Category: Musings (Page 15 of 18)

There are things that an educated human is supposed to know about the world. Like that the Earth is spherical and that it revolves around the sun.

But there are things we are supposed to know also about ourselves. Most prominently, we are supposed to know that we are animals, one of the primate species.

The question I’m pondering is this:

• Can we have knowledge about ourselves in the same way that we have knowledge about the world?

I have noticed a tendency among those who straightforwardly answer this question in the affirmative. They marvel at the fact that evolution produced a species that understands the evolutionary process that produced that species.

It is as if the world finally bit its own human tail and thereby became closed as a natural world and nothing but that natural world.

And since the bite was achieved by the science that the human species produced, the closure of the world as nothing but a natural world is celebrated also as the closure of science. Science finally knows itself as a product of the world it knows.

Science is the world’s self-knowledge.

I’ve been reading Martin Heidegger, who has a different kind of answer to the question under discussion. His answer is: yes and no, depending who “we” are; for there are two ways of being human.

In one way, human beings are among the living beings that inhabit the world, and they can be scientifically studied as such. Heidegger would hardly reject biological knowledge about life and about human beings as one of the animal species on Earth.

But does biology also reveal a more profound fact, namely, that the world is nothing but a natural world so that all the things we are supposed to know about the world must be reinterpreted as the world’s self-knowledge? – Reinterpreted by whom? By the world? Can the world think? Can it rethink science as its own self-knowledge?

“No one can jump over his own shadow,” Heidegger wrote (in a slightly different context). But that is the weird feat that is celebrated when the world finally is supposed to understand itself.

Heidegger reminds that we are not just one of the living beings on Earth. We are also the beings for whom there is world; for whom there is Earth and sky; and for whom there is science accumulating knowledge about the world. Talking about this nearest way of being human, he emphasizes not closures but openings.

The nearest human is the opening up of a world (with living beings that can be studied scientifically).

The alleged completion of the history of the universe through the world’s self-knowledge is not produced by evolution, or by the science that a product of evolution produced. It is produced by people who forget the simplest and nearest way of being human, and who thus are led to such old-fashioned metaphysical absurdities as “the world’s self-knowledge.”

– And yet, Heidegger’s “nearest” human being can hardly be purified as unaffected by the world, or by what is known about human beings as part of the world.

Heidegger identifies a vital problem, but I believe that the relation between the two ways of being human is messier than in Heidegger’s elegant philosophical poetry.

I do not quite recognize the connections with the world, and with the animals, in Heidegger’s attempt to uncover the authentic way of being human in the age of science.

Who dares a renewed attack on these messy relationships?

Pär Segerdahl

Intellectual life overflows with regulated forms of discourse about all kinds of urgent matters. Sometimes they are called schools of thought; sometimes theories; sometimes ideologies or positions.

Philosophy could be viewed as the originator of the most prestigious and fundamental discourses about life, like

• idealism
• materialism
• pragmatism
• existentialism
• structuralism
• post-structuralism.

Although this to some extent is historically correct, such a view of philosophy stands in stark contrast to Socrates’ difficulties with speaking and acting publically. His inner voice, his daemon, caused him to hesitate and instead examine himself and his relation to such forms of discourse.

I can imagine Socrates suddenly pausing, torturing himself with questions like

• why do I want to speak in this way?
• couldn’t one say the opposite as well?
• what led me to hold this view?
• is this merely something I’ve learned to repeat, as a lesson learnt by heart?
• am I wise, or do I only pretend I am?

My aim here is to draw attention to philosophy as engagement with the latter, self-examining questions. The importance of being sensitive to such questions derives from the fact that intellectual life resembles a marketplace for the former kinds of regulated discourse. Competing schools fight for dominance and accuse each other for neglecting the most decisive aspect of whatever is under discussion.

I want to highlight the importance of somtimes attacking oneself instead; the significance of asking if one is (perhaps) unjust, exaggerating… unwise.

Pursuing the latter questions, we as it were parenthesize our normal obedience to the rules of discourse and examine the extent to which we honestly can abide by them.

– But wouldn’t such questioning of oneself presuppose a discourse of pure self-examination within which the truth finally can be grounded – a discourse that, if it existed, immediately would achieve absolute dominance on the intellectual market?

The marketplace of ideas is attractive. It is the place where we can stand up, speak publically and influence the direction of the world (and achieve reputation). Not surprisingly, philosophers found it difficult to avoid presenting their self-examinations, especially if they found them successful, as being if not truth itself, then at least the right path to truth: as the the discourse that almost guarantees honesty!

To me, these temptations and pitfalls make it all the more important to emphasize the latter list of actually rather simple questions, by which any person can be haunted. Discourse that never is interrupted by pangs of intellectual conscience and consequent self-examinations soon runs amok.

Sometimes, one must sit down and think. Thinking in this sense is not a (silent) form of discourse. But we always compare it with one, and thus we constantly misunderstand philosophy as if it were the purest and most prestigious form of discourse.

Pär Segerdahl