Is water fundamentally H2O? The answer at first seems obvious: of course. Perhaps this should be rephrased: do we understand water best by specifying its molecular makeup? Is this what water fundamentally is? Again the answer seems obvious. However, this is a peculiarity of our age. Our adoration of science as the supreme mode for understanding the world requires us to look at the world this way. This way of looking at the world seems to leave something out psychologically. Is water merely its chemical components? Is Earth simply a speck in the backwaters of the Milky Way Galaxy? Are humans a member of the ape family, with an evolutionary legacy? These are all no doubt true, from a certain way of looking at the world. This is the scientific expression of these things. The real question is whether this expression is more "true" than any other expression. Martin Heidegger argues this detached way of looking at the world is distanced from truth, and contests the "correspondence" model of truth:
If we now ask what shows itself in the phenomenal findings of knowing, we must remember that knowing itself is grounded beforehand in already-being-in-the-world which essentially constitutes the being of Da-sein. Initially, this already-being-in-the-world is not solely a rigid staring at something merely objectively present, there must first be a deficiency of having to do with the world and taking care of it. In refraining from all production, manipulation, and so on, taking care of things places itself in the only mode of being-in which is left over, int the mode of simply lingering with.... On the basis of this kind of being toward the world which lets us encounter beings within the world solely in their mere outward appearance (eidos), and as a mode of this kind of being, looking explicitly at something thus encountered is impossible. This looking at is always a way of assuming a definite direction toward something, a glimpse of what is objectively present. It takes over a "perspective" from the beings thus encountered from the very beginning. This looking itself becomes a mode of independent dwelling together with beings in the world. In this "dwelling" -- as the refusal of every manipulation and use -- the perception of what is objectively present takes place. Perception takes place as addressing and discussing something as something. On the foundation of this interpretation in the broadest sense, perception becomes definition. What is perceived and defined can be expressed in propositions and as thus expressed can be maintained and preserved. This perceptive retention of a proposition about...is itself a way of being-in-the-world, and must not be interpreted as a "procedure" by which a subject gathers representations about something for itself which then remain stored up "inside" as thus appropriated, and in reference to which the question can arise at times of how they "correspond" with reality.
2 comments:
Is the modern view the result of the rejection of the other three of Aristotle's four causes? In other words, is not the modern view simply the application of material cause without consideration of formal, efficient, and final causes? If you say that water is its components, isn't that defining water exclusively in terms of its material cause? And is Heidegger's concern addressed by the application of the other causes?
The modern view is without question at least partially a result of the rejection some of the causes. The efficient cause is actually considered by the continental rationalists (even to the detriment of the material cause, as in Spinoza). But final cause in particular is certainly not often considered by modern thinkers.
This is not the case with Heidegger. For him, the essence of a thing is in its handiness (what it is used for). However, I don't know if applying the four causes completely addresses his concern. To a large degree, that excerpt is talking about an abstract way of looking at the world in which substances are considered explicitly, and a more fundamental way of engaging with the world without standing back and appraising it. He argues that engagement with the world is our fundamental way of being, and our theoretical way of being in the world is a deficient mode of the prior way. In this fundamental engagement with the world, substances do not manifest themselves, it is only when something breaks down or works improperly that we have an explicit awareness of them. So to some degree, using the four causes doesn't go deep enough, since they are a form of abstraction, which -- he argues -- is not the primary way of understanding things. That's not to say that they are useless, and teleology in particular plays a very large role in his thought. It just means they are not the most fundamental way of knowing things.
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