That Which Takes Care of Itself

At some point in Antifragile Taleb says, 'as if the world needed to be governed'. He is referring to international institutions, and their attempts to control the world.

More specifically, he is referring to the spirit of interventionism that has so thoroughly overtaken the modern world.

My life, it turns out, is taking care of itself.

The more I learn to let go and see what is around me the more I see what it is that I must do, and the more I do it.

There is no need to make anything happen.

There is only what is to be done.

Can't Shake It

I can't shake the problem of authenticity and necessity.

It is such a thread in Collingwood's thought. The artist's work is absolutely necessary. Dutiful action is absolutely necessary.

Is there more than one authentic action open to a person? Or is there a single action that is most authentic?

Ugh.

Can't shake it.

Inner-Directedness

I'm reading The Closing of the American Mind.

I like it quite a lot.

Allan Bloom wanted to preserve the idea of the philosophical life. He believed that value relativism was threatening the American democratic spirit.

I was just reading a chapter about Nietzsche and the rise of value relativism.

Something about how inner-directedness seems impossible to us.

I think it is possible.

Moreover, I think it is singular.

Inner-directedness does not produce alternatives. Inner-directedness produces definite direction.

Definite, particular, direction.

To act authentically is to act in the only way that we can.

To act authentically is to act necessarily.

Inner direction does not know of alternatives.

Finding Balance in The Venture, Turning to The Open, Becoming Human

1. Being After The Enlightenment: Modern Man in Opposition to The World

Martin Heidegger believed that the West’s commitment to the principles of the natural sciences has alienated us from the nature of Being. By accepting the natural sciences as the only form of knowledge, and in attempting to found society on pure reason, we have forgotten what it means to be human. We are no longer at home in the world, fully situated, as other animals are. We have tried instead to place ourselves above and outside the world. We no longer regard ourselves as part of nature. We no longer dwell in the Open. We seek to dominate nature through science and technology, hoping to find shelter and protection in objective modes of thought. Our commitment to reason and representative modes of thought means that we are “not admitted to the Open. Man stands over against the world. He does not live immediately in the drift and wind of the whole draft” (‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry Language Thought, 106). By thinking scientifically, and more importantly, by thinking objectively, we have alienated ourselves from the experience of Being in the world.

Our withdrawal into science, however, has offered little protection or relief from the difficulties of Being. On the contrary, science has plunged us into a deeper state of confusion, into a destitute time in which we “have not yet come into ownership of [our] nature,” where “Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. Love has not been learned” (Ibid., 94). In short, our quest for scientific knowledge, while incredibly fruitful in some regards, has left us alienated from the human experience, unable to cope with the bare fact that we are in the world. Since the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific method, Western Man has not sat comfortably in Being. 

Perhaps the natural sciences just need more time. Perhaps at some point in the future those methods will be able to answer the question of what it means to be human, what death means, why pain exists, and what it means to love. Heidegger’s wager, however, is that science will never be able to answer those human questions, and that answers can only be found in poetic and philosophical modes of thought. I agree with him, and am here to add support to this claim. 

I believe that science will always fail to answer these questions about the human experience because it’s methods are fundamentally reductionist. That is, science prefers to analyze things not in terms of wholes, but in terms of constituent parts. I believe that the natural sciences have provided us with a multitude of ways of explaining our behavior that avoid the raw complexity of the human experience. We speak of ourselves in terms of our brains, our genes, our chemical impulses. In doing so we avoid difficult discussions of our emotions and thoughts; we avoid the most human parts of ourselves in favor of cleaner, material analysis. We prefer to speak of ourselves as machines, driven by material processes, rather than as humans, driven by thoughts and feelings.

I personally believe that experience alone allows me to brush aside these types of mechanistic explanations of behavior. If you have no faith in your own ability to think and feel, then I don’t know what I can do for you. Consciousness and the human experience are self-evident to me. But if the experience of being human isn’t enough for you, then let me use a brief discussion of the idea of emergent properties to try and persuade you that it deserves it’s own terms.

I’ve done a little bit of reading about emergent properties and nonlinearity, primarily in Manuel DeLanda, but also in Nassim Taleb and Alan Beyerchan. The main idea is that natural processes cannot be represented in linear ways, they do not follow a simple A to Z development. This is because somewhere in natural processes properties emerge that are greater than the sum of their parts. Water, for example, is comprised of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule. But to learn everything there is to learn about water we cannot simply analyze what hydrogen is and what oxygen is. The nature of water is not contained in those elements alone, but in the combination of those elements and the way they give rise to new properties. The properties that are ‘water’ emerge out of the combination of those smaller particles. Water, being an emergent property of smaller components, thus deserves analysis on its own terms, and cannot be reduced to its constituent parts. Thus, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. All biological processes, too, are a great example of emergent properties. A heart, for example, is made up of certain kinds of cells. But we cannot fully understand what a heart is just by understanding the types of cells that comprise them. We would have to examine a heart as an emergent property of that combination of cells, discussing it not merely as a collection of a certain type of cell, but as a unique whole that deserves analysis on its own terms.  

Consciousness, emotions, and all the rest of humanity, I am claiming, is an emergent property of simpler material processes. What this means is that the human experience of conscious thought, feeling, and agency cannot be fully reduced to the brain, genes, or any other reductive mode of explanation. Just as water deserves to be analyzed as water (and not as 2 Hs and O), and hearts deserve to be analyzed as hearts (and not in terms of their constitutive cells), so too does the human experience deserve to be analyzed in its own terms (and not in terms of brains or genes). The notion of an emergent property shows that complex systems deserve their own terms, and that any attempt to try and reduce them to more basic elements reflects a misunderstanding of natural systems. I believe that the human experience of consciousness is one of those complex natural systems. It is an emergent property of the brain, and even though it can be traced back to the brain, it cannot be fully understood in those terms.

What, then, are the terms that the human experience deserves? Heidegger’s answer is that we need the language of poetry and philosophy. More specifically, Heidegger believed we needed to speak of life as a venture, as a process of finding balance in a world full of risk and uncertainty. These terms, Heidegger believed, sit more comfortably with the experience of Being, and can allow us to be more human. To develop these terms is to try and counteract the epistemological domination of the natural sciences that has seized the modern world. This is about epistemological balancing.

2. The Venture and Being In The Open

The problem, therefore, is that modern man’s relationship to science has plunged us into a state of nihilism. We are groundless, unable to understand how one belief is superior to another. God is dead, and we killed him by means of rational inquiry. Here we are, fearful, godless, hopelessly relativistic, and staring into the Abyss. The task of modern man, for Heidegger, is to turn away from the Abyss, to rediscover a kind of ground for Being. The turn from the Abyss, he believes, is a return to the Open, to the Venture that is life in the world. Moreover, it is poets and artists that are to aid us in this task, for being “a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods” (Ibid., 92). We must find a way to be human again. We must find a way to return to the Openness of the Venture.

The Venture is one of Heidegger’s crucial ideas. I believe that the Venture is comparable to the idea of a nonpredictive view of the world. It is a way of characterizing life as a journey, an unpredictable movement. If the problem with the modern view of the world is that it embraces purely rational and predictive views of the world, then the task is to develop a different view of the world, one that is less reliant on reason and prediction. The idea of the Venture is meant to show us see that man cannot place himself fully in opposition to the world, and will never be able to fully control it. For “Nature ventures living beings, and ‘grants none special cover’.... Plant, animal, and man... agree in this, that they are not specially protected” (Ibid., 100). To be in the world is to be at risk, to hang in the balance. Heidegger also says, however, that “those who are not protected are nevertheless not abandoned. If they were, they would be just as little ventured as if they were protected. Surrendered only to annihilation, they would no longer hang in the balance.” (Ibid., 100-101). To embrace the Venture, then, is to embrace life as a risk, as an unpredictable process, a path to be courageously embraced for all its peril.

By embracing the instability of the Venture, however, we gain a new kind of protection. We find ourselves more at home in the world, more comfortable with the uncertainty that will constantly confront us. We embrace the perils of the path, we make the perils our home. “What is ventured,” he claims, “can follow the venture, follow it into the unprotectedness of the ventured, only if it rests securely in the venture. The unprotectednes of what is ventured not only does not exclude, it necessarily includes, its being secure in its ground. What is ventured goes along with the venture” (Ibid., 101). The way to recover the ground that the Enlightenment stole from us, the way to turn away from the Abyss, is to be found in the venture. As he said, what is ventured is necessarily secure in its ground. That which is ventured understands that there is no stable ground, that the world will never be predictable, and that we will never understand it. Yet, paradoxically, comfort with the instability of life is a form of stability in itself. 

Embracing the Venture, then, is about accepting life’s groundlessness, and finding that this acceptance is a new sort of ground. Comfort with fluidity provides a unique sort of stability. Heidegger also expresses this idea by discussing ‘the shieldedness of the open’

In our use of scientific thought we have placed ourselves above and outside of the world, hoping that our objective modes of thought would provide us some sort of protection from the ‘Open’ of the world in which all other animals dwell without choice. Paradoxically, placing ourselves above and outside the Open has left us less protected, less able to deal with the difficulties of Being. Heidegger borrows this concept of the Open from the poet Rilke, and draws on his letters to explain its significance. In a 1926 letter Rilke explained the Open as such: 

“the animal’s degree of consciousness sets it into the world without the animal’s placing the world over against itself at every moment (as we do); the animal is in the world; we stand before it by virtue of what peculiar turn and intensification which our consciousness has taken.... By the ‘Open,’ therefore, I do not mean sky, air, and space; they, too, are ‘object’ and thus ‘opaque’ and closed to the man who observes and judges. The animal, the flower, presumably is all that, without accounting to itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when one human beings sees his own vastness in another, his beloved, and in man’s elevation towards god” (Ibid., 105-106). 

The crucial thing to note here is the relationship between consciousness and the Open. Rilke believes that man is not welcome in the Open because our consciousness underwent a certain ‘intensification’ that caused us to engage with the world in terms of the representation and objectivity. Our habit of engaging with the world as object has caused it to become opaque and incomprehensible to us. Instead of being in the Open, we attempt to use the world for our own purposes, engaging it as raw material for our own self-assertion. 

That is to say, we prefer the technological domination of nature over being in the Open. The heart of the matter is the representative, scientific, modes of thought that emerged out of the Enlightenment. Our habit is to transform the world to make it fit the image of our minds. “To such a willing,” Heidegger claims, “everything beforehand and thus subsequently, turns irresistibly into material for self-assertive production. The earth and its atmosphere become raw material. Man becomes human material, which is disposed of with a view to proposed goals. The unconditioned establishment of the unconditional self-assertion by which the world is purposefully made over according to the frame of mind of man’s command is a process that emerges from the hidden nature of technology” (Ibid., 109). Thus our representative modes of thought close us off from the Open, blind us to the reality that we already are, and hardly need to make ourselves into anything. It is this resistance to the Open that causes modern anxiety and distress. It is this turning against the Open that leaves us groundless in our being: “What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man’s being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects. But the peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed continuing of relentlessness of the fury of self-assertion which is resolutely self-reliant” (Ibid., 114). It is the fight against the Open that leads us into the Abyss, that leaves us groundless. 

To be in the Open is thus to belong to the world, to not regard it as raw material for domination or control, but to see it as the ground of our Being that needs no willing. But how does the Open offer a protection all it’s own? 

The protection that comes from the Open is the protection that comes from being in touch with reality, with what is. In scientific modes of thought and in technological willing there is a denial of what is in favor of what could be. As Wendell Berry argued, scientific and technological language can never be fully in touch with reality because it necessitates “talking about, if not in, the future, where” things are not: “All the grand and perfect dreams of the technologists are happening in the future, but nobody is there” (Standing by Words, 60). It is in the nature of scientific and technological thought to close us off to the present, to estrange us from reality. This is why Heidegger claims that objective thought “blocks us off against the Open” (‘What Are Poets For?, 117), and why going along with the venture makes “a secureness for us in the Open” (Ibid., 118). The shieldedness of the Open is thus the protection that comes from a knowledge of reality. Or, as Heidegger puts it, “To turn into the Open is to renounce giving a negative reading to that which is” (Ibid., 122). 

I fear I’ve been repeating myself. But the point is that Western man needs to reject the unhealthy habit of objectifying the world and the people around us. We need to overcome the form of thought that, ever since the Enlightenment, we have been addicted to. For so “long as man is wholly absorbed in nothing but purposeful self-assertion, not only is he himself unshielded, but so are things, because they have become objects” (Ibid., 127). We need to find a way to be in the world again, and not set ourselves over and against it. In short, we need to find a way to be connected again, to love again. I believe these concepts of the venture and the turn into the Open embody this hope and desire for love and connection. 

3. The Open and the Venture as Connectedness

The true significance of the idea of the venture and the Open is that they allow us to talk about love and connectedness in ways that scientific language cannot. All of these quotations and my writing feel opaque. But there is something honest in the way Heidegger is speaking. There is something about the human experience, something about love and connection, that can only be discussed in poetic and philosophical language. It is this spirit of connection and love that I want in my own life. This spirit of connection, however, does not stop just with connections to other people, but extends to the entirety of the world. It is with this idea of the Open that we see Heidegger’s desire to feel a connection to all that is. 

That Heidegger’s philosophy is fundamentally about connectedness becomes clearer if we reflect on his relationship to earlier philosophers. Hubert Dreyfus argues that Heidegger’s philosophy was conceived directly in opposition to the Cartesian tradition, which reached its pinnacle with Edmund Husserl. Husserl founded his philosophy on the distinction between human subjectivity and the objects being observed. Most philosophy since Descartes, in fact, has assumed that knowledge must grounded on the distinction between subject and object. Heidegger, however, challenges this distinction between subject and object. He wagers, instead, that humans are far more connected to and embedded in the world than the subject/object distinction implies. When we are living and things are going well, we do not feel separate from the things around us, we do not experience ourselves as subjects examining objects. We feel a flow, a connection to what we are doing and to the people and things around us. 

It is this feeling of connectedness, this experience of being in the world, that Heidegger is trying to articulate. The task of being in the world, however, is not a simple one. It is incredibly difficult, especially as modern beings. We have forgotten how to dwell, we have lost touch with what Heidegger refers to as ‘the simple unity of the fourfold’: earth and sky, divinities and mortals. There is a simple unity to being that is somehow lost on us. “This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold. Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. But the basic character of dwelling is to spare, to preserve. Mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being, its presencing. Accordingly, the preserving that dwells is the fourfold” (Building Dwelling Thinking, in Poetry Language Thought, 148). For Heidegger there is no denying our connectedness to all that is, and therefore no need to distinguish between subject and object. That distinction only reinforces the perceived separateness between us, others, and the world.

The challenge, Heidegger argued, was to learn to dwell. In his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ he argues that we have misunderstood the relationship between dwelling and building. Western thought assumes that we build in order to dwell, that first we build homes and communities and then we dwell in them. For Heidegger, however, dwelling must precede building. It is by learning to dwell, learning to be in the world and belong to it, that we truly begin to build: “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build” (Ibid., 157). This is because dwelling is “the basic character of human being” (Ibid., 146). Only by learning to dwell to we become comfortable and stable in the fourfold, in the simple unity of the world. Once we become comfortable dwelling, building will take care of itself, it will emerge organically from our belonging to the world. Once we recognize that we can only “build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling,” we will begin to feel a connectedness to the world that will bring us far more authenticity and love (Ibid., 159). Once we have learned to dwell we will learn about another part of ourselves: the “invisible innermost of the heart” where we are “inclined toward what there is for [us] to love: the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come. All this belongs in the widest orbit, which now proves to be the sphere of the presence of the whole integral draft” (‘What Are Poets For?, 125). In dwelling in order to build, in the Open and the Venture, we find a deep spirit of love and connectedness that can never be understood through the language of subjects and objects. 

I have been deeply impressed by my contact with Heidegger so far. I have only begun to skim his work, and look forward to delving deeper into his thinking. Above all, I am excited to see that his philosophy is eminently human, and poses a serious challenge to the distinction between subject and object. I agree with him (and others) that the West’s commitment to scientific/objective modes of thought has ravaged our culture. There is a need to rethink what it means to be human, to relearn to connect to the Open, to reinvent the idea of love,  and to learn to set out into life as a venture. In short, I want to know how to embrace life’s uncertainty with a spirit of connection and balance. 

The next step for my thinking is to explore the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and other philosophers that I’m fond of. In particular, I want to see what will happen if I pass Heidegger through the prism of R.G. Collingwood’s thought. There are certain similarities I see between them, and I believe that a comparison would prove fruitful. In particular, I want to know how Collingwood’s theory of reenactment relates to Heidegger.