Exploring Existentialism Part Two

Existentialism: A Response to Logical Positivism

Heidegger vs The Positivists

In the previous post on existentialism we look at how existentialism is more of a philosophical  tendency than a formal school of thought.  We looked at the two noteworthy predecessors of the movement, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.  We juxtaposed these seemingly contrary thinkers and found that their common ground was more or less their individualistic devil may care, non orthodox attitude toward confronting the questions presented in philosophy, characterized perhaps, by a somewhat brazen disregard for traditional authority and even, in so far as is possible for the constraints of reason itself. 

We then moved onto Heidegger as one of the earliest recognized existentialist thinkers and outlined his method, his ontology, and his approach to the human condition and ended off with his circumvention of the scientism of the positivists by the fact that the questions that Heidegger identifies as the most fundamental to our experience as humans existing in the world cannot be asked by the positivists, let alone answered.  He effectively demotes the positivists from any claim to a total and final narrative about the human condition and reclaims a place for philosophy and ontology.

Now the main reason why the positivists can't ask or answer these fundamental questions, is that these questions deal with either implicitly or explicitly psychological states.  They cannot deal with questions involving psychological states because they've essentially banished the human psyche as a player in the pursuit of meaningful insight into the world. From the positivist’s interpretation of ontology, there's nothing to talk about: your fear, your terror, your worries, your hopes, your lusts are all unscientific.  If it cannot be quantified and easily replicated then it’s not real, nor is it worth talking about.  For them these topics are not for real philosophers. 

Putting The Positivists In Their Place

The existentialists stand that paradigm on its head. They tell us that NO, this is actually what philosophy is all about. In my view Heidegger, goes to the other extreme in so far as he expresses some extremely strong technophobic sentiments. Those of you who have ever read his essays about technology will note real technophobia: a shunning of science and technology because it interferes with our recognition of who and what we are. 

Heidegger asserts that all the gadgets, all the technical manipulations that we can do with physical reality prevent us from realizing that the human condition is uncertain, they distract us from this fundamental fact that we all must face.  Human existence has no limits and there are no rules. The pseudo security that we get from science and techniques is in fact a danger to our achieving the self-consciousness of what we really are.  

Self-consciousness is a big deal for someone such as Plato, and especially for people like Hegel who have shaped the legacy of the continental tradition of which Heidegger is both an inheritor and significant contributor. Albeit, what makes Heidegger unique is how he takes this outlook and the futility of answering these fundamental human questions and presents this philosophical futility as an authentic description of the human condition itself.

Heidegger evades the closed totalizing of the the positivists and bypasses their caustic explaining away of human phenomena; their reductionism. If the early Wittgenstein and people like him wish to say that there's nothing that can be sensibly said about life beyond the domains of physics and logic, well, then what Heidegger and other existentialists of that technophobic stripe are going to do is delegitimize the foundation from which the logical positivists draw upon. 

A Brief Criticism Of Heidegger

In his philosophy it seems that Heidegger may be suggesting that we substitute scientific dogmatism for silence. While the allusion to nihilism here is problematic for many, his project loses some credibility when Heidegger asserts that not only himself and his fellow Germans are the ones who will release us from this problem. So the whole world can relax as Hiedegger saves the day, as this will no longer be the main issue, instead, we can absorb ourselves in the anxieties and the difficulties of the human condition. We can confront Dasein and at least live the best possible nihilistic way that we can. Critics might posit this at best as a choice of nihilisms. This particular one seems to be the the best, the most authentic. There's a set of jargon for each existentialist, but what it really refers to is understanding the fact that there's not a great deal that we can understand and confronting squarely the fact, that there aren't many things that we can adequately deal with.

Another scathing critique of Heidegger's existential philosophy takes the form of a question: how do you articulate a critique of Western philosophy which says that all the solutions alleged to have been created in the whole history of the West are, in fact, pseudo solutions. In fact, there is no solution to the problem of being a human in the world: you simply confront Dasein and deal with it. There isn’t much room left for meaningful philosophy at this point and all the alternatives are even worse: all of them involve self-deception. So Heidegger leads us in many ways here into a philosophical dead end; however, he does make some compelling points about the human condition and it’s relationship with the Western philosophical tradition.

Reframing The Western Tradition

An important takeaway in Heidegger's work is this: if we can't be perfectly knowledgeable, we can at least avoid deceiving ourselves. If we can't ever completely comprehend the universe, we can at least prevent it from being less comprehensible than it would be otherwise. At least we can avoid deceiving ourselves, no matter what the limitations of the human mind are. What Heidegger attempts to do here, is to force us back, prior to the Western tradition of metaphysics, prior to the Socratic abstraction of nouns into metaphysical constructs, and abstractions which Heidegger believes has led us astray. The temptation to metaphysics is the big wrong turning point that Western philosophy takes. The consequence of that is that we are stuck looking for answers in some eternal realm independent of space and time, independent of the real human condition.

These are fictions which prevent us from understanding our limitations. Now, what Heidegger wants to do is to force us back to rethink our problem. He wants to force us back to, essentially, the pre-Socratic conception of the world, where at least we are not obscuring the ambiguities and difficulties of our condition with a pseudo-answer, with a series of mythological entities like the Platonic forms. The narrative Heidegger constructs around this appoints him at least implicitly as the greatest of the modern pre-Socratics. 

It's not an accident that he likes Anaximander and Anaximenes and Heraclitus as much as he does, and it’s no enigma as to why much of his written work has been connected with an analysis of pre-Socratic physics and pre-Socratic ethics. Much of his concern is to try and undo the damage done by Socrates, who represents the will to know, the will to rationality, the will to certainty. In this context we can say that for Heidegger all metaphysical and epistemological illusions, or philosophical inheritances, are pernicious: we need to be rid of them. 

Turning Inwards

Now, Heidegger, in Being and Time, tried to discuss Dasein, tried to explain to us what it was like to be a human being and what it was like to live in the world that human beings have. Note here that Instead of describing the external world the way the Anglo-American tradition has done, instead of being concerned primarily with the location of things outside of us, this is an almost entirely inward-looking philosophy.

It's largely a matter of indifference to Heidegger how the physical world works. Logic is an entertaining thing for undergraduates to learn, yet in his view real philosophers aren't particularly concerned with it because there is no ultimate solution to the problems that philosophy is forced to confront, and there is certainly no logical solution. There's no way that you could do a series of logical proofs and find out how you're supposed to behave. There is no way for you to create a logical algorithm which will allow you to choose just political systems as opposed to unjust political systems. You take your best shot. Don't try and create any theory which accounts for it, because there is no such possible theory. Just choose a philosophy from the philosophical buffet and go with it all the way leaving us with a radical philosophy of individual choice.

Further Criticism 

The difficulties with this approach to philosophy, I think, are obvious. Someone once asked Robert Frost why he didn't write free verse, why he kept the idea of rhymes and a form in his poetry. He said, Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. And philosophy without rules that is entirely subjective is an awful lot like playing tennis with the net down because everything is in.

Now, what they give with one hand, they take with the other. Someone like Heidegger, when he says that there is no ultimate solution to the problems of human beings, also tells you that you must confront Dasein because that's something important for you to do, or he'll invent some lingo which accounts for it. But in fact, he can't go beyond the limitations of his own subjectivity. 

To a great extent, the existentialists, when you read them, especially over a period of time, and you absorb what they're trying to drive at, they sound like people who are talking to themselves. That accounts for a good bit of why it's very hard to comprehend what they're driving at. Moreover, it also accounts for the very poetic nature of existentialist writings. In fact, their emphasis on anxiety and worry and care and uncertainty on all extreme psychological states is in fact the stuff of poetry more so than philosophy.

Now, to be fair we might consider that the great critics such as say the early Wittgenstein was wrong. Perhaps what we cannot speak about, we don't have to pass over in silence. Perhaps we have to move from science to art. Perhaps it is a fair assessment to move from logic to poetry in our attempts to grapple with the great questions of being in the world. Essentially, Heidegger's work, like Being in Time and the works of Sartre and the other existentialists, are hymns to becoming. Maybe this approach is a fair appraisal of the the nature and the challenges presented to us by the human condition. Either way we are left with fertile ground both for art and further philosophical inquiries since the dawn of these thinkers and their unique attitude and approach to these great philosophical questions.