Shadowing Practice: Husserl, Heidegger & Existentialism - Hubert Dreyfus & Bryan Magee (1987) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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One philosopher active earlier in this century who was much more

important than his reputation outside the subject might suggest was the German Hussle,

Edmund Hussle, who was born in 1859 and died in 1938.

His acknowledged masterpiece is a book called Logical Investigations, published in two volumes in 1900 and 1901,

and perhaps I might also mention a book called Ideas, published in 1913.

Charles' basic approach went something like this.

For each one of us, there is one thing that is indubitably certain, and that is our own conscious awareness.

Therefore, if we want to build our knowledge of reality on rock-solid foundations, that is the place from which to start.

But as soon as we analyze it, we find that awareness has to be awareness of something.

Consciousness must be consciousness of something.

And we are never able to distinguish in experience between states of consciousness and objects of consciousness.

In actual experience, however careful the analysis, they seem to be the same thing.

Now skeptics down the ages have argued

that we can never know whether the objects of our consciousness

have a separate existence from us independent of our experience of them.

conceded that but insisted that they do indubitably exist as objects of consciousness for us, whatever other status they may have or lack,

and therefore that we have direct access to them as objects of consciousness

and can investigate them as such without making any assumptions about their independent existence.

Thus he launched a school of philosophy devoted to the systematic analysis of consciousness and its objects.

This school is known as phenomenology, and one use of

that word phenomenology continues to this day to refer to whatever

is given in direct experience regardless of any question of independent existence.

And our direct experience, of course, encompasses not only material objects but all sorts of abstract things such as music, mathematics, not to mention our own thoughts,

pains, emotions, memories, and so on.

One of Husserl's followers, Heidegger, struck out on his own with a book called Being and Time, published in 1927 and dedicated to Husserl.

This book became the fountainhead of modern existentialism, though Heidegger never actually liked having the label existentialist attached to him.

He went on to produce a great deal more philosophical work in the course of a long life.

He died in 1976 at the age of 86, and much of that work was influential, but Being and Time remains his masterpiece.

Later existentialist thinkers, especially Jean-Paul Sartre,

became better known to the general public and did more to propagate existentialist ideas outside the confines of academic philosophy,

but Heidegger remained very much their master.

The very title of Sartre's main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, published in 1943,

is a direct allusion to Heidegger's Being and Time.

So here we have a clear-cut line of philosophical development, which we're going to discuss in this program, from Hussle to Heidegger and Heidegger to Sartre.

And perhaps we might mention one other figure, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who published an important book in 1945 called The Phenomenology of Perception.

He and Sartre were great friends at one time.

Together they founded and edited the journal Les Temps Modernes.

But Merleau-Ponty died early at the age of only 53 in 1961.

Here to discuss this major tradition within modern philosophy is Professor Hubert Dreyfus of the University of California at Berkeley.

Professor Dreyfus, I said at the beginning of that introduction to our discussion

that Husserl is probably not well known outside academic philosophy.

How could does it come about?

Can you explain this for us, how somebody so little known generally is of such enormous importance inside philosophy?

Well, it was Husserl's own idea that he was important that helped, and he was important in a reactionary kind of way.

That is, he culminated a whole philosophical tradition,

the Cartesian tradition that thinks of man's relationship to the world in terms of subjects knowing objects.

In fact, Husserl thought he culminated the whole philosophical tradition from Plato on

because he had discovered the indubitable basis on which one could ground an understanding of everything.

Setting himself up like that, he's similar to the way Hegel set himself up as the culmination of idealism

so that Kierkegaard could rebel against Hegel in the name of the beginning of existentialism and Marx in the name of materialism.

So Husserl sets himself up as the culmination of Cartesianism.

His last book is called Cartesian Meditations.

And then other thinkers like Heidegger, like Merleau-Ponty, can understand what the tradition really comes to and then they can rebel against it.

Now I try to give a sort of lightning sketch in my opening words,

of Husserl's basic approach, but I think we need something a bit more substantial than that to get our teeth into.

Can you fill that out a bit?

Yes, Husserl's basic idea was that the mind is always directed toward objects under some aspect.

So I am perceiving that table roughly, I'm perceiving that as a table, and from the top I can remember it, I have beliefs about it,

I could have desires about it.

All my mental content is directed, and Husserl thought that was in fact what the essence of the mind.

The mind and nothing else in the universe has this kind of directedness toward something outside of it, other than it.

And there is a mystery here, isn't there, how, for example, if I think about astronomical questions, how events inside my head can relate to distant galaxies.

Right.

thought that was a wunderbar phenomenon, and he was ready to devote his life to trying to understand it,

and his way of understanding it was to say there must be some kind of content in the mind

that accounted for this aboutness or directedness.

The aboutness or directedness is called technically intentionality in the tradition, and not because it has to do with our intentions, but because it has to do with this directedness,

and he said there was something which he called intentional content in the mind, which was sort of like a description of reality.

And it was by virtue of that description that I could perceive or remember this table under some aspect.

Now, you said earlier that thinkers like Heidegger reacted against this.

How did they react?

Well, at first we should say what Husserl thought he got out of this.

He got out of it an amazing finished edifice that was so impressive that one would naturally want to react against it.

He thought, and quite rightly, that it didn't matter whether there was a table there or not.

That is, it didn't matter to his philosophy.

He could just bracket the table.

In fact, he could bracket the whole world.

All he needed to study was the fact that he took it that there was a table there.

He performed what he called the phenomenological reduction.

He reflected on his own intentional content.

And what was special about that, according to him, was he had an indubitable basis to start from.

It wasn't just that he had some kind of evidence that he took that to be a table.

As he put it, he had indubitable evidence that he had himself produced.

Taking it to be a table was just taking it to be a table.

He couldn't be wrong about that.

Secondly, he had absolute grounding because I couldn't experience anything.

Music, other people, tables, galaxies, as you mentioned, I couldn't experience anything at all except by virtue of my directed mental content.

So he thought he had discovered the indubitable foundation, which is the condition of the possibility of our being able to encounter anything.

And he found it in this relation of subjects directed toward objects.

Now, that is, as you say, the culmination of a whole tradition of philosophy, stemming at least from Descartes,

if not from before, of seeing man's situation as that of a subject confronted by objects.

Now it's that that really Heidegger reacted against.

That's right.

That that Cartesian tradition became so clear, and in a certain way so persuasive in Husserl,

that Heidegger was driven to see whether that really was the true description of the phenomena,

because Husserl kept saying we must go to the things themselves and let them show themselves as they are in themselves.

And when Heidegger actually looked at the way human beings are related to the world, he found that it wasn't as subjects related to objects at all,

that awareness and consciousness didn't play any role.

Now that seems very strange.

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How could it be?

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Well, he took as his example, and he was good at going to simple examples, hammering.

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When an expert carpenter is simply hammering, if the hammer is working well and he's a master at what he's doing, the hammer becomes transparent for him.

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It isn't as if he's a subject contemplating the hammer.

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Maybe he's paying attention to the nails, but if the nails are going in well and he's really good and he's been doing it all day, he doesn't even have to pay attention to that.

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He can think about lunch or he can talk to some fellow carpenter

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and everything is going on with what I would call transparent coping.

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Heidegger calls that the ready to hand.

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When you look at our ready-to-hand relation to things, you just don't find subjects contemplating objects.

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This is such a contrast with the traditional approach to philosophy that I think it's worth going over it again, perhaps in slightly different terms.

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That from Descartes onwards, philosophers had thought of the human being as a subject relating to objects.

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And therefore, because of that, the central philosophical problems were seen to be how do we as subject have knowledge of these objects?

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And the central problems to which philosophers address themselves were about perception, about whether we have any certain knowledge at all, if so, how we got it,

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how we knew we had it, and so on.

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Now, Heidegger isn't saying that these problems don't exist, but what he's saying is that this is not what is central to the human situation.

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We aren't, as it were, separate subjects looking through some invisible plate glass window at an objective reality

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which is out there and to which we try to relate or of which we try to get knowledge.

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We are, from the beginning, in amongst it all.

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We are in there in the world, so to speak, coping with it so that we are not primarily observing

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or knowing beings at all in the way that traditional philosophers have treated us as being.

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We're coping beings, or even he might have been inclined to say, we are being beings.

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And it's from there that we start.

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That's right.

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It's a relationship of, for instance, as Gilbert Ryle put it when he reviewed Being in Time,

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he reviewed both Being in Time and Husserl's logical investigations.

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He thought they were both good, but he thought Heidegger was really on to something interesting.

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Ryle distinguished knowing that, which is what the tradition had always been interested from knowing how, which is what he took Heidegger to be interested in.

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And that isn't just to claim the primacy of practical activity, though that's radical enough.

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The pragmatists have claimed that too.

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It was to have an analysis of practical activity that didn't need to bring in mental content,

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like desiring, believing, following a rule.

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You could try to explain hammering as in more mental activity.

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But Heidegger said if you really observe it, Or to take another of his favorite examples, he said to his students, when you come into the classroom, you must turn the doorknob.

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But you don't observe the doorknob, believe that you have to turn the doorknob to get in, try to turn the doorknob.

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All you do, all we know is here you are in the classroom, and you couldn't have got here without turning the doorknob.

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You have no memory of it, because the whole activity was so transparent, it didn't even pass through consciousness.

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A driver has the same experience shifting from first to second.

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They do a lot of fancy footwork with the clutch, but they can be carrying on a deep philosophical conversation.

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It doesn't even have to be conscious.

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Although these examples are mundane and trivial, what they actually illustrate is of enormous importance, isn't it?

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Because what they show is that our conscious act, or even that is begging the question,

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that our activity is not characteristically determined by conscious choices and aware states of mind at all.

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And that is of great significance.

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Dr. That's right.

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Now, Heidegger didn't want to deny that there was a place for that.

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He said in his language, first and foremost, we are coping beings already involved in the world.

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But if something should go wrong, for instance, in the hammer case, if the hammer is too heavy, then I will notice this aspect too heavy,

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and I'll become a problem solver like the tradition thought human beings were.

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I'll become a rational animal, and I will say, for this task, it's too heavy if I take another hammer, then it might work better.

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The kind of Aristotelian practical syllogism.

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All of that has its place.

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The same if the door knob sticks.

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Then I have to try to turn the door knob.

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Heidegger calls that the unready to hand.

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And he thinks that's the level, I presume, he thinks that's the level at which Husserl came into the story.

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One crucial step too late.

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And there is another level while we're at it, which Heidegger calls the present at hand, which is important too.

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We can get in a stance of just staring at the object.

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If the hammer, if the head flies off the hammer, for instance, or if the nails are missing, or if we're just feeling in a relaxed attitude of wonder,

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we can see the hammer as a wooden shank with an iron blob on the end.

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Then we see it as a object with properties.

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It weighs, say, one pound.

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That's the level, too, that philosophers have always studied.

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There's a whole logic of subjects and predicates discussed in what's called the predicate calculus.

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That has its place, Heidegger would say, But that's a third level down the line after you left out the everyday coping

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and even left out the practical situation in which things can break down because that hammer isn't even a broken down hammer.

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It's just a piece of wood with metal on the end.

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But that's important too, Heidegger would say, because it's by relating those kinds of predicates with laws that we get science and theory.

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And Heidegger thought science and theory was very important.

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He has what he calls an existential account of science in being and time.

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But what's important to him is to realize

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that to get to these predicates

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and laws of science you have to leave out the whole level of practical coping in the world.

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So you shouldn't have the idea that scientific theory

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that can explain causal things very well could ever explain the everyday meaningful world of significance that Heidegger wants to talk about.

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Dr. That's what he's saying in effect is that we only become conscious of things in in most cases, when something goes wrong, when there's a specific problem.

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But that for most of the time, we're kind of moving in a medium, we're swimming in a medium, that we take utterly for granted, and are not conscious of,

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and don't direct our attention to at all.

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And one consequence of that is, that unlike traditional philosophers, he sees the world as being, not as being something that's inferred.

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I mean, the traditional philosopher talks as if, what I have access to is my mind with its contents,

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and from these contents I infer the existence of a world external to myself." And Heidegger is saying,

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no, no, that is not actually what the situation is at all.

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The world is not something I infer.

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I start with it and in it.

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Is that not fair?

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That's right.

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The way he put it was that philosophers since Descartes had been trying to prove the existence of the external world,

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and Kant said that it was a scandal that no one had successfully proved the existence of the external world.

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Heidegger says in Being and Time, it's a scandal that people are trying to prove the existence of the external world, as if we were stuck with this internal world and couldn't get out,

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whereas we are, as he puts it, being in the world.

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I think I should explain that a little bit further, because we've only talked so far about the directedness being not the kind of mental directedness that Husserl was interested in.

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Any particular directedness of my mind toward the hammer I'm using, of me, not my mind, toward the hammer, of using this hammer, takes place on a whole background,

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which he calls the world.

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The hammer only makes sense in terms of nails and wood and houses and other totality of equipment, which he calls significance.

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And my skill of hammering only makes sense in a whole background of other skills, of standing and moving and wearing my clothes and talking and so forth.

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So it's on the background of the world and my capacities for being in that world, or really being of that world,

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you might say, that anything gets encountered at all.

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So as you say, you can't call that into question.

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And this launches him into forming a view of human beings

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which is radically different from the traditional philosophers' view of human beings, isn't it?

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Can you begin to tell us what that is?

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Well, certainly he can't talk about subjects or persons or minds,

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and he needs a completely new word to even talk about this ongoing activity on a background.

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And he chooses brilliantly to use, as a word, Dasein.

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In German, Dasein means simply existence.

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Like you earn your daily bread, you would earn your daily Dasein.

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But it also means, if you take it apart, being the there.

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And so he thinks that this activity of human being, which he sees as an activity, is an activity of being the there,

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which for him is being the situation in which this coping is going on.

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So when I'm driving, if we're looking at that aspect of me which is coping,

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not at my body, it's just identical with the driving situation.

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so that being the there is actively being a situation in which directed activity is going on.

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And that's a completely new understanding of what it is to be a human being.

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And Dasein also gives him the possibility, as we have with the word human being, of either talking about that activity,

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human being, or to talk about a human being, an instance of that activity.

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And he does both.

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And he actually offers us an analysis, doesn't he, of this particular kind of being or way of being that we are,

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which relates it directly to time, and hence the title of his most famous book.

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Can you explain what that relationship is?

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Yes, we better spell that out.

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The relationship of, another word that's handy here, this relationship of opening a clearing, because another word for the situation is a clearing.

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there is this activity of clearing this clearing, which we are.

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And he says this activity has a three-fold structure.

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First, he says, we, that is, Dasein has what he calls disposition, the best example of which is moods.

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That is, thanks to a basic characteristic of us, we are, things show up for us as mattering,

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as threatening or attractive or stubborn or useful and so forth or just important in some way.

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Or important in some way.

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And the tradition has generally overlooked that, he thinks, because it doesn't easily fall into these knowing interests.

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But he says, of course, rightly, that it's very important that things show up for us as mattering.

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And they do because we have this basic characteristic called disposition.

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And we're always already in a situation, and it always already matters some way.

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We don't ever get behind our moods and start from no mood and then step into one.

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The second structure he calls discourse, which is a little bit misleading, but it grows out of a kind of interesting pun.

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That is, he says, the world is always articulated.

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That is, right now, everything is already laid out in this, what he calls, context of significance,

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all pieces of equipment fitting together so that we can use any particular one.

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And I'm always articulating the world, that is, breaking it up at its joints by using a piece of equipment.

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If I take out of this total, which he calls a referential or a totality of significance, a hammer, I can articulate it by hammering with it as a hammer

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or I can articulate it as a nail puller under different aspects.

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And then, of course, I can talk about what I'm doing.

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I can say, this nail is hard to pull.

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Then I will be articulating even further what I had already articulated.

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That's constantly going on.

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That's called discourse.

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And the third aspect, which has been implicit in what we've been saying, is that Dasein is always pressing into the future.

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If I'm hammering with a nail, it's in order to, say,

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repair a house, in order to do my job as homemaker, say, or carpenter.

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Dasein, in Heidegger's talk, is using equipment in order to pursue some goal, which he calls towards which,

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for the sake of some ultimate, let's say, life plan, which he calls a for the sake of.

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Now, it's important not to speak about goals and life plans.

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His funny language is necessary, because a goal is what you have in your mind, or a life plan.

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Whereas, he just says Dasein is always oriented toward the future, doing something now in order to get to do something later,

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and that all of this makes sense as oriented toward something which is what that person is up to,

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and that threefold structure, which is being already in amidst things and always ahead of itself,

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pressing into the future, is, as you let the cat out of the bag, the structure of time.

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In the second half of being in time, lo and behold, the threefold structure of being in the world

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or being in a situation turns out to be mappable on past, present, and future.

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And he ends up saying almost that being is time, doesn't it?

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That's right.

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Well, Dasein, anyway.

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We are embodied time in some way.

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That's right.

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Dasein, in his language, is care, and the structure of care is temporality.

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Yeah.

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Now, we've talked up to this point just about the individual human being,

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what Heidegger calls Dasein, and its position in the world, and all these various aspects of it that you've been spelling out.

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But of course, Heidegger doesn't suppose that he's the only being that exists,

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and you and I when we talk about this don't suppose that you or I are the only beings that exist.

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The world is full of people.

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How do all the other people or the other Darseins come into this picture?

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Well, it's very important that they come in from the very start.

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In fact, it's a big problem for Cartesians like Descartes and Husserl.

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They have the same problem about other minds that they have about the external world because they start with an individual, autonomous, isolated subject.

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Heidegger starts in an entirely different way, closer to the phenomena and saving him from this problem.

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He says, we all already do what anyone does.

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I hammer with a hammer because one hammers with hammers in our culture.

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I eat the way one eats.

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I pronounce words the way one pronounces words in our country.

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And you have to or you wouldn't be understood.

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That's right.

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In fact, people subtly, constantly, people can't stand distance, Heidegger says,

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meaning people subtly lead other people to correct their pronunciation or whatever, and they don't have to be coerced into it.

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People are eager not to deviate from the norm.

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It's just a basic fact about human beings.

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So we grow up, Heidegger doesn't talk genetically, but we could say it helpfully,

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a baby gets socialized into a bunch of shared public practices

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and starts doing what one does and saying what one says

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and at that point this baby has Dasein in it to talk like Heidegger

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and of course this one doesn't mean just the masses as

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Heidegger says in one point we flee from the crowd the way one flees from the crowd

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but even when we flee from the crowd we do it the way one does it

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so finally Heidegger says about Dasein that normally Dasein is what it does

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or one is what one does or Dasein's self is a one self.

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If one takes together various aspects of what you've said up to this point, they could be rather disquieting.

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I mean you've just said that one does what one does

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and lives the way one does because that is how we are socially conditioned

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and we have to do it for the most part.

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You were saying much earlier that Heidegger rejected the idea

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that most of our activity is directed by conscious choices and decisions and mentally aware reflection.

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If you take these things together, doesn't that rather reduce the human agent to a sort zombie,

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I mean somebody who is merely responding to pressures on him from outside in an unreflecting way.

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Dr. That's quite right.

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This anyone, this self that just does what one does in an unreflective way sounds pretty much like a very zombie-like character.

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But Heidegger is trying to do things the other way around.

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He now will show you how we can get free individuals to crystallize out of this rather amorphous public us.

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And that's the subject of Division II of being in time, the subject of authenticity, the part of Heidegger which is really existentialist.

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So far we haven't said anything very existentialist.

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But in Division II, Heidegger talks about guilt and about death, which I don't have time to go into here.

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But guilt and death all turn out to be versions of anxiety, which we better talk about for a minute.

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A Dasein, according to Heidegger,

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any Dasein, anywhere, is always dimly aware that the way the world is, is ungrounded.

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By that I mean there's no reason why one has to do things this way.

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It isn't because it's rational to do things this way.

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It isn't because God ordered us to do things this way.

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It isn't because human nature requires we do them this way.

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Heidegger is, as an existentialist says at one point, that the essence of Dasein is its existence, meaning there is no human nature.

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We are what we take ourselves to be, how we interpret ourselves in our practices.

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But that is rather unsettling, and that's exactly his word for it.

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Anxiety is the experience, is the disposition,

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that is our response to the fundamentally unsettling character of being Dasein.

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And the question then is, what do you do about it?

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Well, what you have to do about it is you can either flee it,

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in which case one goes back to the kind of conformity which is required just to be intelligible.

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I have to do what one does and talk like one talks.

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But you become a conformist.

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You try even more to shape up to the norms, to pronounce things the right way and dress the right way and everything.

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That's how you could flee into inauthenticity.

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Literally, that would mean something like disowning what it is to be Dasein.

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Or you can own up to what it is to be Dasein.

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To own up means, for Heidegger, to hold on to anxiety and not flee it.

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And if you do that, you will be catapulted into an entirely different way of being human.

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Now, what you do needn't change, because you only can do what one does, or you just be kooky and insane.

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So you go on doing probably the same thing you did, but how you do it changes completely.

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You no longer expect to get any deep final meaning out of anything.

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So you don't embrace projects with the conviction that now at last this is going to make sense of your life.

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So and you also don't then drop all your projects because they fail to make the ultimate meaning you're looking for.

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As one of my students once said, you are able to stick with things without getting stuck with them.

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In this authentic activity, Heidegger says, you no longer have to respond to what he calls the general situation.

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You can respond to what he calls the unique situation.

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He doesn't give any examples, but I take it to be something like this.

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Take his carpenter that he's always talking about with his hammer.

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When he puts his hammer down for lunch, he could just have his sausages and sauerkraut.

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But if there's beautiful flowers blooming outdoors and he's authentic, He doesn't have to do what a respectable carpenter does.

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He can go out and wander in the flowers.

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But it's important that he can do only what one does.

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He can't take off all his clothes and roll in the flowers.

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One doesn't do that.

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But there's a little space for authenticity.

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Namely, doing the sort of thing that one does

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enables you to respond to the unique situation without concern for respectability and conformity.

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And that kind of life, not trying to get absolute meaning and responding to the current situation makes you an individual,

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Heidegger says, makes you flexible, alive, gay, froh in German, and that is his idea of how one should live.

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Put that way, you make it sound like a sort of philosophy of personal liberation.

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One hears this phrase philosophy of liberation used about a lot of political philosophies, but this is, as it were, an individual liberation philosophy, is it not?

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And it's an existentialist liberation philosophy which makes it the sort of last and strangest liberation philosophy.

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We don't liberate, say, our sexual drives or our repressed classes.

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The liberation comes from realizing that there's no deep truth to liberate, no deep meaning in Dasein.

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Accepting the ungrounded and unsettledness is itself liberate.

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Yeah.

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Now in the whole of this discussion, you've been forced to use some very strange terms like Dasein, and to use ordinary words in some unusual ways.

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And when one reads Being and Time, because everything we've talked about so far is what's contained in Being and Time, the early Heidegger, when one reads this book,

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this vocabulary really does become very difficult to cope with.

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In fact, I think it's one of the most difficult books to read and understand that I ever have read.

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But you've actually, in spite of that difficulty, succeeded in making a lot of these ideas clear.

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Why didn't Heidegger do that?

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Why did he have to be so obscure?

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Well, it's implied in what I did.

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If he could have done what I was just doing, namely using the wrong word and then backing off and using the right word, that probably would have been the best thing to do.

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For instance, I talked about goals and then said, but of course they're not really goals because that's too mental, and life plans but they're not really plans.

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And then I introduced his funny language, the towards which and the for the sake of, and I said we had to use Dasein because we're a way of being but not a mind directed toward things.

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In general, he would say,

371

the whole philosophical tradition has passed over the world and our usual kind of involved coping with the world,

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not only because it's something you don't notice if everything is going well, but also because we have no language for it since we don't need any language for it.

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We need language for how to repair the doorknob and how to get a lighter hammer if the hammer is too heavy.

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But we don't need language to describe the way everything is when it's going transparently well, and the kind of being we are when everything's going transparently well.

375

So Heidegger would say he has to make up a whole new vocabulary for this.

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And once you get in it, it does seem to be the right economical vocabulary, and he uses it rigorously,

377

so that when he's taken up a new word like ready to hand, unready to hand, or present at hand, he sticks to it.

378

So once you get in this language, it's really a very elegant and simple language.

379

Being in Time was presented when it was published as being the first volume of what was to be a two-volume work.

380

But Volume 2 never came out, did it?

381

Because Heidegger, in fact, changed his views, and that made him unable to finish the project.

382

And this change is itself very frequently referred to in the literature about Heidegger.

383

It's called the turn, die Kera, the German word.

384

Now, in what way does the later Heidegger differ from the earlier Heidegger?

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What are the real grounds of the difference?

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Dr. There are a lot of different views of this, and it's not a settled question in Heidegger scholarship.

387

People say he went from a resolute sort of grasping of things to a kind of openness and so forth.

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That's probably true, but I don't think that's the essence of it.

389

There's at one point, I think he says it clearly, where he says that he has changed to thinking being historically,

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and that that's what he wasn't doing before.

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You can see that he wasn't doing it before, because everything I've explained so far was supposed to be about the structure of all human beings, anywhere, anytime.

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Even anxiety was supposed to be what any human being experienced and fled from or faced up to.

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But now Heidegger gets the idea

394

that there's something special about each epoch of our understanding of being

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and that he had been talking only about the modern epoch without realizing it.

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And he begins to try to describe these various epochs.

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For the Greeks, they felt rooted.

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They weren't unsettled.

399

And things showed up for them as natural.

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And they appreciated them.

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And for the Christians, they felt that they were created and that all the things they dealt with were creatures

402

and that they could read God's plan out of the world.

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And for us, we have another understanding of being, an understanding of being where everything is objects for us to control and use,

404

and we're subjects with desires to satisfy.

405

So that these are all different understandings of what it is to be a thing, what it is to be a person, what it is to be an institution.

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Heidegger would say different understandings of what it is to be.

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And if you have a different understanding of what it is to be, then different sort of things show up.

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For the Greeks, heroes showed up and beautiful things in Homer.

409

For the Christians, saints and sinners showed up.

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You can't have any saints and sinners in Greece.

411

They would just be poor people that everybody walked all over.

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You can't have any heroes in the Middle Ages.

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They would be proud people who were damned.

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So different sorts of peoples and things show up.

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And Heidegger now thinks he should talk about the kind of peoples and things that show up in our understanding of being.

416

Now, one of the ways you can point out this change, just for an example, is he thinks anxiety isn't a universal structure, when he gets to later Heidegger thinks this.

417

The Greeks didn't have it, Christians didn't have it.

418

He thinks we have it because we have what he calls a technological, nihilistic understanding of being, and that that is a distressing,

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rootless, anxious-making understanding of being.

420

If he's moving from something which is perennial, or at least which he regards as being a perennial,

421

universal, in human experience, to considering something which he regards as being, as it were, topical to our age,

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and for that reason ephemeral, so that in 200 years' time when we're all dead, this will all be past history and something else will be the case,

423

isn't But is philosophy ceasing to be, concern itself with the permanent and just concerning itself with the superficial?

424

Well, if this were any old culture or even any old stage of our culture, he would say yes, and what he was doing would then be soon passe, as you were saying.

425

But he thinks that this is a very special culture and

426

that we're in a very special stage of this very special culture.

427

It's a special culture for him because we're the only culture that has history.

428

In any culture, events follow one after another, but only in ours does the understanding of being change from the Greek to the Christian to the modern.

429

And that's historicity in Heidegger language.

430

And we happen to stand in a special place in our culture.

431

An understanding of being

432

that started with Plato 2,000 years ago has gone through all sorts of philosophical

433

and practical transformations until it is now finished in Heidegger terms.

434

That means all the philosophical moves have been tried and played out, completed, and now it's done for.

435

It's a sort of pun on finished.

436

He gets this idea from Nietzsche who influenced him a lot.

437

We have reached a stage of planetary technology where we are now taking over the whole planet.

438

Our understanding of being is dominating every understanding of being.

439

And our understanding of being has come to a dead end, which Heidegger calls nihilism.

440

One aspect of the late Heidegger which we haven't touched on and we must, I think, before we move on to the thinkers after Heidegger,

441

is his concern with language.

442

The later Heidegger is not just concerned with language, he's almost obsessed by language, isn't he?

443

Why is that?

444

Well, we're in a way set to see that, because since there's no way the world is in itself, language isn't there to correspond to reality,

445

nor is language there just to be made up arbitrarily.

446

Heidegger a vocabulary or the kind of metaphors one uses, name things into being.

447

When in California somebody said that everybody was laid back, there were already people with hot tubs taking it easy and taking drugs,

448

but now they discovered that that all fitted together and they were laid back, so there was more of it.

449

So language is a marvelously powerful way to change the practices,

450

focus them, and add new practices to Dasein's way of life.

451

So it's the poets, not the philosophers or the priests or the scientists,

452

who are the vanguard of humanity and the hope of some new understanding of being.

453

Dr. Now, I think we've been quite right to devote almost the whole of this discussion to Heidegger,

454

because he is far and away the most important 20th century existentialist philosopher.

455

I did say in the introduction to this discussion that we would touch on others, and I think we must do so now before we bring the discussion to a close.

456

I mentioned specifically Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

457

Let's take them in that order, the chronological order.

458

How would you characterize Sartre's relationship as a philosopher to Heidegger?

459

Well, Sartre starts out as a Husserlian and becomes a phenomenologist, writes a good novel called Nausea,

460

which is a phenomenological description of a world breaking down, but then he read Heidegger and he was converted to what he thought was Heidegger.

461

But he felt he had to fix up Heidegger as a Frenchman and make it Cartesian.

462

So he starts with the individual subject and tries to get

463

and to talk about death and guilt and all the things that Heidegger talks about.

464

But that's a disaster, because if this story that we've been telling is right, that's what Heidegger was trying to free us from.

465

In fact, when I went to visit Heidegger, he had being and nothingness on his desk in German translation and I said, oh, you're reading Sartre?

466

And he said, how can I even begin to read this muck?

467

His word was dreck.

468

And that's pretty strong and I think that's accurate because what happens

469

if you treat Heidegger as if he were talking about subjects is you really push him back to Husserl.

470

It's difficult to believe actually that Sartre will survive as a philosopher at all, though he might survive as a novelist and a playwright.

471

What's your view of Merleau-Ponty?

472

I'm very much more impressed with Merleau-Ponty.

473

I think he's a great philosopher and will survive.

474

His great contribution was to bring in the body as our way of being in the world.

475

There are two big gaps in being in time.

476

One of them is that Heidegger never talks about the body or even about skills or practices.

477

I put all that in to explain the ready-to-hand and the understanding of being.

478

Now, Merleau-Ponty, because he does talk about the body, and it's the body that acquires skills, he answers Sartre for one thing.

479

He says, we're not free.

480

We're restricted by having the same sort of bodies everyone has, and by the fact that what we do becoming habits in our bodies and skills in our bodies,

481

which we're not arbitrarily free to change.

482

And this both answers Sartre, and in a way, oddly enough, Merleau-Ponty answering Sartre, who was like Husserl,

483

reinvents Heidegger, but filling in the gaps.

484

The other gap is perception.

485

Heidegger talks about perception as if it was just staring at things.

486

And that is unfortunate, because it does seem as if we spend a lot of time not only using things, but seeing things.

487

But Merleau-Ponty has an analysis of perception as a embodied activity in which we move to get an optimal grip on things,

488

which makes it more of the ready to hand, thereby completing the Heidegger picture.

489

Now all of the four named philosophers that we've been discussing, Husserl, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,

490

they're all dead, Sartre only recently dead.

491

Do you regard this whole tradition of philosophy that we've been talking about as something that's now closed,

492

or do you regard it as very much an alive and ongoing enterprise?

493

Dr. I think it's very much alive.

494

Even the phenomenology, the Husserl side, which Heidegger was trying to kill off, is very much alive.

495

The Husserl is alive in two ways.

496

One is that if you want to describe the phenomena, what it's like to listen to music, what it's like to have sexual desire.

497

Any phenomenon, Husserl gives you a license to do it and a method for doing it.

498

And we have young philosophers in Britain who are doing precisely that sort of thing now.

499

And in the United States too.

500

The other side of Husserl is, if anything, even more alive and active.

501

Namely, he was interested in the structure of the intentional content of

502

that in the mind that enables us to refer to things.

503

Now there's something called cognitive science, actually trying to investigate empirically the structure of our mental representations, as they would say.

504

And Husserl has laid down the general guidelines that anybody doing that investigation will follow.

505

Or if you're trying to build a mind, as people using computers in artificial intelligence are doing, Husserl is also the father of artificial intelligence.

506

Many of his ideas that the mind follows hierarchies of strict rules are now being cashed out into computer programs.

507

So Husserl's doing fine.

508

Heidegger's doing fine too.

509

Early Heidegger, being in time, is not perhaps as much followed now as it should be.

510

I'm using it, the way I use it is as I've been using it here.

511

If you actually get back to the phenomena of our engaged everyday activity,

512

you can criticize the linguistic analysts who either trust their intuitions or trust our linguistic categories.

513

Heidegger would say, and I think a description of skills shows it, that if you trust our intuitions, you talk always about beliefs,

514

desires, and so forth, and that that's not an adequate description of what's normally going on, it's only a breakdown description.

515

And likewise, we talked about how our language mirrors not the everyday coping, but the breakdown.

516

So there, Heidegger phenomenology gives us a good point for criticizing some unquestioned assumptions of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy.

517

And finally, in Europe now, particularly in France, later Heidegger, is the great father of those who want to,

518

as he already put it, deconstruct the tradition.

519

For instance, Michel Foucault

520

and Jacques Derrida are trying to follow out the Heidegger project

521

of defining exactly what our understanding of being is in order to help us get over it.

522

So I would say that there is hardly any area of intellectual activity these days in

523

which the concerns of these thinkers don't play a large role.

524

Well, thank you very much for that, Professor Dreyfus.

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The Ideas of Chomsky - Bryan Magee & Noam Chomsky (1977)

Daily ConversationUniversity Students

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83 sentences

What You'll Learn

This video helps you build two key speaking skills: explaining complex ideas clearly and maintaining a conversational flow while discussing abstract topics. The dialogue between the speakers involves breaking down philosophical concepts—like Husserl's phenomenology—into accessible language, which trains you to organize thoughts logically. Additionally, the natural back-and-forth teaches you to connect ideas smoothly, a crucial skill for engaging in academic or deep conversations. These skills are perfect for practicing with a shadowing technique, as they require focus on both content and delivery.

Listen For These Sounds

Pay attention to connected speech and reductions that make the conversation sound natural. For example, phrases like "he was important in a reactionary kind of way" often link "in a" to "in'a" (/'ɪnə/). You'll also hear "could does it come about" (from the transcript) as a casual slip, but more importantly, reductions like "that is" becoming "that's" and "they do" sounding like "they'do" (with a slight glide). These sounds are key to mastering real-world English, and a shadowing site can help you mimic them accurately.

Say It Like a Native

To mirror the speakers' rhythm and stress, focus on stressing content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and reducing function words (prepositions, articles). For instance, in "His acknowledged masterpiece is a book called Logical Investigations," stress "acknowledged," "masterpiece," "book," and "Logical Investigations," while softening "His," "is," "a," and "called." The speakers also use pauses before introducing key terms (e.g., "This school is known as phenomenology"), which you can mimic to emphasize new ideas. Practice this with the shadowing technique—repeat the lines immediately after the speakers, matching their pace and stress. Tools like shadowspeak or shadow speak resources can help you refine this, making your speech sound more natural and confident.

Learning English with videos like this one, paired with shadowing practice, is a powerful way to improve both your comprehension and speaking skills. By focusing on the sounds, rhythm, and structure of the dialogue, you'll build the ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity and fluency.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	he's been doing · we've been saying · you've been spelling
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if you do that, you will be
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have argued · have treated · have claimed
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was born · is known · is given

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Husserl, Heidegger & Existentialism - Hubert Dreyfus & Bryan Magee (1987) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Say It Like a Native

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?