Verfallenheit

I was looking again through Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity and the Phenomenology of Religious Life, and thinking about the various critiques Derrida and others levy against a distinction Heidegger makes between the proper and the improper. One can't understand these critiques as just critiques of the distinction between the two or a taking apart of a binary opposition (which some would call a "deconstruction" but that, without what follows here, does not get at the sense of the word as Derrida and others like Nancy mean it), because it is a critique that is really an investigation of a problem very internal to the nature of the phenomenon that Heidegger was (in an unbelievably amazing manner) attempting to investigate in Being and Time and elsewhere that he names Verfallenheit, fallingness (a coinage I prefer over "fallenness," the standard translation). This is the spirit of the account and explanation Nancy makes that I quote in an earlier post: one needs to understand the complications of the distinction between the proper and the improper within the phenomenon of their meeting, in fallingness and in the other phenomenon of anxiety before one can start critiquing the distinction--or rather, understanding the critiques of the distinction (by Derrida, especially), because they are indeed thinking precisely about this phenomenon when they critique it.

So what is Verfallenheit? Nothing more (and nothing less) than absorbtion in the world, the withdrawing of the possibility of access to something in the face of one's actual process of accessing it, even when one is trying to investigate or discern the reasons for one's ability to encounter it (in fact, falling shows up really concretely there). The process is quite simple, actually, because we encounter it every day:

During the course of a factically experienced day, I deal with quite different things; but in the factical course of life, I do not become aware of the different hows of my reactions to those different things. Instead, I encounter them at most in the content I experience itself: factical life experience manifests an indifference with regard to the manner of experiencing. It does not even occur to factical life experience that something might not become accessible to it. This factical experience engages, as it were, all concerns of life. The differences and changes of emphasis are found entirely in the content itself. The self-sufficiency of factical life experience is, therefore, grounded upon this indifference, an indifference which extends itself to everything; it decides even on the highest matters within this self-sufficiency.

-from The Phenomenology of Religious Life

But of course its simplicity does not extend to its ramifications or even in the reasons for its constitution as such. And this is the same spirit in which we should encounter the critiques that Derrida (and others) levy against this: the fact that for Derrida the experience of falling is also interrupted all the time, that in fact it is always interrupted prior to its being constituted as such and from outside what it distinguishes itself from (authentic projection of oneself into the future as the future and as oneself), is also just a simple phenomenon--with of course vast implications, since it is the structure or non-structure in which we (and more than we) encounter and are able to encounter anything.

"Des engins à donner la mort:" Technical Responsibility in The Gift of Death, 2

(continued from last time...) Derrida shows that, despite some earlier references to work or labor as it functions within the opposition of the sacred and the profane (HE, 99-100), technics begins to figure significantly in Patočka’s history of responsibility through the rise of its modern, technological form; a form sustained by the spread of an understanding of the world in terms of what Patočka calls a “metaphysics of force” (HE, 119). Derrida recalls that the determination of this “metaphysics of force” as the essential support of modern technics is a “schema that is analogous to that employed by Heidegger” (GD, 37). According to Derrida, this schema belongs to a “tradition” older even than Plato and his dismissal of hypomnesis. It consists of the “denunciation of technology in the name of an originary authenticity” in the understanding of being—i.e. what allows things to have meaning—that modern technics or technology is supposed to contaminate (GD, 36).

Heidegger explains that with the rise of reason as the privileged standpoint from which things in the world are viewed, being comes to be understood in terms of what can be immediately apprehended or presented with certainty to a consciousness. That is, what allows things to have meaning becomes what allows an object to come and stay before rational thought. Science and industry, with the help of the machine (which is not yet technical in a modern way, as we shall see), take this determination of being and extend it rapidly on a planetary scale: they set up all things in the world to exist and to mean only in conformity with this conscious reason in front of which being gets revealed. Things thus become raw material that produces particular effects for reason, while the revealing of being becomes this productive work. In other words, something is seen as understood in its being when it is being accounted for, stored, exchanged or transformed—in short, calculated—by reason, whether by man or by the network of rational devices and systems with which he surrounds himself (culture, law, the economy, as well as stockpiles of resources, potencies, etc.). Eventually, this understanding gets so rigidified that the thing itself is seen as having its being only as the amount of calculating work necessary for this production. In other words, it only has meaning as a reserve of energy for rational action no different from any other except perhaps in the amount of energy also involved in the calculating effort of gathering or releasing it. In short, the thing is only a suspended moment in the circulation of reason. This narrows down the aspects produced or brought out of it to one: what guarantees the maintenance and expansion of the circulation itself. In other words, the thing has its being or its possibility of meaning only as what is calculated by this rational circulation so as to power its constant, boundless expansion. Now, this thing determined in its being is what Heidegger calls force, and this calculating rationality by which force is determined is what he designates as modern technics—thus, as we said, modern technics supports a determination of the being of things (or, a metaphysics) as force, and force, in turn, supports a process of technical calculation. Now, what is crucial about force is that it is precisely coordinated by this calculating technics to replace any need for the determination of a thing in its being at all. In other words, since the entire world is set up in advance through technics as wholly determinable quantities for technical reason; since everything will exhaust its meaning only as a force, being or what makes meaning possible no longer matters. Setting itself up more and more to understand only itself and make only itself understandable, technical reason will interpret itself by itself without regard for being: it will make decisions about how and even whether it should be without being able to see or understand anything concerning why it is instead of not.

Derrida stresses that this inability to see that Heidegger locates in the technical metaphysics of force is what will be especially important in Patočka’s rendering of this schema (which Derrida is here paraphrasing): “man, instead of relating to the being that is hidden under this figure of force, represents himself as quantifiable power” (GD, 37). Derrida emphasizes “hidden under” because if, as we just said, technical force does not merely make everything calculable or fit for processing by technics but also does so in opposition to the ability to determine anything outside of calculation, it does not just simply render the possibility for ontology unavailable for our sight or understanding in any way whatever: according to Heidegger the metaphysics of force specifically dissimulates this possibility, or makes any attempt to rediscover being underneath force’s prevalence almost impossible. We can now see fully why Derrida says Heidegger falls into a tradition of denouncing technics in the name of authenticity: technics, taken to its extreme in its modern form, disturbs our proper relationship to being or our proper ability to see why things mean—to the extent that the proper cannot be recovered except through an extreme effort. We must begin to ask whether Patočka cannot help but duplicate this fall if he grants even more importance to dissimulation...

Division II, baby

Ohh yeah... get ready for it: Classes start soon at Berkeley, and Hubert Dreyfus' lectures on Division II of Being and Time are going to be downloadable.

They're amazing lectures, and a really great way to begin to learn what Heidegger is talking about. It's interesting: you see that many people are critical of Dreyfus for being too pragmatist, leaning too much on Division I and not pursuing paths, very much present in Being and Time, that open up so easily into his later work--all this you hear, but I think Dreyfus' interpretations have held up for so long despite the changes in Heidegger scholarship over the years because he has a real sense of what he continually refers to as "the phenomenon:" Dreyfus thinks extremely hard about the sort of happening, the sort of taking place, the phenomenology that Heidegger is doing when he is doing phenomenological ontology and that can be overlooked quite easily, because he just has so much to say about ontology! This doesn't mean Dreyfus interprets Heidegger like he is Husserl or something, or even like Merleau-Ponty... it just means that he gives you such a solid foundation from which you can either take off from or ground yourself within in order to deal with Heidegger, because he gives you a vivid sense of the moment of the phenomenon taking place--the point of its withdrawal. You really see that this aspect of what Heidegger is doing is almost indispensable for some of his larger claims: the interpretation of time as futural must show up in worldhood somehow, and show up in a definite phenomenon that we can sort of see every day... this "must," this necessity, is the mark of Dreyfus' rigor--getting you to see it like this is his job, and he does it wonderfully. I think that one thing that he said during last semester's course is absolutely true: that in this sense Division I is more expansive and anything said in Division II. Whether Dreyfus thinks this is because Division II is less worked out and a more rough draft than Division I, or because it constitutes less of an interpretation and working out of Aristotle, or anything else, I think that this claim remains legitimate if only because you can see how much mileage Dreyfus himself is able to make of it. That is (sorry for these fragmented comments, they'll have to do for now, given that I'm traveling a lot and writing papers), I think Division I is more expansive because it is making a claim about the merits of ontology in its exposition that is unprecedented and sets the tone, so to speak, for anything that could follow from it. More than the courses, or even the Contributions to Philosophy, the first division of Being and Time is such a sustained effort of an argument about ontology that it colors everything that will follow. It is the struggle with the attempt to think beyond or before "values" or "experiences" and to bring them back to a "how," a reason or a structure that runs deeper than any particular way you can specify that structure--any "what." It is that amazingly creative leap Heidegger makes away from Husserl and back towards Aristotle, that one can see in his early lecture notes.