegger's originary world we glimpse art's appearing and inner knowing-handling as a vital actuality addressed to our lives."
Introduction
Conclusion: Art's "appearings" and Knowing-Handling
Historically, what began as a desire for originality in modern art and discourse can be used as a medium or technique for interpreting the impasse between a dematerialised hyperculture (an uncritical virtual reality), and the kind of artist who seeks an authentic utterance over against a pervading societal unoriginality. Here we can begin to establish a gestalt-like pattern at the heart of creative thought and practice; for only where perception and experience meet do we invest ourselves wholeheartedly in cultural meaning. And we may yet come to a deeper awareness of some Heideggerian appearing: a kind of in-sight that is granted to us that we may see what we do not ordinarily see. The theme of appearing proposes a guiding premise or intuition for carrying out works of art; but one which as Jean Francois Lyotard tells us, "is still limpid for thought."[55] Any limpidity for thought is a metier born of seer and seen: a testing yet solicitous communication between art and its recipients through the expressive range which the enigma of appearing opens up.
What are the lessons to be drawn from philosophy's engagement with modern art? And has art gained from the exchange? Firstly, I would suggest that both Heidegger's originary truth-telling and Klee's materialising gestalt can activate, even refine and redirect, the appreciative faculties: our aesthetic senses. Secondly, Klee encourages artistic createdness to be exuberant in its reach and scope, thus making available a working consciousness at once self-corrective and self-assertive. This is a labouring aesthetic born of the body-constant: a silent discourse of arousal wherein an artist's judgment freewheels as to technical means and compositional ends. Thirdly, just as Paul Klee's graphic and painterly vision marks out our humanity at some secret scale, inscribing a life-image of itself in our retinal memory, even so does Martin Heidegger's mythos of art and truth infuse our imagination with the wonder of being. Indeed, here we contemplate the very possibility of seeing itself: for through the evocation of Klee's supernal world and Heidegger's originary world we glimpse art's appearing and inner knowing-handling as a vital actuality addressed to our lives."
Introduction
Further clarification of Heidegger's though is provided in this very good short essay in wikipedia entitled "Fundamental Ontology."
Fundamental ontology - Wikipedia
Fundamental ontology - Wikipedia
From Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews . . .
Martin Heidegger
The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus
Reviewed by William McNeill, DePaul University
"The appearance in English of two of Heidegger’s most important Freiburg lecture courses from the early 1930s—The Essence of Human Freedom, from summer semester 1930, and The Essence of Truth, delivered in winter semester 1931/32—marks a major and significant contribution to the accessibility of this pivotal period of Heidegger’s thought for the English-speaking world. Together, these courses document the inseparability of Heidegger’s thought from a critical and ongoing dialogue with the philosophical tradition. They serve at once to illuminate texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, to clarify the significance and stance of Heidegger’s own thinking, and to display Heidegger’s unique and meticulous pedagogical style. Although both volumes have been available in German since the 1980s (The Essence of Human Freedom was published in 1982, The Essence of Truth in 1988), they have been largely ignored by Heidegger scholarship outside of Germany. Their publication in English is a welcome event.
The first volume, The Essence of Human Freedom, presents itself as an introduction to philosophy as a whole by way of what appears to be just one particular, regional question: that of human freedom. And yet, Heidegger suggests, the distinction of philosophical questioning perhaps lies in the fact that it always reveals the whole in and through—and only in and through—the unfolding of particular questions. This does not, however, mean that in philosophizing we simply broaden our field of view in order better to situate and understand our particular theme—in regard to the question of freedom, for example, also taking God and world into our view as that in relation to which freedom (as negative freedom, freedom from…) is situated. It means, rather, a concern with the whole that “goes to our own roots,” that challenges us in the very grounds of our being. Taking his lead from Kant’s understanding of practical freedom, as ultimately grounded in transcendental freedom, Heidegger quickly moves from Kant’s understanding of freedom in terms of causality to argue that causality at once directs us back to the phenomenon of movement in general, which, as a fundamental determination of beings that varies in accordance with the kind of beings involved, directs us toward the question of beings as such—of “what beings in their breadth and depth actually are”—and thus to the “leading question” (Leitfrage) of philosophy: ti to on, what are beings? (German 31/translation, 23).
From here, Heidegger suggests that this question, while raised by Plato and Aristotle, was nevertheless not genuinely or radically unfolded by them; thus, it is our prerogative, he states, but also our responsibility, “to become the murderers of our forefathers,” and indeed to succumb to such a fate ourselves: “Only then, can we arrive at the problematic in which they immediately existed, but precisely for this reason were not able to work through to final transparency.” (37/27). What follows is an extensive excursus (of some 50 pages) inquiring into the multiple meanings of being in Aristotle, starting from the basic Greek word for being, ousia, and culminating in an important interpretation of Metaphysics IX, 10, where Heidegger argues that Aristotle’s understanding of the most proper being of what properly is (beings proper) as being true (to on alethes as kuriotaton on), that is, as the deconcealment of what presents itself in sheer presence, not only constitutes an integral part of Metaphysics IX (contrary to what some commentators have suggested), but contains “the keystone of Book IX, which itself is the center of the entire Metaphysics.” (107/75). And yet, Heidegger notes, this chapter also documents something of the growing exclusion of the possibility of untruth from truth: the sheer unhiddenness of something straightforwardly (haplos) or simply given, apprehended by nous, of itself excludes any possibility of distortion or error, of apprehending what is given as something other than itself.
Following a very brief discussion of the culmination of this Greek understanding of being as sheer presence in Hegel, Heidegger, reverting to the problematic of Being and Time, suggests not only that the fundamental Greek understanding of being as presence “receives its illumination” from time itself, but that the leading question of philosophy (what are beings?) must be transformed into the fundamental or grounding question (Grundfrage), “i.e, into the question which inquires into the ‘and’ of being and time and thus into the ground of both.” (116/81). In little more than ten condensed, yet incredibly compelling pages, Heidegger then seeks to show that this ground, which lies “prior even to being and time” and constitutes “the ground of the possibility of existence, the root of being and time,” is nothing other than freedom. Freedom, however, is no longer to be understood as a property of man; at most the converse is the case: “man as a possibility of freedom,” freedom as the “awesome’ (ungeheuerliche) ground wherein the disclosure or deconcealment of beings as such and as a whole occurs. (133–35/93–94). These pivotal pages of the book not only retrieve in a transformed manner Heidegger’s analyses of time from 1924 through 1930, but also show Heidegger attempting to take a further, decisive step along the path opened up by The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, the important lecture course delivered in winter semester 1929–30.
In a somewhat surprising turn, Heidegger, rather than further developing the radical perspective just opened up, turns back to a consideration of freedom in Kant, and the last hundred pages of the course are devoted to this task. Heidegger, while intimating a series of complicated questions that lie ahead, deliberately chooses another path, one “which forces us into constant dialogue with the philosophers, in particular with Kant,” who was “the first to see the problem of freedom in its most radical philosophical consequences” (136–37/95). The entire analysis of Kant’s understanding of freedom, however, is situated under the question of whether freedom is a problem of causality (as in Kant), or whether, conversely, causality is a problem of freedom; of whether, indeed, freedom demands to be conceived more radically than in terms of causality at all. In the closing pages of the course, Heidegger argues that this is indeed the case, and that causality is grounded in freedom, not vice-versa. Here, Heidegger seeks to move beyond the Kantian perspective, which, he argues, fails to adequately interrogate the ontological character of the possibility and actuality of freedom. Freedom in a more primordial sense, he indicates, entails an “originary self-binding” that lies prior to the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge and comportment.
The second volume, The Essence of Truth, presents a careful, step-by-step exegesis of two central arguments from Plato’s dialogues. The first, an analysis of the allegory of the cave from Book VII of the Republic, seeks to return to the original Greek experience of aletheia (truth) as “unhiddenness” or “unconcealment,” a sense of aletheia that Heidegger shows is a precondition for understanding truth as propositional correctness. The analysis of the allegory follows the different stages of the occurrence of truth as gradations of unhiddenness and of the prisoners’ relation to what becomes unhidden or revealed at each stage. In interpreting the central themes of the allegory—themes such as the progressive liberation of the prisoners; their turning toward the light; the essence of the ideas; the idea of the Good; the philosopher as liberator; the essence of paideia; and the fate of philosophizing—Heidegger, however, not only reads the allegory as a testament to the original power of unhiddenness in Greek existence, but also as an indication of the waning of this fundamental experience, such that Plato does not, in the allegory, ask concerning the essence of unhiddenness as such: “Plato equates the unhidden with what is (beings), in such a way that the question of unhiddenness as such does not come to life.” (German 123–24; translation, 89). That this is so, Heidegger argues, is evidenced by the fact that Plato fails to ask about the essence of hiddenness, as that from which unhiddenness must be wrested. Thus, the theme of unhiddenness has an ambiguous status in the allegory: “For Plato, therefore, unhiddenness is a theme, and at the same time not a theme. Because this is the situation with regard to un- hiddenness, an explicit clarification of the hiddenness of beings does not eventuate. But just this neglect of the question of hiddenness as such is the decisive indication of the already beginning ineffectiveness of un hiddenness in the strict sense… . For the unhiddenness of beings is precisely wrested from hiddenness, i.e., it is obtained in struggle against the latter.” (125/90-91).
From here, mindful of this failure to inquire into the essence of hiddenness and, as a consequence, into the essence of unhiddenness as such, Heidegger moves to the second dialogue of interest, namely the Theaetetus, for which he makes a striking claim: This dialogue, he claims, represents “that stretch of the road of the question concerning untruth which, for the first and last time in the history of philosophy, Plato actually trod …” (129/93). Here, in his analysis of the Theaetetus, Heidegger takes us through the various stages of the argument that unfolds from Theaetetus’ initial answer to what constitutes knowledge (episteme), namely, aisthesis, or sense-perception, to the problem of how wrong opinion (pseudes doxa) is possible. Heidegger’s interpretation shows not only how falsity and—as an apparent consequence—truth come to be conceived as uncorrectness and correctness of the propositional statement respectively (entailing both a shift away from the original experience of unhiddenness and a shift in the understanding of doxa), but also how truth and untruth thereby come to be viewed as mutually exclusive, contrary to the insight that lies close at hand in the cave-allegory, but is not taken up by Plato himself: namely, that “unhiddenness … in itself is simultaneously, and indeed essentially, hiddenness; a truth to whose essence there belongs un-truth.” (321/227). Yet Heidegger’s readings should not be seen as simply an indictment of Plato’s thought: not only do they succeed magnificently in bringing out the experiential and, one might say, phenomenological, basis of Plato’s thought—breathing new life into these dialogues; Heideggr’s insights into the essence of truth as unconcealment (being) are also ever mindful of the implications for his own “question of being.” As he notes toward the close of this volume: “Untruth belongs to the primordial essence of truth as the unhiddenness of being, i.e., to the inner possibility of truth. The question of being is thus thoroughly ambiguous—it is a question of the deepest truth and at the same time it is on the edge of, and in the zone of, the deepest untruth.” (322/228)
Each of these two volumes makes an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Heidegger’s own thinking as in constant dialogue with the philosophical tradition. They illuminate not only the philosophers he engages, but the metamorphoses of Heidegger’s own thinking of being as well. Anyone seeking to understand the shifting ground of Heidegger’s thinking of being and time from the late 1920s through the early 1930s will have to study The Essence of Human Freedom; those who are of the opinion that Heidegger has little or nothing to say about the phenomenon of the human body need to study the analyses of Platonic eros, sense-perception, bodily dispersion, and desire from The Essence of Truth. The translator has done a very fine job overall: the translations convey the sense of Heidegger’s difficult prose in a very readable and generally accurate manner. A few errors or inaccuracies that I discovered serve as a reminder that one should always consult the German when undertaking careful study: in The Essence of Human Freedom, the term existenziellen is rendered as “existential” (instead of “existentiell”) at one critical point (136/94); in On the Essence of Truth, “authentic” is at one point used to translate both eigenen and eigentlichen (238/170) although the two are quite distinct for Heidegger, eigenen really meaning “own”: thus, in this particular context, one’s own self could very well be at stake without one necessarily being authentic; in another place in the same volume, “hiddenness” appears instead of “unhiddenness” for Unverborgenheit (322/228))."
The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
Martin Heidegger
The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus
Reviewed by William McNeill, DePaul University
"The appearance in English of two of Heidegger’s most important Freiburg lecture courses from the early 1930s—The Essence of Human Freedom, from summer semester 1930, and The Essence of Truth, delivered in winter semester 1931/32—marks a major and significant contribution to the accessibility of this pivotal period of Heidegger’s thought for the English-speaking world. Together, these courses document the inseparability of Heidegger’s thought from a critical and ongoing dialogue with the philosophical tradition. They serve at once to illuminate texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, to clarify the significance and stance of Heidegger’s own thinking, and to display Heidegger’s unique and meticulous pedagogical style. Although both volumes have been available in German since the 1980s (The Essence of Human Freedom was published in 1982, The Essence of Truth in 1988), they have been largely ignored by Heidegger scholarship outside of Germany. Their publication in English is a welcome event.
The first volume, The Essence of Human Freedom, presents itself as an introduction to philosophy as a whole by way of what appears to be just one particular, regional question: that of human freedom. And yet, Heidegger suggests, the distinction of philosophical questioning perhaps lies in the fact that it always reveals the whole in and through—and only in and through—the unfolding of particular questions. This does not, however, mean that in philosophizing we simply broaden our field of view in order better to situate and understand our particular theme—in regard to the question of freedom, for example, also taking God and world into our view as that in relation to which freedom (as negative freedom, freedom from…) is situated. It means, rather, a concern with the whole that “goes to our own roots,” that challenges us in the very grounds of our being. Taking his lead from Kant’s understanding of practical freedom, as ultimately grounded in transcendental freedom, Heidegger quickly moves from Kant’s understanding of freedom in terms of causality to argue that causality at once directs us back to the phenomenon of movement in general, which, as a fundamental determination of beings that varies in accordance with the kind of beings involved, directs us toward the question of beings as such—of “what beings in their breadth and depth actually are”—and thus to the “leading question” (Leitfrage) of philosophy: ti to on, what are beings? (German 31/translation, 23).
From here, Heidegger suggests that this question, while raised by Plato and Aristotle, was nevertheless not genuinely or radically unfolded by them; thus, it is our prerogative, he states, but also our responsibility, “to become the murderers of our forefathers,” and indeed to succumb to such a fate ourselves: “Only then, can we arrive at the problematic in which they immediately existed, but precisely for this reason were not able to work through to final transparency.” (37/27). What follows is an extensive excursus (of some 50 pages) inquiring into the multiple meanings of being in Aristotle, starting from the basic Greek word for being, ousia, and culminating in an important interpretation of Metaphysics IX, 10, where Heidegger argues that Aristotle’s understanding of the most proper being of what properly is (beings proper) as being true (to on alethes as kuriotaton on), that is, as the deconcealment of what presents itself in sheer presence, not only constitutes an integral part of Metaphysics IX (contrary to what some commentators have suggested), but contains “the keystone of Book IX, which itself is the center of the entire Metaphysics.” (107/75). And yet, Heidegger notes, this chapter also documents something of the growing exclusion of the possibility of untruth from truth: the sheer unhiddenness of something straightforwardly (haplos) or simply given, apprehended by nous, of itself excludes any possibility of distortion or error, of apprehending what is given as something other than itself.
Following a very brief discussion of the culmination of this Greek understanding of being as sheer presence in Hegel, Heidegger, reverting to the problematic of Being and Time, suggests not only that the fundamental Greek understanding of being as presence “receives its illumination” from time itself, but that the leading question of philosophy (what are beings?) must be transformed into the fundamental or grounding question (Grundfrage), “i.e, into the question which inquires into the ‘and’ of being and time and thus into the ground of both.” (116/81). In little more than ten condensed, yet incredibly compelling pages, Heidegger then seeks to show that this ground, which lies “prior even to being and time” and constitutes “the ground of the possibility of existence, the root of being and time,” is nothing other than freedom. Freedom, however, is no longer to be understood as a property of man; at most the converse is the case: “man as a possibility of freedom,” freedom as the “awesome’ (ungeheuerliche) ground wherein the disclosure or deconcealment of beings as such and as a whole occurs. (133–35/93–94). These pivotal pages of the book not only retrieve in a transformed manner Heidegger’s analyses of time from 1924 through 1930, but also show Heidegger attempting to take a further, decisive step along the path opened up by The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, the important lecture course delivered in winter semester 1929–30.
In a somewhat surprising turn, Heidegger, rather than further developing the radical perspective just opened up, turns back to a consideration of freedom in Kant, and the last hundred pages of the course are devoted to this task. Heidegger, while intimating a series of complicated questions that lie ahead, deliberately chooses another path, one “which forces us into constant dialogue with the philosophers, in particular with Kant,” who was “the first to see the problem of freedom in its most radical philosophical consequences” (136–37/95). The entire analysis of Kant’s understanding of freedom, however, is situated under the question of whether freedom is a problem of causality (as in Kant), or whether, conversely, causality is a problem of freedom; of whether, indeed, freedom demands to be conceived more radically than in terms of causality at all. In the closing pages of the course, Heidegger argues that this is indeed the case, and that causality is grounded in freedom, not vice-versa. Here, Heidegger seeks to move beyond the Kantian perspective, which, he argues, fails to adequately interrogate the ontological character of the possibility and actuality of freedom. Freedom in a more primordial sense, he indicates, entails an “originary self-binding” that lies prior to the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge and comportment.
The second volume, The Essence of Truth, presents a careful, step-by-step exegesis of two central arguments from Plato’s dialogues. The first, an analysis of the allegory of the cave from Book VII of the Republic, seeks to return to the original Greek experience of aletheia (truth) as “unhiddenness” or “unconcealment,” a sense of aletheia that Heidegger shows is a precondition for understanding truth as propositional correctness. The analysis of the allegory follows the different stages of the occurrence of truth as gradations of unhiddenness and of the prisoners’ relation to what becomes unhidden or revealed at each stage. In interpreting the central themes of the allegory—themes such as the progressive liberation of the prisoners; their turning toward the light; the essence of the ideas; the idea of the Good; the philosopher as liberator; the essence of paideia; and the fate of philosophizing—Heidegger, however, not only reads the allegory as a testament to the original power of unhiddenness in Greek existence, but also as an indication of the waning of this fundamental experience, such that Plato does not, in the allegory, ask concerning the essence of unhiddenness as such: “Plato equates the unhidden with what is (beings), in such a way that the question of unhiddenness as such does not come to life.” (German 123–24; translation, 89). That this is so, Heidegger argues, is evidenced by the fact that Plato fails to ask about the essence of hiddenness, as that from which unhiddenness must be wrested. Thus, the theme of unhiddenness has an ambiguous status in the allegory: “For Plato, therefore, unhiddenness is a theme, and at the same time not a theme. Because this is the situation with regard to un- hiddenness, an explicit clarification of the hiddenness of beings does not eventuate. But just this neglect of the question of hiddenness as such is the decisive indication of the already beginning ineffectiveness of un hiddenness in the strict sense… . For the unhiddenness of beings is precisely wrested from hiddenness, i.e., it is obtained in struggle against the latter.” (125/90-91).
From here, mindful of this failure to inquire into the essence of hiddenness and, as a consequence, into the essence of unhiddenness as such, Heidegger moves to the second dialogue of interest, namely the Theaetetus, for which he makes a striking claim: This dialogue, he claims, represents “that stretch of the road of the question concerning untruth which, for the first and last time in the history of philosophy, Plato actually trod …” (129/93). Here, in his analysis of the Theaetetus, Heidegger takes us through the various stages of the argument that unfolds from Theaetetus’ initial answer to what constitutes knowledge (episteme), namely, aisthesis, or sense-perception, to the problem of how wrong opinion (pseudes doxa) is possible. Heidegger’s interpretation shows not only how falsity and—as an apparent consequence—truth come to be conceived as uncorrectness and correctness of the propositional statement respectively (entailing both a shift away from the original experience of unhiddenness and a shift in the understanding of doxa), but also how truth and untruth thereby come to be viewed as mutually exclusive, contrary to the insight that lies close at hand in the cave-allegory, but is not taken up by Plato himself: namely, that “unhiddenness … in itself is simultaneously, and indeed essentially, hiddenness; a truth to whose essence there belongs un-truth.” (321/227). Yet Heidegger’s readings should not be seen as simply an indictment of Plato’s thought: not only do they succeed magnificently in bringing out the experiential and, one might say, phenomenological, basis of Plato’s thought—breathing new life into these dialogues; Heideggr’s insights into the essence of truth as unconcealment (being) are also ever mindful of the implications for his own “question of being.” As he notes toward the close of this volume: “Untruth belongs to the primordial essence of truth as the unhiddenness of being, i.e., to the inner possibility of truth. The question of being is thus thoroughly ambiguous—it is a question of the deepest truth and at the same time it is on the edge of, and in the zone of, the deepest untruth.” (322/228)
Each of these two volumes makes an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Heidegger’s own thinking as in constant dialogue with the philosophical tradition. They illuminate not only the philosophers he engages, but the metamorphoses of Heidegger’s own thinking of being as well. Anyone seeking to understand the shifting ground of Heidegger’s thinking of being and time from the late 1920s through the early 1930s will have to study The Essence of Human Freedom; those who are of the opinion that Heidegger has little or nothing to say about the phenomenon of the human body need to study the analyses of Platonic eros, sense-perception, bodily dispersion, and desire from The Essence of Truth. The translator has done a very fine job overall: the translations convey the sense of Heidegger’s difficult prose in a very readable and generally accurate manner. A few errors or inaccuracies that I discovered serve as a reminder that one should always consult the German when undertaking careful study: in The Essence of Human Freedom, the term existenziellen is rendered as “existential” (instead of “existentiell”) at one critical point (136/94); in On the Essence of Truth, “authentic” is at one point used to translate both eigenen and eigentlichen (238/170) although the two are quite distinct for Heidegger, eigenen really meaning “own”: thus, in this particular context, one’s own self could very well be at stake without one necessarily being authentic; in another place in the same volume, “hiddenness” appears instead of “unhiddenness” for Unverborgenheit (322/228))."
The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
smcder
Paranormal Adept
- Status