James Still

Introduction

I’m going to talk about post-truth. The term burst onto the scene when Oxford Dictionaries made it their word of the year in 2016 in the wake of the Brexit Referendum and Donald Trump’s election. Oxford defines it as a circumstance where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” I don’t think this definition is very useful. I’ll say more about that later. Needless to say, post-truth and “alternative facts” certainly didn’t start with Trump. In his excellent short book Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre concludes that 20th century postmodernism is “the godfather of post-truth” [1]. This is probably the consensus view of most analytic philosophers and scientists. Although McIntyre has good reasons for this conclusion—and I will go into them in depth—it’s probably wrong. 

Continue reading “Truth and Post-Truth”

This post is part of a series. Go to the Introduction

First Thoughts

My overall reaction after reading Heidegger’s Being and Time was that I had a vague sense something important was being said but I wasn’t sure what it was. Heidegger is repetitive, opaque, baffling, and difficult. But he also has some central insights that on balance make the challenge of reading him worth it. Heidegger provided a unique alternative to the traditional way of seeing our being.  Before him, those of us in Eurocentric cultures were used to seeing ourselves as static, unchanging souls buried somewhere in the heart or maybe consciousness operating at a distance somewhere inside the head. After him, to see one’s being as mere substance seems limited. We are signifiers, possibilities, events, and references, all in relation to each other and the world in which we are thrown and entangled. Who we are is in constant motion. Our existence forms according to the choices made over time. That’s why he thinks the meaning of our being is time. This is all expressed in his observation that our essence lies in our existence, which Sarte famously reformulates in his humanism as “existence precedes essence”. I have criticisms regarding this brief summary, which I’ll get to below. But I want to say at the outset that Heidegger has some thought provoking and original ideas that are to his credit. Continue reading “Being And Time: Final Opinions”

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Previous Post in Series: Care

The preparatory analysis in the previous post reached the preliminary conclusion that our being is care. Heidegger goes on to conclude later that our being is time, or more specifically ecstatic temporality. This is the main topic of the second half of the book. It’s very technical and I’d be a fool to attempt the same level of commentary as I did for the first half. But I can at least provide a brief summary. Continue reading “Being And Time: Temporality”

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Previous Post in Series: Authentic Self

In the previous post I mentioned that we are concerned about our being. Or as Heidegger puts it “Dasein is a being which is concerned in its being about that being” (191). What does this mean? Basically, in our daily lives we take care of things. We undertake tasks. We project ourselves forward and make goals for ourselves. We are always “ahead of ourselves” as being-in-the-world and surrounded by other people and things (innerworldly beings) in the world. Being-in-the-world for Heidegger is care [Sorge] and being-together-with these other things in our world shows our concern. Care is not “an isolated attitude of the ego toward itself” (193). Rather, for Heidegger care is an “ontological condition” in which our being is free to choose authentic or inauthentic possibilities for itself. In our inauthenticity, we flee from ourselves and ignore our potentiality of being. Either way, Dasein is “a being that is concerned about its being” (193). Simply put, our being matters to us.

Heidegger was influenced by a fable that came from the Roman librarian Hyginus, through Goethe, and to a scholar named Burdach. I’ll reproduce it here in its entirety since it seems to have had quite an impact on Heidegger:

“Once when Care was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took a piece and began to shape it. While she was thinking about what she had made, Jupiter came by. Care asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, Jupiter forbade this and demanded that it be given his name instead. While Care and Jupiter were arguing, Earth (Tellus) arose, and desired that her name be conferred upon the creature, since she had offered it part of her body. They asked Saturn to be the judge. And Saturn gave them the following decision, which seemed to be just: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you should receive that spirit at death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since Care first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called ‘homo,’ for it is made out of hummus (earth)” (198).

Heidegger sees an ancient truth disclosed in this fable. He thinks it shows us an interpretation of ourselves that is more than just “animal rationale” or mind-body substance dualism. Saturn was the Roman god of time. While our being-in-the-world takes its being from the earth, its meaning unfolds over time.

“The pre-ontological characterization of the essence of human being expressed in this fable thus has envisaged from the very beginning the mode of being which rules its temporal sojourn in the world” (199).

Heidegger is saying that, as long as we are being-in-the-world, the meaning of our being is care. Only at death are we released from care. Death is a topic for later sections of the book and I’m not going to get into it here. But basically, Heidegger will suggest that death is the ultimate limit, and because we know we will die, we care deeply about our brief existence. If we lived forever, then we probably wouldn’t care much about anything. Or as Wittgenstein put it in a similar context:

“This assumption [the temporal immortality of the human soul] completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?” (TLP, 6.4312).

After his concluding remarks about care, Heidegger moves on to a discussion of reality, the ontological tradition, and truth. Let me say a few things about Heidegger’s view of truth. There is an idea of truth, which goes back to Aristotle, in which a proposition is true if it agrees with the facts. For example, I might say to you “the sky is blue.” You look up and see a blue sky for yourself. We then both agree that since my statement corresponds to reality it is a true statement. This is known as the correspondence theory of truth. The important thing to note with the traditional view is that truth is “outside” of us, that is, it is an objective truth whether we are around to know it or not.

As previously discussed, for Heidegger there is no world outside of Dasein. There are no objective truths independent of our knowledge of them. So, he seeks to ground truth in a deeper “primordial sense” that exists alongside our disclosed being-in-the-world:

“Insofar as Dasein essentially is its disclosedness, and as disclosed, it discloses and discovers, it is essentially ‘true.’ Dasein is ‘in the truth.’ This statement has an ontological meaning” (221).

For Heidegger “all truth is relative to the being of Dasein” and belongs to our “fundamental constitution” (227). Just as he believes that, as being-in-the-world, world and Dasein are unified so that there cannot be one without the other, so too without Dasein there can be no truth. Take for example Newton’s Second Law of Motion in which the force on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration (F = m * a). These forces have always been in effect on objects. But for Heidegger this law of motion was not true until Newton discovered (or disclosed) it. Truth then is wrapped up in judgments that we make about our world. When one day we are no more? Truth is also no more. While the traditional view holds that a statement is true whether we observe it or not, Heidegger argues that if there are no observers then there are no true statements either.

I’d like to bring us to the end of Heidegger’s preparatory analysis of Dasein. He concludes:

“We have found the fundamental constitution of the being in question, being-in-the-world, whose essential structures are centered in disclosedness. The totality of this structural whole revealed itself as care. The being of Dasein is contained in care. The analysis of this being took as its guideline existence, which was defined by way of anticipation as the essence of Dasein. The term existence formally indicates that Dasein is as an understanding potentiality-of-being which is concerned in its being about its being. I myself am in each instance the being existing in this way” (231).

Heidegger had foreshadowed this conclusion when he wrote early on that our essence lies in our existence (41). We are not an immutable soul trapped in a body for a time before being released. Rather, we are thrown into the world, and our essence (our being) evolves over our lifetime by the possible ways for us to be and the choices we make among those possibilities.

Next Post in Series: Temporality

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Previous Post in Series: Average Everydayness

In the last post, I surveyed the threefold structure of fallenness (ambiguity, curiosity, and idle talk). For Heidegger, this is the typical way in which we are in the world or as he says our “average everydayness”. We become entangled in that world and live away from ourselves to take on a “they-self” of the others.

In this post, I turn to authenticity. Here again Heidegger identifies another threefold structure. These three, that I’ll group under disclosedness, are attunement, understanding, and discourse. They can be seen as counterparts to the threefold structure of fallenness:

Fallenness	Disclosedness
Ambiguity	Attunement [Befindlichkeit]
Curiosity	Understanding [Verstehen]
Idle Talk	Discourse/Speech [Rede]

For Heidegger, to be authentic is to act for ourselves given the possibilities of being that lie before us. This is not a psychological change in perspective. It doesn’t mean to take a good long look in the mirror. It is seeing clearly and taking action. Not action just for the sake of doing something. But action that makes a decision to choose for the self from among our own possibilities rather than picking up the easy options that the world offers us.

Heidegger thinks it is difficult to go through life and encounter those moments when we disclose our being to ourselves. Dasein, our “being there,” is usually hidden from us in plain sight. Just like with other innerworldly beings, at different times our being is both veiled and disclosed – absent and present. And as previously discussed, we are also “thrown” into the world. This primordial thrownness is prior to any rational or conscious realization that we are there. Our being is “there” and not “here” – or as Heidegger says “delivered over” to the world (135).

We do not directly experience our thrownness. Ironically, Heidegger asserts that we become most aware of it when we turn away from the world. What brings our being-there into awareness? Mood. Or rather being in a mood [Stimmung]. By “mood” Heidegger does not mean the type of ordinary mental observations such as when we say, “I’m in a good mood today.”

Mood is something deeper and serves as a sort of barometer for how we feel we are in the world. “Mood makes manifest ‘how one is and is coming along.’ In this ‘how one is’ being in a mood brings being to its ‘there'” (134).  When Heidegger uses the term “mood” he means to describe this more fundamental component of our being. We are always in a mood whether we realize it or not. When we sit up and take notice of our moods, Heidegger calls this attunement [Befindlichkeit]:

“Mood does not disclose in the mode of looking at thrownness, but as turning toward and away from it. For the most part, mood does not turn itself toward the burdensome character of Dasein manifest in it, it does this least of all in an elevated mood in which this burden is lifted. This turning away is always what it is in the mode of attunement” (135).

Moods break our equanimity. They disrupt the status quo. They stir us from the slumber of everydayness and the tranquil way in which we are a “they-self” for others. When we are attuned to a mood this attunement is a pre-conscious, ontological mode of being that “turns away” in order to see our being. “Attunement is an existential, fundamental way in which Dasein is its there” (139). At the same time, it reveals our thrownness into the world.

One very powerful mode of attunement is fear. Fear is always being afraid of something. It can be a threat like a wild animal. Or a sudden sound in the night. But there is another related mood in which there is no definable threat and yet we feel profound unsettledness when we experience it. That mood is anxiety [Angst]. When we are anxious, we do not know why we are anxious. We do not know the cause of our anxiety. Heidegger suggests “that about which anxiety is anxious is being-in-the-world itself” (187). Anxiety is a curious mood that seems to take us out of our average everydayness. We might have a vague sense of unease. Or a sudden feeling that nothing matters, or that the world seems suddenly meaningless:

“In anxiety, the things at hand in the surrounding world sink away, and so do innerworldly beings in general. The ‘world’ can offer nothing more, nor can the Dasein-with of others. Thus anxiety takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, falling prey, in terms of the ‘world’ and the public way of being interpreted” (187).

It sounds pretty bleak, but for Heidegger this is a good thing. Anxiety removes our identification with the they-self. We become momentarily individualized as the mood of anxiety separates us from being with others in the world. It’s an opportunity to pull back from the “entangled” average everydayness that keeps us busy in order to reveal to us a certain “uncanny” feeling of freedom. We are free to become. To choose for ourselves from among our possibilities of being. Anxiety has a way of showing us to ourselves without being filtered through social norms that tend to distract us.

“In anxiety there lies the possibility of a distinctive disclosure, since anxiety individualizes. This individuality fetches Dasein back from its falling prey and reveals to it authenticity and inauthenticity as possibilities of its being. The fundamental possibilities of Dasein, which are always my own, show themselves in anxiety as they are, undisguised by innerworldly beings to which Dasein, initially and for the most part, clings” (191).

I have a personal anecdote that might make this clearer. When I was young, I had a job that required a substantial commute by car. Every morning, I drove with thousands of others on a freeway that became a bumper-to-bumper crawl. It would take over an hour to get to work. And then I’d repeat the experience on the way home that night. Did I think about what was going on? Vaguely. I got irritated from time to time, but for the most part I gave it very little thought. This was just “what one does” as an adult. On one particular and routine day we all came to a halt for several minutes. I found myself looking fully to my left. The person in that car was staring straight ahead. I looked to my right and saw another doing the same. I looked in my rear-view mirror and all around me were stony-faced people sitting motionless in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead. An eerie feeling came over me. It was a moment of clarity, or as Heidegger would say, it was a disclosure showing me in my thrownness that for which I felt anxiety. What am I doing? Is this all there is?

The mood of anxiety calls us back to ourselves. But it doesn’t have anything to say. It is little more than a brief uncanny interruption that alerts us to the fact that something is not quite right. Like it wants us to stop what we’re doing and take a look. Take a look at what? At the crossroads where the authentic and inauthentic possibilities of our being present themselves.

The second part of authentic existence is what Heidegger calls understanding [Verstehen]. It’s common in ordinary language for us to say things like “I get what you’re saying” or “I understand what it is you need me to do.” But this is Heidegger so of course ordinary uses of the word “understanding” is not what he means here. Just like with other technical terms, understanding is an ontological or existential part of Dasein’s being.

Where mood and attunement are the interruption of a routinized existence, understanding is the realization of our potentiality of being. At every moment we can choose a different way to be. Our understanding then is “being possible,” which is to say, out of the possibilities and choices that are always in front of us we consciously pick one over the others. Through our understanding we are “the possibility of being free for [our] ownmost potentiality of being” (144). As possibilities are chosen, we disclose to ourselves our being. Your mother likely told you at some point “you are what you eat.” Ontologically speaking, you are what you choose. When anxiety calls, will we choose authentically for ourselves? Or is anxiety so uncomfortable, and the burden of our existence so heavy, that we instead flee back to the welcome embrace of the others?

Needless to say, Heidegger’s not talking about choosing between vanilla or chocolate. He means projecting yourself into a self for the sake of which you want to be in the world:

“[Dasein] is existentially that which is not yet in its potentiality of being, understanding, and its character of project, only because it is what it becomes or does not become, can it say understandingly to itself: ‘become what you are!” (145).

In the margins of his copy of the book, Heidegger later made this enigmatic comment: “But who are ‘you’? The one who let’s go – and becomes.”

Remember that first premise I quoted at the beginning? “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (42). This has all been a deep dive into the structures of our being to explain that premise. Simply put, Heidegger is saying that who we are – our being – is not spirit, soul, or consciousness. It is not something immutable that remains fixed throughout life. We are not doomed by Fate to propel toward a preordained outcome. Instead, who we are is a recognition of the potentiality of our being, the possibilities that we choose, and the sum total of those choices.

Heidegger believes that in our everyday lives we are entangled in the world in such a way that for the most part we fail to see or choose our possibilities. We close ourselves off from authenticity. But at the same time, we are concerned about how things are going and how we are doing in the world. We are invested (absorbed) in the various careers, projects and tasks that we undertake. In short, we care. And not just about our thrown being but especially about the potentiality of our being and what we can do with the time we have.

Dasein “projects its being upon [and toward] possibilities” (148). But this movement on our part is not serendipity or some kind of amble down a path in random directions. In our understanding we interpret our potentiality and being is disclosed to us as something meaningful. “All interpretation is grounded in understanding” (154).

Heidegger then walks through a dense thicket of some derivative grammatical structures: interpretation, statements, communication, the Greek idea of λόγος (logos) and language [Sprache]. Finally, he concludes that “the existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse [Rede]” (160).

Discourse is the third leg of the stool for authentic being. It exists alongside (or in Heidegger’s technical term “equiprimordially”) with attunement and understanding. Unlike the meaninglessness of idle talk, discourse makes intelligible and articulates what is known in the interpretation given by understanding. I found this section very pedantic unfortunately. It’s even more obscure than earlier sections if that can be believed. The bottom line is Heidegger is looking for a way to ground meaningful discourse in our ontological being rather than in ordinary language, higher order logic, or reason. It is a pattern with Heidegger throughout the book. There is always something primordial, something ontological, something deep, that lies beneath and grounds what is seen on the surface.

Heidegger calls the threefold of attunement, understanding, and discourse the “being of disclosedness” (180) and this is contrasted with the threefold of fallenness: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. For Heidegger, only when we turn away from the they-self and disclose ourselves to ourselves can we be authentic. In his unique jargon, that only a philosopher could love, Heidegger summarizes the existential analytic thusly:

“On the basis of the attunement essentially belonging to it, Dasein has a mode of being in which it is brought before itself and it is disclosed to itself in its thrownness. But thrownness is the mode of being of a being which always is itself its possibilities in such a way that it understands itself in them and in terms of them (projects itself upon them). Being-in-the-world, to which being together with things at hand belongs just as primordially as being-with others, is always for the sake of itself…. The average everydayness of Dasein can thus be determined as entangled-disclosed, thrown-projecting being-in-the-world, which is concerned with its ownmost potentially in its being together with the ‘world’ and in being-with with others” (181).

Let me try to unpack the jargon here. We are always in a mood. The mood of anxiety is important because we are attuned to it. If we listen, if we set aside our routinized existence, attunement calls attention to our anxiety. Our understanding then provides the means by which we can see ourselves as a mode of being that is its possibilities. We are concerned about our being. We care about those possibilities that lie before us. Discourse is a way for us to articulate that understanding in order to act on our possibilities for the sake of which we become who we are. This is us choosing authentically for our true self.

The alternative approach is for us to succumb to anxiety. It makes us deeply uncomfortable, and we want to push it away. Heidegger says our being becomes a “burden” for us. We flee from it and back into the they-self that others offer to us. We don’t have to make difficult choices because the world provides templates for living that are easy to pick up and adopt as our own. This is us choosing inauthentically.

We now take another turn on the hermeneutic circle. Heidegger will conclude that our being is care. I’ll take that up in the next post.

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Previous Post in Series: The Others

Heidegger uses the word Verfallen to describe our regular everyday way of being as a they-self in the world with others. Variously translated as fallenness, falling prey, or entanglement, it does not represent a fall “from a purer and higher” way of being. Nor does he mean that our fallenness is something like original sin or a fall from grace. Fallenness is just a regular habit pattern in our average everyday lives in which we ignore our own potential for being and have “fallen” into the world of others. We do what they do. We choose what they choose. Heidegger doesn’t want to say entanglement is good or bad. However, in my own reading it seems pretty clear that entanglement is inauthentic (that is, bad). It’s even tempting to say it’s a secular version of a fall from grace.

Heidegger identifies a threefold structure of fallenness: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. When Heidegger refers to a “threefold structure” or sometimes “constitutive components” or “categories that exist equiprimordially” what he means is that they are essential parts of the whole phenomenon. A threefold is like a stool with three legs. You cannot remove one leg. The legs are “constitutive components” and without all three you cannot have a stool.

Idle talk is a type of discourse (or language) and a part of our understanding and interpretation of the world. But it’s disconnected from the subjects of language and instead engages in casual fluffery. Idle talk is “groundless” and superficial. Heidegger writes, “what is spoken about as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so” (168). The strange aspect of idle talk is that in the telling it takes on a life of its own and “closes off” the original source that inspired the gossip in the first place. Heidegger distinguishes “genuine understanding” from this shallower “average understanding” that is the primary way we talk with others. Idle talk shapes our everyday being and “determines what and how one ‘sees'” (170). In other words, we take on a convenient public understanding of others [das Man] rather than come to our own deeper conclusions about the matter.

Curiosity is “a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered in perception” (170). That sounds like a good thing, right? Not in the way Heidegger means it. Curiosity is our puerile everydayness in seeking spectacle, entertainment, or “the pleasure of the eyes” without going deeper into genuine understanding. We perceive without really seeing:

“[Curiosity] takes care to see not in order to understand what it sees… but only in order to see. It seeks novelty only to leap from it again to another novelty” (172).

Suppose I point my telescope to an object in the night sky. I gesture to the eyepiece and invite you to take a look. You take a quick peek, say “wow!” and then ask me to show you some other objects. But then after a few more you get bored and find that your mind wanders to something else. This is what Heidegger means by curiosity. Curiosity levels everything down to mere amusement. Nothing really goes very deep. We are entertained but miss out on deeper truths and real understanding.

For example, you might have asked me what it was you were seeing. I might say it was the Andromeda Galaxy. You ask more questions. I realize I don’t know the answer. We find ourselves looking it up online or in a reference book. Soon we discover that the Andromeda Galaxy contains about a trillion stars, is 152,000 light years across, and that in a few billion years it will collide spectacularly with our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The third part of entanglement is ambiguity. “When, in everyday being with one another, we encounter things that are accessible to everybody and about which everyone can say everything, we can soon no longer decide what is disclosed in genuine understanding and what is not” (173). Ambiguity is the failure to distinguish between genuine understanding and idle talk. Gossip, rumors, hearsay, titillating stories, or social media conspiracy theories all become mixed and mingled with factual news or evidence-based conclusions. Dasein is usually embedded in its public being with others in such a way that it risks losing itself in ambiguity:

“The loudest idle talk and the most inventive curiosity keep the ‘business’ going, where everything happens in an everyday way, and basically nothing happens at all. Ambiguity is always tossing to curiosity what it seeks, and it gives to idle talk the illusion of having everything decided in it” (174).

Heidegger stresses that these aspects of entanglement are “implied in being-with-one-another, as thrown being-with-one-another in a world” (175). In other words, for us they are like water to a school of fish: pervasive, normative, and wholly unnoticed. Our entanglement interconnects us with other beings in the world at such a deep level that the phenomena remain largely hidden. If you were to bring it up with someone in polite company, they would likely give you a blank stare or maybe a confused “what are you talking about?”

The collective purpose of idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity is to provide the illusion of a “genuine ‘lively life'” without actually being challenged (173). Someone else has already made the hard decisions. And yet no one has decided anything. Heidegger says we are reassured by the illusion that others are in charge. We don’t have to worry about anything. This reassurance tranquilizes us and serves to increase our entanglement in the world of others. We lose ourselves in them. Their values become our values. We did not choose them.

Entanglement keeps us in a vicious circle with respect to our average everydayness. In rare moments we try to go back to our genuine understanding in order to find the self in its possibilities. But possibilities are never truly present, they are always in the future as a potential way of being. To press ahead we must first find ourselves in order to make choices. That takes effort. It’s much easier to pick up the “busyness” that the world offers. We find ourselves “surrendered to thrownness” [Geworfenheit] and thus “always already gone astray” such that we fail to recognize the self (144). Yet the self is a burden which calls us back to it when we go astray — more on that later. So, we go back to our understanding and again seek to revisit the self in its possibilities. Did you notice past and future tense here? This temporality will be the focus of the second division of the book.

Why do we bother to seek ourselves in our possibilities? In short, we are concerned about the choices we make. We care about the person we become. We didn’t ask to be born but here we are, thrown into the world with no roadmap and no clue. Our thrownness is our being-in-the-world. And when we occasionally turn away from our entangled being-in-the-world, we disclose to ourselves the possibilities of our being and what we can become. Will we choose for ourselves? Or will we flee from the self and fall prey to the world of others? This is the focus of authentic self in the next section.

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