Heidegger & Technology

In this essay I am going to look at Martin Heidegger’s critique of the essence of modern technology as “enframing” outlined in The Question Concerning Technology. Ultimately I hope to defend the notion that Heidegger’s critique will not fit into a technological determinist framework.

Before we begin, a crucial notion in the philosophy of Heidegger must briefly be made clear. In Being and Time Heidegger distinguishes between the being [sein] of something, and beings [seindes] in general.[1] The disanalogy between being and beings is called the ontological difference. For Heidegger, one cannot get at the essence of what a thing is (the being [sein] of beings [seindes]) by looking at and listing the properties of the thing itself as it appears already intelligible. For this reason the being of beings is not a simple distillation of essential properties identified in a group of objects which are then organised into a genus (Heidegger, 2010).

Things are not, for Heidegger, directly intelligible to us – we must have a mode of access to beings in order to achieve intelligibility at all. To make this clearer, consider how it is only by having a pre-conceptual understanding of how something can be for something that any given thing can be understood by us as something with-which we might achieve some end. This “being-for” in general is understood by us pre-conceptually by means of our fundamental dependence upon beings in order to do things we need to do. It is an irreducible aspect of our facticity that we need more than our bodily appendages to make music, to cook, or even to survive at all (King, 2001). Our very relationship to technology emerges first of all from this fact.

To give an example of how intelligibility is secured by understanding the being of beings, consider how the mug is intelligible to us as something which we might drink out of. This results from a possibility of being that we have already built into us – namely, that we drink things. The being of beings we make use of for-the-sake-of all types of ends is accordingly understood in advance as readiness-to-hand [zuhandenheit]. With the being of equipment as ready-to-hand we see quite clearly, then, how “the being of beings is not itself a being” (Heidegger, 2010). Understanding the being of something as ready-to-hand is an order quite distinct from knowing the properties this thing can exhibit (e.g. that the hammer is too heavy) in the practical context made possible by that understanding of the thing’s being.

The significant result of Heidegger’s ontological difference, then, is that things can only demonstrate what they are within an a priori understanding of their being. You could not understand how the coffee mug could be unsuitable for drinking out of (perhaps it has a series of fissures in it) unless you already understand the coffee mug in its being as ready-to-hand (e.g. as for drinking from). The fissures as they are perceived demonstrate their very meaning for us against the practical context in which they are involved and which is already understood by us before we apprehend the coffee mug itself. In this way our understanding of being grants us our mode of access to beings and enables them to demonstrate their properties to us.[3]

The later Heidegger, however, is not so much interested in these ahistoric existential features of man, but rather in the historic disclosures of being [sein] which grant us intelligibility. That we have a relationship to technology as a result of our always-already being delivered over to beings by virtue of our fundamental dependence on them is an ahistoric fact of human life. How this relationship is manifest, Heidegger holds, is not ahistoric. Heidegger begins his critique of modern technology by affirming the ontological difference, still present in his philosophy, asserting that the essence of technology is not itself discoverable in any particular item of technology. What Heidegger has in mind by the essence of technology is a historic a priori understanding of being [sein] as apart from the particular qualities of those items of technology revealed within this understanding of being.[3]

Heidegger considers at first an anthropological definition of technology, that technology is characterised in its essence as means to ends. Heidegger considers this definition correct but not true in that it captures an aspect of the phenomenon but does not penetrate to its essence. The anthropological definition is untenable as essence of technology. The essence of technology is rather grounded in how technology reveals beings. The essence of technology, he says, is truth (Heidegger, 2009). Things are still understood by us as being something with-which we might achieve some end, however the specific character of our understanding renders salient different aspects of the beings understood. It is by virtue of these different aspects of beings which are revealed by different historic understandings of being that, for Heidegger, makes the anthropological definition untenable owing to its inability to account for this revealing.

It might be objected at this point that as the anthropological definition is correct from epoch to epoch that it is itself in fact the true essence of technology. However, as we will come to see, this presupposes an understanding of making present which Heidegger does not accept. The very notion that what is guaranteed in beings (their unchanging, calculable qualities) is what is essential to them is a principle which is only present in Heidegger’s philosophy insofar as it stands as the subject of a fundamental rejection. What is essential to a thing is its condition of possibility. As the anthropological definition cannot discriminate between what makes a given epoch’s technology possible it cannot, for Heidegger, be its essence.

How, then, is technology related to truth? In approaching this question it will be helpful to follow Heidegger in comparing the understanding of being which underpins modern technology with that of previous technologies. We’ll borrow an example from Lee Braver who compares the farmer who looks after the crops in his field with someone who grows crops with hydroponics (Braver, 2009). The farmer who tills his field does so in a receptive manner. They plant the seeds in the soil and then leave the forces of nature to unfold themselves - the rain, the ecology of the soil, organic processes, etc.

Now, the farmer might intervene in some way by uprooting weeds which begin affecting their crops (or something similar) but they are in each case letting nature come forward in embracing her powers. The hydroponic grower, however, has broken nature down into its constituent parts and “unlocked nature’s energies”. Hydroponics even eliminates the need for soil as the relevant nutrients and pH balancing chemicals have already been extracted from the natural world and stored for just such an occasion. In fact this breaking nature down into its most malleable and useful form, energy, and storing it is for later use is one of the chief characteristics of enframing (Heidegger, 2009)

What is manifest in the two different technologies are two different understandings of being (unconcealment). In the case of the farmer, nature is revealed as something to be respected. The way of the natural world is not interrupted – the farmer goes to the field and lets nature be. This mode of unconcealment Heidegger calls poiesis, i.e. bringing-forth. The hydroponic grower, however, has intervened in nature, has taken it apart and distilled the essential processes in order to grow more efficiently. This Heidegger calls enframing i.e. challenging-forth. The crucial distinction between poiesis and enframing is captured in the phrase “to grow more efficiently”. Whereas poiesis is a bringing-forth, enframing challenges nature. It wants to break nature apart and make its processes lend themselves to more immediate availability. Heidegger’s discussion of Aristotle’s four causes may help us further distinguish the two modes of revealing and in this way come to see enframing in a clearer light.

Aristotle discriminates between the formal (the form of the coffee mug), the material (the matter which assumes the form of a mug), the efficient (the hand which created the mug), and the final (ithe reason why a mug is) causes. The understanding of causation manifest in pre-modern technology is captured by the Greek term “aition” which derives from “aitios”, i.e. “responsible” (Heidegger, 2009). Accordingly, each of the four causes are understood as mutually responsible for any given being under poiesis. The understanding of causality which goes along with enframing, however, stresses the efficient cause as primary – it puts the human being at the front. Braver observes that, despite the enframing attitude which reveals nature as something to order around, we are still in fact dependent upon what we inherit from the natural world. If nature herself did not grant it possible to remove the soil and simply fasten the roots of a plant in nutrient-enriched water, hydroponics would not be possible at all (Braver, 2009).

Despite the fact that this is so, it is not the accomplishment but aim of enframing to control nature. Even though enframing is still rendered possible by the factical being [seindes] of nature itself, and even if enframing feels itself as opposed by, or even pressed upon by nature to control it, it is the feeling of this opposition which manifests only in enframing. If the hydroponics researcher acts in full understanding of their having to deal with their factical inheritance, the thrust towards greater forms of control is nevertheless manifest. It does not matter to enframing if absolute control is ultimately unattainable.

Enframing, then, as the essence of technology is an understanding of being [sein] which reveals beings [seindes] and makes them intelligible in a certain way (specifically, as that which is ours to command). Enframing reveals nature as a “gigantic gasoline station” (Braver, 2009). Everything must be immediately available and readily calculable. Heidegger mentions Werner Heisenberg’s lament that the subject matter of physics in no longer even the object but is mathematical formalism (Heidegger, 2009). Even human beings are understood with respect to this historic disclosure of being, evidenced in the term “human resources”. Zygmunt Bauman in fact even sees modernity as the condition of possibility for the concentration camps of the Third Reich – a consequence of the way of ordering expressed in the modern understanding. This is one aspect of the “danger” Heidegger sees in enframing. The other aspect of the danger is in the forgetting of being, a common theme in the later Heidegger, present in all understandings of being hitherto inherited.

Heidegger has it that all ways of understanding being (ancient Greek physis, Medieval theism, modern enframing) have an uncanny way of forgetting being (Braver, 2009), which is to say, any way of achieving intelligibility forgets that it has gained its understanding of beings [seindes] in a particular way. The illusion is that things just are the way they stand in a given mode of unconcealment, and that the reason they are grasped by us in this particular manner is that we have direct access to them as they are. The actual fact of the matter, according to Heidegger, is that we can only reveal one aspect of beings at a time. Beings for the modern age, then, are those which are under our command.

Another difference between the Heidegger of Being and Time and the later Heidegger is that the later Heidegger sees the understanding of being as given to man rather than as emerging from man’s existential structure (Braver, 2009). Heidegger has it that enframing as understanding of being cannot be changed by mere human effort:

“[…] the essential unfolding of technology gives man entry into something which […] he can neither invent nor [...] make.” (Heidegger, 2009)

Man is commanded by being to command nature - the irony, of course, is that man has no choice in this (Braver, 2009). This way of speaking would certainly at least suggest that Heidegger is a technological determinist. Technological determinism is defined as “the claim that technology causes or determines the structure of the rest of society and culture” (Dusek, 2006). On page 312 we even see Heidegger affirming that the possibility of a radar station emerges from a meeting of technical-industrial production processes (Heidegger, 2009). It might seem to follow from this that the patterns of societal discourse rendered possible by such a technology (the necessity of building stealth aircraft, the possibility of detecting airborne invasion, etc.) are ultimately founded by this technology.

As we cannot actually stop enframing by a will to mastering technology (as this simply expresses the attitude of enframing and therefore undercuts itself) it would seem that the essence of technology will continue to unfold in this way and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. The hope Heidegger identifies is that we cultivate a receptive attitude to being [sein]. We ought not to hope to change our mode of unconcealment - we can only become aware of it as one way of many in which we can reveal beings. The fact that enframing propriates as a way of grasping beings Heidegger hopes is the key to its solution – that it can still be grasped as historic understanding of being and not “how things absolutely are”, even if we cannot change it. However, what it is crucial to realise about Heidegger’s account is that it’s unconcealment itself which is what’s essential to technology:

“Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology.” (Heidegger, 2009)

It is not technology per se which determines our way of revealing but the essence of technology which is our understanding of being (and accordingly the condition of the possibility of the particular artefacts of technology manifest through history). Whereas a type of Marxist might say it is economics which drives society, and therefore also technology, I feel that Heidegger would have rather said it is being [sein] which drives society (and therefore also technology). Although technological determinism does not necessarily presuppose autonomous technology, it does suppose that it is technology itself which motivates societal structure and progress. This conclusion, I feel, is anathema to Heidegger’s critique.

Technological determinism itself has come under fire by those who champion the social determination of technology. Val Dusek recommends that assessments of social or technological determinism ought to be handled on a “case by case basis”, and voices scepticism regarding a homogenous technological or social base (Dusek, 2006). Contrary to this, I contend that Heidegger would see both the technological and social as deriving from unconcealment. We recall that not just items of equipment are intelligible to us in the unconcealed region, but people are too (Heidegger, 2009). Braver identifies enframing even in the structure of teaching which he says:

“[…] has become the academic ‘business’ ruled by the need to reduce waste and maximize output.” (Braver, 2009)

Heidegger’s resolution itself is curious. If there is hope in our becoming aware of enframing as one of many ways of having access to beings, presumably Heidegger must feel that we as human beings have some way of moving our understanding of being. If our understanding of being as being is any hope at all for us and not merely the way in which we at last discover the inevitable force of our doom it would seem to follow that this very awareness itself has some impact on our understanding of being. But what could Heidegger mean, if this was so, by the claim that no human action itself could possibly overturn the way in which we see things? How could cultivating a sense of the historicity of being really change anything? I freely admit that I do not know how to answer these questions.

In the foregoing we’ve identified in Heidegger’s work the “turn” in which he no longer proceeds from the existential structure of man but from the historic disclosure of being. Through this we have followed the consequences of this change with respect to his view of the essence of technology as delivered historically from being. In identifying being in Heidegger as the source of intelligibility, we’ve seen an interpretation of Heidegger which does not, on Dusek’s definition, render him a technological determinist despite initial appearances to the contrary.

- Jordan Adshead (October 2011)

Bibliography

Braver, L. (2009). Heidegger's Later Writings: A Reader's Guide. Continuum.

Dreyfus, H. (1991). Being-in-the-World. MIT Press.

Dusek, V. (2006). Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction. Blackwell.

Heidegger, M. (2009). The Question Concerning Technology. In M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (pp. 307-343). Routledge.

Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and Time. SUNY.

King, M. (2001). A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time. SUNY.

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[1] The English language does not discriminate between “being” as sein and “beings” as seindes. Where this distinction must be made salient, I’ve included the German term in brackets.

[2] It’s important to make clear the notion that readiness-to-hand is not the only understanding of being we have available to us. Against other understandings, other properties not related to a context of use are able to become salient.

[3] At this stage in his career, Heidegger often expressed “understanding of being” by “unconcealment”.

The Problem of Epistemology

Epistemology as a branch of philosophy (roughly, the study of knowledge) is unclear. Where other disciplines and sub-disciplines have delineated regions between statements about the subject and statements about the fundamental nature of the subject (i.e. between mathematical statements like "2 + 2 =4" and meta-mathematical statements like "what is the possibility of axiomatising arithmetic?") epistemology appears to have no such distinction. Insofar as epistemology makes clear the structure of knowledge and belief it says something about knowledge, like whether knowledge is closed under known entailment. But when the sceptic's question arises, "how do I know that I know?", we proceed into meta-epistemological territory.

Meta-epistemological territory, then, asks questions about how knowledge is possible. But insofar as epistemology carries within it a bias of the Western rational tradition it overlooks the original phenomenon of world which renders things intelligible (and thus ultimately knowable). It sees knowledge as the primary mode of access to beings, underpinning all possible activity (knowing how to ride a bike, for example, is considered a sort of unconscious knowledge as opposed to practical know-how - the distinction between propositional knowledge and practical understanding is not there). For this reason a distinction between first-order and second-order statements cannot coherently emerge, because knowing how you know is seen as the only way to get at the understanding that you know.

However, once the ontological ground has been cleared it's then possible to ask meta-epistemological questions about intelligibility, and what is given over to knowledge. For instance, Samuel Todes refines Merleau-Ponty's researches into the role of embodiment in intelligibility by pointing out that the forward-back, up-down, and other spatial "categories" delivered over to our understanding non-cognitively (i.e. prior to knowledge) enable us to understand more complex concepts (like the "forward" arrow of time, or higher and lower values). As this understanding is not first given over by knowledge but is grasped initially simply by virtue of being embodied it cannot be susceptible to the sceptic's touch. Mental content, such as propositions, are only possible on the basis of non-cognitive worlded activity. Conscious, knowing experience is not primary as knowledge is a founded mode of being-in-the-world and as such cannot make sense of itself.

Not being able to know that the world is real is not a problem as the world is in fact given along with the possibility of having representations at all. One can only pose the sceptic's question if they see themselves primarily in the mode of knowing (which is not the case) and thus owning the sentiment that you can only get at the reality of the world through knowledge itself. As we have modes of access to beings which are not propositional in character (using them, or being them as in the case of the orientation of the body) we can be sure those beings are indeed there. Accordingly, if the preceding estimations are correct (owing to Heidegger's phenomenological account) it is in fact no problem at all.

With its ontological foundations in place the region of discourse available to epistemology is clearly defined. Second-order statements about the ontological-existential possibility of knowledge are released from being appraised by the same modes of investigation as first-order epistemological questions about knowledge itself.

Heidegger's Public World, Other Minds, and the Possibility of Automatons (Part I)

I’ll begin by briefly setting out the epistemological problem of other minds. The problem originates from Descartes project of systematically building a picture of the world up from a minimal basis on which he could be certain. Having previously stripped away all beliefs which were vulnerable to scepticism he sought from there to found knowledge on a secure epistemological basis. The founding stone of Descartes epistemic reconstitution was the cogito, the famous philosophical adage which goes “I think, therefore I am”. The cogito is supposed to reaffirm for us that, as the subject of a given mental state, I cannot be sceptical about the existence of a subject having that mental state. The self is inseparably given in any intentional act as that to which the intentional act refers. The existence of the res cogitans is, for Descartes, secured on that basis.

The other minds problem, then, proceeds from these grounds and attempts to obtain knowledge about the minds of others. As we in fact have no such first-person access to the minds of others, we cannot guarantee that the minds are “there”. When we start from the experiences of a subject and intend to build ontology from that point “outwards”, we find ourselves stuck in a sort of solipsism. All we have is the knowledge of our mental states. The epistemological character of the problem of other minds is thus rendered clear.

Heidegger’s objection to the problem is ontological (Hall, 1980) in that it does not discuss epistemological access but rather seeks to ground the problem in the existential-ontological structures which make possible an understanding of the world, including the other people in it. To understand Heidegger’s objection some preliminary remarks are required. What Heidegger does is to demonstrate the priority of what he calls being-in-the-world over detached propositional knowledge. In Being and Time he conceives of knowing as a founded mode of being-in-the-world and not as the primary way in which beings become intelligible to us. The idea is that in order to be able to know any being, the being must first have touched upon us or become relevant (intelligible) to us in some way on the basis of how it fits in with a possibility of our being. For example we may use a hammer for-the-sake-of building a shelter and find it too heavy, or eat a mango for-the-sake-of nourishment and find it delicious.

What being-in-the-world amounts to is the various possible ways a human (henceforth understood as the way of existence known as Dasein) can be. Dasein can build things, drink things, prepare things, drive things, watch the sunset, appreciate art, navigate its way about the world, etc. The notion that knowledge underpins these ways of being as the original mode of access to them is disturbed by Heidegger’s phenomenological account of everyday being-in-the-world.

It’s fairly obvious that most of the time when we use the keyboard we do not own any mental states whatsoever. Cognitivists tend to think that such practical skills result from unconscious calculative processes involving inferences based on beliefs and desires (Dreyfus, 1991). However it’s easy to find skills we have simply learned non-cognitively by imitation and trial and error, and not by means of acquiring a set of beliefs and inference rules. If it can be said that we unconsciously believe that “doing so-and-so” will make the wheels turn we already presuppose practical know-how in helping ourselves to understanding how to “do so-and-so”. So this being able to “do so-and-so” must be grounded in propositional knowledge itself, devoid of any practical content if the cognitivist is correct. What would this pure propositional knowledge look like if it could not assume as its content non-cognitive abilities like "doing so-and-so"? I can think only of the formalism of logic and mathematics as modes of knowing which do not ultimately presuppose this kind of content and so accordingly don't solve the problem (more on the dependence of propositional knowledge on being-in-the-world in the next two paragraphs). But as we don’t have to work through the complex of differential equations involved in turning a bicycle, we in fact don’t even have to know the equations at all (Andler, 2006).

We just do these things - our bodies can assume what Merleau-Ponty called "sets" to deal with our environments and others. Other examples are certain social norms, such as intuitively (non-cognitively) grasping the appropriate amount of distance to maintain between yourself and another person (Dreyfus, 1991). This skill requires a kind of sensitivity to context - a sensitivity which draws upon much more than cognition. More often rather how you feel is significant. Just consider the various distances you maintain, without thought, between lovers and friends, or teachers and colleagues, and how these distances differ from situation to situation. Accordingly this skill cannot be learned in terms of context-free rules and in fact presupposes an involved, concerned participant (or participants). The difference between knowing-how and knowing-that we have thus indicated is detailed explicitly in other places (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1987), but a more in depth discussion here would take us too far from our primary purpose.

So we see how being-in-the-world cannot be made intelligible on the basis of propositional knowing-that. This results from the notion that the existential-ontological foundation of knowledge itself is actually this being-in-the-world. Detached, speculative thought must use the significations which arise from this sort of original involvement as their content. For instance, you cannot come to grasp the fact that “this radio is broken” without having the way of being of Dasein. Only by being so constituted as to intend upon something as a piece of equipment which makes sense in terms of some purpose of Dasein (for playing music, the news, etc.) can we ever understand what it would mean for something to be broken or too heavy or boring (Dreyfus, 1991). Only through our having involvements in the world can things be relevant to us and thus secure their intelligibility as radios or as bikes and keyboards.

But, Heidegger says, our being-in-the-world is essentially a being-in-the-world-with-others. The equipmental nexus inextricably tied to purposes of Dasein through which we come to have a self includes reference to other Dasein. The roles which Dasein takes upon itself (tacitly or explicitly) in being a nurse or a professional tennis player bear explicit reference to others, both in terms of any equipment they use (which can also be taken up and used by another Dasein) and in terms of the others which the roles would not make sense without (like patients and sports fans to the nurse and tennis player respectively). We encounter other people first and foremost not in the detached mode of speculation Descartes was in when he wrote his philosophy, but as engaged participants in a public world. By starting with the detached individual, Descartes had already taken a wrong step, as the world and the others are pre-given before he detaches himself from them to reflect on things in the mode of knowing. Here he believes himself an isolable subject without epistemological access to other minds. If Heidegger is correct the ontological structure on which he deliberates means he always already is in the world along with others. We are, Heidegger has it, all constituted by a shared horizon of intelligibility strung together by roles emerging from concerns and involvements of beings with the same way of being as us.

Heidegger’s argument is not supposed to provide a response to the problem of other minds on epistemological terms. By demonstrating that prior to detached speculation the others are already given along with the horizon of intelligibility (the others indeed mutually constitute that very horizon of intelligibility with their purposive concerned involvements). When we get our ontology right, the question simply doesn’t manifest. We are not first and foremost, contra Descartes, a separate I which thinks, but are rather before ourselves in activity. However, the possibility of automatons makes a robust argument against Heidegger’s ontological argument. The logical possibility of non-Dasein which nevertheless behave like Dasein threatens the whole enterprise. If we can establish beyond logical possibility the notion that we may be in a public world populated by automatons which behave like-Dasein but are not-Dasein, then the traditional epistemological worries resurface at the fundamental level which Heidegger appeals to in order to avoid them.

Effectively what we’re asking is if it’s possible to have a simulation of the entire dynamic public world, a simulation not strung together by significance at all but by a sort of behavioural mimicry. The question on which all of this turns is a demonstration that such a complex simulation would not be possible without those participants having the way of being of Dasein. If we can establish this (and only if we can) then Heidegger’s ontological argument has successfully caught traditional epistemological worries in the bud. Working out these questions will be the aim of the following part.

- Jordan Adshead (September 2011)

Bibliography

Andler, D. (2006). Phenomenology in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. In H. Dreyfus, & M. Wrathall, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (p. 390). Blackwell.

Dreyfus, H. (1991). Being-in-the-World. MIT Press.

Dreyfus, H., & Dreyfus, S. (1987). Mind Over Machine. The Free Press.

Hall, H. (1980). The Other Minds Problem in Early Heidegger. Human Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, 247-254.

Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and Time. SUNY.

On Heidegger's "Being and Time": Critique of Descartes (Study Notes #1)

I've decided to post some of my study notes to Heidegger's Being and Time in the hope that they'll be useful to others who are studying the text as well. Please be aware that as these are study notes and not essays they will be devoid of much if not all comment and criticism. Their aim is simply to enlighten the text. As such they presuppose some familiarity with the special language Heidegger established when he wrote the book. The first set of notes I'm going to post up here are notes which should accompany the critique of Descartes (the mid-section of the fairly large third chapter, "The Wordliness of the World") which is the place where Heidegger branches off from what had hiterto been the Western way of thinking and situates that understanding of being in a broader horizon.

René Descartes understood the being of beings as substance, and the essential quality of substance, he argued, is extension. Descartes articulates being into three substances, res extensa (Matter), res cogitans (Mind), and the ens creatum (God). The ens creatum is the perfectly self-sufficient substance (the metaphysical "God", not the religious god). Heidegger notes that Descartes himself admits that he sees no way that the idea of substance as a determination of all three articulations of being could be reconciled, as the res extensa and the res cogitans are not substantial in the same way as God which is wholly self-sufficient. The idea of substantiality is, according to Heidegger, already clouded by this inability to characterise all three of Descartes' articulations of substantiality.

With his determination of being as substance nevertheless settled, Descartes goes on to affirm the long-held philosophical distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The example used is that hardness and resistance can only be understand as modes of the extensio - that two bodies can only "have" resistance as a result of their relative velocities and trajectories means that if the thing you attempt to push moves at the same velocity at which your hand pushes, there is no resistance. Yet the things still have their bare objective presence in terms of their extension. Descartes would have it that other modes of the extensio (colour, weight, etc.) can similarly be demonstrated to be modes of the extensio through which the primary, objective presence as extension remains.

Descartes' conclusion is obvious, the essence of being lies in its extension and accordingly its objective presence. All other properties are modifications of substance as extension (Aristotle, in fact, came to the very same conclusion). The proper mode of access to beings is not, then, through sensuous apprehension which does not deliver beings over in their "in itself" but only in their relation to an embodied human being (useful, not useful, hard, soft, etc.) Accordingly, this would require the elimination of qualities apprehended in this way (from the perspective of Dasein in its everyday world) from our ontology. The proper mode of access to beings is the intellect, which can separate these contextual and "subjective" secondary qualities from the more primary qualities of extension.

However, Heidegger, as a phenomenologist, is keen to disagree. In fact, he believes that what Descartes is doing with his ontology is an impoverishment of our understanding of being. Hardness is not just the objective presence of two beings meeting each other with opposing velocities. It certainly is that, but not only that. Without Dasein nothing like hardness can be discovered. Only by being so constituted as to intend upon things can something like hardness be disclosed. It's through our involvements with things that we can discover hardness as the hardness of steel or marble which we are attempting to fashion into a blade or statue. Hardness as discovered in this manner is a far cry from the objective presence tale Descartes has given us.

What Heidegger wants to make clear is that the being of beings is much more than what we get when we look at the modifications of the extensio. Equipment, for instance, cannot be grasped against the horizon of substantiality. The hammer's "for-ness" will not be captured in a collection of objective facts regarding its extension; hardness, weight, and colour. This is why the tradition has superimposed values on top of the pure objective presence of equipment to explain its readiness-to-hand. For example, we consider the knife "good for cutting" and attach this value predicate onto the objective facts about it. But what Heidegger is trying to get us to see is that the knife is originally apprehended as a "for cutting" (depending on the context in which the knife is encountered) and that our reconstruction of the knife through superimposing value predicates onto objective facts is only possible against the prior understanding of the knife as the "for-cutting" without which no such reconstruction would be possible. So we see that the knife has already been made intelligible to us as the "for cutting" (again, the mode of being of Dasein and context of use determines which aspect of the knife's being is presently disclosed) - how we have arrived at it as mere objective presence is (as the foregoing chapters have demonstrated) as a result of a suspension of Dasein's everyday activity.

But when we are in our everyday mode we catch sight of equipment as equipment, and not as this objectively present entity with value predicates attached. It is intelligible to us at first by being relevant to a possibility of our being (perhaps cutting up a nice t-bone steak) and is accordingly discovered by us in its handiness. Hubert Dreyfus has it that Heidegger does not want to deny that the objective facts enable the knife to be good for cutting or the hammer good for hammering. As Magda King points out, it is an issue of how the "being there" of things is intelligible to us - and this intelligibility is only possible on the basis of their being-relevant to our being in some way so that they can become involved and we can subsequently discover them.

Heidegger drops a few hints towards the end of this section regarding the role of temporality in all of this. As Descartes is only willing to determine being as raw objective presence, as that which is perpetually guaranteed no matter the formal manifestations of it (remember Descartes was a monist, he saw the res extensa as one big substance - things coming and going are just manifestations of indestructible and ever present matter - only forms fade, matter itself does not). This is determining being as a mode of time (presence). Certain beings, like Dasein and equipment (probably animals too), cannot be characterised in this way as they are of a different mode of temporality. An essential structual feature of Dasein is its always being involved in some sort of activity - and, of course, the significance and dynamism of human activity is absolutely unable to be captured in a list of context-free, objective facts.

First-person, phenomenological access to beings, then, is important to the task of ontology as it discloses and reveals the being of beings in wider spheres than simple substantiality can, being as it is disclosed by an un-involved perspective of Dasein. The being of Dasein and equipment must be able to be articulated by a fundamental ontology, and so Descartes, according to Heidegger, fails to create an ontology suitable for describing the being of all beings. As he takes his point of departure from the being of an innerworldly being (substance) he cannot piece together the phenomenon of world which is essentially much larger then the extensio (and is rather the condition of intelligibility of the extensio), embracing the whole structure of for-the-sake-of-which's, in-order-to 's (with-which's and towards-which's) and the being of equipment and the being of Dasein therein.

Hubert Dreyfus holds that third-person, objective, scientific ontology in the manner of Descartes can offer causal explanations for how the things in the world (like knives, boats, hammers, orbits, nuclear reactors) work, but cannot tell us what they are. Only our first-person phenomenological access can disclose what things are, by being as such as to reveal them in their being through our involvements. To borrow Magda King's example, the apple tree could not be discovered as a source of food if it were not "in itself" handy, and if the fruit on its branches were not "in themselves" sweet and nutritious. But no list of objective facts regarding the extension of the tree could bring us to an understanding of its handiness - only intending upon the tree, as we do, can bring us to that kind of understanding.

Why You Can't Understand Anything By Reading Alone

In "Ecce Homo" Nietzsche suggests that you can only take from a book what you already have. Despite how dubious it might seem at first, given that the written word is there to convey information, and that it does in fact regularly convey information to people, I happen to think he's right. It seems paradoxical to suggest that you pick up a book and cannot grasp it unless you've already understood the content within its pages, but let me see if I can show you what is meant...

Words express significations which arise in our involvements with things. When you pick up a book to read it, the author (and you) assume some background familiarity with the meanings of the words in the book. However, what cannot be assumed is that you know what it is like to understand or encounter the phenomenon being written about. If you do not grasp what the author is trying to say (though you may be able to get a hold of it purely intellectually by simple virtue of knowing what the sentences mean) then you won't truly understand the significance of what is being expressed, though you may come to see it in future.

Phenomenology is the finest example of philosophy in my view because it encourages its readers to go out and check the findings of the text with their own encounters and see if the story fits. Not so much explicitly, but simply because the words cannot at all be understood without the reader's own first-hand experience. You cannot, for instance, see what Merleau-Ponty means for the body to be the basis against which space is intelligible without looking at how you yourself are able to grasp spatiality. Nor can you understand what Heidegger means by significance-whole without going and looking at your own involvements in the world and noting how significations arise from them.

One of the most important things my study of Heidegger has shown me is that first-person access to things is absolutely vital if you are serious about understanding anything. As Magda King writes, it is a habit of Western thinking to dismiss so called "subjective" understanding as superfluous or illusory - but if we could not let things be relevant to us by letting them be significant to our own being (reaching out to the apple tree for food for-the-sake-of nourishment, a necessity of our being) then we couldn't encounter them at all. But if the apple tree were not in itself available in this manner, with its ontic properties making it ideal for producing food, then it could not be understood as such. Because we have to access it on a first-person basis to understand this, i.e. by having to be such as to have nourishment as a necessity of your being, does not make it illusory or superfluous to understanding the apple tree. It's only on the basis of this first person phenomenological aspect with its world-disclosing activity that anything can be understood. Their relevance to our being is the first place our existence reveals innerworldly beings as what they are.

As this is so, to truly understand anything it does not do to simply read about it. As in Jackson's "Mary's Room" thought experiment, it is not enough to amass as many facts about colours in order to build up a picture of them. In "Mary's Room" we are to imagine a brilliant physicist by the name of Mary who can only see in black and white. She has an exceptionally vast understanding of all the factual elements which go to make up colours like red, green, yellow. She can recall at the slightest whim precise details regarding the wavelengths of certain colours, and all other physical facts regarding them. Yet she doesn't know what red or green or yellow look like. Mary has never seen reds or greens, and no matter how many facts she collects about them, she will never understand them because she cannot see these colours to experience them in a first-person aspect.

It's wise to remember that not everything about our understanding is factual...

The Meaning of Life

It's a question which has struck people for as long as I'd dare to guess and one which hits at the very ground of one's being - what is it all about, all this? Human beings are confronted directly by their own existence, coming into being just long enough to realise the very being they're profoundly aware of will not actually last. It's a gruesome prospect for sure, and anybody who doesn't stir in the face of death just isn't thinking about it properly.

The long adored mechanistic interpretation of the world, the idea that the world is made up of simple atoms moving in a void giving rise to the emergence of all kinds of weird and wonderful phenomena, fans the flames of existential dread. Ultimately the universe machine will fail - we know that what comes up must come down, and that before we can even witness the shit hit the cosmic fan we'll either have obliterated ourselves through nuclear war, our sun will have died, or some other scenario you can imagine which sends an unwelcome chill down your spine.

But far from a simple spinal shiver, these sorts of notions can call into question the very meaning of life itself. What is the point if it is all literally going to be blasted to atoms before the possible summa exstinctio of the universe as a whole takes place at some point in the future, long after we are extinct? Indeed, even if the immortalists manage to secure the biological process which stops ageing, I wouldn't be too optimistic about the follow-up project aiming to reverse the universe's trend towards entropy.

It's something of a blessing and a curse to be able to look ahead in these ways. On the plus side we can plan ahead and make sure we take a piss before hopping on for that 6 hour coach journey, anticipating the future discomfort which may be wrought upon us - sat fidgeting and becoming intensely annoyed. On the other hand it lets us see what our life's work will ultimately come to - a harrowing prospect for those who want lasting results from their labour.

So what is the meaning of it all? I don't pretend to be able to give you a definitive answer, but I hope what I do have to say at least keeps the creeping backdoor nihilists at bay for a while. The idea struck me that to ask what the meaning of life is, is to assume that life itself takes place inside of a context which encompasses it and gives it meaning. The meaning of any piece of equipment, for example, is the context into which that piece of equipment fits. Without the pen (and paints, pencils, etc.), without writing (and painting, drawing, etc.), without human life itself, the paper means nothing. But with all of these things the paper can mean something. Meaning is given by this phenomenon, what Heidegger called "world", i.e. the interconnected nexus of purposes and tools and people - something I write a lot about on this blog.

To ask about life itself having a meaning, there would have to be some similar sort of meaning-giving horizon which underpins life itself. As life per se was not created towards some end, and as there is nothing apart from life for life to be useful for, it looks like we might be asking the wrong question in asking what the meaning of life in general is (a kind of category error). If only things situated in a context can have meaning, perhaps we ought to ask a different question: what is the meaning of this life?

The simplest answer is that the meaning of your life is whatever you choose to do with it. The meaning of your acts is determined by how they fit into the world, what they do. And how you choose to lead your life prefigures the meaning of certain concrete acts. But... is there really any point if it all dissapears? This idea plagues collectors and hoarders of all kinds, and is rooted in what I consider to be a very backwards view of temporality.

Remember when you were a child, and you built that big lego house (or whatever) but later on it was smashed apart and returned to a state of chaos inside the toy box? Remember how you didn't give a shit and built a better one later? This, I feel, is the meaning of that old maxim "life is play". If there is one context into which the whole of life fits, it is that of change. Everything in life changes (from people to passive substances) and to fight this fact is to defy the metaphysical grounds of life itself. Enjoy building and creating - after all, it is the best part. Once something is attained, we just end up wanting something else anyway. That's just how we are. When there's nothing left to do, nothing left to chase, life gets boring. Accordingly, then, the very idea that something only has meaning when its presence can be guaranteed indefinitely is, to put it as plainly as possible, horse shit. If anything, things threaten to become meaningless when they can be guaranteed to stick about like a drunk on a bus and never change.

My advice, then, is to discount[1] the mechanistic picture of life and it's nihilistic consequences (unless, that is, you fancy yourself a bit of a tragic type and want to spend your life sobbing into a notebook or something). It is a view of the universe which is based on the ultimately meaningless motion of matter in space, and as a result cannot penetrate to the meaning of human life which is essentially not characterised by matter in motion, but by the significance resulting from our involvements with things. Don't worry that it'll all be dust in the void one day because if you're reading this you're still lucky enough to have time left to do meaningful things.

[1] When writing this, it didn't seem to me as obvious as it does now that this could be seen in some way in which I would not like to be misunderstood. I am absolutely not writing off the (in my view, indispensible) value of being able to see things in such scientific terms, only that we ought to remember that this way of seeing the world is a modification of a more primary way of viewing things and so we should take care that our lives be understood in terms more suited to appreciating them. Human life cannot be adequately grasped in terms of the motion of bodies in space as other phenomena can.