Beneath language and concepts we encounter the world of phenomena.
Not seldom we perceive things that we are unable to put in words. And in just a moment’s worth of experience, there are more perceptions and implicit judgments than anyone could describe accurately in hundreds of pages. The parts of our experience that enter into the world of language and conscious thought are vanishingly small.
But concepts and words are not sealed, finalised entities. They evolve over time, need to evolve so that the small fragment that they capture can be the best possible fragment, the one that gives us the best grasp. Static, fixed concepts lose their grip over time as the underlying world changes and the relevant details move to somewhere else. Concepts must always play catch-up, chasing the fluid world.
How can concepts change? Through a questioning of the phenomena. Proper questioning is a relationship between the one who asks and the world, a relationship that enables interrogation beyond what is normally perceived. The results of this interrogation may be used to expand, shrink or alter concepts. Eventually the concepts settle in a new place and the new phenomena can be accessed more easily even without a true questioning. A kind of caching seems to take place.
This kind of questioning is an attitude, an attunement that opens a channel. One purpose of philosophy is to open up and renew this channel, to teach how to question. Real problems begin to appear in Western thinking and teaching at the point where one stops teaching how to question, and focusses on how to answer. The result of deep questioning should not be answers, but the mindset that allows concepts to evolve.
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Fractals appear in many places in biology and ecology, in society, in man-made artefacts. Yet the concept itself is quite new. Fractal phenomena existed for a long time before Benoit Mandelbrot formally investigated them as such. Amazingly, the Greeks, who did so much, do not seem to have had the notion of a fractal.
In the age of software, we can easily understand that fractals simply are the result of a function applied to its own output at different levels of scale. We know what that function is if we have written the software ourselves, but it might not be so easy to know what it might be if a fractal is detected in nature, say.
It seems that today we have instruments for observing all kinds of basically linear things at many different scales: microscopes, telescopes, oscilloscopes and so on. Yet, there is no good instrument for detecting self-similar phenomena that appear at multiple different orders of magnitude. For example, how could I look for fractals in the genome? In the organisation of my local community? What methods should I use to extract the process that generates the self-similarity?
We are very comfortable with thinking about linear quantities and smooth shapes, but applying linear methods to fractal phenomena will often miss the point. This is one of the essential points that we may take from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.
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Some books that I’m reading at the moment. This isn’t to say that I’m likely to finish them all within the near future. Reading should be done at the right time and in the right context. Occasionally it’s natural to finish a book immediately after opening it, but more often I find myself waiting for the right time to get serious about it. Still, reading just a few pages in a dense book can have an enormous effect if the circumstances are beneficial. Moral: in life, one should open more books than one can finish reading.
- Jorge Louis Borges: Fictions
- Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings
- Martin Heidegger: Nietzsche, vol. 1
- Bruno Latour: Science in Action
- Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science (re-reading)
- Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West
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Usually, simple writing is considered good writing. If readers can understand what is meant with little effort, the text is a successful one. This valuation makes sense in a lot of cases.
However, in philosophy, it may well be the case that the more difficult the text is to read, the better it is – provided that the difficulty is essential, not accidental. Essential difficulty would stem from the nature of what the writer is trying to describe. Accidental difficulty would stem from errors such as spelling mistakes. Provided that all the difficulty of a text is essential, a more difficult text would have more to say, more to enlighten us about, since philosophy is suppose to probe unexplored territory.
In Being and Time, Heidegger seeks to analyse and give us a fresh perspective on everyday phenomena, such as guilt, anxiety, time, space, equipment, language and being, perhaps the most “everyday” but least understood concept of all. Maybe precisely because he is trying to describe everyday things while avoiding the everyday conception of them, the language has to be this hard. It is exceedingly demanding, especially at first when the reader is not used to it. And even after the reader has gotten used to it, it demands total dedication to be read. It cannot be read in a laid back or half-hearted way. (For this reason, the book also serves as a useful reset device for the mind, since it forces the reader to pull themselves out of anything that is distracting them at the moment.)
Thus, I can see two valid reasons for Being and Time to be written in its peculiarly difficult style. The subject matter that Heidegger wants to explore is sufficiently novel that no simple path to it exists, and there is also a vast burden of everyday conceptions in the readers’ minds that must be avoided entirely. The difficulty of reading the text coincides in a neat way with the difficulty of acquiring Heidegger’s perspective and concepts. To struggle with difficult sentences and paragraphs in Being and Time is to struggle with Heidegger’s concepts themselves. Or so it appears. The difficulty of reading somebody like Nietzsche is much more indirect: the latter’s aphorisms are smooth and even entertaining, but grasping the whole requires that we actively seek the secret and difficult totality that generates it. This difficulty will not come to us as it does in Heidegger; we must seek it ourselves.
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Fri Intellektuell believes that Deleuze & Guattari, in their Anti-Oedipus, used perverted and sensationally irreverent language in order to intentionally make themselves a bit ridiculous. Having made themselves ridiculous thusly, they do not have to appear ridiculous in their pretention when the scope of their ambition in the book becomes clear. One doesn’t become ridiculous twice.
Heidegger’s Being and Time takes a different approach. The language is amazingly difficult most of the time. The reader is forced to desperately scrape and claw at the text in order to extract meaning. As a rule, Heidegger doesn’t reveal in advance where he is going with the text, other than quite subtly. The result is that as soon as we understand what he is doing, we also understand that he is capable of doing it. He explains the meaning of being to us, but we don’t understand quite how much that means until we have understood his explanation of being. Thus he escapes the trap of appearing pretentious: there is no initial announcement “we’re going to achieve X and Y” followed by an arduous attempt to achieve it. The achievement and the announcement are the same. He usually cannot be accused of promising more than he can deliver. The downside is that a lot of readers will simply not be able to put up with the book, giving up in frustration.
Nietzsche takes a different approach again in his works, promising heaven and earth at the outset, and then taking the reader on an aphoristic odyssey. If the reader has a sensitive stomach, Nietzsche will of course appear extremely pretentious. He doesn’t mind; he doesn’t write for those who can’t tolerate pretention.
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