Not School Digest #3: The Future of Work, Blood Meridian, Embodied Mind, and Heidegger

0:05 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life Not School Digest Number three. My name is Mark Linsenmayer. What you're about to hear are excerpts from four discussions held in recent months as part of our Not School offering. Topics you'll hear about here include Fritjof Bergman on the future of work, Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, Philosophy of Mind by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and some more about Heidegger's essay on humanism. What is Not School? If you go to partiallyexaminedlife.com and become a PEL citizen, cost just $5 a month or get a discount and get $50 for the year, then you can take part in online discussion groups.

Now some of these just use forums, but many of these culminate in a recording like the ones you're going to hear now. Since these are often recorded by the citizens themselves and even the case in the one I recorded, I did it in kind of a quick and dirty way as compared to the way I do a normal episode. So no, the sound quality is not as good, but they're a lot of fun to participate in and a lot of fun to listen to. And you can hear the full length versions of all four of these discussions right now by becoming a citizen and going to the Free Stuff for Citizens page.

And of course you'll additionally have access to around a dozen other recordings of this sort. And more importantly, you can take part in this kind of discussion yourself. Not school study groups are formed every month based on the interests of citizens. You could sign up right now and go propose a group for September.

1:26 Unknown speaker: If you get at least two people

1:27 Mark: to sign on to read something you want to read or watch something you want to watch or listen to something you want to listen to and talk about it, that's a group. If you're not sure about all this, go take a look at the video tour I posted so you can see the site before you sign up. First off, we've got about 10 minutes of a discussion that I took part in about the future of the job system, which is actually going to be a topic for an upcoming full pel episode. So I led this group to read one of the readings that we'll be reading for that larger episode, which was the introduction to Fritjof Bergman's new work, New Culture. The participants, in the order in which you'll hear their voices are me, Jason Durso, Kari Robertson, Leland Gregory, Andrew Miles, Michael Burgess, and Tammy Gottschling.

2:07 Unknown speaker: It's a Matter of Human nature is such that the Present state of wage slavery. I guess that we're in just the entire focus of our lives is supposed to be on our jobs and, and our societies are centered around the job system. That, that is not a healthy thing. And it might seem like you don't need a lot of philosophical heavy lifting to motivate that point. You know, the mass of men live in quiet desperation.

2:29 Mark: That whole thing back to Thoreau.

2:31 Unknown speaker: Yeah, but he doesn't really, it's not particularly whiny in the tone that he does. It doesn't seem like we don't want to continue working because work sucks sort of thing. It's not an early 90s pop punk sort of revolt. It's I think a little bit more comprehensive than that, which is refreshing, which is great.

It doesn't seem like a revolt against the idea of working. It's a revolt against the idea of letting capitalism be the driving force behind how we organize work. He wants to organize work essentially on a means that deals with the needs and desires of more people individually than it does for just an isolated group of people doling out the organizational method to lower people in the hierarchy.

I thought it was like a really cogent look at where things are going, where things are headed. The natural tendency of capitalism to eat itself eventually due to automation. I don't think you can make a lot of arguments against what he was putting forth. And I especially liked his bit on like how socialism is not even, it's a dirty word in America. Right. You can't even say anything anti capitalism. It's just rejected at the outset. And I think that sort of ideological closed mindedness prevents us from moving the ball forward at all.

Yeah, I like. In addition to that, it was disturbingly prophetic in the sense, you know, this text being written in 2003 and he's saying in the next 10 to 15 years you're going to see this sort of thing, this sort of thing and most of it he just hit it right on the head. I thought it was fairly interesting. In addition, the way in which the alternatives that he presents to this whole capitalistic sort of self consumption weren't the kind of Mark Twain esque romantic like just focus on the work as you're doing it and it'll become more tolerable or more enjoyable.

He really is trying to set up some sort of systemic thing that doesn't ditch the idea of work or even work for an end. He doesn't seem to have a problem with like working for a specific goal. It was a refreshing sort of Sidestep from the socialism, I guess, dogma that you normally hear. So I think he's really trying to re situate socialism as a conceptual map.

He doesn't like the way that socialism has been framed, at least in the American conception, the way that American media and so forth has put it out. So he's trying to author some kind of alternative that doesn't have the baggage of what's currently considered socialism. His endeavor is like with I want to introduce one of the things that he had, which is the high tech self providing concept, which is something kind of crossing over a technocratic idea with a sustainability subsistence idea. Those are the parts of his venture that I think really might have some substance to take forward.

What I always got out of taking classes from him is to establish what is the goal, what is the utopia first. And this is supposed to come straight

5:19 Mark: out of this Nietzsche analysis, Sartre and

5:22 Unknown speaker: Hegelian analysis of human nature. And then you worry about the means. Whereas Marx, if you emphasize too much who owns the means of production, or we can't produce things through capitalism because competition is bad or something, that is all putting the cart before the horse that you need to figure out first what the goal is, which is we need to have a job system that makes people feel more energetic instead of destroying them. So that's the big thing. Even if you don't agree with anything methodologically, he put forward just let's agree on that and then we could have a conversation.

I think that what he's saying is that new work is a means to an end. It is the horse. New work will get us to the place if we are ourselves in this way, then we can create a society in which you aren't forced to work menial jobs. Because without certain capital constraints we'll be able to have automization take care of, you know, 95% of the work. We only need so few people that it'll then allow people to then direct themselves in work. Not that once everyone has no need to work, we won't work. He's saying that everyone will work. And what we need to do is find a way to organize ourselves to when there is no need to work so that what we're doing is actually motivated or moving towards some kind of goal. Which I think is a great idea.

I had a really big question about

this, which was if people become self

sustaining, why would anyone do anything constructive?

The sort of quick answer to that is he has an idea of in the ideal situation, you'd have three kinds of work that you'd be doing. One is this pursuing your calling, you know, and people don't know this to start with, that we are far from being selfish, self, self willed creatures by nature. We're very feeble and we don't introspect very much. And so it's, you know, you need philosophy or need other things to get you to think about what you really want to do. And when people feel like they don't have any choices, you know, that it's just really between should I be a doctor or be a lawyer or work In a fact, you know, that the array of choices on our plate is so limited that even for people that are doing economically well that we don't think about what we really want to do.

And so he's found through interviewing people and, and the work that the new work centers have been doing that actually you find the retreat to leisure to just wanting to lie around and play video games all day is more a reaction to this horrible job situation that if you actually can sort of clear your mind of just having the awful choices. And the choices are to either take one of the awful choices or do nothing. Just blow it all off and be a freeloader. If you try to figure out what people's callings are, then they actually will for the most part to have a meaningful life, want to do something productive.

So that's the calling part. And then there is like, you know, we're not getting rid of jobs completely. There's always going to be some amount of crap to do. Somebody's got to clean up the feces. But maybe there's a way of organizing that so that if the expectation was that you're not going to have to do that for 40 hours of your week, but that everybody is, you know, for 10 hours a week, you have to do the social chores. And I think he's open to different ways that this could be organized. It doesn't necessarily have to be the government assigning jobs or something.

It could just be the expectation is everybody just like the expectation now is everybody has a full time job, 40 hours a week. Let's just change that expectation over time so that it's, you know, more like 20, more like 10. So there was that there was the busy work and then there was the high tech self providing, which is the rest of, you know, part what would take up a lot of your time. And we do all this like in terms of we don't need travel agents anymore because people give their own time to going online and picking out what tickets they're going to buy.

Like this is something that's already happening. And the more technologies we have, you know, as we know, the information economy has let us do a lot of things, like what travel agents used to do. But the manufacturing economy is the part that he doesn't think has been replaced. And so that's where all this decentralized fabricators and the new things that will clean up your water supply, where all that stuff comes in.

Yeah, I think all that ties into how do we get away from the current system. Right. And they were talking before about you can't just kill capitalism, right? You can't like stab it and then put something new in its place. What it is, is it's exactly like new technology, right. When the iPhone comes out, it's like, holy shit, this thing. Awesome, I need it. Right? That's what we need in terms of some sort of productive organization. We need something where people can get together, they can produce like that. And other people look around and they're like, oh my God, this is obviously so much better. Let's just adopt this, right? And in that way then people will want to, I mean, they'll be more motivated to work, they'll want to engage in that instead of this, oh, which sort of 40 hour shitty job do you want? Which is not very motivating at all.

It's also better on the whole. I mean, there's actually a perfect quote that ties into all of this. Everything that Mark just mentioned on page 40. I mean, this is in the demise of the left section. But he says regardless of what group or enclave or camp one visited, it was the defense of jobs or wages or the barrier against drilling oil in a region or against the technology. Reactive and defensive and therefore forever close to a mood of retreat. And I think that that's, I mean, if anything we're looking for the redemptive message in here. It's absolutely that it's getting away from retreat, getting away from this idea that you want to battle capitalism and moving more into productive modes and productive in the very human sense on the sort of basic level, just making something better.

You know, the iPhone of economy, that's what we need.

I economy.

Yeah.

There's a couple of things to say about Marx's input on this before we get too blurry. So Marx outlined three mod the production, the capitalist, the communist, and the ancient. Now the ancient mode is actually kind of an American dream kind of mode where you're working for yourself and you may be working with your family, you may Be working off the land, or you may be producing something. And that to Marx was never capitalism. Capitalism was always someone is owning the work that you do and they're using you and they're not giving you the full value of your work. The kind of idea he's outlining here is, I think, quite close to what the American dream often is when it's presented. And it's quite close to what Marx thought the ancient pre capitalist way of working was. And he's trying to get back to that.

It has to be possible to situate it as like a dialectical sort of end between those, though, because one of the things that I think Marxism misses and one of the things that, like I said, distinguishes him from Marx is that he doesn't have this sort of inlaid opposition to work as such, because the detachment of your labor from its production, in a way, it allows you essentially to produce more. If you're not producing things simply for your family, you can produce things for a whole village. And that was kind of one of the underlying ideas of capitalism initially was, you know, Instead of having 20 people growing cucumbers for themselves, you have one person grow cucumbers, and then you have 19 other people who are now free to move on and do other things.

And socialism, in a way, attempted to regulate that under Marx. And I think that what he's trying to do is not say we need to get back to everybody growing their own cucumbers, but make it so that essentially cucumbers can be grown for you with this high tech option. And then you are still freed up in the same way that capitalism also freed you. I think he still sees something redemptive in capitalism.

I agree.

I think in the 21st century we have abundance. Okay. And I'm talking about America. I know that's not the case outside of America, but I mean, we have to get rid of the thinking that everything is scarce, that our jobs are alive and saying in the 21st century because of abundance. We need to reframe and kind of restructure, like you said, how we think of work and what we really want, what it means, the meaning. Now is the time to find meaning.

13:08 Mark: One of our most beloved, partially examined life episodes was from late last summer where we covered the novel no country for Old men by Cormac McCarthy. This selection surprised some people, even fans of McCarthy, because it's his earlier novel, Blood Meridian, that is most often talked about in philosophy contexts. Well, the ongoing Not School Fiction group discussed that. And on this clip you'll hear Jordan Payne, Nathan Shane and Dylan Casey starting their discussion with the Judge, a notoriously ruthless character who often in the book spouts a Nietzsche like philosophy.

13:38 Unknown speaker: I like what you said, Nathan, about him sort of binding men together. Often when we meet new characters, we get the two characters talking about the time that they saw the Judge. And just that kind of philosophy, or just presence is a thing that bonds men together. I don't know, that seems true to my experience of that. You know, certain kinds of things or whatever they are, if you've done a certain thing that it's a way that bonds people together.

There's this kind of refrain that's being said about people. Whenever the gang writes together, they. Yeah, it's page 152, he says. Conjoined, they made a thing that had not been before. And in that communal soul were waste, hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live. And as they ride through, they all have eyes looking out in the desert for threats or whatever vantage, and they are wiring together and they make this single resonance of witness that moves through the desert. And there's another moment where they're talking about taking pictures of people and that kind of writes you into the memory.

And people are tabernacled in each other in an endless complexity of knowing and witness. The whole witnessing is something I'd like to try and dig into out of the book because I think there's something else being said there. And this time it's not just the judge, it's also in the narrative a lot.

Well, what's on your mind there?

There's some kind of vision for humanity that there is a collective knowing entity that, you know, so if you kill someone, like that node disappears and kind of is absorbed into someone else. And there's this line where, you know, if two men are in a duel and they both were to shoot themselves, then they would just disappear without a third person. And that third person isn't a third thing. It's not auxiliary or less important, but it's the prime. It's what makes existence happen. And nothing occurs without observation or there's not existence as we know it without that kind of first person account.

The witnessing is your point?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's drawn out too, just in the fact of the setting of the book. I mean, the west is. It's desolate. And the only way that we're, you know, the descriptions of it, I don't know, they seem to be places. And this also goes with the sort of magical Realist sort of landscape or whatever. But the only way that we're given these descriptions is the fact that, you know, these people are there. It almost seems like a place that you would never think of if there weren't those people there.

Yeah. And after one of the slaughters, there's this passage, you know, in a circuit of a few suns, there would be no trace of the people that had lived here. And there wouldn't be a ghost or a scribe to tell anyone that this had existed. And it's interesting, though, that we read that, so we become that witness through this recounting. It's almost as if it's just an interesting way to put nothing. So no one knows about this. But that's a fact for us to know. And the witness of the narrative, or the authority of the narrative gives us access to this world that we wouldn't be able to see if it wasn't for it being recounted to us.

This seems to relate to what we were talking about earlier, of the meaning of history and fact with respect to fiction and lensed through the judge's speeches at the end to the kid about the nature of the past to the present. So the idea that you could have something disappear and what the role of witnessing it is.

Yeah, well, he says in that last bit you mentioned, the judge says, did you post witnesses to report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you put them? And then the kid says, that's crazy. And the judge says, is it? Where is yesterday? Where is Glanton and Brown? And where is the priest? And on like that. And then, you know, the kid says, I guess you can tell me. And then the judge has a really interesting bit here about falseness, which I think is also a big theme in the book. He says, I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question, those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right.

And thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always, who is a true dancer. And can you guess who that might be? And the kid says, you ain't nothing. And the judge says, you speak truer than you know. But I will tell you only that man who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart. Only that man can dance.

So this highlights the judge's notion that life is war and it's not sort of a simplistic. Exactly. War of all against all Hobbes sounds pleasant in this respect and in what you just quoted. It sounds as if there's only ever one truly living person, the one who's on top of the gore at the bottom of the pit.

Well, I remember from the no country podcast. I forget who said it, but it was an interesting question. Does this philosophy endear you to the warring lifestyle? Like, can you believe what the Judge believes without also having to go out and murder people?

So what would you believe that the

judge believes in order to do this? What philosophy could drive you mad? Like, you know, what would it be? Yeah, that's a good question.

Well, because his philosophy is not so much. It's just sort of. It would be the doing, Right?

Yeah.

And I found myself going through and wondering if you believe in that the philosophy is just in the doing or that the life is just in the doing. The Judge, at least. And I think Chigurh in no country for Old Men also goes this direction of it also being about beating and winning and killing. And so violence is not a manifestation of the judge's point of view or even Chigurh's point of view. It is the embodiment of it, the fact of it. It's not as if you could live another kind of life and be in the moment from the judge's understanding, you would have to be like him to do it. You couldn't be a priest and be like the judge.

Yeah, I think that you're right. If you wanted to say be like the Judge, but also have a job and you'd have to go in and clock in and listen to someone tell you that you were late. If you were late, I would agree

with that about having a job and stuff like that. But what if you were a kind of hermit or traveler or whatever? Could you be a pacifist effectively, or.

I mean, he does meet that hermit and the pacifists and people that warn him against war. I mean, there's people that just do war. I mean, David Brown is a warrior, but the Judge is something on top of that because he knows what he's doing and he can. He knows about geological time and the history of the universe and he still does what he does. It's the judgments of life that he gives. And his philosophies and sermons about things are all just kind of extra.

20:51 Mark: And I don't know.

20:52 Unknown speaker: But it doesn't make him different, I think, because he gets to stand apart with that knowledge.

Yeah. I think claim in the novel is that life is utterly violent and that living involves violence. And it's not clear to me if the judge is meant to be a kind of hero in this respect, or the kid or I mean, or anybody exactly is meant to be a hero or if it's more of a painting or a landscape of the way of living as war. I hesitate to take a kind of moral judgment out of it. I read a couple things that tried to set the novel as a kind of social commentary on interpretations of the west and stuff like that. It doesn't strike me that it's that kind of book, that it's trying to remind us of the authentic history of the west or something like that. There might be an aspect of it that has taken the notion of the Western as a genre.

And working with that, I read an interesting interview between two authors who were talking about Blood Meridian. And they were talking about essentially like what makes a good piece of art and politics and art. Because they precisely brought up that fact that the book's often read as some sort of social commentary about the Western frontier. But I'm gonna quote this because it was pretty good and it really is. It says that it. It takes up a subject matter that is inescapably political, but it builds a systematic violence. A work that comes to rest only in the territory of art, where the thing built is so elegant and strange that it cannot be justice or even really explained.

And I think that that's what does separate it from being sort of just like a polemic or whatever is that it does. You know, things come and go and it gets to sort of sit above those things. It doesn't have to try to be that, I guess.

Well, it stands on its own in that respect. I think that's one aspect of really good art and really good literature is that it has an internal integrity that doesn't make it subservient to some other claim or cause that it's trying to present.

22:55 Mark: Next we've got the latest recording by our philosophy of mind group, Philosophy in the the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. This excerpt actually starts out with Evan discussing a paper called the Brain's the Role of the Sensory Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge by Vittorio Gaese and George Lakoff. On this recording you'll hear group leader Evan Gould, Neil Earnshaw, Steve Lindsey and Michael Burgess.

23:21 Unknown speaker: It actually gets pretty detailed into analyzing different neural circuits and how they are activated in imagining motor movements. The contention is that the neural circuits that are activated in that imagination simulation are actually the conceptual symbols themselves, that there really is no need for duplication. So that is the brain, you know, that's what we're doing our thinking with. That's the idea.

That's brilliant. That's brilliant. I was sitting here thinking that the brain is a neural network, and I haven't met one philosopher that takes fuzzy logic into account. Not a single one. A neural network is a fuzzy pattern matcher. And I haven't met anyone who's addressed that in anything. You know, the physical nature of the brain, what that means for things like epistemology. You don't know a thing. You have a fuzzy pattern for a thing. And what does that imply? What does that lead to?

And it's a fuzzy pattern of fuzzy patterns as well, isn't it?

Absolutely. And all the time that we're trying to force ourselves to have concrete, solid, absolute facts, and it all dissolves when you drill down. You go quantum, and it's just like the weirdness.

Right?

And that's a good point, because the idea here in embodied cognition is that our conceptualization is based on the way that we act in the world and the experiences that are common to us and make us successful in the world. And so we don't interact with quantum level realities. We haven't had to develop sensory motor circuits to contend with those quantum realities.

I am an absolute fan of this book. I think it's a breath of fresh air with a philosopher and a cognitive scientist working together.

It seems you're talking about philosophy in the flesh.

Are you?

Mm.

Well, I think I really dislike the book.

I wasn't a big fan of the style of the book. I don't know if that's what you.

Oh, no, no. The substance. I don't mind the style. Oh, okay. To put it very simply, you were saying just before, you know, if we have certain structure to the brain, then that entails certain things for how we understand things. But it seems that's never applied. Retrograde. Right. So we're not saying the fact that the brain is such a way that means we can't even know about the brain itself. We're taking for granted all of cognitive science and all of the material of our analysis and saying, no, no, the rest of the world is something that is actually liable for doubt and needing more resolution and all these kind of things.

In other words, the subject of this book is really very, very, very far down the line from philosophy. It seems philosophy is asking the Questions about what makes this book possible, conditions for the possibility of knowing about the brain and knowing about various other things. And it seems like, first of all, that the author's largely unfamiliar with quite a lot of 20th century philosophy after Husserl, especially since they're doing very, very similar things from the point of view of philosophy. And he seems to have just sort of divided things into a kind of brash realism, which seems to be the most popular kind of realism, admittedly, and a kind of social constructivism.

And the middle ground he's arguing for, he's not doing. You don't even really need cognitive science to make that point. It's been made many times before and much better. And when you introduce cognitive science, I think you're introducing quite a lot of baggage in terms of things that you have to be fairly confident about without explaining how you've even got to these points in the beginning. So it's like saying, well, isn't empirical knowledge subject to all these things we know about the brain? But then you say, well, how do you know all these things about the brain?

And so on and so forth.

That's the beauty of it. It's a fuzzy system trying to look at a fuzzy system using fuzzy ideas and fuzzy patterns. But it's the best that we've got in terms of the empirical side of things.

So I think the question for philosophy, in particular metaphysics, is what is the starting point? What is the basic point from which we start? And then how can we derive from that starting point all the things we know? And it seems that there is a starting point prior to the starting point outlined here with the brain and so on, and that's just consciousness or the conscious experience and so on. And it seems like he's assuming a hell of a lot of epistemology and metaphysics before he's even talking about ordinary experience, if you know what I mean. So while I think I agree with quite a lot of it, I think the cognitive science detracts quite considerably from the parts that you agree with.

Well, what about its implications for abstract thought? In investigating this embodied cognition, we seem to be finding that our language, how we speak and how we think is also deeply related to our embodiment. And that can affect confidence in your own philosophical musings. So I think that that has a way of feeding back into your prior assumptions.

Well, could you give me an example of one you think is quite important about how embodiment affects language and so on?

Well, I mean, in the middle of the book, he goes through what five examples of major topics of philosophy and how the thinking of them has been shaped by our embodiment. He talks about time, the mind, causation. As we think about these topics, we have overlapping and somewhat contradictory metaphorical schemas that we use to think about these topics. So wouldn't it be interesting to see if some of our inferences that we make in those philosophical territories could be false inferences drawn from our physical embodiment, the generation of those metaphors?

So there's definitely a couple of things going on. One of them I would call phenomenology, which is basically you look at the content of conscious experience and you describe it. Now he's doing quite a lot of that now. All of that sort of stuff, you know, is still being done today and was done throughout the 20th century in phenomenology, in philosophy, looking at how people use language and how people describe things in relation to their experience. Now he's doing quite a lot of that now that I'm perfectly happy with. And then you add in this cognitive science part, which I don't understand really what that adds to this analysis.

I think introducing cognitive science makes the whole thing less valuable because it doesn't tell us about how we learn about cognitive science. It just tells us, given cognitive science is how we then approach every other aspect of our knowledge. And it seems to ignore the history of its own discipline that, you know, it seems to say we've been handed down by God, analysis of experience, and then we've just come to it with a tool set, and this is how we're going to apply it. I mean, if you can't give an account of how you can come to a description of the brain without already having a description of the brain, then there's something wrong.

You're not answering the same question that metaphysics is asking. Metaphysics is asking, you know, what is the starting point? And the starting point can't be a list of observations about the brain, because we don't start with those, we learn them, if that makes sense.

So what is the actual path out of that then? If you assume that you know, every

explanation that you're going to provide for

anything, it's always mediated in some way

by the fact that it comes through your conscious experience.

How do you ever actually make any progress out of that level of analysis?

It depends what you mean by progress. I mean, I don't think that one can step outside of the conscious experience. You know, there is no kind of what it is like to look at oneself being conscious that doesn't really exist. But I mean, consciousness isn't subjectivity. And I think that's the aspect of philosophy that's missing from this book. It's an awareness of the analysis of objective conscious experience. So when someone says, for example, suddenly a conscious experience has the ability to have an aspect to it which is completely objective, which doesn't depend upon whims, imagination and the rest of it that isn't deprived from it being conscious.

I'm conscious of the tree, but I'm in no position to imagine the tree away or the laptop or the whatever it is. So there is definitely the character to experience of it being completely objective part. Now if you want to then do science in that completely objective part, you know, that's fine. And that's largely what he's doing here, right? You know. Well, in part what he's doing here, part of what he's doing is metaphysics proper, which is just saying, well, you know, look at how conscious experience relates to us. I mean, you know, there's. We have a position in the world, we have a body, there are things ahead of the body, there are things next to the body.

You know, we know we have a self, we have this perception of time and so on. And that's all well and good, but then when you're trying to say that all of that sort of stuff is explained by some objective part, then you kind of have to set up a relationship between the explanation and consciousness. And you have to say the explanation precedes consciousness. And I think that's the mistake that gets made. I think we have to. From a philosophical point of view, I should say, really what's happening is the explanation has been derived from consciousness.

It isn't actually producing it.

Does that mean that consciousness is forever

outside the purview of science?

Yeah, I think it is. I mean, science has to be reductive, right? I mean, it's, you know, you don't have doors in science, you don't have trees in science, you have. So I mean, a door is more than just a series of atoms that make it up. There are certain qualities to doors that make them doors, not just bits of wood. I mean, this is quite a lot of what he's talking about actually when it comes to categories, that there is some non reductive component to the way we categorize things in our experience. And then he kind of tries to say that, but actually that can be reduced down to some neural system.

I'm not convinced it can be, but it may have some relationship to a neural system. But in any case, there's no door in a neuronal system, and a science can't generate a door from a neuronal system. You can only say that if you find this neuronal system, then we can see that it will probably recognize a door, if that makes sense.

33:17 Mark: Lastly, we have an excerpt of the discussion back in March that Seth Paskin held on Heidegger's letter on Humanism. As you probably know, he just did an episode on this finally, and this discussion was the citizens opportunity to dwell with the text beforehand, because I'm hoping you've listened to that episode and Seth's excellent precognition for it. I'm not including any of the footage here that explains what the text is about, but instead want to give you the taste of the different perspectives that were on display here. From Marilyn Lawrence, a classics person, into Neoplatonism and such, and Ryan Mitch and Danny McKay, both of whom are very into Deleuze and Derrida and folks like that, who of course claimed Heidegger as their big influence.

33:54 Unknown speaker: Is it meaningful in this essay or is it meaningful in any other Heidegger that you've read? That it makes sense when he says, I'm not talking about understanding being through beings, like I'm talking about a hierarchy of animals or of attributes of individual beings and saying that human beings are the rational animal, the political animal, or the social animal, or the economic animal. And. But that we actually want to ask the question of what is the is of is, Right? What is the meaning of being? Does that question even make sense?

It did at one point in my life.

Yeah. Well, I think that it does seem that that's what he's trying to get at. But is it really possible, us being only these rational animals? Right. Can we actually go beyond that and try to discover an essence?

I do think he thinks it is possible. And I think he's actually either consciously or most likely unconsciously borrowing from Hegel and the idea of world historical beings. It's this idea that there are certain people who shape history. And for him, this is the history of being as it unfolds itself. You know, he singles out certain philosophers who have come to some disclosure or some unconcealement of being's nature, but it's incomplete and being is always receding. So once these things are spoken, it starts receding again, but it produced some new phase in this history of being. So I do think he thinks it's possible, but I think it's very rare. Too.

I think it's interesting how he kind of throws in a spike there against poetic foundation, it seems, when he's talking about technological mastery. And I think that some of the thought near the end of the essay was that, okay, we're in this new dawn of Techni right. Of technological mastery. And the poets had it all wrong. Because they were going back to some kind of ultimate God source. And we need to go beyond that. That was kind of my understanding.

So is he basically talking about the context and the environment. Like being is brought to. Or thinking is brought to bear by its context?

Let's think about it in terms of language. I think when he has in mind he talks about techneopraxis. Then he's thinking about language used to make assertions or propositions. Or the idea of we use language to communicate information. My goal in speaking is to get you to understand X. Or to communicate X, or to articulate Y. And if you think of poetic language. In contrast to sort of declarative language. You can kind of see where the poet isn't necessarily trying to communicate something specific. Or trying to get me to understand a particular concept. Instead, the poet is articulating some aspect of experience.

This goes back to why he's delving into these etymologies. Because when we have language that's born in the early Greeks. It had a very concrete sense to it. If you look at a lot of the early meanings of Greek words. They were all around military words and farming words. And things that were very concrete about the earth. That's one of the reasons why he keeps searching for these original meanings. Because they weren't nominalistic in the sense that a word is just a word. And you can replace it with any other word. Part of it is this privileging in terms of recovering or recollection of Being.

But he also talks about epochs in history. Like throughout history. Being does unconceal itself through the language of the time. And that language of the time is shaped by these eminent philosophers usually. So it's not like the language of the everyday people or anything like that for Heidegger. And I think what he's trying to do at the end in his later works. Is to create his own language.

He does mention in this essay. That what he set out to do in Being in Time. We haven't got there yet. We can't even get to that point yet. And I'm wondering if that's due to the limits of our language. The limits to the way that we understand Being. And by Trying to interpret this essay. Does it hold some golden key to help us get to that point?

It's got that quote that you mentioned, Seth, in the podcast about how the language was not up to par with being in time.

Yeah.

He talks about himself in the third person, which is disturbing. Like he's some sort of automaton. There's no I, It's.

It's uses passive language.

Yeah.

I would even characterize it more strongly than just passive. If you really believe, like Heidegger, that language is being speaking through you, or you're just sort of an instrument. If you're in the clearing of being, and you're in this pure, you know, authentic relationship with being, that language is a saying of the truth of being through you, then it is kind of prophetic.

Right.

To some degree. I think Deleuze talks about that language is like a prison. There's like a slave master relationship that people who have a larger vocabulary have over the people who have less vocabulary.

I think a lot of the post structuralists kind of took what we're talking about now that there needs to be some kind of violent thrust for us to reach another level of whatever. I guess we can determine it being right now. But it all falls back to this metaphysical idea of this is the progression of man and this is where we've gotten to this part. And what's the next horizon and how do we get there?

This idea of existence, the ekzistence, which is this being there in the presence of being or in the clearing of being. He uses the word immediacy. And it's this being immediately present in your whole being. So not distinguishing already, if you're distinguishing between mind and body, you're creating an artificial barrier that's going to take you out of the possibility of this immediate experience. Immediate experience. Ecstatic. Yes, exactly. The ecstatic experience.

The thing that comes to mind for me is when in the process of creating something, like the highest level for me of executing as a musician is not having to overthink what I'm doing. I'm performing and it's like a spiritual thing where I'm not having to think about what I'm going to do next. It's just unfolding and I'm almost like an audience member.

If we agree that he's made a problem statement and the essay is a working out of some articulation of what it's not what his solution is, not some articulation of why being trapped in the language of metaphysics. The history of metaphysics and language is bad if we believe that this meditative silence, this transcendental meditative silence somehow is a way to access that. Does it seem like he's on a project here to try to find a way to find a language that isn't metaphysical, that does speak?

Being says many times we should let beings be. Like, not let beings be for something else for some purpose or anything.

Yeah, that was another thing that I got caught up on. Beings be in being. Or I was like, oh, my God, okay, is his big hang up on technology. Just the thought that it's accelerating towards our abstraction, away from the context he

thinks it's stopping us from thinking. It's like completely taking over our essence. And if you look at developments after Heidegger with artificial intelligence, it's a little bit interesting to look at it in that perspective of how we treat technology and how it uses us rather than we just use.

Seems to me that he does predict some kind of violent event that's going to come out of the technological age, you know, whereas the random few or the chosen few, however you will, are going to come out of this and all of a sudden understand what he was trying to get at through being in time. And it seems like one of these byproducts of civilization, if you will, that we have to go through this to actually understand what he's trying to get at, the being behind a sign.

I'll just end by saying this for those of you who have never read Spinoza's discussion of the prophets in his biblical studies or biblical criticism. He says that it's not unusual that prophets who are from the country would articulate their visions from God in terms of sheep and grass and trees, and prophets from the city, you know, would use other sorts of metaphors. And I think insofar as Heidegger saw himself as a prophet and in a lot of ways maybe was prophetic in nature. The fact that his strengths and his limitations, which are related to his personal biography, are absolutely understandable. And you can read backwards through his life history and his biography and make a lot of sense of things.

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