Heidegger
- Thread starter luka
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Like I said, dumbing down of Husserl for the uncultivated nouveau middle class.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Helluva question for a Saturday. I got 23+77 tunes to finish up. Priorities. Plus I’m not in the kitchen, Heidegger is more my cook books guide....
Other than that, when studying Britain and Irish landscapes from what’s pejoratively termed the Dark Ages (ie when the English ‘arrived’), Husserl and Martin H started turning up a lot and exposed my lack of philosophical (non public school) education. The sites themselves were fairly well understood. Chronologies, function, social domains - settlement and ritual realms etc.
The problem is/was, what exactly is a phenomenological interpretation of landscape? This is what @luka your favourite author Robert McF misses entirely - sensory engagement in the world through being AND time. Expand that out to a hill fort. What does sensory engagement help you with when moving around the locale either on foot or horse? Does the phenomenological angle help situate the site’s position in the immediate topography and your direct experience of it? The answer is obviously yes.
Recommended bridge would be Chris Tilley’s ‘A Phenomenology of Landscape’. Tilley is the crown of thorns, the pebble under the mattress, of dry academic literature, but he‘s brilliant at it. Tilley took walks around a bunch of heritage sites and describes the experiential flow of walking - contours, escarpments, weather and temperatures, this thing called view-sheds ie your 360degree views from specific positions. It foreground consciousness not as an arbitrary adjunct, but as the main event within subtle variations of welt/weltlich/weltlichkeit/weltmassigkeit....worldly or worldliness or worldhood, but the German and English cognates differ so they don’t quite mean the same thing when Heidegger says ‘man of the world’. Presence gets at my waffle more coherently. Check Shanks and Pearson there.
A personal analogy to being, dasein, would be music. I tend to dwell in the welt with an ongoing musical accompaniment going on in my bonce. Harmonies, tunes remembered or discovered or made up, don’t know if it’s a strength or madness yet. But look at various music events Dissensus members have been to over the course of time, then apply a phenomenological perspective to each. A Slayer gig is a world away from a jazz night. A hardcore night was different from a DiY session phenomenologically. ‘Metal, Rock and Jazz - Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience” by Harris Berger is an intriguing take on these zones.
We’re all students.
Other than that, when studying Britain and Irish landscapes from what’s pejoratively termed the Dark Ages (ie when the English ‘arrived’), Husserl and Martin H started turning up a lot and exposed my lack of philosophical (non public school) education. The sites themselves were fairly well understood. Chronologies, function, social domains - settlement and ritual realms etc.
The problem is/was, what exactly is a phenomenological interpretation of landscape? This is what @luka your favourite author Robert McF misses entirely - sensory engagement in the world through being AND time. Expand that out to a hill fort. What does sensory engagement help you with when moving around the locale either on foot or horse? Does the phenomenological angle help situate the site’s position in the immediate topography and your direct experience of it? The answer is obviously yes.
Recommended bridge would be Chris Tilley’s ‘A Phenomenology of Landscape’. Tilley is the crown of thorns, the pebble under the mattress, of dry academic literature, but he‘s brilliant at it. Tilley took walks around a bunch of heritage sites and describes the experiential flow of walking - contours, escarpments, weather and temperatures, this thing called view-sheds ie your 360degree views from specific positions. It foreground consciousness not as an arbitrary adjunct, but as the main event within subtle variations of welt/weltlich/weltlichkeit/weltmassigkeit....worldly or worldliness or worldhood, but the German and English cognates differ so they don’t quite mean the same thing when Heidegger says ‘man of the world’. Presence gets at my waffle more coherently. Check Shanks and Pearson there.
A personal analogy to being, dasein, would be music. I tend to dwell in the welt with an ongoing musical accompaniment going on in my bonce. Harmonies, tunes remembered or discovered or made up, don’t know if it’s a strength or madness yet. But look at various music events Dissensus members have been to over the course of time, then apply a phenomenological perspective to each. A Slayer gig is a world away from a jazz night. A hardcore night was different from a DiY session phenomenologically. ‘Metal, Rock and Jazz - Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience” by Harris Berger is an intriguing take on these zones.
We’re all students.
Nope. we can talk about heidegger beyond his nazism but you don't want to do that, because that will get you wrestling with his conception of epistemology, something you said you don't want to debate.
Heidegger took Husserls groundings of language in formal and (to a lesser extent) mathematical logic and then reduced them to a gloopy mess criticising the western metaphysical tradition for a return to authenticity, ignoring that Feuerbach and even Sterner had carried out the same task 100 years before him, without succumbing to the fetishisation of the primitive.
luka
Well-known member
Psychogeography before it became an empty term was about the same thing. Registering what happens to us and in us as we walk through the city. That sense you get in London when you've been wandering down a gentle gradient, through narrow streets and suddenly you burst onto the Thames. That sense of physical emotional psychic expansion that fllows, with the eye given space to roam. And then the contrast allowing you to fully appreciate what effect being penned up in those canyons has upon you, with just a slit of sky above.
(Was going to correct the typo, but it's a good one. Follows into Flows.)
(Was going to correct the typo, but it's a good one. Follows into Flows.)
Alexander Trocki is good. Read his books. proper heroin psychogeography.
luka
Well-known member
Das Man, in Heidegger’s German, translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as They Self, and otherwise variously translated as People, or Anyone, the no one, the global man, or, and, supposedly with most accuracy, One, as in one does one’s duty. They being misleading because they are always those who are not us, we define ourselves against and in comparison to, the they, whereas Das Man is explicitly intended to involve and contain us.
In his own words
By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too…
It is this failure to distinguish oneself which is perhaps the problem.
We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as THEY take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as THEY see and judge; likewise, we shrink back from the "great mass" as THEY shrink back; we find "shocking" what THEY find shocking.
We can detect here the same strain of high-minded contempt for the bourgeoisie we find throughout the intellectual and artistic milieu of the late 19th and early 20th century whether Zola, Hesse, Musil, or the provocations of Dada.
The utility of the concept, however, is not confined to the European bourgeoisie of the modern era. The They is protean, multiform, omnipresent, inescapable, regardless of social class or cultural background. Every Dasein is part of a They although the form that They takes will differ according to context. It is, very loosely speaking, a personification of received opinion.
It is a ghost that haunts us all but that ghost takes different form for each individual and consequently the relationship of each individual to the other is unique. That relationship could be typically belligerent, defensive, cowering, swaggering, craven, obsequious, and the quality of that individual relationship will be manifested in all facets of behaviour, from the way syllables are sounded to the curvature of the spine, why this man stoops while that man struts, why this one looks the world boldly in the eye while this other averts his gaze.
It is worth asking how this is all impressed upon us, how we come to understand and internalise this censorious other but for now I’d just like to draw attention to some of the characteristics of the they self, and highlight some of the words Heidegger uses to describe it.
First of all, it is hidden, it is camouflaged, it does not announce itself but rather insinuates itself, slyly, and that’s Heidegger’s word, into our thought processes and decision making. Think of the tongue eating louse, a parasitic isopod which, having entered a fish through the gills, fastens itself to that fish’s tongue, eventually causing the tongue to fall off completely to be replaced by the parasite itself.
In his own words
By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too…
It is this failure to distinguish oneself which is perhaps the problem.
We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as THEY take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as THEY see and judge; likewise, we shrink back from the "great mass" as THEY shrink back; we find "shocking" what THEY find shocking.
We can detect here the same strain of high-minded contempt for the bourgeoisie we find throughout the intellectual and artistic milieu of the late 19th and early 20th century whether Zola, Hesse, Musil, or the provocations of Dada.
The utility of the concept, however, is not confined to the European bourgeoisie of the modern era. The They is protean, multiform, omnipresent, inescapable, regardless of social class or cultural background. Every Dasein is part of a They although the form that They takes will differ according to context. It is, very loosely speaking, a personification of received opinion.
It is a ghost that haunts us all but that ghost takes different form for each individual and consequently the relationship of each individual to the other is unique. That relationship could be typically belligerent, defensive, cowering, swaggering, craven, obsequious, and the quality of that individual relationship will be manifested in all facets of behaviour, from the way syllables are sounded to the curvature of the spine, why this man stoops while that man struts, why this one looks the world boldly in the eye while this other averts his gaze.
It is worth asking how this is all impressed upon us, how we come to understand and internalise this censorious other but for now I’d just like to draw attention to some of the characteristics of the they self, and highlight some of the words Heidegger uses to describe it.
First of all, it is hidden, it is camouflaged, it does not announce itself but rather insinuates itself, slyly, and that’s Heidegger’s word, into our thought processes and decision making. Think of the tongue eating louse, a parasitic isopod which, having entered a fish through the gills, fastens itself to that fish’s tongue, eventually causing the tongue to fall off completely to be replaced by the parasite itself.
luka
Well-known member
Mouths mouth words mind never formulated. Convention speaks.
“see ya mate, yeah see ya mate, see you mate, yeah see ya mate”
And I quote
The more inconspicuous this kind of being is to everyday Dasein itself, all the more stubbornly and primordially does it work itself out.
Now what happens here is a subjugation, and please note how forceful and violent Heidegger’s word choices are throughout, how this is characterised always in terms of usurpation, tyranny, dictatorship, what’s happening is, a subjugation of Dasein and its potentialities.
And these others, these hidden, domineering, usurping, dictatorial others, we collude with them, we work with and for them, as Heidegger says
One belongs to the others and enhances their power
we are collaborators, like the Vichy regime, we collude in our own subjugation.
Now what does this subjugation consist of? What form does it take? It is not that we are acting against our will, with a gun to our head, it is something far more insidious and inconspicuous and difficult to unpick.
Heidegger posits an authentic self, or perhaps we should say an authentic mode of being. This is contrasted with what he calls ‘everydayness’ or the everyday self. This everyday self is the mode of being of the they, and our authentic self, Dasein, is dissolved into this everydayness and the more absolutely we are dissolved the more the Others, the They, become imperceptible. We have outsourced our thinking, but more than that we have outsourced our experiencing. Are we really here at all? This creates what Heidegger terms distanciality, a distancing from ourselves and our fundamental experience. The They by necessity flattens out, it is concerned with averageness, not in the sense of mediocrity, but in the sense of a mean, median and mode. The authentic self exists as a field of potentialities radiating out in every direction, a crowd of latent possibilities anxious to be embodied “unexhausted and undiscovered is still man and man’s world”, as Nietzsche put it.
Now, there’s a very powerful and impassioned passage I’d like to quote from at this point
In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force.
“see ya mate, yeah see ya mate, see you mate, yeah see ya mate”
And I quote
The more inconspicuous this kind of being is to everyday Dasein itself, all the more stubbornly and primordially does it work itself out.
Now what happens here is a subjugation, and please note how forceful and violent Heidegger’s word choices are throughout, how this is characterised always in terms of usurpation, tyranny, dictatorship, what’s happening is, a subjugation of Dasein and its potentialities.
And these others, these hidden, domineering, usurping, dictatorial others, we collude with them, we work with and for them, as Heidegger says
One belongs to the others and enhances their power
we are collaborators, like the Vichy regime, we collude in our own subjugation.
Now what does this subjugation consist of? What form does it take? It is not that we are acting against our will, with a gun to our head, it is something far more insidious and inconspicuous and difficult to unpick.
Heidegger posits an authentic self, or perhaps we should say an authentic mode of being. This is contrasted with what he calls ‘everydayness’ or the everyday self. This everyday self is the mode of being of the they, and our authentic self, Dasein, is dissolved into this everydayness and the more absolutely we are dissolved the more the Others, the They, become imperceptible. We have outsourced our thinking, but more than that we have outsourced our experiencing. Are we really here at all? This creates what Heidegger terms distanciality, a distancing from ourselves and our fundamental experience. The They by necessity flattens out, it is concerned with averageness, not in the sense of mediocrity, but in the sense of a mean, median and mode. The authentic self exists as a field of potentialities radiating out in every direction, a crowd of latent possibilities anxious to be embodied “unexhausted and undiscovered is still man and man’s world”, as Nietzsche put it.
Now, there’s a very powerful and impassioned passage I’d like to quote from at this point
In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force.
luka
Well-known member
I’d like to dwell on that for a little while. It is this tendency which makes the starry night and all the heavenly bodies invisible, it is, to invoke Keats,(Lamia) the unweaving of the rainbow, the emptying of the haunted air. Why pay attention to that which has already been explained and entered into the dull catalogue of common things? The primordial, intoxicating mystery of this world, and our being in this world, is obscured utterly by the dim, unexamined certainty that this has all been looked at and comprehended by others, and that we needn’t or shouldn’t focus our attention there. The primordial moon, the primordial sea, the mystery of another person, warm blooded, hot breathed, and everything hinted at behind their blinking eyes.
I think it’s worth looking at the poets Heidegger revered and wrote about, Rilke, Trakl, Holderlin, to perhaps get a feel for this mystery, this mode of being and experiencing, this primordial, first light quality, this perpetual dawn. I think of Rilke’s advice
Resolve to be always beginning—to be a beginner!
Which is to say, to be one for whom everything is new, one for whom everything is unexplained and pregnant with mystery, one for whom every experience retains the startling freshness of youth, but also perhaps the fearfulness, or at least what Freud called the unheimlich, the unhomeliness, the uncanny quality the world sometimes takes on.
is this, as I understand it, that Heidegger means by angst. Not anxiety as we think of it in the mental health model, but as a sudden onrush, unexpected and disorientating, of the very unhomliness of the everyday. Who are these people? What do they want from me? What are these sounds coming out of my mouth? What am I doing here? Thrown into a world not of my making, suddenly incarnate, blinking in the light of a newborn sun.
And I think too of a good friend of mine, and the way he keeps disavowing and distancing himself from experience, continually undermining his own thoughts and sensations by saying, ‘ah, its such a cliché, it’s a cliché’ Pushing it away, the immediacy of the experience kept at arms length and how much that upsets me.
Our lives are made of feelings as rainbows are made of light. They are the only things we possess, they are more real to us than the jelly of our eyes, the white stone of our skull, the skins we’re stitched into, creasing and coarsening, and the secret is not to float serenely above it all but to inhabit it completely, tasting the sunlight in the mouth.
But Why live, when so many others have already done it for us? This is the question the they self asks. It’s all been done before, felt before, discovered before, every sea sailed, every mountain scaled, every landmass explored, surveyed and mapped, no distant desert not pockmarked with a thousand footprints, and it is this Heidegger describes as our disburdening. The burden of living is lifted from our shoulders.
I think it’s worth looking at the poets Heidegger revered and wrote about, Rilke, Trakl, Holderlin, to perhaps get a feel for this mystery, this mode of being and experiencing, this primordial, first light quality, this perpetual dawn. I think of Rilke’s advice
Resolve to be always beginning—to be a beginner!
Which is to say, to be one for whom everything is new, one for whom everything is unexplained and pregnant with mystery, one for whom every experience retains the startling freshness of youth, but also perhaps the fearfulness, or at least what Freud called the unheimlich, the unhomeliness, the uncanny quality the world sometimes takes on.
is this, as I understand it, that Heidegger means by angst. Not anxiety as we think of it in the mental health model, but as a sudden onrush, unexpected and disorientating, of the very unhomliness of the everyday. Who are these people? What do they want from me? What are these sounds coming out of my mouth? What am I doing here? Thrown into a world not of my making, suddenly incarnate, blinking in the light of a newborn sun.
And I think too of a good friend of mine, and the way he keeps disavowing and distancing himself from experience, continually undermining his own thoughts and sensations by saying, ‘ah, its such a cliché, it’s a cliché’ Pushing it away, the immediacy of the experience kept at arms length and how much that upsets me.
Our lives are made of feelings as rainbows are made of light. They are the only things we possess, they are more real to us than the jelly of our eyes, the white stone of our skull, the skins we’re stitched into, creasing and coarsening, and the secret is not to float serenely above it all but to inhabit it completely, tasting the sunlight in the mouth.
But Why live, when so many others have already done it for us? This is the question the they self asks. It’s all been done before, felt before, discovered before, every sea sailed, every mountain scaled, every landmass explored, surveyed and mapped, no distant desert not pockmarked with a thousand footprints, and it is this Heidegger describes as our disburdening. The burden of living is lifted from our shoulders.
luka
Well-known member
It was always the they who did it
And, to the extent to which we like to take things easy and make them easy the They
Retains and enhances its stubborn dominion.
So you get a sense, I hope, of how subtle a foe we’re grappling with, this invasive parasite in the shape of a tongue. It coddles us, it indulges and facilitates our weakness and our indolence, our tendency to shirk responsibility. Our behaviour flows down well-worn channels and it takes conscious, deliberate effort, or, alternatively, a kind of grace, in the theological sense, to divert the stream, to etch some new path into the bedrock
Everyone is the other and no one is himself.
I think of perhaps the most glaringly artificial encounter most of us undergo, the job interview, in which RD Laing’s dictum is so artlessly enacted
“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game”
“I would say my greatest weakness is, uh, my perfectionism, I’m told I’m always being much too hard on myself.”
“I’m motivated by incentivising positive product placement throughout our store footprint”
“Every day I’m always asking myself, how can I add value?”
And, to the extent to which we like to take things easy and make them easy the They
Retains and enhances its stubborn dominion.
So you get a sense, I hope, of how subtle a foe we’re grappling with, this invasive parasite in the shape of a tongue. It coddles us, it indulges and facilitates our weakness and our indolence, our tendency to shirk responsibility. Our behaviour flows down well-worn channels and it takes conscious, deliberate effort, or, alternatively, a kind of grace, in the theological sense, to divert the stream, to etch some new path into the bedrock
Everyone is the other and no one is himself.
I think of perhaps the most glaringly artificial encounter most of us undergo, the job interview, in which RD Laing’s dictum is so artlessly enacted
“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game”
“I would say my greatest weakness is, uh, my perfectionism, I’m told I’m always being much too hard on myself.”
“I’m motivated by incentivising positive product placement throughout our store footprint”
“Every day I’m always asking myself, how can I add value?”
luka
Well-known member
So many of our structured, formalised interactions lack any space for truth. There is a tacit set of rules encoded into all but our most intimate interactions, and perhaps, even there we have a sense of what can and can’t be broached, of where the boundaries of the permissible lie.
There is an implicit script, one from which we might deviate somewhat, insert a joke, or pleasantry perhaps, but still largely adhere to, a script for buying a packet of cigarettes from the corner shop, for greeting work colleagues, for telephone conversations with your father-in-law, for chatting with strangers at dinner parties, so there is structure there and a set of expectations and too radical a departure from that script or structure produces anxiety and discomfort; the man in the shop asks too personal a question, a dinner party guest is too earnest and unguarded in his speech, his gaze too fixed and unblinking, a stalled lift prolongs an encounter with a casual acquaintance beyond what was anticipated, the duration of the encounter stretched beyond what the script provides for. How do we fill that strained silence?
There is an implicit script, one from which we might deviate somewhat, insert a joke, or pleasantry perhaps, but still largely adhere to, a script for buying a packet of cigarettes from the corner shop, for greeting work colleagues, for telephone conversations with your father-in-law, for chatting with strangers at dinner parties, so there is structure there and a set of expectations and too radical a departure from that script or structure produces anxiety and discomfort; the man in the shop asks too personal a question, a dinner party guest is too earnest and unguarded in his speech, his gaze too fixed and unblinking, a stalled lift prolongs an encounter with a casual acquaintance beyond what was anticipated, the duration of the encounter stretched beyond what the script provides for. How do we fill that strained silence?
luka
Well-known member
But I’d like to extend that a little into how Heidegger’s publicness is also operating and intruding in our privateness and in our solitudes, not just what we sayabout literature and art for instance, but what we think about it, how we feel in response to it. Meanings are attached to images for instance, there are sets of associations there, a kind of shorthand, ordained by the culture we find ourselves embedded in. these do not preclude a more personal response but they at the very least coexist with that personal response and modulate it. Sunset over blue lagoon, wild horses galloping across open prairie, desolate moor in moonlight, white tablecloth, white wine, scallops on restaurant balcony overlooking Mediterranean harbour, blue swimming pool in a glare of Californian light, ice creaking, cracking and shearing off into arctic ocean, wolves howling in northern pine forest, children with dirty faces playing on cobblestoned streets, frozen in a black and white photograph, all this operates, in its public aspect, as a learned language.
Or consider the nagging sense of what we should be doing, as we lie in bed, curtains drawn, the sun high in the sky outside, the sounds of work barging into the room, the shouts of men in high-vis tabards, drills biting into plaster, metal clanging against metal, the lorry drivers, the cabbies, the couriers, the delivery men, the tiny buzzing motors of mopeds ferrying salt beef bagels to office desks, that inescapable concern with who we ought to be and how we ought to spend our days, the guilt and self-recriminations, the ever present bass note of despair.
Or consider the nagging sense of what we should be doing, as we lie in bed, curtains drawn, the sun high in the sky outside, the sounds of work barging into the room, the shouts of men in high-vis tabards, drills biting into plaster, metal clanging against metal, the lorry drivers, the cabbies, the couriers, the delivery men, the tiny buzzing motors of mopeds ferrying salt beef bagels to office desks, that inescapable concern with who we ought to be and how we ought to spend our days, the guilt and self-recriminations, the ever present bass note of despair.
luka
Well-known member
We are always in negotiation with the they whether we are kowtowing (cow tauing) to it or kicking against it, and I think there’s a danger here. It’s the trap of rebellion or of kneejerk contrarianism. To wilfully refuse to act in accordance with the expectations of the they is not necessarily to be authentic. In this scenario behaviour is still dictated by the they, no new freedom is opened up, no new vista of possibility. If there is to be an authentic mode of being it has to take a step beyond that binary and find some other source of motivation, and this is something gestured to in Nietzsche, when he talks of going beyond good and evil and it’s in Blake too, 100 years earlier, when he writes of the marriage of heaven and hell.
I should add, if only as an aside, that Heidegger takes pains to deny there are any value judgements attached to authenticity and inauthenticity as states of being, and that, despite what our translation suggests, it is not a question of the genuine and the false per se, but that’s one can of worms we’ll have to leave unopened for now.
Instead I want to wrap things up by suggesting that these are just modes of being, not states to be sought after or avoided, and that each informs the other and is in dialogue with the other, but when we are immersed wholly in one, the other may become wholly invisible, as land and sky become invisible to the diving cormorant, and as that underwater world becomes invisible upon surfacing, , and that life is forever tapping out that rhythm, of forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering, sometimes here, and sometimes there.
I should add, if only as an aside, that Heidegger takes pains to deny there are any value judgements attached to authenticity and inauthenticity as states of being, and that, despite what our translation suggests, it is not a question of the genuine and the false per se, but that’s one can of worms we’ll have to leave unopened for now.
Instead I want to wrap things up by suggesting that these are just modes of being, not states to be sought after or avoided, and that each informs the other and is in dialogue with the other, but when we are immersed wholly in one, the other may become wholly invisible, as land and sky become invisible to the diving cormorant, and as that underwater world becomes invisible upon surfacing, , and that life is forever tapping out that rhythm, of forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering, sometimes here, and sometimes there.