JDStupi said:
You see, I am certainly interested in this Heideggerian viewpoint, but what I keep seeing as problematic is the attempt to develop a "view from existence" because I see it is a continual banging our head against the wall, against the limits of what can be said...
...we can only attempt to wake people up to the "Radical root of their existence" as Ortega y Gasset called it, but we cannot built a system of Being, for that would be against the spirit of Being itself...
Essentially, I think we may remain at the level of the "Pre-Socratics" and the only way to improve would be to show people the "limits of language" and then we can use language to discuss this mode of Being simply by virtue of having a shared experience of it.
Thanks very much for your comments, JD... I can see you appreciate where the problem lies. If there can be an adequate way of understanding existence, it will have to operate with a conceptual language quite different from what we’re used to. And you’re right – it will need to bring us closer to our shared experience instead of distancing us from it.
The thing is – this is the reason I fell in love with the history of Western thought, when I was much younger – that over and over again these remarkable people were inventing new kinds of language, starting with the earliest Greek poets and philosophers. When the pre-Socratics began, there was simply no way of talking about “reality”... the concept had to be built up through a series of metaphors, piece by piece, until it finally emerged in Plato and Aristotle. Even in Plato “really” is still essentially an adverb, a way of emphasizing that one thing is more true than another. The concept of
one exclusive truth about the world, that somehow encompasses all the differences and shades of truth we know in our lives... that notion of “reality” as a noun required not just a new word, but a whole new way of talking with each other. Eric Havelock is worth reading on this – e.g.
The Muse Learns to Write. He points out for example that the construction “X is Y”, which came to dominate Western thought through philosophy, is almost absent from the language of pre-literate culture and from the earliest writing, e.g. Homer and Hesiod. It took many generations to establish the possibility of “theorizing” about the world.
At every stage, in the development of Christian dogma and then Medieval theology, in the emergence of modern philosophy and science, people were learning how to imagine the world in ways that just hadn’t been possible before. But you’re right – when it comes to “existence”, we face a new kind of challenge. And so it’s not so surprising that philosophy more or less gave up the ghost in the 20th century. The conceptual creativity of our tradition from 11th to the 19th centuries was unparalleled... but it’s hard to imagine anything like that coming out of our Philosophy Departments today.
JDStupi said:
Namely, I think that Heidegger attempted to get down not to "beings" but to "The meaning of Being"... As such he believed the only way to view the meaning of "Being" itself was to investigate it from the perspective of Being, of existence as you call it, and so analyze our human condition and authentic existence. I see this as a great idea. However, where it seems to run into problems is that, we are limited to and can only know our own way of existence and of Being and the meaning that Being takes on for us is a personal "Existential" question, the minute we attempt to create a framework for how other beings "Be" we are necessarily abstracting and extrapolating from our own mode-of-Being and nothing necessitates that this is the case for others.
Yes, this is very good. If there’s an “authentic” way of thinking about existence, it can’t be a matter of generalizing from what I experience to what people in general experience... let alone to what animals or plants or atoms “experience”.
As soon as we start down that path, we lose what’s essential about existence, that it’s
only “one’s own”. Each of us has only our own life, in this web of connections with others. It’s remarkable how much we can share with each other, but the “own existence” that each of us has is not something anyone can share.
So I strongly disagree, for example, with the perspective of Ramachandran quoted by Ferris_bg in #157 above. The point is not that there are objective “experiences” going on in my brain that could be transmitted to someone else’s brain through “a cable of neural pathways.” Apart from the fact that I think this completely misconstrues how the brain works, what gives me my own unique, “private” perspective on the world is not the fact that my “brain-state” at a given instant is walled off and hidden in my head. It’s that I’m the only one who will ever have lived my life, from beginning to end.
But then – If we can’t generalize about “what it means to Be”... does that mean there’s nothing to understand about it? Or is it that we need to find language for an appropriate kind of understanding?
My thought is that understanding has two directions. The one that we’re very accomplished at has to do with gaining knowledge – investigating the facts, and finding explanations that lead to further investigation. The premise is that there’s a
lot out there we don’t know... including, of course, a lot we don’t yet know about us humans, how our brains and our cultures work, etc.
The other direction of understanding has to do with what we all already know, but take for granted. What’s hardest for us to understand are the things closest to us, that we’re all intimately familiar with, that we’ve all experienced ever since we were born.
Time, for example. There are no mysteries about time, nothing “unknown” about it. We all know how this business of “past, present and future” works. But it’s very hard to describe it, or even to think about the time we actually live in. Our language about “flow” and “passing” and “lengths” of time all describe something we don’t experience.
Now I don’t see why it’s impossible to develop adequate language for this. But the point is
not to develop a “correct theory” about time – i.e. to generalize about our “internal sense of time”, for example. Gaining knowledge about that is a valid task for psychology, part of the traditional task of understanding Reality.
The point of understanding our Existence is to stop taking it for granted... to appreciate what each one of us has been given as our own. As you say, “to wake people up.” But I don’t see this as a one-shot deal, like a spiritual awakening you achieve once and for all. It’s not at all possible or desirable simply to stop taking everything for granted at once. This was Kierkegaard’s objection to Descartes, that he presumed to “doubt everything” intellectually, while still going on with his daily life, taking
so much for granted. That there’s a beautiful planet for us to live on, that the laws of physics are so reliable, that life evolved, that we can talk with each other and have such a rich culture, on and on.
The realm of Existence, of what we all know but take for granted, is maybe just as vast as the realm of objective Reality. These are not two different worlds, but two sides of the same world we all live in. So the intellectual project of “not taking for granted” will maybe turn out to be just as extensive as the project of gaining scientific knowledge. And the two are not unrelated.
Look, in physics today, virtually everything is
known. We have good theoretical explanations for virtually all observable phenomena. But, because the theories themselves don’t make any sense to us, we go on and on looking for further knowledge – about “branes” and “hidden dimensions” of reality, etc. – in the hope that it will somehow clarify things.
But the problem isn’t that something is still unknown, the problem is in what we take for granted about the physical world. That it happens “in real time”, for example, or that everything about it is “measurable”. We know all about how to measure things... but we don’t know how to think about that, we don’t have the conceptual tools that would let us
not take it for granted.
So the issue of thinking “existentially” is not just about us humans. It’s about finding a different point of view and learning to think in a different direction, for a different purpose. There’s more to life, and there’s more to understand about life, than this business of gaining factual knowledge and arguing about theories.