Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl and his student Martin Heidegger were German philosophers who were active in the 20th century. Husserl was the founder of phenomenology, a method that studies intentionality: the way the human mind is directed toward objects. Phenomenology’s catchphrase, “Back to the things themselves,” was a reaction to how philosophy had become mainly concerned with theoretical knowledge at the end of the 19th century.
Edmund Husserl used phenomenology for epistemology: the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. He wanted to make philosophy a rigorous science like mathematics and physics. To make philosophy a rigorous science, Husserl practiced bracketing: putting out of play things that would distract you from focusing on “the things themselves.” For example, bracketing could involve listing the qualities of a human being that we can dispense with while still being able to call something a human being. Edmund Husserl believed that bracketing is necessary when first-person experiences are analyzed phenomenologically.
Heidegger, on the other hand, used phenomenology to study ontology: the science of being. To study ontology, Husserl’s bracketing does not go far enough. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger believed that bracketing is impossible because no type of study can be presuppositionless. This does not entail throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Bracketing is useful for beginning to access the question of being because there are so many prejudices that prevent us from properly doing ontology. To study being, Heidegger started by studying the only being capable of asking questions about being: the human being. He used the phenomenological method to study everyday human experiences that come before theory. Everyday experiences like going to the store, playing video games, cooking, and watching Netflix are how we understand being. We generally do not lock ourselves in a room to read philosophical and scientific texts while deeply contemplating what it means for something to be. Since ontology is more fundamental than epistemology, Heidegger surpassed his teacher because his questioning of being showed that theoretical knowledge is not the baseline for how we understand the world. Being something is more fundamental than learning theories and methods about how to be that thing.
References
- Large, William. Heidegger’s Being and Time: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
- Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Phenomenology: A Comparison of Historical and Methodological Considerations.
- Blattner, William D. Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Anthropology and Psychology
In Martin Heidegger’s book Being and Time, he claims that the question of the meaning of being has been forgotten by the West. To reawaken this question, he starts by questioning the meaning of the being that we ourselves are; that is, human beings. Most of the book is concerned with studying how human beings behave in their day-to-day lives: walking to work, taking an elevator, riding a bicycle, socializing with others, and so on.
It is only natural to ask, “Is Heidegger even doing philosophy? Isn’t he doing science, namely anthropology or psychology?” Heidegger addresses this question in a section titled “How the Analytic of Dasein Is to Be Distinguished from Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology” (Dasein is Heidegger’s word for human being).
Anthropology and psychology are the study of man. The concept of “man” is handed down from our culture: a culture that is an amalgamation of Ancient Greek and Christian cultures. The Greeks, specifically Aristotle, tell us that man is a rational animal. The problem is that the kind of being that belongs to an “animal” is just another object in a world of objects. We are not objects. The kind of being that is “rational,” on the other hand, is very mysterious: “What does it mean to be rational?” is as difficult to tackle as “What does it mean to be a human being?”
Christians, by contrast, think that man is more than a rational animal. According to Genesis, man is created in the image and likeness of God. To Christians, the kind of being that belongs to man is transcendence: something that draws man toward God. But transcendence is an entity. Since the being of entities (human beings) is not itself an entity (transcendence), due to the ontological difference, following this path will not help us get closer to the meaning of the being of man.
References
- Heidegger, Martin. “How the Analytic of Dasein Is to Be Distinguished from Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology.” Being and Time, Blackwell, Oxford, 1967, pp. 46–50.
- Heidegger, Martin. “Result of the Critical Reflection: The Neglect of the Question of Being as Such and of the Being of the Intentional Is Grounded in the Fallenness of Dasein Itself.” History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1992, pp. 130–131.
Truth as Disclosedness
Heidegger’s treatise Being and Time claims that the question of being has been forgotten by our society and needs to be reawakened. The book later goes on an excursion about truth. Why does talking about being necessarily mean talking about truth? The first sentence of Wikipedia’s entry says, “Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.” Notice that the word “being” is contained in Wikipedia’s sentence. Since the question of being has been forgotten, the ontological foundations of Wikipedia’s definition of truth, which is the same as the traditional definition of truth, must be forgotten as well. The founders of Western philosophy, and hence our culture, did not define truth as correspondence with reality. They defined truth as disclosedness, but this definition became corrupted into the derivative “truth as correspondence.”
To demonstrate how the primordial conception of truth is disclosedness, Heidegger studies a phenomenon in which someone is turned away from a wall that has a painting whose frame is askew. The person rightly asserts that the painting on the wall is crooked and then turns around and sees that it is indeed crooked. This phenomenon can be interpreted in two different ways: the primordial way and a way that is derivative of the primordial way. The derivative interpretation has been what the West has defined truth to be for over 2,000 years. This derivative way is to claim that the person’s assertion was true because it corresponded with reality: they claimed the picture was crooked, and it was so.
When this phenomenon is interpreted primordially, we see that before the person’s assertion became true via correspondence, there was an elaborate ontological framework that made it possible for them to assert whether the painting was askew. This ontological framework is the being that has been forgotten. What does it mean for a painting to be askew on a wall? This question must have an implicit answer before anyone can assert that a painting is askew.
A paradigmatic example in Being and Time says that “Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not ‘true.’” Without context, this statement is very controversial. But it is only controversial because, by default, we all go along with “truth as correspondence.” If we switch to “truth as disclosedness,” this statement makes sense.
To bring it close to home, let us assert that “A qubit is a two-level quantum system.” Before quantum information theory was disclosed in the late 20th century, this statement would have made no sense whatsoever. It is only through the founders of quantum information theory that our assertion is true. Yes, atoms existed before Schumacher and Wootters, but the concept of using an atomic system to encode and manipulate “quantum information” would have been bizarre to Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and all the other Quantum 1.0 people who were not playing around with desktop computers and, more importantly, did their greatest work before Claude Shannon did his best work. Because of Deutsch and Feynman, atoms reveal themselves to us as vehicles for storing and manipulating information, not as storage for energy, mechanical systems, or “what everything is made out of,” as previous generations of quantum people believed. This is the truth of Quantum 2.0.
References
- Heidegger, Martin. “Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth.” Being and Time, Blackwell, Oxford, 1967, pp. 256–259.
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