The State of the Blog

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

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?