Dear Ken,
Let me quote what Adolfo Casais Monteiro wrote in 1956:
"Modernity was a fight against everything - but for nothing. For that reason
no philosopher belongs more to modernity than Heidegger. And so La Nausée by
Sartre is one of the greatest books of our time. At least the annulment
takes consciousness of itself, in spite of the weird words of the former
author who can't be blamed for being a philosopher and not a poet."
Not being blamed for being a philosopher.
My "Building Dwelling Thinking" was "Bâtir, Habiter Penser" and the book was
Essays et Conferences and not Poetry, Language, Thought. It is interesting
that your wonderful post digresses through these maters. We must confront
what are the essays in both editions. Thinking about Language and Thought,
naturally, you oppose or complement Heidegger with Wittgenstein (somehow a
red worm in my word processor underlines Heidegger as an error and
Wittgenstein doesn't. I guess that's what you meant by different traditions)
apart from Vienna's Circle loathing of his philosophy.
I also was appalled by Heidegger's apparent lack of tact in talking about
the "fourfold" when Europe was laid in ruins caused by the Nazi folly. I
wrote about it in "How to make your ideas obscure." Back then, I opposed
Heidegger with Peirce, a very good but insidious man that is behind, I
think, the forms of clarity that David, Chris and you, still, embrace and
not Wittgenstein's.
In Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two
Great Philosophers, by David Edmonds and David Eidinow, we can read about
the opposition between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper which one could
summarize, from Popper's side, on the lack of Wittgenstein's interest in the
real human problems reducing philosophy to riddles of words constructions.
The way in which philosophy escape from the nomic anathema that you speak
of has been by plunging deeply in sentiments (funny that you bring
Kierkegaard into the conversation) which tend to afflict both barbarians and
Greeks. That's why suffering is so worked out.
1951, the year of Wittgenstein's death (April), coincidentally is the same
year of Building Dwelling Thinking (August).
A philosopher belonging Modernity. With no doubt, especially when time found
out that modernity was over.
In my architecture school, he and Husserl were so important that the Theory
and History Department was called "Department of History, Theory and
Phenomenology of Architecture"! What about that.as if Phenomenology had the
same levell of theory or history!
Thanks for your post,
Cheers
Eduardo
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Friedman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 2:38 PM
Subject: Poetry, Language, Thought.
Dear Eduardo,
Your post got me thinking on something that
caught my eye in the thread that blossomed with
Anne-Marie's CFP and David's response. I promised
myself I would not get into the thread and I
didn't, but your thoughtful response calls for a
few additional thoughts.
Like you, I saw Anne-Maries reference to Martin
Heidegger's "Building Dwelling Thinking." For
reasons entirely removed from design, the essay
has been sitting on my desk this week. It is a
chapter in Poetry, Language, Thought (Heidegger:
1971).
Two issues interested me about the thread. First
was the way that different languages evoke
different communities of inquiry and different
practices.
The second is what Heidegger said about building and dwelling.
On the first count, language, I saw both the
provocative poetry in Anne-Marie's CFP and the
reasonable request for clarity in David's
response. Nevertheless, I saw these emerging from
two different language traditions. The CFP
emerges from an inquiry that often refers to
Heidegger. David's response refers to a
consciousness of language and meaning that often
refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Heidegger and Wittgenstein break language open in
entirely different ways. Heidegger breaks
language as a plough breaks soil, turning
language over like a plowman breaks the earth to
plant a field.
Heidegger sees building and planting as part of the same act:
"S if we listen to what language says in the
[German] word bauen we hear three things:
1) Building is really dwelling.
2) Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
3) Building as dwelling unfolds into the building
that cultivates growing things and the building
that erects buildings" (Heidegger 1971: 148).
Interestingly, he comments on growing things
without relating the word bauen, build, to the
close-related word bauer, farmer. My German
etymology isn't what it used to be, so there may
be a reason he did not. To my eye, though, the
relationship is there.
Wittgenstein treats language like an engineer,
analytically. He breaking down small parts to
reveal parts that are smaller still, and he also
uses the leverage of rough thoughts to create
smoother and more polished thoughts.
In the clash of any two languages, we also see a
clash of cultures. Heidegger wrote, elsewhere,
"language belongs to the closest neighborhood of
man's being," and people treat their language as
an expression of self.
The ancient Greeks expressed this most clearly
when they labeled anyone who did not speak Greek
as a barbarian, barbaros, someone who did not
speak Greek. Originally, the world simply
distinguished between Hellenes and all others.
This changed in the wake of the Persian Wars. The
term barbarian shifted meaning to embrace - in
different languages - all the negative
connotations one can imagine for the word
barbarian. We often treat those who speak
different languages as if their failure to speak
our language also means that they are barbaric in
every other way.
Languages arise from and represent a nomos, a
culture. Those who share our nomos are nomic -
civilized and sane. Those who do not are anomic -
barbaric or insane. It is from this word that
Durkheim shaped his concept of anomie.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann discuss these
issues extensively in The Social Construction of
Reality, and Berger discusses them more deeply in
a small masterpiece written at the same time, The
Sacred Canopy. We build worlds through language,
not the physical worlds that exist independent of
our concept of them, but the social worlds
through which we interpret and understand the
reality around us. There is no other way for
humans to understand reality, and this means that
the symbols we use and the ways we use them
becomes a part of our culture and our individual
being, much as Heidegger suggested.
What I find so fascinating in this thread is the
way in which we seem to be divided, as it were,
by a common language. Chris's comments struck a
real note with me in that regard: "As researchers
we should aspire to precision and clarity. The
more difficult the issue the more pressing the
need for good communication." To me, this seems
especially vital in an interdisciplinary field
that engages researchers, scholars, and
practitioners from so many different disciplines
and design traditions.
When Heidegger breaks language open, he does so
to reveal the rich earth of often-ambiguous
ideas. As you wrote yesterday, "Sorry, Chris and
David, one cannot expect from anyone that uses
Heidegger the kind of clarity you demand." True
enough. I've gotten myself into hot water on this
list by noting that Heidegger is obscure and
often oracular. That never seemed to me to be
terribly controversial - many of Heidegger's
greatest admirers say the same thing, and observe
the difficulty they and others have in
understanding him.
I still recall the difficult time I had the first
time I tried to read Heidegger. It was forty
years ago, and I couldn't make heads or tails out
of him. He was far more difficult than
Kierkegaard, though it may be that Heidegger made
Kierkegaard seemed easy by comparison. I tried
Being and Time without much luck. I had much
better luck with the short, clear essays in
Poetry, Language, Thought when it came out in the
early 1970s.
I've had a difficult time dealing with Heidegger
for many reasons. His difficulty is only one
reason. Meeting Heidegger during the Vietnam War
era had many kinds of resonance.
The best of these many evocative resonances came
from Heidegger's call to a renewed inquiry into
being and authenticity. That was a time when the
United States had seemingly been hijacked by the
military-industrial complex and Heidegger offered
a remedy, or part of one. In the 1990s, of
course, the Viet Nam era has a "back to the
future" feel.
The worst of these resonances came about when I
discovered Heidegger's personal history, and his
membership in Hitler's Nazi party, a far more
sinister military-industrial regime. The
Heidegger whom my teachers and fellow-students
admired was one person. This was another, darker
Heidegger. Heidegger's Nazi party membership and
his failure to renounce it even after the war
always puzzled me. Fred Dallmyr's book - The
Other Heidegger - gets as close to a resolution
as I can imagine, saying that even though it is
difficult to excuse these facts, they do not
diminish Heidegger's philosophical contribution.
I still struggle with some of Heidegger's ideas.
But I recall that he wrote a wonderful passage
somewhere in which he describes his struggle to
understand Husserl. I think he was still an
aspiring theologian at the time that he got a
couple of Husserl's works from the library. He
spoke about staring at the books again and again,
perplexed and unable to understand them, even
though he found them captivating. He spoke about
being charmed even by the physical quality of the
books, the very typography and the way the pages
smelled.
By the 1980s, I was so irked by Heidegger that I
got rid of all his books. I got rid of all my
Wittgenstein volumes at the same time. I
regretted it, of course, and I have slowly been
buying new (or used) copies of the same books to
struggle with them once again. I still have my
first Kierkegaard volumes, though, the copies I
bought back in the 1960s.
In "Building Dwelling Thinking," it surprises me
that Heidegger does not speak of oikos. The Greek
word oikos meant "the center around which life
was organized, from which flowed not only
material needs, including security, but ethical
norms and values, duties, obligations, and
responsibilities, social relationships, and
relations with the gods. The oikos was not merely
the family, it was all the people of the
household and its good; hence [the word]
'economics' (from the Latinized form oecus), the
art of managing an oikos S" (Finley 1956: 61).
This is also the root of the word ecology, the household of the earth.
This is what I saw in the CFP, and I think you
address some of the issues nicely. Of course,
David raised some of these issues in his own way.
It seems to me that clarity is necessary for
speaking with each other to generate dialogue.
Even when we argue from belief rather than
evidence, it seems reasonable to make our beliefs
and values clear.
Part of the goal of research is the struggle to
make ideas clear, to find ways to express what we
know so that others may take them on board and
use them.
This, too, is a kind of building. Berger would
explain this as world building, building the
cultural worlds we inhabit with our fellow
beings. This is difficult. The language we
establish through nomos enables us to build some
kinds of communication while making other kinds
more difficult.
On some occasions, I have been fortunate to speak
across the borders of nomoi with people who
became friends and colleagues. On other
occasions, I have been grumpy and ill tempered
toward those who I thought of as barbarians
because they did not speak my language while I
could not build a bridge to theirs. Bridges and
dialogue are better.
Thanks for your post. I am not sure that you
meant to bring up all these issues, but your
posts of the past few days and some of the others
got me thinking.
Yours,
Ken
References
Finley, M. J. 1956. The World of Odysseus. London: Chatto and Windus.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language,
Thought. Translations and introduction by Albert
Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.
--
Prof. Ken Friedman
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo
Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen
+47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email: [log in to unmask]
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