On meaning #1: We thinking animals
The first in a series exploring meaning as inspired by Heidegger's 'Being and Time'
This is the first in a series of essays I’m writing on Heidegger’s Being and Time and why it still matters. I’ll be interpreting it through a more contemporary lens informed by 4E/enactivist cognitive science1.
Essay One: We thinking animals
How do we relate the world and ourselves? What is existence like?2 Although these questions seem best answered by action and observation — indeed in my experience they are — it is sometimes important to also think and talk about them.
Humans as thinking animals
In the history of philosophy, one of the most influential arguments about how we are in the world was made by Rene Descartes, who basically asserted that our fundamental mode of existence was thinking. In other words, everything we are able to do depends on thinking: sipping hot tea, glancing at your favorite book — all depend on our ability to think. As he famously argued, cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am3. It is also only on the basis of our thinking that we can prove our existence.
With this claim as a foundation, Descartes then lays out a series of, to our contemporary ears, obviously unconvincing arguments that end in ‘therefore, we have two fundamental types of substances: mind stuff and matter4.
This breakdown of the world into mind and matter has become so fundamental that it is hard to fully see. It allows for this dualistic division of our world in terms of a perceiving subject (the mind) and objects ‘out there’.
Much of our scientific thought takes for granted Descartes’ dualism, having forgotten other ways of seeing. At the most obvious end, rational choice theory models people as agents (subjects) who use a utility function to make choices in an environment5 (containing the objects). People are in, but not of, the world they inhabit. At the more subtle end, the entire scientific approach tends to characterize humans as just matter. The biologist sees us as a collection of cells, the chemist as a bag of colliding chemicals, the physicist as a region of organized atoms in the face of an increasingly entropic cosmos.
Something important is left out here. But isn’t this just the truth? Can it be any other way?
Yes, it can. I’m going to go on to argue in this series that this dualism banishes meaning from our world, and that the arguments in Being and Time provide perspective for reenchantment.
The one sentence summary of the first half of Being and Time is “humans are not separate subjects from the world, but instead are thoroughly embedded in and of the world.” The rest of my writing will be my attempt to unpack the significant implications of this sentence without resorting to tortured Heideggerese6.
Enactivism comes from Heidegger through Merleau-Ponty’s extension of Heidegger’s ideas to the body, but also a host of other thinkers like Lakoff and Johnson’s work on metaphorical cognition, Gibson’s work on affordances, etc. Heidegger himself (in my view) clearly was inspired by the Zen Buddhist monks he interacted with but to whom he never gave proper attribution
Heidegger calls these “the question of the meaning of being”.
First found in Discourse on the Method (1637)
mind stuff (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa). Seriously, Descartes basically argues that his idea of God is so good that he couldn’t have invented it himself, so God must exist. God would never fool him, and so his hunch about the mind and matter being fundamentally different must be right. See Third Meditation (“Of God; that He exists”), and Fifth Meditation (“Of the Essence of Material things; and, again, of God; that He exists”).
Per von Neumann and Morgenstern’s formulation.
One of the more legible paragraphs: “If to interpret the meaning of being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already comports itself, in its being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. But in that case the question of being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-being which belongs to Dasein itself—the pre-ontological understanding of being.” (35/H14-15)