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[Music] thinking aloud conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey Mishlove today we are going to explore Martin Heidegger great philosophical classic being in time with me is philosopher jason reza george ani who is the author of Prometheus and atlas world state of emergency and a recently published anthology of essays the great philosophers of history called lovers of sofia jason is a faculty member at the New Jersey Institute of Technology welcome Jason great to be with you again Jeffrey it's a pleasure to be with you being in time and the name Martin Heidegger I think practically everybody who has a college degree has heard of this book and has heard of Heidegger but I would venture to say very few people really understand what Heidegger was saying I know it was very dense and difficult to comprehend and yet it's been enormous ly influential it has I would say it's the most revolutionary philosophical texts of the 20th century which is saying quite a bit yeah Heidegger wrote this book as I recall in 1927 that's right he was about 38 years old mm-hmm it was a time he was writing in Germany yeah 1927 would have been the vomer era that's right a time of great social experimentation indeed and I think his work is one example of that experimentation mmm-hmm well let's dig into it what what in the world is he Sam when I think of these concepts being and time they're so broad it's almost as if there's nothing to say because they're such large concepts well-being as existence and there are people who have argued that Heidegger is the starting point for existentialism that's questionable because the existentialist school Sartre and his disciples and so forth I think misunderstands some of Heidegger's fundamental concepts but at any rate being has to do with existence and time in this case has to do with the radical historicity of human existence the fact that human existence is radically historical that's the core thesis of the book in other words we all are born into a world in which we inherit a history that's given to us that's right but it's an even more radical claim than that because science the various Sciences and you know technological development and so forth are all human endeavors so by arguing that our existence is radically historical Heidegger is also claiming that structures of scientific knowledge and the discoveries that they afford us about the nature of the cosmos and so forth are radically historical as well and they're subject to changes from one epoch to another which i think is a fair view of history historians often think in terms of epochs historians do but scientists tend not to and the analytic so-called philosophers who have reconciled themselves to being handmaidens of the established empirical sciences reject the view that the well let's put it this way they take the view that the structure of the cosmos is a historical that there is a fundamental structure to nature that can be reflected in the mirror of the human mind which is objectively existent and a historical Heidegger challenges that claim well I you know the pythagoreans or the politeness would say that a perfect circle is a perfect circle no matter when you live that's right that's right and it's that kind of thinking that's prevailed at least implicitly in the empirical sciences I don't think largely most scientists are conscious of the fact that they're some kind of bizarre implicit plate inist see because you know plate Nisour idealists and their materialists but you're right that on some level at least in a mathematical sense they are plate inist the most mathematicians are plate inist to my understand and heidegger's thought although in some ways it delineates unchanging characteristics of human experience I would say is a confrontation with the kind of platonism that's predominant in the sciences well I gathered that Heidegger's purpose in writing being in time was to kind of get underneath the historical trends and find principles that were even more basic than history is that right that's true that's true but see when I say that his thought confronts a kind of tacit Platonism in the sciences I mean to suggest that in a way he's a pragmatist being in Times point of departure is an analysis of different types of human behavior mm-hmm our relationship with objects and our relationship with people mm-hmm these are two different basic categories of human behavior and in terms of our relationship with objects Heidegger draws a distinction between relationship to a thing that is merely present at hand and our relationship to something usually a tool that's ready to hand mm-hmm in the case where something is ready to hand like a hammer because that's for nailing you should not be conscious really of how that tool is performing its function it should be so integrate into the activity of hammering that it performs its function seamlessly and only if the tool breaks down do you become aware of its structure that it's made up of various components and parts mm-hmm and in that moment of breakdown the tool goes from something ready to hand for a certain activity to being an object that's present at hand and Heidegger thinks that this kind of breakdown scenario operating on a societal scale during the Renaissance is what led to our objectification of the world in general as increasingly complex instruments were designed where there is more of a possibility for breakdown mm-hm and a need to reconstruct them in more complex ways we began to see the entire cosmos as a machinery mm-hm that it consists of you know gear works and whose operative laws are like those of a machine mm-hmm and that's very interesting because one of my mentors and to throw this back at you a little bit Arthur M young invented a machine he invented the helicopter the the first commercially licensed helicopter the Bell Helicopter and he said well it's very interesting that these philosophers think of the universe as a great machine because there never existed a machine that didn't have a creator that's right and you know this is of course the the type of thinking that led to D ISM and you know that that deism the idea of an architect grand architect of the universe or the machinery of the cosmos is what underlies something as fundamental to us as the political ideology of the Declaration of Independence or the the French Constitution the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the citizen so that's an important idea which Heidegger is challenging because people are not helicopters right and so that brings us to the delineation of the types of relationships that we have with others rather than with objects but just to recapitulate what you're saying is Heidegger is challenging the notion that nature itself is mechanistic he says this this is a mistake we make because we project our analysis of tools and technology onto all of nature that's right the breakdown of increasingly complex tools and our flipping from an implicit embodied relation to tools to a distant observational objectifying attitude toward the broken tool as a mere object is the catalyst for our objectification of the cosmos and nature as a whole and in 1927 to come up with that idea must have been challenging the the very structure of society because that was a time when railroads and airplanes and I mean technology was everywhere it was a very exciting time for people in terms of all the new technologies that were being introduced electric lighting and so on well it has a you know it is revolutionary but partly because it has another very significant implication which we can only really properly appreciate after discussing some other fundamental concepts in Heidegger but just to foreshadow it the implication is that crafts activity the production of tools which goes further back than our history of man mm-hmm is more fundamental than scientific theorization it's perhaps one of the defining features of a human being is that we use tools right so Heidegger thinks that a change in our relationship to technology mmm-hmm is what led to modern theoretical science and that means that the cosmos as it's comprehended by the paradigm of you know Dave by the Cartesian paradigm is not an objective reality it's the outcome of a social and psychological change that that ultimately has to do with a change in our crafts production our relationship to two meaningful things mm-hmm okay so then he also talks about our relationship with other people yeah so I mean one of the disastrous consequences of this objectification of nature as a whole is the objectification of our fellow human beings and so Heidegger it distinguishes between an authentic and an inauthentic rapport with others generally speaking we function as part of mass man we are reiterations of prevailing common opinion and Prejudice on various subjects we give voice to already established conventions and cliches you know I think that's it's probably fair to say that even the most advanced thinkers among us hold many conventional ideas without question yes and Heidegger saw the advent of mediums of mass communication as intensifying this phenomenon in his time it was a mass printing of newspapers and the advent of radio in our time it's not just television but also the Internet right and so there is this inauthentic relationship to the other in terms of the expectations and demands of the anonymous mass he calls this dust none the man which you can see whenever someone says one ought not to do such-and-such or they say that oh who is this day who is this one that's always dictating to you this is the masked man within oneself which largely goes unquestioned now Heidegger isn't so naive is to think that we can definitively surmount and overcome this relationship to the other in terms the collective of society but he does think if that's the only relationship you have to went to another person including your friends or those who are you know most intimately close to you then you're living in authentically mm-hmm and what it would mean to live an authentic life would be to heed the call of your own conscience and this idea of a call of conscience is also as a counterpart to the idea of the day or dustman another fundamental concept in Heidegger's thought now this reminds me a bit of Colin Wilson's great philosophical work the outsider and in which he suggests that there's something very important about people who are alienated from the the conventions of society well the outsider is a classic of existentialism mmm-hmm in fact Colin Wilson later wrote a book called the new existentialism and so existentialism is a school of thought that ultimately originates in heidecker's work and specifically in being in time which describes its own project as an existential analysis so one of the features of this existential analysis is the identification of conscience personal conscience and we become most acutely aware of our personal conscience in what he calls a being towards death when our very existence is threatened when we're faced with an existential threat we are thrown back upon our own conscience and we realize hopefully if we don't avert this call of conscience if we don't try to silence our conscience or lose ourselves and one or another form of distraction whether it's entertainment ism or the dogmas of a certain religion in those moments we realize our radical differentiation from anyone else who can't decide for us how we're going to face that acute crisis it's important to note that when Heidegger talks about a being towards death he's not talking about facing the cessation of function of our biological organism he's talking about that nothingness that let's say Gautama Buddha describes as the disintegration of the personality that might come only after many lifetimes what he's trying to point to is the essential finitude of human existence that our existence is finite we are not these eternally abiding self identical platonic Souls we are beings that are fundamentally conditioned by both a personal history and a social history and our scope of possible action is to some extent predefined by the experiences that we undergo from birth but also by the heritage of our particular culture I mean it's it's part of existential philosophy that each person has to confront their own death and and Heidegger is saying something a little different than that though well what they're saying is a certain interpretation of what Heidegger forwards in being in time which is that in an acute crisis where we sense an existential threat where we sense more than the annihilation of our physical bodies or the cessation of the function of our organism where we sense the potential annihilation of our persona mm-hmm we experience a fundamental anxiety or angst right that we're generally covering over and we're generally covering over it by tacitly accepting the dictates of mass man mmm-hmm well those dictates can be very comforting and in the face of death that's right I mean that's why we have religions you know something they say it's for baptism marriage and a funeral yes and you know one of the differences between Heidegger's understanding of existential angst and what and and being towards death and what the existentialist school later made out of it particularly what someone like jean-paul Sartre made out of it is that unlike sart's notion that personal freedom is unconditioned yeah and that one can radically define one's own way of life and as if from out of a vacuum and by Fiat Heidegger understands that even the authentic individual has to define his ethos in the context of concrete possibilities provided by a historical heritage and so it's a question of making a historical heritage one's own appropriating a history in a way that is dynamic and that revitalizes it rather than relating to history as a static inherited tradition in other words if I were to try to define myself in a way that had no relationship to previous historical precedents of any sort I could only be doing so in a very superficial way that's right and it's not just a question of requiring previous historical precedents for someone in your position for example to define yourself with respect to the possibilities inherent in the cultural sphere of Chinese civilization is inauthentic you do not have a known most relation to that civilization almost you don't have a in a direct relationship to that particular heritage right it doesn't make sense for you to make that your own right and to dynamically appropriate its possibilities that doesn't mean that one can't draw from more than one tradition or heritage but one has to in a in a tangible way be situated at a place where that makes sense right so a person can be an inheritor of two distinct traditions to an extent that's true of myself well yes I even have two passports and that's true I do but here's how I view that maybe you can reflect that to me what what Heidegger might say I believe that every human being on the planet today whether they're from Africa or South America or Europe or Antarctica inherits all of human culture inherits global culture at this point that it's available to everyone if I want to study your Taoist philosophy or if I would prefer to study Zulu traditions they're available to me a high degree would see that as an authentic relationship to various Heritage's but ultimately he wouldn't disagree with you that something like that is possible now and only now for the first time if you asserted that about people in Prior epochs he would take serious exception right to it the reason that it's changing now is because of the in framing or encompassing of the entire planet and all of its cultures by Western science and technology and to the extent that our mechanistic technological science has shattered the worlds of meaning of various cultures across the entire planet what we make out of those ruins to an extent is something that we're all challenged with we already implicitly are living in a global context in a way that we never were in Prior epochs but to get more clear about what an authentic relationship to a heritage is it's important to approach the subject of a distinction between three types of relation to history that we see at the core of being in time okay you're sure we go into that sure so Heidegger differentiates an antiquarian relationship to history from a critical rapport with a particular heritage and monumental or monumental assister e so an antiquarian relationship to history is basically that of a conservative no this is when somebody always looks back to the past as a golden age and is trying to hang on to fragments of a type of society that once was the most extreme form of this is the Hindu conception of cyclical time and world ages where we're declining from a bygone golden age and you can you can never really make any progress the world will end and the cycle will start over again but our best days are always behind us and even though that's the most extreme form of the view you also see it in any kind of conservatism the idea that you know let's say well in a way make America great again because an antiquarian it's Logan so the fundamental or diametric opposite of this kind of relationship to history is what heidi recalls critical history and that's the idea that every social structure every ideal is the product of oppressive power relations that formed in a particular place in time and so what we need to do is to deconstruct these ideas to reveal that underpinning them is some unjust social relation that's unjustly been assumed as legitimate mmm whereas in fact it's artificial that's sort of the postmodern approach morph it has become to some extent the feminist analysis of history what it is is the Marxist approach and that's what Heidegger had in mind and to the extent that Marxism has deeply impacted post-modernism including you know feminist strands of post-modernism it's also become characteristic of those attitudes toward history for example I mean Michel Foucault epitomizes this finally there's what Hager considers the most authentic relationship to history and that's monumental history this the idea of appropriating great events and percentages of one's heritage as symbols that inspire future evolution and development the idea that any growth forward into the future like the growth of limbs of a tree needs to be deeply rooted in the earth in the earth as in the sense of the soil of a certain people and so you know one shouldn't relate to the great ideas or ideals of the past as if there are mummies one should look to them for inspiration that will drive further exploration and discovery but that exploration and discovery requires the grounding of a tradition and this this is Heidegger's preferred attitude he thinks that this is what it means to have an authentic relationship to history mm-hm and so a person who is facing an existential threat and even more so a person in a whole society that's facing an existential threat mm-hmm claims their destiny when they act as a visionary who reappropriation Sorek --all heritage in a dynamic and evolutionary fashion isn't it the case that Heidegger felt that each of these three approaches to history have their strengths and weaknesses that's exactly right I mean if one is in a period of all-encompassing degeneration and decline then some antiquarian history really wouldn't hurt as a counterbalance to widespread degeneracy let's say but it's not ideal mm-hm and so you know all of these these types of history do have their place in a world dominated let's say by a caste system let's say that you know genetic engineering we're to converge with certain deeply entrenched aristocratic ideas of you know differentiation between various social classes and this were to concretize into a new caste system somebody like Heidegger would say that under those conditions even an emphasis on critical history would be warranted in order to liberate us from that kind of an oppressive society mm-hmm well let me reflect this to you as a person of Jewish heritage I probably yeah different than many people because the Jewish people didn't have a nation of their own for thousands of years and what I see and and it's probably true amongst the many people I've interviewed maybe a thousand so far you can find Jewish people who have gone to Tibet and become Tibetan Lamas or who become Indian gurus or become Sufi masters and to me that's authentic they're they're expressing something that's in a truly authentic part of their heritage I'll tell you why I don't agree with your characterization and I would say that those Jews who largely are living in diaspora communities in the West really exemplify Western man at this moment in history and you know it's been the case that many Jewish intellectuals have been among the leading lights of the modern Western world people like Spinoza like Karl Marx Einstein Einstein and so Freud and free I mean you one could go on and on okay so I think that what you're really putting your finger on is the fact that among the most bold explorers of the modern or maybe postmodern epoch of Western man are people from the Jewish Diaspora in the West another point that I would make in response to that is that the Jews most certainly did have a homeland for many hundreds of years they had a great Kingdom and so I would see Zionism modern Zionism as a form of this monumental 'sister II that Heidegger is talking about that's very interesting it would lead me to want to bring up your own interest in the revitalization of the Zoroastrian culture yeah I mean there's a question about whether attempts to revive a heritage after a hiatus of centuries can really be authentic or at what point it becomes an artificial reconstruction and some people have accused scientism of that of being an artificial reconstruction I don't see it that way and I think that the attempt to bring about a renaissance of Iranian civilization is even more clearly something that could be authentic that has real roots extending back thousands of years it's true that between the Arab Muslim conquest of the sauce onion Empire in the 650s and the rise of the Safavids in the 1400s you had a hiatus of 800 years where there was no Persian Kingdom or certainly no Persian Empire variety of semi-autonomous fiefdom but you did have a survival of Persian culture and I would say that you had a similar survival of the Jewish heritage in the diaspora community and there were Jews who remained in in what was the Kingdom of Israel so I really do see Zionism as one expression of a monumental Istria procreation of a historical heritage and note of course that it also fits Heidegger's criteria of emerging from out of an existential threat mm-hmm and a being towards death in a very real sense although I presume Heidegger himself was not a Zionist you know that's a good question I really don't know yeah I know that Hannah Arendt who was his mistress and dear friend and you could certainly say disciple philosophically in some sense was a harsh critic of Zionism mm-hmm I'm not sure whether Heidegger would have shared her view on that actually would have been interesting to ask him about that I'm not aware of any interview where he was asked that question well well before we close our discussion on being in time and and Heidegger I think we ought to mention the fact that during his lifetime he affiliated with the Nazi Party in Germany yes Heidegger you know was trying to play Plato at Syracuse Plato during his own lifetime not only elaborated the idea or the ideal of the philosopher king he actually tried to turn Dionysus of Syracuse a tyrant he had the tyrant quote-unquote of a Greek city-state into the ideal platonic philosopher king and it was a fiasco there was a revolt against him a coup against Plato and his influence in the court at Syracuse and he barely escaped with his life I believe in the middle of the night by boat he was smuggled out of Syracuse and back to Athens and this is the kind of thing that winds up happening with Heidegger and the party he has a certain ideal conception of what could come out of National Socialism remember also the alliance between Germany and the government of Benito Mussolini in Italy I think that he was imagining a kind of second Renaissance a second type of Italian Renaissance and that he could play the role of the philosopher King the the power behind the throne as it were he was very quickly disabused of this this notion and I think he only spent a little over a year really functioning as a party official before becoming somewhat of a hermit he resigned his position as director of Harvard University yeah when he became disenchanted and that's right and it really was a resignation in protest mm-hmm is there anything else we should cover a concerning being and time well let me just add that the concept of time at play in this work is not only concerned with history toward the end of the text Heidegger gets into a very abstract discussion of how our original or primordial experience of time is radically different from the chronological time elaborated by modern sciences particularly physics so this idea of the relativity of space-time that Einstein and others forward is something that's called into question by Heidegger he sees it as a very useful practical convention that can lead to technological breakthroughs mm-hmm but we are misunderstanding ourselves insofar as we see ourselves as entities encompassed by this post Cartesian grid a relative space-time our time is a time of our consciousness and our consciousness is always directed toward the future in terms of the three modalities of time past present and future Heidegger believes that the future modality is more fundamental and that in some sense we are always reappropriation our past from out of the future mmm you'll notice that just even in terms of the conversation that we're having we are always already anticipating the next thing that we're going to be saying and where each of us is going to be bringing the other person and if that weren't the case we would experience life as a series of shocks so the future does not unfold as a successive series of instance that are the present moment what the present is is the reappropriation of the past from out of the future and being in time as we have it is an uncompleted work there was supposed to be a second half of this text which Heidegger referred to as the destruction or what later winds up being called the deconstruction of the whole history of Western ontology taking Conte Descartes and Aristotle as the milestones and this deconstruction of the whole history of stern thought is meant to do exactly that to reappropriation out of the future and for the sake of the future to dig through the crust a various established frameworks of thought in order to reinvigorate philosophy mm-hmm by reaching back to the pre-socratics in a way that takes us beyond the modern jason reza george ani once again it's been a great pleasure to share this time with you and to explore the thinking of one of the great thinkers of the 20th century thank thank you so much for inviting me again Jeffrey well thank you for being with me and I hope to do many many more interviews with you in the future I look forward to that and thank you for being with us [Music] [Music] you