So this week we have a paper by a member of our community trying to make a call back to an age old discussion of being. I do not know a single member of the Academy who believes in his/her heart that a university education is not a place for growth and development of the individual as a whole; however, the day to day hustle and bustle of the disciplines can turn idealism sour.
To use a Welsh expression, Martin Heidegger is a strange duck. When I teach Martin Heidegger to my friends and fellow engineers, I always start off with the statement, "Martin Heidegger is a lot like Bill Clinton, he wants to know what *is* is." More importantly, he is fundamentally concerned with igniting a new fire about the work of Rene Descartes and what he feels are some unaddressed problems with classic and modern philosophy. His primary claim to fame (to the armchair philosopher,) is that he tackles "je pense, donc je suis," in a way that had his peers thinking in different ways. I will expound upon this either in class or maybe in another post, but all of you should know at the very least that Heidegger != Descartes.
Here are some important people/concepts/battles/struggles to understand:
Husserl's Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften. Here Husserl argues that there are four important revolutions in history of thought: Socratic/Platonic arguments based on logos and its subsequent development into scientific thought; the Cartesian revolution; the transcendental revolution of Kant, whereby the only source of necessity is subjectivity and thus follows knowledge; and finally, the phenomenological revolution, which incorporates the form of and content of acts of knowing into a subjective framework.
Descartes vs Husserl. In short, Descartes (who wrote the Discourse on the Method in French, not Latin,) believes that we have method in order to overcome a tendency to accept naive uncertainties (2). Here the method in the Cartesian sense admits that the subjective paints our experiences and reasoning.
Kant vs Husserl. Kant's role in phenomenology is that of the "straw man." We can find evidence of reflections on Kant throughout Husserl's works (3-6). Husserl is concerned with the incorporation of what is now thought of as the dialectic into a discussion of objective validity and complete justification. Whereas Kant considered the metaphysical urges of the human brain to be inseparable from human thinking, thus defining one of the core aspects of his transcendentalism.
Traditional ontology by Nietzsche. Existential Phenomenologists have always had a different view of ontology than classic philosophers. Nietzsche, for instance, challenged Plato's and subsequent philosophers' ideas of the temporal nature of being, that is to say, that being and becoming are in a struggle in classic philosophy and the being part wins. That which is being, akin to the Dæmons of Socrates, is transcendental and outside of lived experience, and Nietzsche believes that classic philosophy involves itself mostly with the psychosis of wo/man to grapple the ideas that traditional philosophy has set up for him/her.
Heidegger and meaning. Meaningfulness strikes a cord with Heidegger (7). One of the primary concepts within his works addresses the human being at the nexus of object and subject, that human being's (or amalgamation's) negotiation of the world, the human being experience and the limits of being experiences through constructs such as negation and death. Ultimately, meaning presents itself to humans and is neither created nor destroyed by humans. That holds since being and what beings are are intertwined throughout the question of existence. Finally, the disclosure of being is not an objective event. Meaning is unfolded (or disclosed or presented) through a neo-classic interpretation of moods and involvement. Thus, Heidegger's work resounds well with the evolution of being/meaning briefly discussed here.
1. Husserl, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften
2. Descartes, Discourse on the Method
3. Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy
4. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
5. Husserl, Ideen I
6. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen
7. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit
