Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger: Section 4

[bigturtlehand]

UGH...philosophy.

[TheDavid2222]

I was thinking, and I came up with an idea on aesthetics. Heidegger describes the authentic person as one who leads an "independent" life. An independent life comes with anxiety but is seperate from "the one". Those are his words for it. Couldn't this view be applied to aesthetics and the understanding of musical value? I would appreciate some thoughts on this. It is an interesting idea I think at least.

[bboyamir]

@polpoint @soultorment27 i feel like in this case, though, we would have to be careful what kind of causal story we're trying to figure out. if its the laws of nature, heidegger would probably disagree because dasein is not rule-based, however i supposed we could conceive of a deterministic causal story that doesn't follow any specific set of rules, yet still couldn't have happened any other way?

[GeorgesBarras]

The description of the dasein in anxiety, 'stick with things and not getting stuck' - I experienced this epiphany myself several years ago; I do indeed feel liberated.

[890buddha]

the universe is just the sum of all the existential factors, choice does not exist, everything is already set on a specific course and there cannot be a deviation, we humans are on the rails so to speak, we are just along for the ride, everything i will ever do is just my pre determined reaction to the stimulus of the information i absorb.

[polpoint]

@890buddha I completely disagree because I will do whatever the fuck I want to do. It's the same reason none of my psychologist girl friends could "figure me out." You can "figure out" the apes and idiots controlled by their instincts who are mimicking human behaviors, needs and wants because they are simplistic and, for the most part, predictable. And even they sometimes let their self-determination shine through. But In my unhumble opinon you can't "figure out" a human.

[890buddha]

@polpoint you can't do what the fuck you want, because you can only do what you know how to do, because you have been taught certain things and absorbed certain information.

[soultorment27]

@polpoint Why think that free will & causal determinism are incompatible? Even if everything was set on a specific causal course, we aren't in any position to know, since there are so many factors. So in that sense, we cannot fully "figure out" other's behavior. But perhaps in principle, it's possible? I don't see why human free will would be incompatible with the fact that everything is causally determined. It seems to me that if the will was not caused, then it would be random & inexplicable.

[polpoint]

@soultorment27 I think it is random & inexplicable and then tempered/ refined by our past responses to stimuli. It's just that most people appear to be creatures of habit and are supposedly comfortable with repetition/ predictability. Though you are right, and I would need to be observing my internal processes externally to actually determine if that is true or if there is just so much complexity that it appears to be random. I guess in the end it comes down to "is anything _really_ random?"

[Sconz32]

Sounds like German flavored Buddhism.

[youtease0]

Hubert is a great speaker. Wish he had the same interest in the other phil's

[Xenophanes21]

yeah! hes AMAZING, you should check out his Michel Foucault: Beyond Post-Structuralism and Hermeneutics, sooo good

[Eldel15]

This guy looks like a parrot

[Nostatementinthename]

Am I right to asume then - I have only read "Being and Time" - that the later epoch/historically thinking Heidegger is who Foucault was inspired from to begin with?

[zenica12]

well, the whole structualist movment was partially inspired by Heidegger, simply because of his cartesian destruction and language-derrida, lacan. for Focault i think he was inspired more by nietzsche and his "will to power" discourse, but then again heidegger consider nietzsche as the first thinker to kill a methaphysycal men.

[soursourapples]

@Nostatementinthename

yeh i think thats the case. type in 'dreyfus heidegger foucault' into google. he has an essay about that.

[Nostatementinthename]

@soursourapples

thx

[AphexXtal]

@Nostatementinthename Yes I think you are right. Foucault apparently read Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology". I have the feeling that he might have also read Heidegger's books on Nietzsche.

[dedbusted]

Anyone else think Dreyfus is slightly off in this discussion? Or simply doesn't offer the viewer the real Heidegger one would read in the works?

[dedbusted]

Sorry, I didn't read all the other comments. I think many do agree.

[Nostatementinthename]

Totally. However, I do think this is as good as it is possibly gonna get when given 35 minutes to explain even a fragment of Heideggers works.

[prinkotheclown]

'Be' in the moment , breath, feel,experience .....

[svengalistudios]

Interesting how anxiety is an important device for locating ones own authenticity - then later Heidegger mentioned that that sort of anxiety may be a modern phenomenon. When I read Being and Time, I did not consider it to be in any way exclusively modern when it comes to authenticity. I can see why Heidegger would later change course and become interested in the quality of the various epocs in history. Any ideas on the matter?

[begily]

"accpeting the ungrounded and unsettleness is itself liberating", this seems to be the one thing the Christians and other religious individuals cannot even understand in order to accept it.

[ultrak0w]

saint paul understood it

[S2Cents]

Heidegger could have been much more clear about his philosophy. Don't buy the response Dreyfus offers to this issue.

[85Shalin]

How come there is no mention of presence/absence duality in Dasein? Did I miss out on it? And

Heidegger does say that Being is time since, as Dreyfus rightly put it, it can be mapped on to the threefold structure time viz, past, present, future... although I wish he had talked a bit more about Heidegger's concept of Nothingness and how Being collapses onto Nothingness......

[noeatingallowed]

One time I put on a cape and went shopping and so I bought the pickles. The pickles purchased Me, not me, nor me them I did not them for pickles haven't got it quite right. I took the cape off and went home and then I was there.

[ludachris475]

Adolf Heidegger.

[theinternetscholar]

Heidegger is much more than 'carpe diem' . . .

[GordonMorrice]

This question about "authenticity" is the key, I feel, to the whole point of Heidegger's message to the world. It has slowly, but surely, crept into my way of thinking/being, though I do not claim to fully understand Heidegger's work.

[PedroAlonsoLopez]

They call it dreydegger. I think Searle coined it. Its a misinterpretation, but then again in the US its good to see Heidegger being discussed at all.

[GodlessPhilosopher]

Can you tell me what you mean? Sounds interesting. Do you have an anti-ontotheological interpretation of St. Paul? "Religion after Metaphysics" is a great book on topics like this.

I like Heidegger's (or Dreydegger's) account of nihilism and his solution to it more than Nietzsche's. Perhaps there is similarity between authenticity and the ubermensch (Heidegger wrote four volumes on Nietzsche afterall), but I like authenticity more.

[ExMachine]

I would add that on the 2007 Berkeley webcast Professor Dreyfus seems to find that Heideggers vocabulary is not used as rigorously as suggested here.

[Krelianx]

That is misleading: he says that about some parts, but he is not making a general point.

[rootberg]

I wonder what other Heidegger scholars think of the interpretations of Dreyfus. Seems like loads of students get their understanding of Heidegger from him.

[ExMachine]

Yes, i was wondering the same thing. I read on a blog (make of that what you will) that some of his interpretations may be considered quirky. He certainly does a good job of making Heidegger appear intelligible. It's not entirely clear to me though how much is Dreyfus and how much Heidegger.

[Krelianx]

I find Dreyfus to be misinterpreting H in a rather serious way. He fails to acknowledge that entities ready-to-hand are not the same entities given to us in abstract observation through interruption: for Heidegger the mode of being of the ready-to-hand is not a bundle of entities being transparently coped with, but with what he calls an 'equipmental whole', which has its own relational structure. The story about familiarity and absorbed coping is secondary to that of how beings are determined.

[Krelianx]

As for Heidegger's 'obscurity', that results from reading Being and Time separetely, without reading all the thorough lecture courses around the time, dealing with the transition from the traditional problems of the tradition to the new vocabulary. Being and Time is the analytic of Dasein, it is his constructive attempt at phenomenology. It is ridiculous to expect to pick it up and grasp what H is after without reading his reading of the tradition and terms. Understanding the German is crucial.

[gen6k]

this could be pushed further into a disengagement with will. the feeling of receiving a gift of a singularity that is first living and then makes the non-seqitor that it presupposes inertia. the ready-to-hand is active in mind moreso than unready-to-hand. always already ends in hard determinism.

[regalkidney]

I think it's not uncommon for scholars to refer to Dreyfus's Heidegger as "Dreifegger" (they do the same thing with Kripke's Wittgenstein "Kripkenstein").

This is a way of indicating that the interpretation is idiosyncratic and departs from the original Heidegger. But it also indicates that the hybrid creature has a vitality of its own. Personally, I much prefer Dreifegger to Heidegger.

[randyhelzerman]

Very very helpful.