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Ep. 47 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Heidegger

Vervaeke's lecture on Heidegger: phenomenology, the lost contact epistemology, participatory knowing, Being vs. beings, and Heidegger's critique of metaphysics as nihilism.

Key Takeaways

  • Heidegger's critique of Husserl is that phenomenology remained subjectivist and failed to reach Being itself.
  • Participatory knowing requires an ontological grounding, not only embodiment.
  • Heidegger's notion of Dasein and questioning offers a path to reconnect with Being through wonder and questing.
  • Metaphysics' forgetting of Being, culminating in onto-theology, leads to nihilism, which is the meaning crisis in Heidegger's terms.

What the video covers

  • Lecture resumes the series on the meaning crisis, positioning Heidegger as a 'prophet' who articulated the crisis and a response to it, after discussing wisdom and enlightenment as a response.
  • Heidegger's relation to Husserl's phenomenology is examined: Husserl aimed to return to 'the things themselves' but Heidegger argued he remained trapped in Cartesian subjectivity.
  • Sokolowski's introduction to phenomenology and his diagnosis of a lost 'contact epistemology' in European science is discussed, with the noesis-noema correlation linked to agent-arena relationships.
  • Merleau-Ponty's embodiment is presented as addressing the lack of participatory knowing, but Heidegger's concern with ontology and the independence of Being is said to go beyond it.
  • The speaker explains Heidegger's notion of Dasein and existentialism: humans are beings whose being is in question, defining themselves through questioning.
  • Heidegger's 'questing' is contrasted with the 'having mode' of propositional control, favoring a 'being mode' experienced as wonder and participatory transformation.
  • Heidegger's view that the history of metaphysics culminates in nihilism, through forgetting Being, is outlined.
  • Vervaeke connects Heidegger's ideas to relevance realization, participatory knowing, and dynamic coupling in cognitive science and AI critiques such as Dreyfus's.
  • Truth as aletheia (unconcealment) is discussed: Being simultaneously shines and withdraws, and truth involves attunement to this mystery.
  • The lecture notes Heidegger's ambivalent relation to Plato and the connection between onto-theology and nihilism, and previews future series on the Kyoto School, Derrida, and negative theology.

Chapters

  1. 00:00Introduction and recap of wisdom and enlightenment
  2. 03:33Husserl, phenomenology, and the lost contact epistemology
  3. 07:37Merleau-Ponty, embodiment, and the critique of subjectivity
  4. 17:00Heidegger's questing and Dasein
  5. 28:20Metaphysics, nihilism, and Plato
  6. 39:26Truth, unconcealment, and participatory knowing
  7. 45:50Relevance realization and cognitive science critiques
  8. 53:06Being mode, having mode, and forgetfulness

Answers

Questions about this video

Why does Vervaeke think Heidegger critiques Husserl's phenomenology?

Heidegger argues that Husserl, despite aiming to return to the things themselves, remained trapped in Cartesian subjectivity and never reached Being itself. The lecture frames this as a lack of ontological grounding for participatory knowing.

What is the difference between the 'having mode' and the 'being mode'?

The having mode seeks propositional answers and control over situations, while the being mode engages questioning as wonder and participatory transformation. Vervaeke suggests Heidegger's questing belongs to the being mode.

How does Heidegger connect metaphysics to nihilism?

According to the lecture, Heidegger sees the history of metaphysics, especially onto-theology identifying Being with a Supreme Being, as forgetting Being itself, which culminates in nihilism as the meaning crisis.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis last time I finished the discussion of wisdom and connected it to enlightenment and argued for the wise cultivation of lighten ment as our deepest kind of existential response to the meaning crisis a way in which we can
00:36
Speaker A
awaken from the meaning crisis I then wanted to put that scientific model of spirituality or lack of a better phrase into discourse with some of these central prophets of the meaning crisis I'm using the word prophet of course as
00:59
Speaker A
it's used in the Old Testament sense I'm talking about individuals who were crucial for articulating the advent and helping to propose or promise a response to the meaning crisis I put a diagram on the board I'm not going to reap it that
01:22
Speaker A
diagram on the board in which Heidegger played a central role there's many connections in there that I will not be able to fully address I'll point out and because some of the people are there insofar as they help us
01:34
Speaker A
articulate their response not to be examined for their own sake a couple of major pointers I want to make out first an apology I misspelled because of my dysgraphia and I didn't realize it there was something bothering me the whole
01:47
Speaker A
time about the diagram I misspelled Heidegger I won't make that mistake again I mentioned the work of Nishida in the shot initially in the Kyoto school I will talk briefly about nishitani here but I won't be able to go into that in
02:00
Speaker A
depth I do intend to pursue this later in another series I am putting together I'm putting together a couple of series to follow this one and I would like to do a series that will include work on the kyoto school series that i'm
02:16
Speaker A
entitled the god beyond God in which we look at all of these great non-theistic thinkers within both eastern and western traditions and things like be killed a school that tried to bridge between them so I will have to neglect to some degree
02:32
Speaker A
the curative school in this series but I promise to follow it up more deeply in another series I also mentioned Derrida and I will not be able to talk very much a problem maybe not even on all about
02:48
Speaker A
Derrida and deconstructionism I will also address this again when I return in the other series to God beyond God especially when I'm going to talk about the relationship between Derrida and what's called negative theology so many of you will be perhaps disappointed that
03:04
Speaker A
I don't talk too much about Derrida or the ACOTA school I do promise to return to that in another series that I am currently working on so what I did I do I sort of tried to give a quick
03:17
Speaker A
background did Heidegger I talked about the importance of literal and-and-and phenomenology and I pointed you to the work of Sokolowski as a great introduction and there's slow gonna back to the things whose role and he does write a book with the word crisis in its
03:37
Speaker A
title the crisis I think in what is it in European science we talks and this is basically he is pointing to the loss of contact epistemology and he's trying to get that contact back and this is done through a reflective experience
03:53
Speaker A
introspection but through a reflective experiential attention paid to the structures and processes within our experience and I pointed out how there's two components in this there's the intentional mental directedness noesis and then there's the world disclosure there's a deep correlation between them
04:13
Speaker A
this is the note and this is the new EEMA the new esis and notice that that's a term I've used also to describe perspectival knowing right and and the correlation between the noesis and the no EEMA is very much right like
04:33
Speaker A
the agent arena relationship now we took a look at heidegger's main criticism of hospitals work had and heidegger's main criticism is that hustlers work had not really given given us back the missing contact I would say that I mean
04:54
Speaker A
agreement with this I think Heidegger is pointing to something very important in the critique of phenomenology that espero has picked up in his wonderful book the end of phenomenology anyways well suppose work had not given us a contact but it has not really developed
05:14
Speaker A
adequately participatory knowing now I do think that Marlow Ponte went a long way towards addressing this he's after Heidegger with his notion of embodiment and I think I tried to explain how much this notion of embodiment has been taken
05:30
Speaker A
up into cognitive science and how intimately it is connected with the return to contact epistemology in fact I would argue that there is no return to a contact epistemology without a deep existential and theoretical recognition of embodiment so Heidegger is critiquing
05:54
Speaker A
both the being active the lack of participatory knowing and perhaps that's addressed by merleau-ponty but there's a further thing that I think Marlow Ponte does not address that is also lacking for Heidegger right is that participatory knowing is not set with an
06:10
Speaker A
ontology it's not set within a deeper understanding of being and how we come into contact with being being as realness is in in the sense of the ground Ignis without which grounds truth seems to be something that Hydra feels
06:28
Speaker A
that was lacking in Husserl's work another way of putting it is that how do they thought that HUS row was still trapped within the Cartesian cultural cognitive grammar was still trapped within subjectivity and this is the main thing that Sparrow criticizes throughout
06:47
Speaker A
his entire book there's also a YouTube video by him that you can watch on his critique of phenomenology that phenomenology is driven by the goal of returning to the things but because of its approach it actually can never
07:04
Speaker A
return to the things it is still locked into a kind of subjectivity or a hidden kind of idealism that what is really needed right to get to being is this aspect of how to gear that I'm going to
07:19
Speaker A
talk about shortly which is to pay attention to the independence of being from our experience of it which is something that a lot of people do not tend to emphasize and Heidegger that's largely because I think while it's
07:32
Speaker A
president Heidegger it's not made explicit and foregrounded enough from him but I think the work of speculative realists like Harmon and others Morton for example brings this aspect out and why they see their work as transcending phenomenology so how but now to return
07:50
Speaker A
to Heidegger how do we get to this deeper contact well it's really interesting that he tries to do he's still within phenomenology but he's trying to get it to drive towards ontology get us back in touch with the
08:05
Speaker A
world and he's trying to get you to do this through a specific kind of questioning now this questioning you have to think of this questioning as taking place not in the having mode in which we're trying to get an answer
08:18
Speaker A
trying to control the situation you have to think of it much more as within the be in mode a being mode that is experienced as Wonder in fact perhaps a better word is not questioning but questing you're trying to go on a quest
08:31
Speaker A
with this questioning you're not trying to have a propositional answer you're trying to engage in a participatory transformation now this brings us to the central thing for Heidegger in some ways and this is Heidegger's notion of design being there
08:49
Speaker A
this is our being and notice notice how this is an inheritance from the Christian tradition that we're in the image of God somehow by Heidegger is taking this up as somehow by paying attention by wandering into questing into our being we will get a deeper
09:08
Speaker A
understanding of being itself why is that because for Heidegger our being is the being right whose being is in question we are the type of being who actually question who and what we are in a way that makes a difference
09:26
Speaker A
to who and what we are this is the core idea of existentialism existentialism is that we are fundamentally right without an essence and that we are right our essence if you want to put it that way is to have no essence and therefore we
09:42
Speaker A
are continually defining ourselves by how we question and right and we question our being and respond to that questioning question so the idea by phenomenologically exploring that being our design the way we are the being whose being is in question we can
10:02
Speaker A
simultaneously come into contact with our modal existence come into the being mode and come into contact with the mystery of beer now coming into contact with this is central to Heidegger and Heidegger is deeply responding to the meaning crisis one of Heidegger is most
10:28
Speaker A
famous or perhaps infamous theses the one that runs is a constant thread throughout his work is the this idea that the history of metaphysics which Heidegger tends to use in a pejorative term the history of philosophical existential and perhaps
10:49
Speaker A
also religious responses to design to the kind of the kind of being we have the history of that response is metaphysics and for Heidegger the hit that history is the history of nihilism Heidegger sees that whole project has fundamentally
11:17
Speaker A
misconstrued to use our language the whole project is a fundamental Mis framing of our relationship to being and because of that that has produced this deep loss of contact with our being and therefore simultaneously with being itself and that for Heidegger is the
11:40
Speaker A
meaning crisis so this whole history that we saw for example in the first half of this series is the history of nihilism and you can see I hope if you remember that argument that there's a lot of great truth in what Heidegger has
11:55
Speaker A
to say about how the unfolding of the history of that metaphysical project has led us into the meaning crisis now Heidegger does not use the word ontology in a pejorative way the way he uses the word metaphysics most people don't have
12:15
Speaker A
this distinction as as clearly as Heidegger stipulates it to be so when we're talking about how do their metaphysics is a pejorative term it is a Mis framing of the ontological project the ontological project is the project of understanding our being and thereby
12:32
Speaker A
understanding our relation to being and thereby understanding being itself so there I mean editors volumous who's incredibly prolific he's also famously difficult to read his wheats his works have an operatic structure to them they often fail to come to any clear conclusion
12:54
Speaker A
part of that I think is legitimate part of that it right is him wrestling with trying to break out of the cultural cognitive grammar but I so think and this is part of my criticism of Heidegger part of it is
13:08
Speaker A
self-promotional by constantly being the person for you know I'm now seeing that these deep mysteries he also and how difficult it is to think about them and how he's exemplifying that difficulty he's all he was also and I think it's
13:24
Speaker A
pretty clear this is part of what he's doing he was also from those you can see this from some of those who knew him more intimately he was also building a mystique around himself so you have to take that into
13:35
Speaker A
account so all of that makes it difficult to sort of point to here's where I'm going to point to the core of Heidegger right but I do think there's something for me and for many other people and I hope for you there there is
13:51
Speaker A
a particular place where I think we can zero in on what Heidegger is doing and this is his his his important essay on evolve is in their VAR height which is on the essence of truth and I think this
14:05
Speaker A
is important because it will tie into many of the themes we have discussed I want to read an extended quote from this and then I'll comment on it so this is the quote from Heidegger obviously translated into English which is a
14:21
Speaker A
difficult task I've been told um you have to read a lot of Heidegger before you read Heidegger well because you will miss read Heidegger for a long time and part of why he makes his writing so torturous is to sort of tear you out of
14:38
Speaker A
the mistake in ways you will misunderstand him okay so here is the translation a statement is invested with its correctness so this is right a sense of true when we say that statement is true and we mean it's correct a
14:54
Speaker A
statement is invested with its correctness by the openness of comportment so I'm gonna try and unpack all of this for you the openness of comportment Howe right there's your how you work imported towards things right for only through the latter the openness
15:11
Speaker A
of compartment and I'll try to explain to you what that means can what is opened up be what can what has opened up really become the standard for the present ativ correspondence okay so let's stop here so here's the idea of truth as
15:26
Speaker A
correspondents a standard notion of truth so the idea here is this is how truth works here's a statement and what makes it correct is that it corresponds in some important way to reality what's in the statement and what's in reality
15:46
Speaker A
right correspond that's what makes it correct that's what it is to be true now of course famously philosophers have argued for a long time and many different ways about with this correspondences but what Heidegger is trying to say is right that that debate
16:02
Speaker A
about the correspondence has missed something and here's part of the MIS framing it's missed that this corresponding relationship is grounded is depended on right and it's sustained by a deeper relationship all right open comportment Mutt let must let itself be
16:23
Speaker A
assigned the standard so this lower relationship this open compartment is an affordance of an ability to set up correspondence between statements and reality such that we find them true now it's not to think about what this means there must mean that in making the
16:44
Speaker A
statement the person is directed and connected it also means that right the statement is picking up on some aspect of reality that it's disclosed and there's some kind of connection there so he's trying to point towards thus this
17:00
Speaker A
means that it must take over a pre given standard for all presentation this belongs to the openness of comportment so the normative standard what we normally call truth truth as correctness as correspondence between statement and reality right is ultimately grounded
17:17
Speaker A
dependence on how this deeper relationship which we haven't quite articulated yet our fords and makes possible this but you can see something here to use some of our language you can see how the agent and the arena have to be shaped to
17:36
Speaker A
each other such that what the agent does or says is meaningful in that arena so the agent arena relationship makes possible and affords right this right correctness but of course what hydrators pointing to is yes but what grounds this
17:56
Speaker A
agent arena relationship now I've tried to argue that it's ultimately the process of relevance realization we're going to come back to that Heidegger is gonna I'm gonna argue that this is relevance I've argued this is relevance realization Heydrich talks about this in
18:13
Speaker A
terms of attunement he uses a tune mint which is very nice because it picks up on musicality so here's another quote by Heidegger specifically mention this however being attuned attunement can never be understood as experience notice what he's saying here acumen can never
18:36
Speaker A
be understood as experience and feeling he is rejecting any subjective interpretation of entombment why because to continue it is there by simply deprived of its essence you have lost the essence of attunement if you understand its subjectively it is not an experience it is something
19:03
Speaker A
that makes meaningful experience possible and I argue that that of course was the case right for relevance realization let's continue his quote being attuned that is what he calls Eck distant standing out exposing us so this standing out he spreads he takes the
19:24
Speaker A
word existence and does it's sort of he plays with words a lot and just does this is standing out which of course is analogous to how what the word salient means standing out this existent expose it Ness nothing's right expose it 'no stew ba
19:46
Speaker A
this is us right as a whole can be experienced and felt and he puts both of those words in sort of scare quotes to question them only because the man who experiences again in question because he's challenging this whole natural way
20:03
Speaker A
of thinking and talking that's what it's putting it all in these scare quotes right with without being aware of the essence of attunement is always engaged in being in tune in a way that discloses beings as a whole right so attunement is
20:18
Speaker A
not subjective any subjective feeling or experience of it is actually grounded in the attuning relationship that precedes and grounds our cognitive appraisal or appropriation within the agent arena relationship okay so because we have got locked up here what I would call the
20:52
Speaker A
propositional level we have forgotten this we have forgotten the attunement relationship which for Heidegger is the essence of truth because it's what makes correctness of statements possible for us because of this forgetfulness there's another quote man clings to what is
21:11
Speaker A
readily available and controllable ever while we're even sorry man clings to what is readily available and controllable even we're ultimate matters are concerned remember that we're ultimate when we come back to Tillich please so what happens right is we get
21:30
Speaker A
trapped into the having of propositions we get trapped into the having mode all right what is readily available and controllable there's a deep modal confusion at this deep existential level the forgetting of the grounding attunement also traps us with
21:50
Speaker A
improvisational processing and and it traps us it's in the having mode the having of correct positions and this goes right back right this goes right back to Plato I don't think I did it would like me doing this
22:03
Speaker A
his attitude towards Plato is very ambivalent right you know Plato consistently makes a distinction between Philo phyleus ophea right the love of wisdom and Phi Leah Nakia right the love of victory the love of victory the having of the correct
22:25
Speaker A
answer that defeats the opponent and when one of Plato's like ongoing points is this is the deepest kind of bullshitting because this looks like we're arguing this looks like we're reasoning right but what we're doing is manipulating propositions right and
22:41
Speaker A
trying to assert corrective nough sand we're forgetting the pursuit of wisdom the transforms transformative existential project that Socrates advents for us this is why I continually criticize people who I suspect present themselves as if they're doing this but
23:03
Speaker A
are often doing this this is why I am so critical of people who want to debunk demolish and debate to the point of victory their opponents people who really are incapable of getting out of modal confusion they cannot remember the
23:20
Speaker A
being mode because right they can't listen look this is house you know somebody's listening they will say I did not know that I have just learned something from you or I was wrong I was mistaken about this those are the marks
23:40
Speaker A
of phyleus ophea Heidegger is trying to get us to remember Philae Oh Sophia and he definitely sees the history of metaphysics is becoming more and more bound up of Philae an Ikea the pursuit of victory the ultimate theory that
24:00
Speaker A
crushes all opposition so we have to wake up for according to Heidegger and again this is why his language is so torturous because we are in a state of deep forgetfulness deep mortal confusion and if we read his text
24:17
Speaker A
we are deeply tempted to read them from that forgetfulness and that modal confusion and thereby fundamentally misunderstand him so his texts are write deliberately Socratic in there they're constantly trying to undermine that right that cognitive cultural grammar that we habitually bring to things so he
24:39
Speaker A
wants us to remember sati The Forgotten mystery of design so he says this whenever the concealment of being as whole is conceded only as a limit that occasionally announces itself concealing as a fundamental occurrence has sunk into forgetfulness if we only sort of
25:06
Speaker A
acknowledge the way beings transcend our framing of them sort of at the limit yes yes yes their reality is combinatorial explosive yes yes yes yes ah and we've hit her back and we wave our hands and then we go back - yes but within this
25:23
Speaker A
within my framework bla bla bla bla right and what Heidegger says is right when you only acknowledge it as a limit you have actually deeply forgotten it that relationship to the combinatorial explosive nature of things has to be a
25:39
Speaker A
ongoing feature of your thinking now I try to argue for this within the relevance realization framework which I'm going to show you is deeply appropriate to Heidegger in terms of this idea of sacredness as a as an acted
25:55
Speaker A
enacted participatory right resonance to the mourners the inexhaustible Ness of reality in order to pick this up I want to briefly because as I said I can't go into this a great deal I hope to go into this again later and
26:16
Speaker A
in another series but I want to briefly talk about the work of Hartmann and what's called object-oriented ontology or what's also known as speculative realism and this is the position from which Sparrow and Harmon and others have critique phenomenology as being
26:39
Speaker A
inadequate so what's again trying to summarize all of this which is like some of the most exciting work that's recently being done in ontology you know and I and I respect people who say we need to talk about ontology more but if
26:55
Speaker A
you want to talk about ontology just don't do old talk about ontology pay attention to the insightful inventive new work being done on ontology within speculative realism so again I I wouldn't even claim this as a summary I'm just picking up one important thread
27:13
Speaker A
of the speculative realism as a way of trying to develop this important idea of Heidegger and because we're gonna need it when we talk about other people like you know Tillich and young and Barfield so the core of this is not the contine
27:27
Speaker A
picture of the thing in itself veiled by subjectivity right so remember that content picture right right our subjectivity completely veils the thing in itself and makes it ultimately inaccessible to us so what Hartmann and speaking up on is
27:46
Speaker A
that this transient and we'll come back to see that there's a difficulty there they have a difficulty with limiting ontology to what they call correlation just our experience of ontology but nevertheless let's start here this transient makes both the subject and the
28:07
Speaker A
object possible in experience right in phenomenological experience so what does that mean well there's a different way about thinking about how you encounter objects right instead of the Contin thing in itself that is veiled from us by our subjectivity
28:30
Speaker A
instead think about two things happening simultaneously this is picking up on what Heidegger is talking about think about the thing shining into subjectivity and that's what phenomenology originally means how do their picks up on that the Greek term
28:44
Speaker A
phenomenon actually means to shine forth so simultaneously the thing is shining into my subjectivity but that is interpenetrated inter afforded with it is simultaneously withdrawing from my framing it is always beyond my framing as well and that that beyond this is not
29:09
Speaker A
something in my phenomenology but it contributes to the sense of the realness of my phenomenological experience right think about how in virtual reality when there if the world if you get a sense that the world is closed if that
29:26
Speaker A
you can drain it dry with your activity it loses its realness but only and here's now the openness that kiters talking about the compartment but only if there's a realness a way in which the world withdraws beyond you continually
29:42
Speaker A
right so things there's always a horizon of your experience a horizon is something you always move towards but you can never reach right so as long as that world constantly withdraws as it also shines into your experience then it
29:57
Speaker A
is real to you now the morning is not something in your experience it's not an object of your experience but it's a feature that withdrawal is as much a contributor to the realness of things as they're shining into your subjectivity
30:13
Speaker A
this is I think a profound way in which harman and others have explicate 'add heidegger's idea and then gone beyond it now the way I want to put it and the way I've argued it right earlier is this I
30:27
Speaker A
think this lines up with what I've tried to argue that our framing which is trans ejected in nature about attunement simultaneously discloses and conceals right so I want to replace the content term the thing in itself with another
30:48
Speaker A
way another term the thing beyond itself everything is both shining into our subjectivity and withdrawing beyond our framing of it and those are inter affording their interpenetrating they co contribute to the realness of the object for us and it's precisely that
31:12
Speaker A
withdrawing according to Harman and others that was missed by phenomenology because of the way it was still bound within a Cartesian subjective framework whether or not that is completely fair to phenomenology is another question and I'm not trying to get into that
31:29
Speaker A
theoretical debate right here my main focus here is trying to understand what's going on but I think we can take from speculative realism this idea this term I've coined the thing beyond itself it's clearly a central idea in in
31:45
Speaker A
Harmons idea of the object the thing beyond itself okay so this takes us to now a new understanding of truth how do we get an attunement that discloses things as things beyond themselves things that are simultaneously shining in and into our subjectivity but and in
32:13
Speaker A
right but also withdrawing into their objectivity where this no longer means an object of thought it means a depth beyond our framing and independence beyond our experience and how those are transgender penetrating for us in the sense of realism what does it mean to be
32:32
Speaker A
connected to things in this way and this is Heidi there's famous notion of truth as Alafaya truth is Alafaya so late they means - it means to cover or to forget the in the in Greek mythology the underworld you pass
32:54
Speaker A
through the river Leyte and it made you forget all of your previous life as you went into the underworld and this is of course the negation of it so means sort of a deep remembering it's a te and a
33:05
Speaker A
deep disclosure so always remember these two poles it's a deep remembering you have to modally remember not just like our normal sense of remember it like sati you have to remember the being mode and this disclose is right this aspect
33:22
Speaker A
of reality that it is simultaneously shining and withdrawing so truth is all affair is this right a tuning to the mutual disclosure fitted mystery of being so right you're getting attuned to things you you're deeply remembering things and again not just cognitive
33:45
Speaker A
memory existential memory you're remembering things this is to be in contact with them when you're attuned to how they are simultaneously appearing shining and withdrawing all right now I've been through out using the language of relevance realization that I've
34:06
Speaker A
argued for to talk about Heidegger and some of you may be a little bit sort of like I don't like that you know Heidegger is you know you know I like the harder you're talking it's all ontological and I don't want this
34:16
Speaker A
scientific talk and you know and you might have a deeper point there because the scientific talk for Heidegger is at a higher level than ontology nevertheless I want to continue to making this argument and I want to make it because
34:28
Speaker A
there's an explicit and important history and this is the connection that has had a profound impact on my work and the argument that you have seen between Heidegger Herbert Dreyfuss and third-generation third-gen 4e oxide that I have articulated and exemplified to you
35:03
Speaker A
Dreyfus is an important interpreter of Heidegger but he's also one of the founding figures of this version of cognitive science in fact Dreyfus tried to formulate or is continuing to formulate important aspects of third generation for ACOG in of science as a
35:24
Speaker A
way of trying to articulate the importance of Heidegger for understanding the nature of mind the nature of cognition the nature of consciousness etc so there's a book he wrote on heidegger's most central work being in time and a dreyfuses book is
35:46
Speaker A
called being in the world and I want to read you a quote for that and the quote is exemplary it's not a unique isolated moment in Dreyfuss work it's something that is exemplary of a theme running throughout Dreyfuss here's the quote
36:03
Speaker A
from that book on Heidegger okay quote facts and rules are by themselves meaninglessness to capture what Heidegger calls significance or involvement they must be assigned relevance and those two terms are emphasized in the original my emphasis of them are is just reporting the
36:31
Speaker A
emphasis that he gave them they must be assigned relevance but the predicates that must be added to define relevance right are just more meaningless facts you can't capture it with the definition and paradoxically the more facts the computers right
36:54
Speaker A
are given so the more facts the computer is given notice how he shot he immediately leaks Heidegger to a computational psychology and the critique of it alright the more facts the computer is given the harder it is to compute what is relevant to the
37:13
Speaker A
current situation you get into combinatorial explosion if you stay at the propositional computational level and you lose your ability to fit yourself to the current situation to cope with the current situation this is why Dreyfuss because of Heidegger was
37:30
Speaker A
one of the has was one of the founding and remains one of the ongoing critics of a cup eur a purely computational cartesian approach to cognitive science to AI to artificial intelligence he literally wrote the book entitled what
37:47
Speaker A
computers can't do that founded this whole right criticism of computational psychology it's considered the discovery of the frame problem within cognitive science he later updated it with a later book called what computers still can't do this has been an ongoing thing he
38:08
Speaker A
sees Heidegger as the deep floor Runner of the criticism that we should understand the mind only in propositional computational terms this is why Dreyfuss went on to pick up also work from Marla Ponte which I've referenced and helped to develop right
38:30
Speaker A
this notion of an optimal grip that I've discussed that length right optimal grip as a process that is doing this relevance realization and it is something that is deeper than propositional knowing so I'm trying to show you that right my attempts to
38:50
Speaker A
connect Heidegger who is a prophet of the meaning crisis to the machinery of relevance realization and participatory knowing an optimal gripping is not misplaced Dreyfuss is not a single figure there are other figures like this see the work by Dreyfus and
39:09
Speaker A
Charles Taylor retrieving realism about how we can get back to really be in contact by making use of these ideas I'm going to keep doing that I'm gonna keep showing you because what I'm trying to show you is that the framework we have
39:28
Speaker A
built allows us to enter into deep dialogue with the central prophets of the meaning crisis in a way that I think insightfully discloses aspects of their own theorizing and affords potential eason optically integrating them together into a more comprehensive
39:45
Speaker A
response to the meaning crisis this is the final part of the argument I'm making I want to continue on do a little bit more about Heidegger and leading into the other thinkers we want to examine so evens in his wonderful book
40:03
Speaker A
the new gnosis in which he talks about Heidegger Corbin Jung Hillman right it's a book in which he links Heidegger to korban into Jung and he puts it this way when he's discussing Heidegger's thought okay here's a quote again it picks up on
40:22
Speaker A
something we've already been talking about here's the quote a questioning that involves the questionnaire in the matter of thought so deeply he becomes in a sense one with it at the point at this point knowing is no longer divorced
40:36
Speaker A
from being we know the way we are and we are the way we know in the Platonic tradition this is expressed in the axiom light can only be known by like he is pointing directly and this is not
40:48
Speaker A
something you get in Heidegger but that's why I turned to avens right he's pointing to how Heidegger's actually bringing back this deeply in the Neoplatonic know in platonic idea right of knowing of participatory knowing as a deep kind of karna forma t between you
41:07
Speaker A
and the world and this is a participatory knowing that is a dynamic coupling now even's immediately points and connects this kind of participatory knowing this dynamic coupling like knowing by like and reality is dynamic so you have to be
41:29
Speaker A
dynamic and dynamically coupled to it right he immediately points from Heidegger to korben korben is deeply influenced by how to grow Corbin was one of the first important translators of Heidegger into French his translation of introduction to metaphysics was seminal
41:48
Speaker A
for how Heidegger was spread into France for example but high Corbin explicitly calls this participatory knowing that is a dynamical coupling a dynamical conformity right he explicitly calls this gnosis term we've already examined right gnosis for Corbin this is quote is
42:11
Speaker A
a here's the quote a salvation all redemptive knowledge because it has the virtue of bringing about the inner transformation of man sorry for the sexist language on his part it is knowing that quote changes and transforms the knowing subject you see
42:28
Speaker A
it's that dynamical coupling in which you know by being coupled to something and it's participatory knowing because you know it insofar as you are changed and your knowing of yourself and your knowing of the object are coupled together but that is what you need to
42:43
Speaker A
respond appropriately to Jacques design look you are the being who's being in question and by questing into that you quest into being you are only going to get a response to that quest when you add something that simultaneously in an
43:02
Speaker A
inter penetrative into a 14 fashion is both knowing yourself not your autobiographical knowing knowing the depths of your being knowing yourself and knowing the world coupled together mutually affording each other that this is what Corbin is calling gnosis and
43:18
Speaker A
this is what he's saying he's getting from Heidegger now let's take a look at what we've done so far and I want to show you how these two things are not right irrelevant they're deeply relevant to each other
43:41
Speaker A
you've got Dreyfus over here and the whole aspect of relevance realization and Dreyfus is clearly pointing out that this is no on Proposition all coming from Heidegger non-computational in the sense where computation is the inferential manipulation of propositions
44:06
Speaker A
to dry out implication relations and then over here you have Corbin and he's calling all of this gnosis this participatory mutually self and world transformative kind of knowing but what Corbin is doing with the gnosis that isn't apparent in Dreyfus is that he's
44:37
Speaker A
pointing out how this is redemptive how it saves us right remember the Gnostics are trying to free us to liberate us from existential entrapment so Corbin is pointing out that how this Corbett is making explicit that this machinery that
44:52
Speaker A
we're talking about here is a way of responding to the modal confusion it is a way of responding to the forgetfulness of being it is a way of awakening from the meaning crisis so let's try and do this again a little bit more carefully
45:19
Speaker A
so I do this a little bit more carefully what is this forgetfulness this modal confusion okay so on one hand we have the being load and remember from ultimately gets this from Heidegger as does Steven bachelor being mowed the
45:40
Speaker A
having mode do you see what I'm trying to do though I'm trying to show you how seamlessly you can interleave this language right from Heidegger with the language we've been developing in the second half of this series okay so the
46:02
Speaker A
being mode so what's going on in the being mode the being mode is the transformative participation in the mystery of being okay that transformative participation and the mystery of being right this leads of course to Alafaya which I've discussed
46:25
Speaker A
right and there's two components to this that we've discussed there's the attunement right but there's also the independence of being right I think the attunement clearly points to relevance I've already argued that repeatedly I hope I don't have to argue it anymore
47:02
Speaker A
but this independence of being this is independent right of the correlation between us and being that being always transcends how it is being known and being experienced by us this is the more nests that withdrawal that is simultaneously present and so that's
47:22
Speaker A
what I almost made a mistake sorry about that right the more nests is simultaneously with the presence of the shining right this I think is what Harmon and others would argue ultimately gives things what I don't want to say
47:48
Speaker A
all of their realness but an important pole of their realness that we have neglected so you can see what I'm trying to point there's I mean the word I would you know it might even seem natural to put here right of the independence of
48:11
Speaker A
being its truth but that's not quite right right because we've seen that truth belongs up here in the discussion of Alafaya or even higher up in the correctness of our propositions based on Alafaya right so this is relevance and
48:29
Speaker A
what am i stopping here because remember we don't want to confuse relevance and we don't want to disconnect relevance from truth or realness right and I want to put to something deeper here that the relevance must always be right open to
48:45
Speaker A
and not remember not just as an acknowledgement as a limit it has to be an ongoing constraint the relevance has to have an ongoing constraint right in its connectedness to a sense of the more nests the inexhaustible nests
49:01
Speaker A
of the thing beyond itself so what would be going on over here in the having mode and where we're getting the modal confusion so now we think of an object we think of its being in terms of how it can be manipulated by us not
49:32
Speaker A
just physically conceptually remember this is the the quintessential point of the having mode we have control we can we can grasp it we can manipulate it we can use it we're not confronting mysteries we're solving problems and so
49:46
Speaker A
what happens when we get into the having mode into conceptual manipulation and the halving of propositions and we forget the being mode and all of this over here what can happen to us well and this is one of hydras main
50:00
Speaker A
critiques we start to miss understand in a modal sense you start to misunderstand being as a right particular being we misunderstand being as a being so I'm using being as a with a capital B to being being where I'm using a little B
50:23
Speaker A
to mean a particular being like this you know marker or this eraser or this body right and then we misunderstand the attempt to try and get back to this by positing it with it this is a modal confusion we try
50:47
Speaker A
to capture which with something's wrong just thinking we're not quite getting being with a big B when we look at this being or think of being as a particular we've got to do something more and so it we'll do is we'll put it to the limit
50:59
Speaker A
I remember what Heidegger says that's insufficient we'll understand being right as right as the Supreme Being the highest being the highest subject perhaps the highest person the highest force the highest thing and for Heidegger this is the ultimate modal
51:28
Speaker A
confusion for this is to try to turn being in a problem being into a problem that can be solved by the conceptual right manipulation of a propositional a defined object and of course what's being alluded to here is classical
51:48
Speaker A
theism z' sort of traditional presentation of God now whether or not this is going to be fair to how many people have just written about God we're gonna come back to that when we talk about Tillich and Barfield Heidegger is
52:01
Speaker A
certainly right that there is a long-standing tradition within metaphysics understood in a pejorative sense in which God is understood in this limit sense God is understood within the having mode God is understood as the Supreme Being that somehow grounds and
52:17
Speaker A
makes right all other beings and this is a fundamental mistake for Heidegger there's a fundamental misunderstanding it's a fundamental problem so this is known as the problem of Anto theology where we try to understand being theologically in terms of a Supreme
52:42
Speaker A
Being and for Heidegger that and this may strike many of you who come from religious framework as you know almost bordering on offensive I'm trying I'm trying to present in a way I think that's more accessible to you that's not
52:57
Speaker A
the case right but what Heidegger is saying I'm sorry it's not the case that I what I I misspoke there it's not the case that you should simply I'm sorry I'm not I'm stating something where I should be requesting something that's
53:12
Speaker A
why I'm stumbling I'm requesting of you that you are not simply offended that you try and understand what Heidegger is trying to articulate here right because he's going to make this claim and here's the claim that you might find offensive
53:25
Speaker A
that there's a deep connection between the understanding of being in terms of the Supreme Being God Anto theology and nihilism this is this is Heidi to try to articulate nietzsche and reaches another big influence on how to do understanding
53:46
Speaker A
being or the ground of being as a supreme being on to theology is the deep forgetfulness that just cause us existentially right adrift in modal confusion and fundamentally miss framing our relationship to to being and therefore being subject to a
54:06
Speaker A
disconnectedness from realness which is at the heart with the meaning crisis so Tillich is going to pick this up gonna be deeply influenced by hiding it but also I think I'd prefer Tillich to Heidegger and there's also personal
54:26
Speaker A
reasons for that Tillich was the first non-jewish academic to be basically well persecuted by the Nazis because he from the very beginning opposed them and resisted them he had to leave Germany because of that unlike Heidegger and this is not something you should dismiss
54:45
Speaker A
like some people do and I want to return to it discuss it later Heidegger joins the Nazi Party and becomes an official member an official within the Nazi Party and that is something to pay attention to and it's fair to bring this up because
54:57
Speaker A
Heidegger presents his entire position as an existential one not just a theoretical one and if you try to dismiss his participation in the Nazis by just saying oh but that has nothing to do with his theory you have
55:10
Speaker A
sort of fundamentally missed how he is involved with the very presentation of his own theory now Tillich is gonna take up nevertheless Heidegger's critique of Anto theology but he's going to do something very interesting with it he's going to use this as a way of bringing
55:29
Speaker A
back the very traditional religious notion of idolatry and what is wrong with idolatry so next time what I would like to explore with you as a way of developing further what Corbin is talking about with gnosis and gnosis as
55:48
Speaker A
serious play I want to try to finish up what would it be like to have the gnosis to remember to remember being through Alafaya what would it be like to be remembering being threal affair what would that be like how would we be how
56:07
Speaker A
would the world be to us and this is a way of trying to say what it would be like to experience the remembering that is a way of awakening from the meaning crisis thank you very much for your time
56:21
Speaker A
and attention [Music] you
Topics:HeideggerphenomenologyHusserlDaseinparticipatory knowingmeaning crisisexistentialismBeingonto-theologynihilism

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