Crucial Conversations 2

From Whooshup.org

Howard: How are you on Dreyfus webcasts? I have finally made it thru most of the 2002 Being & Time lectures. That helped a lot.

Frank: Yes. I've just listened to most of the Division 2 stuff. I will go back and listen to the Div 1. It is interesting to hear these because he has less time to make his points.

Howard: Yes - but also he is making "different" points - concentrating on different things. For instance he spent much more time on phronimos - Aristotle - world discloser etc in 2002 than in the first few of 2008. He basically reviewed his 2000 paper on it.

Frank: What do you think was added in the recent podcasts? I'm afraid they are no longer fresh in my memory.

Howard: I finally got the temporality issue when he basically said it was same as cartesian space - what's left when you take the referentiality out of it. Apparently it is a big deal whether Heidegger was a temporal idealist - and Dreyfus sort of defends him against that.

Frank: By the term temporal idealist, is it meant that somehow he finds something transcendent in temporality?

Howard: Well that may be part of it. What I get is that he thinks time depends on us - that's idealism - all the outside world depends on us - is not separate and "real" - would not exist if we were gone.

Frank: It is the two way relation. Entities exist without us but their meaning depends upon us. Cartesian time exists without us but we are the ones who give it intelligibility?

Howard: Yes - but I gather dreyfus has a harder time defending this in terms of time - that his "brightest" student Bill Blattner basically tore apart Heidegger's temporal idealism and proved it was inconsistent with science etc. - but Dreyfus - at least in 2002 - disagreed with him on that.

Frank: But it does seem to be an idealism of sorts. Not only temporality but the fact that all things derive their intelligibility from Dasein. In what way is Dreyfus resisting this? I remember his lecture on weak and robust realism but I am not clear.

Howard: As I take it, first, Dreyfus has a vested interest as his own philosopher to have a real universe full of quantum particles, etc. - you recall his start as a physicist and all. Maybe Heidegger was not as concerned that we be left with that real world - the one that was here before us and would be here if we suddenly disappeared. I heard Dreyfus say that an extreme idealist - like Rorty - would even say you can't really know anything about the world before humans inhabited it and started describing or disclosing things. That would mean that when we talk about dinosaurs - we're talking about people who dig and study them, but can't really talk about them in their time and space - it just doesn't exist. An odd thought, no?

Frank: But we do have the bones. We can say something. We can also infer what those big teeth might have done.

Howard: Yes, I agree. But you know inferences can get a philosopher in trouble. Paleontologists are free to infer all they want.

Frank: Part of it, I think, is trying to overcome the subject-object split that has tied philosophy up in knots and what philosophers like Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein were trying to overcome. Do you think that Dreyfus feels if ground is given to idealism we are just back in the same problem?

Howard: I think Dreyfus wants to somehow integrate a bunch of stuff - he wants as much of Heidegger as he can possibly get - but not idealism, or even weak realism - and as we have seen, he wants to go beyond Heidegger into Kierkegaard for a "moral" or authentic stance. He definitely rejects any hint of subject-object except as a derivative notion that leaves out so much it is hardly worth studying it (he lets the scientists do that).

Frank: How does the moral stance and realism tie together?

Howard: I am not sure they do! The realism is science - the authentic-ness is just ethics - what we as humans should strive towards. That moral bit ties back into the whole national socialist line you guys talked about last night - Heidegger can hardly be pointed to on this sort of thing because of his Nazi affiliation.

Frank: My question was is that there is no way to differentiate between our heritage. I posed the question if I could pick out something like the KKK and revive and transform it and be authentic. I think the answer is yes. I also find that disturbing.

Howard: Yes - if we really analyze it, Hitler was doing just that, and clearly Heidegger sort of picked up the "zeitgeist" of that in the 20's and gave it his stamp of approval. Of course this ties into another touchy subject - all the "good" things that went along with Nazi ideology.

Frank: So it seems to me, there is no ethics, in the way we might want it, to be found in Heidegger.

Howard: Yes - I think that's why Dreyfus ties into Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, both christian existentialists with impeccable moral authority.

Frank: But as he presents Kieregaard, could I not unconditionally commit to National Socialism? Where is a moral criteria to be found?

Howard: Well - worse - from Dostoevsky could come the idea that one could murder another human and still be forgiven - rehabilitated - and ultimately justified.

Frank: So the concern is not for the other but ultimately for the self.

Howard: But both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky do NOT have to defend that side of their arguments - in my opinion - because they are grounded in the particular heritage that Dreyfus seems to strongly recommend - judeo-christian religion. This is what I find amazing - that even though he does not believe, in the ordinary way, he seems to think the judeo-christian tradition is absolutely important to us.

Frank: But Dreyfus is attempting to secularise it, isn't he. How can we hold on to it and give up the belief?

Howard: That's his move - he sees us somehow "structuralizing it" which is like an unconditional commitment that structurally puts you into an "Abraham mode." Or "existentializing" it - which is the whole Dostoevsky approach - you make the religion a lived experience and ditch the rest. And, amazingly, he also defends a sort of paganism that relies on "moods" to steer us - but how you get ethics in that is another problem.

Frank: But if it is not God speaking to me, what would give me the authority to murder. Dostoevsky's notion also seems to have some grace involved in it.

Howard: It is not authority to murder - it is the grace to go on - to survive murdering.

Frank: No. The authority to murder is Abraham.

Howard: Yes - I agree there - but I have a problem with that particular old testament example.

Frank: I am unconditionally committed to fighting abortion. I kill doctors as part of my unconditional commitment. Where in Kierkegaard, in the existenializing of Christianity, or more precisely, where in Dreyfus, do we get the criteria to judge unconditional commitments?

Howard: I'm stumped - you don't, as far as I can see.

Frank: Right. So does Kierkegaard really give us an out? Or do we still need the Christian god?

Howard: There are much more common problems - I'm an air force pilot, a strong christian, but i drop bombs on villages knowing there will be collataral damage - how would we judge him - how different from the anti-abortion shooter? It seems to me ethics gives us guidelines - not absolutes.

Howard: And if we adopt absolutes, we are in as many murky situations as if we adopt guidelines.

Frank: But that leaves us in the moral relativism problem. I can trust my guidelines but can I trust yours? And what beyond God or the total state will be strong enough to get us to agree on the guidelines? Very difficult to come to terms with this.

Howard: OK - good problem and I think at the heart of ethics. But let me take it a weird direction - let's talk about those moods. Dreyfus may be saying that the moods are what bails us out. If we are in tune with our heritage - that "attuneness" will be with the better side not the worse (I don't have an answer as to why that would be...)

Frank: That's my problem. How do we even judge our good or bad heritage? From the standpoint of the current "One." And might it not lead to places we cannot anticipate, no matter how good our intentions (if we even know what good intentions are) such as the Holocaust which Heidegger never seemed to have addressed in an adequate way? How do you think moods could help us understand ethics. From what I understand, we have very little control.

Howard: I am not sure we can "control" ethics, even though that is what we all seem to want - Heidegger with his authenticity, Dreyfus with his Kierkegard extension to save Heidegger's authenticity.

Frank: So we might be chasing a rabbit. Might as well go drinking at the cafe as you remarked in one of your earlier posts.

Howard: Would absolute religion do better than relativist philosophy?

Frank: Not now. This is our "throwness" and issue we have to grapple with.

Howard: That's what really worries me - I see the latest culture of technology being unreachable by either religion or philosophy.

Frank: Which means beyond all direction? Cut off from the "humane."

Howard: Yes - everything is a resource - if you are a resource manager, and I am a resource that has no use - you are "ethically" bound to delete me...

Howard: It's the efficient thing to do.

Frank: Which is what we are seeing all around us.

Howard: maybe even starting back when Heidegger was downplaying gas chambers and criticizing industrialization.

Frank: What do you think, ultimately, is the answer? Where do we go and who do we look to?

Howard: Personally, this is where hope and faith kick in for me - one of the reasons I am so much more persistent in pursuing the structural line than the ethical line - I have already decided which cultural heritage to press into, and am enjoying a vigorous philosophical debate about some of its dimensions... I see a world outside of, but intermixed with ours, which is what religion and some philosophy has tried to describe through the ages. I don't claim to know anything - I have been an atheist and everything in between, but now just kind of adopt a very basic stance on these things - that's why I fall back on moods - I expect our faith in "something" to get it right and preserve us, both in this life and any other we stumble into.

Frank: Did Heidegger clarify this for you?

Howard: Heidegger clarified structural things for me, not on the religous side. I agree with Dreyfus on his shortcomings in using anxiety to motivate authenticity.

Frank: I can't help but thinking that I am looking for that religious dimension as well. In some odd way, I think that is why I listened to the podcastsa and ended up here.

Howard: Well, dreyfus really got my attention because rather than dismiss religion outright, he finessed it - he pulled many aspects of it, from paganism to christianity, right out and threw it on the table, then said to his students - what do you think?

Frank: But I am having trouble seeing how it all fits or whether it can all fit. But the very fact that he is opening it up is of considerable value.

Howard: Maybe Dreyfus sees himself carrying on the mantle of later Heidegger - when he claimed we needed an "incarnate god" to get through this phase.

Frank: "Waiting for Godot"?

Howard: Maybe - it's been a long time since I read part of that, so I'm not sure what he was waiting for.

Frank: The god who never showed up.