Minds and Brains

I have been seeing a lot of commentary on the recent Science article about whether dolphins should have nonhuman personhood status.

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=9921886

Marino began researching dolphins and determined that they had a brain-to-body-mass ratio that is second only to humans. Human beings have the largest brains, compared to their body mass, of any known animals. Brain size, relative to body size, is believed by many scientists to be a key prerequisite to intelligence, although there are many other factors as well.

So Marino and Reiss turned to the New York Aquarium, which had a couple of male bottlenose dolphins in captivity, to see if they knew who they were.

“We marked them on different parts of their bodies with a magic marker,” Marino said. Each dolphin immediately raced to the mirror, “postured in front of the mirror and positioned itself in strange ways to expose the marked part of its body much the same way that you and I would if we passed a wall with wet paint on it. As soon as we get to the bathroom we would look in the mirror and turn around to see if we got any paint on us.”

Sometimes the researchers used a marker that left no mark, and the result was quite different. The dolphin would dash to the mirror, but if he could not find a mark, he would immediately move on, ignoring the incident. Marino and other researchers have concluded that the experiment showed the dolphins were aware of who they were and knew it was their body they were checking out.

If an animal recognizes “itself” in the mirror, that animal is said to possess self-consciousness, a purportedly advanced cognitive skill traditionally thought to be unique to humans. Thus, the difference between human and nonhuman animals is largely quantitative rather than qualitative.

I see this argument put forward frequently, by journalists and academics alike. On first glance, the argument seems perfectly reasonable. However, if we examine the language involved, we can see than the reasoning is faulty on phenomenological grounds. The key point is that in order to be self-conscious, one must be able to attain genuine selfhood status. Having a body is not enough. It seems to me that a particular type of cognitive savvy is necessary for being a “Who”.

The central claim is that “The experiment showed the dolphins were aware of who they were.” In order to understand this claim, we must know how it would apply to us. To say that Susan “knows who she is” is to say that Susan, could, in principle, tell a story about her past, present, and future life, either to herself, or to someone else. To know who you are is to explicitly know what it is that you do, broadly speaking. For example, I am a graduate student. I know that I must read and study philosophy in order to be who I am. Moreover, part of who I am is who I want to be, namely, an academic philosopher. When existentialists talk about human beings “having a project”, this is what they mean. The project of academia structures my entire being, that is, my entire mode of thrown existence in the world. Accordingly, humans are exceedingly teleological in their mode of being. In normal humans there is a sense of purpose, a sense of direction in one’s life, a directedness-towards, both implicit and explicit. This can be as mundane as getting ready for work work or as grand as martyrdom. Heidegger referred to this curiously strong, sometimes-explicit teleological drive as our “directionality”. As Dasein, humans are always involved in projects only intelligible at longer timescales. Moreover, even at the small-to-medium timescale, our lives are infused with microteleology insofar as we are intimately familiar with our daily surroundings and thrown into daily coping, usually, with some degree of skill.

Furthermore, a subcomponent of this self-knowledge is knowing, in principle, how other people would describe me if they were asked to briefly summarize “who” I am. Knowing how other people would describe me helps me describe myself. In the modern world of facebook and online dating, we are all used to describing ourselves in several brief paragraphs. We have explicit knowledge of what sorts of things we like to do, what our interests are, what music we listen to, what shows we like to watch, and moreover, we routinely practice making such knowledge available to others, verbally or in writing. Personally, I have always  partly defined myself and others in terms of books read, if any. I look at my bookshelf and see my intellectual self extended in time.

Moreover, we dress ourselves in accordance with our levels of social conformity and individuality in order to form a  ”look” with the express purpose of making other people think “I like that persons look”. “Forming a look” is something we all do whether we are conscious of it or not.Even if we do not “take care of ourself”, we are well-aware that exactly such a message is being transmitted publically; the question then is whether we care. The amount of time we spend arranging superficial details of our appearance before going out into public is one of the most curious behaviors of our species.

Furthermore, self-knowledge usually consists of being able to form internal narratives about yourself. When making a mistake we might think “How typical of myself to do that” or “I can’t believe I just did that! That isn’t who I am”. Without this possibility of self-expression, the normative structure of social experience remains low dimensional. With human culture and language, the possibility of expression in regards to self-interpretation constructs a high dimensional normative space in which deeper layers of experiential meaning can occur than a purely instrumental calculation affords. For example, in some cultures the language game of honor/dishonor provides a deeper  layer of normativity powerful enough to induce suicide in those who understand themselves to be dishonored. We should never underestimate the brutal emotional force of social shame. Moreover, the distinction between understanding oneself to live a honorable vs. dishonorable life surely requires a logical space of reasons holistically constructed by linguistic discourse and what John Protevi calls “bodies politic”. Such concepts simply don’t make sense outside of a larger social background knowledge involving complex affective experiences such as shame, despair, existential anxiety, wretchedness/pride, honor, eudaimonia, sanctification, etc.

Charles Taylor is the best source on this notion of linguistically constructed self-interpretation being the basis of higher order emotional-cognitive complexity. He says, for example,

Shameful[ness] is not a property which can hold of something quite independently of the experience subjects have of it. Rather, the very account of what shame means involves reference to things – like our sense of dignity, of worth, of how we are seen by others – which are essentially bound up with the life of a subject of experience.

By articulating our feelings through the structures of language (good/bad, desirable/non-desirable, etc.), we set up the possibility of having

a sense of what the good life is for a subject; and this involves in turn our making qualitative discriminations between our desires and goals, whereby we see some as higher and others as lower, some as good and others as discreditable, still others as evil, some as truly vital and others as trivial, and so on.

Accordingly, this sets up the cognitive skill of second-order evaluation, wherein we can desire to have different desires e.g. we can repudiate ourselves for giving in to temptation. Second-order evaluation allows for a high dimensional normative space such that we can evaluate our desires and goals and set up hierarchies. A Christian, for example, might “reorder his priorities” and “put God first” instead of falling prey to the secular world. Although he deeply craves secular freedom, he has a higher-order desire to live a “pure” life.

As we can see then, it requires an extreme anthropomorphism to make the claim that when dolphins notice a mark on their body they are being self-conscious, as opposed to simply being aware-of-a-mark-on-their-body. Self-awareness means being aware of a self not a dot. Dot-consciousness is not self-consciousness. As Skinner proved, the ability to receive proprioceptive information from a mirror is no more philosophically interesting than doing so by normal means of bodily-perception. Are then Dolphins persons? Not like we are.

To take the bite, I want to answer Christoper Vitale’s question, which is itself a response to Graham Harman’s post on the “most overrated philosopher of all time”:

There’s so many folks online whose thought I DO respect that like Heidegger, that I’m probably missing something. And I’m curious what that is. I’m curious, that’s what it comes down to. Was Heidegger essential as a path to where you are now, or do you think he has something lasting to say to us today? That’s my question.

Let me start by saying that I primarily deal with philosophy of mind. Let me also say that there is a quiet storm brewing in philosophy of mind circles, with essentially two competing philosophical paradigms standing at odds: one inspired by Descartes/Locke/Kant and the other by Heidegger/Merleau-Ponty/Gibson. The former trio is foundational in respect to the cognitivism still very much in vogue today; the latter with respect to the less established but quickly growing 4E paradigm (embodied, embedded, extended, enacted). The 4E paradigm is a direct reaction to the perceived failures of classic cognitivism in respect to understanding perception, action, intentionality, emotion, reasoning, etc.  Accordingly, there are many overlapping ways to cash out the distinction between the two paradigms:

• Cartesian vs. Heideggerian philosophy of mind
• indirect representationalism  vs. direct nonrepresentationalism
• strict primary/secondary qualities distinction vs. skepticism of distinction
• atomism vs. holism
• computationalist vs. Gibsonian theories of information processing
• disembodied vs. embodied theories of mind
• social atomism vs. social embeddedness/contextualism
• emphasis on the theoretical vs. emphasis on the instrumental
• theory-theory vs. the Narrative Practice Hypothesis
• reductionist vs. social constructivist approaches to higher-order cognition
• computer metaphor vs. “bundle of habits” metaphor
• literal view of language vs. figurative-metaphorical view of language
• analytic vs. hermeneutic approach to interpretation and understanding
• internalist vs. externalist approaches to perception
• dualist ontology vs. affordance ontology
• robust vs. minimalist conceptions of selfhood
• subject-as-against-objects vs. subject-as-”amidst”-objects
• Those who believe in the Myth of the Given vs. those who don’t
• etc.

I can thus answer Christopher’s question of whether Heidegger has anything important to say to contemporary philosophers: Yes, of course! Heidegger’s texts were groundbreaking in respect to almost every idea in the right-hand column. Moreover, he was the first thinker to systematically defend a coherent philosophical alternative to Cartesian and Kantian theories of mind. Thinkers up until Husserl overcame  the tradition in many respects, but never broke away from it in a decisive fashion like Heidegger did. Philosophers were far too embroiled within the language games of traditional philosophy to see that their theories were grounded upon a particular intellectual trajectory starting with ancient philosophy and moving up and through Descartes and Kant. I am of the opinion that Heidegger was perhaps the first major thinker to break away from the tradition in respect to all the major dogmatisms in philosophy of mind . For this reason, I must modify something that Paul Ennis said in his own defense of Heidegger:

It is important to situate Heidegger in order to defend him. He only makes sense as a thinker of and within the tradition. He is self-consciously an ‘inheritor’ of the tradition – hell he even seems to be putting himself into it as it were.

I would say instead that Heidegger only ever put himself into the tradition in order to destroy it. I think Paul would probably agree with me on this, but I think it is important to emphasis the ways in which Heidegger broke with tradition in many key areas. His ideas are so influential and so far reaching that, in my opinion, anyone working with Descartes and Kant is obliged to understand Heidegger’s alternative model of human existence. This is especially important when engaging with the cognitivism debate in philosophy of mind. While many excellent books and articles have been inspired by Heidegger’s ideas, many philosophers not well-versed in the history of philosophy lose sight of Heidegger’s larger metaphilosophical goal of overcoming the deficiencies in Cartesian and Kantian philosophy. Without understanding the historical context in which Heidegger overcame traditional views of subjectivity, his philosophical achievements are difficult to fully recognize. Conversely, traditional Heideggerians get so wrapped up in the system and the terminology that they overlook the wider context of what people like Dreyfus and Andy Clark are doing with Heidegger, namely, trying to overcome the deficiencies of the Cartesian homunculus theory.

There is much more to say on this issue of Heidegger’s intellectual lineage. One could write ten volumes  tracing his thought through the work of people like Merleau-Ponty and the Gibson up and through the developments of 4E philosophy in the early 90s. The intersection between Heideggerian phenomenology and cognitive science is rich. For this reason, Heidegger has much to say to us in the 21st century.

The “ka” is a very complex part of the symbolism in ancient Egyptian mythology and represents several things: the ka is a symbol of the reception of the life powers from each man from the gods, it is the source of these powers, and it is the spiritual double that resides with every man.

The ka as a spiritual double was born with every man and lived on after he died as long as it had a place to live. The ka lived within the body of the individual and therefore needed that body after death. This is why the Egyptians mummified their dead. If the body decomposed, their spiritual double would die and the deceased would lose their chance for eternal life. An Egyptian euphemism for death was “going to one’s ka”. After death the ka became supreme. Kings thus claimed to have multiple kas. Rameses II announced that he had over 20.

The ka was more than that though. When the ka acted, all was well, both spiritually and materially. Sin was called “an abomination of the ka”. The ka could also be seen as the conscience or guide of each individual, urging kindness, quietude, honor and compassion. In images and statues of the ka, they are depicted as their owner in an idealized state of youth, vigor and beauty. The ka is the origin and giver of all the Egyptians saw as desirable, especially eternal life. - source

I find mythology of neolithic cultures to be absolutely fascinating. They offer a glimpse into a radical religious phenomenology of auditory hallucination. I am of the opinion that the most parsimonious way to interpret Egyptian mentality is in terms of Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind. The bicameral mind is based on the metaphor of a divided house. On the one “side”, there is a god(s)-complex structured in terms of narrative and a unitary personality, whose function whose to send admonitory auditory hallucinations in times of stress to guide the other “side”, the man-complex. The gods commanded and the men obeyed. Such was the order of things for many thousands of years. Following Jaynes, Judith Weissman argues in her excellent book Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices that we can see such a mentality displayed prominently in one of the earliest poems known, The Iliad (likely to have first been transmitted orally by the Aoidos through hallucinated “inspiration” by the god-complex), wherein the immortals presence themselves to the mortals to offer guidance and judgement in times of great stress. As is well-known, Socrates himself had a daimon to guide him. Likewise, in ancient Egytpian life, everybody had their own personal demigod to guide them through stressful situations, offering commands and assurance, judgement and praise.

Moreover, because the gods were believed to live on after death, this created the conditions for literal ancestor worship, with father figures, kings, and god-kings living on in such a way as to be narratively implanted into the minds of the living through a mechanism of auditory hallucination, commanding temples to be built, burial rites to be performed, often including commands to provide food and everyday items of sustenance for their decomposing bodies. According to wikipedia,

The people of Çatalhöyük [a Neolithic tribe] buried their dead within the village. Human remains have been found in pits beneath the floors, and especially beneath hearths, the platforms within the main rooms and under the beds. The bodies were tightly flexed before burial, and were often placed in baskets or wrapped in reed mats. Disarticulated bones in some graves suggest that bodies may have been exposed in the open air for a time before the bones were gathered and buried. In some cases, graves were disturbed and the individual’s head removed from the skeleton. These heads may have been used in ritual, as some were found in other areas of the community. Some skulls were plastered and painted with ochre to recreate human-like faces, a custom more characteristic of Neolithic sites in Syria and at Neolithic Jericho than at sites closer by.

Jaynes theory is that the bodies of these revered fathers and god-kings were hallucinatorily experienced as still willing and commanding, issues orders as normal such that everyday items of gear were brought before them. In many cases, the heads were cut off in order that they may still receive hallucinated orders issuing from the mouths, and more importantly,  the eyes. Imagine a really, really scary acid trip and maybe you can comprehend what such an experience would be like. Moreover, Jaynes claimed that enormous religious temples were constructed for the express purpose of housing the idols of the hallucinated gods, often portrayed with huge staring eyes. He says,

Now this needs a little more psychologizing. Eye-to-eye contact in primates is extremely important. Below humans, it is indicative of the hierchical position of the animal, the submissive animal turning away grinning in many primate species. But in humans, perhaps because of the much longer juvenile period, eye-to-eye contact has evolved into a social interaction of great importance. An infant child, when its mother speaks to it, looks at the mother’s eyes, not her lips. This response is automatic and universal. The development of such eye-to-eye contact into authority relationships and love relationships is an exceedingly important trajectory that has yet to be traced. It is sufficient here merely to suggest that you are more likely to feel a superior’s authority when you and he are staring straight into each other’s eyes. There is a kind of stress, an unresolvedness about the experience, and withal something of a dimunution of consciousness, so that, were such a relationship mimicked in a statue, it would enhance the hallucination of divine speech.

If this sounds outlandish, consider the phenomenon of imaginary companions in children. Some studies have found that 15-65% of children have mental conversations with imaginary playmates at one point in their life. Moreover, the phenomenological character of such conversations is typical of auditory hallucinatory, with the companion offering advice and guidance. With this in mind, imagine a society where not only were imaginary friends positively encouraged, but that moreover, there was an entire system of mythological narratives that structured the hallucination in terms of, not friends, but gods and demigods. In ancient chinese Shi “corpse/personator” ceremonies, auditory hallucination structured by cultural narratives of ancestor worship were extremely common. It is also well-known that classic schizoid hallucinations are structured in terms of the surrounding cultural context; if you hear voices in a Christian society, it is likely that voice will be structured in terms of the Abrahamic mythology, including Father God and the demonic world .

However, bicamerality is not nearly as present in today’s society. In breakdown situations, it is now phenomenologically average to narratize events through folk psychological background skills rather than obey a commanding voice. How did this happen? Jaynes speculated that

Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed. But if a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outisde, could harbor his hatred and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would survive.Or, in the more usual situation of being commanded by invading strangers, perhaps in a strange language, the person who could obey superfically and have “within him” another self with “thoughts” contrary to his disloyal actions, who could loathe the man he smiled at, would be much more successful in perpetuating himself and his family.

This seems plausible to me. Moreover, narratization was increasingly employed in more day-to-day tasks, with narrative practice being useful for structuring reports of the past into easily understood stories, such as became codified in epics or written down and read out as social commands. Such a skill was learned by the man-complex much later than when it was learned by the god-complex. The first poets were the Muses; only later did man learn the skill of narrative for “himself”.

As an aside, I recently started reading Daniel Hutto’s book Folk Psychological Narratives. I have heard various things about Hutto’s Narrative Practive Hypothesis (NPH) over the years, but I had always been skeptical. But the other day I was thinking about the way in which our frontal cortex isn’t fully developed until early adulthood. Accordingly, the practice of “having a responsible self” does not really fully mature until one reaches the stage in social discourse such that narratives of authentic selfhood and agency are frequently prevalent in second-person interaction, self-intepretation, and social expectation. It struct me that in the same way children’s brain are radically sculpted by listening to primitive narratives appropriate for children, the frontal cortex later in life is radically sculpted by more advanced narratives appropriate for responsible adults with mature cognitive skills, including narratization and formal thinking skills. Upon this realization, it occurred to me  that Hutto’s NPH, which explains folk psychological cognitive skills in terms of a socialcultural narrative practice, was entirely plausible if we accept the fundamental plasticity of the cortex.

Thus, under Hutto’s NPH and Julian Jaynes’ own theory, we can say that “consciousness”, in terms of being an operation of narratization for the purpose of making more adequate decisions, is skill learned in development such that the language games of selfhood and responsibility literally “construct” an agent qua agent from the raw material of a plastic embodied brain.

When Heidegger says that language is the house of being, what does he mean? Perhaps the best way to look at such a statement in terms of what Charles Taylor calls a “constitutive” theory of language, as opposed to an instrumental theory. On the instrumental view, language is seen purely as a tool for communication which can be more or less “added” onto existing cognitive architecture without necessarily changing the way in which the animal perceives or understands the earth. In contrast, the constitutive view claims that the possession of complex language fundamentally changes the way in which an animal approaches the earth, in effect, generating a new dimension of significance above and beyond brute functional instrumentality. In other words, a constitutive view sees language as providing the cognitive scaffolding for world construction. Living in a world is different from coping on the earth. To illustrate the difference between “having” a world and not having a world, let us examine the phenomenon of social bonding.

When interacting with other members of the troop, a worldless animal will react appropriately in terms of dominance and submission, “understanding” perfectly the way in which some responses towards members of the troop are appropriate and others are not. For the worldless animal, there is a normative dimension for behavior in response to certain objects, but the “depth” of the interaction bottoms out purely in terms of whether or not the response is appropriate according to largely unconscious standards and mores driven through evolutionary development. In contrast, linguistic animals operate with highly refined cognitive skills which worldless instrumentality simply does not afford. Two examples are perceptual interpretation (perceiving events in terms of higher-order dimensions of intelligibility) and socially complex emotional responses (love not lust, anxiety not fear, etc.). A worlded animal can look at an event of social bonding and explicitly understand the situation as a display of love, with all its implied content. This perceptual judgement brings with it a higher-order normative dimension such that the interpretative gloss is not only explicitly understood in terms of possible sets of articulations (“They are so happy together”, “That love won’t last”), but also, in terms of a narrative. Narrative allows for a perception of the social bonding event in terms of a story (“I wonder how they met”, “They must be new lovers”, “What a charming old couple”, etc.). Moreover, such narratives are structured in terms of certain metaphorical dimensions (“Love Is a Journey”, “Love Is a Rose”, etc.) which are possible only in virtue of linguistic discourse.

With narrative comes the possibility of higher-order perceptual interpretation filtered in terms of possible articulations structured in accordance with a logical space of reasons. If we see two people wearing a tuxedo and a wedding dress, there is a limited number of rational narratives in which to fit that event into a cohesive story according to public background knowledge. While the ultimate result of a worlded perception and worldless perception is the same (the execution of appropriate behavior in response to stimuli), there is a semantic-perceptual depth for worlded animals that simply isn’t available for nonlinguistic creatures. Through the use and understanding of explicit language, humans are able to go above and beyond normal animal communication e.g. a cry indicating a danger. For humans, language provides more than just the possibility of communication, but rather, the possibility of interpretative perception filtered in terms of explicit object recognition (“I can see that that couple is in love“), semantic depth (love implies a range of emotional responses which are richer in content than mere affection, fear, aversion, etc.), and explicit narrative formation (“That couple must be getting married because they are all dressed up”).

Moreover, with language comes the possibility of self-interpretation in light of partially expressed articulations structured by social narratives. While the worldless animal’s self-understanding bottoms out in terms of unconscious dispositions for behavior in light of appropriate social norms and evolutionary instinct, the worlded animal’s self-understanding is rich in virtue of being an understanding of self qua self, that is, in terms of personality, having a name, being a moral agent, etc. In other words, because a human child is more or less taught to understand and interpret itself in terms of being an individual self (at least in Western countries), the self-understanding engendered through social discourse allows for genuine subjectivity qua subjectivity. For example, if the child is good at sports, language provides a possible set of articulations which can be internalized by the child in accordance with its self-interpretation (“I am a good sports player”, “I want to  be an athlete when I grow up”). If we reflect closely on these normative dimensions, we can see an enormously complex web of social language games being played in accordance with possible sets of self-interpretations structured by historical and cultural development. The most obvious example is of course religion and the possibility of self-interpretation as a child of God or as a member of a Christian community. Such a self-interpretation structures human life from the ground up, affecting almost all dimensions of personal experience. Without language, self-interpretation is impossible.

Accordingly, I hope this post has demonstrated the significance of language for world construction.

What is perception?

For Kant, perception is the process of the noumenal realm being sensed through the categories of intuition such that our phenomenal experience is always a “mere appearance” of the thing-in-itself. Although Kant had a different understanding of what “Reality” entailed, we can say that for Kant, perception is the experience of reality through a representational filter such that we can never gain access to reality. In other words, we are trapped behind our senses and phenomenal experience, while objectively valid, is “merely” an appearance of a reality that never shows-itself-as-itself. Kantian perception is thus representational.

For Heidegger, in contrast, perception is the process of intentionally directing-oneself-towards the noumenal realm without any sort of representational mediation. We can say that for Heidegger, perception is the experience of responding to how the thing-in-itself shows itself to us. In other words, perception is direct and nonrepresentational.

“To say that I am in the first place oriented towards sensations is all just pure theory. In conformity with its sense of direction, perception is directed toward a being that is extant. It intends this precisely as extant and knows nothing at all about sensations that it is apprehending” (Basic Problems 63)

“The statement that the comportments of the Dasein are intentional means that the mode of being of our own self, the Dasein, is essentially such that this being, so far as it is, is always already dwelling with the extant. The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences merely inside its own sphere and is not yet outside it but encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are.” (BP 64).

However, if we leave the phenomenon of perception here, we are left clueless as to how this notion of “directing-towards” is accomplished. Does intentional comportment mean that perception is always veridical? Can we not be mistaken in our perception? Here, we must understand the phenomenon and the semblance.

The phenomenon is that which shows-itself. We have already seen that what shows-itself is the extant Earth, the thing-in-itself. This Earth existed as an extant environs long before humans existed. “Such a being, for example, nature, does not depend in its being – that and whether it is a being or not – on whether it is true, whether or not it is unveiled and encountered as unveiled for a Dasein” (BP 219). The Earth is the noumenal realm i.e. the planet as it is independently of our perception of it. For Heidegger, the phenomenal/noumenal distinction is collapsed not by placing our intentional comportment entirely within a subjective sphere, but rather, by eliminating the representational medium which blocks our access to the thing-in-itself through intentional perception.

“the intentional constitution of the Dasein’s comportments is precisely the ontological condition of the possibility of every and any transcendence…The Dasein, comports existingly toward the extant” (BP 65)

How is this possible? Through ambient light. The Earth is there without our perceiving it. So is ambient light. The light bounces around the environment, settles into stable overlapping arrays, and carries information regarding the environment in virtue of the light interacting with the environment as it gets reflected/absorbed. All we have to do is direct ourselves towards this information. The evolutionary reasons for doing so are enormous given that visual perception gives us unparalleled access to behaviorally useful information. It is no surprise that visual perceptual systems have evolved independently in separate species numerous times.

So, the Earth is showing-itself to us in virtue of ambient light. We are behaviorally directed towards this information and react to it in terms of a functional contexture of instrumentality. But to say that we act towards this light in an instrumental fashion is not to say that we are somehow encapsulated within a subjective sphere of readiness-to-hand such that we never have access to the thing-in-itself. On the contrary, we are always already surrounded and enveloped by the thing-in-itself in virtue of inhabiting a giant rock which floats around the sun in an elliptical orbit.

“Nevertheless, the walls [in a lecture hall] are already present even before we think them as objects. Much else also gives itself to us before any determining of it by thought. Much else – but how? Not as a jumbled heap of things but as an environs, a surroundings, which contains within itself a closed, intelligible contexture” (BP 163)

Okay, so that is the phenomenon: a directing-towards that which surrounds us. The directing-towards is essentially an uncovering of what’s-already-there. However, perception is not veridical. We do not perceive the Earth in its pure-presence-at-hand. We interpret Nature in terms of entities. This is our understanding of being. Thus, “[Entities] show themselves, but in the mode of semblance” (SZ 222). Semblance is the perception of what shows-itself (the Earth) as something it-is-not. The Earth is not naturally composed of chairs, tables, people, cats, etc. It is composed of energy. The human world is made up of chairs, tables, people, cats, etc. Thus, we operate within a realm of semblance wherein what shows-itself is perceived as something it is not. The power to interpret the world in terms of entities is that which establishes the phenomenon of Being with a capital B. This capacity is granted to us through language and predication for “language is the house of Being”.

However, Heidegger’s great advance over Kant is to claim that even though we operate within a “subjective” realm of readiness-to-hand and intepretation, there is no representational mediation between us and the ambient optic array. Quite simply, for Heidegger, there is never anything transcendentally lurking “behind” the phenomena.“Uncovering…brings the uncovering Dasein face to face with the entities themselves” (SZ 227, emphasis added). We directly perceive the Earth in terms of Worldliness. In conclusion,

“As surely as we can never comprehend absolutely the whole of beings in themselves we certainly do find ourselves stationed in the midst of beings that are revealed somehow as a whole. In the end as essential distinction prevails between comprehending the whole of beings in themselves and finding oneself in the midst of beings as a whole. The former is impossible in principle. The latter happens all the time in our existence.” (What is Metaphysics? Basic Writings pg 99)

In his recently published article on Heidegger’s Aesthetics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Iain Thomson has this to say about Heidegger’s concept of Earth:

“Earth,” in other words, is an inherently dynamic dimension of intelligibility that simultaneously offers itself to and resists being fully brought into the light of our “worlds” of meaning and permanently stabilized therein, despite our best efforts. These very efforts to bring the earth’s “inexhaustible abundance of simple modes and shapes” completely into the light of our worlds generates what Heidegger calls the “essential strife” between “earth” and “world”

…

In Heidegger’s view, then, for a great artwork to work—that is, for it to help focus and preserve a meaningful “world” for an audience—this artwork must maintain an essential tension between the world of meanings it pulls together and the more mysterious phenomenon of the “earth.”

…

the “earth” is thus Heidegger’s name in 1935–36 for what he most frequently calls “being as such,” a dynamic phenomenological “presencing” (Anwesen) which gives rise to our worlds of meaning without ever being exhausted by them, a dimension of intelligibility we experience both as it informs and as it escapes our attempts to pin it down

…

With world and earth, in other words, Heidegger seeks to name and so render visible the quietly conflictual structure at the heart of intelligibility, the unified opposition that allows “being” to be “dis-closed” in time.

Pretty confusing, no? To me, such attempts to make Heidegger intelligible are simply too complex, too philosophical, and too difficult to fully make sense of. Can anyone translate such jargon into plain English? I propose a much simpler explanation of what Heidegger’s concept of “Earth” means: the Earth!

Yes, it really is that simple. “Earth” means the Earth i.e. the planet we live and die on. But note, Heidegger is attempting to describe the subsisting earth which continually and effortlessly surrounds us in nonmetaphysical terms . Thus, “Earth is that which comes forth and shelters.” Examples of “Earth”? A cave to live in, a tree for shade, the ground for walking, materials for building,  ecological mediums for seeing and hearing (light and air), etc. The earth is “that on which and in which man bases his dwelling…In the things that arise, earth occurs essentially as the sheltering agent.” However, “World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world.”

As Being and Time clearly spells out, the “World” in which Dasein lives is different from the planet “on which” we dwell. The world of Dasein is the world of significance given through being-in-a-world i.e. understanding, interpretation and language (as-structure, rift-design, etc.) being-with, possibilities of authenticity, etc. In other words, the “World” of Dasein is our rich cultural-linguistic life and the “Earth” is the always-already-there environment in which we are always already dwelling, indeed, born into.  As Heidegger says, “Upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world.”  Accordingly, I interpret the “strife” between earth and world as being characterized by, for example, the tension between hammer-as-physical-thing and hammer-as-tool.

As for the stuff on self-seclusion, this idea is best made sense of in terms of J.J. Gibson’s work on ecological optics. Heidegger, like Gibson, is essentially describing the earth in terms of biological agents and how they interact with the world through perceptual comportment. The earth is self-secluding because due to its three dimensional structure, seeing the book on the table is at the expensive of seeing the table underneath the book. The earth, with its ground, horizons, buildings, and objects, is always occluding some parts of itself from the perspective of a perceiver. There are “lines of sight” embedded in the environment in virtue of the ambient light bouncing off the the ground and various objects and “settling” into stable, overlapping “arrays” which reflect information about the objects and environment being reflected. Gibson describes all this much more rigorously than does Heidegger.

So, for all those confounded by Heidegger’s ideas, do yourself a favor and read Gibson’s  book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception or his The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Gibson was a much better Heideggerian than Heidegger himself. Getting a sense for what “ecological psychology” entails will provide the conceptual resources for understanding and making sense of Heidegger without all the confusing jargon that does more to obfuscate that illuminate, particularly with a text as complicated and rich as The Origin of the Work of Art.

Of course, only as long as Dasein is, that is, the ontical possibility of the understanding of being is, “is there” being. If Dasein does not exist, then “independence” “is” not either, nor “is” the “in itself”. Such a thing is then neither understandable nor not understandable. Then also intraworldly entities neither are discoverable, nor can they lie in hiddenness. Then it can be said neither that entities are, nor that they are not. Nevertheless, it can now be said — as long as the understanding of being, and thereby the understanding of occurrentness are — that then entities will continue to be. (SZ 212)

In his 2007 article in Inquiry (“Heidegger’s Kantian Idealism Revisited”), William Blattner concludes from this passage that the question “Do occurrent entities exist when humans do not?” is impossible to answer for “If we suspend the understanding of being, then ‘entities do exist’ and ‘entities do not exist’ not only lack truth-values; they are undefined, meaningless” (327).

It is my contention however that such questions do have meaningful answers and that moreover, a proper interpretation of the above puzzle passage can provide the conceptual means for doing so. A clue is given in the very next sentence: “As we have noted, being (not entities) is dependent upon the understanding of being; that is to say, Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care.”

Thus, in accordance with the puzzle passage, we can make several distinctions:

-How beings “are” when Dasein understands them and how beings “are” independent of Dasein’s understanding of being.
-The Worldhood of the world and the extantness of the planet.
-Reality as opposed to the Real
-An entity understood or determined “as” an entity and the entity as it is independent of Dasein’s as-structure.

In light of these distinctions, which are synonymous, we can see how Blattner’s answer to the puzzle passage is much too complicated for its own good. Instead of claiming that the concept of entities existing independently of Dasein is meaningless (a bizarre claim), we can instead claim that it makes sense in terms of the distinction between Reality and the Real.

Reality is the Kantian concept of “thingness” or Sachheit. In how Heidegger adopts the term, it designates the mode of being of objects as understood through Dasein’s understanding and interpretation of the world as worldly. When Heidegger defines being as “that which determines entities as entities”, the determination of entities according to the as-structure is the “Reality” of such objects. In contrast, the “Real” existence of entities is the determinate structure of entities as they exist independently of our understanding and interpretation of them as entities.

Thus, when Heidegger says “entities will continue to be” only when there is Dasein’s understanding of being, there is a crucial ambiguity here overlooked by Blattner. We can distinguish between “continue to be” in the sense of Real existence (subsistence, extantness) and “continue to be” in the sense of Reality or the as-structure of worldhood. It is my contention that Heidegger meant the latter. Accordingly, the puzzle passage’s cryptic meaning becomes clear. Only as long as Dasein exists “is there” being in the sense of that which determines entities in terms of entities as entities i.e. in terms of the understanding of being. This can be translated as “Only as long as Dasein exists is there a determination of entities as entities”. Accordingly, there is no contradiction in saying that being is dependent on Dasein’s understanding of being but entities nevertheless are “extant”. We can then make sense of the other puzzle passages in Being and Time, which say:

“Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are “in themselves” are defined ontologico-categorially. Yet only by reason of something present-at-hand, ‘is there’ anything ready-to-hand” (SZ 71)

“Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained” (SZ 183).

“But the fact that Reality is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself it is” (SZ 212)

Thus, the answer to the question of whether occurrent entities can exist independently of Dasein’s understanding of being depends on how you understand the occurrent existence of entities. If you understand it in terms of the ontological-categorial determination of entities as entities (Reality), then no, entities do not exist independently of Dasein. If you understand it in terms of the Real and extantness, then yes, of course occurrent entiteis continue to exist or “subsist” when Dasein is not around. Case closed?

I’ve been gathering quotes in preparation for my master’s thesis. I will admit that I am deliberately reading into the texts to find quotes to support my position, but the textual evidence for direct realism is overwhelming. It seems to me that the only way to falsify my position would be to show that the translations, particularly in Basic Problems, are somehow misleading. However, I believe that any attempt to falsify my thesis will need to provide an equally parsimonious framework to capture the essential structure of Heidegger’s thought. In my opinion,  reading Heidegger in terms of direct realism makes his system coherent and intelligible while making the least metaphysical assumptions.

Quotes Supporting Direct Realism in Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“The window, however, surely does not receive existence from my perceiving it, but just the reverse: I can perceive it only if it exists and because it exists. In every case, perceivedness presupposes perceivability, and perceivability on its part already requires the existence of the perceivable or the perceived being…This extantness, or existence, belongs to the extant, the existent, without its being uncovered. That alone is why it is uncoverable” (BP 49)

“What we concisely call perception is, more explicitly formulated, the perceptual directing of oneself toward what is perceived, in such a way indeed that the perceived is itself always understood as perceived in its perceivedness…This directedness-toward constitutes, as it were, the framework of the whole phenomenon ‘perception’” (BP 57)

“To say that I am in the first place oriented towards sensations is all just pure theory. In conformity with its sense of direction, perception is directed toward a being that is extant. It intends this precisely as extant and knows nothing at all about sensations that it is apprehending” (BP 63)

“I cannot and must not ask how the inner intentional experience arrives at an outside. I cannot and must not put the question in that way because intentional comportment itself as such orients itself toward the extant. I do not first need to ask how the immanent intentional experience acquires transcendent validity; rather, what has to be seen is that it is precisely intentionality and nothing else in which transcendence consists” (BP 63)

“The statement that the comportments of the Dasein are intentional means that the mode of being of our own self, the Dasein, is essentially such that this being, so far as it is, is always already dwelling with the extant. The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences merely inside its own sphere and is not yet outside it but encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are.” (BP 64).

“A window, a chair, in general anything extant in the broadest sense, does not exist, because it cannot comport toward extant entities in the manner of intentional self-directedness-toward them” (BP 64)

“the intentional constitution of the Dasein’s comportments is precisely the ontological condition of the possibility of every and any transcendence…The Dasein, comports existingly toward the extant” (BP 65)

“On the contrary, implicit in the sense of perceptual apprehension is the aim to uncover what is perceived in such a way that it exhibits itself in and of its own self…Perceiving uncovers the extant and lets it be encountered in the manner of a specific uncovering” (BP 69).

“Perceiving is a release of extant things which lets them be encountered. Transcending is an uncovering” (BP 70)

“Or can it be shown that something like an understanding of extantness is already implicit in the intentionality of perception, that is, in perceptual uncovering?” (BP 70)

“in opposition to the subjectivist misinterpretations that perception is directed in the first instance only to something subjective, that is, to sensations, it was necessary to show that perception is directed toward the extant itself” (BP 71)

“In this understanding, what extantness means is unveiled, laid open, or, as we say, disclosed” (BP 71)

“it is implicit in the basic constitution of the Dasein itself that, in existing, the Dasein also already understands the mode of being of the extant, to which it comports existingly, regardless of how far this extant entity is uncovered and whether it is or is not adequately and suitably uncovered” (BP 71)

“the disclosure of extantness belongs to this comportment, to the Dasein’s existence. This is the condition of the possibility of the uncoverability of extant things.” (BP 71)

“The Dasein’s comportments have an intentional character and that on the basis of this intentionality the subject already stands in relation to things that it itself is not” (BP 155)

“For the Dasein, with its existence, there is always a being and an interconnection with a being already somehow unveiled, without its being expressly made into an object” (BP 157)

“The Dasein does not need a special kind of observation, nor does it need to conduct a sort of espionage on the ego in order to have the self; rather, as the Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world, its own self is reflected to it from things…This is not mysticism and does not presuppose the assigning of souls to things. It is only a reference to an elementary phenomenological fact of existence, which must be seen prior to all talk, no matter how acute, about the subject-object relation” (BP 159)

“Nevertheless, the walls [in a lecture hall] are already present even before we think them as objects. Much else also gives itself to us before any determining of it by thought. Much else – but how? Not as a jumbled heap of things but as an environs, a surroundings, which contains within itself a closed, intelligible contexture” (BP 163)

“Until the ontology of the Dasein is made secure in its fundamental elements, it remains a blind philosophical demagoguery to charge something with the heresy of subjectivism” (BP 167)

“no reason can be adduced that makes it evident that a Dasein necessarily exists” (BP 169)

“World is only, if, and as long as a Dasein exists. Nature can also be when no Dasein exists” (BP 170)

“intraworldliness does not belong to the being of the extant, or in particular to that of nature, but only devolves upon it. Nature can also be without there being a world, without a Dasein existing…The being of beings which are not a Dasein has a richer and more complex structure and therefore goes beyond the usual characterization of that extant as a contexture of things” (BP 175)

“Such a being, for example, nature, does not depend in its being – that and whether it is a being or not – on whether it is true, whether or not it is unveiled and encountered as unveiled for a Dasein” (BP 219)

“For nature to be as it is, it does not need truth, unveiledness” (BP 221)

“How can the being of a being, and especially the being of the extant, which in its essential nature is independent of the existence of a Dasein, be determined by uncoveredness?” (BP 222)

Quotes Supporting Direct Realism in Being and Time

“Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are “in themselves” are defined ontologico-categorially. Yet only by reason of something present-at-hand, ‘is there’ anything ready-to-hand” (SZ 71)

“In such in interpretation, the way in which the entity we are interpreting is to be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself, or the interpretation can force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of being” (SZ 150).

“The present-at-hand, as Dasein encounters it, can, as it were, assault Dasein’s Being; natural events, for instance, can break in upon us and destroy us” (SZ 152)
“Our everyday environmental experiencing, which remains directed both ontically and ontologically towards entities within-the-world…” (SZ 181)

“Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained” (SZ 183).

“As we have noted, Being (not entities) is dependent upon the understanding of Being, that is to say, Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care” (SZ 212)

“Being (not entities) is something which ‘there is’ only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far as and as long as Dasein is” (SZ 230).
“…the world does not ‘consist’ of the ready-to-hand” (SZ 75)

“Previously letting something ‘be’ does not mean that we must first bring it into its Being and produce it; it means rather that something which is already an ‘entity’ must be discovered in its readiness-to-hand, and that we must thus let the entity which has this Being be encountered” (SZ 85)

“The ‘Nature’ by which we are ‘surrounded’ is, of course, an entity within-the-world; but the kind of Being which it shows belongs neither to the ready-to-hand nor to what is present-at-hand as “Things of Nature’”(SZ 211)

“But the fact that Reality is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself it is” (SZ 212)

“When Dasein does not exist…entities will still continue to be” (SZ 212)

“Dasein’s Being becomes ontologically transparent in a comprehensive way only within the horizon in which the Being of entities other than Dasein – and this means even of those which are neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand but just ‘subsist’ – has been clarified” (SZ 333)

Oh, how I love Hofstadter’s translation of Basic Problems of Phenomenology! Here, Heidegger achieves his greatest clarity in phenomenological description. The nature of Dasein’s primary mode of self-understanding is perhaps never illustrated more beautifully than in section 15. “When we say the Factical Dasein understands itself, its own self, from the things with which it is daily concerned, we should not rest this on some fabricated concept of soul, person, and ego but must see in what self-understanding the factical Dasein moves in its everyday existence.”

Here we can see that our most basic level of self-understanding must be differentiated from self-consciousness, which is introspective in nature, turned “inwards” towards a functional landscape of memory and imagination. Counter-intuitively, self-consciousness is not genuine, not actual, in the sense that inauthentic existence is. “The genuine, actual, though inauthentic understanding of the self takes place in such a way that this self, the self of our thoughtlessly random, common, everyday existence, “reflects” itself to itself from out of that to which it has given itself over”. Thus, we need to rid ourselves of any pejorative connotation for inauthenticity, for

Being lost [into the they-self]…does not have a negative, depreciative significance but means something positive belonging to the Dasein itself….This inauthentic self-understanding of the Dasein’s by no means signifies an ungenuine self-understanding. On the contrary, this everyday having of self within our factical, existent, passionate merging into things can surely be genuine.

We are thus caught up in things in the broadest sense, with families, friends, projects, jobs, kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, living rooms, the ground, the sky, the very medium of light itself. “The Dasein must be with things.We have also already aheard that the Dasein’s comportments, in which it exists, are intentionally directed-toward.The directedness of [Dasein's] comportments expresses a being-with[amidst] that with which we have to do, a dwelling-with, a going-along-with the givens.”

But, prima facie, the nature of intentionality is ambiguous in respect to the ontological structure of subjectivity. We can state, however, that “the Dasein does not “transport” itself to things by leaping out of a presumably subjective sphere over into a sphere of objects. But perhaps we have before us a “transposition” of a peculiar sort.” What then is the fundamental ontological constitution of human intentionality? Heidegger claims that “Transcendence is a fundamental determination of the ontological structure of the Dasein. It belongs to the existentiality of existence. Transcendence is an existential concept.” Moreover, “intentionality is founded in the Dasein’s transcendence”.

Understanding this last phrase is crucial. Intentionality is the hermeneutic “rift-design” which carves up the world through language and the “discovery” or “uncovering” of entities as entities, that is, in terms of worldliness. For all we know, this is unique to humans. However, I think transcendence is something shared by all living organisms; it underlies our bodily-experience in a real world. Transcendence is thus more fundamental than intentionality because we must first be situated within an environment before we can categorially interpret it through intentional comportment.  When sitting in a lecture hall, “[T]he walls are already present even before we think them as objects. Much else also gives itself to us before any determining of it by thought. Much else-but how? Not as a jumbled heap of things but as an environs, a surroundings, which contains within itself a closed, intelligible contexture.” Thus, Heidegger falls in line with classic empiricist thinking with the important caveat that he allows for qualitative cognitive development through language learning, allowing for a “determination” of objectivity through linguistically structured categorial intuition, the “casting-forth” of a world according to our understanding of being.

Moreover, the primary mode of inauthenetic self-understanding within an enviromental contexture is known as “circumspection”. “[C]ompletely, unobtrusive and unthought, is the view and sight of practical circumspection, of our practical everyday orientation. ‘Unthought’ means that it is not thematically apprehended for deliberate thinking about things. Circumspection uncovers and understands beings primarily as equipment.”

Thus, the nature of primordial self-understanding has become clear. “The Dasein does not need a special kind of observation, nor does it need to conduct a sort of espionage on the ego in order to have the self; rather, as the Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world, its own self is reflected to it from things”.  ”First and mostly, we take ourselves much as daily life prompts; we do not dissect and rack our brains about some soul-life.”

As readers of this blog are probably well-aware, the issue of realism in Heidegger has been a pet issue of mine for quite some time. Over and over, I repeatedly hear the same claims made in regard to Heidegger. “Oh, Heidegger thinks that Being is correlated with Thought.” “Oh, Heidegger was an idealist because he didn’t have the resources to make a distinction between presence in the sense of presentability (idealism) and presence as the ground of presentability (realism).” “Oh, Heidegger was an ontic idealist because he thought all modes of Being are dependent on Dasein.”

No!

Such positions are positively absurd in light of our existence in the REAL world! Was Heidegger a fool? Did he really think that we have no phenomenological recourse for overcoming both vapid realism and vapid idealism? Did he not explicitly say that a correlation between subject and object completely misses the phenomenon of existence, of our living and breathing and dying in a world that resists us, that presents itself or shows itself to us? Are not the conceptual resources for ontic realism already established within his very definition of phenomena as against the Kantian critique of appearances as a possible ontology? How can that which shows itself to us be a correlation of our subjectivity when Heidegger himself defines subjectivity in terms of an intentional comportment towards the world, towards the extant?  Thought is not correlated to another correlation, it is correlated to reality itself, otherwise it would not be intentional i.e. transcendental. Does he not say, over and over, that “The window, however, surely does not receive existence from my perceiving it, but just the reverse: I can perceive it only if it exists and because it exists“? How else can we make sense of this except in terms of realism concerning the external world? Any other interpretation simply renders Heidegger a fool and Heidegger was no fool, no mere correlationist, if by that we mean a vapid anthropomorphizing of reality.

Thus, I have provisionally decided that my master’s thesis will be on the issue of realism and the external world. It will be my scholarly goal to provide the conceptual resources within Heidegger* to establish an ontic realism which claims, as our common sense preontological understanding itself confirms, that physical entities exist independently of our interpretation of them as physical. Any other position is absolutely absurd in light of phenomenological-ontology being an analytic of finitude, of real existence. To construct a strawman of vapid idealism and then congratulate yourself for tearing it down is surely not an impressive feat.

I apologize for the snarky tone of this post but I am just seriously tired of hearing about the same tired story of “correlationism this” and “correlationism that” when Heidegger himself explicitly claims that a conception of “correlation” cannot possibly capture the phenomenon of intentional comportment towards extant reality i.e. of our uncovering of reality. How else can we understand the Heideggerian advance over Husserlian correlation? As Merleau-Ponty said,

To ask oneself whether the world is real is to fail to understand what one is asking, since the world is not a sum of things which might always be called into question, but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn.

*The final chapter will probably attempt to establish the theoretical viability of a direct or “naive” realism via conceptual resources outside of Heidegger, such as in Gibsonian ecological optics, dynamic systems theory, and embodied/embedded philosophy of mind.