Husserl, Heidegger & Existentialism - Hubert Dreyfus & Bryan Magee (1987)

A philosopher active at the beginning of this century who was much more important than his off-the-top reputation might suggest was the German Edmund Hustle, who was born in 1859 and died in 1938. His recognized masterpiece is a book called Logical Investigations published in two volumes in 1900 and 1901 and perhaps I could also mention a book called ideas published in 1913. The basic approach of Hustle was something like this, for each of us there is one thing that is undoubtedly true and that is our own consciousness, so So, if we want to build our knowledge of reality on a rock-solid foundation, that is the starting point, but as soon as we analyze it we find that consciousness has to be consciousness of something.

Consciousness must be consciousness of something and we are never able to distinguish inexperience between states of Consciousness and the objects of consciousness in actual experience, no matter how careful the analysis, seem to be the same thing now. Skeptics over the centuries have argued that we can never know whether the objects of our consciousness have an existence separate from our own, independent of our experience of them. Russell admitted this, but insisted that they undoubtedly exist as objects of Consciousness for us, independently of any other status they may have or lack, and that we therefore have direct access to them as objects of Consciousness and can investigate them as such without making assumptions. about its independent existence.

Thus he launched a school of philosophy dedicated to the systematic analysis of Consciousness and its objects. This school is known as phenomenology and a use of that word phenomenology continues to this day to refer to everything that occurs in direct experience, independent of any question of independent existence. and our direct experience, of course, encompasses not only material objects but all kinds of abstract things such as music, mathematics, not to mention our own thoughts, pains, emotions, memories, etc. One of Hustle's followers, Heidegger, launched himself on his account with a book called Being and Time. Published in 1927 and dedicated to his soul, this book became the main source of modern

existentialism

, although Heidegger never liked being attributed the label of existentialist, he continued to produce many more philosophical works throughout a long life in the one who died.

He was born 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 Sultra, 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 title itself. Satra's main philosophical work, being a nothing, published in 1943, is a direct allusion to Heidegger's existence at the time, so here we have a clear line of philosophical development that we are going to discuss in this program. from Hustle to Heidegger and from Heidegger to satra and perhaps we could mention another figure Maurice Merlot ponti who published an important book in 1945 called the phenomenology of perception he and satra were great friends at one time together they founded and edited the magazine Li tomoderma but Merlo Ponte died early, at the age of just 53 in 1961.

Here to discuss this important tradition within modern philosophy is Professor Hubert Dreyfuss of the University of California at Berkeley Professor Dreyfuss I said at the beginning of the introduction to our discussion that hustle is probably not well known outside of academic philosophy, how did it come about? Can you explain to us how someone so little known in general is of such enormous importance within philosophy? Well, it was Kosaro's own idea that he was important that helped and was important in a reactionary way, that is, it culminated a whole philosophical tradition, the Cartesian tradition that thinks about man's relationship with the world in terms of subjects who know the objects, in fact, Joseph thought that he had culminated the entire philosophical tradition from Plato onwards because he had discovered the undoubted basis on which an understanding of everything that is established in this way could be based, it is similar to the way in which that Hegel posited himself as the culmination of idealism, so that Kierkegaard could rebel against I in the name of the beginning of

existentialism

and against Marx in the name of materialism. glycerol stands as the culmination of Cartesianism his latest book is titled Cartesian Meditations and then other thinkers like Heidegger like Marlo Ponte cannot understand what the tradition is really about and then they can rebel against it.

Now I tried to give a sort of Flash Sketch in my opening words of Hustle's basic approach, but I think we need something a little more substantial than that to sink our teeth into. Can you fill that in a bit? Yes, the basic idea of ​​visceral was that the mind is always directed towards objects in some aspect. So I am perceiving that table approximately, I am perceiving it as a table and from above I can remember it. I have beliefs about her. I could have wishes on her. All my mental content is directed and Hussarel thought that was indeed the essence.

Of Mind, the mind and nothing else in the universe has this kind of direction towards something external to it and there is a mystery here, isn't there? How, for example, if I think about astronomical questions, how can the events inside my head be related? to distant galaxies, the Right Hussars thought it was a Wonder Bar phenomenon and was ready to dedicate his life to trying to understand it and his way of understanding it was to say that there must be some kind of content in the mind that would explain this approach or The directionality, directionality or directionality is technically called intentionality in the tradition and not because it has to do with our intentions but because it has to do with this directionality and he said that there was something he called intentional content in the mind that was something like a description of reality and it was by virtue of that description that I was able to perceive or remember this table in some aspect now you said before that thinkers like Heideka reacted against this, how did they react well at the beginning? we should say whatever thought came out of this he came out with an amazing, uh finished building, which was so impressive that one would naturally want to react against it, he thought and rightly so, it didn't matter if there was a table there or not, that is, it didn't matter.

For his philosophy, he could simply bracket the table, in fact, he could bracket the entire world, all he needed to study was the fact that he assumed there was a table there, he performed what he called the phenomenological reduction, he reflected on its own intentional content. and what was special about it, according to him, was that he had an indubitable basis to begin with, it was not just that he had some kind of evidence that he took that as a table, as he put it, he had indubitable evidence that he himself had produced taking it as a table he just took it as a table, he couldn't be wrong about that, secondly he was absolutely grounded because he couldn't experience anything, music, other people, tables, galaxies, as you mentioned he couldn't experience anything . at all except by virtue of my directed mental content, then he thought that he had discovered the undoubtable foundation which is the condition of possibility that we can find anything and he found it in this relation of directed subjects to objects now that is like you .

Let's say that the culmination of an entire philosophical tradition that comes at least from Descartes, if not before, of seeing the situation of man is that of a subject confronted by objects now is that Heidegger really reacted against that. It is true that this Cartesian tradition is came back so clearly and so persuasively in the hospital that Heidegger was driven to see if that was really the true description of the phenomena because Joseph kept saying that we must go to the things themselves and let them show themselves as they are in themselves. and when Heidegger really looked at them. in the way human beings relate to the world, he discovered that subjects were not related to objects at all, that consciousness and awareness did not play any role now, that seems very strange, how could it be good ?

He took as an example and was good at resorting to simple examples, uh, hammering, when a skilled carpenter just hammers, if the hammer works well and he is a master at what he does, the hammer becomes transparent to him, it's not like it was a guy contemplating the hammer, perhaps. He's paying attention to the nails, but if the nails are going in right and he's really good and he's been doing it all day, he doesn't even have to pay attention to that, he can think about lunch or he can talk to some fellow carpenter. and it all happens with what I would call transparent coping.

Heidegger calls that being at hand when you look at our relationship to being at hand with things you just don't find subjects contemplating objects. This is a stark contrast to the traditional approach. to philosophy, I think it is worth going over it again, perhaps in slightly different terms: from Descartes onwards philosophers had thought of the human being as a subject related to objects and, therefore, because of that, the problems Central philosophical problems were seen as how as a subject do we have knowledge of these objects and the central problems that the philosophers addressed were about perception, about whether we have any certain knowledge, if so, how did we obtain it, how did we know that we had it? , etc., now Heidegger is not saying that.

These problems do not exist, but what he is saying is that this is not central to the human situation: we are not, so to speak, separate subjects looking through an invisible plate-class window at an objective reality that is out there. and to which we must access. what we try to relate to or what we try to gain knowledge of we are from the beginning starting among everything that we are there in the world, so to speak, dealing with it so that we are not primarily observing or knowing beings at all in the way that we Traditional philosophers treat us as if we are beings that confront each other or he might even have been inclined to say that we are beings and that's where we start from, that's right, it's a relationship of uh, for example, as Gilbert Ryle said. when he reviewed being in time he reviewed both being in time and hospitals logical investigations he thought they were both good but he thought Heidegger was really onto something interesting irritated distinguished knowing that what tradition has always been interested in knowing how that This is what I considered Heidegger to be interested in and it is not just claiming the primacy of practical activity, although that is radical enough as pragmatists have claimed that it was also having an analysis of practical activity that did not need to incorporate mental content such as opportunity.

If you want to believe the following rule, you could try to explain hammering as a more mental activity, but Heidegger said that if you really observe it or take another of his favorite examples, he told his students when you enter the classroom. you must turn the doorknob but you don't look at the doorknob you think you have to turn the doorknob to get in you try to turn the doorknob all you do the only thing we know is that you are here in the living room classes and you couldn't have gotten here without turning the doorknob you don't remember because the whole activity was so transparent that it didn't even pass through Consciousness a driver has the same experience changing from first to second they do a lot of fancy footwork with the clutch but they can be to carry out a deep philosophical conversation it doesn't even have to be conscious, although these examples are mundane and trivial, what they really illustrate is of enormous importance, isn't it because what they show is that our conscious act or even that is raising the question that our activity is not characteristically determined by conscious choices and conscious mental states at all and that is of great importance, but at this point Heidegger did not want to deny that there was a place for that, he said in his language First and foremost, we are beings who face situations that are already involved in the world, but if something goes wrong, for example in the case of the hammer, if the hammer is too heavy, then I will notice that this aspect is too heavy and I will become a problem solver as tradition thought I was human. all beings would become rational animals and I will say that for this task it is too heavy if I take another hammer then the type of Aristotelian practical syllogism might work better all that has its place just like the sticks on the doorknob so I have to try to turning the doorknob, Heidi remembers that it's not ready and thinks that's the level.

I guess she thinks that's the level where the hospital entered the story one crucial step too late and there's another level while we're at it. Heidegger calls the present what is also important: we can simply stay looking at the object if, for example, the head of the hammer comes outflying or if the nails are missing or if we simply feel in a relaxed attitude. From Wonder we can see the Hammer as a wooden handle with an iron ball on the end, then we see it as an object with properties, it weighs let's say a pound, if that is level two that philosophers have always studied, there is a whole logic of themes and predicates discussed in What is called the calculus of predicates has its place, Heidegger would say, but that is a third level after having left aside everyday coping and even left aside the practical situation in which the Things can break because that hammer doesn't work.

Not even a broken hammer is just a piece of wood with metal on the end, but that is also important, Heidegger would say, because by relating those types of predicates to laws we get science and theory and Heidegger. He thought that science and theory were very important. He has what he calls an existential explanation of science in time, but what is important to him is to realize that to get to these predicates and laws of science you have to leave aside the entire level of practical coping. in the world, so you shouldn't get the idea that a scientific theory that can explain causal things very well could ever explain the meaningful everyday world that Heidegger wants to talk about, that's what he's saying in effect is that only We become aware of things in most cases, when something goes wrong, when there is a specific problem, but most of the time we move in a medium, we swim in a medium that we take for granted and of which we are not aware and not directing our attention at all, and a consequence of that is that, unlike traditional philosophers, he sees the world as something that is not inferred.

I mean, the traditional philosopher speaks as if what he had access to was my mind with its contents and from these contents I infer the existence of a world external to me and Heidegger is saying that no, no, that is not really the situation in absolute. The world is not something I infer. I start with that and that's what he said was that philosophers since Descartes had been trying to prove the existence of the external world and Kant said that it was a scandal that no one had successfully proven the existence of the external world. Heidegger says that at the time it is a scandal that people are trying to prove the existence of the external world as if we were trapped in this internal world and couldn't get out while, as he says, we are in the world.

I think I should explain that a little more because we've only so far talked about direction not being the kind of mental direction that Hussarel was interested in, but rather any particular direction of my mind toward the hammer I'm using from my self, not my mind towards the hammer I'm using. This hammer takes place in a whole background he calls the world, the hammer only makes sense in terms of nails, wood, houses and so on, a totality of equipment he calls meaning and my ability to hammer only makes sense in a complete background of other standing and moving skills. and wearing my clothes and talking and so on, so it's in the background of the world and my abilities to be in that world or really be of that world, you could say that anything is found at all, so, as you say, no you can call that. in question and this launches him to form a vision of human beings that is radically different from the vision of human beings that the traditional philosopher has, isn't it now?

Can you start telling us what it is? Well, he certainly can't talk about topics or people or minds or the and and he needs a whole new word to even talk about this ongoing activity in a context and he brilliantly chooses you as the word dazon in German design simply means existence as if You will earn your daily bread. his daily dream and, but it also means that if you take it apart, being there and then he thinks that this activity of the human being that he sees as an activity is an activity of being there, which for him is being the situation in which faces. is happening, so when I drive, if we look at that aspect of me that is coping, not in my body, it is simply identical to the driving situation, so actively being there is a situation in which the directed activity is happening and that is a completely new understanding of what it is to be a human being and Dawson also gives them the possibility, as we have with the word being human, to talk about that activity, a human being, or to talk about a human being, a instance of that activity and he does both and really offers us an analysis of this particular type of being or way of being that we are, which relates it directly to time and hence the title of his most famous book.

Can you explain what that is? relationship is yes, we better spell that the relationship of another word that is useful here this relationship of opening a clearing because another word for the situation is a clearing and there is this activity of clearing this clearing that we are and he says that this activity has a triple structure first, he says we, that is, the design, has what he calls disposition, the best example of this is the states of mind, that is, thanks to a basic characteristic of us, what we are, things are They present us as important, as threatening, attractive, stubborn or useful. and so on, well, just important in some way or important in some way and tradition has generally overlooked that, he thinks that because he doesn't fall easily into these interests of knowledge, but he says, of course, rightly, that it is very important that things are presented.

We are important and they do it because we have this basic characteristic called disposition and we are always in a situation and it always matters in some way, we never fall behind our moods and we start from no mood and then we enter one. He calls the second structure discourse, which is a little misleading but arises from a kind of something interesting, that is, he says that the world is always articulated, that is, right now, everything is already arranged in what he calls context of meaning, all the pieces. of teams fitting together so that we can use any one in particular and I am always articulating the world that is breaking it at its joints using a team if I draw from this total that he calls A referential or a totality of means a hammer.

I can articulate it by hitting it like a hammer or I can articulate it like a nail puller under different aspects and then of course I can talk about what I'm doing. I can say that the snail is difficult to get out, so I will be articulating even more what I had already articulated and that happens constantly, that is called speech and the third aspect that has been implicit in what we have been saying is that the design always presses towards the future if I'm hammering with a nail. is to say repair a house to do my work, as the housewife or the carpenter says Dawson and Heidegger speak of using equipment to pursue a goal to which he calls, towards which, for the sake of some ultimate, say, plan of life, which he calls by the Now it is important not to talk about goals and life plans his funny language is necessary because a goal is what you have in mind or a life plan while he only says that Dawson is always oriented towards the future by doing something now in order to be able to do something later and that all this makes sense as oriented towards something that is what that person is doing and that triple structure that is already in the middle of things and always ahead of itself pressing towards the Future is how you leave it. the cat out of the bag the structure of time in the second half of being in time here is the triple structure of being in the world or being in a situation turns out to be mappable in the past, present and future and ends by saying almost that being is time, that is correct, anyway, we are time incarnate and therefore design in its language is care and the structure of care is temporal, yes, up to this point we have talked only about the individual human being, which Heidegger calls dazine and it is positioned in the world and in all these various aspects of it that you have been explaining but of course Heidegger does not suppose that he is the only being that exists and you and I, when we talk about this, let's not suppose that you or I am the only beings that exist, the world is full of people, how do all the other people or the other darzans come into this picture?

Well, it is very important that they come in from the beginning, in fact, it is a big problem for Cartesians like Descartes and viscerals have the same problem with other Minds that they have with the external world because they start with an individual atom. Anonymous and isolated subject. Heidegger begins a completely different path, approaching the phenomena and saving him from this problem, he says that we all already do what anyone else does. Hammer with a hammer because in our culture we hammer with hammers? Like how you eat. I pronounce the words the way they are pronounced in our country and you have to do it or they wouldn't understand you.

That is correct and in fact people subtly constantly. People can't stand distance, Heidegger says, which means that people subtly guide other people to correct their pronunciation or whatever and don't have to be coerced into doing so. Growing up, Heidegger doesn't speak genetically, but we could put it usefully: a baby becomes socialized into a bunch of shared public practices and starts doing what you do and saying what you say, and at that moment this baby has Dawson. to speak like Heidegger. and of course this does not refer only to the masses as Heidegger says at one point we flee from the crowd as one flees from the crowd but even when we flee from the crowd we do it as one does so finally Heidegger says about dazan, usually dazine It is what one does and or one is what one does or does in oneself, it is not oneself, if one takes together various aspects of what you have set up up to this point, they could be quite disturbing, I mean. you just said that no one does what they do and lives how they do because that's how we are socially conditioned and we have to do it for the most part.

You were saying much earlier that Heidegger rejected the idea that most of our activity is directed by conscious choices and decisions and mentally conscious reflection, if we take these things together, doesn't that reduce the human agent to a kind of zombie? I mean someone who simply responds to external pressures on him in a thoughtless way. That's right, this anyone, this self that just does what you do in a thoughtless way, sounds more like a very zombie-like character, but Heidegger is trying to do things the other way around. He now he will show you how we can free ourselves. individuals crystallize from this rather amorphous public we and that is the theme of the second division of being time the theme of authenticity what is the part of Heidegger that is really existentialist so far we have not said anything very existentialist but in the second division Heidegger talks about guilt and death, something I don't have time to discuss here, but guilt and death turn out to be versions of anxiety that we'd better talk about for a minute.

A Dawson according to Heidegger and he does it anywhere is always vaguely aware that the way the world is has no basis in that, I mean there is no reason why one has to do things this way, no. It is because it is rational to do things this way, it is not because God ordered us to do things this way. It is not because human nature requires us to do them this way. Heidegger is like an existentialist says at one point that the essence of dazzling is its existence, which means that there is no human nature, we are what we consider ourselves to be, how we interpret ourselves in our practices, but that is quite disturbing and that is exactly their word to describe anxiety is the experience is the disposition that is our response to the fundamentally unsettling nature of being dizzy and the question then is what do you do about it, what do you have to do about it.

It is that you can escape from it, in which case one reverts to the kind of conformity that is required simply to be intelligible. I have to do what you do and talk like you talk, but you become conformist, you try even harder to adapt to the Standards to pronounce things the right way and dress the right way and all that is how you could escape towards lack of authenticity, literally, that would mean something like repudiating what should be done or you can recognize what should be recognized. For Heidegger it means holding on to anxiety and not running away from it and if you do you will be catapulted into a completely different way of being human.

Now what you do does not need to change because you can only do what you do, whether you are or just are. eccentric and crazy, then you probably continue doing the same thing you did, but the way you do it changes completely, you no longer expect to get any deep final meaning from anything, so you don't embrace projects with the conviction that now, finally, this is you are going to give meaning to your life, so don't abandon all your projects because they fail to have the ultimate meaning you are looking for, as one of my students once said: you are able to get on with things without getting stuck in the real world. this activityauthentic Heidegger says that you no longer have to respond to what he calls the general situation, you can respond to what he calls the unique situation of the Union, he doesn't give any examples, but I guess it's something like this. take your carpenter that you always talk about with his hammer when you leave him for lunch, he could just stick to his sausages and sauerkraut, but if there are beautiful flowers blooming outdoors and he's the real deal, you don't have to do what a respectable carpenter does .

You can go out and wander among the flowers, but it is important that you can only do what you do, you cannot take off all your clothes and roll among the flowers, you do not do that, but there is a small space for authenticity, that is, doing The kind of things one does allows one to respond to the unique situation without worrying about respectability and conformity and that kind of life that does not try to obtain absolute meaning and responds to the current situation makes one an individual, says Heidegger, makes him flexible, alive, gay from here to there. in German and that's their idea of ​​how one should live, put that way you make it sound like some kind of personal liberation philosophy, but here's this phrase liberation philosophy that's used in a lot of political philosophies, but it's like If it were an individual Liberation philosophy it is not, but it is an existentialist Liberation philosophy that makes it a kind of last and strangest Liberation Philosophy that we do not liberate, say our sexual impulses or our repressed classes.

Liberation comes from realizing that there is no deep truth to free us. The meaning of accepting unfoundedness and uneasiness is in itself liberating. Yes, throughout this entire discussion you have been forced to use some very strange terms like darzeno and to use common words in unusual ways and when one reads be on time because Everything we have talked about so far is what is contained in Being and Time, the first Heidegger. When one reads this book, this vocabulary really becomes very unwieldy. In fact, I think it's one of the hardest books to read. I understand that I have read it at some point, but despite that difficulty you have managed to clarify many of these ideas.

Why didn't Heidegger do that? Why did it have to be so dark? Well, it's implicit in what I did if he could. I've done what I was doing, which is using the wrong word and then going back and using the right word which probably would have been better, for example, I talked about goals and then I said, but of course, they're not actually gold because That It's too mental and life plans, but they're not really plans and then I introduced his funny language towards which and the for the sake of and said we had to use dazine because we are a way of being but not a directed mind.

Towards things in general, I would say that the entire philosophical tradition has passed through the world and our usual way of dealing with the world is not only something that you don't notice if everything is going well, but also because we don't have a language for it. Since we don't need any language, we need language about how to repair the doorknob and how to get a lighter hammer if the hammer is too heavy, but we don't need language to describe what everything is like when it's going well in a transparent way. and the kind of being we are when everything becomes very transparent, then Heidegger would say that he has to invent a whole new vocabulary for this and once you understand it, it seems to be the right economic vocabulary and he uses it rigorously so that when he takes a new word like ready to deliver not ready to deliver or present at hand, you stick to it, so once you get into this language, it's really a very elegant and simple language that was published at the time it was introduced when was published as the first volume of what was to be a two-volume work, but volume 2 never came out, it did so because, in fact, Heidegger changed his views and that prevented him from finishing the project and these changes are mentioned very frequently in literature. about Heidegger it is called the term decala, the German word now how does the later Heidegger differ from the earlier Heidegger what are the real reasons for the difference there are many different points of view on this and it is not a subtle question in the idea the scholarship people he says he got it, he went from a kind of resolute understanding of things to a kind of openness and so on, that's probably true, but I don't think that's the essence, at one point I think he says it clearly where he says he's changed to think historically and that's what I wasn't doing before, you can see I wasn't doing it before because everything I've explained so far was supposed to be about the structure of all human beings everywhere.

At one time it was even assumed that anxiety was what any human being experienced, ran away from or faced, but now Heidegger has the idea that there is something special in each epoch of our understanding of being and that he had been talking only of the modern era. without realizing it and begins to try to describe these different eras, for the Greeks they felt rooted, they were not restless and things appeared natural to them and they appreciated them and for the Christians they felt that they were created creators and that all things with The ones they dealt with were creatures and they could read God's plan in the world and for us we have another understanding of being, an understanding of being where everything is objects that we can control and use and we are subjects with desires. satisfy so that all of these are different interpretations of what it is to be a thing, what it is to be a person, what it is to be an institution.

Heidegger would say different interpretations of what it is to be and if you have a different understanding of what will be then different kinds of things appear for the Greeks. Heroes and beautiful things appeared in Homer, for Christians saints and sinners appeared. You can't have anything since it's in Greece, they would all be poor people. we walk everywhere there cannot be heroes in the Middle Ages, they would be proud people who were doomed, so different types of people and things appear and Heidegger now thinks that he should talk about the type of people and things that appear in our Understanding Being now is one of the ways you can point out this change, just for example, if you believe that anxiety is not a universal structure.

When he gets to later, Heidegger thinks that Greece did not have this anxiety, Christians did not have it. he thinks we have it because we have what he calls a nihilistic technological understanding of being and that that is a distressing, rootless, anxious understanding of being if it is moving from something that is perennial or at least that he considers a perennial Universal in experience. human to consider something that he considers current of our time and for that reason ephemeral, so that in 200 years, when we are all dead, all this will be past history and something else will be the case.

If his philosophy stopped being a concern for the permanent and was simply concerned with the superficial, well, if this were an ancient culture or even an ancient stage of our culture, he would say yes and what he was doing would soon pass into obscurity. history. "I'm saying, but he thinks this is a very special culture and we are in a very special stage of this very special culture. It's a special culture for him because we are the only culture that has history. I mean any cultural event. they follow one after another, but only in ours does the understanding of being change from the Greek to the Christian and the modern and that is its historicity in Heidegger's language and it turns out that we occupy a special place in our culture an understanding of being that began with Plato, two thousand years ago, went through all kinds of philosophical and practical transformations until now it is finished in Heidegger's terms, which means that all the philosophical moves have been tried and executed, and now it is done, it is a kind of game of unfinished words.

Receive this idea from Nieto and from him. Very much we have reached the stage of planetary technology in which we are now taking over the entire planet. Our understanding of being is dominating all understanding of being and our understanding. of being has come to an end. end that Heidegger calls nihilism is an aspect of the later Heidegger that we have not touched on and must think about before moving on to the thinkers after Heidegger is concerned with language, the later Heidegger is not only concerned with language, he is almost obsessed with language, isn't it, why?, we are in a way willing to see that, because since there is no way for the world to be in itself, language is not there to correspond to reality nor is it there simply to be invented arbitrarily.

Heidegger, a vocabulary or the type of metaphors that one uses to name things when in California someone said that everyone was relaxed, that there were already people with jacuzzis taking things easy and doing drugs, but now they discover that everything fit and they went to bed So there was more of that, so language is a wonderfully powerful way to change practices, focus them and add new practices to the Dasan way of life, so it is the poets, not the philosophers, not the priests, not the scientists, who are the vanguard of humanity and the hope for a new understanding of being now.

I think we have been right to develop almost this entire discussion towards Heidegger because he has found a way to be the most important existentialist philosopher of the 20th century, but I already said it in the introduction to this discussion. that we would touch others and I think we should do it now before closing the discussion. What I mentioned specifically Satra and Merlo Ponte, let's take them in that order, the chronological order, how would you characterize Sultra's relationship as a philosopher? For Heidegger, well, he starts out as a hosarian and becomes a phenomenologist, writes a good novel called Nausea, which is a phenomenological description of a world falling apart, but then he read Heidegger and became what he thought Heidegger was, but He felt he had a solution.

Present Heidegger as French and make him Cartesian so that he starts with the individual subject and tries to understand and talk about death and guilt and all the things that Heidegger talks about, but that is a disaster because if this story that we have been telling is correct That's what Heidegger is trying to free us from, in fact, when I went to visit Heidegger, he had being and nothingness on his desk in a German translation and I said, oh, you're reading Sardinian and he He said, how can I even begin to read this crap of yours?

The word was trash and that's pretty strong and I think it's accurate because what happens if you treat Heidegger like he's talking about issues, are you really going back to Hussarel? It's hard to really believe that culture will survive as a philosopher, although he could survive as a novelist and playwright. What is his view of Merlot Ponte? I am much more impressed with mayoralopanti. I think he is a great philosopher and Will Survive his great contribution was incorporating the body as our way of being in the world. There are two big gaps in being in time, one of them is that Heidegger never talks about the body or even about skills or practices.

I put all this to explain being at hand and understanding the being now marilopanti because he does talk about the body. and it is the body that acquires abilities, sart answers for one thing, it says that we are not free, we are restricted by having the same type of body that we all have and by the fact that what we do becomes habits in our bodies and abilities in our bodies that we are not arbitrarily free to change and with this both answers begin and in a rather strange way Merlot Ponte responding to sart that it was like hussarel reinvents Heidegger but filling the gaps the other gap is perception Heidegger talks about perception like it's just looking at things and that's unfortunate because it seems like we spend a lot of time not only using things but also seeing them, but marilopanti has an analysis of perception as an embodied activity in which we move to achieve optimal control of things , which makes it more at hand, therefore, completing the picture of Heidegger now all the four named philosophers we have been discussing, hustle Heidegger Jean-Paul sultra and Merlo Ponte Are all dead Sartor recently dead do you consider the Toda Is this philosophical tradition that we've been talking about something that is now closed or do you consider it a living and ongoing enterprise?

I think it's very alive, even the phenomenology, the visceral side that Heideker was trying to put an end to. very alive the hospital was alive in two ways: one is that if you want to describe the phenomena, what it is like to listen to music, what it is like to have sexual desire, any phenomenon gives you a license to do it and a method to do it. and we have young philosophers in Britain who are doing precisely that sort of thing now and in the United States too. the mind that allows us to refer to things now there is something called cognitive science that actually tries to empirically investigate the structure of our mental representations as they would say and pleceral has established the general guidelines that anyone doing that research will follow or if they are trying to build a mind, like people who use computers doin artificial intelligence, glycerol is also the father of artificial intelligence, many of his ideas that the Mind follows hierarchies of strict rules are now being transferred to computer programs, so cholesterol is doing well.

Heidegger is doing it. well, too early, Heidegger's being in time is perhaps not as common now as it should be. I'm using it as I use it as I've been using it here if you really go back to the phenomena of our engaged in everyday activity, you can criticize linguistic analysts who trust their intuitions or trust our linguistic categories, Heidegger would say, and I think that A description of abilities shows that if you trust our intuitions, you always talk about beliefs, desires, etc., and that that is not an adequate description of what happens usually it is just a description of collapse and in the same way we talk about how our Language reflects not everyday coping but collapse, so Heidegger's phenomenology gives us a good point to criticize some unquestionable assumptions of contemporary Anglo-Americans. philosophy and finally in Europe, now particularly in France, later Heidegger is the great father of those who want, as he already said, to deconstruct tradition, for example, Michelle Foucault and Jacques Derida are trying to follow Heidegger's project of defining Exactly what our understanding of being is is to help us overcome it, so I would say that there is almost no area of ​​intellectual activity today in which the concerns of these thinkers do not play an important role.

Thank you very much for that, Professor Dreyfuss.