WhooshUp

Bye Bye Berkeley

2011-06-30T23:29:00.000-07:00

All good things must come to an end. The Do It Yourself Scholar has posted that many of the courses that Berkeley has maintained on its podcast site over the years have been removed. As far as I can tell, all the Dreyfus podcasts are gone. It was interest generated by those podcasts that originally brought us here so it is very depressing to see them just disappear.

UPDATE: The Dreyfus courses can still be found on Berkeley's iTunesU page.

FURTHER UPDATE: The Do It Yourself Scholar is now reporting that "due to an overwhelming outcry from viewers across the globe" Berkeley is going to make more of its retired courses available once again.

A Gathering Place

2010-12-23T14:40:00.000-08:00

Over the last few months our list of podcasts has been greatly expanded. This post is intended to solicit recommendations that we can add to the growing list. Following the lead of Dreyfus and his Philosophy 6 & 7 courses the concentration of podcasts listed deal with philosophy, literature, art, and film. Please use the "comments" for this post to recommend any podcasts that you think would make good additions. This would also be a good place to review any of the podcasts we have listed or start a dialogue concerning them.

Dreyfus and Kelly start a blog

2010-06-02T18:40:00.000-07:00

Professors Dreyfus and Kelly have started a blog associated with a book they are currently writing titled "All Things Shining." Here is an excerpt from blog's first entry:

How did we go from the intense and meaningful lives of Homer’s world to the sadness and indecision, perhaps even the nihilism, of the current age? And how can we find the shining things once more?

Bert Dreyfus and I are just completing a book on this topic. It is called All Things Shining: Reading the Western Canon To Find Meaning in a Secular Age. As we put the finishing touches on the manuscript this summer, and as we prepare for courses on the topic at Berkeley and Harvard this fall, we hope to use this blog to lay out some of the themes of the project and to generate discussion among a wider group of folks.

You can find it at: http://allthingsshiningbook.wordpress.com/

Being & Time Revisited

2010-05-22T04:50:00.000-07:00

For some reason I was clicking on bookmarks from yesteryear, and came across Sean Kellys Fall 2009 podcasts on Being & Time out of Harvard. Hooray! I enjoyed his lectures on "Later Heidegger" which were brought into the clearing on this blog last year....In my opinion, his presentation is every bit as good, maybe even clearer (in some parts) than what we got out of Dreyfus at Berkeley.

...Yet the distinction between Dreyfus & Kelly is justified only on the condition that this is kept constantly in mind: only by way of what Dreyfus has taught does one gain access to what is to-be-taught by Kelly. And the teachings of Dreyfus seemingly become more accessible when it is explained by Kelly...

Or so I hope. Just downloaded the first 3 lectures, and am ready to go!

http://my.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k65010

Poetry Corner

2010-03-31T09:16:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I just feel like posting some of my old poetry here on Whooshup, just for the fun of it. Last time I did, we got some return poetry, which was nice. I wrote this maybe two or three years ago.

When we trump the night.

That we should trump our given hands,
or strut and shunt our bones around,
when every tree and shrub remands
our justice to the frozen ground,

or grab the gladness we denied,
or false remake the words we lied.
Begone the mist! Away the veil,
that masks the many ways we failed!

Beyond the dormant, raised by straps,
that bind us to the stage above -
this escalator, ripped and gapped,
we solemnize, then quickly shove

to get beyond, to raise to heaven,
to greet and 'brace the law of seven.
The law of seven guarantees
a fitful state that we may sieze
(A fitful state, all crumped with light,
that lullabies the cruel night).

For when we get the eyeless gaze
and mystify our greasy bounds,
wrapped up in dusk's uneasy haze,
we faintly hear organic sounds

of stove-pipe dreams and treble sighs,
that grip our bones and tear our guise,
until that smoky, lurid night
enfolds our soul, our heart, our might.

What daemon halts us, calls our bluff,
and wheedles out an apish trust,
which all our inspirations hush,
and camouflages faith with lust?

To get beyond, to haul and push,
we back out sense, and clip the bush.
The bush that rises from the ashes,
frozen by our pearl white sashes
(Sashes earned in turning ground
to make the woodwork come around).

Letter to a friend on Christmas Day

2009-12-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, I have been mulling over a response since that last email you sent. Then a week ago, at a funeral, I determined that I should at least try (try again - I already threw away a couple tries). The problem has been that I feel totally inadequate to convince you of a truth I feel "to my bones" as it were, about christianity and how one properly enters into it.

And now, after months of hesitation and self-agonizing indecision, here is the result, just in time for the high holy days of Christmas.

"After a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself. Stop. There was first a game at blind-man's buff. Of course there was." says Dickens in A Chrstmas Carol.

Dickens possessed a profound christian sensibility without ever bothering to mention Jesus directly in his fiction, a tradition that 20th century englishmen like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis emulated, and we who spout the holy name left and right as if it is in danger of being forgotten entirely should take note of them. Maybe the best way to allow others to be drawn to christian thinking is to give it a rest.

So Jesus was born about 2000 years ago and did so spectacularly well with his gig on earth that his purported stable-based birthday eventually preempted that most pagan and ancient holiday - winter solstice. The rebirth of the sun in the northern hemisphere - a fitting cultural deep meme for the one who told an elder emissary from the jewish religious establishment of his day "you must be reborn". It sounds so simple, but of course, if you bother to think about it (reborn?) it's incredibly complicated prima facie.

Even though many christians talk as if the "plan of salvation" is just a simple recipe you can cook up, with a little coaxing, the paradox (and there are paradoxes galore) is that for each individual, its working out is often not so simple. Maybe it takes a special time and place of execution, but I doubt it. Maybe it takes some special mental energy, but I doubt that too. The mental act, if we care to speak that way, is more a surrender than an achievement. We don't really have to worry about when and how we "become" a christian, as much as we ought to worry about whether we have "given up" being no more (and no less) than a human animal.

Nevertheless, I do not think the answers you may be pursuing are to be found in an intellectual exercise, and the above is as far into actual thinking as I think the merry season warrants. The real answers are experiential - you have to "live into" them, not think them, much less mentally appropriate them from someone else's recipe. Thinking is as likely to mess up the thing as to help it along. My best spiritual exemplars have had, as far as I can tell, an average to below average IQ. They are not particularly skilled or superior at doing anything, except being spiritual. They certainly would not understand modern philosophy, nor care much about it.

Just as our oh-so-postmodern strengths may include understanding complex shades of subtle discrimination between finely hewn arguments within shadows cast by deep philosophical questions, their strengths include humbly addressing themselves (often on our behalf) to a totally different world, one that is adjacent to our every-day world, but utterly set apart. This other world disintegrates whenever the analytic spotlight shines on it. It is necessarily mysterious - not because it cannot be understood, but because as soon as it is understood it no longer has power to help us find our way.

It's as if these untutored seers are sitting at a strange computer you and I have never used, entering something into it that we cannot fathom. The computer's internal operating system consist of the exact opposite of what normal computers do. Instead of manipulating logic, it manipulates an irrational connectedness between all things. But these operators I speak of, they would never use that particular word picture, because to them what they are doing is as old and traditional as the hills. What they are doing, they will tell you, is "praising God", "being in prayer", "communing with the Spirit", "talking to Jesus", "stilling their soul", "worshipping the Father", "intercessory prayer", and so on. These are activities many philosophers simply cannot stomach, and would likely hold in utter contempt as a dreary descent into a pedestrian skein of compulsive religious fallacy.

Ergo, I'll use the story of the three crosses of the crucifixion. The one in the middle held the dying Jesus, and the two on either side held two common criminals also sentenced to death, almost certainly because they committed murder and mayhem. Here's their conversation, roughly:

Left-hand Criminal: Aren't you Jesus, the G*d-damned f*cking Christ? Here we are nailed to three g*d-damned wooden crosses and you can't get us the f*ck outta here? What a pile of sh*t you turned out to be!

Right-hand Criminal: Hey, shut up, you g*d-damn loser. We got ourselves to blame for this - but he didn't do a damn thing wrong. Yo, Jesus, would you talk to the Big Man when you get to heaven, put in a word for me?

Jesus Christ: Sure man, sure. See you on the other side.

--Luke 23:39-43 my version -note that all the cursing going on here is quite attested, if not transliterated.

I don't know what this has to do with anything - I've just been wanting to share it. But it's my kind of salvation plan. All this guy asked for was to be remembered. Tell me if you noticed any other significant step in this crucial (pun intended) interchange. How hard is that? Of course, we don't all get the chance to be crucified right next to Jesus Christ, so it gets more complicated the farther away we get from that signal honor. And we are such a long way from believing that this crucifixion and resurrection story I just alluded to is true. We postmoderns believe Jesus died, the criminals died, their bones turned to dust, their gory execution got mythologized by a cult, and the rest is history. Here we are.

Until we go to a funeral. Now, I've been wondering what a postmodern funeral should be - one in which we philosophically skewer the mock seriousness with which even the oh-so-scientific moderns (still!) pretend to solemnize the onset of human tissue death and decomposition. Would there be dancing, laughter? Would we celebrate the banishment of all religious nonsense from the simple fact of organic death? What would we say about the 85-year-old departed - that she lived too long? But wait - perhaps a true postmodern would not even bother to gather the family, except perhaps to divide the belongings. Dice anyone?

It would be inexact to say that the very traditional funeral I attended the other day was for the living. The funeral was for the souls, the souls of us living organic beings, and the souls of dead and decomposing organic beings set loose at last. Religious people do funerals because it is an observance of a religious truth, one that is inaccessible to the modern and postmodern mind: that in this "other world" which religion and other practices, unlike science and logic, are capable of linking up to, souls survive. Do you have a soul? Not sure? Just ask it.

Imagine yourself sitting calmly in an armchair. Across from you lies a haphazard pile of bones and muscle and organs and skin, oozing blood and other fluids. The pile is fresh, but you know it cannot stay that way - it is going to start turning smellishly into compost soon. Then comes self-recognition - the mass of flesh is you, it is your "bone bag" of a body, opened up and spilled on the floor. Is that pile you? Ask your soul. If you have one, it will whisper "I am still here."

For me, the major redeeming grace of the postmodern perspective, and the christian existentialism it enables, is that it lets me retain such a simplistic belief, and hold it in my being without forcing my hand on any other matter, such as quantum mechanics, for instance, or genetic drift, social construction of truth, power relationships expressed in language, artificial intelligence, fractals, alien life, or interplanetary emigration. Jesus doesn't care, he's mainly about asking and receiving.

So here's the best witness I can give. Be really, really open. Pay attention to the people in your life who will never understand what Heidegger was getting at. Pay attention to people who remain stubbornly stupid about the profound, troubling, and utterly complex challenges facing the postmodern intellect, preferring that worn out dodge about us not fully comprehending "God's ways". For one thing, they are probably praying for you. Put another way, they are accessing the other world in which your soul does not die and go away, a world no scientist or philosopher can ever quite nail down precisely. They are putting in a word for you.

Their intercession may well lift you to an amazing level of spiritual strength, resilience and confidence, as I believe the nightly prayers of this now-dead, frail old woman of average intelligence, whose funeral I attended, in fact, did for me, and for my family members, spawning miracle after miracle in life's hidden linch-pin moments over the past twelve years. In this humble, broken way, the simple archaic practices, which we moderns and postmoderns alike disdain - we cast about for substitutionary rituals - are somehow shouting "remember me!" back in time 2000 years, trying to wedge their humble petition right in alongside the dying criminal who bothered to ask it, and who got the answer, "sure", when no logical processor could ever enable such a strange reconciliation between sin and salvation, between rejection and acceptance, between condemnation and forgiveness.

So my existential christian attitude is simply this: don't worry so much about it. Give it a rest. Accept the humility of the prayer. Accept the incredible freedom apportioned to each new christian, to reinterpret the asking and the receiving, like I have done, until it feels right for you. The recipe is, there is no recipe. And perhaps that can give aid and comfort to us postmodern watchers out in the border hills of our lumbering culture with its many parts.

SACREBLEU! Another Heidegger Book

2009-11-29T16:37:00.000-08:00

Heidegger is splashing some ink on the pages of the New York Times once again. A "new" book by Emmanuel Faye has hit the English speaking shelves this month, translated by Michael B. Smith from the French, which came out in 2005. So far, I've looked at the forward by Tom Rockmore, and the preface and introduction by the author. The book evidently caused a bit of heat (une reaction au chaud) when it came out in France, and is expected to do the same in the English reading world. With a subtitle like "the introduction of nazism into philosophy", its not hard to understand why.

Faye worries that some intellectuals have been blithe apologists of Heidegger's nazi past. He claims that Heidegger's philosophical message was and continues to be the basis of national socialism. He would like to see his works removed from the philosophy section of the library and placed in the basement under "history, nazism, hate speech", marked with a government warning label He claims:

..."the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after an explosion - a gray cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds"

In other words, a Heideggerian "suicide bomber" has allegedly corrupted our youth, and continues to do so even from the grave. I am reminded of Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles", where a black sheriff is seen riding into town, as a crier shouts "the sheriff is a N****R !", only to be drowned out by the clapping of a bell. Mr. Faye feels that he is the crier in this case, shouting "Heidegger is a N**I !", having been drowned out too long by philosophical apologists grounded in their Heideggerian pixie dust.

After listening to the Berkeley podcasts for a couple of years, and reading and continuing to read things by or about Heidegger, I am not really convinced by the claims made in the first 32 pages by the Frenchman. So far, I have not found myself goose stepping around town, or sporting a toothbrush moustache, or knowingly(?) contemplating the inner truth and beauty of national socialism. Is there a danger that my not so young mind has been irrevocably corrupted by contemplating the existential analytic of the dasein? OK, OK, so I bought the damn book - I did have a coupon -and I may even get to page 33, before moving on with my idle curiosity.

Interestingly, the authors father was also a philosopher who had it in for Heidegger. And the son of Heidegger has done a pretty remarkable job getting a bunch of old lecture notes of his father on the shelves of bookstores across the world. The past, present and future all look very promising indeed for Heidegger enterprises, both pro and con.

A poem I wrote at this season, long ago...

2009-11-14T13:14:00.001-08:00

November snow, a quilted white aphasia,
Scuttles past out-scoured features
and scattered faces in a man-made maze of
frozen glass and gritty concrete seizures.

Injected anasthesia grips the unreal city,
Smothers in a welcome chloroform of cold
My unanchored premonitions from a litany
Of autumn evils awkwardly foretold.

Wrapped in numb amnesia, snow, November's gift,
Soothes embattled senses, lures out illusion
To replace fragments of reality adrift,
As the intimacy of cold negates confusion

Gazing at the falling snow I am steeled
To weather now the world's insanity, congealed.

"Later Heidegger" podcast by Sean Kelly

2009-08-29T13:25:00.000-07:00

Harvard Professor Sean Kelly has his 2008 course titled "Later Heidegger" available on audio. Kelly was a student of Dreyfus and gave a guest lecture for Dreyfus' "Merleau-Ponty" class.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdkelly/SDK-4-PHI139.html

An interesting side-note is that Kelly is teaching the "Man, God,and Society" and "Existentialism in Literature and Film" courses at Harvard. Those are not currently available as podcasts.

Campbell, Dreyfus & Searle to mix it up in PodiCast Triple "Header"

2009-08-27T05:52:00.000-07:00

Theory of Meaning[Campbell] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67289&semesterid=2009-D

Existentialism in Lit & Film [Dreyfus] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67124&semesterid=2009-D

Philosophy of Society [Searle] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67309&semesterid=2009-D

A letter to Dave

2009-08-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

Dave wrote:

Karl, I am looking forward to reading the Heidegger essay. I have very mixed feelings about Hegel, only because of the ways that contrary philosophers such as Neitzche and Engels turned it upside down, and, borrowing from Kant, created the idea of the "Hegelian Dialectic," which has been used for nefarious purposes. Yet I value his position of the subjectivity of history, and the idea that out of thesis and antithesis comes synthesis. I shall try to be open minded as I read the work.

Hi Dave,

Well, so philosophy is sort of my refuge. I admit I don't know a lot about Hegel. I need to read some of his accessible work. What mainly interests me is the 19th century rupture in philosophy between two camps. The first camp consists of the mainstream of european philosophy devoted to understanding what is "real" while the second camp consists of those, like me, who cannot get far beyond the "is" of reality - who, what, how does the reality we experience get assigned this "is-ness" by philosophers.

Most prominent figureheads of the first camp are the rational dualists (like Descartes who founded the subject-object duality and then placed us as the observer-subject and reality as any object properly observed), the rational empiricists (like Hume, who didn't believe in anything he couldn't touch or measure) and the rational idealists (like Kant, who synthesized Descartes and Hume by turning every "thing" into a formalized idea-thing). These three strands of thought, among other varieties of rational philosophy, then influenced the rest of history down to today, decisively.

The second camp arose in the following generations and consisted of the earliest existentialists, the thinkers who questioned the primacy of rationality, and who have served to subtly bend our current reality, where absolute confidence in science and technology is coupled with the most bizarre forms of irrational entertainment as evidenced by TV shows and commercials, music, the internet, etc.

So the critical difference is one's faith in the rational faculty. The earlier thinkers (and the majority of ordinary people today, including most of the scientists who dominate our view of reality) believe that rationality is somehow the basis of truth. Ultimately, that boils down to the statement that all truth can be mathematically expressed. Stephen Wolfram says that the universe is "calculable". It's his faith statement.

Existentialists do not deny rationality as one of the many human faculties that become apparent to any observer. However, they would claim that there is something deeper and more fundamental than a sort of mathematical truth, or logical order, in the universe. They would say that us living in the world is the basis for everything else. That is, lived experience presupposes everything else. This seems trivial, but it becomes a powerful antidote for an unbalanced way of thinking, in which rationality becomes the ultimate end instead of an occasional means. So what exactly is this alternative state, "lived experience"? Think of everything you do without thinking (note the paradox - by thinking about it you destroy the unthinking thing you are trying to evaluate). Things like breathing, walking, eating, sleeping, dreaming, humming, doodling, glancing to and fro, and most work, once you get into a routine. What is foremost in all such activities is not discrete thoughts, but rather vague feelings, intuitions, instinct.

Let's assume for a moment that moods, emotions, hunches, and vague feelings are the opposite from what we mean by rational. Reductionists would simply dismiss this premise, saying that moods are chemical alignments in the body and brain, and therefore perfectly predictable and rational if we could only measure them well enough. But nevertheless, in the ordinary way we talk about them, moods are rarely rational. Now, do moods come before thinking rationally, or after? Which is a more fundamental aspect of human-ness? It seems a person has to "overcome" their moods and feelings in order to get into a rational frame of mind. But once there, that rational person likely says that rationality must be the fundamental aspect of reality, the raw truth about things. Feelings are merely the fog that obscures reason. We come from this tendency to say the universe is built on orderly laws - it is a rational universe. The laws of the universe must have been in place before humans ever existed. Many religious folks then deduce that God must be rational, despite His many seemingly irrational acts.

The existentialist turns it around and says that moods are the fundamental basis for everything else. They would say, more or less, that rationality is a certain kind of mood, or better yet, it is a mood wherein the natural flow of human action has broken down. This breakdown picture, to me, is the key observation of the existentialists, and the one thing most non-existentialist, rationalist outsiders simply cannot see, or cannot accept. In this picture, most "thinking" - including their own philosophical thinking on either side - must be labelled as abnormal, as suspect, as a sort of tool of last resort when all else fails. This is the opposite of everything we are taught by our culture and education system. We are taught that thinking is good, that it leads to truth, that it is a precondition of success. But existentialists think (note the paradox of thinking about thinking again) that thinking is often bad. This is Dostoevsky's key insight, and why he is considered one of the founders of existentialism. In his novels, every one of his characters who thinks more than he/she feels, ends up with far worse consequences than those who feel more than they think! He writes about evil, and he recognizes two kinds - brute evil, which is what animals do as well as humans, and intellectual evil, which is uniquely human, but often drives humans to behave worse than animals.

I am thoroughly Dostoevskian, at this point in my life. Love is not rational. Beauty cannot be adequately defined and calculated. Hope and faith utterly defy reason. The best in us, as humans, emerges when we have not broken down and fallen into a process of logical thought. Rationality is an emergency measure. We must accept it, carry it around with us like some societal life preserver, and deploy it when lived experience and the natural flow it adheres to have met some difficulty too great to live through alive. And given the violence and uncertainty we see in studying history, that is often enough. For the rest, we should concentrate on existing well.

Heidegger and Pilate

2009-08-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

I could not sleep, so I read an essay by Martin Heidegger called "Hegel and the Greeks" which would be impossible to summarize and is near impossible to read. But I would urge you to try it anyway, like cliff diving, but with less adrenaline.

Heidegger has taken a lot of flak, from all sides, for smashing our comfortable notions of truth. Many mainstream philosophers discount him for ruining their party. Many thinkers find it impossible to forgive his German Nazi identity in the 1930's. Most Christians, especially those who need the idea of truth to stay put, find his existentialism much too relativistic for their taste.

This is perhaps the most comprehensible paragraph in the essay:

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history. Prior to a decision as to the historical correctness of the representation it is therefore necessary to consider if and how history is experienced, from whence does it determine its fundamental traits.

The above paragraph occurs 3/4 of the way through the essay, after he explains in painful detail what Hegel's philosophy of history consists of. At this point, he is getting ready to strongly, massively, disagree with Hegel. He does so in the following paragraph, which I apologize for in advance:

With regards to Hegel and the Greeks this means: all correct or incorrect historical statements presuppose that Hegel has experienced the essence of history out of the essence of being in the sense of absolute subjectivity. There is at this hour no experience of history that can, philosophically speaking, historically correspond to it. However, the speculative-dialectical determination of history brings with as consequence that it prohibits Hegel from regarding 'Aletheia' and its prevalence as the proper matter of thought, and this, precisely, in that philosophy that determines the "reign of truth" as the "purpose" of philosophy. Because Hegel experiences being, when he conceives it as the indeterminate immediate, as the determining and comprehending subject's posited. Consequently, he cannot disassociate being in the Greek sense, the 'einai', from its relation to the subject, and release it to its proper essence. This latter however is pre-sence [An-wesen], that which out of concealedness abides [vor-Wahren] in disclosedness. In pre-sence the unconcealed plays. It plays within 'en' and within 'logos', within the properly gathered bestowment [Vorliegen] - that which lets truth be [An-wahren-lassen]. 'Aletheia' plays within the 'idea' and within the 'choinomia' of the ideas, insofar as these mutually bring to appearance and so compose the existent being, the 'ontos on'. 'Aletheia' plays within 'Energeia' which has nothing in common with actuality, but only with the Greek experience of 'ergon' and its manner of being produced before us within pre-sence.

The passage above captures Heidegger's departure from the rest of philosophy. But it is essentially non-understandable without a whole lot of explanation. I can say that I just barely understand what he's doing. So here's the rundown on this bizarre paragraph:

1. One of the main ways Heidegger "does philosophy" is by picking apart the meaning of words (usually Greek, Latin and German words that ground the language used by philosophers). He does this with hundreds of words in hundreds of contexts all through his writings. In this paragraph he chooses the following words to pick apart:

1a. Aletheia is Greek and usually translated as "truth" - a pretty important word. But it is formed from the root parts "a-" meaning not or opposite from, and "letheia" meaning hidden. So the root meaning is "not hidden" or "unconcealed" and Heidegger makes much of this meaning. Our ordinary sense of truth is that truth is truth whether it is hidden or not - it stays the same before and after we discover it. Heidegger disagrees. He says truth is properly that which is disclosed, not that from which it emerges (hiddenness). This alone is a huge philosophical leap. It suggests that the only things we can say anything meaningful (or truthful) about are the things we have "brought out" of concealment - mainly by seeing them, and thinking about them.

1b. einai is Greek for being, that is, just being there - "is-ness" if you will. Heidegger extends this with the Latin word "presence" and characteristically splits it up for emphasis. The derivation of presence implies it is before (pre) perceptions come into us (sence). Something similar is behind German An-wesen but I can't figure out what. The basic idea is that there is something that comes before our awareness of something. Hegel thinks that thing is truth. Heidegger thinks that thing is more or less "hidden" until it hits us - then it becomes "disclosed" and is true. The rest of the word analysis seems somewhat less important, and the "choinomia" Greek word is a total mystery - even Google can't find it anywhere other than in this essay. Maybe it's a typo.

2. Heidegger saw himself as going against the entire train of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. In attempting to overturn this locomotive, he had earlier help from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who also called a lot of the standard philosophical assumptions into question. The way Heidegger proceeds is to point out ways in which the basic assumptions everyone took for granted were subtly flawed. In this paragraph, he is attempting to shift the focus from logic, which is the ultimate outcome and triumph of Greek philosophy, made much more powerful by modern science, to that which is non-logical. That which is hidden cannot be made logical. In a sense, it is pre-rational. The logical and rational is what most certainly is not hidden. It may be difficult, but it's clear when you study it how logic works. Heidegger does not question that. He questions whether it is the foundational tool needed for understanding the truth. He suggests that we cannot understand the (disclosed) truth without looking at the (hidden) un-truth that lies behind it. This essentially boils down to mysticism.

Heidegger is following in the footsteps of Pontius Pilate, who when questioning Jesus at trial asked him if he was guilty of the obvious crime of proclaiming himself a king in rebellion to Rome's rule. Jesus answered that Pilate was correct, that he was a king. But then he extended this comment with a comment about truth, saying that he had come to demonstrate the truth, and that those who know or want truth should pay attention. So, his life is on the line, and he starts a philosophical discussion with the judge! We can imagine Pilate's snort, as he answers that bizarre statement with the rhetorical question "what is truth?"

I feel more like Pilate than Jesus. Pilate knew that truth was up for grabs. Jesus had an immense certainty that truth was in him, in his words and deeds. Pilate knew that given power, the governor of a Roman province could, in effect, fabricate the truth and make it stick. He could have, he tried to, let Jesus off alive. There is a real question whether if Jesus had responded "of course I'm not a king - anyone can see that!" he would never have been crucified under Roman edict. Pilate was fishing for something he could work with.

I also am fishing for something I can work with. The truth that Jesus represents feels much more like a Heideggerian un-truth, a truth that is not yet discernible, than the truth we associate so readily with scientific logic. Pilate, like so many spin-meisters of our own time, knew that logical truth was subject to manipulation. Pilate wanted an appearance of truth (for instance, Jesus did not appear to be a rebel king to him). Jesus testified to an as yet undisclosed truth (that his lived-out ethics of kindness, caring and self-abnegation would come to dominate the lived experience of the next two millenia in western history).

A new B&T Heidegger Blog at The Guardian.co.uk

2009-06-11T04:39:00.000-07:00

Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters
a blog that showed up this week at the Guardian
Hosted by Simon Critchley

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy

Seeing Seeing

2009-06-08T00:50:00.000-07:00

Daniel Coffeen has a podcast lecture series that looks at perception. Most of the lectures focus on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Bergson. The lecture series can be found at the following:

http://danielcoffeen.podomatic.com/profile?p=1

The blog for the lectures is here:

http://seeingseeing.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-10-07T17%3A36%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7

Gimme some Truth

2009-04-10T23:47:00.000-07:00

What is truth? We have so many in our culture who seem to know it in its totality and will hand it to us (if not jam it down our throats) if we will only grasp for it. It seems only fair that they are usually well compensated for doing so. With so much “truth” being peddled out there, it must be some lack in ourselves if we do not feel we have it in our possession. A moral failing perhaps?

What is often confusing is that these claims are often at odds (to put it politely.) We are expected to choose the “right” one and there we will find repose. Of course, that repose is disturbed if our neighbor chooses the “wrong” one. If he is Guelph instead of Ghibelline; Red instead of Blue. Then that neighbor is a very deluded and dangerous person; he is probably unpatriotic to boot.

How different could things be if we just admitted that none of us finite and mortal creatures could ever have possession of the totality of truth which so many now claim in word and deed? What if we gave up the project of totality? What if we could “think” in a different way? Would this lead us out of our cultural impasse?

I don’t claim to be any more than a novice in the study of Heidegger and I have struggled with him for the last year. I am currently on my third copy of “Being and Time” as the first two were thrown in the fire. Thankfully, the summer months approach. But through the study encouraged by our group I do believe that Heidegger was offering a solution; an exit from the age. At least an exit in thought.

Heidegger claimed that truth is not a correspondence (proposition to object guaranteed by the mind of God or some such transcendent source) by rather an “event.” This event occurs in the movement between my solicitation of an entity and what the entity reveals. The space between my solicitation and the entity is the “open region.” It is in this “open region” that truth might be glimpsed.

Heidegger says that we must make an insistence (solicitation) for the entity to reveal itself. We do not impose meaning on the entity; we draw it out through the solicitation. Bucking virtually the whole Western Tradition, Heidegger is asserting that the entity has an agency. It is an active participant in “the event of truth.” Truth needs both the solicitation of Dasein and the revealing of the entity. In “The Letter on Humanism” Heidegger will make us the “lieutenants of Being”; receivers of what Being discloses to us. In “The Essence of Truth” Heidegger goes back to the Pre-Socratics, he insists that every revealing is also a concealing. We can never get the entity in its totality. Something always withdrawals. This is the notion of “aletheia.” This is not to deny that we get some truth; the entity does reveal itself in some way. I don’t think Heidegger can be counted as one who denies truth. What he does deny is our ability to get the totality of the truth. So aletheia gives us both truth and error. It gives it truth in so far as the entity reveals itself and error in what withdrew in the face of our insistence. Truth and error make up “the event of truth.” This is unavoidable; no insistence can get the totality of the entity. Error is as constitutive as truth is in “the event of truth.”

The problem is that we embrace what is revealed in our insistences and forget aletheia. We forget that error is an essential component of our “truth.” Instead of “letting beings be” so they can reveal themselves in manifold ways, we crush them through the weight of dogmatic insistence. The problem is the forgetting: the forgetting that has run through the course of the Western Philosophical tradition since Plato. We fall in love with our insistences and forget that something withdraws. We forget aletheia. According to the “Essence of Truth” we must insist. But we do not have to forget that something withdraws from that insistence. We need to remember that we have the freedom to make other solicitations that will lead to a different revealing (and concealing.) This road leads to Heidegger's engagement with the poets.

What if we learn to “think” differently? To think and remember aletheia? We would not have to deny truth or make it relative. We would have to accept the humility of realizing that we cannot ever expect to come in full possession of truth and maybe we could learn to thrive in the freedom that new solicitations could offer. We would understand that all of our insistences are only partial and that unavoidably there will be error. How would this change cultural and political discourse?

It is fair to ask exactly what is this “open region” where the insistence and entity meet in the event of truth? To learn to think differently Heidegger tells us not to think of it as "what" or an "entity" at all. Heidegger calls it “the mystery.” Could we learn to treat this “mystery” with reverence and gratitude as perhaps the antidote to a dispirited and fractured age? Heidegger gives us these intriguing alternatives.

The Broken Circle

2009-03-23T14:27:00.000-07:00

I have had an interesting experience the last couple of months. I abandoned my own discussion group. I suppose any attempt to compare such an action to real life begs bemused contempt. A boy running away from home; a husband from his wife; a captain jumping his sinking ship. Leaving a virtual reality is extraordinarily easy by comparison - virtual feelings and virtual loyalties run shallow, a truism Dreyfus, as usual, sniffed out early and loudly outed (see his book On the Internet).

So now I'll do the obvious Tysonian thing and discuss, in public, on my discussion's blog, what it feels like to reject my discussion's "on the basis of which" and like so many others, just break the wrist, and walk away.

First, the technical points to review. The Whooshup discussion was meant to draw in a crowd of Dreyfus' podcast lecture devotees as a sort of adjunct classroom. In Fall 2007, I sent polite email invitations to hundreds of contactees and got polite responses from many dozens, some enthusiastic. We held an inaugural meeting in Second Life, which drew a dozen or more curious participants, who got to converse, after a fashion, with Bert Dreyfus in the budding metaverse, the "basis of which" he has so presciently criticized most of his life. Our group, following a stumbling statistical tail curve, soon diminished to five, then four, then three. The three of us got to know each other too well, until we could describe each other's philosophical undergarments, and then I dropped out myself. I'm not sure if the other two virtual souls I left behind still virtually meet at the Garden Spot at EdTech to talk about Martin Heidegger (arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century), Bert Dreyfus (arguably Heidegger's strongest living proponent), and the constellation of worthies that surrounds them. Well, do you?

So that's the scenario. But why did I leave? Well, the easy answer is that I just got too busy. Things came up. Absorbing things, that turned out to be more compelling than virtual discussion groups. But that is only one aspect of the answer. Another aspect of the explanation, brighter but even more contrived, is that I left in order to find out why everybody else left. What did it feel like to the other critical members, who could have kept something afloat if they had really tried to, after they just stopped showing up every weekend? Because now I could feel that way. A little remorse, a twinge of regret at not getting in to a good philosophy discussion every week, perhaps even guilt (virtual guilt?). Now I can feel it too.

But there's a darker aspect too, and I'll dive right into it. Religion and politics, they say, are two things strangers cannot discuss safely. Philosophy is a sinewy matrix that encompasses and entwines religion and politics. One thinks to escape them in pure speculation but gets tripped up nevertheless, and I believe our discussion group mirrors, in our palpably bumbling and amateur way, the wider picture in contemporary philosophy, even in its academic stratosphere. Dreyfus, like Heidegger, is tangibly conservative. Rorty, like Derrida, is bona fide liberal. These labels are almost meaningless in terms of pure thought, but can we ever really escape them?

So if you want to follow my justification for leaving farther than it may justifiably go, and franker than it ever needed to get, here it is: Those Dreyfus fans who got as far as the "real" but "virtual" discussion group ended up peeling away by ideological idiosyncrasies. The buddhist Deleuzian left first. Then the Rortian liberal secularist. The existential christian Heideggerian (me) left (experimentally?) the ground occupied by the neo-pagan Heideggerian. The best of us, just a good man looking for a good world view, stayed to the end.

But is this the end? If we all faced our own deep religious and political insecurities, picked them up and laid them on the table along with all the "safe" but equally bizarre and ultimately ridiculous concepts such as Heideggerian authenticity, Neitszchean free will, Kierkegaardian commitment, could we still come together for continued discussions? Could we put humpty dumpty together again? I'm open to it.

I am grasping for a meta-narrative of this entire whooshup episode, acting inside and outside of it, myself as object and subject simultaneously. Some may find it embarrassing or distasteful, but it is clearly the only thing to be done beyond brushing our hands and walking away. It is a form of group analysis. A learning experience inside a failed learning experience: What is the "basis upon which" a freely organized high-level philosophy discussion group remains susceptible to such an apparently weak contingency as cultural alignment, and is it possible for the group disbanded by such contingencies to seek its explanation? Or better: Can the patient who has died on the operating table evaluate the cause of the mishap? Or better still: Can the society, the civilization, that tears itself apart in violent strife over political (who gets what) and religious (who believes right) issues, successfully analyze the "basis upon which" that urge to fight, or any other social tendency can be caught, diverted, subsumed, survived?

A Question Concerning Humanities

2009-02-27T04:56:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports that at colleges and universities across the country, the humanities are under scrutiny to justify their salt. "Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defense and health care." Evidently, what it means to be a human being is less important at the college level than cranking out workers to run our technological life-machine. Higher ed bean counters everywhere are engaged in a process of enframing a curriculum to respond to these perceived vocational ends. But what of the spirit of man? Where are these questions to be asked (and perhaps answered) if colleges and universities either cannot afford or choose not to keep the doors open to an examined life?

Heidegger in his essay on technology hears from Holderlin:

"But where danger is, grows
The saving power also"

Which he rephrases:

"...poetically dwells man upon this earth."

Is there a gate through which thought must pass for man to take a stand on his own being? Is it a question of thinking through a homeric gate of horn or ivory?

Heidegger concludes his essay "For questioning is the piety of thought". I would hope all this means that so long as creative thought is not entirely extinguished in society in general, or vacated by higher education in particular, that the relation between man and technics will continue to evoke something more than a simple ordering of a grocers ledger. And perhaps this questioning will occur less in a physical classroom, and more in the virtual environment.

Groundhog Day

2009-02-02T06:17:00.001-08:00

Today is Groundhog Day, a quaint Pennsylvanian tradition involving a ground-dwelling rodent predicting the next six weeks of weather, and a time for some families to gather around their old TV-VCR and dust off that unlikely American existential classic, Harold Ramis' movie of the same name.

Everyone knows this plot, or should. In it, Phil the jaded weatherman gets stuck in an endless repetition of the same day until his commitment to ingenue Rita surfaces above ingrained selfishness and frees him.

These themes of repetition and conviction can be found in Kierkegaard and Neitzsche, of course. Repetition grapples briefly with Kant's categorical in arresting our attention. Everything that repeats in our life fades back into a suggestion of an event, rather than the event itself. Thus, morning becomes the category of events in which we witness the magical becoming of the day, and since we can be certain that morning came before, is coming now, and will come again, we are allowed and solicited to fold its specificity into a category. To a small child each new horse is just that: new. Only a maturing intellect sees yet another boring repetition of the horse form.

Heidegger says that death is unique for each person, only the same sharable experience for each other. Death, the end of the life cycle, repeats for each mortal being. It cannot come twice to a single (multiple death is a sign of a god, as Phil learns), so it can only categorize us en masse, and from second hand. Our culture helps us keep going by substituting fear of categorical death for our eerie yearning for that singular closing newness to be had in a life that descends ever so slowly, as we age, into endless repetition. I wake up. I go to work. I feed my face. I lay down.

Nietzsche extends from such reflections that absolutely all is repetition. We cannot escape the hidden epicycles of existence, only meet them with fierce braggadocio. Heidegger suggests we make a riposte, a reciprocal rejoinder, to this flood of the past breaking across Dasein and washing into the future. This rejoinder attempts to reconfigure history. A brave thing, to be sure.

Kierkegaard insists that no such significant action has a chance without commitment, as if we were not, standing alone, strong enough to make such an earth-shaking resistance to repetition. And this commitment we find in few others, certainly not in Heidegger or Nietzsche. They seem to content themselves with the individual will or intellect. It is Kierkegaard who points to that which stands outside himself, and sees in any such help, which in the end must be essentially irrational, magical, the hazy shadow of a saving Christ.

So having laid these pieces out, categories disguising repetition, death disguising itself, liberty of action disguising inevitability of fate, and magic disguising salvation, let us proceed into madness. For Dostoevsky comes from an insane asylum. His is the endlessly repeated epileptic fit we cannot escape, the sudden seizure of brilliance in which intellectual madness, divine insight, uncontrollable bodily quaking, and exhaustion become momentary in time.

Like all compelling morality tales, or horror stories, his consist of what we fear the most, of the sudden, uncontrollable urge to rape or be raped, to murder another or one's self, to make a conspiracy of one or two, to steal, to lie, to betray. These gory, trans-emotional, life-shattering events are what Nietzsche and Heidegger want to talk about but can't, quite. Too bad. No millions died because of Dostoevsky's fiction, only countless readers steeled against the oh so human madness he lays down before us.

Unlike Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky occludes the commitment his extravagant sinners are always offered before or after throwing themselves into our collective and depressingly repeatable crimes. The Underground Man is offered the prostitute Lisa as wife and soulmate, but he rejects her and becomes the pathetic burrowing creature he rightfully claims to be. Rogozhin is offered Prince Myshkin, a living, blameless sacrifice, whose death would have surely spared their beloved Nastasya a gruesome death at Rogozhin's own hands. Raskolnikov is offered Sonia, and accepts her, and recoups his soul from the consequences of that savage, unforgivable axe murder we have all, in some inscrutable repetition, commited in his image. The parricide Smerdyakov is offered Ivan's confession, tentatively, as his very last hope before suicide, but he cannot trust Ivan and hangs himself anyway.

It is these attempted rescues, some successful and others not, with which Dostoevsky sprinkles his fiction and offers us as tangible, existential clues to our own best hope of making change. Not great historic movements like Nietzsche and Heidegger expect, but small human taps and nudges, which alone create the human matrix for real change to unfold in our cultures. Indeed we may choose to see history, not as a series of great works and grandiose flourishes, of temples, books, leaders, ideas, but as a long chain of exactly such conflicted, intimate touches of mercy, hoarse whispers in the flickering candlelight, incrementally elevating the human to the divine.

So a superficially senseless commitment engaged by mercy to others - not the cold, insistent, unbreakable bond that Kierkegaard prescribes, but the momentary, incidental, tentative possibility of grace - Dostoevsky believes can overcome death and meaninglessness. These are authentic. These are superhuman. These are the lessons Phil eventually learns on Groundhog Day.

Between Husserl and Heidegger

2009-01-20T16:32:00.000-08:00

Here is a link for John Drabinski's lectures titled "Between Husserl and Heidegger." The link also includes "On Derrida's Politics" and "The Frankfurt School."

http://www.jdrabinski.com/Site/Podcasts.html

The Heidegger Channel

2008-12-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

“All Heidegger, All the Time”. Little did I know what I was getting into when I got this pretty piece of technology called an iPod Nano, and accidently tuned in to the Webcast Berkeley site. I wonder what “Heidegger” means, says I? Seemed like something I should have heard of years ago when I was in college......

Well, many of us spent the last year listening to podcasts past and present, with the ghostly “dead hand” of Heidegger pushing some of us through the machinations of Second Life. The podcasting phenomenon allowed people all over the world to listen to these lectures, and meet a couple of times a week in Second Life (if they chose) to wrangle over their lack of understanding of the material. As we were attempting to discuss Division II of Heidegger’s “Being & Time”, and Kierkegaard’s “Fear & Trembling” to a general audience, there was lots to be confused about. We generally had 4 to 6 people show up consistently when we finished the Spring 2008 semester.

A Group of Four elected to continue our experiment in Second Life with a course of study we called “Later Heidegger” over the Summer. We used as the text for the course “Basic Writings”, plus a series of archived podcasts by Dreyfus which covered much of this material. We hoped this would be easier than “Being & Time”, but soon found ourselves swimming once again through more wet sand! However, we kept up with it, and I suspect we all got something out of it by summer’s end - plus more books by or about Heidegger.

This past semester we had the chance to continue the experiment with Philosophy 6. Homer to Moby Dick, seasoned with plenty of Heidegger. It was a bit reminiscent of Monty Python’s Dead Bishop sketch ....

Well there's rat cake ... rat sorbet... rat pudding... or strawberry tart.
Man: Strawberry tart?!
Woman: Well it's got some rat in it.
Man: How much?
Woman: Three, rather a lot really.
Man: ... well, I'll have a slice without so much rat in it.

Well, our slices of Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, John, Dante, Melville and sometimes Luther and Pascal all contained rather a lot of that philosophical rat Heidegger! The “auf toten hand” was never far away...

Professor Dreyfus has a style of channeling Heidegger’s work in his lectures which has attracted a following from the general public all over the world. The Second Life experiment was presumably a response to the overwhelming interest his podcasts attract. For a number of reasons, it never really took off, due partly to technical difficulties and also to the semester’s subject matter. Philosophy 6, although challenging, deals with works which are better known to the general public, and would have been a better starting point for the experiment. Unfortunately, nobody really knew about it in Fall 2008, so like a tree falling in the woods, it withdrew into its own soundlessness.

Lifting a line from Heidegger, which he lifted from Holderlin, “For as you began, so will you remain”. If it’s one thing I have learned in the year long study of Heidegger, it’s how much I don’t know. Looking things over, they seem different than when first apprehended, and no doubt will continue to evolve as my understanding/mis-understandings deepen. What is the point? Perhaps “philosophy is held together by its questions rather than its answers” (Roy Sorenson, A Brief History of the Paradox”). There remains a lot more of Heidegger than what we have covered to date. Perhaps only the podcast can save us now...

Whooshing Up Religion

2008-12-03T10:36:00.000-08:00

For some unknowable reason, it seems this blog needs another long-winded pseudo-literary demarche from its founder.

I have an admission to start with, which is poor advertisement for the authenticity of my own blog. I'm not currently following the Fall 2008 production of the Dreyfus Phil 7 trek (famously subtitled "From gods to God and back to gods" reflecting our path from polytheism to monotheism and back). So, that said, I'm still following many interesting hints by other members of our small discussion group, and I have enough of those to make a couple comments myself, albeit from a position of profound ignorance.

I started and named this blog after listening to the 2007 version of this same class, saying this in my first post reverently praising Dreyfus:

(Y)ou will frequently find that things just "whoosh up" and take over - at least when you are in tune and ready to get whooshed.

This observation pointed to a phenomenon rather than an understanding. That understanding of whooshing up actually unfolded with a Dreyfus-mediated reading of Being and Time on the moods (rooted in the past) which dispose us (in the present) to press into our destinies (in the future). And I claim that I have experienced a kind of whoosh up in the project of creating this blog and encouraging people to participate in the particular learning process which is Dreyfus via the internet (a proposition which I loudly proclaimed was risky, could fail, and by many measures now has failed). I met (virtually) and corresponded for a time with Dreyfus himself. I was thrown into reading and grappling with thoughts I never would have. I don't regret the ride.

Now it also bears mentioning that the phrase "whoosh up" is just a wee bit sensitive, an aspect to which I was oblivious last year when I naively appropriated it. For it turns out that even though Dreyfus used it liberally when explaining the zigzag course our civilization has charted from Homer to Melville, he did not originate it. Richard Rorty, somewhere between or both a friend and rival of Dreyfus, used it first. So now, following Rorty's untimely death last year, and the nomenclatural piracy by our lonely discussion group, the phrase has been somehow occluded in the current series of lectures. Dreyfus has used it virtually not at all. (Check me on that - I haven't listened to every lecture, as I said.)

And further, bearing in mind the difficulties of sorting out causality from coincidence, it should be noted that Dreyfus has made no effort similar to last year's, to corral an enthusiatic fan base of non-student students dwelling in his podcast world into a serious, external, adjunct study group (which perhaps was my hope and never his). That project may revive, but for now rests moribund. I'd blame myself, but Dreyfus directly told me in an email not to do so, so I won't. This is merely the progression of an ultimately irrelevant and untimely little side note, whooshing up in the grand scheme of such things.

Now, to progress from this quantum condensation of reality in which Schrodinger's box has been opened and our discussion group found dead (unhappily, for those like myself who believed in the whooshup magic so cracklingly close last year), I have a second admission to make. I am at heart a spiritual reflector, for which the vicissitudes of religious thought are like comfortable pieces of furniture in a lived room, not like the perilous mountains some of the smartest of us seem to encounter therein. Of all the thinkers Dreyfus teaches, the one I like best, am drawn into deepest, is Dostoevsky. Melville would count, but his Ishmael is too frighteningly close to what I am myself: detached, restless, changeable, fascinated alike, and equally comfortable, in picking apart Ahab's megalomania, Starbuck's solid morality, or Queequeg's fantastical shamanism, but never able to face his own lack of conviction. No, rather give me Alyosha to be like, whose actions are governed from outside himself, by something immaterial whooshing up around and through him at every juncture. While Ishmael holds back, Alyosha leans in.

Perhaps Dreyfus believes that Heidegger's religious thought may be framed by the tension between, on one hand, Luther's hidden God and Holderlin's failing (fehl) God or fled (Entflohene) gods, which argue for resolute Dasein facing the abyss with self-conscious individuality, versus, on the other hand, the care (Latin caritas, Greek agape) with which, according to Dostoevsky, ordinary sinners pull other sinners out of the metaphorical lake of fire. Strangely, Heidegger seems to value the care (as concern) of the workman for his hammer-tapping carpentry, or the care (as shining) of the celebrant invoking a cheery toast at a convivial dinner party, more than the care (as love) of a self-sacrificing nurse for a dying invalid. I very much doubt that Luther, who urged the massacre of illiterate peasants, or Calvin, who had a man burned at the stake for disagreeing with him, or any other protestant reformer will yield a tangible source for agape love in our existential analysis of Heidegger's reconfiguration. They needed resoluteness, an Ahab megalomania, to do their jobs in history. Perhaps it is precisely in this space that Heidegger, in 1933, momentarily lost his path.

I have twice in this blog appealed to sacrificial love as the standard by which christian existentialism should be calibrated, both in relation to Dostoevsky's madness. Once in seeing, in the Grand Inquisitor's riddle, the answer simply as Jesus' willingness to be crucified however many times spoiled mankind demands it. Again, in seeing the villain Smerdyakov as the essential clue to Dostoevsky's search for the one who can never be reached, who is beyond saving, even by his saintly brother Alyosha. Somehow Smerdyakov must be saved, or the balance will never be restored, the exhausting epileptic fit that is our western culture will never end. Not even Dostoevsky, while alive, could answer that riddle, and neither can Heidegger. Can we?

The problem is that whooshing up is only half the problematic. All sorts of things can whoosh up and carry us off to think, to invent, to explore, to fight, to procreate, to kill. Understanding that moods are rooted in an unknowable past, and that their ultimate effects are likewise partitioned in an unknowable future, is Heidegger's great insight. He, like Nietzsche, fails miserably to give us believable guidance as to which whooshing we should tune in to. Dreyfus has long recognized this failing (see his Appendix to Being in the World), and has filled the gap with Kierkegaard's more reliable spiritual mechanics of steadfast commitment. But I suspect even that ultimately will not satisfy. Whatever hidden Second World we seek to coax into our mundane reality, whether the drunken old gods of Homer, the jealous, cruel One God of Dante, the disinterested Cartesian god of science, or the yammering new gods of the Internet, I suspect we will all attempt to tune in to that darkening which surrounds our own particular clearing in hopes of finding a personal whoosh of salvation.

So salvation demands a context, and although Dreyfus does not hesitate to speak into that context, I have never heard him come out of it, having, like Christ, and perhaps Dostoevsky, visited hell in person.

Philosophy 6 Dreyfus Berkeley Podcasts

2008-10-27T04:01:00.000-07:00

We have been covering a lot of ground over the past couple of months in Philosophy 6, beginning with Homer’s Odyssey, and working our way through Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a bit of Virgil’s Aeneid, and last week a quick run through the Gospel of John. We now should be pretty well warmed up for a journey into Hell with Dante’s Inferno - hope to see some of you next week in Second Life!

I had been concerned that their wouldn’t be much Heidegger in this course. It turns out that my anxiety was completely ungrounded. I am not sure how you would get through these podcasts without him!

Philosophy 25 A

2008-08-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Looks like Berkeley is rolling out another course, Ancient Philosophy, which will give us 3 podcasts per week! Looks like we can have as busy a semester as we want.

New related Blog: The Philospher's Rail

2008-08-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

Dean has started a new blog site to serve as the center of gravity for this Fall's review course of the Phil 185 - Heidegger's Being and Time podcast lecture series of Hubert Dreyfus:

http://rail2hand.blogspot.com/

Please visit, and support Dean's initiative if you are an ardent Being and Time student!

New Dreyfus Bulletin Board for discussions

2008-08-21T13:06:00.000-07:00

One of our newest contacts, Nikhil, has put up a great new bulletin board style website where interested "outer circle" students can post comments and reciprocate through discussion threads on many of the available Dreyfus webcast courses.

http://hubertdreyfus.proboards55.com

This has several advantages - you can participate at any time you want on any topic you want. Let's get some good "asynchronous" conversations going!

We will keep doing our Whooshup meetings in Second Life for a more immediate experience of interacting with fellow students. More choices!

Fall 2008: Schedule and Classes

2008-08-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone! Those of us who participated in the "Later Heidegger Immersion Course" over Summer 2008 are still trying to regroup, recover, and recharge, after having shined, gathered, appropriated, and just plain thinged our way through it all, and just in time for more fun philosophy therapy this Fall 2008. Everyone out there interested in Dreyfus and his teaching on existentialism and his focus on Martin Heidegger are encouraged to join us.

Schedule: First and foremost, check the Second Life meeting schedule which is now posted on the right side. We have dropped all Saturday meetings, and we will only meet on Saturday or Wednesday if there is a pre-arranged informal, or specially announced meeting. All regular discussion meetings are now on Sunday, with three time slots allocated. Our hope is that everyone can attend at least one of these three.

Classes: We will be following this year's Phil 6 - Man, God and Society lecture series, which we expect will be podcast and posted on the UC Berkeley website. The class should start soon, and we will post the download information as soon as we have it. We will also post a schedule for a study based on Dreyfus teaching Heidegger's Being and Time Division I, from Fall 2007. See you there!

Summer Session 2008: Later Heidegger

2008-05-20T23:53:00.000-07:00

We are planning a very busy summer session for the Discussion Group in Second Life.

The focus will be Later Heidegger. We will use both printed reading material and audio lectures from past courses given by Bert Dreyfus (see right side panel under Webcasts). Please join us!

* May 31 What is Metaphysics? and On the Essence of Truth
* June 7 The Origin of the Work of Art
* June 14 Letter on Humanism
* June 21 Basic Questions of Philosophy
* June 28 The Age of the World Picture
* July 5 The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics
* July 12 The Question Concerning Technology
* July 19 The Thing
* July 26 Building Dwelling Thinking and What Calls for Thinking
* August 2 Language and The Way to Language
* August 9 Contributions to Philosophy
* August 16 The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking

There is more info at the wiki. You will want to check out the Summer Session Chart for week by week details.

2008-05-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

This should be useful for the summer study course:
Hubert Dreyfus and Ken Goldberg, Spring 2006
Questioning Efficiency: Human Factors and Existential Phenomenology
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dilanm/ieor/
Audio lectures by Dreyfus on "The Age Of The World Picture", "The Question Concerning Technology", "The Thing", as well as on Borgmann and focal practices, and Foucault and
docile bodies.

Notes: Conclusion to Philosophy 7

2008-05-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Dreyfus' concluding lecture to his Phil 7 Existentialism in Film and Literature course, I made this set of diagrams. They attempt to show my take on the way in which the following four (or five if you count the two Christian Existential stories separately) contrasting world views (the ones which everyone in class voted their preference for on the last day) and how they would interpret the significance of themselves and each other:

Traditional Christianity (Onto-theology) 9 votes

Liberal Enlightenment (Science, Progress) 9 votes

Christian Existentialism (Kierkegaard & Dostoevsky) 8+1(Dreyfus) votes for K & 43 votes for D

Atheistic Existentialism (Nietzsche) 16 votes

In this last lecture, Dreyfus described how, to followers of one strand of existentialism, another strand looks like it is in error and doomed, even though they share many of the same approaches, such as the five he listed:

There is no human nature ("custom is our nature" -Pascal "the undetermined animal" -Nietzsche)

We can change human nature - History is the story of changing human natures

The Individual is higher than the Universal ("suspension of the ethical" - Kierkegaard)

The Involved point of view is better than Detached ("truth is subjectivity" -Kierkegaard "perspectivism" - Nietzsche)

Against Onto-Theology but retain The Sacred: they reject the view that One Creator God grounds all meaning ("calling without a caller" -Kierkegaard "connectedness of all beings" -Dostoevsky "we are all gods" -Nietzsche)

The chart tries to graphically represent the Heideggerian concepts of world disclosing (open circle), world collapse (x mark) and the revitalization of marginal practices (dotted lines). This is me reaching for what I think the class is really about: how these three examplars of early existentialism set up Heidegger, and ultimately, Dreyfus.

(click on the diagram below to enlarge it)

Anybody care to take a stab at how Heidegger/Dreyfus would construct such a diagram?

Here's my cut:

Discussion: Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov

2008-04-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

(Warning: This discussion will give away many highly interesting plot details of the novel. If you intend to read the book, don't read the following!)

Now that, in his "Existentialism in Literature and Film" class, Dreyfus has performed a thorough vivisection of The Brothers Karamazov, I would love to generate some discussion on it, but what is left to say? Bert has convincingly highlighted the author's careful existentialization - the "demagicalization" - of Christian religious motifs. He has shown how three prototypical configurations of the soul's struggle with its corporeality can be framed. One of these three resides in each brother, who grapple with these motifs in a contrived fictional reality that nevertheless represents us all in one magisterial Work of Art, The Brothers Karamazov: Alyosha the simple friendly spiritual adept who fastens onto agape love but has not yet confronted his own fleshly dynamics; Ivan the cold intellectual who by rational thought suppresses and sanitizes the perverse demands of his body; Dmitri the frank impulsive sensualist who can't control his bodily passions yet ardently desires nobility of spirit. They all, it turns out, conspire to murder their wicked father. Alyosha looks away, Ivan goes away, and Dmitri flails away, but none of them smashes old man Karamazov's skull. They are all technically innocent, but existentially guilty. This is all great stuff, and I absolutely loved the book and the classroom study of it.

But I am fascinated by the character of Smerdyakov. He is the brother "unnaturally born" who is the efficient cause of the old man's death. Dreyfus did not spend much time on Smerdyakov - suggesting that his configuration is the absence of a configuration. He has no soul, and he does not particularly have much in the way of bodily passions either. He is, if anything, a sort of robotnik, a soulless machine fit to act as a lackey, a cook, a criminal, but not really a human like the others. He is closest in temperament, one would guess, to Ivan, who he idolizes. But Smerdyakov is not nearly as educated or refined as Ivan, and thus cannot intellectualize his condition in life, but only resent it.

For argument's sake, I propose to rehabilitate Smerdyakov as an integral part of Dostoevsky's portrayal of our cultural and psychological condition. He is as fully Karamazov as Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha, and should be considered side by side with the rest - there really are four brothers, not three.

1. Smerdyakov has the opposite guilt configuration from the other brothers: he is technically guilty, but existentially innocent. Why is he existentially innocent? For the same reason a soldier who is trained to shoot, guided to the battlefield by his officers, encouraged by his religious leadership (either by their silence or their vocal approval), and authorized by his political leadership to pull the trigger, must be existentially innocent of the death of the bullet's human target. Smerdyakov looked to his foster father and half brothers for guidance. Grigory's baleful parenting turned him in boyhood to killing cats and dogs - a sort of inhuman resentment training. He was, by his childhood experience, "anti-baptized". Alyosha, who had a spiritual impact on everyone around him, apparently avoided Smerdyakov - he remained a silent voice. Dmitri, who Smerdyakov feared, was constantly shouting about killing the old man. Ivan, who Smerdyakov most closely watched for direction, gave him what he took for tacit approval to do as he thought fit - even to murder. Smerdyakov was merely being a good foot soldier to Alyosha his priest, Dmitri his officer, and Ivan his governor.

2. Smerdyakov is redeemable. To explain this, let's assume the opposite, that he is unredeemable, and that Dostoevsky thinks people are born, or can make themselves, unredeemable. The counter-evidence to this is considerable. Not only is the "redeemability" of all mankind a central tenet of Christianity, it is a theme frequently explored by Dostoevsky himself, and perhaps even lived by Dostoevsky himself, whose conversion from radical idealism to radical Christianity apparently followed a dramatic brush with death by execution for political activities. The clearest example from his work is the redeemability of the axe murderer Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. But even in Brothers Karamazov, the characters of the boy Ilyusha, who Smerdyakov trained in cruelty (killing dogs), and the boy Kolya, who Rakitin trained in rational disbelief - both central traits of Smerdyakov's own character - were ably engaged, corrected, redeemed and raised up to a higher consciousness by Alyosha. Why then, was Alyosha never interested in similarly engaging his brother Smerdyakov? Why is there no hope of redemption for him? At the end of the novel, we as readers may hope for the redemption of Ivan in the Siberian mines, and even for the recovery and softening of the mentally unstable and deathly ill Ivan. But Smerdyakov is dead, hanging himself to spite Ivan and snub the callous world he was born into. Was he, like Rakitin, simply a personified devil, that is, structurally beyond hope? I don't think the text supports that view - Smerdyakov is everywhere treated in a more ambiguous light than Rakitin. Neither do I think that Dostoevsky believed in a form of spiritual predestination - that some souls are condemned before time to lostness, and others are assuredly not.

3. Smerdyakov's biological origin is unique and significant. One could argue at this point that Smerdyakov is really just a "throw-away" in The Brothers Karamazov - that he has a role in sharpening the characterization of the three other brothers, and advancing the plot, but no great revelatory significance himself beyond lacking a soul to work with. (This seems to be the line taken by Dreyfus in his exegesis of the novel.) But if we grant that Dostoevsky is himself intensely interested in biological origins - who the father and mother were, their traits, and how those are expressed in the child - then we must admit Smerdyakov is perhaps the most interesting son of old man Karamavoz. If we assume Smerdyakov is throw-away, then we would assume his mother Lizaveta is also throw-away, but that clearly is not the case. The background elements of Lizaveta, and the circumstances surrounding her conceiving and bearing a child, are if anything much more crucially Dostoevskian than those of the other two upper-class mothers who bore Dmitri (Adelaida), and Ivan and Alyosha (Sofya). Lizaveta was a poor, retarded, homeless beggar girl dressed in filthy rags who was held in general contempt by her betters. But the common people took care of her, and treated her with a kind of superstitious veneration, as if she was under God's special protection. This description should read as a sort of warning flag to Dostoevsky readers: he is once again framing the issue of how we treat the innocent among us, particularly our women, children, and mentally ill (Lizaveta is all these). A parallel can be made to Prince Myshkin's story about the Swiss peasant girl Maria in his earlier novel The Idiot. In that story, the prince is kind to a destitute, dishonored shepherdess (a figure in many ways similar to Lizaveta and other Dostoevsky heroines) who the "upright" citizens of the village demean and detest. But the prince's kindness and agape love flowing to Maria generates the kind of spiritual outflowing among the local children that is found in the last part of Brothers Karamazov, when Alyosha works with the boys to existentialize the church as a sort of youth fellowship. So Dostoevsky frames two outcomes to the "Lizaveta/Maria" motif of a helpless young woman in rags: one stemming from tender care in The Idiot's Maria story, and one from foul abuse in Fyodor Karamazov's sacrilegious rape of Lizaveta that produces her miserable death during Smerdyakov's unattended birth in the Karamazov bathhouse. By the way, the Lizaveta story is perhaps the most damning indictment of Fyodor's utter wickedness, which makes him eminently murderable - a theme explored by the defense lawyer Fetyukovich during Dmitri's trial. Clearly, Smerdyakov avenges his own sordid beginning, but that cannot be all of it. We are forced by the structural configuration of Smerdyakov's origin to ask what larger role he plays in this masterfully structured novel.

4. Smerdyakov does have a soul, but it is crippled and cannot be easily reached. The assertion that Smerdyakov has no soul needs further analysis. Certainly his foster-father Grigory tells him he is soulless, that he grew from the mold in the bathhouse. But is this Dostoevsky's comment on Smerdyakov, or Grigory, or the narrator, or us all? We can find evidence for a soul in many places: in Smerdyakov's obsessive interest in French culture, which reveals the intelligence his family disparages; in his devotion to Ivan, who he desperately seeks the approval of; in the ordinariness of his later domestic situation - living with a girlfriend and her family. Certainly he is cruel to animals and heartless to people. Certainly he lives like an outcast with little or no sociability. But the fact that he possesses some shred of conscience is displayed in his dealings with Ivan both before and after the murder. He gives Ivan an opportunity to "call off" the cryptically agreed upon murder of their father, but Ivan brushes him off, ambiguously giving an affirmative signal. Would a soulless person need such a go-ahead? He pleads with Ivan to acknowledge him and praise his actions when Ivan visits him after the murder. Would a soulless man need such human justification? Finally, when all he sees from Ivan is rejection, and all he sees from further life is guilt, shame, inferiority, and hiding his crime, he commits suicide rather than face that future. I think there is a good case to affirm that Smerdyakov had a soul, but it was crippled, and it was left untouched. By contrast, what might have happened if Ivan had truly connected with Smerdyakov unselfishly, like Alyosha would have, if he had been Smerdyakov's mentor? What if Ivan had urged him to confess the crime, and had offered to publicly admit his own complicity to the world, on Smerdyakov's behalf. Would such an action have changed the novel's ultimate catastrophe into a miraculous and cleansing redemption for them both?

5. Smerdyakov completes the existentialization of the crucifixion. Dreyfus argues that the crucifixion is distortedly represented by the suffering of Dmitri in the "right way" of opening up a positive message to others, vis a vis the suffering of Ivan in the "wrong way" of self-inflicted penance. Admittedly, they both bear their crosses, undergo temptation, prepare their hearts and minds through suffering, and get publicly humiliated in a near-death manner at the end of the book. But perhaps the key here is to look for three crosses. The story has it that one in the middle held Jesus, with two thieves on either side. One criminal scoffed at Jesus, and the other criminal believed. I propose Smerdyakov is the third embodied criminal hanging from a cross on Dostoevsky's existentialized Calgary. If Alyosha is the undefiled soul who escapes crucifixion by acting on the connectedness of all beings, if Dmitri is the noble heart of the innocent man whose very human body gets nailed to the middle cross like Jesus, and if Ivan is the criminal who at the very last minute sides with Dmitri and his spirit-keeper Alyosha, then perhaps Smerdyakov is the third criminal who spits at them all and dies unredeemed. This unredeemed death of a redeemable soul is, I believe, a central problematic for Dostoevsky and all serious Christians. As described, the fault was not his. Smerdyakov was no more guilty of murder than the others, perhaps far less guilty. He relied on the wrong man - on Ivan and the rational supremacy he admired so much. Smerdyakov represents those of us who follow the teachings of the most intellectual but misguided of our culture's leadership. Where Ivan represents the elite educated mandarin class, Smerdyakov represents the unlettered masses, the public sphere, the loyal enabler, the hit man of our modern civilization. If the existential Christianity Dostoevsky proposes cannot reach Smerdyakov, then it cannot save the world. Dostoevsky builds in the fatal flaw to his own construct, and, in my reading, uncovers a fundamental structural problem for posterity: how to save a Smerdyakov.

6. Smerdyakov requires a trip to Hell. Perhaps because all such "Smerdyakov souls" are too shrivelled, too deformed, too buried under their fathers' transgressions to ever actively reach out and grab the "onion chain" with which sinners pull other sinners out of the metaphorical lake of fire (or ice), using the immense potential of agape love as exampled by Alyosha, nothing remains but that they must suffer and die alone and without hope, unless we enter into their lived Hell to grab them first - the deed even Alyosha shirked. Otherwise, the redeemable die unredeemed, and thus it may well be that only the suffering death and mystical, practically un-demagicalizable, transmigration of an inspired innocent like Jesus will ever enable us to reach them, and then only if it thematizes the existential act of ultimate outreach. The central, vexing problem Dreyfus uncovers about Christianity in general, of how the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross could ever be construed as structurally, existentially, saving everyone else in the world, not through their own claustrophobic experience of suffering, but solely, impersonally, through the public demise of Jesus, may be explained in the three day side-trip which stone-dead Jesus made to "harrow Hell", there to muck about in search of the Gestas Smerdyakov, that scorned and sullen lackey who scoffed at his fellow sufferers, to tell him the good news of his existential innocence, and lift him up to stand with his brothers in the end.

Ska -Ska -Skunked Again

2008-04-09T06:25:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to the staff of experts that was supposed to be making sure that the Dreyfus 189 lectures would be available to the podcast community? Are they too busy girl watching to push the on/off button on a recording device? Or are we so entrapped with cheap foreign technology that breaks down at an inappropriate time in an inopportune way that we fail to make the occurrent available?

Evidently, Heidegger never typed any anything out, but gave his manuscripts to his affable brother Fritz, who typed them up. As a result, he was more familiar with his brother's work than most professional philosophers of the day. He did have a habit of stuttering when he got serious, hence the da-da-sein came into the world.

Fritz, where are you now? We might do better if someone would take their lecture notes and nail them to a tree.

New Program in Second Life

2008-04-06T04:32:00.000-07:00

Next time you log into Second Life, you may find that you need to download a 35 Mb program file to get back in (I could NOT log in with the existing program Saturday night). Evidently, there was a major crash on Saturday, and things are still being worked out. I got back in Sunday morning, although my avatar looks something like a headless scarecrow that has been through a shredder at the local meat packing facility. Kinda cool actually, I might keep it! I do have a head that seems to be floating in my midsection, happily spinning around and occasionally darting out "peekaboo" . Halloween come early. Hopefully things will be back to normal this afternoon and evening!

State of the Blog

2008-03-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

Hello Everyone!

Karl here. I just finished a quick cleanup of some of the blog sections. I took a back up first, so if you miss some resource you expected to find, please email me and I will send you what I can. Several sections are gone. The Frappr map is now a link rather than a live Flash program.

For those who are browsing or checking back with our discussion group, there's lots going on that does not necessarily show on the blog. We are having intense and rewarding one- to two-hour discussions in Second Life, often in voice, but sometimes still by texting. There are four or five of us who meet every week, sometimes several times, and we have been able to hold lively, deep, enlightening, challenging talks about many topics having to do with the Dreyfus webcasts, and existentialist philosophy, and related subjects like history, culture, religion, virtual reality, and laundry. Actually the laundry was just thrown in to see if you are awake.

The momentum seems like it will carry into the foreseeable future with a combination of independent study, long-distance friendship, shared resources, and good discussions. Please join us if and when you can!

The Avatars Speak

2008-03-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

Had a voice discussion in Second Life Sunday afternoon with three avatars, it seemed to go pretty well! Perhaps we should focus on voice in the afternoons, and the chat bar in the evening discussion sessions. Seems that we have been mostly focusing on Heidegger, although also discussing the influence of Kierkegaard. We have been covering a lot of ground, and the online interactions continue to bring out a lot of good ideas. I get the feeling that people are working very hard at home trying to keep up with the material. Having 5 time slots a week has helped bring more people in, and accommodate every ones schedules. Given the nature of the material, I am not sure we would have come as far without the chance to meet in Second Life as we have been!

Why I Attend

2008-03-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

I discovered the podcast lectures of Professor Dreyfus about this time last year. Once I started listening I was hooked and quickly listened to all that were available. Like many of you, I was contacted by Karl because I had directed an email to the professor. In my case, it was to let him know how much I appreciated the lectures and to lend my voice to those that were imploring him to podcast the Division II lectures.

I was initially interested in this idea of Karl’s but also a little hesitant. Did I understand the material well enough to talk about it? Would I be in over my head? I also was worried if I would be comfortable in Second Life. Prior to joining this adventure I had never been in a chatroom or posted on a blog. Maybe this wasn’t for me.

But, like many of you, I tried it. What I have found is that through this forum I can really become engaged in a way that I could not when I had listened to the podcasts alone. The interaction I have found in our discussions in Second Life has made this possible. I now find myself listening and reading more closely than I had before. I also get the sense why the sections are so important. They require involved participation by the students. Listening to podcasts alone misses what, I am now coming to see, is that vital element of discussion and interaction.

Last week johnjoe made the argument that Holly Martin did not fit into the category of the naive ethical as cleanly or neatly as the podcast made it out to be. The contention was that though Holly entered the film in this way, he ultimately experienced some growth and towards the end showed some evidence of being a Knight of Resignation in his relationship to Anna. She fielded many questions by me and others and in the end I found her interpretation very plausible and convincing. On my own, listening to the podcast and watching the film, I would not have considered this.

Tonight we talked about how closely related Fear and Trembling seems to be to Division II. How much of what Heidegger was doing in Division II is an attempt to secularize Kierkegaard. In a wide-ranging discussion, Karl made some powerful points about how problematic this is. After this discussion, I will be listening to future podcasts a little differently and be attentive to how they relate to the questions which were raised this evening. Again, without the discussion, this would not have happened.

Like you, I love listening to the lectures. Like you, I spend a lot of time doing it. But I have now come to see the discussions as essential in my effort to really try to understand what I am listening to. That is why I attend. Hope to see all of you there.

Weekend Brunch in Second Life

2008-02-29T05:01:00.000-08:00

Philosophy 7 posted a series of paper topics for the students earlier this week on the course website. I think they would also be great discussion topics in Second Life this Saturday night! We will also be having weekend morning brunches at 12pm Pacific/SL time to accommodate our friends from “across the pond”, as well as those who have lives and are otherwise engaged Saturday evening. Maybe we should try a half chat half voice interaction and see how that goes. Hope to see you all there!

Movie Night

2008-02-17T21:12:00.000-08:00

This is film week in Philosophy 7. I know that some have already seen The Third Man and others are planning to. So I would like to suggest that we make this the topic of our discussion at our next Saturday meeting. According to Dreyfus, the film deals with the teleological suspension of the ethical as well as the themes of lower immediacy, the universal and of course, higher immediacy or the "Knight of faith". This would give us plenty to discuss and since people will be viewing the movie, this is a good time to discuss them.

Some of us may have some problems getting our hands on the film. My Blockbuster doesn't seem to recognize that films were made before 1990. Also couldn't find a copy at my local library. But Dean told me that most libraries have interlibrary lending and I am going to try that. But even if I fail to see the film, I would enjoy a discussion focused on these important topics in Fear and Trembling.

I know that Dreyfus won't be discussing the film this week as his students will be viewing it Thursday. But the 06 lecture is available. It is sometimes interesting to listen to these to hear the changes in his views. As he stated, his opinion of what nature symbolized in Hiroshima Mon Amour completely reversed. This is one of the things I love about Dreyfus. He seems to embody "an open head turned towards the world".

Again, since people are making an effort to see The Third Man now, it just seems like a good time to focus on Fear and Trembling and the topics listed above.

What does everyone think? If agreeable, I will pop the popcorn, get some milkduds and soda and see y'all Saturday night.

Report: Feel the Risk

2008-02-13T17:45:00.000-08:00

This will be a difficult one for me to write, so I'll start with the good news. This blog was originally meant to spark one or more discussions centered around the teaching on existential thinking of Hubert Dreyfus through his webcast lectures. That has happened. Later tonight I will join other members of this "outer circle" and discuss philosophy in Second Life.

The other day Bert Dreyfus emailed and asked how the Second Life discussion group was going. I replied that I had missed the last one, but the report from others was good. He wrote simply: "You really seem to have launched it. As soon as I catch up on my work, I'll drop back in." I take it he means all of us, no matter how lightly you have brushed up against the project, we have all managed to launch it.

And that brings me to Risk. I have been thinking a lot about Risk lately. It is not easy to lure intelligent people into risky undertakings, even by risking oneself. Ours is an inherently risk-averse communication culture - the more controversial the subject, the less likely we are to risk our opinions as our own, the more we seek safety in detached and nameless monitoring.

Risk, I think, is a Dreyfus usage. If you have come across his writings on learning, the Risk comes in, necessarily, at the transition from competence to expert skill acquisition:

"In general, if one seeks to follow rules one will not get beyond competence. There is no substitute for taking risks... With enough experience and willingness to take risks, the learner becomes an expert who immediately sees what sort of situation he is in and what to do."

- HL Dreyfus "Can There Be a Better Source of Meaning than Everyday Practices?" 2000

It also seems to tie into Kierkegaard's Faith and Heidegger's Anxiety. It makes us feel uncomfortable, and care about the outcome. It puts us in touch with inifinite possibility within finite situations. It reminds us of our ungroundedness, and our culture's. Dreyfus strongly criticizes the web for removing Risk from encounters in his 2001 book "On the Internet".

But I have never felt as much at Risk on the internet as I do here. Professor Dreyfus could as easily have written "You really don't have a viable discussion group. I wasn't sure it would work from the start." He may yet. Whatever possibilities are here, are risky ones. And that's good. Just when we are learning in Division II that anxiety is good, this is an opportunity to embrace Risk.

What is this Risk? Risk is starting a discussion without knowing what will come of it (like this one - talk about experiencing "anxiety towards guilt"!). Risk is disclosing your true identity (saying "I am me" in a world of "guess who I am"). Risk is being open to new technologies and new ways of organized learning (floating, bumping, crashing your way into Second Life gatherings without a clue how to drive an avatar). Risk is participating when you just can't (overcoming my natural hesitation to act, rather than observe and reflect). Risk is a real philosopher reaching out to amateurs (I can't understand why an eminent sachem would do so, unless addicted to risk). Risk is amateur philosophers daring to take themselves seriously (and being labelled "fans" by professional philosophers like Nigel). Risk is giving over authorship of your blog to every interested dasein you can sense about you in the darkness of the electronic ether, and finding that only a very few will risk posting an article of any kind, then commenting about that fact, here, now, whilst navigating the delicate balancing act of individual and group dynamics that will make or break the project, and picking each word as if it really matters.

Ultimately, Risk is failing in ways that later whoosh up as success:

"A few people, however, at least in areas important to them, are never satisfied that they have done the right thing, even if public opinion assures them it was right. They sense that there is no one right thing to do and that they can always improve... Such continually anxious experts are never complacent. But, happily, if they brood over their successes and failures, replaying them over and over in their mind, they will reach a new level of skillful coping beyond expertise."

- HL Dreyfus "Can There Be a Better Source of Meaning than Everyday Practices?"

The paper quoted is available in the Phil 189 Course Handouts link on the right side of the blog. Here I have followed Risk out to the level of the Phronesis - Practical Wisdom. But that is only half way past expertise, and Dreyfus takes the Risk beyond that. Please read it through yourself - I would not give away the ending.

On the Road with Second Life

2008-02-07T06:59:00.001-08:00

Had another virtual run last night in Second Life. My internet connection at home was knocked out during the recent storms, so I had to give it a go by driving into town to a coffee shop (with wireless internet), and a 2 year old laptop. I am glad to say that things went reasonably well, given the mobile nature of the interface. The most important factor in getting voice enabled on my machine was setting the voice and audio options on my computer's operating system, and then fine tuning within the Second Life environment. I also had to make sure that the microphone was closer to my mouth, and was able to determine this while I was setting the thing up in the Windows environment. Bottom line is that I could hear and be heard on a common machine and connection. Unfortunately, I wasn't on the Left Bank at some Parisian cafe, but I could have been!

Report: Feb 2 SL Discussion Meeting

2008-02-04T04:50:00.001-08:00

The meeting last Saturday night went well. About eight to ten avatars showed up. We seemed to have fewer technical problems, with a few exceptions. I encourage you other webcast listeners who were there to comment on this post, with your own perspective on the event.

The main part of the discussion was on the topic: What is the difference between Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's version of "taking a stand." It ended up being a good question to shoot to Dreyfus for clarification!

We tried out some new procedures:

1) We met in the "Sandbox" area of EdTech, right next to the garden spot, rather than the boardroom of the Lodge. This reduced the "object overload" problem, but some strange distractions in the form of virtual gypsies whooshed up. This is not the best solution to the location problem, but a start.

2) We alternated between keeping the discussion in text chat mode only, then going to voice. Over half the attendees did not have voice, so these periods equalized the discussion. It worked, but expect the voice vs. text issue to stay with us.

3) We picked a topic and pretty much stuck to it. This helped us avoid having many separate strands that everyone has to keep up on, which makes the chat history feel like spaghetti. It might be good to keep topics pertinent to the week's lectures, and to have a few topics loaded up before meetings, so if you have any please post or send them!

We have lots of other issues to iron out - such as schedules, locations, etc. I expect Professor Dreyfus (Farnsworth Roux as an avatar) will attend future discussions when he can. Some of us will do Wednesday night practice meetings - join us then if you can.

Second Life Meeting Issues

2008-02-02T11:14:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone. Let's try another meeting in Second Life tonight (Saturday Feb 2) at 6:00 PM Pacific Time.

I am trying to sort out all the issues we have and break them into manageable pieces. Please bear with me.

Both webcast classes are in full swing now, so we should be generating good topics both for blog comments and real-time talking. Also, I strongly recommend you listen to the noozit interview I found from last April - it may amaze you where Dreyfus goes with the question "What is the meaning of life?"

OK, here are the issues as I see them, in the Question/Answer format:

Q: Some people want to participate, but cannot do it in Second Life. What are their options?
A: (1) This blog - post or comment. (2) Other blogs or group sites - find one or create your own and we will link to it. (3) Start a phone conference approach, either with Skype, or a free linkup for multiple cell phones - which usually do free long distance (these two options were proposed by James Roome and Beads Land). Bert Dreyfus said he would understand and support that simpler option. (4) Start an IRC (Chat) approach, where everyone would meet in a free, fast chat room. Please use this blog to base or launch such an alternative approach - I will support it however I can.

Q: In Second Life, some people can't get voice to work. How can they be included in the discussions?
A: This is a serious issue - see Brad's post below this one. We talked and experimented a lot with it, and I am convinced we need to clear a space for a text-only discussion period in Second Life, preferably right before doing a voice discussion. So I am proposing we start doing that when we first meet - set aside at least 30 minutes or more for text only. If Farnsworth Roux shows up in that period, we may switch to voice. Also, we may designate another text-only discussion period after the voice discussion. Let's try this and see if it helps.

Q: We have people in Phil 7, Phil 189, and both. How do we talk about the issues relavent to each group?
A: This is a tough one. We could split the group up into at least two sub-groups. But that seems drastic, to split the group before it really has formed itself by meeting several times. My suggestion is to put this issue on hold, until we can actually get a count of who would join one or the other group. Meanwhile, we should try to choose topics that, as best we can, alternately address one or the other class.

Q: Some people want to have a structured discussion, with prepared topics, and others want a free flow. How do we manage the topics and moderate the discussion?
A: I think this is a good point. But I am bad at structure, and worse at moderating, so I could use some help on this one. If you will email or post any topics you would specifically like to cover, I will turn that into a "suggested topic list" and post it on the right side of the blog.

Q: Some Second Life attendees want to use their voice apparatus but are having trouble with it. How can they figure out what they need to do to make it work?
A: If this is you, just find a tutor who is familiar with this feature. I (Dahr) will help if I can. Dean (Hammerer) will also help. I would ask the people who feel they know this complicated set-up to make it known to others and help them get their systems working to the best advantage possible. Dean has added a comment voice FAQ list to the last post which has many good instructions. But it is critical to get "in-world" and try voice out with another understanding avatar. There are many variables.

Q: Some people want to have discussions, but not on Saturday night. They have lives, apparently.
A: We need alternate times. Either we switch from Saturday to another evening, or we run two or more sessions a week. We already started a Wednesday potluck working meet, and that helped shake out these issues. I think we need an informal vote on the schedule people want. Let's see what everybody thinks and change accordingly. If we have a consensus, then we should ask Farnsworth Roux if he can adjust to the new schedule.

One last comment. It is clear that the "board room" in the lodge at Edtech Island complicates the technology problem. This is because it contains many objects which your computer must handle before it can let you have a philosophy conversation. I think we should move the discussion to an open space nearby, and I will try to do that this evening. See you there.

OK that wasn't the last comment, but this is: maybe not everybody else is ready, but I'd like to know whose who. We have at least three identities apiece (real, blogger, and SL names). This is just another authenticity pitch for taking a stand on our virtual being. In the words of Jean Valjean: "24601."

Texting and Voice Dilemma

2008-01-31T13:48:00.000-08:00

I've attended the last two meetings as someone who was only able to text. Like the Judaic- Christian and Greek traditions, I'm not sure text and voice can be reconciled in a way which will allow us to meet and discuss productively.

The people at the meetings have been trying earnestly to combine both but it just seems as if the two mediums refuse to jell. This has led me to wonder if, maybe, we couldn't have meetings set up just for text and ones for voice?

Those of us who are currently restricted to text could still attend the voice meetings with the obvious limitation of not being able to participate. But we could submit questions beforehand to those who are voice enabled if we would like. By limiting some meetings only to voice they could be more wide ranging and free flowing. As Karl would say, things could "whoosh up." This seems to be what Dreyfus would definately prefer.

I think text only meetings would need to be limited to specific topics. We could possibly meet to discuss the latest podcasts only. If anyone would like to pursue another topic, they could post here on the blog and see if anyone would be interested in meeting. Though not ideal, some sort of protocol will need to be developed that would help those of us using text to keep on track. It is hard to follow (for me at least) more than one topic at a time while using text.

I'm tossing these ideas out here so they can either be refined or lead to a discussion that will allow us to discover the optimal way to proceed. The meetings have such great potential, we just need to find a way to get all of this technical stuff into the background.

BH

Discussion: The Kiss in The Grand Inquisitor

2008-01-28T23:16:00.000-08:00

This dicussion whooshed up in an email from Victoria, a Venezualan going to school in France. She wrote a question about Brothers Karamazov, while following the 2006 series of the Phil 7 - Existentialism class we are now following again this semester. So if you haven't read The Grand Inquisitor section of that novel yet, you may want to wait and come back to this very interesting discussion item!

Here's the start she wrote, more in comments:

"I haven't heard the whole podcast yet and I don't even know when the podcast was recorded, so I'm probably not saying something new, but, doesn't the kiss that Jesus gives to the Grand Inquisitor is somehow a reference to the Kiss that Judas gave to Jesus in the Gospels before turning him in? I know it's silly, but I thought that might be a clue and I thought it was weird that no one suggested during the lecture."

Second Life Informal Meet & Greet

2008-01-28T17:09:00.001-08:00

Although the virtual discussion section last Saturday night went far better than the first, we still had a number of communication issues that got in the way of the conversation. Some people came through loud and clear. Others were on the faint side. Still others couldn't join in at all, as they couldn't get their microphones to work. And trying to keep up with comments in the scroll box wasn't all that enlightening either. It seems that we need a little more time in the simulator figuring out how the interface works!

So why not have a virtual pot luck? This Wednesday night, same time (6pm Pacific), same place, and we can take the time we need to get more familiar with the tools available to us. And also teach each other how to communicate (by text and or voice) effectively within small groups, as well as to the group at large. We'll try to cover the basics, like enabling voice, instant messaging, passing note cards, and whatever else we can think of to facilitate the flow of ideas. Once we are comfortable with the tools and techniques in Second Life, we can then concentrate on discussing the podcasts.

I am bringing a brand spanking new headset/microphone, and ideas to share!

Second Second Life Virtual Discussion Section Observations

2008-01-27T06:42:00.000-08:00

Things went much better than last week, in that there were at least 4 or 5 of us that could interact on a voice chat with a microphone. We were also struggling to follow what was being typed in by those who weren't able to join in via voice, although we had less success doing that then I had previously hoped. I think once I was drawn in by listening, I had a little trouble following what was being typed in by my mute colleagues. Maybe next time, those of us who can speak and be heard should identify ourselves, and then partner up with members of the group who can only type in their questions. That way, we could take some responsibility for bringing them into the conversation so they don't become a "victim of the scroll". When you teleport in, there is a kiosk where you can join the EdTech Group. Once you are in a group, I think you can then set up IM chat within the group, which may help with the communication issues we are trying to address.

One of the interesting things we can do in Second Life as opposed to a conference call is that when we partner up, we will be able to distribute ourselves spatially within the conference room (say one voice person with 2 typing people, connected by IM chat), and group ourselves around the table. This would somewhat mimic the associations that develop in a physical discussion session. I also felt that I had a better understanding of the dynamics of the conversation by having a rough idea of how many people were around the table. I think these are a couple of reasons to try to figure out a way to make this thing work, and taking advantage of the opportunities afforded in the virtual realm.

The conversation was more of an after class discussion with professor Dreyfus, than a virtual discussion section amongst the podcast people, at least during the first hour. I think we can regard an appearance by Dreyfus as an occasional opportunity, but we need to focus on how to interact amongst ourselves and make sense out of the podcasts. My own recollection of university days some (gulp!) 25 years ago is that you can get overwhelmed pretty quickly with the material! How are we going to keep up and interact profitably?

I think using Karl's blog as a "hub" is a start. I wonder though, in terms of discussion points, can we do some of that ahead of time before the virtual discussion section? And would we do that by forever posting to karl's page? One possibility is for each podcaster to have his or her own "blog" or "group" where they can post their own ideas, and invite comments from others. Karl might put a list of these on this site, and then we could "make the rounds" and see where people are coming from, before hashing it out in Second Life. I created a group last week in google, www.PodClearing.Com, where I am going to try to illustrate this concept. I will invite your comments!

Second Life Meeting FAQ List

2008-01-23T08:26:00.000-08:00

With the official kickoff of Second Life discussion group meetings coming up this Saturday January 26 at 6:00 PM Pacific Time, let's maintain a checklist of instructions, hints, warnings and frequently asked questions - FAQs. If you have questions, or want additions or changes to items, please comment on this post, or email. Thanks everyone.

How to download and install the Second Life program. Start by going to their main page at http//secondlife.com, and follow their instructions. The download and install process is pretty standard. It will warn you if your system is somehow incompatible.

How to register and get oriented. Again, follow the directions to register and create your own basic avatar. Just accept the defaults on choices they give you - the most basic (and free) account details should enable you to participate. Go through the recommended orientation course to learn how to move around.

How to enable voice. There are two main options for communication - chat typing and voice. You can do both. The chat is set up by default, but you need to enable the voice feature by clicking Edit > Preferences > Voice tab > run the Voice wizard and be sure to check your microphone level. You will need to set your computer up with appropriate speaker/earphones plus microphone. A combination headset is handy, but other setups are also possible - speakers and a hand mic, etc. Note: You do not have to have a microphone to listen, only to talk. You can always type questions, and listen to answers, but you will need to activate voice to hear them.

How to use voice in Second Life. Find the Voice control in the lower right corner. Press the Talk button, hold it down, and speak into your microphone slowly, clearly, loudly. The quality varies based on equipment, connection, server load, background noise, etc. If it is simply not working well, switch to chat, and try again later. We know that when everyone is set up and being quiet, we can all hear the group leader (Dreyfus or TA) talk. Note that when using voice, you can lock it to be continuously on by clicking one part of the Talk button, or you can set it to toggle on only when you click the Talk button. To cut down on background noise when discussing in the group - use the toggle on method if you can.

How to find the meeting place. From your starting point, you need to move to EdTech Island, where the first few meetings are being held. The easiest way to do this is to go to Search in the upper right corner > Places tab > enter "EdTech" and click Search > select the top item > find and click the Teleport button. You should end up at a location you can easily find the central garden spot with radiating paths, that has a calendar of events. The coordinates are Edtech:106,133,25. Here is a web shortcut: http://slurl.com/secondlife/EdTech/106/133/25/ This should link you to the meeting place if you are running Second Life.

How to recognize each other. The names you get in Second Life are not normally your real names, or your nick names from blogging. We will need to recognize each other "on the fly." The direct approach is to walk up to someone and ask. Here are a few names I know to look for: Dreyfus is Farnsworth Roux. He may have a TA there, first name Solomon. The names Hammerer and Bratislav are Whooshup participants that came for the trial run. My name is Dahr.

How to raise your hand. Type "/hey" into the chat box and hit Enter. This simple gesture may be the best way to help the discussion flow smoothly, just like in real classrooms.

How to ask a question. Raise your hand. When recognized, ask a question either by typing it in chat or asking by voice. When the group leader (i.e. Dreyfus or a TA) is finished with the spoken answer, he or she will indicate that by saying "and that's my answer," or something like that, to break back to open questions again. (Note: This is the preliminary idea to prevent confusion and talking over each other. We may adopt additional procedures for asking followup questions, establishing topics, etc. See foundrysmith/Hammerer notes in comments.)

How to look at chat history. There is a scrolling history of what has been typed by you and the avatars around you. Click the History button when in chat mode.

How to get out of chat mode. While typing, you can't do other things, like move around. Use the Esc {Escape} key to jump out of chat mode. This trick is useful in all sorts of situations when you just want to back out of what you are doing.

How to make it bright. The lighting dims to simulate nightfall after sundown in California. But you can override this effect and make it bright and sunny. On the top menu, go to World > Force Sun > Noon.

How to sit down. If you see anything that looks like a seating accomodation, you can try sitting. Hold your mouse over the object and right click (I'm not sure how Macs do it). You will see a circular menu with a "Sit here" option. If you click that, your avatar will sit. To stand up, either click the Stand Up button if you see one, or right click again on your chair underneath your avatar - there will be another menu item on the circle called "Stand up" - just click that.

How to recover from lag and crashes. In Second Life, sometimes the program, the connections, or the servers, get overloaded and affect the flow of the virtual simulation so that you really notice it. Lag means that everything slows down, avatar motion gets jerky, or pauses a few seconds then speeds up, as if catching up with itself. When this happens, the best response is to do nothing, and wait until the lag dies down. Sometimes, your program will crash - it is as if you are thrown out of the program, back to your computer. When this happens, wait a few moments, close and restart your Second Life program, and log in to your account again. You should be transported back where you were before the crash.

We will add more FAQs as we go this week. Please try to work out the basic technology beforehand and plan on attending. If you can't attend for whatever reason, please join us in building other online discussion groups.

Discussion: Dreyfus and Embodiment in Virtual Space

2008-01-22T19:36:00.000-08:00

This relates to several previous posts and comments about some of the implications of this discussion for the embodiment problem - that is, how can computers be *like* humans without possessing a humanlike body, and at another level, how can people learn through computers, at a distance from their teachers, without being bodily present in a studio or classroom. Hubert Dreyfus has commented extensively on these issues, and the background to his critique can be noticed in some of these webcast lectures. The full arguments are found in his books "What Computers Still Can't Do" and "On the Internet."

Demographer and I got started on this, but I would like to invite anybody interested in this subject to join our conversation. I have collected the text, some of it repeated from other threads, some of it from emails, and put it all together as the starting comments to this post.

Discussion: The Seamy Side of Second Life

2008-01-21T06:46:00.000-08:00

One member of the circle emailed me some of the problems he is facing getting around in Second Life, and one of those problems hit a sensitive nerve, and I wanted to share these thoughts with everyone, and invite further discussion.

I am particularly sorry about the "red light district" effect. I feel a responsibility and even guilt for not warning more clearly that ubiquitous pornography and acting out is a well-known and very distasteful problem for the unwary on Second Life. I should have posted more and clearer warnings about this aspect of the virtual world.

It boils down to (1) adults are basically free to do whatever they choose in SL, and (2) not everyone is more interested in philosophy than sex. This was such a worry for me, because I had previously encountered it, that I looked around for alternatives - alas, the main competitors, if anything, are less family friendly.

The fact is, notwithstanding these glaring problems, Second Life remains the most accessible, well-tested, free virtual reality forum available to us, and many sincere teachers around the world are trying to use it for educational purposes.

Not that this is a justification, but I felt that anyone deep enough into philosophy at the level Dreyfus teaches it would be able to "walk past the red lights to get to the academy" and understand how this bizarre voyeurism is our culture commenting on its own lack of direction. The trend to drop societal boundaries and elevate the individual "I will it" to an unquestioned right (which I think is part of why internet proponents are so adamant that no restrictions be placed on it) must have some root in Nietzsche, who is central to our entire existentialist study. Understanding the philosophical implications of establishing the proper limits of self-expression is a course in itself.

But if this follow-up question is posed: "if you accept existentialism, why not accept Nietzsche?" then I believe Dreyfus offers us an amazing suite of alternatives: commitment and disclosure and skillfulness and shared social experiences, and more. Interestingly, none of these explicitly denies the importance of a religious level of existential grappling, which, honestly, appeals greatly to me, having worked through all the alternatives myself.

Please accept my apologies, as well as the challenge to take this subject under discussion right along with all the other deep, culturally-embedded subjects this blog is meant to open a clearing for.

Report: Second Life Trial Discussion

2008-01-19T19:14:00.000-08:00

We conducted a proof of concept discussion group meeting on Second Life tonight. A few others managed to get all the technology worked out and we met with Bert Dreyfus and had a chat. I encourage the others to give their comments on the meeting, and general impressions, under this post.

The good news is, it happened at all. There were so many technical glitches and hurdles and snafus that it is really amazing that we actually discussed philosophy with an incredibly intrepid professor. He really wants to enable the webcast audience to ask questions directly to him, or when he can't attend, to interact with one of his TA's, and is willing to push the limits to make it happen.

The bad news is, the technology is still so fragile it's frightening. First we had to meet, figure out who was who with the strange names, and get everybody so they could hear the voice communication. Talking and listening were both difficult, and it often seemed like talking on a cell phone just going out of range. The Second Life servers had a bad night - we all crashed one time and had to log back in, and there was a lot of "lag time," where everything gets slow or jerky.

In summary, every caution about the technical difficulties and distractions inherent to the Second Life approach - from a steep learning curve to figure out how to use it, to very unnatural and fragmented communication - was verified. What do we do?

We'll try again. We agreed to carry on with a "real" startup discussion group next week. I hope everybody can pick up the challenge and try to attend. There's an old saying - something about always getting back on the horse that throws you. If Professor Dreyfus can keep trying to make it work, I'll keep trying too.

Frappr Map of the "Outer Circle"

2008-01-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

In an effort to facilitate getting to know one another, I've set up a Frappr map for the Whooshup community. My hope is that this map will serve the dual purpose of promoting the Second Life virtual discussion group, and at the same time, providing a means for students of Dreyfus to find and meet in embodied space with likeminded individuals.

Discussion: On Discussions

2008-01-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

Well, the response to invitations for discussion groups has been terrific so far. Thanks to all who cheerfully spoke up.

But what's this? The first real discussion has whooshed up on its own: the discussion about discussions. I take this to be the "primordial for-the-sake-of-which" this blog takes a stand on itself. The discussion on discussion should be a great testimonial and amusement for us all. So, in the immortal words of king Max from Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are: "Let the Wild Rumpus start!"

I will give as many of the starting positions as I can remember in the Comments to this Discussion item.

Second Life Discussions

2008-01-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

Coming up soon will be a first attempt to convene a Virtual Reality Discussion Group on Dreyfus' upcoming Spring 2008 course. It will be held in the Second Life world, and I want to encourage everyone who checks this blog to attend. Basically, it's free to get started, and if you have a good internet connection and a little technological patience, that's all you would need to attend the meeting. If you would like some suggestions on how to get on and around in Second Life, I'd be glad to help, just email me.

Professor Dreyfus will attend at least some of these meetings so he can answer questions from the webcast listeners, as he does from students who are bodily present in his classroom.

It could turn into a profound experiment on self-organizing online learning, or it could just be a fun online gathering of interested and interesting folks. Either way, please plan to participate if you can!

...(C)an the bodily presence required for acquiring skills
in various domains and for acquiring mastery of one's
culture be delivered by means of the Internet?

The promise of telepresence holds out hope for
a positive answer to this question. If
telepresence could enable human beings
to be present at a distance in a way that captures
all that is essential about bodily presence, then
the dream of distance learning at all levels could,
in principle, be achieved. But if telepresence cannot
deliver the classroom coaching and the lecture-hall
presence through which involvement is fostered by committed
teachers, as well as the presence to apprentices of
masters whose style is manifest on a day-to-day basis
so that it can be imitated, distance learning
will produce only competence, while expertise
and practical wisdom will remain completely out of reach.
Hyper-learning would then turn out to be mere hype. So
our question becomes: how much presence can
telepresence deliver?

-Hubert Dreyfus, On the Internet (italics mine)

The State of the Blog

2008-01-04T12:45:00.000-08:00

Greetings everyone at one year's end and another's beginning!

In the last few weeks I have posted some discussion items that whooshed up. Any improvements or suggestions in the format or topics of the Whooshup blog are welcome. If you would like to contribute to this blog, please send me an email. We would need to get you set up on blogspot before you can post main articles. You are always encouraged to post Comments.

Corvid suggested a wiki on the subject areas covered, and to post resources for the webcast classes, such as printouts, assignments, etc. As far as definitions of Heidegger terms, I noticed there was a good start in Wikipedia. Public web pages for the Dreyfus classes can be found at the Berkeley site. I was able to run down the course web page for Phil 185 and could download handouts there. If there is a need and interest for a wiki please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I hope those of you who are tracking with the three courses that have already been podcast, and may take the classes that are repeated or new that will be webcast in the next couple semesters, will find this blog a good place to leave your thoughts. I am also googling for other blogs that tag Dreyfus, and have listed those I've found on the right side panel.

A final note: In reading some of the criticisms Professor Dreyfus has aimed at the Internet, I was challenged to develop this blog as myself, opening up my somewhat simple and entirely mundane existence to the world, having come to grips with passages like this:

The test as to whether one had acquired an unconditional commitment would come only if one had the passion and courage to transfer what one had learned on the Net to the real world. Then one would confront what Kierkegaard calls 'the danger and life's stern judgment.' But precisely the attraction of the Net, like that of the press in Kierkegaard's time, is that it inhibits that final plunge. Indeed, anyone using the Net who is led to risk his or her real identity in the real world would have to act against the grain of what attracted him or her to the Net in first place.

This statement applies directly to me. I was very hesitant to be myself on the web where I have become used to anonymity, posting to blogs and wandering about as if I had no real existence but was nothing more than a heckler and a snoop. You may not feel obliged to attempt to disclose yourself, and you certainly won't be criticised here if you remain anonymous. But the issue runs deep:

So it looks like Kierkegaard may be right. The press and the Internet are the ultimate enemy of unconditional commitment, but only the unconditional commitment of what Kierkegaard calls the religious sphere of existence can save us from the new holistic leveling launched by the Enlightenment, promoted by the press and the public sphere, and perfected in the World Wide Web.

Hubert Dreyfus, On the Internet, 2001

Discussion: Heidegger, existentialism, a paradox

2008-01-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

This discussion item is geared towards virtually all the Phil 185 - Heidegger: Being and Time Division I from Fall 2007.

The teaching seems to be that as human beings, or Daseins, we act most primitively and most authentically when we are coping, or dealing, in a totally absorbed way, with the interconnected, transparent, background elements of the world. Thus, when we hammer without thinking about the hammer, but rather as an non-conspicuous part of the task of building a house for Dasein to live in, then we are being in the world and the hammer is ready to hand and neither it nor our actions fall into the foreground of our attention. And that is somehow a right way to be, as opposed to the alternative possibility that would make the hammer, the house, and the human into an interaction of mental representations and goals, and physical substances with properties, the way we might script a computer to simulate the given situation. This phenomenon appears to be Heidegger's essential insight.

That description is totally inadequate to summarize Division I, but I suppose it will have to do. I just want to set up a paradox that has been bothering me. This paradox may apply to existentialism in general, or there may be a very simple answer to it. I'd really like to know.

The paradox is simply this: the teaching of existentialism appears to elevate the act of absorbed coping, or being, bodily, in the world; yet it does so in a framework that requires constant interpretation and excessive introspection, which must happen (or at least we must experience as happening) in the learner's "mind," whatever that means. Therefore, we use the most intensely individualist Cartesian mental faculties of analysis to unfold the most Heideggerian themes, such as a pleasant drinking party where everyone toasts the divinities of friendliness. This raises the question why we study Heidegger in a university classroom, by dicing text, rather than in a cafe, by getting sloshed.

Worse, we suspect, after listening to the class and reflecting just a bit, that the students who skipped the lecture and sat around drinking espresso, flirting, and throwing insults and accolades at each other, already had a better notion of the teaching than the studious ones who attended every lecture and parsed every sentence, simply because they were being in the flow, unconscious of it, rather than stepping out of the flow and attempting to systematize a better phenomenological understanding of it.

Dreyfus claims, and I completely agree, that Heidegger's anti-Cartesian perspective is revolutionary. It frees us to attend to our embodied existence in an endlessly connected world. But the philosophy remains trapped in a traditional Cartesian-dominated environment - the elite university classroom and its western analytical and interpretive protocol. The teaching makes me want to go outside and hammer something, unconsciously, with my "...body and its great reason: that does not say 'I' but does 'I'" (Nietzsche in Zarathustra). Is not any teaching like this an effort to say, not do?

Please give me refutations! I would love to get past this nagging paradox. I'm sure every student of existentialism goes through something like this. Have you had any startling "wait just a minute" moments too?

Discussion: Ethics and Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith

2007-12-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

This item concerns the first 10 lectures of Phil 7 - Existentialism in Literature and Film, where the early Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard is addressed.

The teaching seems to be this: a Knight of Faith gets a defining commitment. This commitment is private - it cannot be publicly explained in the context of his or her dominant social environment. His peers wouldn't get it. In particular, he may (must?) violate in some way the accepted ethical dimension for his time and place. This situation leads to the "Teleological Suspension of the Ethical" when the Knight of Faith acts upon his defining commitment.

The examples given in Fear and Trembling include the following: Abraham committed to Isaac who he will sacrifice but be restored with somehow. The knight committed to his lady love who he will never marry but with whom he will spend eternity. The examples given in class by Hubert Dreyfus include: A homosexual in 1850's Copenhagen who feels he must be a certain way no matter what the public taboos. The young Hitler Youth boy who falls in love with a Jewish girl and must save her despite his indoctrination. Another example from recent history was given as Martin Luther King.

The discussion I would like to start here has to do with further examples of this phenomenon, and an exploration of how the ethical standards of a culture can be set aside in light of a "higher" truth that is personal and non-rational.

I would start by introducing Huck Finn in Mark Twain's book of that name, as a fictional character who meets this definition by defying the ethos of the pre-Civl War era by helping the slave, Jim, escape. The problem here is that the ethos of the entire situation was in flux between the intended time of the book (in the 1840-1850 period of Twain's youth) and both the publishing time (post Civil War) and today. Huck can only be a Knight of Faith hero under the old ethos of returning "stolen" property to its rightful owner, which was the law of the land before Emancipation. How should we treat this ethical transition? Huck's actions appear supremely ethical to us today, and it is paradoxically his own hesitation to act that seems unethical.

Next, I would like to talk about Martin Luther King. Dreyfus introduced MLK as an example of someone with a defining commitment - fighting for Civil Rights informed what he was. Dreyfus later reversed himself on that example when a student pointed out that he was not going "against" the ethos but "along with" the ethos of equality in America. But I disagree. The ethical standards for race relations was in flux during MLK's life, just as they were in Mark Twain's. It was presumably not an accepted ethical action in the South for blacks to mix in everyday settings with whites in the 1940's and 1950's. These "Jim Crow ethics" called for sensible persons of both races to honor an invisible dividing line. MLK therefore did challenge that in a valid Suspension of the Ethical for a greater good. I would respectfully ask that Dreyfus retract the retraction, or at least address it, next class.

Finally, I would like to comment on Abraham and Isaac, and challenge Kierkegaard's framing of their story. The cultural norm in some parts of the ancient Middle East did in fact include the sacrifice of the first child under certain circumstances (viz. Carthaginians). Dreyfus claimed that Abraham would have had no shared vocabulary with his neighbors to discuss the proposed killing of his own child, but that may not have been the case - it is just as reasonable to suppose that his neighbors fully expected him to do so. In this light, his finding a Ram and sparing Isaac a fate that the surrounding society expected would have been the act reflecting Kierkegaard's Suspension of the Ethical.

Everyone is invited to comment on any of these three scenarios, and add their own. Mine all question what happens when ethical norms change in a culture. Is the Knight of Faith merely acting as a harbinger or change agent? Which ethical norms are used to test the Faith required? The earlier ones, or the later ones?

The LA Times Article

2007-12-08T06:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to the article in the LA Times by Michelle Quinn that "exposed" the outside circle of Professor Hubert Dreyfus webcast listeners:

The iPod Lecture Circuit

If you have not read it, do. Very interesting and well written.

The only thing I'm not sure I can find in it is the answer to the question "Why?" What is it that gets a bunch of ordinary folks excited about philosophy? That's what this blog should help us explore. Please feel free to post your comments, or email me (see profile) if you have questions.

Textual vs. Virtual Discussion Spaces

2007-12-03T08:58:00.000-08:00

It seems that there are now multiple formats available for interacting as a group online. I would like to hear any comments from others about how a purely text-based format like this blog compares to the virtual reality model available at sites like Second Life.

The limitations of this blog site will no doubt quickly become apparent. As a programmer, I am sorely tempted to develop some custom discussion website that would adapt better to the task at hand, but I also know that 90% of success is using the KISS principle wisely. At this point, it is critical to keep everything as simple as possible. So this Google-ized blog seems best for starters.

I have experimented with Second Life, and I think it has great promise for promoting interaction in a more natural setting than posting to an electronic bulletin board. On the other hand, I have been more impressed with the busy trendiness and virtualized materialism of the Second Life paradigm than with its uplifting aspects. But I would like to try it when there are more interested students willing and available for that level of experiment.

Open Invitation to Contribute

2007-12-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

I do not consider this "my" blog, even though I started it and right now I am the only one writing it.

If you are interested in this subject, its your blog too. I would suggest that you start out by leaving a comment, however brief. If you want to post a regular blog entry I will need to add you to the list of authors, so you will have to (1) get an account here, and (2) transmit your info to me so I can add you.

Wikipedia Dreyfus Links

2007-12-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

I thought it would be good to provide a bunch of links on this blog. Then I thought better of it. Most of the critical links already exist on Wikipedia and I will try to add all the ones I know of that are not on that page, and keep it current as best I can. If we use the Wikipedia article as the central hub of our resource linking, it will improve that information and be available to everyone in the world, so let's do it that way until someone has a better plan!

Here is the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus

Hints:

1. Go to the External Links, and find the webcasts of his classes. Then listen to them.

2. Go to the Dreyfus home page at UC Berkeley for more general info on him. Also, there is a link to his papers - pick a short one - usually you can get the .pdf version and read it in 15 minutes. Very good stuff.

The information in the Wikipedia article is good but basic and sometimes incomplete. It focuses on the AI debate. You can track from this page to most of the immediately relavent philosophy articles, but it seems to me this is still an area where Wikipedia is finding its way, and you may stumble on lots of inconsistent articles.

Start Up and Explanation

2007-12-02T22:39:00.001-08:00

Hello All.

This is the starting post for a blog called WhooshUp - my particular favorite phrase of Professor Hubert Dreyfus when teaching his now classic "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature" at UC Berkeley. You have to listen to that course to really get this phrase, but if you do, you will frequently find that things just "whoosh up" and take over - at least when you are in tune and ready to get whooshed. How's that for an over-arching explanation of mankind under western civilization, especially his interaction with Pagan, Platonic, Judeo-Christian, and Modern belief systems? Well, at least it might be some small thing to blog about...

I am in an "outer circle" of students of Dr. Dreyfus. His regular students go to UC Berkeley and sit in his classroom. If they get turned on to existentialism, they earn PhD's, I suppose, and go on to teach and practice philosophy in the world of academia. But this outer circle of students listen to him via webcasts. They listen, read, think about, then go back to work or family. I am not an ordinary scholar - I have a Dilbert job, in a cubicle, on a computer. I don't know all the basic prerequisites, or have lots of time to read comprehensively or discuss a class with graduate assistants. I will never get a degree in this stuff. But I love studying it. If you are a member of this outer circle of students, this blog is for you too.

This blog is an attempt to start a discussion centered around what he teaches and how he does it. The first question is so incredibly deep and seemingly unfathomable that I can't even begin to explain it - largely because I have just begun to learn anything about it. Others will hopefully take a stab at describing what he teaches - for now I will just suggest that it concerns the nature of reality, and the past and future of human comprehension of reality, and the way we do, can, and should try to interact with reality on an individual basis day by day - but all that is a very poor answer, I assure you! The subject area often gets piled up under this name: Existentialist Philosophy.

What I can describe, imperfectly, is how he teaches this subject. I can do this because I have listened to three webcasts, and I can just report my impressions. That's all. Anybody else could add to this list of impressions.

1. He has really done this thing called academic work, and it shows in his teaching. The highest praise for academic work comes when a prediction is made and later proves out true, especially when at the time of the prediction, the majority of opinion would fall on the other side of the question. Dreyfus strongly predicted, in 1972, that the standard approach to AI would fail. He based his prediction on the implications of Heidigger's existentialist philosophy which describes how human knowledge works. The prediction was correct, and most researchers in the field admit it now, after nearly thirty years.

2. He teaches his subjects with clarity and continuity. He knows what he wants the student to understand, and in what order the topics need to be absorbed. Often the concepts involved are very difficult to grasp. I am not any kind of expert in philosophy, history, or literature - which are normally all mixed in to his lectures. But I get it. He is able to explain things so a non-specialist can, with a little work, figure out some of the deepest philosophy our civilization has produced.

3. He teaches with such comfortable authority that he is constantly asking for reaction and correction from his students. He does this first by working very, very closely from a selected text - normally an important source book for the topic under study. I mean line by line. He will read or summarize what the source is saying, and explain it, or expound what possibilities can be derived from it. Then he invites the class to go into the same text and come up with examples that do not fit his own explanation. In other words, he empowers the student to disagree with him, only insisting that the challenge be a valid, sustainable, and topical analysis - like those he has demonstrated by making them over and over himself in the lecture.

I hope that if you have never heard a lecture like this, you will get one and try. It's not your ordinary class.