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View submission: Spirited Away With Heidegger
I had this big reply written for some DK boi but his post was deleted. Regarding the “breaking open the stone” quote
It’s part of phenomenology, the systematic analysis of phenomena on their own terms while suspending various metaphysical and theoretical commitments to investigate what we can learn about the world without appealing to categories like matter, objects, ideas, spirit, multidimensional strings, immaterial substance, transcendence, etc that cyclically gain and lose support and fall in and out of favor over history and that men of antiquity evidently did not need to build many thousands of years of civilizations before running out of cool new job ideas and tasking the nerds with figuring out what’s really going on behind the scenes of all this stuff we’ve been using in this place we’ve pretty much beaten since there ain’t much else left to do but exploit/kill/rape/eat each other now that we got this agriculture, writing, metalworking, government, stuff down and the gods are pretty much appeased and the barbarians all enslaved.
Turns out you can learn a whole lot about the world with phenomenology, stuff you can’t learn anywhere else, stuff civilization hasn’t talked much about in much of recorded history, and there’s even a good bit of recorded history we’ve been misinterpreting by imposing modern or contemporary philosophical concepts, moral values and ethical theories, social forms and worldviews on ancient authors who had no way of cognizing those terms because at that point in history nearly their entire language was limited to things you can point at.
That particular quote about the stone is really important in fact because it has to do with truth: what that observation leads to is an understanding that there are no insides as such. A theory of truth that claims ‘We just gotta cut the thing and look inside to see its essence’ or similar fails because phenomenologically there is never a revealable inside; and so it is with physics that there can be no discernible fundamental particles or whatever, I mean the world can be simulated with cardboard paper cutouts pretty much. Truth isn’t some essence inside a thing, truth is how a thing relates to other things, what that stone can be used for, what was concealed behind the stone.
Maybe if more people studied phenomenology we would have a greater appreciation for Egyptian art (as those funky 2d limbs akimbo portraits indicate a mastery of phenomenology we lacked the framework to recognize until over a century ago) and we would not have and be wasting so much brainpower looking for a theory of quantum gravity, like what quantum Apple is going to fall on someone’s head or some photon, what metaphor is gonna eureka the formulae, and why is it even needed considering we’ve got a whole lot of working quantum stuff with no quantum gravity? What are we supposed to be able to do with a working theory of quantum gravity? Other than reassure ourselves that gravity is as we have though it is, because if gravity isn’t a universal force that applies at every scale then that would be pretty spooky huh, it would suggest there’s something else going on with gravity and a hella lotta work redrawing models and probably changing a lot of political policy cuz, unless dark energy did it, accepted theory doesn’t really have any room or open questions that could satisfy causing gravity at some scales but not others.
And here’s that materialism/idealism cycle again: Idealist based physics was coming back in fashion until Einstein’s relativity appeared to account for observations that only the Idealists could otherwise explain. I expect the quixotic quest for quantum gravity will play out much like progress in Afghanistan, always six months away, because if physicists throw in the towel on this one the idealists get a seat at the table again.
Phenomenologists aren’t all that interested; call it a universal force of nature or the will of Gaia, gravity is what makes apples fall on your head and stops you from flying away when you flap your arms or drink too much fizzy lifting drink. The end. Your equations work for what you use them for, maybe you have to change them a bit sometime big deal.
If what we call ancient superstition did have phenomenal referents, then we today are quite damned. If not then I’ll need it explained how any non-phenomenal referent arising from superstitious delusions aren’t simply a more refined delusion?
There's nothing here!