Problems and Meta-problems

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel's treatment of the problematical and the meta-problematical is relevant to Heidegger's distinction between what is at hand and what is to hand (mentioned in this post) . In Heidegger's Being and Time the fundamental structure of the world is called "ready-to-hand." It is of the utmost importance not to think of world as a spatial and temporal region that we are "in." Heidegger tries to get away from any subject/object distinctions. Instead, think of the world in somewhat Kantian terms: as something we generate. The role of our generation of the world in Heidegger is even more active. For Kant, there are categories through which we mediate experience, and which are uniform from person to person. For Heidegger, the world shows up differently for us depending on what our intentions and mood are. The world is fundamentally contexts of significance, not substances as in the Aristotelian tradition. When the world is ready to hand, it is engaged in, and not viewed abstractly. Substances do not really reveal themselves as independent things, instead we accomplish things. Depending on ones goals (and ones mood, which he regards as an existential condition) different things show up. These things do not show up primarily as substances with certain properties; in fact, they don't show up in any explicit way (as objectively present) at all. Our understanding of things is enabled by the contexts of significance, though this understanding is not an intellectual one--it is knowing the use for something. Turning a doorknob to exit a room or using a brake to slow down a car are examples of this sort of understanding, and these require no explicit awareness of the doorknob or the brake. Instead one is conscious of a purpose, and uses tools to accomplish that purpose without particular attention to those tools. Explicit awareness arises as a tool malfunctions and becomes an obstacle to ones task. This breakdown of worldliness allows an explicit consideration of a thing, it causes one to rend the object from its place in the web of ones purposes so that one may look at it (and in doing so allows it to become an object). When a pencil, for example, breaks down while one is writing, it becomes possible to consider the color of the pencil, its texture; it manifests itself as an enduring substance. It is important to note that substantiality comes about as a fissure in the primordial world. In this fissure we move from what is to hand to what is at hand. The earlier post quoted Heidegger on objective presence not being the fundamental constitution of the world. Heidegger deals with the consequences for science and philosophy at length, but I won't deal with his position here. Instead, we can use this distinction between what is ready to hand (the primordial world structure) and what is present at hand (the explicit awareness that arises out of the rupturing of the world) to turn to Marcel.

In Marcel's The Philosophy of Existentialism he distinguishes the problematic from the meta-problematic. In the problematic, things are considered objectively, as something which does not concern us, something which does not affect ones being. This has many parallels to "objective presence," but refers even more broadly the mode of consideration one employs in regard to the relation of the one who asks the question and the question itself. The problematic requires a distance between the questioner and the question, this is what allows one to consider the matter rationally and objectively. The problems dealt with do not contain the being of the one who is considering them. One views the problem from the outside. Ones objectivity is compromised if one has a personal stake in the question. An interesting question which arises here is whether any problem can be considered apart from one's own being--the phenomenological position is that there is not. I will neglect this question, for now.

The meta-problematical is, according to Marcel, a problem which encroaches on its own data. In other words, it is a problem in which our being is at issue. As the being posing a question which concerns that very being, the problematical is transcended, or more precisely, left aside. Objectivity is compromised. The question cannot be considered apart from the questioner. (This, perhaps, is the definitive insight of existentialism.) At the very least, all of the questions that matter to us are meta-problematical--they are mysteries. Marcel claims despair arises from the incapacity of the problematical to address these questions meaningfully:

Despair consists in the recognition of the ultimate inefficacy of all technics, joined to the inability or refusal to change over to a new ground--a ground where all technics [means of resolving problems]  are seen to be incompatible with the fundamental nature of being, which itself escapes our grasp (in so far as this grasp is  limited to the world of objects and this alone). It is for this reason that we seem nowadays to have entered upon the very era of despair; we have not ceased to believe in technics, that is to envisage reality as a complex of problems; yet at the same time the failure of technics as a whole [on the level of meta-problems] is as discernible to us as its partial triumphs. To the question: what can man achieve? we continue to reply: He can achieve as much as his technics; yet we are obligated to admit that these technics are unable to save man himself, and even that they are apt to conclude with the most sinister alliance with the enemy he bears within him. [The Philosophy of Existentialism]

Consider the question: "Is there meaning to life?" If this question is posed rationally, that is: as a problem, it must be posed objectively as something in which we are not involved. Yet our involvement in the question is manifest even as it is asked. When considered as a problem, there is no meaning to life--precisely because to pose such a question as something which does not affect us completely obscures the investigation. This is not because there is no meaning to life, but because the meaning of life lies is a meta-problem. It is a mystery. When the meaning of life is posed as a problem, it is lost.

Thus these questions must be taken up as meta-problems, in which we participate rather than simply ask. Our questioning is not carried out solely by the intellect, it is explored through our engagement in the world. Mystery is not absolutely inaccessible; it is only inaccessible to pure reason. The differences between Heidegger and Marcel will be explored another times, it is the similarities that interest us here. The insight of Heidegger and Marcel is that the important questions are the ones in which we are involved; ones which we cannot separate ourselves from. We have no vantage point from which we can reduce meta-problems to problems without losing their meaning, and we must understand that fundamental truths are truths which are lived.