The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World. Ľubica Učník

word λόγος, we have already indicated the arena that is the topic of logic: speech in the broadest sense.

      —Martin Heidegger¹

      The ripple effects caused by the eccentric principle, which ushered in a new age more than four hundred years ago, seem to me to have become exceedingly broad and flat; knowledge has advanced to the point of nullifying itself, and man has become so far removed from himself that he no longer catches sight of himself. “Modern man,” that is, man since the renaissance, is fit for the grave.

      —Yorck von Wartenburg²

      In chapter 1, I addressed Edmund Husserl’s critique of the formalization of reasoning, and his insight that the mathematical rendering of nature leads us not only to forsake our responsibility for our epistemological claims but also to forget our responsibility for the world we live in. Husserl argues that knowledge cannot be reduced to technical know-how.³ As I have suggested, Husserl’s critique of the formalization of knowledge is a principal concern throughout his work. In his view, modern knowledge, instead of following the tradition of the ancient Greek, medieval, and Renaissance thinkers—who saw knowledge as “wisdom”—becomes technical expertise. Technicians, by manipulating formal systems, sidestep responsibility for their own achievements because they have forgotten the ground of knowledge. Husserl’s critique of psychologism, anthropologism, and un-reflected-upon epistemological formalization—which he sees as responsible for ushering in the skepticism and relativism of his age—leads him to consider the notion of the life-world. For Husserl the priority of the life-world is not only a background to our everyday understanding, but is also the original ground of scientific knowledge.

      In this chapter, I will consider Martin Heidegger’s work. I will argue that Heidegger is also concerned with the way science frames the experience of the world we live in. Heidegger confronts the predominance of scientific understanding differently throughout the various stages of his thinking, but the idea that science limits, in advance, our experience of being in the world is a recurrent theme. Like Husserl, Heidegger maintains that nature is not “primarily the object of scientific-theoretical understanding” (CT, 16 [23]), but is, first and foremost, the world that we live in. The notion of the world is very different for the two thinkers—and yet, those notions are related.⁴ Heidegger, after all, was privy to Husserl’s investigations of the life-world and to Husserl’s writings that later appeared as Ideas II and III.⁵ However, there are also important differences.

      For Heidegger, in the initial “thrownness” defined by facticity (BT, § 12, 53 [55–56]), our understanding is derived from the age we live in, from tradition. In other words, we are always born (thrown) into the world that was here before we were born and that will be here when we die. Our initial understanding is from others, from our involvement in dealing with things, from our living in the world. Only by questioning the history of thinking⁶ might we be able to go back to the things themselves (CT, 42 [51]) and consider anew the meaning that we inherited from tradition. Human existence is always circumscribed by particular situations, things we encounter, projects we undertake.⁷

      It is important to stress that my aim is not to address the complexity of Heidegger’s work, trace its changes of direction, consider whether late Heidegger is a return to early Heidegger, or whether the famous Kehre occurred, why and when.⁸ In this chapter, I will deal with Heidegger’s themes that specifically relate to his notion of Dasein (the structure of human existence), his notion of truth, and his discussion of the scientific rendering of nature by technoscience, themes that Arendt and Patočka take up, extend, and change.

THE HISTORY OF THINKING: DESTRUCTION

      Destruction means—to open our ears, to make ourselves free for what speaks to us in tradition as the being of being.⁹

      Heidegger’s questioning of the history of thinking, or, as he calls it, destruction, means to begin to unravel the meaning that we have inherited.¹⁰ His method is phenomenological.¹¹ Hans-Georg Gadamer remarks that Heidegger “built on research in intentionality carried out by the phenomenology of Husserl.”¹² For Heidegger, phenomenology is important as a critique of “presuppositions, overlays from the tradition, and hasty questions laden with presumptions” (LQT, § 5, 28 [33]). Heidegger stresses that in Logical Investigations, Husserl makes three groundbreaking discoveries that will eventually show him the way toward phenomenology as we know it. They are: “1) intentionality, 2) categorial intuition, and 3) the original sense of the apriori.”¹³ To extend Heidegger’s attestation to the importance of Husserl’s phenomenological method for his thinking,¹⁴ I will consider the trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking concerning logic, which leads him to reformulate the question of truth, his understanding of meaning, and his realization that a questioner, who lives in the world, is central to a consideration of the constitution of meaning. All these concerns are framed by his misgivings related to the state of modern science¹⁵ and technology.¹⁶

      The centrality of the Being of a questioner leads Heidegger to rethink the facticity of Dasein, framed in terms of a speaking being living in the world. Who is the being for whom the world is always meaningful? The shift from consciousness as the ground for the constitution of meaning, to the questioner for whom the world is already meaningful, guides Heidegger’s transformation of Husserl’s considerations regarding meaning and human understanding of the world. The epistemological problem of the gap between our thinking and things in the world ceases to be important if humans always already live in the world. The world is not a collection of objectively present things that we eventually encounter. Neither can the world be reduced to a bundle of impressions from which we supposedly construct meaningful things through understanding. The world is here and we live among things. Heidegger speaks of the facticity of human beings who find themselves in the world. Prior to all epistemological considerations, the world is the space of meaningful manifestation of things that we encounter in our everyday dealings. The world is the backdrop against which and from which things appear, and from which they eventually disappear by ceasing to be. Yet how is it that we live in an already meaningful world? How can we explain Heidegger’s insistence that living in the world is prior to the problems that modern epistemology regards as primary?

      Heidegger argues that to speak about the world implies that the world is already a horizon where things appear and disappear in turn. It is already opened to humans living there; humans understand things based on their everyday dealings with them. The things given to us are not the things of natural science: objects defined by a theoretical attitude. Living in the world means that things are close or far from us depending on our projects, depending on what we do. We do not measure distances between things; or if we do, this is not our primary encounter with things. A keyboard is right here in front of me, but a jug of coffee is in the kitchen. I have to get up and go there. We use things according to our activities. We touch them, use them, and walk toward or around them.¹⁷ Only when we stop using things and change our attitude toward them do we develop a different point of view. We start looking at things as objectively present and not as a part of our living and dealing with them.

      Similarly, only when we change our attitude and disengage from using things, looking at them apart from our everyday dealings with them, can geometry develop. “Science is the development of this way of merely looking at a thing.”¹⁸ In order for people to be able to produce things that we can all participate in, we need a scale of measurement that can be shared. We invent the specific method for measuring distances between things in the world to develop procedures; for example, for the building of pyramids. However, measuring procedures are practical; they are not yet idealized. Husserl explains that the ancient Greeks developed geometry only by extending measurement techniques and idealizing them.¹⁹

      So, first, we live in the world where we use things. In order to extend our communication with others about the environment around us, we develop measuring procedures. We can use the edge of a table as a standard rule for measurements that others can adopt by replicating it, in order to build and produce things for use. However,