Month: May 2021

35. Heidegger’s Scripts Rescripted

Scripts, repeatable sequences of actions triggered by experienced events and aiming at a goal, were moved to the center of philosophy by Heidegger. But they long predate him, for they are basic to life itself. But where in fact do they come from? Where are they going?

There are different ways to take that question.

First, scripts are acquired by individuals, because they consist basically in bodily movements and bodies are individuated. How does an individual acquire a script? By learning (#34), but not only. Some are programmed into the human (or other animal) body: walking, eating, sex. Others  are learned in early childhood (bathroom procedures, dressing). Others do not pre-exist their acquisition, but ae improvised from an encounter with something radically new (works of art). Some scripts come from other scripts, which they either modify (as driving cars modifies guiding carriages) or into which they are inserted as subscripts (as careful washing of hands was inserted into the “return home from the supermarket” script during the coronavirus pandemic).

The Kantian question of the criteria for forming a name, raised in post # 20, gains a bit more clarity from Heidegger’s notion of a script: a new word either plays its role in an old script (often, in this context, called a “language-game”), or modifies it, or designates a new script; the criteria for new words thus coincide, at least in part, with those for introducing new scripts.

What makes a new script, or word,  a good one is in part how it relates to scripts already in existence. The relation may be additive, in that a new script enables socially coordinated action to achieve new goals, or more efficiently achieve old goals. A new script may also be revisionary, in that the new script makes changes in old scripts, often forcing them to cohere in a new and larger project. Hegel examines this sort of thing in his Philosophy of Right, which unites numerous social institutions and practices—scripts—into a new and a larger project of producing a sort of Kantian moral agents (see my Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant).

This kind of unification of scripts can eventually result in the structure Aristotle sets out in Nicomachean Ethics I.1 (and which, as I mentioned in #34, was Teutonified in Heidegger’s account of the worldhood of the world in Being and Time): all human pursuits have a single goal. For Aristotle that goal was ἐυδαιμονία, reason functioning as the ousiodic form of an individual life (often mistranslated as “happiness”). For Heidegger (as a good Teuton) it is death.

But this raises another question: in what sense is death the “goal” of life? Who seeks it?

No one; death seeks us. As have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy, Chapter Seven), the fact that I am going to die shapes my life, for it means that I cannot do everything: I cannot live everywhere, marry everyone, pursue every possible career. I cannot acquire all possible scripts, and must therefore allocate my time and energy by selecting and organizing the scripts I do acquire. In doing so I act, like a Homeric hero (#32), at the behest of my mortality, which forces me to put my life into a definite shape.

Death thus dominates our lives in a way oddly similar to Aristotle’s concept of deliberation (προαίρεσις). In deliberation we reason back from our concept of ἐυδαιμονία toour present situation, and decide what we can do now to most advance our “happiness.” This process, which is the rule of reason in an individual life, selects and organizes, from all the alternatives available to the deliberator, the single best one. In that way the process of deliberation shapes the life of the person deliberating; and since it is a rational process (Aristotle calls it a syllogism), deliberation constitutes the rule of reason in a human life. Deliberating well is thus ἐυδαιμονία itself (hence the infelicity of “happiness” as a translation). It is the full realization (ἐνεργεῖα) of the human essence.

Death for Heidegger provokes similar selections and organization; it bounds and disposes thr components of my life and so of my self. But this ousiodic dominance is, here, without content: unlike Aristotelian ἐυδαιμονία,death does not provide a concrete goal to work towards but merely forces me to determine that some scripts will be included and others excluded from my life, without telling me which. It is indeed my τέλος, but it is an empty τέλος: since its nature is unknown, its commands are empty, and it rests with me to fill them in.

We can now see Heidegger’s major innovation on traditional accounts of ousia: ousiodic form, the telos of a life, is for him indeterminate, for no one knows what death is. As such, it has no characteristics of its own and is defined only by what it puts a stop to, i.e. a human life. It is an utter darkness at the end of the tunnel. Moreover, your death and my death, being both utterly featureless, are indistinguishable and so constitute a single large extinction—a single Nothing.

Yet this nothingness is active, in that it shapes the very lives it ends: “The Nothing,” Heidegger says, “nothings.” Given philosophy’s ancient commitment to ousia, it is not surprising that Heidegger’s pithiest formulation of his alternative to ousia—“the Nothing nothings—” should have drawn so much ridicule from philosophers, especially those in the English-speaking world. Their laughter showed us who they are.

 Though ousiodic structure is endemic in the West, its three axes never been focused on, and the post-Aristotelian roles of ousia in structuring Western lives have never been seen clearly—which has only enhanced their dominance. In Being and Time, ousiodic structure finally receives a frontal philosophical assault; more will follow (see my Reshaping Reason, 2014).

34. Heidegger’s Scripts

Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. This can never be forgotten, any more than it can be forgotten that Jefferson owned and sired slaves, or that Nietzsche vilified women, or that Lindbergh was an anti-Semite. We need to redefine greatness: there is no such thing as a “great man” or “great woman,” only people—morally ambiguous beings who ocasionally do great things. The bad with the good, in philosophy as well as in philosophers: they were all mongers of ousia, but their mongering was often fascinating and now constitutes much of your intellectual spinal chord. The special problem with Heidegger is that his Nazism was, he claimed, a philosophical position—he himself joined his evil to his greatness. The joint is disturbing: what good is philosophy if it doesn’t teach you that Nazism is evil?

The connection is also suspect. Heidegger’s thought, which he himself clearly did not understand very well, is not unified enough for all aspects of it to be automatically classed as Nazi. Consider, in particular, Heidegger’s notion of the “totality-of-significance” (Bewandtnisganzheit), the context which enables the use of a tool. If the tool is a pen, its totality-of-signifieance includes physical things like paper and light source, social things like the technology of eventual publication or private delivery, cultural things such as the genre in which one writes, and personal things such as what one thinks one has to say. Totalities-of-significance concern practices of tool-using, and his emphasis on them joins Heidegger, not to Nazism, but to pragmatism.

It is testimony to the hold atemporality has on philosophical minds that so many readers of Heidegger think that a totality of significance must be all there at once, arrayed (if “non-thematically”) around the tool at the outset of its use. In fact, a moment’s reflection shows that even the most stable physical components of such a totality have to be encountered in a certain order. I need to secure paper and a light source before I pick up the pen, but I don’t yet have to know what I am going to say (and usually don’t, in any detail). Totalities of significance unfold step by step, which is why I call them “scripts.”

One important function of such scripts is to direct awareness: it is the script I am engaged in, and in executing which I have arrived as a certain point or “line,” that selects for me, from all the sensory messages that I am receiving at a given moment, the ones I attend to. This selection has the feel of something surging up before me, of its unwilled movement to the center of my awareness; and since it is governed by the script, it is a surging-up-as. The same thing (in physical terms) can surge up differently if I am engaged in a different script.

Scripts were for a while major concerns of artificial intelligence (see Shank and Abelson Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, 1977). They dropped out of centrality because of the field’s obsession with getting computers to perform them. Heideggerean scripts are, more realistically, riddled with holes and ambiguities, which give them the flexibility to be performed on differing occasions. Computers, at least the ones available to Shank and Abelson, are not good with holes and ambiguities, and attempts to program even simple behaviors into computers recurrently collapsed under the weight of exceptions and spur-of-the-moment modifications. So much the worse for programing.

In human beings, the holes and ambiguities in scripts are mastered by their goal-directed character, and this helps explain why computers can’t run them. The person executing a script does so to achieve some goal, and any part of the script needs to be executed only well and completely enough to realize that goal. But deciding that requires a judgment-call which computers are, so far, unable to make. Their tendency is to execute each phase of a script perfectly, and this requires that it be written perfectly—something humans, so far, are unable to do. Hubert Dreyfus thus finds himself reversed[1]: in this case, getting computers to mimic human intelligence fails because of what humans, not computers, can’t do.

Because scripts guide behavior, philosophers have mostly ignored them; they have historically viewed the mind as a device for looking at things (“representational mind”), not acting. But pragmatism is not the only exception to this: Heidegger’s account of the worldhood of the world, which is built on the notion of scripts, is basically a Teutonification of Aristotle’s pragmatically-oriented Nicomachean Ethics I.1. And what are Kant’s categories but guides for encountering any object whatever?

Kant’s treatment reveals the limits of traditional philosophy, however, for he insisted that the validity of the categories’ operation extended to all experiences. This meant that the categories could not be acquired from experience, because then they would not apply to the experience of their acquisition. So they had to be a priori, independent of all experience, and that meant independent of the intuitive form of all experience, time—landing Kant back in traditional philosophy. Heidegger, by contrast, talks about relative a priori’s: contexts of significance acquired independently of my current experience, which they help to shape, but not of experience altogether: they are learned, i.e. come from previous experiences.

[1] Dreyfus What Computer Can’t Do, New York 1972

33 The Situation of Philosophy in the Early 20th Century

By the early 20th Century, the directive concept (or as I call it the parameter) of ousia was, like everything else, in a condition both objectively unstable and subjectively uncertain. For millennia, ousiodic structure had been both a philosophical obsession, reacquired and reinterpreted by every creative philosophical mind, and a practical guide, providing an intelligible justification for institutions and practices across the human world. Families, economies, fiefdoms, states, religions and even individual moral agents were structured as so many bounded domains, within each of which a single unitary part organized the rest and maintained internal order, while managing interactions with the outside world. Philosophy’s contribution had been to justify this structure as, in Aristotle’s words, basic to “all of nature:”

In all things which are composed out of several other things, and which come to be some single common thing, whether continuous or discrete, in all of them there turns out to be a distinction between that which rules, and that which is ruled; and this holds for all ensouled things by virtue of the whole of nature…

Politics I.4 1254a28-32)

The “rationalists” had extended ousia’s domination to the supersensible realm; but it entered modernity with a difference. In premodern times, the various levels of ousiodic structure mentioned above were comfortably internested: individuals within households, fathers within cities, cities within kingdoms, kingdoms eventually within Christendom, all of it bounded and disposed by a benevolent Creator.

The downfall of something so fundamental, multifarious, and far-reaching could not happen all at once. Different realizations of ousiodic structure were discovered, in different ways and at different times, to be inadequate. The result was not a sudden toppling or a gradual replacement, but a whole gamut of destabilizations of what had been an unquestioned principle; in the words of one important participant in those destabilizations, Karl Marx “all that is solid melts into air.”

An early case of this was the “eviction” of ousia from nature in the 16th Century, when Medieval substantial forms were replaced by Galilean mechanical bodies. Matter had traditionally been seen in terms of its capacity to bear form, and so exhibited qualitative distinctions (so that, for example, human matter, being appropriate to the human form, differed from animal matter and plant matter). Now it became homogenous: governed by the laws of mechanics, all matter for people like Galileo (and later Newton) is basically alike.

This intellectual development had practical consequences, because matter provided limits to form. For Aristotle, a given form required a certain type of matter, and could control only a certain amount of it; it could not expand its dominion indefinitely. Once matter had become homogenous, there were no such material limits to growth: a sovereign, convinced of his worth, could aspire to control the planet (it may have worked the other way too: the ambitions of sovereigns led to changes in metaphysics).

The result was an aggressive expansion of empires across the globe, and their inevitable competition with one another. The same thing happened on an individual level: once wealth was defined in terms of money, a homogeneous medium, an individual could aspire to possess all of it, which brought endless competition in what would come to be enshrined as the “free market.”

These two levels, each a giant theater of competition, also competed with each other: states could not tolerate unlimited personal acquisition, which might result in competing centers of power; while rich men resented government regulations. Each side found its theorists: the state in people like Hobbes and Spinoza, the individual in people like Locke and Smith.

In religion, what had at least since Aquinas been a benevolent diversity of local cults, each singing to God (#17), gave way, under pressures of papal corruption, to fundamentally different Christian traditions. The internested ousiodic structure of Catholicism, inherited from Roman forebears, was replaced with a plurality of contending mini-ousias, each following a local or regional leader (Calvin in Geneva, Henry VIII in England), and each with its own set of ultimate doctrines. Each religion aspired to solitary dominance in the world.

These new political and social formations, unbound by any larger cosmic order and each claiming ultimate validity within its genre, rose and fell chaotically, and often by accident. Instead of a human cosmos of stable ousiai, we find a ferment of ousiodic structures which come together and disperse, melting into air almost as quickly as they arise.

But there was another set of problems, even greater: ousia is inherently oppressive. Ousiodic metaphysics, the whole barn, in fact amounts to a general theory of exclusion, providing a rationale for denying whole groups of people access to resources, particularly to power—all of which was assigned to form. All you had to do was associate the members of some group to matter, which ipso facto made them deficiently rational and so less than human. This has been done to women from ancient days, and also to foreigners, who could not speak (your language) and so were not wholly rational—and so subject to enslavement. It was applied, with exuberant cruelty, to people of color. Philosophers, alas, shared in the exuberance, for the cruelty had long been underwritten by their ancient discipline (Africans can speak, said Hume; but so can parrots).

But by the 18th Century, the intellectual achievements of women and people of color became undeniable (except to people like Hume); members of both groups were producing important philosophical work, which strongly suggested that they were as rational as anyone else. So, some philosophers came to suspect, were people from the “lower classes” of society. Revolutionaries even proposed that all men (at least) are created equal.

By 1920, European political structures had invalidated themselves in the Great War of 1914-18. Free markets had self-immolated in recurrent depressions, and much religious dogma had been discredited by modern science (particularly Darwin). The oppressive nature of ousia came to be felt, if not clearly seen, by many. The time was ripe for a frontal attack on it.

Enter, for better or worse, Martin Heidegger. His attack would come from the future.

32. Homer, Nietzsche, and the Final Slamover

I called attention, in discussing Kant, to how tightly his solution to the problem of the causality or reason adhered to an Aristotelian model (# 24). Nietzsche, too, is more Aristotelian than he is often thought to be. I said (#8) that for Aristotle, form exercised a threefold domination over matter: it drew boundaries which separated one thing from others; disposed (ordered) whatever was within those boundaries; and took the initiative with regard to managing interactions with the outside world. Initiative and boundary are thus at odds for Aristotle, because once a boundary is in place, acting on the world outside transgresses it (see my Metaphysics and Oppression).

The heart of this problem is that boundary and disposition have priority over initiative: a thing without boundaries which separate it from other things does not exist at all, and a boundary within which no single component disposes the rest has—for the metaphysical tradition, anyway—no unity. Thus, for that tradition, something has to be fully existent, i.e. its form has to be in relatively full control of its matter, before it can cause changes in other things. Only an adult (male) can beget; only someone who has fully mastered a skill can teach it.

In Nietzsche’s inversion of metaphysics, initiative is basic: what is ontologically fundamental is not things but forces, which act on the world without themselves being rooted in a bounded subject or substratum. As Nietzsche puts it, “”there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought,—the doing is everything (Genealogy of Morality I.13). Nietzsche’s overall name for the totality of such forces is, famously, “will to power.”

When one force achieves dominance of another force (or forces), we get what I have called the “slamover.” This, I have suggested (#31), is Nietzsche’s appropriation of pre-Aristotelian (and indeed pre-Platonic) physics to furnish the stylistic form of his sentences and aphorisms. For much of their content, however, Nietzsche goes even farther back—to Homer. To understand Nietzsche even partially, then, we must understand a bit about the Homeric worldview.

There is such a thing, at least in the Iliad (for complexities in the Odyssey see its treatment in Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment). The social world of the Iliad is a simple place, centered on a series of hand-to-hand combats. In the Trojan War, groups of men never move together. Rather, each hero on the Plain of Troy selects an opponent from the other army and tries to kill him. If he fails, he dies. If he succeeds, he selects another opponent, ideally one slightly stronger then the first, and repeats his efforts. The whole Trojan War thus has the structure of a video game, in which each vanquished opponent only gives rise to a more formidable foe.

But this is no game. With one exception, every Achaean knows that if things go really well for him, he will eventually face Hector, the Trojan champion; and Hector will kill him. Every Trojan, without exception, knows that if things go really well for him, he will eventually have to face Achilles (if he returns to the battle); and Achilles will kill him. (Achilles himself, the exception, does not die in hand-to-hand combat, but from a poisoned arrow shot by Paris). Death, the ultimate slam-over, waits at the end of the hero’s path, and it is awful indeed: whether you have been good or bad, when you die you lose most of your life-force and spend eternity shrieking in Hades.

Most of the soldiers in this war do not want to play this game; they want to live and go home. Instead of fighting, they merely stand around and watch the heroes fight. Homer calls them ὄι κακοί, the ordinary ones; in classical Greek, as Nietzsche points out (Genealogy of Morals I.5) κακός will mean “bad.” But what about the heroes? What motivates them?

The utterly slim chance of salvaging something posthumous: the chance that your valor in battle will inspire a bard to sing about you, so that you gain ὃ κλἐος ἀθανατὀς, immortal fame. While you scream in Hades, your valor survives in the memories of your fellows.

The Greek hero, confronting his death with only his valor, quickness and strength, is a clear prototype of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. And Nietzsche describes the Achaean hero’s moment of glory, his ἀριστεῖα —the moment that shows him at his best, just after he has killed the last man he will kill, for—as he must suspect—his next opponent will kill him:

One experiences again and again one’s golden hour of victory—and then one stands forth as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for new, even harder, remoter things…

Gen. Mor. I.12

After a victory, as one receives the plaudits of ὄι κακοί, our hero does not know if he is experiencing his ἀριστεῖα or not, for the future is radically uncertain, and the final slam-over awaits.

The Greek hero thus exhibits a metaphysical transgression. What makes his life worthwhile is not to be found in him, but in his effects on others—on those who will sing of him, and those who will hear the songs. The good life is not for Nietzsche a matter of the right organization of the soul, as both Plato and Aristotle thought, and certainly not one of following divine commandments, but of moving outward beyond one’s self to affect the world—one of the many meanings of Nietzsche’s famous concept of “self-overcoming.” Under the rubric of will to power, initiative, the last and most problematic of the tree axes of ousiodic domination, is posited as ontologically most basic.

31. Nietzsche and the Slamover

That time is a philosophical mystery has been obvious to philosophers since Heraclitus. That time is not merely one philosophical problem among others but a condition of philosophy itself, so that philosophy needs, in all its dimension, to respond to time was propounded by Hegel out of Hume’s success and Kant’s failure (# 24).  It was so radical a thought that its presence in Hegel’s writings was, and still is, missed entirely.

How philosophy should respond to time is obviously a function of what we take time to be. For Kant, it was the ordering of incompatibles: if x has both property φ and ～φ, our minds assign φ and ～φ  to different times, so that instead of a contradiction we have a process: φt implies ～φt±n. This follows from the nature of time itself: nothing comes-to-be from itself, because then it would not have come-to-be at all; it would have been there all along. Nor can it pass-away into itself, for then it would not pass away at all. So it must come-to-be from its opposite and pass-away into it, in the ancient sense in which the “opposite” of hot is not cold but not-hot. Kant’s account of time thus accommodates the ancient doctrine of antapodosis, that things come-to-be from their opposites (see Plato,  Phaedo 70e-71e).

But this account of changes is incomplete, for it focuses only on the terminal points of the process:～φ  from which it begins, and φ with which it ends (or vice-versa for passing-away). What about the process itself?

Nietzsche’s characteristic way of handling this begins by designating or evoking various intermediate stages of the process. Example: “the water is hot.” Since the hot water is in time, it must have come-to-be from something that is not hot water, either because it is not hot or because it is not even water. Let us take the previous case. English affords us several different ways of referring to water by its temperature, so we can say, first, that the water is cool; then that it is lukewarm; then that it is warm; then warmer; then really warm; and finally hot. We have now construed the coming-to-be of the hot water as a six-stage sequence ending in hot water. That final stage is different from the others in that it marks the end of our construal. The water may go on to boil, or it may cool down, but those possibilities do not interest us; for our purposes the process is over, and we now have, not a process of water getting progressively hotter but something quite different, namely a state of the water.

This, then, is a version of antapodosis, a general theory of coming-to-be formulated in Plato’s Phaedo. It is the last (indeed the only) theory of change advanced in the Phaedo before the Theory of Forms is introduced, so we can see how it would appeal to the materialist in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s way of mimicking antapodosis is, often, to lead the reader in one direction, getting closer and closer to a final revelation—and then slamming-over, not to the revelation prepared for, but to something quite different: as if the sequence were cool—lukewarm—warm—warmer—really warm—ice. A quick and simple example is Nietzsche’s joke, “God’s only excuse is that He doesn’t exist.” The first part of the sentence prepares us, not merely for an assertion of God’s existence, but for an apologia for Him; the second part undoes the expectation. The two parts can only function together, but what is important is the slamover from seeming apologia for, to atheistic dismissal of, the Deity.

A deeper example, to be discussed shortly (#32), lies in the progression of the Homeric hero, who wins victory after victory—until he doesn’t, which means he is vanquished and dies in the ultimate slamover. Slamovers, then, are not merely philosophical tropes. They have general significance for knowledge and action:

As knowers, let us not be ungrateful towards such resolute reversals of familiar perspectives and valuations…to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity—”the latter understood, not as contemplation [Anschauug] without interest but as having in our power our “pro’s” and “cons:” so as to be able to engage and disengage them so that we can use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge.

Genealogy of Morality III.12

One of the cardinal rules of reading Nietzsche is, then, to wait for the slamover. A case in point is his treatment of the Übermensch. We hear so much about the Übermensch’s superiority to others, his awareness of that superiority and his salutary contempt for inferior creatures, that we are unprepared for—and so set up for—the slamover when Nietzsche says that the Übermenschis is often kind to others—as humans are often kind to kittens. In particular, using other people to assert one’s own superiority is about as un-Nietzschean as anything can be—a fact which escaped Nietzsche-readers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 failed to wait for the slamover and, entranced by the ruthlessness in early stages of Nietzsche’s portrayals of the Übermensch, killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. They not only misunderstood Nietzsche but mutilated the rest of their lives: both of them went, fittingly, to the slammer.