Tag: existence

Being at Home in the World/Universe

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided an introduction to the problem of being at home when he wrote:

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. ‘There is a world’, or rather: “There is the world’; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life.”

Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 369.

Remy C. Kwant, in his essay “Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology”, commented:

For, according to him, the original lies buried in a dimension of darkness in such a way that it cannot be brought to light. Our existence is interwoven with the world, is a dialogue with the world. This dialogue reaches its most profound point there where the first and most original meaning arises, a meaning that is pre-conscious and pre-personal. Whatever is in our consciousness, whatever comes to light, becomes lucid, originates also in this darkness. As we have seen, man is able to obtain a measure of knowledge regarding this dark depth. He is able to divine something about the mysterious dialogue between the body-subject and the world. However, according to Merleau-Ponty, an absolute illumination of the phenomenal field is in principle impossible. All man can do is to erect some pointers in a darkness which resists full illumination.

Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 390-391.

We sense that the interaction between ourselves and the world at every level may not be explainable. Therefore, we seek emotional or psychological shelter. The three levels of shelter are:

  1. hearth and home
  2. a sense of belonging
  3. gods

Think of the song, “A House Is Not a Home”, sung by Dionne Warwick. “A chair is still a chair / Even though there’s no one sitting there … But a room is not a house
/ And a house is not a home” depicts the human longing for shelter via hearth and home. The French philosopher Bruno Latour referred to this as a “parliament of things.”

Consider “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, as well as the novel (and later film) The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Both of these cover the deep issue of shelter.

Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (German: Bauen Wohnen Denken) states:

In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask:

  1.   What is it to dwell?
  2.   How does building belong to dwelling?
I

We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today’s housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but—do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man’s dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and building are related as end and means. However, as long as this is all we have in mind, we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling—to build is in itself already to dwell. Who tells us this? Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the nature of dwelling and building?

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, (translated by Albert Hofstadter), Harper & Row, 1975, pages 145-146.

Stuart Kauffman comes at this from a different angle:

Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Did Neanderthal, Homo habilis, or Homo erectus ask? Around which fire in the past 3 million years of hominid evolution did these questions first arise? Who knows.

Somewhere along our path, paradise has been lost, lost to the Western mind, and in the spreading world civilization, lost to our collective mind. John Milton must have been the last superb poet of Western civilization who could have sought to justify the ways of God to man in those early years foreshadowing the modern era. Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science. Once, a scant few centuries ago, we of the West believed ourselves the chosen of God, made in his image, keeping his word in a creation wrought by his love for us. Now, only 400 years later, we find ourselves on a tiny planet, on the edge of a humdrum galaxy among billions like it scattered across vast megaparsecs, around the curvature of space-time back to the Big Bang. We are but accidents, we’re told. Purpose and value are ours alone to make. Without Satan and God, the universe now appears the neutral home of matter, dark and light, and is utterly indifferent. We bustle, but are no longer at home in the ancient sense.

Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, page 4.

Kauffman comes to grips with this problem with the final line above. He continues:


In this new view of life, organisms are not merely tinkered-together contraptions, bricolage, in Jacob’s phrase. Evolution is not merely “chance caught on the wing,” in Monod’s evocative image. The history of life captures the natural order, on which selection is privileged to act. If this idea is true, many features of organisms are not merely historical accidents, but also reflections of the profound order that evolution has further molded. If true, we are at home in the universe in ways not imagined since Darwin stood natural theology on is head with his blind watchmaker.

Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 25-26.

Kauffman wants to complete the Darwinian revolution by adding self-organization and complexity to natural selection. In his vision, this will begin to produce a holistic picture of who we are. This will perhaps allow us to feel “We are all at home in the universe, poised to sanctify by our best, brief, only stay.” [page 30.]

Zooming out from this, we can see a meta-intelligent sense in which science believes it can convert mysteries into problems using math. In contrast to this, philosophers believe the opposite, that the problems are becoming more mysterious.

Realms and Domains: Levels and Confusion

Are we governed by words or numbers? Martin Heidegger’s star pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer, points a penetrating flashlight at this question of words vs. numbers when he writes, “It is obvious that not mathematics but the linguistic nature of people is the basis of human civilization.”

According to Gadamer, our primary way of being is interpretative rather than computative. Our fundamental function is to cope, not to theorize. He argues, we can never finally step outside the traditions and practices of our culture. As one critic stated, “the metaphysical aid of a view from nowhere is seen by Gadamer as a questionable illusion that can have damaging consequences for a culture. It is not that scientific methods are mistaken—he thinks that science is involved an unstoppable dynamic which cannot be halted by philosophical or other objections…Gadamer gives a central role to art in questioning the dominance of the methods of the natural sciences. The artwork is not something to be determined by concepts, but something which ‘happens’ via its reception in real social contexts…”

Think about the interaction between words and numbers in the opening of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Vintage Books, 1989, page 19.

Note how Nabokov describes our existence above. Think about the word “eternities”? It brings to mind infinity. For example, in algebra, 1/x goes to infinity as 1 approaches zero. Nabokov also states that man is doing all this infinity-watching which he describes in heartbeats per hour.

Another issue in this realm and domain confusion is provided by Gabriel Marcel, when he writes, “We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious and the unknowable.” Marcel continues:

A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I myself am involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as “a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity”. A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined; whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique. It is, no doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of corruption of the intelligence. The problem of evil, as the philosophers have called it, supplies us with a particularly instructive example of this degradation.

Just because it is the essence of mystery to be recognized or capable of recognition, it may also be ignored and actively denied. It then becomes reduced to something I have “heard talked about” but which I refuse as only “being for other people”; and that in virtue of an illusion which these “others” are deceived by, but which I myself claim to have detected.

We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious and the unknowable. The unknowable is in fact only the limiting case of the problematic, which cannot be actualized without contradiction. The recognition of mystery, on the contrary, is an essentially positive act of the mind, the supremely positive act in virtue of which all positivity may perhaps be strictly defined. In this sphere everything seems to go on as if I found myself acting on an intuition which I possess without immediately knowing myself to possess it— an intuition which cannot be, strictly speaking, self-conscious and which can grasp itself only through the modes of experience in which its image is reflected, and which it lights up by being thus reflected in them.

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection & Mystery, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 260-261.

A final profound confusion is the body as a physical item vs. a means of expression. Picture Fred Astaire dancing opposite Ginger Rogers. You have both the movements of his dance and what he conveys through body language. In order to dance, you have the biochemical fuel (food) to enable the biomechanical movement of the dance. The courtship expressed through his movements is something different. Marcel describes it thus:

We should recall, at this point, what we said in an earlier lecture about the body; the latter is not merely an instrument, it presents us with a kind of reality which is quite different from the reality of any sort of apparatus, in so far as it, my body, is also my way of being in the world.

Gabriel Marcel, page 257.

See also “Existence and the Problem of Separability”, “Is It Good to Be a Detached Observer?” and “Arguments Without End: A Few Simple Examples” which also reference Marcel.

Existence and the Problem of Separability

In contracts and legal documents, there is a concept of “separability” which means that clause A is connected to clause B in a way that cannot be undone.

The great twentieth century French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, has a profound non-separability analysis of existence itself. Marcel wrote:

…We cannot really separate:—

  1. Existence
  2. Consciousness of self as existing
  3. Consciousness of self as bound to a body, as incarnate.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 10.

This leads to saying things that are very deep aspects of existential thinking governed by the points above. For example, Marcel wrote, “As I have said elsewhere, the moment I treat my body as an object of scientific knowledge, I banish myself to infinity.” Consider the end of the previous phrase. The very notion that someone, within themselves could go down a route to “banish themselves” in this way, shows you a door into very deep psychological problems. In other words, Marcel is telling you that some psychological problems could have a philosophical or existential root cause and are a type of blunder.

This is not to say that one should avoid scientific thought. Taking a drop of your blood and viewing it under a microscope is not a blunder. However, if you take this to the extreme of trying to analyze everything scientifically, to the exclusion of philosophy in daily life, this is Marcel’s warning.

Marcel’s context for this thinking is given here:

Notes for a Paper to the Philosophical Society

Undated, written in 1927 or 19281

When I affirm that something exists, I always mean that I consider this something as connected with my body, as able to be put in contact with it, however indirect this contact may be. But note must be taken that the priority I thus ascribe to my body depends on the fact that my body is given to me in a way that is not exclusively objective, i.e. on the fact that it is my body. This character, at once mysterious and intimate, of the bond between me and my body (I purposely avoid the word relation) does in fact colour all existential judgments.


What it comes to is this. We cannot really separate:—

  1. Existence
  2. Consciousness of self as existing
  3. Consciousness of self as bound to a body, as incarnate.

From this several important conclusions would seem to follow:

  1. In the first place, the existential point of view about reality cannot, it seems, be other than that of an incarnate personality. In so far as we can imagine a pure understanding, there is, for such an understanding, no possibility of considering things as existent or non-existent.
  2. On the one hand, the problem of the existence of the external world is now changed and perhaps even loses its meaning; I cannot in fact without contradiction think of my body as non-existent, since it is in connection with it (in so far as it is my body) that every existing thing is defined and placed. On the other hand, we ought to ask whether there are valid reasons for giving my body a privileged metaphysical status in comparison with other things.
  3. If this is so, it is permissible to ask whether the union of the soul and body is, in essence, really different from the union between the soul and other existing things. In other words, does not a certain experience of the self, as tied up with the universe, underlie all affirmation of existence?
  4. Inquire whether such an interpretation of the existential leads towards subjectivism.
  5. Shew how idealism tends inevitably to eliminate all existential considerations in view of the fundamental unintelligibility of existence. Idealism versus metaphysics. Values detached from existence: too real to exist.

Existential and personalist interests closely linked. The problem of the immortality of the soul is the pivot of metaphysic.

Every existent is thought of like an obstacle by which we take our bearings—like something we could collide with in certain circumstances—resistent, impenetrable. We think of this impenetrability, no doubt, but we think of it as not completely thinkable.2 Just as my body is thought of in so far as it is a body, but my thought collides with the fact that it is my body.

To say that something exists is not only to say that it belongs to the same system as my body (that it is bound to it by certain connections which reason can define), it is also to say that it is in some way united to me as my body is.

Incarnation—the central ‘given’ of metaphysic. Incarnation is the situation of a being who appears to himself to be, as it were, bound to a body. This ‘given’ is opaque to itself: opposition to the cogito. Of this body, I can neither say that it is I, nor that it is not I, nor that it is for me (object). The opposition of subject and object is found to be transcended from the start. Inversely, if I start from the opposition, treating it as fundamental, I shall find no trick of logical sleight of hand which lets me get back to the original experience, which will inevitably be either eluded or (which comes to the same thing) refused. We are not to object that this experience shews a contingent character: in point of fact, all metaphysical enquiry requires a starting-point of this kind. It can only start from a situation which is mirrored but cannot be understood.

Inquire if incarnation is a fact; it does not seem so to me, it is the ‘given’ starting from which a fact is possible (which is not true of the cogito).

A fundamental predicament which cannot be in a strict sense mastered or analysed. It is exactly this impossibility which is being stated when I declare, confusedly, that I am my body; i.e. I cannot quite treat myself as a term distinct from my body, a term which would be in a definable connection with it. As I have said else-where, the moment I treat my body as an object of scientific know-ledge, I banish myself to infinity.

This is the reason why I cannot think of my death, but only of the standstill of that machine (illam, not banc). It would perhaps be more accurate to say that I cannot anticipate my death, that is, I cannot ask myself what will become of me when the machine is no longer working.3

[1] This paper was never delivered.

[2] It is thought of, but it is never resolved. The opacity of the world is in a certain sense insoluble. The link between opacity and Meinbeit. My idea is opaque to me personally in so far as it is mine. We think of it as an adherence. (Note written Feb. 24th, 1929.)

[3] ‘To be involved.’ (idée d’un engagement) Try to shew in what sense this implies the impossibility (or absolute non-validity of my representing my death. In trying to think of my death I break the rules of the game. But it is radically illegitimate to convert this impossibility into a dogmatic negation. (Note written Feb. 24th, 1929.)

It is evident that this whole train of thought is at the root of le Gouvernail: the first notes on the theme of le Gouvernail were composed a few days after these. (Note written April 13th, 1934.)

Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, pages 10-12

The reader should not be afraid of converting this level of discussion to everyday life and everyday slang. For example, when Marcel uses phrases like, “I banish myself to infinity” that should resonate with phrases like “flipping out.”

Take this example from Kierkegaard. There’s a book-seller in Copenhagen and he greets a customer who has just entered his shop. The book-seller turns to his wife and says, “It is I who am speaking, isn’t it?” Kierkegaard’s book-seller seems to have “banished himself” and cannot return.