Thanks for the interesting essay. It raises many questions--not least of which, alas, is the extent to which the author's theological concerns might be subtly distorting his understanding and account of Polanyi's epistemology (I can't say, not having read Polanyi). The reactions of mine I think might interest you are as follows:
Thanks for the interesting essay. It raises many questions--not least of which, alas, is the extent to which the author's theological concerns might be subtly distorting his understanding and account of Polanyi's epistemology (I can't say, not having read Polanyi). The reactions of mine I think might interest you are as follows:
You could well find the French Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel's account of faith appealing. Marcel argues that it's a mistake to think of faith as a species of weak belief; i.e., belief without sufficient evidence. Rather, it's an orientation that allows us to proceed as if our confidence in reason and evidence had some adequate epistemological grounding in the first place.
The notion of being obliged to 'entrust ourselves' to something is central to the work of Karl Jaspers, another philosopher whose insights I respect. Jaspers explicitly says, "The historical process can be seen either as an irresistible mechanism or as an infinitely interpretable meaning which manifests itself by unexpected new events, which remains always equivocal, a meaning which, even when we entrust ourselves to it, is never known to us." That pretty much sums up my experience, all right.
Jaspers also says, "The overweening plans of rulers, based upon a supposed total knowledge of history, have always ended in catastrophe," a lesson difficult to learn, apparently.
There's an interesting echo of this in a book published a few years ago by Oxford University Press, by an author whose name I unfortunately can't remember. Her studies suggest that when it comes to routine decision-making we perform the kind of cost-benefit analysis you'd suppose would be rational, but we do something quite different in making major life decisions. For example, you might think, coming out of high school, that going to university and becoming a marine biologist would be a fun idea; but you don't yet have the data or experience to know what this actually entails, and consequently aren't in a position to make a proper cost-benefit assessment. It's only years later, when you've got your degree and are heading to graduate school, that it might occur to you to look back and say, "Thank God my instincts were correct and I made the right choice: this is absolutely the life for me, though the reasons for that were unknown to me at the time."
I suspect Polanyi would have liked this; and for all I know he probably did like and endorse Husserl's claim that in order to hear a note as Middle C there must be both a perceived sound and an intuited understanding.
These might seem terminological quibbles, but I'm uncomfortable with essay formulations like 'responsible acts claim universal validity,' and the claim that what we gain when the 'objective world speaks' are insights into 'reality.' Acts can be ethical or unethical, helpful or unhelpful, wise or foolish, etc., but only logical arguments can be valid or invalid. The contrast between objectivity and subjectivity isn't a contrast between degrees of reality; nor, for that matter, is the contrast between reason and unreason. For reason's true antithesis we should look to Schopenhauer: he's the philosopher who warned that you need to recognize when you're no longer dealing with someone's reason but his will... he simply will not understand you (we've all had too many conversations like this).
Ditto for the claim, "What is not understood cannot be said to be known." If true understanding were the test, we'd all know remarkably little. You might express puzzlement at the phenomenon of animals knowing how to do something despite never having encountered the least demonstration either of the need or the technique for doing that thing. Someone comes along and says, "Well, that's just their instinct." Swell: now you've learned how to use words like 'instinct' and 'instinctive' correctly whenever the occasion arises, and in this sense you can reasonably be said to know something about animals previously unfamiliar to you. But in terms of actually enlarging your understanding about how animals manage to accomplish this feat, you're no wiser than you were before. How often do what we're offered as 'explanations' function as mere covers for our ignorance? Yet these same explanations incontestably qualify as constituents of our knowledge base and enable us to communicate intelligibly with one another. (If you think we live in a complacent culture that's somewhat lax in its standards when it comes to knowledge base admissions criteria, I would agree with you.)
As for 'attention to particulars,' this is so habitual that it's scarcely possible for us to imagine the existence of alternative modes of perception and cognition (there's a reason why, in reference libraries organized according to the Dewey Decimal System, books on classification and categorization are found in the 000 range). If you aren't familiar with Heidegger's take on Plato, I think you'll find the following summary fascinating... presuming it can be shoehorned into the length limit for posts here:
Hi Mark, thank you for your excellent and thought-provoking comments. You’re exactly right about the essay author and the weaknesses in his thinking; he doesn’t do justice to Polanyi, who is very much in harmony with your thinking and the writers and philosophers you cite. I’m a big fan of Jaspers, too.
You clearly know your subject and your comments deserve a considered response. I absolutely love the fascinating excerpt you included below and I’d like to comment further on it, too.
This forum isn’t the ideal place to continue our discussion. My email is coffman@alameda.net.au. If you’re willing to reach out to me directly I’d be very glad to continue this conversation. Very best, Chris
Thanks for the invitation, Chris. I'll be happy to take you up on it and we can introduce ourselves to each other properly, though probably not today (I have a couple of appointments this afternoon and another tomorrow morning). I've written down your email address, so if you want to remove it from your post it might be prudent to do so.
Always nice to meet a fellow Jaspers fan (or at least so I've always presumed: if memory serves, you may actually be the first), especially one who's as full of compliments as you are.
His studies of Holderlin were not undertaken solely out of Heidegger's growing conviction, as a philosopher concerned with the problem of language, that poetry was the essential form of speech. His tie to Holderlin is closer than this. Holderlin, like Heidegger, is the enraptured Hellenist who turns his eyes back to the sunlit age of the Greeks and speaks of the modern age as "the night of the world" from which all of the gods have departed. Holderlin here is the most extreme and the most visionary of the romantic poets, all of whom were possessed by the uneasy dread that in the modern age man had come to sever himself so drastically from nature that some new and uncanny fate would fall upon him. In English poetry this uneasiness, which is something new in the history of poetry, begins with Blake and Wordsworth. It becomes a clamor of warning voices among some of our greatest contemporary poets: for Yeats this is the time of the dark of the moon, of empty objectivity and bloody violence; for Eliot (before his conversion at least, and perhaps after it too) ours is the wasteland in which the saving waters no longer flow; for Rilke (on whom Heidegger has written a perceptive study) this is the time when the lost angelic voices are no longer heard; for Robert Graves, we have lost all contact with the great Goddess, and we are "no longer at home with the lady of the house"—we are no longer at home in nature. This testimony of the poets is so extraordinary that we can hardly afford to brush it aside lightly; and a society that does so has already lost all contact with its poets and thereby confirms their prophecy. Heidegger is the thinker of what these poets seek to poetize. As the poets, from romanticism onward, warn against the severance of man from nature, Heidegger seeks to warn us of a severance of thinking from Being; and this not merely as a severance of man's instincts from the way of nature, but also as something that takes place in the very mode of his thinking.
Heidegger’s interpretations of Holderlin have thus to be seen in the context of a general interpretation of history that is also one of the remarkable products of this last phase of his thought. This view of history is very bold and sweeping, yet in a fashion typical of Heidegger it starts from a very simple and banal observation of the present. This observation is that the characteristic of the modern age in comparison with past ages is the extraordinary development of technology that has made possible the organization of men into mass societies and secured the domination by man of the whole planet. So far, nothing very new about this. But Heidegger pushes this point in a very simple-minded and persistent way: If technology is now the dominant thing in man’s life, how did this become possible? Through modern science. And where did modern science begin? In the seventeenth century, when for the sake of precision and measurement men began to apply mathematics to natural phenomena. The concurrent philosophic expression of this is the Cartesian philosophy of clear and distinct ideas. But it is quite obvious that the development of science in the seventeenth century could not have taken place without the knowledge of Greek science that had been rediscovered by the Renaissance. Our steps from the present backward lead us thus to Greek science.
But Greek science is, in its turn, the offspring of Greek philosophy, for it is out of the speculations of the Greek philosophers that science is born. The seed then of what the world is today and of what we ourselves are lies in the step taken by the Greek thinkers to detach beings as beings, objects as objects, from the environing presence of Being, and so to make possible eventually the thematic elaboration of these objects in science.
With this objectification of nature—that is, the detachment of objects as objects from the environing ground of Being—the age of metaphysics begins. This age culminates 2500 years later in modern science, where the objectification of nature is almost complete. Its final philosophic utterance is in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power: for here, in Nietzsche, is the extreme expression of man’s drive to tear himself loose from nature and manipulate it in the interests of his own power. The process that begins with the earliest Greek philosopher, Anaximander, culminates in Nietzsche; and with a very neat, perhaps too neat, stroke of symmetry Heidegger speaks of the age from Anaximander to Nietzsche as a single unit. This age of metaphysics is now finished, says Heidegger, not in the sense the positivists would aver that metaphysics itself has become “meaningless”; on the contrary, the positivists themselves are unconscious dupes of metaphysics since they are completely captured by its spirit of objectification; no, this age is finished because it has, after Nietzsche, no further fundamental possibilities open to it. The step taken by the Greeks to distinguish clear and distinct objects was the great historical step taken by no other people (the Greeks alone among ancient people created science); but in this great step forward the sheer presence of Being as the environing context from which all objects are detached was lost and forgotten. Poets remind us of this presence. But if there is to be a genuine renewal in the perspectives of civilization, there must be a new kind of thinking (of which Heidegger would be the groping forerunner) that would seek to make us stand once again in the sheer presence of that which is.
All of this historical framework has to be kept in mind in reading Heidegger’s brief essay Plato’s Doctrine of Truth. Plato, according to Heidegger, shifts the meaning of truth from a characteristic of Being—namely the open-ness or unhiddenness of Being (the Greek word we translate as “truth,” alethia, means literally “unhiddenness”)—to a characteristic of mental concepts: their correctness or precision. Hence the Idea becomes for Plato the real reality. But Idea, in Greek, has its root in the verb for seeing: an Idea is always thus a human perspective. Thus the consequence of Plato's shift in the meaning of truth is to turn from Being itself in order to confer preeminent reality upon our own human and mental perspectives upon Being. It is a first step in that long journey that is Western philosophy toward the severance of man from Being. With this little change in words Plato has launched Western history toward the age of cerebration and computing machines.
This may look altogether pat to some readers. It would look less so, however, if all the connecting links were put in, and if Heidegger were to expound his point about Platonism in a broader and less microscopic way. He chooses instead to burrow in the words of the Greek text, and to unfold his point from those words like a man unwrapping tiny nuggets. But to each writer must be granted his own mode of expression, as to each thinker his own mode of attack; and for Heidegger it is a consecrated task to dig back to the original thinking of the Greeks as it is caught in the web of the Greek language.
The Letter on Humanism has also to be read within the context of Heidegger’s historical vision. It is easy to misunderstand Heidegger here as anti-humanist (perhaps in the sense of anti-humane) because he does not see humanism as the essential message for our time. But this would be an entirely superficial and frivolous reading. Heidegger’s point of view is historical, and philosophy, in view of the essential temporality of man, must always take the historical point of view: Humanism was a great historical effort on the part of the Greeks, and it was necessary at that turning point of time to rescue man from his immersion in nature and to define the strictly human as distinct from the animal. The great artistic expressions of humanism are those beautiful and idealized forms of man created by the classic Greek sculptors. If the modern sculptor cannot create such idealized forms, it is not because he is anti-human or anti-humane; another vision claims him, such as the need to reintegrate man into nature, so that some of Henry Moore’s carvings, for example, exhibit the human body as a rock eroded by the sea and cast upon the shore from the waves. Man needs to preserve the inherited values of his humanity; but humanism as a doctrine is incomplete for an age when the human is threatening to overpower nature…
William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
A terrific tour d’horizon (Heidegger reference intended!) full of gems. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Mark. Wonderfully thought-provoking, and in this moment of the rapid emergence of AI most apposite.
Thanks for the interesting essay. It raises many questions--not least of which, alas, is the extent to which the author's theological concerns might be subtly distorting his understanding and account of Polanyi's epistemology (I can't say, not having read Polanyi). The reactions of mine I think might interest you are as follows:
You could well find the French Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel's account of faith appealing. Marcel argues that it's a mistake to think of faith as a species of weak belief; i.e., belief without sufficient evidence. Rather, it's an orientation that allows us to proceed as if our confidence in reason and evidence had some adequate epistemological grounding in the first place.
The notion of being obliged to 'entrust ourselves' to something is central to the work of Karl Jaspers, another philosopher whose insights I respect. Jaspers explicitly says, "The historical process can be seen either as an irresistible mechanism or as an infinitely interpretable meaning which manifests itself by unexpected new events, which remains always equivocal, a meaning which, even when we entrust ourselves to it, is never known to us." That pretty much sums up my experience, all right.
Jaspers also says, "The overweening plans of rulers, based upon a supposed total knowledge of history, have always ended in catastrophe," a lesson difficult to learn, apparently.
There's an interesting echo of this in a book published a few years ago by Oxford University Press, by an author whose name I unfortunately can't remember. Her studies suggest that when it comes to routine decision-making we perform the kind of cost-benefit analysis you'd suppose would be rational, but we do something quite different in making major life decisions. For example, you might think, coming out of high school, that going to university and becoming a marine biologist would be a fun idea; but you don't yet have the data or experience to know what this actually entails, and consequently aren't in a position to make a proper cost-benefit assessment. It's only years later, when you've got your degree and are heading to graduate school, that it might occur to you to look back and say, "Thank God my instincts were correct and I made the right choice: this is absolutely the life for me, though the reasons for that were unknown to me at the time."
I suspect Polanyi would have liked this; and for all I know he probably did like and endorse Husserl's claim that in order to hear a note as Middle C there must be both a perceived sound and an intuited understanding.
These might seem terminological quibbles, but I'm uncomfortable with essay formulations like 'responsible acts claim universal validity,' and the claim that what we gain when the 'objective world speaks' are insights into 'reality.' Acts can be ethical or unethical, helpful or unhelpful, wise or foolish, etc., but only logical arguments can be valid or invalid. The contrast between objectivity and subjectivity isn't a contrast between degrees of reality; nor, for that matter, is the contrast between reason and unreason. For reason's true antithesis we should look to Schopenhauer: he's the philosopher who warned that you need to recognize when you're no longer dealing with someone's reason but his will... he simply will not understand you (we've all had too many conversations like this).
Ditto for the claim, "What is not understood cannot be said to be known." If true understanding were the test, we'd all know remarkably little. You might express puzzlement at the phenomenon of animals knowing how to do something despite never having encountered the least demonstration either of the need or the technique for doing that thing. Someone comes along and says, "Well, that's just their instinct." Swell: now you've learned how to use words like 'instinct' and 'instinctive' correctly whenever the occasion arises, and in this sense you can reasonably be said to know something about animals previously unfamiliar to you. But in terms of actually enlarging your understanding about how animals manage to accomplish this feat, you're no wiser than you were before. How often do what we're offered as 'explanations' function as mere covers for our ignorance? Yet these same explanations incontestably qualify as constituents of our knowledge base and enable us to communicate intelligibly with one another. (If you think we live in a complacent culture that's somewhat lax in its standards when it comes to knowledge base admissions criteria, I would agree with you.)
As for 'attention to particulars,' this is so habitual that it's scarcely possible for us to imagine the existence of alternative modes of perception and cognition (there's a reason why, in reference libraries organized according to the Dewey Decimal System, books on classification and categorization are found in the 000 range). If you aren't familiar with Heidegger's take on Plato, I think you'll find the following summary fascinating... presuming it can be shoehorned into the length limit for posts here:
Ah, no... I'll trying breaking it up...
Hi Mark, thank you for your excellent and thought-provoking comments. You’re exactly right about the essay author and the weaknesses in his thinking; he doesn’t do justice to Polanyi, who is very much in harmony with your thinking and the writers and philosophers you cite. I’m a big fan of Jaspers, too.
You clearly know your subject and your comments deserve a considered response. I absolutely love the fascinating excerpt you included below and I’d like to comment further on it, too.
This forum isn’t the ideal place to continue our discussion. My email is coffman@alameda.net.au. If you’re willing to reach out to me directly I’d be very glad to continue this conversation. Very best, Chris
Thanks for the invitation, Chris. I'll be happy to take you up on it and we can introduce ourselves to each other properly, though probably not today (I have a couple of appointments this afternoon and another tomorrow morning). I've written down your email address, so if you want to remove it from your post it might be prudent to do so.
Always nice to meet a fellow Jaspers fan (or at least so I've always presumed: if memory serves, you may actually be the first), especially one who's as full of compliments as you are.
Sounds good Mark. BTW I don’t know if you follow the excellent Substack The Upheaval but he had an especially good post to day, and one that’s relevant to our discussion: https://open.substack.com/pub/theupheaval/p/upheaval-interview-matthew-b-crawford?r=exi3h&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
# # #
His studies of Holderlin were not undertaken solely out of Heidegger's growing conviction, as a philosopher concerned with the problem of language, that poetry was the essential form of speech. His tie to Holderlin is closer than this. Holderlin, like Heidegger, is the enraptured Hellenist who turns his eyes back to the sunlit age of the Greeks and speaks of the modern age as "the night of the world" from which all of the gods have departed. Holderlin here is the most extreme and the most visionary of the romantic poets, all of whom were possessed by the uneasy dread that in the modern age man had come to sever himself so drastically from nature that some new and uncanny fate would fall upon him. In English poetry this uneasiness, which is something new in the history of poetry, begins with Blake and Wordsworth. It becomes a clamor of warning voices among some of our greatest contemporary poets: for Yeats this is the time of the dark of the moon, of empty objectivity and bloody violence; for Eliot (before his conversion at least, and perhaps after it too) ours is the wasteland in which the saving waters no longer flow; for Rilke (on whom Heidegger has written a perceptive study) this is the time when the lost angelic voices are no longer heard; for Robert Graves, we have lost all contact with the great Goddess, and we are "no longer at home with the lady of the house"—we are no longer at home in nature. This testimony of the poets is so extraordinary that we can hardly afford to brush it aside lightly; and a society that does so has already lost all contact with its poets and thereby confirms their prophecy. Heidegger is the thinker of what these poets seek to poetize. As the poets, from romanticism onward, warn against the severance of man from nature, Heidegger seeks to warn us of a severance of thinking from Being; and this not merely as a severance of man's instincts from the way of nature, but also as something that takes place in the very mode of his thinking.
Heidegger’s interpretations of Holderlin have thus to be seen in the context of a general interpretation of history that is also one of the remarkable products of this last phase of his thought. This view of history is very bold and sweeping, yet in a fashion typical of Heidegger it starts from a very simple and banal observation of the present. This observation is that the characteristic of the modern age in comparison with past ages is the extraordinary development of technology that has made possible the organization of men into mass societies and secured the domination by man of the whole planet. So far, nothing very new about this. But Heidegger pushes this point in a very simple-minded and persistent way: If technology is now the dominant thing in man’s life, how did this become possible? Through modern science. And where did modern science begin? In the seventeenth century, when for the sake of precision and measurement men began to apply mathematics to natural phenomena. The concurrent philosophic expression of this is the Cartesian philosophy of clear and distinct ideas. But it is quite obvious that the development of science in the seventeenth century could not have taken place without the knowledge of Greek science that had been rediscovered by the Renaissance. Our steps from the present backward lead us thus to Greek science.
But Greek science is, in its turn, the offspring of Greek philosophy, for it is out of the speculations of the Greek philosophers that science is born. The seed then of what the world is today and of what we ourselves are lies in the step taken by the Greek thinkers to detach beings as beings, objects as objects, from the environing presence of Being, and so to make possible eventually the thematic elaboration of these objects in science.
With this objectification of nature—that is, the detachment of objects as objects from the environing ground of Being—the age of metaphysics begins. This age culminates 2500 years later in modern science, where the objectification of nature is almost complete. Its final philosophic utterance is in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power: for here, in Nietzsche, is the extreme expression of man’s drive to tear himself loose from nature and manipulate it in the interests of his own power. The process that begins with the earliest Greek philosopher, Anaximander, culminates in Nietzsche; and with a very neat, perhaps too neat, stroke of symmetry Heidegger speaks of the age from Anaximander to Nietzsche as a single unit. This age of metaphysics is now finished, says Heidegger, not in the sense the positivists would aver that metaphysics itself has become “meaningless”; on the contrary, the positivists themselves are unconscious dupes of metaphysics since they are completely captured by its spirit of objectification; no, this age is finished because it has, after Nietzsche, no further fundamental possibilities open to it. The step taken by the Greeks to distinguish clear and distinct objects was the great historical step taken by no other people (the Greeks alone among ancient people created science); but in this great step forward the sheer presence of Being as the environing context from which all objects are detached was lost and forgotten. Poets remind us of this presence. But if there is to be a genuine renewal in the perspectives of civilization, there must be a new kind of thinking (of which Heidegger would be the groping forerunner) that would seek to make us stand once again in the sheer presence of that which is.
All of this historical framework has to be kept in mind in reading Heidegger’s brief essay Plato’s Doctrine of Truth. Plato, according to Heidegger, shifts the meaning of truth from a characteristic of Being—namely the open-ness or unhiddenness of Being (the Greek word we translate as “truth,” alethia, means literally “unhiddenness”)—to a characteristic of mental concepts: their correctness or precision. Hence the Idea becomes for Plato the real reality. But Idea, in Greek, has its root in the verb for seeing: an Idea is always thus a human perspective. Thus the consequence of Plato's shift in the meaning of truth is to turn from Being itself in order to confer preeminent reality upon our own human and mental perspectives upon Being. It is a first step in that long journey that is Western philosophy toward the severance of man from Being. With this little change in words Plato has launched Western history toward the age of cerebration and computing machines.
This may look altogether pat to some readers. It would look less so, however, if all the connecting links were put in, and if Heidegger were to expound his point about Platonism in a broader and less microscopic way. He chooses instead to burrow in the words of the Greek text, and to unfold his point from those words like a man unwrapping tiny nuggets. But to each writer must be granted his own mode of expression, as to each thinker his own mode of attack; and for Heidegger it is a consecrated task to dig back to the original thinking of the Greeks as it is caught in the web of the Greek language.
The Letter on Humanism has also to be read within the context of Heidegger’s historical vision. It is easy to misunderstand Heidegger here as anti-humanist (perhaps in the sense of anti-humane) because he does not see humanism as the essential message for our time. But this would be an entirely superficial and frivolous reading. Heidegger’s point of view is historical, and philosophy, in view of the essential temporality of man, must always take the historical point of view: Humanism was a great historical effort on the part of the Greeks, and it was necessary at that turning point of time to rescue man from his immersion in nature and to define the strictly human as distinct from the animal. The great artistic expressions of humanism are those beautiful and idealized forms of man created by the classic Greek sculptors. If the modern sculptor cannot create such idealized forms, it is not because he is anti-human or anti-humane; another vision claims him, such as the need to reintegrate man into nature, so that some of Henry Moore’s carvings, for example, exhibit the human body as a rock eroded by the sea and cast upon the shore from the waves. Man needs to preserve the inherited values of his humanity; but humanism as a doctrine is incomplete for an age when the human is threatening to overpower nature…
William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
A terrific tour d’horizon (Heidegger reference intended!) full of gems. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Mark. Wonderfully thought-provoking, and in this moment of the rapid emergence of AI most apposite.