Goon-tog and welcome back to the new Thinkery. My name is David Barr with me as always as my his air doctor Alex Prey my good friend Haru. Hey Dr. Professor.
Oh that's right. How are you doing? Are still good and me too the Alke is here Dr. Professor Craig McBrayer hello hello hello it's hello again let's get this house from McBrayer um gross gross gross gross gross McKinda uh yeah why are we talking like this what's going on sausage I can't speak German without doing that oh oh I think Dana Carvey is really like usually usually when you speak German it's like I do not do that with my arm you guys can't see this luckily but Greg Greg that's not natural movement I've even studied Rome what's going on Greg I guess you've changed your ways Alex actually Alex did you lose like a lot of your valuable French aristocratic homes in World War II?
This is actually true during that occupation my grandparents got married in this beautiful house in Bergen day I think or Bordeaux but it was a beautiful house overlooking one of the lines and it's nice we have some of the furniture and effects from the house when you're talking about the stuff because you know they just didn't have money so wow my dad so my my uncle uh may he rest in peace whenever he dies no he died in a while though but he was born in 1939 my dad was born in 1943 in Akknazi occupied France they didn't want to have another kid because of how things were going but they ended up having him anyways and uh and philosophy is all the better for it I don't know about that your birth not the Nazis this is this is like you know philosophic Nazis what are we discussing today we're discussing Martin Heidegger and in my say by Heidegger what's that essay called Alex the question concerning technology why can't he just be more direct in German it's called the Faga Nachtte technique which means literally like the question of or about technology right or is that technology there's not a better word that has logos in German than I don't know English English technology is two Greek words so technique is just one really it's like technique basically right I'm sure there's like techno-logish or something yeah I technically or something yeah but uh I think technique is a normal word for technical fabrication sure sure something but the word the German preposition has a it can't it's mean like following like coming after something so but here you so one way you think about is questioning about or questioning in pursuit of technology because that's explicit what he's doing he's trying to find a way towards the essence of of technology so I don't like I don't like the trans it's come to be known by this translation concerning technology but I don't like it because it's it's a strange English word that can sometimes mean something's troubling and he does find technology troubling right or modern technology troubling but I don't think that that's not reflected in this type at all so I think it's a dance leading at least just a title English I thought I never really studied Heidegger I thought that he was concerned with investigations into being in Aristotle so what are these little essays that he's writing was this for a popular audience what why did technology just become I mean on his way I mean is this so first of all when when was it published and is there something he saw that prompted yeah so it was it was originally delivered as a paper in 1949 and then it was revised in 1953 and then it was eventually published in a collective volume of essays he had a few that he published is like I think this was the first one I might be wrong about this this is the first one that he published out of after it's called lectures and essays that he published after because he was in ex he got obviously got in trouble after the nonsense he didn't publish for some time and then so it was sometime in the 50s that he published and I believe it's not for a popular audience these are largely academic things I mean this is extremely difficult to read in English it's certainly also difficult in in German but it's it's a kind of part of a larger set of questions that he's asking about poetry about the nature of human making in general about art art art out theology and stuff like that but it's approaching it from specifically the angle of modern technology my foot note does say 1954 by the way oh yeah that's right over yeah what's making Alsitza yeah that was published in 1964 I think that must have been I might be wrong about this but I think that was the first thing he published after the end of the word she took like a hiatus so before we get into the whole text and figure out what in the world's going on um maybe you could tell us a little bit how you read Heidegger because I read him with a lot of like a head scratching and hair pulling and wanting him to just shut the hell up and use red regular words um and I don't know I mean I've tried really little of this in German um not this particular one of maybe the art essay and it's just like he's making up words um and maybe that's because he doesn't think and I'm reading the categories and also friends too so maybe the Heidegger so Heidegger and AirSole might just take different approaches to the limits of ordinary language because here right there in the first paragraph says always of thinking lead through language so there is this way that you have to do it through language but him inventing words seems to me to point to he thinks there's a problem or ordinary language is limited in its ability to convey what's actually going on but so one of the first things for me in reading Heidegger is all these weird terms uncovering revealing right okay revealing is not that weird but things aren't just what they are in framing he uses this word in this in this particular piece so they're all these weird terms and then I don't know what else you want to say so yeah I think uh so I mean here's all of them words that's one place I'll be good like that's true an airgate point yeah um and Heidegger it's this is partially a translation problem in partially the philosophic uh point or sort of yes which is so the translation we'll be like first it's in framing the word in German is geschtau it's a perfectly normal word for any kind of rack that'll hold something it can mean skeleton I think you know it's at some point and it can mean a frame or something but it's basically it's like something that you put other things on right so like you put flesh on the skeleton you put you know objects on a kind of drying rack and there's all these different kind of literally it means something where something where other things are placed comes from the Greek and she's to put or to place the translator for German word not Greek word sorry there's German word okay so I can't remember that one from Hansen Gwen anyway yeah yeah and uh so I think there's a there's a kind of there's a translation issue for example there I would not translate geschtau as in framing because he's talking about how technology turns objects into like standing reserve is one it's German word but something like a stockpile right so if you're going to have a stockpile of you know cans of beans or something like that you're going to put them on a rack like in your in your and you're just going to have that waiting for you and so there's a kind of ordinary way in which that's that we can talk about that what does modern technology do it gives us a stock like it gives us a reserve of stuff that we can call upon whenever we want and that's how we treat nature right the earth is no longer a beautiful thing to be contemplated and enjoyed it's a place you mind and you get stuff out of and then you use it when you need it so that you're never needing you've always got this right right okay so that's like an obvious thought but the problem is is that ordinary thought for Heidegger would be too simply put and this is true of all language so when he approaches a greek word like an erige right she will come up typically how to do or say activity would be like the ordinary translation coming to the line she one of the best things he did for the history of policies criticized the latinate translations or or terms for that were used for aerosol and got back to the greek roots so he comes up with the translation being at work which a lot of people know from Joe Sacks right Joe Sacks gone from Jacob Klein Jacob Klein got from right I do right so there's there's and that's a very helpful translation what does it mean what does an erige it's a state of being at work right in an activity in a in a deed that you're doing yeah so he's always conscious of the way in which philosophic terms get extremely vulgarized so that one seems persuasive to me and that's really good but some of his other ones don't seem persuasive to me or seem more problematic yeah I mean poasis as revealing alitha is uncovering right I mean like yeah well so alitha means we should explain for the folks at home in greek this means truth truth truth there is actually but there is actually some evidence that this is unconcealment so Lanfano or lathe means concealment or forgetting alitha means unforgettable or unconcealment right and so now if it were merely an etymological points that would be just kind of worthless philosophic right if it was just on the level of language but he wants to say that the notion of truth needs to be understood as an unconcealment which is to say to get at the truth of something you have to get other things out of the way you need a kind of critique ordinary concepts so another way to put that in simple terms of say what does he mean by truth is unconcealment you've got a question you're inherited opinions right you're an ordinary understanding of words and you try to understand them on a more philosophic level I think we could go from here let me transition here to the question of how to read Heidegger which is that one of the things that makes it really frustrating and in this case as in all case I think it makes it really difficult to give a kind of overview of what he's doing is that for Heidegger right if thinking is a kind of process of uncovering and sort of de-seventizing these words and ideas it's got a kind of fluidity or open-endedness that's not always entirely clear so Heidegger will do things like this he will make a statement using new terminology in a strange way that we just don't understand right and then he goes on to explain and you're like okay I'm starting to understand what you meant by that completely convoluted statements you just write a page about but the problem is is by the time he gets to that stage he started using new terms that he hasn't explained and so you get this feeling as you as you read the essay that there's a kind of cascading effect where just as you feel like you're getting a grip on part of it a new park comes in and you that's keeping you from having a full grip on what you just understood and as you work through it that's difficult and that's a truth just not just of this essay but even of how this essay fits in his work he starts talking about things like the essence of truth about how you were just talking about I'm consuming he doesn't explain that but he does it elsewhere or the nature of fuses he has an essay on that or he talks about these lines from hrodo and which he ends up writing a whole essay on right and then he is or he's talking about uh damming up the rhyme and that's looking forward to another interpretation of hrodo and right and that list goes on and on to how he's talking about art and what he's thinking about so what he's doing here and in many of his essays is he's preparing you or taking you through a part of his path of thinking that that kind of uh bleeds into the other part so a lot of Heidegger scholarship I think takes the effort of trying to reconstruct or pull these various texts together and come out his view I'll say another two of his most significant works after World War II and after his kind of turn um as he realized his political hopes were misguided or called vegmarken or pathmarks or holtzvega you'll see the word veg is in both of those right which means way or path and holtzvega is a difficult term to translate it means those little paths in the woods it's called off the beat track in english but it means a little pass that was you know sometimes you're hiking you go on a little path and it kind of trails off and it's nothing and you realize a sh** I'm lost right it's that kind of those kind of things and both of them are calling their attention to two very obvious things I think there's a main path of thinking that you might take and they're a little marks along the way like look this is something I figured out and it points in this direction and here's another thing that points back but it also points forward but then there's also these paths that go off and maybe lead somewhere maybe don't that's in a way a good way to think about how Heidegger's writing and how you ought to read him you have to always be trying to hold on to something that's ambiguous and nebulous that's slightly slightly concrete but will never become holy concrete and you just have to kind of do your best to make sense of the connections and ideas that he's developing but I have a quick question it does it never become holy concrete because of a is this an educative project a project on Heidegger's part to hold some punches back it was the nature of the thing being discussed doesn't permit of being holy concrete I think Greg was ever ever Patrick's circle smaller and smaller I think that has to do with it has to do with the latter it seems to me does that not seem right now it's no no I agree okay I'm asking this question because the one point in this is where I think I'm comfortable criticizing him which is towards his discussion of poetry I think he's too concrete and so I don't find any place where he's unclear because the issue itself doesn't require it right where he's needlessly I think he you know do I think he could try to translate to ordinary terms sure but I think he one of his main concepts from being in time is this idea of falling into the world of Dassmann and Mon and Jonah means one like or they right like you know what they say or one doesn't do that now does one right that kind of use it's it's like everyone but anyone right and so the world of Dassmann the one the they right completely takes these words and just makes them simplistic vulgarize and then you lose the essence the complex thought and he doesn't want to do that for his readers he knows that can happen anyway and it does happen it has happened hider most obviously in the common use of the word angst right to be angstyed at anxiety like it's become very vulgarized and very commonplace I think largely because of Heidegger but it's been robbed of its philosophic importance he understood yeah we have a runner show that I'll try follow but you mentioned poetry so I'll mention a couple things to see mod to me and how do you get hired writing one is I read this the essence of truth and it was strangely that Heidegger doesn't seem to articulate or name names he mentions cotton in that piece but otherwise he mentioned sorts of thoughts that seem to elude very clearly to Aristotle or someone else if he's even a reference to the book of Isaiah that he doesn't make explicit and here I noticed a similar tendency although it was a little more muted he does actually name names he mentions Aristotle but it seems to be mentioned to ourselves after he's gone through the four causes and it seems like that would be like you know you're talking about aerosols four causes maybe he mentioned that started with make a lot of sense so he doesn't really mention that many philosophers in this text and those he does he seems not to do so provingly of and since you mentioned poetry he seems it seems to me that the overwhelming majority of his references his positive references are references to poets not to philosophers like he quotes poetry and he says as this poet says as that poet says and it one gets the impression I get the impression and this idea that somehow revelation is part of what's going on too I can weigh the impression that Heidegger is I mean I'll state it I'll overstate it he's on the side of poetry against over and against philosophy it seems to me that poetry does a better job of disclosing the truth than philosophy does or something like this yeah I mean it's hard not to get away I mean he's at least doing something similar to Nietzsche where he's imagining a new philosophic poet right and this gets back to the technology issue in the following way which is that and I'll say about this Aristotle thing notice he uses the land as well so yeah here he's concerned above all the lany's version I think he knows that if he were to go into Aristotle he would find him a much more sympathetic but if he goes into Aristotle he'll then have to leave the question of modern technology behind right and by the way similar thing with Plato it seems like he's it seems like his Plato is the Plato of the Platonists is that fair to maybe yeah yeah okay so do I think he and he has less Platonistic sort of like in his discussion of the Fieders and his Nietzsche lectures he has a much more positive view because they're the idea is connected to poetry much more okay I mean what so I guess the point here that I would make is just that when you he accuses you could say or interprets the Greeks of construing being as presencing and prioritizing the thing right as an object and it's you can see why he would say this on the basis of even a very carefully Plato and Aristotle right right and not ironic but still very thoughtful and careful reading and the problem with that is the thing has a larger context right it has a larger sort of um unifying right and so here when he unifies the four causes in his discussion he tries to put them in the context of what you know in being a time he calls a world he can say right a world of references that comes together around some singular interpretation of being right that he he thinks we need to try to appreciate right and so part of the reason I think he goes with poets is because traditionally it was poets who gave speech as he puts it later to this unifying aspect right where is the um some page 339 I believe the he says yeah at the outside of the destiny of the west in grace the arts which is to say the technide like technology in the ancient sense if we can even say stored it to the supreme heights of the revealing granted that the revealing of the nature they illuminated the presence of the gods and the dialogue of divine and human destinies and art was simply called technique it was a single manifold revealing it was pious promos that is yielding to the holding sway and safe keeping of truth so if you're looking for an ancient unifying uh figure it would be the poet and not the philosopher on high degrees reading of course the distress injection would this be like well there's a poetic aspect to play out he invents the crowds or the aid aid of dogmatic play this are kind of god to him you know so can I ask um so the title what the question concerning technology I mean I want to ask what is the question and what is the question that's being asked it's the question um early on page 312 he gives two definitions of technology which I think it's fair to say prove to be inadequate they seem to be like the ordinary definition or beginning definition so I'll read those definitions and maybe you can just lead us to what's the question of technology here the two definitions is in the first full paragraph and then in the second paragraph one says definition of technology technology is a means to an n the other definition says technology is a human activity so those seem to be the two definitions of what technology is how does that help us to answer the question of technology question concerning technology yeah I mean this is where I would I would again emphasize that it's that the question the question is what is the assets most obviously right we not we not it but it's also a question in pursuit of technology right so this is a good example right he starts from an ordinary conception which he calls correct but not simply true right by which it corresponds to something true right it doesn't get out the truth or the essence of technology and so when he starts from that and then he so he goes okay well if it's a means and it has a kind of instrumentality that means it belongs within causality right and therefore if we're going to take causality seriously we need to think about what we mean by cause starting with the four causes right and thinking about what the word cause needs in land but above all in Greece and that's where it has a kind of debt and then he works through the four causes in the case of a chalice and he organizes them where you have matter and form kind of come together you put silver and then the shape of it or the aspect or eight osm as you put said the word aspect is not a good translation of the German elk it's okay good yeah the German on-zect is literally it has a sense of when you look on something right or right what it looks like which is closer to eight osm let's this translation is not great I was wondering if it was Heidegger's bad translation of greek or translated by translation of German okay that's always the issue right yeah and then the then you get the final cause or the tell us the end which is he says it's responsible for what is matter and what as aspect or form are together co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel so what you're using it for is going to unify these two things why it has to be silver why it has to have the specific form size all that and then there's the fourth participant which he says is the silversmith but he says he's not an efficient cause which is what you would say right so Aristotle yeah and why is it not he says the silversmith is co-responsible or the to him as that from which the sacred vessels being brought forth and subsistence take and return their first departure right the three previously mentioned ways of being responsible o-things to the pondering of the silversmith for the that and the how of the coming into appearance and into play for the production of the sacrificial vessel and this is a point where I just use the train of eider I really struggle to understand this point but the best sense I could make of it is that somehow the maker as maker is not just one cause on the other's but has the end in vision the material and form which are then are sort of secondary to that end and he brings them all together and it's really him as the unifying figure and so I think what he's trying to say is that the artisan is not just efficient cause he's a poet in some way he's making the divine situation so he's responsible for maintaining or even being I guess in this situation maintaining and securing leading to endure this larger world of sacrifice and human relationships to the god and that's not just a fish cause and that's the point I think that that makes a certain amount of sense yeah okay maybe I'm David has a question but before we get to that I'm going to try and lay out in my simple brain what's going on here as I see it I'm probably going to mess up his terminology but the ordinary folks Greg David we see technology as like a tool it's a means to achieve something so you know I want to make my feces go away so I flush it down toilet right so that's we've invented the toilet to do that I want some water so I go you know your your bottle suffices to do that on its own on what I don't I want to get some water and so I go to the well and I draw it up in the bucket right this is the technology it's very primitive technology well but very useful we have figured out more efficient ways to do that so our tools have got more efficient so we now use more efficient ways to draw water dams and things in plainish terms what Hijerseens we sang is technology actually changes fundamentally the way that humans interact with the world as a result of technology and so therefore it just the world discloses itself to us differently we now see things differently we see the example he keeps going back to is basically we see the world as reserved energy we see everything you know energy equals mass whatever it is you know Einstein's boat right everything is somehow potentially energy and so we can we don't look at a stream and see water we see potential hydraulic power okay so we it seems to me that what he's saying is I don't again I'm not really sure I can connect this to the title but the notion is that humans understand the world by interacting with the world and the world discloses itself to us based on the way that we interact with it and that technology because technology is a chief way we interact with the world the world is disclosing itself to us in a different way we see things differently than our ancestors what the world is different to us yeah I think that's right and so this gets out of question Derek asked us about I want to read it because I think this is really he says is for example the damming of a river to power turbines ontologically significant because it literally transforms nature and our access to it or because it discloses something about nature its plasticity etc and our relation to it how do these two layers relate for Hijer so I think there's the idea that it's I think it's it's in a way both right that you're transforming nature though I think I think ultimately it's the disclosing issue that's important and this is I think this is I think what makes is I is understanding quite I think significant he's not just hating on modern technology from like an ecological standpoint and he did have a massive influence on ecological movements but when he gives examples of how an impoverished causality can lead to a kind of can become a troubling and destructive force he says the following is on page three thirty but in whatever way the destiny of revealing may hold sway which means we try to understand the world we reveal it as a certain way and that creates a destiny we have a conception and that's going to determine our future the unconceal meaning which everything that is shows itself at any given time harbors the danger that man may misconstrue the unconcealed and misinterpreted you might in unconcealing it actually misunderstand right thus where everything that presences exhibits itself in the light of a cause affects coherence even god for representational thinking can lose all that is exalted in holy mysteriousness and his distance in the light of causality god can sink to the level of a cost of a cause afficience he then becomes even in theology the god of the philosophers namely of those who define the unconcealed and concealed in terms of causality of making without ever considering the essential provenance of this causality where it's derived from so the basic point I mean I just do it's not so much that it's transformative of nature but it's adding tapping into the plasticity of nature you make everything into this make everything into on this sort of model and when Heidegger is concerned about is ultimately how we can shoot highest things not nearly with how we destroy the lowest things. Greg has a great line in the chat can I read this Greg how it discloses itself to David a snake and to Greg as bride I didn't know you were marrying them I thought you were just that's my PG for your eyes you guys you always tell I don't want to derail you but if at some point you Alex or Greg could answer the following so many of the arguments Heidegger is using this essay a reminder of Aristotle another famous philosopher who investigated technology does Heidegger mean to improve upon Aristotle add to him or correct him Alex I think that's a great question it is a great question I think I think obviously he's just improved about it I mean he has great reverence for Aristotle but his goal in interpreting I think is to play full deference to the depth of thought he has nothing but to stand for people who give a kind of simple version of Plato like oh Plato believes the ideas live in a hocus pocus later what a dumbass is like okay no like it's strong adding him so you got to think through the ideas and think through the flosser on the deepest level but he ultimately is aware that perhaps these concepts have failed to get at the deepest question right which is the question of the being of the beings and he knows that this is an eternal question and he knows that Aristotle spoke to that but he would disagree with his construal with the fate that that left or the destiny that left for the for the west and he wants to try to think it through deeper to escape the sort of nihilistic consequences of something and he might finally might only push back there was on page 335 on 336 he says this is a stock he's in Plato and then he seems to imply the same about aerosol is that they think that being is what must exist or endure permanently this is where I was talking earlier where it seems like he's accepting the kind of blatant misversion of Plato supposed to Plato and anyway and you'll notice he gives priority in his account of causality to the maker as a regular not the end you with right you could say what's the end right and you could say well and I don't know the hieroglytex that discusses this and if anybody knows I'd love to hear it but you could say that the the classical position would be that the end would be primary and therefore yeah of course but you have to argue for the priority of it but look he's pushing in the direction of poets right and I think coming out of technology at least and that part of this is historicism but to be charitable you could say that coming out of western rationalism specifically dogmatic skepticism, Kantian dogmatic skepticism the denial of the thing in itself and you know Nietzsche's reaction to this to turn to art into the philosopher poet therefore you would want to try to give higher priority or onto-priority, ontological priority to the poet something like that because and now that means giving priority to making or efficient causality that we deny this as a fishing card to making as truth revealing rather than to the end which has been subjected to the good and true that's been subjected to third-going critique and redurting that might be a kind of defense for this but it is conspicuous that's talking to Strange that he did this poetry and we should be I'm probably gonna push this but this poetry is not sort of we're just inventing things willy-nilly it seems like there's a kind of the creative process the the poetic process actually does reveal something about the character of being okay yeah so it's not just like oh I'm gonna make up the story it's like no this actively does this it brings it out somehow yeah and it's true not just of the the poet David had a kind of hide-a-garian tweet this morning when he tweeted that picture of a super sucker yeah and I immediately I'm like okay this is a plastic squirt gun right and I was I was at the pool signing myself swimming I found a squirt gun at the bottom it was a new one I just got to put it on the side of the pool fun nothing of it but then I see an image of an old squirt gun and I remembered it's really getting in and the reason those objects are so powerful is not because it's like an exceptionally good or competently made squirt gun it's been far exceeded but because it takes you back to you you remember what it was like growing up in the 80s and 90s and in Greg's case the actual 80s and 90s if we have squirt guns and eyes again you just scare it here it's dog around and make him spit on people I don't know you know what the by training thought for that sorry but uh you know it reminds you of a larger works one of how to get his most interesting essays is about this vango painting of apparent pesos shoes and he shows how it's not just a pair of shoes but it evokes a whole world of context and so okay this work on in itself doesn't reveal being but when you start thinking about what it was like to be alive at a time when that's what plastic objects look like that it has that and so it has a sense of manufacturing its limits and its capabilities and so this was not a time where you had like a VR headset right this was a little bit simpler time technologically and you can then start evoking these connections and specific events that you went through and and what was going on in the world and in that way there is a kind of revelation being about the way the world works where we're at where we're going what our goals are as a society and etc etc etc you know but one thing I don't understand is uh you guys so you agree that Heidegger is saying that technology helps uh helps us disclose the nature of the world to man is that accurate okay but if technology is a thing produced by man and man is part of nature I don't understand how wouldn't we just be using nature to disclose more nature or where am I confused so I should repeat the first point again so so I thought so if one of Heidegger's main points is that technology discloses nature to human beings right is that okay it's okay so but if technology is something made by man man is a part of nature and this is something we've constructed why wouldn't technology to be part of nature it's a great environment I think I think the way it is right the arts are part of human existence right so where's the separate I guess it's difficult for me to understand the separation but where Heidegger's class how Heidegger's classified things so I mean well so maybe the best way to think about this is by what he calls the ambiguous character of technology on the one hand it's uh it's uh in framing right this treating nature as a as a reserve or a stockpile that you can just kind of hoard and that's a certain understanding on the other hand um it is a kind of granting specifically and that it lets me in endure when you have a nice stockpile you're not going to die right you can live quite a long time and in that sense uh it allows uh allows human beings to be the one who is needed and used for the safe keeping of the essence of truth so one way to think about his point here in a more tangible way is that look thanks to modern technology uh you can eat very cheaply your life is not spent in like servitude you can study and go to college if you were capable and smart enough and people will pay for it you can go read air stuff even if you're not a wealthy aristocrats son and in that sense um even though it closes us off or blocks us from the truth because it looks at everything is something to be manipulated and used to help us live longer that living longer is also an opportunity if we rise to that opportunity um that keeps us around in losses there is not going to be not as much of a chance of an oblivion you could say of philosophy that ambiguous nature you could say gets at what's at the heart of all the arts in a way right we use the arts we use technical abilities even prior to modern technology to preserve ourselves right we make wells we make houses we all sorts of contraptions that keeps our and in a sense in a small way even when we're taking water from the river we're treating it as a kind of reserve right we're not stockpiling it but we can't stack by we do but we don't make that the whole aim of our understanding of nature which is the problem um the other side of it the one that he wants us to be aware of is that this necessary part of human existence that's part of how we understand the world right is understanding how it operates how strong it could be what we can do with it right or what we can do with metal all of that is part of our understanding of the world but what unifies it or gives it a kind of purpose is non- technological right i think that's a pretty clear and obvious point and for the most part what gives that that whole apparatus meaning what gives modern-sized meaning is an attempt to conquer nature let's say and there's a kind of mission there and it turns human beings into a certain thing and understanding all of that that over-watch is non-technological that's philosophy is task except philosophy is discredited because we think that the understanding of nature is only technological that's an important but lower part of it the higher part for him or what really brings all human making together is poetry right and so one way to think about this is is to think about where our ends come from and what we so we want to grow the economy we want to create wealth prosperity stability and so what does the government do it creates incentives it encourages people to get a certain education encourages innovation in this field or that field and ideally what would happen is that you would greatly improve everybody's well-being through all of this sort of effort those ends organize and give meaning to the whole life so that when i talk to students who go into aerospace engineering i say why are you doing this they'll say things like well i want to be there and be part of mankind becoming a interplanetary species that's like so that's a larger purpose a visionary purpose that comes from science that is not strictly speaking scientific i think space sounds miserable personally but that's that's a kind of unifying view and that's the realm of poets but the problem is is the poets have abdicated poetry is discredited and we don't really understand that kind of unifying vision or nobody really draws it all together it's fragmentary it's parasitic on nature and so on and so forth so that's extremely clear yeah what's this remind me it's simple sorry Greg you asked your question but after else for listeners for me can you give an example of how a poet would unify this like our world yeah that's a hard question right i mean also how do you go can just say this but i guess i'm having a hang up on what it would look like i first completely agree yeah okay okay okay so go ahead Greg like he mentions goerte for example i wonder if that's how many guys in mind as well yeah proderland is huge yeah i see that here as well whole room um he is on page 333 actually read four quotes of poem by holland so i guess one of them i'm sorry let me back up one question point the question concerning technology is it fair to say the question concerning technology is what is the essence of technology that's the question exactly okay because the question what is technology is the wrong question because it gives us the answer it's it's instrumentality it's man's pop ring boba but no actually the real question is what is the essence of technology and its essence it's being is this sort of way that it helped the essence of the technology is the way that it sort of uh discloses us the truth about reality or something like this which might now there's a problem right it seems like technology threatens i'm here paraphrase loosely quote this on page 33 uh threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call to a more primal truth so it seems like technology is preventing us from seeing modern technology is preventing us from seeing the world in the way that a more primal approach to nature would help us to see technology so i think i can see why that's the case like seeing uh seeing a mountain as oh that must be an enormous supply of coal is probably cutting us off and seeing what an actual mountain is but he has this curious line i can't find it quickly but toward the end where he seems to hold out the possibility that modern technology might also offer the solution so it might actually help us to see things much more clearly than before yeah so it's the idea is that there's a danger but there's a difference because that's this danger but where danger is grows the seething power all right that's the poem you know hearing and then he at the very end returns to this and uh brings up another line poetically man dwells on this and he devotes a whole essay uh so we need a poll we need a poll a poet yeah or we already have a poet we need to understand this poet um who who offers a vision of how danger can lead to a kind of saving um so i mean this is where the ambiguous nature of things uh comes in which is that the very fact that modern technology is a kind of danger and is this uh domination also preserves us and opens up the possibility of thinking about the truth and so he says the irresistible of ordering this which is what he says technology does and the strength of the saving power draw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the heavens but precisely this their passing by is the hidden side of their nearness when we look into the ambiguous essence of technology we behold the constellation the stellar course the mystery i know what Greg is thinking here is hyper sounds like a poet here yeah right and and it's no i think that's no accident right at this point he needs to speak in in metaphor to create this kind of hope or vision of of how things could be and he says we need to turn away from activity to reflection and the way through that is to is to tap into a kind of reflection that is akin to but higher than technology and that's this is why he turns to poetry right um poetry in a way and so to go back to the the greeks or just any kind of simple and here i would suggest people go read buildings while i'm thinking he has this idea of a four-fold that's very interesting this is where he's kind of building but when you think about like a rudimentary kind of much simpler pre-technological pre-modern society the idea of religion or what religion was deeply guided the purposes in which we did all of our activities right including technological activities or art and but that can be a more serious disclosing of what things are right like oh this animal is is the divine therefore we use every scrap of its body to like that's that i mean is there a kind of ultra-manstruent here that i'm used to be more time reading the bible than you do modern physics right yes obviously because there's a way in which oh i see physics d nature's mysteries but bible bible at least speaks to mysteries of human relations and the ultimate mystery of the whole i think that's in a way i think the way a place i would criticize him here is that i think he gets to places i'm gonna make it very obvious which is poetry in the greeks or the folks at home yeah places making or poetry in the highest sense it's poetry and he has an idea of the making of gods and so maybe he's thinking of epic or tragedy but there's another genre of poetry equally popular in ancient comedy comedy yeah i don't want to make fun of germans we had a journal podcast out there out there out there out there hider is stowich and the door is in nichtskommish is that no it's a commission it's pretty doesn't it yeah not jlisch they don't even have a word for county i think that's right that's right all right there's no you can't translate laughter even if the german i heard no they don't know what that is doesn't disclose its reality to them yeah but i think this is and so i mean i was i've been you know think a lot about the supposing what Strauss says about comedy and tragedy and i'm i mean Strauss would i think agree that right the technology you know denatures the ultimate history right that the more fundamental question is not ancient and modern but Jerusalem and Athens right okay and the question of i know that's questionable and that maybe took him a while to get to the conclusion but that seems to be the case and Jerusalem and Athens ultimately when you look in Athens for Jerusalem you end up looking to the poets but the poets are twofold one half the poets enchant as he puts it those are the trigidians and and the other side disenchant those are the comedians and philosophy in a way can do both at least play is capable of enchanting and disenchanting and i wonder whether Heidegger's maybe lack of a sense of humor and made him and his seriousness and i mean just looking i mean the fact that he turns to angst or anxiety as a fundamental mood attuning people to the whole and being in time suggests the kind of disposition and i wonder i don't know i wonder whether he was prevented from taking comedy seriously whereas Strauss i think clearly gives at least on a on the level of thought comedy a higher privilege the tragedy i think has a higher privilege in terms of addressing the public i think you know the trigidians are able to captivate the public in a way that a comedian never could anyways this is just a long way i think of saying that Heidegger gets i think very very far in helping to see through the problem of monotechnology but when it comes to where he thinks philosophy needs to go i think he this is where i would say he he paves over an ambiguity like poetry is also twofold in this other sense right it has a kind of enchantment and world building but also disenchantment and i think that if it's the disenchantment that's closer to philosophic thought he's understanding philosophy would be i think too tragic and too much like Jerusalem and not enough like Athens you could start yeah so this Jerusalem Atholom's academy versus ancient modernist what struck me was so Heidegger seems to be on the side of art and i'm not sure but he seems to be on the side of technology of the monotechnology's problematic no here's what i'll say he does seem to admire greek art the tech the technite right that seems clear to me whereas in the bible i think there's clearly an appreciation for poetry in the most obviously in case of the psalms that there are others but the by at least the he'd revival of the Old Testament and i i think it's also fair to say the new testament it's it's clear in the he'd revival of testament that there's an anti-technology bend it seems to me so the the Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Atholom's distinguishes poetry from technite whereas Heidegger seems to bring them together okay and even even in greek tragedy of course i'm thinking of Prometheus Bound but is there anything positive about the arts there i mean and we he's wanting to say that there's this praise of the technite and Plato and maybe in aerosol but not in greek tragedy right i mean except that it's well because we're alone we have the arts or something like this i think i think to answer this question at least for how do you think you'd have to look at his introduction of metaphysics in which he discusses the second core load from uh antiquity i can't wait till i'm a big enough name word like my prayer really said something stupid here like well if you want to see you got to look at his other work to see what he means about that and then i'm just happy my thoughts all connect you to a whole idea it's pretty impressive i remember this class i took on Rawls in grad school and we were reading a theory of justice and i was like this is a bad argument this bad argument the professor just saying oh he resolves this all in political liberalism so don't worry about it like the why are we spending half the semester on this book that get let's just read political liberalism yeah but this is the thing is that like hi to go hi to go write i mean this is a kind of irony you could say he's got a lot of thought right a lot of thinking and a lot of it if you've read a lot of how do you think oh he's he's thinking about his essay here what he works out later in this so you can kind of see it but if he went to that he would leave the question of modern technology aside and he doesn't want to do that so he has to kind of close things off so that he can adequately speak to somebody who might be concerned and say hey look technology seems modern technology seems to understand things like modern science seems to get things like right i don't know i mean but it's troubling it's disturbing it's changing the world i feel like something's lost what's lost he's like i'll work you through it and he works you through it and then you come to this poem and then you say okay i get it but i now have a sense of where i have to go to read next so there's a kind of you know i was i was being somewhat glib and i'll also say just to like i've been reading heidegger for 20 years now and with little to no success whatsoever the first several times i tried to read it only on these last few readings have i felt like okay i'm starting to make some progress and getting someone used to the jargon and i think maybe some of the aerosol i've been reading has been helpful in this regard as well but just seeing what's going on more clearly than before so i mean he says somewhere that you if you want to be a floss you can just sit down and study yourself like 20 years or something but then you can so i'm not surprised i mean he's he's deeply steeped in that i was lucky to take two really excellent courses on heidegger in grad school with richard velkley one was on the first division of being in time it was my first semester it's fantastic i would just spend two days of every piece just prepping 30 page reading or whatever he had and then i'd hear it masterfully talk about it and i really felt like i got my head inside heidegger bit and then another one was on some lectures by nicha on on nicha that i've taught since twice and i've i loved them i mean i've learned so much of it you know i haven't read heidegger quite some time and especially this has been a really long time probably in like 15 years if you like probably since grad school and man it is really good i forgot how interesting it is it's challenging but you know it's 30 pages it took me about a day and a half to read it or two days i really got it but it was worth it yeah for sure it was worthwhile thanks for helping us understand it do a little bit yeah so i thought the task of philosophy is this unceasing quest for wisdom and wisdom about the nature of things so we want nature to disclose herself to us if technology helps us helps us disclose get nature to disclose herself well why is this bad it's all i'll take my kind of my second question is what happens is technology helps us denature the world more and more some people would say oh well we are clarity of our mental clarity of sight becomes powerful we just know more things and other people say no no but all these kind of problems seep in so they would the rationalist would say oh we just replace superstition with reason the more nature uncovers herself to us and so i'm very confused on i don't know so yeah no sure i'll try i'll that makes sense of what's happening your question makes a lot of sense um i mentioned a little bit ago i'm trying to find the page where he says it seems like the ancient technology actually did a better job of disclosing nature to us this more primal understanding but i think direct to plus these questions jokes aside actually does help here this is on page 320 says excuse me this is on page 321 hi to your says this may be a very way from bottom what the river is now namely a water power supplier derives from the essence of the power station so all over state this and this is why daric's question is so good it's it seems like our making the the technological things we're doing to the river are changing what it is and we're like holding it differently to make it show itself differently and so if you hold it one way it shows itself one way if you hold it another way it just blows itself another way so the way that we are bringing technology to bear on it means it's now showing itself in a fundamentally different way than it would otherwise and so it will we now see it is the image we now see less real true or less good than the first it seems like that's the direction he wants to go but my hesitation there is it seems like the only way we can ever understand what anything is is by our acting upon it and it's the one version of acting upon it seems less yeah good or less true and then that's uh that seems sort of my simple brain yes so so less good well it seems like there's kind of anthropopocentric lens through which we see the whole world and now now that we are this technological animal we're seeing it through a more technological lens so this more primal might be more true to human nature but it would still be a human lens we would still see you know primal man would still see cow as food as opposed to I mean this here this is where I see the earth's tailion right that we tend to see things through a very human lens and I think he jokingly does us at the beginning of the ethics in a bunch of other places right well clearly the the bridal maker is subservient to the general and like all these people it's all subservient to the political art it's like winner that's not what horses you know we don't horses teal up to define by how well it can run in battle that's what we put on to a horse yeah yeah I think it's a car well I think this is where um when the world is understood in terms of efficient causality right or technology and you look at the river as a source of power you set up the Hoover dam right and it's amazing right there's a kind of he calls us a challenge right it's a challenging fourth from nature right and you're sort of working in opposition to nature when you when you start thinking about it like that you realize oh yeah this isn't actually what we're doing you start realizing that the world is not merely technological right so that the truth that technology discloses and he's clear you are revealing the truth and technology is a partial truth and it cannot explain its own ground now whereas when you look at the river as a god that miraculously bestows water allows you to water your fields and feed your your people and therefore congregate and give thanks to the river god right that's there and celebrate them in your sacred rituals there is a kind of uh there isn't that making and in that that sort of view of the river uh an attunement to the ultimate mystery right or the or the origin of all this so in that sense it is less true right though it is correct to say that the river gives so many many jewels of electricity or whatever right but it is it is it is not simply true that that's what the river is the river has a provenance unknown to us and there's a mystery behind our relationship to the river that technology cannot explain so when we think of all truth reviewing in terms of technology we fundamentally close ourselves from that so he and this is where I think you can even see the mark of yogurt a little bit whom he read seriously in the in the in the 20s into the early 30s specifically the word the worker but also his preffitory work to that total mobilization where what was envisioned was a mass technological society but that can mobilize or mobilize around a concrete end I don't think that Heidegger is simply opposed to modern technology I think he thinks that it can run too far and therefore I occlude this more fundamental relationship to the world but you could say that what he kind of envisions is look technology can keep us alive but if it's properly understood in its place it can also be organized around guiding philosopher poets or something like that preserving philosophy and that would be a kind of a move away obviously from younger's total mobilization towards war obviously full on war but it is a kind of and you could say there's a trace of the republic here right a relationship between the philosopher and the city is supported by this this city of arts right this is like a lower city of earth I'll just say one other thing your David I mean your question I thought was really good in and of itself but also as far as it compelled Alex and me to try and restate these things in a clear term so I think that was really helpful and the only thing else is this is good we're probably at time we probably should tell them evening but we should do more Heidegger because I think I'm finally getting a little bit of toehold on Heidegger. I get that toe and Heidegger. Yeah and so reveal our I like to reveal ourselves to each other constantly you know if you want a technology that has batteries and if you wanted to squoze mysteries to us send it's like read the subscribe review we're donate or donate oh right we need donations yeah we do we're trying to instrumentalize this podcast get well yeah hi fellas he's