Heidegger, All you Lost Souls & Some Musings on Philosophy and Writing

Good day all,

Yesterday I couldn't help reflecting back on Mr Heidegger, he was a big German Philosopher. Generally, he has two periods of philosophical thought one pre-WWII and the second post WWII. He went from being a Nazi supporter to being someone unable to deal (in a lot of ways) with that support. As a result his latter writings were significantly different.

 Now I am no expert and I'm doing all of this from memory, but basically I want to get at this guys main point. According to one of my Uni teacher's no-one has really done anything new since Heidegger, they have expanded on what he wrote, but no one has written exactly what he posed. Now for me philosophy and poetry are strangely intertwined and that subject I did Culture and Poetics was just that the marriage of poetry and philosophy. Both forms of expression have one very important thing in common, they are really putting language through its paces. Nowhere are the bounds of language confronted, expanded and defined as in poetry and philosophy.

Heideggers philosophy can probably be applied to society as a whole, but in a lot of ways he was talking about language. The sad thing I've only read translations of his work, so that in itself poses another problem. Am I reading Heidegger or simply some English dude's understanding of him. That's the problem of philosophy, language is so limited when we start to scrutinise incredibly simple concepts such as "being" that what happens is that usually philosophers spin pages upon pages of metaphors the readers way and the explanantions get longer trying to compensate for the lack of words that exist to describe their own thoughts. It is really quite fascinating! And anyone, bored...by this stuff need not read on, but I can't help but marvel at what others have achieved. In any case, the fact that philosophy is so long winded, means there are an inumerable amount of ways to understand it, lets compare this with the plain writing of the legal world (yes, I am part lawyer...) where writing is all about clarity of meaning and simplification.

But this is my understanding of Heidegger. It is a naive and overly simplistic one (most definately), but it ties in nicely with a poem I wrote a day or so ago called Knowing and that I posted just before this, then there is All You Lost Souls. Now that was an interesting train wreck. The most embarassing thing about that poem, is I sent it to a law firm apparently looking for someone outside the box. They got it! It was pretty weird and outside the box and negative. It's a confused sort of poem, I played around with it, but basically it is a poem attacking self-help culture. Knowing on the other hand is a little more general, when I wrote it I'd just read surprisingly something very positive. I'd been reading something about bullying, but I couldn't get over how all of the principles were worded so neutrally and positively. I started to think how many Government documents I'd seen with these high and mighty principles, which are abstract to the point of being useless entirely. I googled some more and what did I find? What did I find? Something about parenting...yes now this is where Knowing was born. People were using statistics and scientific studies to explain solid parenting and I thought one thing only...only in 2011 would anyone think this is how to figure stuff out.

Now back to Heidegger what does this have to do with him? Well his theory was about what he described as Technology. Basically, if you've ever done Theory of Knowledge at school (TOK) or even if you haven't the easiest way to describe what Heidegger means by technology is that it is one way of knowing. It is in essence that empirical  ie we know by studying what we see, hear, feel, percieve and touch and then we collect data about our observations and reach conclusions. Blah blah blah...not just that though its a way of knowing, with a particular goal in mind. Its what I like to call and Heidegger too, how things are valued and known or even what is worth knowing?

His fear was that the technological way of knowing would overwhelm every other way of knowing. What does this mean? The end result...well we lose a bit of something. If all we value is to break the world down into categories and simplify it into a bunch of tested theories and principals, we lose something else. What is that something else? Well that was the other half of what Heidegger was articulating now I'll bring you back to the law/philosophy language difference. Lawyers write in a functional way, in a way that values clarity and the way of knowing increasingly prioritised by the western world and you know what that is absolutely perfect, for what law does. Philosophy however is a different way of knowing, It isn't testing theories there is something intuitive about it, sure there is observation but it is highly exploratory and you read the prose you'd see it.

The problem is as we prioritise one form of language, knowing or understanding we begin to devalue the other, Heidegger says if we continue we will reach a point of no return. I say the fact that we study our personal lives and increasingly, we are losing our own privacy and more and more personal facets of our lives are scrutinised tested and new theories of every day life are espoused from increasingly larger sets of data. Something is wrong with that...don't you think? Heidegger's solution although not really fully espoused was simple to locate the opposite. Art.

I would include poetry in this label and perhaps more so as Heidegger I would suggest was primarily talking about language (from my POV at least). So everyone that's basically a very simply intro to Heidegger and some more musings on language. So what do you think...do we prioritise one way of knowing or understanding too much? I think you along with most of the population don't really care...but somethings we do need to reevaluate what is important in life. I would say there's much more to existing than ticking a bunch of boxes...lets not even get started Mr Self-help. The point is Heidegger was on to something. There are things we can say in Art, whether it be poetry, fiction, Art and film that are not functional and do nothing to further our understanding of the world. Then what is their point! Well that's the point isn't it, not everything is trying to "Know" the world in the same way, sometimes it's okay simply to explore and ponder. Trust me I'd say everyone's happier moments are when they become explorers and wander around with absolutely no purpose or particular function in mind. Perhaps that is what Heidegger was getting at with his idea of "being" as well (I'll have to get back to you on that one...I don't really remember his book Being and Time).

And the clincher...so what Heidegger wrote all this stuff? Was it the PRE or POST. Well I know for a fact Heidegger became a recluse after the war, there's a very long winded doco we watched where you got to see the hut where he did alot of his later writing. Although my memory is failing me, I can't help but attribute Heidegger's somewhat cynical and dark musings on "Technology" and "Art" to be attributed to the darker phase of his life after WWII and his views changed (along with the fates of some of his friends no doubt). If anyone wants to make any corrections feel free.

Congrats to anyone still reading. I know not everyone finds this stuff as their cup of tea. I just hope that perhaps you have read this and might briefly ponder or explore your world today. You may be surprised what you find when you try to know the world in a new way.