Archetypes of Wisdom

Archetypes of Wisdom Douglas J. Soccio Chapter 17 The Twentieth Century: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger

Learning Objectives • On completion of this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions: • What is philosophical deconstruction? • What is analytical philosophy? • What is philosophical realism? • What makes a proposition meaningful? • What is phenomenology? • What is constructivism? • What is ontology? • What is the “They”? • What is “Idle Talk”? • What is the “Standing-Reserve”?

Introduction • By the twentieth century, philosophers were struggling with the “post-Nietzschean deconstruction of metaphysics.” • Philosophical deconstruction is a close textual analysis that focuses on uncovering and overcoming “privileges” hidden in philosophic arguments and theories by taking a text “apart.” • Philosophical deconstruction has its most direct and influential expression in Nietzsche’s critique of Western philosophy as just one more historically rooted expression of the will to power.

Two Approaches to Philosophy • There have been two influential trends in twentieth century philosophy: • Analytical philosophy • Continental philosophy

Analytic Philosophy • Analytic philosophy stresses logic, testability, precision and clarity. • Common to this way of approaching philosophy is the notion that the universe consists of independent (atomic) entities, material particles, sense data, impressions, and “facts.” • Logical and linguistic analyses are said to be the only proper methods for sorting out philosophical confusions. • One philosophical archetype of the analytical approach is Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Continental Philosophy • Continental philosophy tends to explain things not by reducing them to simple entities but by understanding them in a broader, holistic, historical context. • This approach includes phenomenology, existentialism, and Deconstruction. • One philosophical archetype of the continental approach is Martin Heidegger.

Ludwig Wittgenstein • One of the most influential analytic philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was born into a prominent family in Austria. As a child and young man Wittgenstein exhibited numerous talents and interests. • In 1912, Wittgenstein registered at Cambridge University to study under Bertrand Russell, one of the most prominent philosophers in the world at the time. • From 1911 to 1913, Wittgenstein discussed the foundations of logic and philosophy with Russell and key figures such as philosopher G. E. Moore (1873-1958), economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), and mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903-1930).

Wittgenstein • In 1914, at the start of WWI, Wittgenstein joined the Austrian army. He was captured in 1917. • While a prisoner of war he wrote his first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. • In 1920, Wittgenstein temporarily gave up philosophy, convinced that in the Tractatus he had, once and for all, solved philosophical problems. • He worked for some time as a gardener in a monastery, then as a grade school teacher and finally as an architect.

Wittgenstein • In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge where he was awarded a Ph.D. Over the next several years he worked intensely and rejected many of his former philosophical positions. • In 1939, Wittgenstein was made a professor at Cambridge. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he worked on his second major work, the Philosophical Investigations. It was published posthumously. • In 1951, Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer.

What Are You Talking About? • Analytic philosophers emphasize the need to clear up linguistic confusions to show that most philosophical “problems” are based upon an abuse of language. • Analytic philosophers are very interested in technical issues in language and logic, as opposed to traditional philosophical concerns such as the meaning of life. • Early analytic philosophers tended to advocate realism. • Realism is the belief that there exists an independent objective world of accessible things and facts. • Philosophy should concern itself with identifying and eliminating mistaken claims about reality.

The Tractatus • Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is seen as a major example of the linguistic-analytical turn in twentieth century philosophy. • The Tractatus consists of seven main propositions and comments on those seven, arranged numerically. He attempts to show the underlying structure of language. • His basic point is this: what cannot be said cannot be thought; trying to say the unsayable amounts to trying to say the unthinkable. • Wittgenstein argues that the complex propositions of ordinary language are meaningful only if they are analyzable into simpler, ultimately elemental propositions that consist only of names.

The Tractatus • In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein further argues: • Analysis must end in simple unanalyzable names that refer to objects. • Sentences that cannot be reduced to simple symbols are meaningless. • Ultimately, all meaningful sentences fall under the natural sciences. • Traditional philosophical problems as such do not exist. • Philosophy is ultimately an ethical and therapeutic enterprise that enables us to see the world afresh.

PhilosophicalInvestigations • Upon reflection, Wittgenstein determined that the Tractatus itself relied upon illegitimate metaphysical assumptions. • Accordingly, rather than one meaningful language, there are many different languages with many different structures and many different uses. • In the Investigations and other writings, Wittgenstein talks about languages as we use it in ordinary life, using such expressions as “forms of life,” “language games,” and “family resemblances,” not as once-and-for-all, fixed, logically exact relationships, but rather as certain kinds of natural human practices.

Philosophical Investigations • Wittgenstein now thinks of words as tools and sentences as instruments. • The structure of language now determines the structure of thought and consequently the structure of experience.

Wittgenstein’s Turn • Fact-stating is only one language use; there are countless others and thus countless ways of experiencing the world. • Language as used in ordinary life exemplifies certain kinds of natural human practices. • When philosophy succeeds, it allows us to give philosophical problems a rest. • According to Wittgenstein,“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

Martin Heidegger • To admirers, Martin Heidegger is seen as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. To detractors, he is dismissed as an incoherent Nazi sympathizer. • Heidegger (1889-1976) grew up in a small rural village in southern Germany. He attended a Jesuit high school with the intention of becoming a priest but had a nervous breakdown, and eventually decided to pursue philosophy. • In 1915, Heidegger sought a position at the University of Freiburg where, in 1916, Edmund Husserl began teaching. Husserl was an extremely important influence on Heidegger.

Heidegger • In 1927, Heidegger began teaching at the University of Marburg where he met Hannah Arendt. • Heidegger was known as a brilliant teacher in great part due to his conviction that philosophy cannot be divorced from life. • In 1927, Heidegger published his most famous, though incomplete work, Being and Time. • During the 1930’s, Heidegger’s reputation was severely tarnished by his association with the Nazi Party.

Heidegger’s Children • Nonetheless, Heidegger was vastly influential regarding the works of many later philosophers, including: • Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt, in existentialism and phenomenology. • Hans-Georg Gadamer in hermeneutics. • Jacques Derrida in deconstructionism. • Richard Rorty in pragmatism. • Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich in theology. • Charles Taylor and Stanley Cavell in analytical philosophy.

Phenomenology: The Science of Being • Phenomenology is a method of philosophical analysis first developed by Edmund Husserl. • It involves an attempt to reveal the “essence” of human consciousness through “descriptive analysis.” • Phenomenology developed as a reaction to constructivism, the epistemological notion that all knowledge is a product of the human mind. • For Husserl, consciousness is always consciousness of something.

Phenomenology:The Science of Being • According to Husserl, we do not need to answer the skeptic’s challenge as to whether the objects of consciousness ever exist objectively. • It is enough for all human purposes that the objects of consciousness exist simply as objects of consciousness. • Husserl, and Heidegger after him, were deeply concerned with a European crisis associated with the spread of relativism, skepticism and the use of science to “objectivize” psychic life, the life of the spirit, and reduce the spiritual realm to matter.

Being Human • Heidegger’s blend of phenomenology, ontology, and existentialism evolved from studying Husserl’s ideas. • According to Heidegger, Husserl saw phenomenology as the science of beings (in the plural), whereas it is more properly understood as the science of Being with a capital “B”. Toward this end, Heidegger attempted to articulate the fundamental condition of uniquely human existence. • He talks about human “be-ing” (humanity) and individual human beings, as well as existing in a uniquely human way, not as a mere object of scientific inquiry. • What makes us uniquely human is not detached knowledge, but fundamental concern about our condition.

The Meaning of Being • In Being and Time, Heidegger struggles to articulate what he calls the “fundametnal ontology of Being.” • Heidegger notes that we can be described from two different levels. • One level is the ordinary, day-to-day level of facts. Heidegger calls this the ontic level. • We are unique among beings because our nature and the fact that we exist at all is something we care about, something that matters to us.

The Meaning of Being • Indeed, our concern with the deeper meaning of our own existence is part of our very essence, part of who and what we are, a reflection of a deeper level of Being. • Heidegger calls this the ontological level of Being. • This is the level of our uniquely human way of existing in the world. • The essence of being human is that we make choices. • We lose the “meaning of Being” in the course of our ontic lives. • To be human is to be amazed in the presence of Being.

The “They” • Anxiety offers us a way to choose authentic existence or to choose to fall into inauthenticity. • When the burdens of the human condition prove too much to bear, we often seek inauthentic escape by loosing ourselves in the “they.” • When we seek false ontological solace in the “they,” we descend from empathetic Being-with-others to Being-with-one-another. • We allow an “aggregate average” to determine how we live and think.

Idle Talk • With the “they” there can be no dialogue, but only “idle talk.” • Fallenness is Heidegger’s term for inauthenticity. It is a mode of being in which we are lost in and dominated by the world. • For Heidegger, authenticity means living in and with anxiety in the “moody understanding” of our indeterminacy. • An authentic individual lives honestly and courageously in the moment, refuses to make excuses, and does not rely on groups or institutions for meaning or purpose.

The Age of Technology • In his analysis of technology, Heidegger says that calculative technological thinking sees everything as “standing-reserve,” a source of energy to be stored to await our beck and call. • This way of thinking transforms human beings into beings “just there,” entities to be used and treated like everything else in the standing-reserve. • The essence of technology is a way of looking at the world as raw material to be used. • Technology is a frame of mind that we have not chosen and that characterizes and dominates our era.

Humanity is a Conversation • Conversation for Heidegger is progressively attuned communication about Being. It is the language function that makes this possible. • Language enables us to be amazed by Being. • Participants in a conversation are not merely exchanging information, but rather are attuned to each other and to whatever they are talking about. • All conversations are really one conversation, the subject of which, ultimately, is Being.

Final Thoughts • “When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein • “Perhaps the distinction of this age consists in the fact that the dimension of grace has been closed. Perhaps this is its unique dis-grace.” - Martin Heidegger

Discussion Questions • Has language ever “bewitched” your intelligence? Think carefully before you say “no.” Consider, as just three possibilities, “he changed his mind,” “she is not being her true self,” “God is everywhere.” • Do you agree with Rorty that Heidegger’s Nazism is irrelevant to his philosophy? Would his religious beliefs be relevant? Does it matter philosophically if a proponent of vegetarianism eats meat? When, if ever, are a philosopher’s personal beliefs and habits philosophically relevant?

Deconstruction Analytical philosophy Continental philosophy Realism Phenomenology Ontology The “They” Idle Talk Conversation Fallenness Thrownness Authenticity Inauthenticity Facticity Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Chapter Review:Key Concepts and Thinkers

Archetypes of Wisdom