We observe reality, this observation provides a base from which we can construct theories of reality, what comes next? Do we continue to observe reality or do we begin to only observe the theory, the interpretation of reality? The Will to Power for example, is a theory, an interpretation, I could see it wherever I looked but that doesn’t neccesarily mean reality is contained…how then to know if we are observing reality or merely a theory of reality, I suppose once we begin to judge, value and create distinctions, once we have begun reacting to reality we begin to interpret it, and in interpreting reality, we lose sight of reality…
I’d like a discussion to continue on this subject, either share your own thoughts or reply to mine.
I don’t quite see your point here. I cannot think of a philosopher for whom the relationship between theory and practice is not an abiding concern in some form or another. Moreover, if you think that philosophy is a waste of time, why are you here (posting on this forum, that is - we’ll leave the existential questions well alone)?
Right, great, some names. How will any of their writings help my tomatoes grow?
I really don’t want to get into the Heidegger thing, because I think it’s flogging a dead horse, but I think it’s grossly unfair to reduce a life’s work to a pithy comment.
I think it’s pretty well established by both the philosophical and psychological disiplins that our observation is theory laden.
To give the silliest of examples- if your wainting for a Red 2007 Honda Civic on a dark night, and a Green 2007 Honda Civic pulls towards you- you will actually see it as Red until your poor starved cones gather enough light to see that it’s green. The mind will paint colors onto the world when it has insufficent light to see color. It’s not only color, our eyes are much poorer then we normally experiance because the brain does so much post-preduction work.
It gets worse when you add something like memory. Say a man hit me last year on tuesday. And the next day if you had asked me, I’d have said a white man hit me because I insulted his wife. Now let’s imagine I’m a racist and have a high opinion of my moral charater. By today if you ask me, I’d say an Asian man hit me because of some trivial argument. What’s worse, is that I would use that as evidence that Asian men are mean.
To fix this in ourselves we have to rely on eachother. If your not sure of my memory of an event, which should be all the time, ask as many people as you can. In the thousand bad memories of people the truth should come up slightly more than the errors and lies. Look at science. If your out in the jungle and observe a baboon make a spear, should you call the media? No, you should call as many primatologist as possible to see if they see it too. After all, maybe you just smoked so much weed you forgot how much weed you’ve smoked. Or maybe you want to belive baboons make spears, so when you see one play with a stick and a rock you think that’s what’s happening.
I don’t think there is any pure observation that doesn’t occur against the backdrop of some theory or other cognitive framework. we see what we are interested in and vice versa - we are interested in what we have evolved (both biologically and personally) to be interested in, this colors everything we observe and largely determines the foci of our perceptions. The will to power is a good theory because it can serve as an explanation for such a broad array phenomena (like you said, “i could see it wherever i looked”) - that doesn’t mean reality “contains” it per say, but that it is a useful and practical device for making sense of certain things we observe in the world - the more useful and practical it becomes the more likely it will be used to the point where it becomes a working truth (ie, something we begin to presume reality “contains”). The dynamics used to construct the theory mirror dynamics we observe in reality and the more familiar we are with those dynamics the more likely we are to observe them, and the more generic those dynamics are the more often they will then recur in what we observe. So any given theory can also be useful and practical in some ways but not in others, depending upon how specific it is. A more universally useful example would be math - we see numbers everywhere we look because numbers are such an immensely practical and highly distilled abstraction - thus numeric calculations color virtually everything we see IF (and this goes back to the original point) we look hard enough. One thing that’s interesting to think about is what our counting habits or our currency would look like if we had evolved to have only 8 or 9 fingers rather than ten … changing the way we look at something (sets of 10) can change the theory (8 cents to a dollar?), just as when we change the theory, we change the way we look at things.
Like existentialism making love to empiricism and producing offspring.
Take what we learn from experience and apply that knowledge to our lives; it is how well that we learn and apply said knowledge that defines the course of our lives.
There are an infinite different interpretations of reality.
Can we ever see or understand “reality”?
Let’s say a robot understands in the context of its programming and sensors how it was created, where it’s going, and where the universe is going.
Is that what we are? The biochemical fungus of the earth?
The understanding of the robot, and the success and consistency of the robots knowledge hinge on heindsight, let’s say (perdictive power)
This robot needs only to be able to perdict what it can clearly percieve. What I’m getting at is from a point of limited brain power, limited perception, and uncertainty, our understanding is likely comparable to an ant. The ant is driven by what it percieves; what affects it. The ant is a master of its limits; a master of its reality. The ant is as successful as we are by any right.
Consider a species of ants that farm aphids. To them the aphids are livestock, just as cows and chickens are to us.
How broad can perception become? Are we ant like to some larger more complex being?
Our only reality is the one where the gears grind. More cogs arguably enables you to percieve more of reality, but what is an infinitely small spec on an infinitely small spec worth?
Humans are not all the same, we can make judgments on some groups traits and abilities based on their physical and psychological nature. To one group, another may appear as aphids do to ants in your example, they may be kept and bred as livestock, and in fact this has happened in history.
Well, fair or not, I don’t intend to give an exhaustive critique of Heidegger every time I mention his name. This is a message board, and not an academic journal. I don’t use footnotes, either.
You could try just not bringing it up then. Anyway, I was asking for “subtance” about “real world philosophy”, not Heidegger. I’m trying to be constructive, remember?!
It is interesting that Heidegger should come up in this context because it seems to me that he, along with Merleau-Ponty and certain Gestalt psychologists, have gone the furthest in bringing face to face with the real world as it might appear in a pre-theoretical way. Until Heidegger we needed to consult a theory of opening doors before doing something like opening a door. Husserl’s phenomenological rallying cry “back to the things themselves” is precisely the attempt to be responsible to the phenomena as they appear. If we consult Merleau-Ponty he would say that in perception, in a kind of passivity, we are faced with the things themselves, it is only when we attempt to act, reflect or say something about that that we fall into our interpretive frameworks. Interpretive frameworks that we cannot avoid mind you, however, it seems to me that philosophy is nothing more than trying to subject these interpretive frameworks and presuppositions to different modes of inquiry in an attempt to make them manifest, perhaps, not in order to rid ourselves of them, but at least to see how they are operant. We are always already in these interpretive frameworks so it makes no sense to try to get in touch with a real world free from interpretation.
Heidegger might sound enigmatic, abstract and mystical, but I can assure you his philosophy has real implications and has brought us closer to something like ‘reality.’ I don’t understand what people mean when they say that his philosophy has no real world implications. I would argue, however, that Merleau-Ponty’s account is richer by virtue of his notion of embodiement.
A prime example of the Heideggarian account at work would be the film “The Gods must be Crazy.”
such beliefs have always been shown to be false. Different men might have different abilities but i think you are ignoring the context of what i am trying to say.
Well then who or what decides usefullness? Is the Nihilist predisposed to Nihilism? i.e. it is useful to interpret life as meaningless because this interpretation would nurture the predisposition. Do our interpretations then simply serve as a means of confirming what we already believe?
