Hail and welcome. This episode continues our initial forays into my theory of ecumenical phenomenology. I recommend listening to the previous episode, “Introduction to Ecumenical Phenomenology,” before diving into this one, but this episode is relatively self-contained so that’s not strictly necessary. And if it’s not clear at the moment where exactly I’m going with all of this, I hope you’ll stick with me. I’m proud of this episode in itself but I’m most excited about how this is all going to come together over time.
Last time I read a quote from the philosopher William James which I’m going to read again here:
The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims… in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.
1982, p. 56
James—and many other philosophers as well—are saying that reality as it appears to us extends well beyond mere arrangements of physical matter. A fountain pen is not just a resin tube but something I know as being a fountain pen, and if it’s a particularly nice one I might describe it as having certain non-physical attributes like beauty and usefulness. These things are given; they present themselves to us as a bare reality soaking into sense experience. The objective of ecumenical phenomenology is to provide a formal ontology of this abstract reality: a total description of its origins, its nature, its structure, and its dynamics. Ecumenical phenomenology provides that ontology in the form of intersubjective, connectionist mind modeled as a distributed network of neural automata: the ecumenicon. This model will allow us to analyze a whole host of philosophical and religious questions with new insight and clarity, but to get there, we have some groundwork to cover. I know I’m throwing out a lot of terminology that might not be familiar to my audience, including some of my own terminology for which I haven’t provided much explanation. For now, it’s sufficient to understand “the ecumenicon” as referring to the “higher universe of abstract ideas” described by James.
In the last episode we just got started with this school of philosophy called phenomenology, which studies our personal human experience, not in terms of whatever reality might lie behind or beyond it but in terms of the experience itself. Phenomenology has been, informally, a subject of philosophical inquiry since at least Plato, but it was established as a discrete discipline of philosophy by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, whom we’ll be discussing extensively further on in this series, with particular regard to his theory of the life-world.
At the end of the last episode, I made the claim that the world is ensouled by the ecumenicon, by our intersubjective phenomenological experience; that there is a nonphysical dimension to human existence which is objectively real and to which we often refer in natural language when we use the word “soul,” and that the ecumenicon—the structural reality of our abstract, intersubjective experience—is its substrate medium. But this presents us with a problem, because, despite all our talk of souls in religion and despite the (at least potential) objective reality of souls as a feature of ecumenical structure and dynamics, we don’t treat the world in a way that reflects that reality. There’s a disconnect between the way the world is and how we act. Why?
This is a question addressed by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a student of Edmund Husserl. And let’s get something out of the way as quickly as possible before moving on to the heart of the matter: yes, Heidegger was a Nazi. There’s been debate in recent years as to the degree of crossover between Heidegger’s philosophy and his Nazi affiliations. I’ve always found the debate ridiculous: to me, Heidegger’s philosophy is clearly inseparable from his endorsement of the Nazi party, but here’s the thing, and this is something I believe true of many German intellectuals of the interwar period who ultimately endorsed the Nazi party: imagine a doctor who discovers a cancer in someone’s right arm. In order to treat the problem, they cut off the person’s head. After all, it is the brain which perceives the pain of illness; sever the brain from the illness and the problem is solved. That’s who Heidegger was as a philosopher, but we can’t forget that he was correct in identifying the cancer in the first place, and I think it’s important for us to learn from that because we can see from Heidegger and others how “rational” but nevertheless inhuman responses to real problems can actually be worse than the problems they’re intended to address in the first place. Fascism is a reaction to modernism, and yes modernism is bad but fascism is much worse. Like Heidegger, I am an anti-modernist, but that’s not going to lead me to simply accept a superficial reading of my own facticity—my being a 41-year-old cis white American male—and go along with the other people who meet that description, who I think are mostly MAGA shitheads from what I’ve seen. It’s also worth noting that Heidegger was defended after the Second World War by none other than Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher with whom Heidegger had had an affair in the 1920s.
I’ll consider that matter dealt with and move on to what Heidegger had to say on the matter I spoke about a bit earlier: what happens when we look at the world and see it, in contradistinction to what it actually is, as being something dead?
Heidegger has an interesting way of writing that doesn’t quite resemble the style of any other philosopher. Reading his work in English, one might think that the translator doesn’t quite understand the language, but in fact Heidegger’s style is quite unusual and idiosyncratic even in the original German. He takes common words, pulls them apart into their components, twists them into forms that depart from their typical morphology, and then pairs those new forms with unexpected prepositions. He’s clearly self-aware of this idiosyncratic style and even seems to joke about it at times. Heidegger wants to redirect us from our normal ways of thinking about things and he does this by using language in ways both novel and tied to ancient Greek, ways that focus in particular on processes, and he focuses on processes because he had come to see the world as something active and dynamic but found the rest of his society looking at the world as something static and dead.
We can take as an example Heidegger’s famous use of the term Dasein, which in Heidegger’s German idiolect translates roughly to there-being, as in “Something is there; it is being where it is; it is a there-being.” Dasein is Heidegger’s term for a person (though also, to some degree, a term for people, collectively), but going through Heidegger’s corpus and just mentally substituting the word “person” every time you see “Dasein” would be the wrong way to read his work. Approaching Heidegger in that way, you’d be importing a whole host of prior assumptions and judgements about what it means to be a person, and Heidegger wants to catapult us past all that so that we can get a fresh take on the matter, while at the same time directing our attention to particular features of everyday human experience. If I were to take the Cartesian route and state simply that “I am,” Heidegger would probably call that an oversimplification, because, in terms of my actual experience, I never just am. I am always somewhere at some time, and while Descartes would respond and say that I can’t be sure that I actually am where I think I am, Heidegger would say, “Doesn’t matter; you still can’t experience yourself as not being anywhere. Locality in space and time is an inescapable fact of human experience; thus, a human being is not just a being but a there-being, a Dasein.”
Heidegger’s ontology and phenomenology of Dasein is not what I’ll be focusing on here, although I’ll be coming back to it at some point because it’s highly relevant to ecumenical phenomenology; rather, I’m going to talk about an essay he published in 1954, “The Question Concerning Technology.”
Heidegger’s essay begins with a discussion of the normal ways that we think about technology as being a human activity and a means to an end. These are understandings which work well enough for everyday purposes but not for any serious consideration of what technology essentially is. He then directs us to think about a silver chalice in terms of Aristotle’s four causes, which he presents with some modifications, and he makes the particular point that the chalice is indebted to these causes. He says that the silversmith is responsible for the chalice, but so too is the fact that silver is an appropriate material out of which to make a chalice, as well as the fact that there is something, a purpose, for which the chalice is made. Heidegger wants us to look at these various causes as a unified process of bringing-forth, compounded as a single word translated from the German verb hervorbringen, which Heidegger has made into a noun and hypenated (Her-vor-bringen) in order to emphasize the individual morphemes. We might consider the alternative and more literal gloss here-forth-bringing, and he compares this with the Greek word physis, which is the Greek concept for nature in terms of it being a process of growth and appearance. He then ties this word into another Greek word, aletheia, typically translated as “truth” but actually closer to the English word “revealed,” and Heidegger, wanting to emphasize the underlying process, goes with “revealing.”
Let’s take a second to think about this, because this point is key for understanding how Heidegger thinks about technology. Let’s take Newton’s first law of motion: “Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” This law isn’t something that Newton invented, but Heidegger would also say that the description “Newton discovered the first law of motion” is thinking about things in an arbitrarily-unidirectional way that misses what’s really going on. Heidegger calls physis “the arising of something from out of itself.” The world of the present is continually arising from the conditions of the past. Art is similar in this regard, but Heidegger says that the key difference is that rather than something arising from out of itself, something is brought forth from another. And you might go immediately back to Heidegger’s example of the silver chalice and say, “Ah, right, that makes sense, the silversmith brings forth the chalice from the silver,” but Heidegger would say that that’s a distortion of what’s really going on. What Heidegger is saying is that the silver, and the form or idea of a chalice, and the purpose of having a chalice, and the silversmith, bring forth the chalice from each other. We can say “The silversmith made the chalice,” but Heidegger is also telling us that it’s equally valid and in some ways more important to say “The chalice made the silversmith.” This person is a silversmith because we have ends, such as thirst, to which chalices serve as appropriate means; and because silver is an appropriate material for making chalices; and because this person whom we’re calling a silversmith does, as a matter of fact, make chalices out of silver; and these things are not some linear arrangement but rather the simultaneous process by which both chalice and silversmith are not made—there is a sense in which they always have existed and always will exist—but rather revealed.
This is how Heidegger directs us to think about technology. Technology, for Heidegger, isn’t objects like hammers or smart phones, nor the making of those things by humans in a linear chain of cause and effect, but rather a “mode of revealing,” one way out of different ways that truth “comes to presence,” and modern technology is a particular mode of revealing among the different modes of technology in general. What’s different about modern technology is that what was bringing-forth in art and earlier forms of technology is now a challenging-forth.
…[A] tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.
1977, pp. 14-15
This is why Heidegger spent so much time and effort contorting his words to break us out of linear cause-and-effect thinking, because only once free of that thinking can we look back and see its relationship to modern technology. We have come to see the linear order as just being the natural way of thinking about things, and so we take modern technology, which reflects that ordering, as just being a broader part of the natural order.
Now, Heidegger isn’t calling this mode of thinking mistaken, exactly. He’s even being careful not to cast moral judgements on it. Modern technology is as much a revealing, as much a mode of the bringing-forth of truth, as any other, but there’s a particular danger that comes along with it. Under modern technology, everything is for something else in a linear chain, and as much as this too is a revealing, there’s no end to it, and this orders the entire world and everything in it into a hierarchy under which nothing has any value in itself but only in terms of what it can provide to the next link in the chain. And since the chain has no terminus, we can’t even posit anything as having some sort of indirect value to some ultimate end for which all means exist. Rather, everything in the world becomes what he calls a standing-reserve, and the underlying process of setting on the world and forcing it to yield its maximum value for an endless chain of purposes, he calls Enframing, as in, the placing of things into a framework.
Heidegger offers an explicit definition of Enframing but it’s a pretty clunky sentence if you haven’t gotten used to his way of writing: “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon [humanity], i.e. challenges [us] forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve” (1977, p. 20). He’s saying that this process that results in world-as-standing-reserve didn’t really start with us but rather from the fact that it is necessary for us to think this way, to a certain degree, in order to survive. We have to eat to survive, for example, so we are predisposed to think of plants and animals purely in terms of their value as food or as beasts of burden. And again, he’s not even saying that this is necessarily a bad way of thinking or of doing or making things, but the problem is that Enframing is not self-limiting in any way and so has a natural tendency to take over—to colonize or perhaps crystallize the ecumenicon, as I would put it—and become the only way we think about or do or make things. Heidegger was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, although his reading of Nietzsche is famously controversial, and he saw this Enframing modality which results in the world-as-standing-reserve as being nihilistic, as devaluing the world, and this extends even to ourselves. Heidegger writes:
The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.
1977, p. 18
Immediately following this passage, Heidegger clarifies that, because humans are the ones ordering—as in, setting to order—this form of revealing, we’re never reduced to just being standing-reserve ourselves. Were that true, the situation would be hopeless. But we Enframe ourselves regardless, treating each other as a standing-reserve even if that’s not quite what we become in fact. Advanced capitalism is a mirror of the universality of Enframing, with every aspect of the world flattened to its potential for profitability. Under advanced capitalism, no one and nothing has innate worth: people must earn a living, and we do so by pulling the world out from under ourselves, converting the world of meaning into the world of money. The fungibility of money means that it cannot be meaningful beyond its being a brute measure of utility under the linear chain of causality, everything made servicable to something else, and even meaning itself, our symbols and stories, are enslaved in this way. What good is a fairy tale if Disney doesn’t make it into a movie? What good is a Disney movie if they don’t also make it into a toy line? What good is a toy if some other toy provides more fun at less cost? What good is that toy when the child has grown? What good are children if they don’t grow up? What good are grown children if they don’t have jobs? What good is a job if it doesn’t pay as much as some other job? What good is money if it can’t buy us back our childhoods? What good are are our lives if they end? An expensive funeral home can answer that question for you, but they’ll answer it with another question: what good is the ground of the Earth except for graves?
But we’re still capable, Heidegger believes, of setting the world into different modalities of revealing.
Heidegger is making a comparison here to another approach, which he refers to via the Greek word poiesis, a word for making or creating that carries different connotations than the kind of technological creation which is the focus of his essay. Poiesis is a kind of making that values and is in harmony with what something already is in itself. He compares a hydroelectric plant that dams the Rhine River to an old bridge that crosses it. Certainly the old bridge is useful for getting from one side of the river to the other, although it may not be, but it’s also something we can look at as having value just in itself, as being beautiful or nostalgic perhaps but not really present in the world specifically in order to be something beautiful and nostalgic. And it’s not like you’d ever be able to pull up a checklist and figure out in a determinate way whether some creation or technology falls on the side of poiesis or on the side of Enframing, but that’s not really what Heidegger is driving at. He’s not asking us to cast off modern technology and return to a pre-modern way of living; he’s just pushing back against how universal the Enframing of modern technology has become, saying “Be aware of the conditions we have created for ourselves; be aware that our present technological paradigm is not the only way of thinking.”
Remember earlier on and in the last episode when I was talking about the ecumenical ontology of souls: souls are real things possessing many of the properties described by Plato in the Phaedo (given some liberty of interpretation) and even many of the properties attributed to it by Christian religion (given a much broader liberty of interpretation); souls are dynamic structural patterns of the ecumenical scaffold which is our intersubjective, abstract reality and they “inhabit” all things to varying degrees, contrary to more traditional conceptions of the soul. It’s possible to say that souls are both separable and collective: we can see the validity of an ancient Greek analysis under which humans have multiple souls, for example a rational and irrational soul, and we can speak meaningfully and truthfully as well about the soul of a people or the soul of the world.
The philosopher Walter Kaufmann would here doubtlessly accuse me of an egregious abuse of language, of equivocating between and reassigning meanings ad hoc so as to be able to make claims that are, on any reasonable interpretation, flatly false. That would be a fair criticism but I don’t think that’s the case here. Suppose we discovered a species of horse with a single horn on its head. Maybe the horn is more hooked than spiral-shaped and maybe it protrudes more from the region above the nose than from the forehead, but having made this discovery, wouldn’t we then be able to say that unicorns exist? It seems our only difficulty in doing so is that the nonexistence of unicorns is built in to our definition of what a unicorn is: dictionary definitions will often describe the unicorn as being a “mythical animal.”
(Funny story, just a few days ago I read a book by the philosopher Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, published in 1980 and written in 1970, in which he refutes this thought experiment in almost the exact terms in which I offered it here. I’m leaning towards agreeing with him, but in any case…)
I think “soul” is a good word to use here precisely because of its connotations of belonging to a higher order, but whatever you want to call the ecumenical pattern I’m describing, it remains that there is something vital and transcendent inhabiting our conscious experience of the world, something in which we deeply vest what is most important to us, our sense of self and our sense of meaning in the world. Enframing has, in the words of philosopher and sociologist Max Weber, disenchanted the world, disconnecting it from the world of meaning.
And someone might respond to that and say, “Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that what the Enlightenment was all about? Casting off these superstitions and false beliefs so we can figure out what’s really true?” Bang bang, Martin’s silver chalice comes down upon our heads. Remember the degree to which our understanding of the process of the chalice coming into being was shaped by the language in which we framed it, and how the sentence “The silversmith made the chalice” reflects no mere objective process which everyone would naturally describe in exactly the same way but rather a specific aspect of that process, omitting other aspects which are equally involved and other perspectives which are equally valid. To say “The silversmith made the chalice” is to place both silversmith and chalice in an ordered hierarchy, and Heidegger would be the first to tell you that we wouldn’t be strictly wrong to do so; rather, we’re only wrong when we say that that’s the sole objective and natural way to look at the silversmith-chalice system.
Let’s not lose our heads. We’re not descending into metaphysical relativism or metaphysical nihilism here, where anything whatsoever or nothing at all can be said to be true. But I agree with Heidegger that we have constrained ourselves into thinking about what is true in a very limited way. This is something I talked about a couple years ago when I did that series on magic: electromagnetism, to take one example, is a powerful, mysterious force that pervades the universe, a force that we can harness to do our bidding, giving us capabilities the ancients could never even have imagined, powers they would have thought belonged only to the gods. Is that magic?
I want to stay grounded in a natural language philosophy here: no one uses “magic” to mean “electromagnetism” except in a sarcastic or ironic sense, but we have to acknowledge a certain arbitrariness to that choice, because it seems not only as though we could use “magic” in the sense that I described but that our failure to do so blinds to us to a valid way of seeing the world, one in which the world is not merely a standing-reserve. We say that one is enchanted, perhaps by a painting, and one so enchanted is not thinking of the painting in terms of what they can get out of or from it, or what they can use it for. What we see in a painting that enchants us is something in ourselves. The painting does not mirror the self nor the self the painting, nor does the painting reveal what is in the self nor the self what is in the painting. Rather, painting and self are together a revealing, a revealing which is good-for-nothing but rather only good, sufficient, just as it is.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays. Garland Pub.
James, W. (1982). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature (M. E. Marty, Ed.). Penguin Books.