Category: heidegger

A phenonmenal turn around

Circumspective concern decides as to the closeness and farness of what is proximally ready-to-hand environmentally. – Being and Time, 142.

This quote reflects Heidegger’s discussion of the manner in which we attempt to bring the world ‘close’, which is to say have it concernfully, subjectively, before us.  The examples given is that while glasses and pavement can be the most spatially present they are often the most concernfully distant entities to us.

Much is of often made of the silliness which postmodern philosophy seems to concern itself with respect to our inability to be present to realities and truth around us.  A while back I posted a quote on Facebook from Heidegger in which he said, “In principle the chair does not touch the wall.”  Now in what follows I am not claiming some sort of direct correspondence or example of this quote, though I think it relates to the initial quote of the post.

I can still vividly remember driving in a new section of Winnipeg that I was not familiar with.  I generally have a good sense of direction and ‘bearings’ so I was sort of going on my gut at that point thinking that I was at least heading generally in the right direction.  At one point an overhead sign was approaching and it basically communicated to me that I was heading in exactly the opposite direction as I thought I was.  Now at some point earlier in the drive I had made this shift but not noticed.  Now with the communication of this sign the reality of being turned around was ‘brought close’ to me immediately and physiologically I felt as though I had been spun around, I felt nauseous.  This always struck me as strange though I could not quite frame the experience.  Now what happened was the neither the truth of what already happened nor was it the direct response to some change in my bodies spatial direction.  What happened was a particular subjective appropriation that I can’t imagine would happen to everyone nor what it likely happen again to me in the same way.  It is this experience that helps me understand his earlier statement which says,

Yet this ‘subjectivity’ perhaps uncovers the ‘Reality’ of the world at its most Real. (141)

This thinking often does not effect (affect?) many aspects of everyday life but it follows as a spectre or hangs as a reminder which, I think, in certain situations should call us both to boldness and humility when faced with those claiming to have ‘direct access’ to the world or ‘Reality’ as such and how such decisions are enacted.

Approaching one of the Big Four

I am not sure it is the case with you but for at least a decade or so four books have hung over my head standing out as foundational for particular interests that I have.  These four books are Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx’s Capital, and Heidegger’s Being and Time.  Of course other works jockey for position but these sort of linger, not that I think reading them will necessarily be transformational (or even good) but only that they are required if I want to feel as though I can develop a proper orientation around the questions these works address.

Given my current reading schedule I have now begun one of the four, Being and Time.  It has been tremendously helpful to have read Husserl prior to starting this work (Heidegger was Husserl’s student).  Heidegger also believe that philosophy and so also science has not ‘gone back far enough’.  This is of course a disputable (overthrown?) quest today but I still find it helpful to try and think along the process of thinking being.  As I am still early in the work I thought I would offer a reasonably accessible quote on Heidegger’s concept of phenomenology,

[Unlike other sciences] ‘phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised.  The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled.  To have a science ‘of’ phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly.  The expression ‘descriptive phenomenology’, which is at bottom tautological, has the same meaning.  Here ‘description’ does not signify such a procedure as we find, let us say, in botanical morphology; the term has rather the sense of prohibition – the avoidance of characterizing anything without demonstration.

. . .

What is it that phenomenology is to ‘let us see’?  What is that must be called ‘phenomenon’ in a distinctive sense?  What is that by its very essence is necessarily the theme whenever we exhibit something explicitly?  Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most does not show itself at all:  it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most does show itself; but at the same time it something that belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground.

Being and Time [trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson], 59.