https://aeon.co/essays/heidegger-v-carnap-how-logic-took-issue-with-metaphysics?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3c1f81616b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_22_12_45&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-3c1f81616b-68850749
Don, thanks for sending this. I read it just now. I’d heard the name Carnap before but never knew who he was. As for Heidegger, I knew who he was and had some vague notions of what he said.
For no reason I can readily identify, I decided to try my hand at some self study of him. I’m watching a nine hour and change online series of lectures about Being and Time, which are a video of a class on it Hubert Dreyfus gave at UC Berkeley. I do a bit at a time—my then being in time. In tandem with that I’m reading a long essay by an Iain Thompson in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Heidegger’s theory of art. I try to integrate the ideas from both sources to each other. Dresser’s essay seems a very, very generalized nice summary of some of Heidegger’s larger project of use for laymen such as me.
I read a note by a student of Dreyfus in which he said, paraphrase,” after you get through the language gobbledygook of Heidegger, the ideas are quite banal. That description, so far as I’ve gotten, resonates with me except at times when what Heidegger says just seems altogether weird.
On the banal side, he talks, for one example, about how we go through our days mostly actively but so non-deliberately in what we’re doing as to vitiate the dualism of subject and object but that then when things go wrong and we have to solve them and in that we’re subjects again in relation to objects.
So he doesn’t deny the dualism in our experience of the world but says it’s not primary or basic with us. I think it’s no great revelation that the familiar—driving through a city we know well—is done without deliberation.
What of it, I ask.
And even when we do it without without deliberation, automatically so to say, who ever really drives in a state such that the self, or we as thinking beings, as subject disappears. All kinds of contingencies happen in traffic constantly that take us out of our non-deliberativeness. We go through our days relentlessly shifting back and forth between acting kind of automatically and then thinkingly in the sense of ourselves as subjects encountering and then negotiating the world external to us.
And why is the immersive experience more basic than, primary to, the dualistic experience of subject and object as we go through the world?
And in the immersive experience does the dualistic self really disappear so as to shatter the dualism of self and outer world, or is describing this latter way more poetry or metaphor than literally so? I don’t think we shatter anything, and describing it as though we do is just a way of saying how we really “got into it,” whatever it is.
I can’t think of too many times when I was utterly without self consciousness even when I was, so to say, “in the flow.”
And finally for the banality, doesn’t it all derive from Heidegger’s overarching characterization of what he calls our epoch, or our being in this historical/historicist time,
“... the historical ascendance of science, technology, aesthetics, and culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, that historical decline of the divine which Heidegger (echoing Schiller) calls the “ungodding...“
which is just his arbitrary summing up, which he then escalates to our essential desire to commodify, master and control everything as the predominant essence of our epoch.
Describe our epoch sharply differently and does his philosophy, what he argues for and wants to prize, his ideal notion of being, start to falter?
It seems to inform his idea of art, which is to say that great art appreciated as magnificently created beauty is a lesser and invidious understanding of it. For at its truest great art illuminates the depths, limits and flaws of our “historicity” and points to, prefigures, the transformation of our human nature, our being, accompanying the next time for beings, the new aborning epoch.
I don’t understand art this way, though certainly in great art we see the deep conflicts roiling its time and the ways of being peculiar to its time but those conflicts and ways of being are continuous with and embedded in our universal, eternal conflicts and permanent drives and dispositions as human beings.
He also argues that if we only see art as aesthetics we don’t get over the subject object hump and stranded on that hump we treat great art as objects to be commodified, mastered and controlled and in doing that we ultimately turn ourselves into objects to be commodified, mastered and controlled rather than being “empty heads” immersed in great art, which unendingly discloses itself to our openness to it.
He does a “phenomenological analysis” of this poem, which Thompson recounts in his essay. Read it for yourself and see.
The Roman Fountain
Up springs the spout and, falling, fills
To brim the marble basin’s round,
Which, under veiling, over spills
Into a second basin's ground;
The second one, too rich now, runs
Into the third its falling waves,
And each one takes and gives at once
And streams and stays.
I find Heidegger’s analysis incredibly strained, remote from and unconvincingly imposing itself on it.
I find, on what I’ve read and heard so far, that these thoughts on art while having some accuracy in describing how some people approach and apprehend art, range from the poetic or metaphoric in capturing that accuracy to the arbitrary and absurd. They at bottom stumble and fall if we reject his characterization of our epoch. And they stumble and fall more if we reject the idea of the radical transformation of our nature from epoch to epoch with no allowance for the poetic wisdom of “thus it ever was,” “plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose,” “there’s nothing new under the sun.” For these verities exist in all art in dialectical relation to the specifics, situations and circumstances of its time. And poets are the unacknowledged legislators of our time about as much as I am.
I’d say we never surmount in experiencing art the dualism of self and object and that to speak of transcending it in our empty headed openness to art is mere poetry or metaphor to describe what we feel to be the intensity of our rapt engagement, which btw is with art as an object of created magnificence and not to a historicist marker.
So, then, finally, to dismiss our aesthetic appreciation of art as an obstacle to appreciating its historicist revelation and prefiguring is to miss what the essence of art is for us.
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