Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 47 — Heidegger (Summary & Notes)

“Understanding being, or the ground of being, as a supreme being is the deep forgetfulness that has us existentially adrift in modal confusion, fundamentally misframing our relationship to being and therefore being subject to a disconnectedness from realness, which is at the heart of the meaning crisis.”

(In case you missed it: Summary & Notes for Ep. 46: https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-46-cca0e9504931)

Ep. 47 — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis —Heidegger [56:44] https://youtu.be/qrkqopjEceU?feature=shared

• Heidegger is trying to get you to do a certain kind of questioning, one that is not in the having mode — to get an answer — but rather in the being mode — experienced as wonder. “Perhaps a better word isn’t questioning but ‘questing.’ You’re not trying to have a propositional answer, you trying to engage in a participatory transformation.”
• Central to Heidegger’s work is his notion of Dasein, “being there.” This refers to our being. Notice that this is an inheritance from the Christian tradition that we are in the image of God. And Heidegger is suggesting that by “questing” into our being we will get a deeper understanding of being itself. Why? Because for Heidegger, our being is the being whose being is in question. “We are the type of being who actually questions who and what we are in a way that makes a difference to who and what we are.”
• This is the core idea of existentialism. Existentialism says that we are fundamentally without an essence (Our “essence” is to have no essence), and therefore we are continually defining ourselves by how we question our being and respond to that questioning.
• Heidegger is deeply responding to the meaning crisis. One of his most famous (or infamous) theses is that the history of the philosophical, existential, and religious responses to the kind of being we have (Dasein) is metaphysics, and he uses that word as a kind of pejorative. He says that history is a history of nihilism, a project fundamentally misconstrued. A misframing of our relationship to being.
• Heidegger was incredibly prolific, but he was also “famously difficult to read.” They often fail to come to any clear conclusion. Vervaeke thinks that part of this is legitimate (Heidegger trying to break free from our cultural grammar) but that some of it is self-promotional, going on about how difficult these things are to think about etc. He was building a kind of “mystique” around himself.
• “You have to read a lot of Heidegger before you read Heidegger well, because you will mis-read Heidegger for a long time. And part of why he makes his writing so torturous is to tear you out of the mistaken ways you will misunderstand him.”
• Truth as correspondence: that what makes a statement correct is that it corresponds in an important way to reality. i.e. what’s in the statement and what’s in reality correspond. Heidegger says that this notion of truth misses something. It misses that this correspondence relationship is grounded in and dependent on a deeper relationship.
• In our language, you can start to see the agent-arena relationship. That agent and arena have to be shaped to each other such that what the agent does or says is meaningful in that arena. The agent-arena relationship makes possible this “correctness.” What Heidegger is asking is: okay yes, but what grounds this agent-arena relationship? Vervaeke has argued that the answer is the process of relevance realization, Heidegger will argue that the answer is something he calls attunement.
• Heidegger says that attunement can never be understood as experience and feeling. He rejects any subjective interpretation of attunement, because doing so will cause you to lose its essence. “It is not experience, it is something that makes meaningful experience possible.”
• Heidegger often plays with words, and in this case describes being attuned is what he calls ek-sistent. i.e. “standing out,” which is analogous to salience.
• A lot of this is reminiscent of Plato (though Heidegger likely wouldn’t love this comparison). Plato made a distinction between philia sophia (love of wisdom) and philia nikia (love of victory), and thinks the latter is the deepest kind of bullshitting because it looks like we’re arguing and reasoning but we’re really manipulating propositions and assert correctedness but forgetting the pursuit of wisdom, which Socrates thinks is the transformative existential project we should be engaged in.
• “This is how you know somebody is listening. They will say ‘I did not know that, I have just learned something from you.’ or ‘I was wrong, I was mistaken about this.’” Those are the marks of philia sophia. Heidegger says we need to wake up and remember the forgotten mystery of Dasein.
• We now shift to the work of Harman and what’s called “object-oriented ontology” or “speculative realism.” The core picture of this is not the Kantian picture of the thing-in-itself veiled by subjectivity and made inaccessible to us. There’s a different way to think about how you encounter objects. Instead, think about two things happening simultaneously: the thing shining into your subjectivity (which is what phenomenology originally meant. The Greek word “phenomenon” means “to shine forth”) while being interpenetrated with withdrawing from your framing and always being beyond your framing as well. “That beyond-ness is not something within my phenomenology, but it contributes to the sense of my phenomenological experience.”
• The Kantian “thing-in-itself” can be replaced by this new notion as the “thing-beyond-itself.” every thing is both shining into our subjectivity and withdrawing beyond our framing of it, and they are both co-contribute to the realness of the object for us. According to Harman, it was precisely the withdrawing that was missed by phenomenology. No longer an object of thought but a depth beyond our framing.
• This all describes Heidegger’s famous notion of truth as alethea. (“lethea” means to cover or to forget, and the prefix “a” is a negation of it.) Alethea means a deep remembering (of the being mode) and a deep disclosure (of reality). “Truth as alethea is this attuning to the mutual disclosure of fittedness within the mystery of being.”
• There is a connection between Heidegger + Hubert Dreyfuss + 3rd gen. 4E cognitive science. Dreyfuss is one of the founding figures of 3rd gen. 4E cog. sci., and uses it as a way to articulate the importance of Heidegger for understanding the nature of mind, cognition, consciousness, etc. He wrote a book called Being-in-the-World which is about Heidegger’s most central work Being in Time, and he writes: “Facts and rules are by themselves meaninglessness. To capture what Heidegger calls ‘significance’ or ‘involvement’ they must be assigned relevance.” (Emphasis is in the original) “But the predicates that must be added to “define” relevance are just more meaningless facts. And paradoxically, the more facts the computer is given the harder it is to compute what is relevant to the current situation.” Dreyfuss wrote the book What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason based on this idea.
• Dreyfuss sees Heidegger as the deep forerunner of the criticism that we should understand the mind only in propositional, computational terms. Dreyfuss went on to pick up work from Merleau-Ponty and helped to develop the notion of optimal grip which we discussed before.
• Henry Corbin (the first French translator of Heidegger) wrote that gnosis is “a salvational, redemptive knowledge because it has the virtue of bringing about the inner transformation of man. It is knowing that changes and transforms the knowing subject.” This knowing of yourself being coupled with the knowing of the object is what you need to respond appropriately to Dasein. Corbin calls this mutual affording “gnosis.”
• What Corbin is doing with his term gnosis that isn’t apparent in Dreyfuss is pointing out that it is redemptive. How it saves us. That it is a way of responding to the modal confusion and the forgetfulness of being. Of awakening from the meaning crisis.
• Returning to the being mode vs. the having mode: there is a tradition of God being understood as “the” supreme being, i.e. in the having mode. As being a being that grounds and makes all other beings. And this is a fundamental mistake according to Heidegger, known as the problem of onto-theology. Trying to understand being — theologically — as a supreme being. And Heidegger says there is a deep connection between this understanding of being (in terms of the supreme being, i.e. God) and nihilism. In some ways this is Heidegger trying to articulate Nietzsche, who was a big influence on Heidegger.
• “Understanding being, or the ground of being, as a supreme being (onto-theology) is the deep forgetfulness that has us existentially adrift in modal confusion, fundamentally misframing our relationship to being and therefore being subject to a disconnectedness from realness, which is at the heart of the meaning crisis.”
• Tillich later picks this up from Heidegger, and uses it as a way of bringing back the very traditional religious notion of idolatry, and what is wrong with idolatry.
• Worth noting: Tillich was the first non-Jewish academic to be persecuted by the Nazis because he opposed them and resisted them from the very beginning, and had to leave Germany because of that. Heidegger, on the other hand, joined the Nazi party and becomes an official of the party. We should not dismiss this as irrelevant, because Heidegger presents his entire position as an existential one, not just a theoretical one. To dismiss his participation in the Nazis as having nothing to do with his theory is to miss how he is involved in he very presentation of his own “theory.”

Next up: Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 48 — Corbin and the Divine Double (Summary & Notes) https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-48-7c95541af4f9

List of Books in the Video:

• Tom Sparrow— The End of Phenomenology
• Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception
• Martin Heidegger — Basic Writings, and the essay “On the Essence of Truth”
• Graham Harman — Object-Oriented Ontology
• Hubert Dreyfuss — Being-in-the-World
• Hubert Dreyfuss — What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason
• Hubert Dreyfuss — What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason
• Hubert Dreyfuss & Charles Taylor — Retrieving Realism
• Roberts Avens — The New Gnosis