What is better-- to live a short and glorious life, or to live a long and easy one; a short life of stunning achievments which are talked about well into history-- or La doche vita?
Some may recall that I have been listening to Hubert Dreyfus' Heidegger lectures on my iPod. I enjoyed them so much that I am now re-listening to his Philosophy 6 Lectures-- which have the intriguing title of From gods to God and back.
The class had a different title back then, but this actually was my very first class at Berkeley some twenty years ago (almost). And, just like with the Heidegger lectures, listening to Professor Dreyfus' voice all over again is just the most nostalgic experience I think I have ever had (It seems that I am now getting to the age where I can experience "nostalgia"...)
Ostensibly about the Great Books, Dreyfus inherited the class when he first arrived at Berkeley probably at least a decade before I got there. Professor Dreyfus-- being Professor Dreyfus-- however takes the class and runs. And even though Heidegger is nowhere on the syllabus, Heidegger remains the elephant in the room. Dreyfus begins the very first lecture with a presentation of Heidegger's concept of the clearing.
If humans have no essential nature as the Existentialists tell us (ie, "existence precedes essence"), then it is humans themselves who assign meaning to being. That is to say, that humans assign meaning and interpret not only the world around them, but their understanding of being itself, so that being is in fact intrinsically embedded within all the shared social and cultural practices by which we have been socialized and through which we understand the world around us. It is this understanding of being that Heidegger refers to as "the clearing" (lichtung). So fundamental and often times unconscious to us as well, these shared practices so inform how we understand things, that anything outside the paradigm will show up as incomprehensible (just like trying to get a flat-worlder to think about the earth being round-- it just "doesn't compute"). For another explanation see this.
To be perfectly clear, this goes far beyond what I have been talking about concerning our cultural heritage, cultural patrimony and memory, for example. This is not only to say that many of my friends in Japan would find it difficult to grasp the meaning of this Post's title (as their images of marital fidelity spring from different sources) but more that this shared background dictates everything from how close we stand to other people when we talk, to how we understand the deepest philosophical concepts concerning being itself.
Dreyfus talks about these concepts of being in terms of Greek temples and European cathedrals. For us now, the ancient temples of Greece or the Medieval cathedrals are "sights"-- for those dwelling within those paradigms however, the temple or the cathedrals stood as what one scholar has called encyclopedias of stone. Everything made sense and everything was intelligible as part of an all-encompassing world-view, and therefore their experience was utterly different from how we today experience temples or churches (perhaps with the exception of practicing Catholics)
Even more illuminating are the various understandings of what it means to be a human being. Two that Dreyfus brings up a lot are heroes and saints.
In this existential scheme, Western history is not an unfolding progression of human development, but rather a history of several major understandings of being ( major paradigms or interpretations of being). None are better or worse than the others as some illuminate certain aspects of our humanity while others illuminate other aspects of our humanity. In that way, the heroes as represented in the Iliad or Odyssey don't really have it more or don't really have it any less "right" than we do. They just understood things differently.
Take Odysseus. The reluctant hero. He never wanted to leave his fields nor his wife. And Ithaca wasn't all that easy either. It was a rocky island where one had to work and feed oneself and weave one's own clothing... it was no Land of the Lotus Eaters. And yet, he never for a moment stopped wanting to get back, did he? He even stooped to less than dignified means to try and get out of the entire thing. Agamemnon and his ill-thought out war. Isn't that also intriguing--how much he didn't want to go? He never forgave Palamedes either for foiling his strategy for getting out of going off to Troy, and he bid his time till he could had his revenge.
Odysseus-- he just wanted to go Home.
He seems so familiar to us-- and yet, Odysseus also remains strangely un-familiar as well. He did, after all, go and fight. Heroically. All for honor and for a woman. Large-scale warfare for an insult over a lady? Well, it does sound odd. Not to mention the meddling ways of all those gods with their interesting human-like flaws....Penelope too was not exactly as she seemed either. And don't even get me started on Aeneas and Dido.
The Greeks were also un-familiar to the Medieval Christians as well for don't forget Odysseus was banned by Dante to the 8th level of Hell.
Even now, one can get a sense of this dis-connect when one travels overseas. People no matter how far you travel are fundamentally the same. We are born, we love our parents, we grow up, marry, love our children and then die. This is our biological nature. And yet, at the same time, our cultural background informs so many details of daily life, of how we think and how we understand ourselves and the world; how we raise our children and how we view "Country" or Heritage. Even if you buy the evolutionary psychology line, still I think it is apparent that the way in which we share an understanding of being affects the way we view the world around us.
So, returning back to the West, where once being was understood in terms of heroes and slaves (in ancient times) and saints and sinners (in Medieval times); and where power was positioned as a myriad of gods and the Good --versus God and the Church during Medieval times-- what have we now?
What is our Post-modern understanding of being? Dreyfus, elaborating on what Heidegger said about technology, I think gives an interesting answer.
Our post-modern understanding of self boils down to Resources. Not only things, but people (even our very selves) are viewed as resources to be used, bought, sold or bartered. Expressions of this understanding of being could include a striving to live lives that utilize our capabilities to the utmost; self-help, self-improvement, being the best you can be, etc. This is neither bad nor good... and people manifest this to differing degrees, though I do thinks modern people (myself included) have this desire to "get the most out of life" and "to develop" as people and individuals. All of these concepts, which were I think apparently absent from the ancient or medieval anthologies.
Dreyfus has an interesting anecdote in the first lecture, in fact, about St Augustine who amazed people with his story of St Jerome who was able to read the Bible silently. It seems difficult to imagine now, but before that time, people did not have inner lives in the way we think of them today and in fact people did not even read inside their heads, but read aloud. (Incidentally, my son is still unable to wrap his mind around the concept that I read without speaking)....With the Medievals, however, this stress on prayer and quiet reading-- and then later with our personal relation to God became ever more important. It was during ancient times a very alien notion, he tells us.
Returning back to our Post modern understanding of Being in terms of resources, relationships too can be viewed in terms of a cost-benefit analysis.
Are they useful? Are they conducive to bringing out the best in me?
And the post-modern Good? It is the Will to Efficiency; whereby the economic good is the economically efficient; the moral good is the most good for the most amount of people... you get the picture.
Art, religion, relationships, education, political policy all must serve the greater good-- that is, it must be useful or find itself obsolete. This goes well beyond materialism or efficiency as an adjective. This last point has so much resonance, I think, when we start talking about "American Philistinism" or "Where have all the Intellectuals gone?" it is a useful place to begin-- as indeed, education is no longer viewed as something to edify but rather as something that will serve a useful purpose, and intellectuals themselves are under the gone to be Relevant. People who care about intellectual matters are seen as snobbish and in Ivory Towers and indeed it is publish or perish-- (ie, be economically useful or find yourself another job) It wasn't always like this either (Recently I "read" a biography about Joseph Needham and his career would be quite frankly impossible today. Scholars just can no longer freely follow their interests that far afield.)
Conrad also does a really good job of presenting the issue here?(it is way far down but also see Xensen's comment 9/18/2007)
Heidegger, according to Dreyfus actually did find something worrisome in our post-Modern paradigm of Efficiency as the Good. And that is, it seems to imply a philistinism that actually defines as "Inefficient" all other paradigms-- thereby becoming a kind of black hole of all other paradigms. Other ways of doing things no longer "make sense" since they are inefficient and therefore "bad." Heidegger believed this was a fundamentally different understanding than all that came before it. For example, even during the crusades, the Christian Crusaders were not going out export their way of life in as much as they wanted to reclaim the holy Land and push the other side back.
This, I think is also interesting in terms of cross-cultural understanding, historical research and even the way we think about contemporary culture for anything not seen as efficient is therefore viewed as being irrelevant.
Yes, Philistinism.
And as Goethe said, "The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own"
On Technology, see this paper (esp. the part on libraries with reference to this post of mine and this one too at Conrad's).
Of course I understand the point about different paradigms not being able to comprehend each other. The problem with these sorts of explanations of Heidegger is that they turn him into a tired hack with nothing to say that hadn't already been said, with much greater elegance, by J. G. Herder, and at much more length by Hegel--and most of all by the proto-Heidegger, Hamann. Heidegger's particular interest in language as something that creates worlds is not so far removed from the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis". This is all in W. Humboldt too--all part of the German 'H for historicist' tradition to which Heidegger was heir.
It's just all so wishy-washy and vague with these philosophers who deal in the a-priori. That's why a more fruitful approach, it seems to me, can be found in the empirical testing of the 'Geography of Thought' book I've mentioned.
The thesis is also generally overstated with regards to the Middle Ages: a scholar reads through an Aquinas 'Summa', or Pseudo-Dionysius, or something like that, and suddenly every mediaeval peasant visualised the world as a great and perfect hierarchy of Being. It is certainly a train of thought which is dominant among the great intellectuals of the period--as it would be until the 19th century--but by no means 'the spirit of the age'. (PS. On this, you must read Lovejoy's accessible classic "The Great Chain of Being".)
The conceptualisation of the good in terms of resources / efficiency, as you've put it, doesn't seem especially postmodern. It is just plain old utilitarianism as it's been going since Bentham et al. As for "being the best you can be", the theme of self-actualisation is classical, and can be seen in the virtue-ethics of Aristotle or the mystical theosis (becoming one with God, which is the same as perfecting the self) of the Neoplatonists. See 'entelechia':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entelechy
Similarly: "People who care about intellectual matters are seen as snobbish and in Ivory Towers". It has been the same since mediaeval jokes about cloud-headed university professors, and even the story in Diogenes Laertius about Thales falling into a well because he was staring at the heavens. The problem with pointing out that we have an essentially utilitarian attitude towards our activities is that it doesn't /solve/ the problem. One cannot convince the efficiency-hound that he is wrong simply by observing that he is an efficiency-hound. Why shouldn't we value things in a utilitarian manner, just because the ancients didn't?
Re: silent reading. Augustine's admiration is directed at his teacher and baptizer, St. Ambrose of Milan. As Mary Carruthers points out in her excellent book on the Art of Memory, what impressed Augustine was that St. Ambrose /only/ read silently: classical authors already distinguished between 'lectio', reading aloud, and 'meditatio'. The history of silent reading and its relation to word-division and the punctuation of texts has been discussed by Ivan Illich, "In the vineyard of the text", and influentially by Paul Saenger, "Silent reading: its impact on late medieval script and society", in 'Viator' #13 (1982).
Posted by: Conrad | August 07, 2008 at 05:26 PM
“Herr Heidegger—Nothing but a hack?”
Well, he certainly seems a hack if you are reading him through the lens of Hegel or Whorf! But, of course, Heidegger did *not* say that history was dialectical—- quite the opposite. (And this is an important point—as Heidegger was in fact not a historicist in the sense of Hegel as he was *arguing against* the dialectical and/or progressive explanation). And concerning Whorf, Heidegger was not saying that language creates the world, but rather that the world creates language. This is another important point since rather than language creating the way we understand the world (Whorf), H is presenting a slightly different picture whereby according to him, language is created and is an expression of the world-picture (that is language does NOT fundamentally affect how we see the world). The Whorf point is less significant than the Hegel point, however, as Heidegger’s writing stands as a critique of Hegel.
A hack like the rest, but more dishing up Kierkegaard, I’d suggest.
On Paradigms: I can no more say what every Medieval peasant was thinking or feeling than you can, but I think it *is* safe to say that throughout history, cultures (as groups of people) have understood human action, morality, & the meaning of being in terms of a shared view of the world, and that this shared culture can be described in broad pen strokes…. We can test this empirically today in fact when we travel overseas and see different outlooks that people of different cultures share which shape their social practices. Your first day in New Delhi will bring this home.
On Post-modern & utilitarianism versus Efficiency/Resources: Utilitarianism has traditionally been concerned with human action (in particular the moral worth of human action in regards to achieving human happiness). Rather than an ontology, I think it may be closer to a kind of moral strategy. So, right away we are comparing apples and oranges. Although they appear similar, saying we should seek out actions that benefit the greater good is significantly & categorically different I would argue than seeing all things and people in terms of resources. The best place to explore this would be our discussing the phenomenology (via comparing and/or contrasting) the following two concepts with reference to the “why”: an ancient Greek or ancient Chinese concept of perfecting the self (in terms of virtue) versus today’s concept of “the best me I can possibly be”…
Is a post-modern understanding of being based on Efficiency bad?
Well, not per se. If history is not developing or unfolding, I don’t think you can say one is better than the other. However, I think you will see certain practices held up and emphasized more in some and less in others, similar to what we see in different cultures or time periods around the world. So that maybe for the Medievals, a person’s personal relation to God was in general more central than it is today; while one’s duties to one’s parents are perhaps more central in Japan than in California. The same with education and academia.
(I personally feel there has been an anti-intellectual shift even in the last 10 years, for example, in the US and this is tied to our current (often unconscious) shared understanding of what it means to be human).
Yes, people have had the “head in the clouds” idea since the beginning of time, but things are emphasized and de-emphaized depending on the current paradigm or shared understanding of a culture…
To me, Conrad, whether Heidegger is a hack or not is less interesting than the question I posed above: Is our current “get the most out of life/be the best I can possibly be” really similar to the Ancient Greek ideal as you presented it. Email me. I would love to hear more…
Whenever your emails come through to my email software, btw, the “C” in your name is replaced with the kanji for ding: 鼎onrad… It’s quite nice, isn’t it?
The Saenger book looks fascinating (word spacing →reading aloud).. it’s rather expensive so I may read about it online….And is there 2 books on the Art of Memory? I bought the Yates one (was that a mistake?)
Posted by: Peony | August 07, 2008 at 07:44 PM
PS:
this is interesting in relation to not only this post but to our other discussion about digital books.
http://askpang.typepad.com/relevant_history/2003/06/word_spacing_si.html
See:
Roman authors like Plutarch and Cicero praised reading aloud as an aid to memory, and internal evidence suggests that letters and orations were meant to be spoken rather than read. Further, "books of the ancient Romans were highly unsuited to visual reading and study," containing "neither punctuation, distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters, nor word separation." This and other evidence suggests that "silent reading was an uncommon practice in classical antiquity." (370)
Posted by: Peony | August 07, 2008 at 09:23 PM