Elsewhere in The Varieties of Religious Experience, [William] James cites the example of a tiger leaping out of the jungle carrying off a man ‘in the twinkle of an eye’ and various other cases to enforce his point that evil, physical pain and death cannot be dismised by neo-Platonists as ‘inessential’; the neo-Platonist, having explained his view that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ is just as likely to be knocked down by a bus…as the deepest-dyed pessimist. It is the irrelevancy of a man’s beliefs to the fate that can overtake him that supplies the most primitive ground for Existentialism and makes that a belief in some sort of providence or destiny is the essential prequisite of all religion…and most philosophy.
[emphasis the author]
Can philosophy be a religious experience? Absolutely!
It can be, in other words, when it is used to dispense with the brutally ambiguous, precarious and ephemeral manner in which “the human condition” unfolds. There are lots and lots of minds out there hell bent on obviating contingency, chance and change by subsuming them in their beloved “carefully calibrated conceptual contraptions”. In other words, if you can’t tame the tiger [or the bus…or the world] in reality then put it into a cage, instead, with words.
I don’t think “put it in a cage” is the best metaphor here. Caging dissapointment implies you are separating it from your self, isolating it. When you put something in a cage you render it impotent. This is NOT the existentialist project. In a way it is the polar opposite of the existentialist project.
When Heidegger talks about facing our possibilities for being, we need “words”. When we face our fate there is interpretation going on, possibilities are articulated in language. However, there is a big difference between facing the tiger in the cage and facing a loose tiger. I would go as far as to say that when we use language to “cage the tiger” (of disappointment/sorrow) then we are indulging in a special postmodern kind of fleeing, akin to repression. Instead of being occasionally eaten by a tiger, we are kept safe outside the cage, but we become fascinated with this visual indulgence, being able to look at a tiger without the real danger.
It’s like Slavoj Zizek’s diet coke, you can drink and drink without ingesting the harsh “reality” of coke. While we are fascinated by a caged sorrow, the world decays around us. Welcome to the desert of the real.
Instead, facing sorrow and disappointment is more like being a tiger-tamer, or the Beastmaster. You don’t cage the tiger, you live with it every day. If you neglect it, it will eat you. If you interact with it too much, it will eat you. You spend your life with the tiger as your familiar.
I see your point but folks who tame tigers by putting them in cages—cages concocted out of philosophical language—are often inside cages too. The important point being that worlds of words exist to enable a distinction between true and false, right and wrong, good and evil etc. to be made at all. They tame the tigers by, first and foremost, taming their “self”. Thus they are safe not only because the tiger is in a cage, but, in turn, because even if the tiger was loose it can’t get into their cage.
Any disappointment and sorrow they face is put in a larger philosophical context whereby they do indeed live in the best of all possible worlds. Why? Because, well, it is the only possible world philosophically. They do the right thing and hopefuly [re Plato, Descartes, Kant] there is a “transcendental” font “out there” that eventually provides a sanctuary that is Salvation.
Once you abandon the cages, the Gods, the duties and obligations etc., you can live by your wits and tame the tigers. But even here there are folks who clamor after solutions said to be more or less “authentic”. Thus Nietzsche’s Uberman or Sartre’s Mao or Camus’s Stranger can be seen to be just another kind of cage.
I get your concern about articulation, and I appreciate the power of this metaphor of a wild animal in a cage. When we use language to articulate something about existence we are bounding a “something” of our understanding of being-in-the-world, placing some aspect of our existence in a cage. We isolate a moral category and place a value on it.
I don’t totally follow your metaphor when you put the moral agent in the cage. It seems like a reasonable move, akin to Plato’s Cave, but that may be precisely where you fall into the same Modernity trap of Descartes and Kant. I have a suspicion that for you, putting aside deontology and metaphysics of presence means breaking out of your cage. The cage is precisely the “sanctuary that is Salvation” which your philosophers of olde are assuming. When we think in the real world of embodied dasein we are outside of the intellectual/solipsistic Cage.
I see a problem here because I think this metaphorical language of “breaking out” of the cave/cage/box is infected with exactly the philosophical outlook you are critiquing. I’m not sure if you are familiar with Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology”, but I think this text will be useful here.
I am certainly splitting hairs. You are suggesting that philosophy implies a caging, of either understanding-in-the-world or dasein-alongside-the-world (or both). Your alternative is not to cage the world with words. You claim to be a card-carrying moral nihilist, only in the sense that you do not countenance the “transcendental font” of objective truths.
There is a question here: Is it that you refuse to cage your understanding by use of transcendental truth, or is it only that you find yourself (for the time being) unable to cage your understanding by use of transcendental truth?
I think there is a Middle Way. Not the Resolute Dasein or the Ubermensch, but the Beastmaster.
This is where my critique of your caged-philosopher starts. The Beastmaster is not a zookeeper or a visitor at the zoo. The Beastmaster does not try to isolate and segregate disappointment/sorrow/pain. The Beastmaster does develop “familiarity” with select animals. They are always already becoming her familiars. I’m trying to get at a sort of Cornel West point about the tragic/comic thinker. The Bluesman.
To the extent that the Beastmaster “tames” her familiars, she is also herself isolated. The Beastmaster is uncomfortable in urban areas. Think about Crocodile Dundee. The 2nd movie is pretty much all Beastmaster-In-The-City problems. This is the weird paradox of isolation. When you live in the untamed wilds, you are isolated, when you live in the subdivided urban world of cubicles and apartment boxes you are alienated. Alienation and isolation are often used (or understood) interchangeably.
This is my issue with your saying that philosophers who “cage” suffering via moral language are themselves “caged”. You are right to suggest that there is a transference going on with the gazer and the gazed-upon. However, it does not necessarily need the negative connotation you imply. Instead, there may be a difference which is “technological” in the Heideggerian sense. Heidegger distinguishes between a hydroelectric dam and a bridge over a river. The bridge is a Premodern Technology, in the sense that it is “alongside” the river. A bridge is a way for humans to disclose the river in their everyday dealings (moving food, traveling, etc.) Heidegger has a more nefarious view of the hydroelectric dam, which is his posterchild of Modern Technology. The dam “Enframes” the river. For dasein, the river is always already disclosed as standing reserve, energy to be ordered around. We become alienated from the river, because our meaningfully understanding the river is tied to our disclosing a river. As standing reserve, the river is already disclosed.
So I think we need to make a similar premodern/modern (don’t think I’m being nostalgic) distinction between the zookeeper and the beastmaster. It is not a matter of degree. There is a legitimate difference. I think you are assuming that all philosophers are zookeepers, and this is incredibly unfair.
Yes, but such mere semantic trickery and psychological self-validation is not philosophy. It is true that some (many) use the form of philosophy toward religious ends, but that does not speak of philosophy, since form can always be falsely extracted and misappropriated for the purposes of a new content.
The difference between religion and philosophy runs deeper than words. There is an essential difference, a difference of essence and of intent, between these.
To the extent that the cage is the actual, convoluted world of dasein and not the carefully calibrated words of the philosopher-king, there is no escaping. Why? Because there is no actual knowing—other than from the perspective of dasein. We all draw lines and make choices in/from different places. But why this choice and not that one? How do we eventually come to accept one point of view and one set of values rather than another? How is that not just another manifestation of dasein? My point is simle: this is always a conflict over existential [subjective] narratives and not essential [objective] truths.
Take for instance the current political controversy over a “balanced budget” in Washington. Here you have a mutitude of value-judgements that range from those on the extreme left to those on the extreme right of the moral continuum. Not to mention the pragmatists in the middle. But why does John Doe believe this while Jane Doe believes that? What is it about the lives they lived that predisposed them to embrace one rendition rather than another? And is there a way to determine precisely how a balanced budget should be viewed by those who wish to be thought of as truly rational and ethical men and women?
Here one can argue that the ever evolving and shifting “cage” is the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty that marbles an essentially absurd and meaningless world—precipitating precarious leaps into the profoundly problematic nature of human interaction. And that’s before oblivion—the obliteration of “I” for eternity.
What I am suggesting is this: The extent to which philosophers speak of human identity and value judgments in the context of a world said to be essentially, objectively, universally apprehendable is the extent to which they rely largely on a world of words to seal the deal. And in most cases—from Plato to Spinoza—on one or another rendition of a transcendental font.
In other words, in order for the existential spokes on the wheel of life [daseins] to acquire something akin to essential communication here they need the equivilant of an ontological rim and a teleological hub. But, sans God or metaphysical Reason, there is none. So all we have available is the manner in which we have come to understand our words in relationship to the world as dasein. There is no getting beyond that except by way of science and mathematics.
The “cage” I live in is my understanding—an existential understanding—of the “self” interacting with others “out in the world”. But that is always a ceaseless refabrication of the prefabrication that is the historical and cultural context in which “I” was “thrown” at birth and out of which “I” am ceaselessly evolving through contingency, chance and change.
Just like you. Your “middle way” may seem reasonable to you. But it will not seem reasonable to others. What, after all, in particular, is the Resolute Dasein being resolute about? As soon as you take the words down off the sky-hooks and situate them out in the world of actual human transactions in conflict nothing ever gets resolved. I simply suggest that philosophically nothing ever can get resolved because there is no way in which to know the world other than from a point of view. At least with respect to one’s “self” and one’s “values”.
This is all profoundly…abstract. What on earth does it mean? For example, with respect a newspaper headline of your choosing, instantiate [and then substantiate] these points out in the world of actual human interaction.
Why do you use the word “dasein” if you completely disagree with Heidegger’s entire project? Either your answer to that question will be incredibly interesting, or I need to try to explain Being and Time in message board posts. God I hope it’s the former.
I use dasein [small “d”] in the sense that Ludwig Feuerbach used it: the individual existing. The individual existing out in the world. The individual existing out in a particular world—dialectically. In other words, historically.
To wit: The individual who is present here and not there, present now and not before or after. I liked Heidegger’s notion of the individual being “thrown” at birth into a particular demographic stew.
The crucial point being that the individual is always situated circumstantially in a world—a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change. The individual is always becoming over time.
What interest me then is not my sense of dasein in relationship to Heidegger’s but Heidegger’s Dasein in relationship to mine.
Heidegger’s notion of dasein incorporates far more than a subjext’s being in the world, and its becoming through and as a function of that world. What is arguably more important is the mineness characteristic of dasein, thus possessing a means of entering into relations with self we have relationality proper posited as the deeper “reality”, or essence itself. Words are a means of exploring the nuances of this relation, how it is constituted and formed, and reformed continuously. Philosophers use words to expose, even their errors and reifyings expose and disclose, though often they do not themselves realise it.
Invoking Feuerbach is a good point here, given his better understanding than his contemporaries of the nature of subjectivity. Also a good point is the ubiquity of contingency, but this must be followed up with examining to what extent the subject-as-experiencing mitigates this contingency through its own becomings; becoming is subject to the world’s contingencies, but the world is subject to the being of the subject. In the context of “the cage”, rather ambiguity is crucial and the cage is seen as the highest potentiality and horizon of being itself given the depth to which the subject has become inclined to withdraw into itself. We see through this thought (of “dasein”) collectively the beginning of a means not of escaping “the cage”, but of understanding the fact that there is no cage so much as there is an essential inexpressibility of finitude actualizations within a space of prescribed enclosure… the illusion of being caged is the projection of that which is as it is upon itself as that which is as it is not (yet). Possibility as the being only of a being that has as its own being its own being; or, fragmentation of the subjectivity resultant of its being in the world, unified by the ‘mineness’ constitutive of this very subjectivity itself, attaining varying and shifting degrees of authenticity or inauthenticity.
Mineness [like me] is always a work in progress. There is a particular existential me that evolved out of the past and will ever evolve into the future. But the present is always fabricated out of the past [a particular past—“my” past] and “I” only have so much control over the variables that made and make me who I think I am here and now. I am relational but I cannot possibly grasp all of the variable permutations involved. Instead, I only see everything from a particular vantage point through time. Some things are objective for all daseins and some things are not. But there is no essense here. After all, essense implies omniscience. In order to grasp what is essentially true I would need to know everything. I would need to know how all of the relationships conflate into Reality.
And, of course, because no mere mortal does so they invent Gods—or Reason. Being, in other words.
Words are excellent for denoting objective things: tree, door, cloud, car, horse, football, baby, funeral. And, of course, the world of science. And they work fine for denoting the relationship between objective things: John crashed his car into a tree. That cloud is in the shape of a football. Joan’s baby died and we attended the funeral.
But some words name relationships that evoke subjective moral, political and aesthetic reactions: We should stop suburban sprawl to save more trees. Baseball is a better sport than football. Aborting a fetus is killing a baby. It’s better to pursue mass transit than build more cars.
Says who?
In what particular context? How, for example, is the conflict that revolves around, say, capital punishment reflected in this point? What can be denoted objectively here and what can only be connoted subjectively? What can we know about capital punishment such that the points of view of all daseins are subsumed in it? When does a perspective stop being subjective?
My point regarding the cage is the manner in which it is or is not constructed out of words. We can believe many things that we think we know are true but they are “true” only because we believe the words are denoting something objective that can only be connoted as a subjective point of view instead. The cage can be religious or secular. But once you begin to fathom how profoundly—inherently?—problematic the point of view of dasein can be you can view the “cage” that is ambiguity and uncertainty from a broader perspective. You can better coordinate contingency, chance and change into your thinking about your self and those things you value.
Heidegger says dasein is thrown, fallen, and projected. I guess what I’d like to argue for here are the second and third parts of the basic three-part situation of dasein.
It makes sense that you can relate to the throwness of dasein. Dasein is thrown into a world. You did not choose to be here in this place and time and situation into which you are born, and it’s arbitrary why you are this person and not someone else. There doesn’t seem to be anything objectively better about the values you have grown up with, and you have some anxiety about whether there are any truths whose value is not totally arbitrary.
The second part, falling, is the sense in which you are always already drawn into the world of objects and work, and drawn into a culture of other people. Heidegger wants to emphasize that in everyday living we are not blank slates deciding at every moment to affirm or deny our entire belief structure. We are always already drawn into the way that “the one” does things (i.e. One must be kind to children).
Iambiguous, in all of your posts you stalwartly deny that the falling aspect of Heidegger’s phenomenology applies to you. That is actually totally OK. You are the exception to the everyday. You do not believe that any of your beliefs and values have any kind of transcendent truth. Every time you decide not to murder someone, you have to think about it, because there’s really no absolute rule against murdering them. Every time you pay for a sandwich you check first to see if there are cameras or cops to prevent you from just stealing it. You function on a level of moral nihilism all of the time. This doesn’t disprove Heidegger because Heidegger is mainly interested in the everyday reality of everyone else out there in the embodied world.
Thirdly dasein is projected. We have project possibilities for becoming ourselves. All these three parts are interrelated. Because dasein is always already fallen toward “The One” (one does this, one does that) dasein often allows possibilities to be presented to it. Really this is to deny projectedness. When dasein faces up to its’ being projected, dasein is forced to acknowledge that there are other possibilities to become than those offered in “what one does”. As far as moral concerns, dasein can own up to projectedness by acknowledging that she has a future that might not be the same as her past. This is not the same as “having an open mind”. Dasein is always already between closeminded and openmindedness because dasein is thrown, fallen, and projected.
A central theme of Heidegger’s Being and Time is that neither objectivity nor subjectivity actually describe the way dasein goes about its worlding. This is because dasein is embodied in a world, with other people, in time. You seem to think that Truth can only be Truth if it’s Objective Truth, and that objectivity is impossible, so Truth must be impossible. Heidegger argues that objectivity/subjectivity is just a hang-up that we can throw out. Truth for Heidegger is more like Truthing (as opposed to a correspondence theory of truth). Dasein is Truthing when dasein faces up to being thrown, fallen, and projected.
Not arbitrary, situated. We are thrown into the world at birth—a world that is prefabricated by others. As a child they tell us what to think and feel. About practically everything. We are literally brainwashed by those we love. And this indocrtination is particularly effective becasue they do it out of love. And, thus, during these crucial formative years, a mental, emotional and psychological scaffold/framework is erected in a particular world at a particular time by particular people. And it follows us to the grave in ways many are often barely cognizant of.
I don’t really see where “falling” is not just an obvious extention of being “thrown” at birth. You come into the world as a blank slate in order for those who raise you to fill in the blanks with their own sense of reality.
Think of it like this:
When they are just infants, Julie and Jane lose their parents. A plane crash, say. Julie is taken to live with her Uncle Bob’s family. Uncle Bob’s family consist largely of evangelical Christians. They are politically conservative [very conservative] and raise Julie to be just like them.
Jane on the other hand is taken to live with her Aunt Sally. Aunt Sally’s family consist largely of radical liberals [very liberal] atheists. Sally is raised to be just like them.
One day Jane and Julie become pregnant. Julie gives birth and Jane has an abortion. When Julie finds out about Jane’s abortion she is shocked and appalled. Jane is just as adament however in defending her right to choose an abortion.
They meet and get into a heated argument about abortion.
Now, given the manner in which I understand dasein, this makes perfect sense. How would it make sense to Heidegger? How does it make sense to you?
Indeed, the question I raise is this: What can philosophy offer here by way of mediating the conflict? Can philosophy resolve it?
My own moral truths [meaning prejudices] are existential. They are rooted in the actual experiences, relationships and sources of information that have been a part of my life from the day I was born. There is no getting around this. It is simply true. Of me. Of you. Of everyone.
But nurture is always deeply intertwined in nature, isn’t it? And nature provides us with the inherent capacity to be compassionaite, kind, empathic, altruistic etc. But no less so the inherent capacity to be aggressive, selfish, vicious, uncaring. How nature and nurture play themselves out in the lives of actual indivdual daseins is, to say the least, virtually incalcuable. At least with anything approaching the precision of logic.
Project? What does this mean substantially? Situate this point of view out in the world of human interaction. This is all achingly abstract [and thus abstruse] to me. What does it mean substantively? How would a moral agent in conflict with another moral agent use these abstractions to facilitate a more rather than less rational choice?
The world that dasein is embodied in has objective elements. There are facts perceived that are relevant to all daseins. For example, before one can discuss the morality of abortion one must be familiar with human biology and the manner in which unwanted pregnancies can occur. One needs to be familiar with the circumstances involved in each unwanted pregnancy. One has to grasp the political reality of gender roles and gender equality out in the world.
For instance: If women were forced to give birth against their will is gender equality with men even possible? There are facts here that can clearly be discerned and argued. Facts that are not just mere points of view. Facts that are not just subjective prejudices.
On the other hand, there are propositions that can only be reflected in subjective assumptions. When does the unborn actually become a human being—at conception? when the heart beats? when brain waves are recorded? at the point of viability? at birth itself? How can this possibly be known objectively? And what of pregnancies that result from rape or incest? How can we react to this other than from the subjective vantage point of dasein?
From my own perspective it is patently absurd to imagine the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity as merely a “hang-up”, readily dismissed. They are easily differentiated in discussing any conflict over identity and value judgments.
It can’t force people to agree. No-one of any note (as far as I’m aware) claims it can. It also can’t remove stubborn stains, kill household germs, give your hair that “just out of bed” look or make your can run cleaner, crisper, quiet as a whisper.
Philosophy can clarify terms and assumptions. It can help define practices to codify mediation. It can analyse the logical consistency of the arguments presented. The things that one does when starting to look for solutions. As a pragmatic out-in-the-world type, what do you do when mediating conflicts, that doesn’t fall under reasoning (philosophy) or persuasion (politics)?
There are people who believe that, through the study of philosophy, we acquire wisdom. All I do is grapple with the extent to which we can be wise regarding human identity, ethics and morality, political choices, metaphysics, political economy, God and religion etc.
What can we know here such that it is proposed all rational people must know what we know; and what can we know such that it is proposed only that our knowledge is just a point of view—and can never be other than that?
That’s what I explore in these posts.
And insofar as I do I see a rather clear distinction between objective truths and subjective specultaion.
You say:
I basically agree. But it is one thing to discuss identity, morality and politics abstractly, conceptually, theoretically. And another thing altogether when the terms and the definitions—the words—are introduced to actual worlds.
What I do is introduce people to their own identity as dasein: “I” situated and evolving over time existentially. And I suggest that, given how we can cannot be objectively wise in our moral and political interactions, we should strive for moderation, negociation and compromise instead. And then, in that respect, I introduce them to Marx and political economy. To, for example, the difference between Plato’s Republic and, say, the Russian Revolution.
You still seem to suggest that wisdom is apparent for all to see - that once exposed to wisdom, the unwise will be forced to become wise. This hasn’t ever been the case, as far as I know. We can find wisdom and offer it to others; no more.
This is the false dichotomy again. You’re living in the 19th century, philosophically, if you stick to that. There are things besides Facts and Opinions. Please, take this on board; you excised it from your response to my last post, but it’s important.
Not another thing altogether - an extension. That’s all.
What does “objectively wise” even mean? Isn’t it enough to be wise?
I think your example shows subjective/objective to be a false dichotomy in the sense that Heidegger wants.
Julie and Jane are Thrown, but not as “blank slates” as you put it. In this example, their thrownness is best understood in this objective fact: neither child had the opportunity to choose whether they preferred to live with Aunt Sally or Uncle Bob. They didn’t ask for x foster parent.
Julie and Jane are Falling: It is an objective fact that Julie is raised by evangelical Christians and appreciates their values. It is an objective fact that Jane is raised by liberal atheists and appreciates their values. Everybody is raised by somebody, or not, either way “the way you were raised” is a good way of thinking about Falling in a real-world sense, though Falling is related to the influence/resentment of the wider culture as well.
Julie and Jane are Projected: They each make a choice about what kind of person they are by making a decision about what to do with the baby. It might be more accurate in this example to say that Julie and Jane do not choose to choose, because it is an objective fact that each woman’s decision corresponds exactly to What-One-Does. They follow exactly the objective fact of their upbringing. Their decisions are objective facts.
At this point you claim that Julie and Jane have conflicting subjective opinions about the moral status of abortion. But how? If we describe Julie and Jane as situated beings-in-time (as I just did above in Heidegger’s schema), then we’re looking at objective facts. You have objective facts piling on objective facts, then at the moment where someone makes a choice (gives birth or has an abortion) you throw in the towel and say they made a decision based on their merely subjective point of view. This is strange though, because we’ve just described their point of view as an objective fact! I think you depart from Heidegger at the point of Projectedness.
My perspective is to suggest that wisdom is not apparent at all. Instead, it is [more often than not] rooted existentially in historical and cultural narratives. And, experientially, in the ever evolving narratives of daseins. It is always only in the mind of the beholder regarding both human identity and value judgments.
But there are others who insist that, on the contrary, we can in fact “know thyself”; and that we can in fact wisely [rationally] differentiate right from wrong, good from bad behavior. In other words, that the wisdom they found must be the wisdom you find in turn. Otherwise, you can be deemed not only unreasonable, but immoral!
Maybe, but ome folks are still living in the 3rd and 4th century B.C. with Plato and Aristotle.
But in doing all of these things it is still important to note this gets us no closer to encompassing the entirety of human identity—or in grasping our duties and obligations as moral agents.
For some though, what’s the point of being “wise” if they can’t insist their wisdom is [or should be] universal? After all, very few folks [philosophers or otherwise] say, “this is what I construe to be a wise course of action regarding abortion but of course your own conflicting point of view can be construed as equally wise.”
And as long as we live in that world, there will always be a place for folks like me.
