Hello, everyone.I'm Stephen West.This is Philosophize This.I want to thank everyone who supports the show on Patreon, patreon.com slash philosophize this.
So if I wanted to set myself up for failure here today, I'd tell you I was going to explain all of High Digger to you in the next 30 minutes.Luckily, I'm too old to be making that mistake.
And you're too old to be believing in it anyway, quite frankly.
One thing I can hope to do here today, though, is to tell you something I think is very jarring and pretty awesome about Heidegger's work, as well as something that's significant about it that'll help you place him in however you think about the history of philosophy.
See, Heidegger was one of the most important members of a movement in philosophy that was trying to question metaphysics at a level that had really never been done before. This is around the 1920s.It's the beginning of his career.
And in many ways, as a German thinker himself, he's reacting to the ripple effect that was created by the work of another German thinker that came before him, a guy we've been talking about on the show lately named Friedrich Nietzsche.
See, if you've listened to the last few episodes, then you know Nietzsche thought his work was the twilight of the idols from the history of philosophy, hence the name of his famous book.
And one of the things that was included in that list of idols was the long set of traditions that philosophers had built up in the field of metaphysics.
Nietzsche says we're going to stop all this unverifiable speculation about ideal, otherworldly stuff.He says let's focus just on the here and now and the real world that we actually have access to.
He really thinks his work is moving beyond this whole metaphysical tradition.
But one of the people that came along after that agreed with Nietzsche, we got to get away from metaphysics, but ultimately said Nietzsche didn't go far enough, was Martin Heidegger.
Because Heidegger makes the claim that every piece of philosophy that Nietzsche ever wrote was built on top of a metaphysical foundation that is completely wrong about the nature of being. What is he talking about here?
Well, he's talking about the set of assumptions from the history of philosophy that claim that as human beings, we are primarily subjects that are navigating a world of objects.
Now, trust me, I get that your first response to hearing that might be, well, what's wrong with that?I mean, aren't we?
But my goal here, if I can do anything in the next 30 minutes, is to explain to you where Heidegger's coming from with this critique, how this critique from his book Being and Time completely changed the way that a lot of philosophers even think about the task of philosophy, and how ultimately Heidegger thinks a very easy trap for an intelligent person in the modern world to fall into is to be someone that's trapped in Plato's cave.
But not trapped in Plato's cave like it's typically said, where all you see are shadows on a cave wall.The trap for a lot of people in the modern world for Heidegger is going to be to get yourself stuck in the allegory of the cave.
To think of yourself as a person that just needs to remove this cultural bias.I need to remove the linguistic, historical biases that are in my way.
and that if only I can do that fully, then I'll eventually get access to the truth that lies on the other side of all these barriers.
Heidegger thinks that this way of thinking is nonsense, and that it fundamentally misunderstands what human existence even is.That just like Nietzsche did, this person gets something very important wrong about the nature of being itself.
Should be said, it's not just Nietzsche that Heidegger thinks is building his philosophy on top of faulty metaphysics, it's essentially the entire history of philosophy.
But if you're someone coming to this episode that sees yourself as a subject in a world of objects, one person from the history of philosophy that you can send a thank you card to for that is going to be Rene Descartes.
Cartesian subjectivity, as it's called.I think, therefore I am.The assumption is that that's the starting point of any further analysis that we're going to be doing.
I am a self, a subject, a mind, and I exist in a spatial realm of objects that is outside of me.
And one of the big tasks of philosophy is going to be then to figure out what the relationship is between me, as a subject, to all the objects out there, to all the other subjects that are out there.
This is the dualistic set of assumptions that a lot of Western thinking is built upon. And to some people, I get it, that may not seem like much of an assumption.
But Heidegger is going to say that while that may be the level we normally analyze things at in philosophy or in the sciences, this isn't the primary way that we experience what it is to be.
In more philosophical terms, what he's making a case for here is that there's something ontologically prior to any claim that we make about how subjects relate to objects.
That any claim about how things relate to other things is ultimately a secondary theoretical abstraction we're making.
But again, that there's something to our existence that comes before any of this, something that makes abstractions like science or the history of philosophy even possible.And understand what he means here.
The first thing he wants us to do is to throw out all the philosophical terms people have been using throughout this history, where they've tried to describe what being is, without having really taken the question of being as seriously as they could have.
So out go terms like the subject, consciousness, person, the self, as it's typically been used as a term, mind-body as a distinction is out.
For the sake of understanding where Heidegger's coming from, try as hard as you can for a minute to forget any of these terms that have tried to describe what it is to exist as you.They're all bringing in way too many assumptions for Heidegger.
And what he wants to do is to try to open our minds up to the possibility of a different framing of what human existence is at bottom. The word Heidegger uses to describe our existence is Dasein.
The English translation of this word is being there, or being in the world, all separated by hyphens that make it into one neat, unified word.Being in the world, said really quickly.
And just one final disclaimer here, out of respect to everyone listening, I'm trying my best here to open you up to a whole different way of framing what it is to be.And this is not exactly a simple task to do.
I mean, it can take years just for somebody to change their viewpoint on something small, to stop eating so much candy because their doctor talks to them about it.
How am I, but a humble podcaster like myself, supposed to take 10 minutes of your time and get you thinking about your whole reality differently?Just know this is coming from a friendly place as always on this podcast.
I'm just trying my best to give you something that really changed the way a lot of philosophers were thinking about their work.
We'll talk a little later about how typical philosophical questions like searching for the objectivity to knowledge or meaning at the level of the universe or
free will and determinism, how many thinkers moved away from these sorts of questions, because under Heidegger's framing, they just sort of dissolve as problems.
Anyway, the first step is going to be, though, for me to try to present you with this different framing.Just know that for you to have the experience of these philosophers, it may take a bit more than what I can do right here.
Now that said, think of Dasein not as a mind with a detached material body in the way that Descartes or many other philosophers may assume, but think of Dasein as a type of existence that is always spatially situated in the world.
If it helps to bend your mind in this direction a bit more, to use familiar language, think of the substance of what Dasein is as existence itself.Though, of course, we're not talking about substance in the usual way.
This is just to shift your thinking.The substance of Dasein is existence.This is an example that Simon Critchley uses in his work on Heidegger.
In other words, before we ever identify ourselves as a self or as a subject, and more than that, before we ever start talking as scientists or philosophers often do about the relationships between external things, there's a more fundamental being that's going on that makes any of these abstractions even possible.
That being is what Heidegger calls Dasein.And it can be understood not in terms of studying the atoms that make it up, but in terms of the existential structures that make up what it is for this type of existence to be.
Dasein, then, is more of a who than it is a what, to help, again, put this into more subject-object terminology.
And being in the world, with all those hyphens in it, that's going to be one of these existential structures that are important for Heidegger.
But should be said, there's several of these, each one of them constituting fundamental aspects of the way that the being of Dasein engages with being.
From being in the world, to understanding, temporality, care, throne-ness, each of these and more is an existential structure to the type of being that Dasein is.
But let's start with being in the world as the first example to illustrate this, and to try to nudge our thinking a little more away from the typical subject-object framing of things.
I'll use the kind of example Heidegger uses in the book, I'll just try to make it a little more modern.
See, Heidegger would say, despite how natural it may seem for you to think of yourself as a detached subject analyzing things that are external to you, this isn't the way that you spend most of your life interacting with the world.
Most of your time is spent just in the world. When you walk across the floor, interacting with the external world, quote unquote, you're not thinking about the floor as some external object with properties for you to study.
No, your experience is that you just walk on the floor to get somewhere that you need to go.The floor, as a theoretical object that you could potentially study, fades into the background in a sense.
Another example, when you type on a keyboard, writing an email to someone, You aren't thinking about the keyboard as some external thing.
No, the keyboard and your existential experience of it becomes a type of equipment that fades into the background as you're accomplishing a task that matters to you.The keyboard becomes more of an extension of you, not some abstract thing.
And to Heidegger, this is the primary level that we experience the world, being in the world.
Point is, if you're trying to describe what type of being we are, we're not these isolated subjects that decide to pay attention to the world and reflect on things every now and again.
No, Dasein is a type of being that is always already in a world, involved in it, immersed in a type of fascination and care for the things in that world.
In other words, it could be said, in some sense, you are the world as Dasein, that this is a piece of what even constitutes this type of being that you are.
That there is no objective, ultimate, metaphysical separation between mind and body, or who you are, whatever that means, and what the world is.Being and the world are fundamentally unified.They've never not been unified.
And splitting mind and body, subject and object, as though these things are separate, leads to a whole bunch of problems in philosophy that, unsurprisingly to Heidegger, the greatest minds haven't been able to solve for coming up on thousands of years now.
Because consider another common way that we categorize things, like that keyboard from our example.
To Heidegger, when the keyboard's just an extension of us, when you're using it to type an email, not thinking about it as a separate object, Heidegger would call that keyboard something that is ready to hand.This is the term he uses.
It's the equipment of Dasein in the world.
However, when something happens to that keyboard, say it breaks or something, key falls off, when we take a step back and we see that keyboard in more of an abstract theoretical way as an object, it is in that moment that that keyboard's become something different to us, something present at hand is the term he uses.
It becomes part of this category of things that are abstract theoretical concepts. Again, our primary experience of the world are with things that are ready to hand.
The more abstract theoretical framing of science and classic philosophy turns the world into a collection of things that are present at hand.Now, none of this is saying that looking at things in a detached, theoretical way is a bad thing.
Science and philosophy are enormously good to Heidegger. Just need to say it again so it's not misunderstood.
None of this is saying that we should stop doing science and to stop looking at things in the world and how they relate to each other in an abstract theoretical way.
What Heidegger's saying is that this is a level of abstraction that is secondary, that there's something to our being that is ontologically prior, that makes important abstractions like this even possible.
And ultimately what he's saying is that if we mistake the subject-object framing as the starting point of any further analysis we do of the world, then we ultimately limit ourselves to a scientific framing of reality that, while it's massively important, cannot ever tell us about important pieces of the types of beings that we are.
And just in practice, when we look at the consequences of seeing things only through this framing, it leads a lot of people into things like nihilism.
It leads them into lives of confusion as they try to find a naturalistic explanation for everything around them.
And it leads people to end up thinking of themselves and the other people in the world around them as though they're objects to be studied, to be optimized and manipulated for the sake of their own benefit, what Heidegger calls a technological framing to the world.
We'll talk more about that here in a second.Let's build up this distinction Heidegger's making here a bit more, though.
The most common way to view things in the world these days, if you're a philosopher or a scientist, is to look for naturalistic explanations for things.If something exists, then it is out there, outside of me.
And the best way to understand it is to find its origins in the world of nature, and then to try to explain it in terms of how it fits into that naturalistic framework.
But again, as important as this is for doing a lot of things, for Heidegger, this is not the only way to be framing reality.This is not the final word on what reality is.
In his terminology, this is always a study of the ontic rather than the ontological.The ontic meaning the study of beings and how they relate to each other, trees, asteroids, volcanoes, etc.The ontological is the study of being in itself.
And the mistake that a lot of people will make when they get too caught up in the subject-object framing of the world is they'll try to explain everything through terminology that only makes sense in conversations where we're talking about how things relate to other things, the ontic.
For example, the philosophical problem of free will and determinism, that only really seems like a big problem when you're trapped in the framing of reality that everything is an object that needs a causal explanation, and where people are just another one of these objects in some grand giant science experiment that's going on.
I mean, the thinking goes, if I can tell where a rock's going to be on the other side of the galaxy simply by knowing the position of it and the laws of the universe,
Then if I had total knowledge of everything, like Laplace's demon, why shouldn't I be able to predict everything someone's going to do before they actually do it?But to Martin Heidiger, this is ultimately a category error.
It's kind of like asking, how much does the number three weigh?Or what does justice taste like when it's administered just right?
To Heidiger, it's trying to apply causal explanations that work at the ontic level to something like Dasein, which exists ontologically.
I mean, quick aside, he'd actually have a lot to ask a person like this about all the assumptions they're bringing in about causality in the first place, where they're talking as though there's some single causal chain that can't be broken, that's just constantly moving into the future like gravity does.
That's a huge assumption they're making.Secondly, you know, just to use the scientific language for a second, is it possible to be totally caused by forces that are themselves unpredictable in their nature?
You know, this obsession with trying to turn human beings
into these computers that can be studied and predicted like the position of rocks in the universe, it's ultimately something I think Heidegger would expect, knowing that this framing of reality tends to treat people in this way and lead to these sorts of outcomes in our societies.
Dasein, on the other hand, part of what makes it the type of being that it is for Heidegger, is that it exists temporally, or in time.
Meaning that the type of being that it is, is one that is first thrown into a world not of its own creation, it then receives language, culture, a history, things that constitute how Dasein is even able to experience being,
And then in relation to these things that are outside of its control, it then projects itself into a future based on possibilities that are available to it.
What this means is that agency is literally a part of the structure of what makes Dasein the type of being that it is.Dasein is a type of being that is always intimately tied in to past, present, and future.
So of course free will, as it's talked about, like you're this detached subject freely choosing things, is delusional.
And, of course, believing it follows some rigid set of causal rules is just trying desperately hard to make all types of beings conform to the realm of the ontic.
It's, again, a category error trying to explain Dasein with terms from a fundamentally different kind of analysis.
The problem of free will and determinism, then, dissolves as a problem if Heidegger is successful here, at least in the traditional way this has been framed as a problem. And does this make causal explanations a total waste of time then?
No, it just maybe shows where the subject-object framing of things starts to run into a limit of what it can explain.
Now, the same way agency changes, in terms of what the conversation even is, the problem of how do we derive meaning from a cold, disinterested universe, that starts to shift or dissolve here as well.
Because again, to see that as a problem is to be starting your analysis of what the universe is from a place where you're capable of framing it as an abstract, cold, disinterested universe.
But the only way you could ever get to making that kind of judgment about it requires for you to be embedded in existential structures that make anything intelligible or meaningful at all.Let me explain this one a bit more.
The thing to remember here is that, again, we're not looking at human existence through the same lens that former philosophers have, where I'm this detached subject and the universe is something out there that I can reach out, I can touch it, grab a hold of it, and get the objective truth about it, if only I remove all my cultural bias.
That type of thinking is just delusional to Heidegger.Now, see, to him, as Dasein, when I look out at the world and understand anything about it, that is not me accessing the truth of the universe.
That is being, revealing itself through me in some very partial way, where the language, the culture, or the historical biases that I carry with me are not barriers that are in the way of that process, but they're the very things that make it possible for me to experience being in a partial way whatsoever.
And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that supports the sponsors of the show today.For an ad-free experience, sub at any level at patreon.com slash philosophize this.
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And now let's get back to it.
A common example that's used to try to nudge people's thinking in this direction a bit more is to compare Dasein to a beam of light that's being cast into a dark room, partially revealing what's inside of that room, but also existentially connected to what it's revealing.
See, it's in this sense that Dasein is the kind of being that reveals a world that is meaningful and significant.Put another way, Simon Critchley describes it like this.
He says, quote, Dasein is the a priori condition of possibility for the structure of involvements that we call the world.So what characterizes us is that we have understanding of the world.
The world as a world for us is a world that relies on us, a world we make. The world of material becomes composed into a world of meaning through our activity with it."
So this quote, I think, really emphasizes the shift in framing that's going on here.We're no longer looking at the world as though it's even possible to be a detached subject that's getting to the objective truth.
No, the way we're looking at the world now is through phenomenology, or how exactly does being reveal itself to us as active participants in it.
There's no view from nowhere here, where we have some perfect set of protocols and we can get to objective knowledge about the universe.Any way that being is partially revealed to Dasein will require an analysis from the perspective of Dasein.
And this is a shift, by the way, that's going on in philosophy more generally from typical questions about epistemology to questions now of ontology.
You know, instead of asking, like earlier philosophers may have asked, how do we know that our knowledge here is the objective truth about things?
Now a lot of philosophers are going to be asking, what is it about someone's experience that reveals the world in this way?What specifically makes this seem like it's the truth to this person?These become the more relevant questions.
Because see, Dasein, under this view, is the very set of existential conditions that make the world intelligible or capable of having meaning at all.
So obviously, if you were to completely bypass our existence at this ontological level, and say, you know what, I'm just going to start from a place where I'm a subject, and I take a step back, abstract, theoretical, examining a world of objects, if you were to do that, then of course it's possible for you to reduce that world into a collection of cold, meaningless objects.
But is that getting a complete picture of what our existence is?See, what this new way of framing existence is going to get us focusing on more for Heidegger is not the world of theoretical abstractions.
The new thing that becomes relevant is average everyday lived experience phenomenologically. And again, think of how radical of a change this is for philosophy.
Not many philosophers have ever said that where philosophy should begin is in the everyday lived experience of people.Heidegger's going to say that.
So as you can see, this is where he's going to agree with Nietzsche, while simultaneously critiquing his entire project.
He definitely thinks we need to move away from concepts like the ideal, from abstract metaphysical concepts that we build an entire philosophy on top of,
But he thinks that Nietzsche, in creating concepts like the will to power, builds on top of a metaphysics that begins from this subject-object thinking.He's ignoring what is ontologically prior to that.
Now for Heidegger, this is going to lead to some pretty predictable outcomes in Nietzsche's work, as we'll get to.
But in Heidegger's work, this turning away from the abstract theoretical side of things is going to land him smack dab in the middle of everyday lived experience as his main focus.
And when you focus on lived experience, it turns out, what you can't help but begin to uncover and notice are the existential structures of Dasein that make our specific type of existence the way that it is.
What I mean is, you can't help but stop doing so much scientific thinking about what life is.And what you start noticing is just how important two things are to the kind of existence that you're living every day.Being and time.
Hence the name of the book.These are two concepts that start to become way more important when you're thinking in this different sort of framing.
See again, unlike the mind-body split of Descartes, Dasein is fundamentally a relational being to Heidegger.It exists constantly within a vast network of meaning, a referential totality as it's sometimes put.
And part of what that means for Dasein is that it's always involved in a world that makes sense to it, meaning the things in the world around us are not cold and meaningless. We care, we have concern, we find ourselves fascinated with things.
This is more the type of being that we are, not some passive subject that has to squint their eyes at something really hard to be concerned with it every once in a while.We're always involved in the world.
In other words, we don't, at the bottom of our existence, perceive anything out there in a cold, disinterested way to Heidegger.Space is a great example of this for him.
See, on one hand, when we make an abstraction out of the world around us, you can view space and distance as though they're these cold, disinterested units that you can calculate freely.
You know, we break things down into feet, centimeters, kilometers, miles.You can do that, certainly. But on the other hand, at this pre-theoretical level for Dasein, space becomes something that is always already imbued with meaning and significance.
What I mean is four miles is not always just four miles to Dasein.Like if there's a donut shop four miles away, six and a half kilometers for you more metric system folks out there.
If donuts are not important to you, then there's no way you'd ever walk four miles or six and a half kilometers.It's too far.But if that donut, was your favorite donut.And they were going out of business the next day.
And this is the last time you're ever going to get to experience the glorious sprinkles and chocolatey goodness of the donut.Four miles ends up not being that far at all.
That is more the way Dasein interacts with space, not in terms of these cold, calculable units. More than that, when you're in your living room and you see the stuff all around you, that stuff isn't just cold, meaningless stuff.That's your stuff.
That's your living room that you made in a way that means something to you and the projects that you engage in.See, it's not until we make space into this abstract theoretical that it can ever be something we deem to be meaningless.
Under the framing of Dasein, though, meaning and purpose as a problem just dissolves as a problem, at least in the way it's been typically presented throughout the history of philosophy.Consider time as another example of this.
Time in one sense, you could say, is just an endless linear progression of seconds that then get grouped into minutes, hours, days, whatever. But time in the world of Dasein actually grounds the meaning of anything we choose to do.
Time is going to be an important one when it comes to the specific type of existence we're in.
Heidegger says there's a lot of other philosophers throughout history who will say, you know, if you want to find yourself and who you really are, you find it through something like a confrontation with God.
But in Heidegger's work, it's through a confrontation with time.
Finding the self, whatever that means in this new framing, where it's not the starting point, but it's an important abstraction that we make, finding your authentic self is only made possible through confronting death, and more importantly, the finite nature of the time you have here as a being.
See, it's more than just saying, I get it, I'm going to die one day.It's about really coming to terms with death as the ultimate horizon for the type of existence that you're always in.
It's only through truly recognizing the temporal nature of Dasein, the type of being that we are, that the events of our lives that can otherwise seem like we're just killing time, truly show their significance in the network of meaning that we exist in.
So anyway, as I started this episode saying, I can't explain High Digger in just 30 minutes.All right.There's so much more to Dasein, not the least of which is how we're always in relation to other Daseins and what that means for us.
We'd love to talk about it more.
But having done the work that we've done up until this point in the episode, let me try to make his point here about this modern trap that's easy to fall into for an intelligent person, as well as the trap that he thinks society in general has fallen into.
So, I'm talking to a particular type of person that may be listening out there now, tying together these insights from the last few episodes.
I mean, you can imagine being born into the world we live in, inheriting a kind of enlightenment optimism, Christian idealism, believing that you're a mind that's inside of a body, that there's one way that the universe reveals itself, and that getting to that objective truth should be one of our biggest priorities in life.
And you can imagine, looking around you at the people that you're going to take inspiration from in doing that, and who do you see?
You see scientists, you see philosophers, you see what seems like the highest level of people that are committed to finding the truth.And what do they say to do?
They say, we got to study these objects that are out there and how they relate to each other.We got to find out the best ways to know exactly what these things are, and then how to manipulate these things to our advantage.
Because not only is that going to get us closer to the truth, that's our ultimate goal, but it's also going to be producing technology that can do miraculous stuff and make people's lives better, more efficient, more optimized.
This is what we've got to be focused on doing. And you can imagine hearing all that and saying, yeah, yeah, OK, I'm on board with all that.
The correct way for me to be viewing my existence, if I want to live in reality, is the scientific way of looking at things.I'm going to work hard to remove my cultural bias.
I'm going to make sure language doesn't get in the way of that truth, make sure I remove how history is shading my thinking.And if only I can do all this stuff fully, then one day, finally, I'll be able to get out of Plato's cave.
I'll be able to see the truth rather than just some shadows on the cave wall. But if Heidegger's right here, then as spectators from the outside, we can see the ways this person is simplifying things.
We can see how they're really just getting stuck in the allegory of the cave, that process where they think they're arriving at the truth.And we can probably guess what sort of outcomes this sole way of framing things is going to lead to.
They'll often struggle with nihilism in their life, because they bypass the ontological level and are trying to create meaning out of these theoretical abstractions.
They'll often live in confusion about subjectivity, and how consciousness makes sense, or free will and determinism, because they're always committing a category error when trying to describe their being.
They'll always see culture and language as a barrier in the way to the truth, rather than some of the very things that makes their experience of being even possible.
And for the very last time on this episode, I'm just going to say, none of this by Heidegger is saying that we shouldn't be viewing things in terms of subjects and objects.
Again, this isn't about finding some ultimate framing of reality that does everything for you.What he's saying is that maybe having one single framing like that is always going to be incomplete.
That maybe there's certain elements of being that are described better or worse with different framings.That maybe we always need multiple framings of reality if we want to understand our lives better.
And that if you're ever over-indexed on any one of these, you're likely to run into very predictable problems when that framing runs into its limitations.
So maybe it's to be expected that if you live your entire existence immersed in the subject-object framing of things, of course you're left with what looks like a cold, disinterested universe filled with objects that you're always detached from.
And to Heidegger, even if you were capable of navigating all this confusion, this paradox, and essentially building a religion for yourself out of this world of theoretical abstractions, his point is, what is that system of values always going to be based in?
It's going to be centered around being a subject that's in a world of objects, and likely centered around some variation of the idea that we need to understand and manipulate these objects in some way that's beneficial to us.
Again, this is why Nietzsche to Heidegger is the last of the great metaphysicians, and he's saying that as a critique to Nietzsche.
Remember, Nietzsche thought he was beyond all this stuff, but ultimately through his concepts of the will to power, the Übermensch, the transvaluation of all values, to Heidegger, he's obviously just building a moral approach that's rooted in the framing of subject-object.
Now, just for context here, for whatever it's worth, this is why last episode, when we talked about Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, Deleuze is in many ways rescuing Nietzsche's work from this critique by Heidegger, by turning it into a metaphysics of forces instead of the subject.
But anyway, think of what this critique from Heidegger means about the state of the world if it's true.
You know, we've been talking about capitalism and communism and corporatism and, you know, how to construct our societies in a way that's more utilitarian, in a way that maximizes the well-being or the flourishing of the average person.
So many cliches we've been throwing around lately.
But if what Heidegger is saying is true, then this whole way that we're framing our world in terms of trying to maximize outcomes, any one of these modes of governing people, whatever it is, is ultimately corrupted by what he calls a technological enframing of people and society.
See, technology is a way of thinking for Heidegger.
We are always looking at people and things in the modern world as though they are these objects present at hand, as though they're things to be understood, controlled, and manipulated, and then optimized for some particular outcome.
In other words, if a question we've been asking on this podcast is, what is the role of capitalism when it comes to the problems people are facing in the world? Would the world be a better place if we got rid of capitalism and tried something new?
It's not that Heidegger wouldn't have thoughts on capitalism or any specific way of doing things, but zoomed out enough, you would likely see capitalism as just a symptom of a larger sickness we have at the level of being.
that if you were to try to remove capitalism and try to replace it with some other system that we arrived at that was supposedly better, well, that new system would also be created by people that were overly indexed in the subject-object framing of things as well.
We'd likely have very similar negative outcomes until we were capable of viewing people in the world not in terms of it being some warehouse of stuff for us to manipulate.Now, a couple important things to clarify here towards the end.
By the end of Heidegger's career, Dasein and the work he did in Being and Time is not something he views as the primary way we should be looking at our relationship to being.You know, if anything, Being and Time is kind of like a proof of concept.
It's an exercise in reframing what being is in one potential way, that by doing the work, it can get people loosened up from this grip of seeing things only from the subject-object framing.
If most of us are starting in the subject-object way of framing things, and if being in time is something that can open us up to how the nature of being is more complicated than having just that single framing of it, then by the end of his work, Heidegger's gotten to a totally different place, where he accepts how truly mysterious certain aspects of being are.
It turns out they're things that are practically impossible to categorize in language or in rational arguments altogether. Being is something, it turns out to him, that reveals and conceals itself simultaneously to us.
Being is something that we are always a part of in ways that are deeply mysterious when compared to our average everyday experience, though it's starting with your average everyday experience that's ironically the way you get to this place he's talking about.
But a question you could ask here is, what is he talking about?
I mean, if you're going to say here, Heidegger, that this is a way of experiencing being that's so crazy you can't even tell me about it, real question, how am I, as a listener of that, ever supposed to tell the difference between you making a legitimate point and needlessly obscuring things with a bunch of nonsense just so that you can sound deep?
Next episode, we're going to dive into this whole sector of being that Heidegger's talking about.Is there really stuff that can't be explained by theoretical abstractions at the level of the subject?
Are there really things in this Dionysian side of existence that are so chaotic and so emergent that any attempt to place rational parameters around them is always doomed to fail?
Are there experiences that human beings can have where they lose themselves and discover something deeper about being?And if there are, How do we even talk about those things if they did exist?
We're going to be talking about one potential entry point into this area of existence, of which there are many.We're talking about mysticism next episode.
And I'll be doing it from the perspective of one of these skeptical observers from the outside, the hope here being, you know, artistically, to balance this discussion into something that doesn't just devolve into a bunch of poetic sounding language.
As always, I'm going to give it everything I have, do the best I can for all you listening. Thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon, patreon.com slash philosophize this.Thank you for listening.I'll talk to you next time.
