I was rereading and thinking about Heidegger in preparation for Zohar Atkins’ salon on Heidegger and the meaning of life and there were a couple points that piqued my interest.
First, was his distinction between what we might call the flow state and interruptions in ordinary consciousness. Second, was Heidegger’s distinction between calculative and meditative thinking and it’s implications for being human and for healing.
Interruptions in the Ordinary Flow of Consciousness
Heidegger suggests that we regularly encounter entities (read: equipment) that are used for specific tasks like cooking, building, sitting, etc. Our closest relationship to the equipment is when we are simply using it without thinking, what he calls readiness-to-hand.
The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’. (Being and Time, 98)
When we are engaging in some sort of activity without any problems we have no conscious experience of the equipment as independent objects. A carpenter doesn’t look at his hammer and think about what the hammer is and what it is for before using it to hammer a nail. He simply picks it up and uses it accordingly.
There is also something Heidegger calls un-readiness-to-hand. This occurs when an activity is disturbed by something being broken, being discovered as missing, or being in the way. The equipment is no longer phenomenologically transparent. We have conscious experience of it. One might seamlessly grab a hammer to hammer a nail into a piece of wood without thought. However, if the hammer is misplaced or if it breaks the hammer is brought into your awareness as malfunctioning. The flow state is interrupted.
Life functions in a similar way. We might be functioning in a ready-at-hand state–going through the motions of daily life, without consciously thinking about the “fundamental questions” as Heidegger names them. These function as a part of what Heidegger terms “meditative thinking”.
Meditative Thinking as Being Human
Meditative thinking is placed in juxtaposition with calculative thinking. It is a type of thinking that is deeper, slower, and a far more difficult thinking that is consistently confronting us with the most fundamental questions about ourselves and existence. We’ve gotten substantially better at calculative thinking as a species (thinking associated with technology, rushing from one topic to the next, hot takes, etc.). For Heidegger though, the human being “is a thinking, that is, a meditating being” (Discourse on Thinking, 47). If humans were to stop thinking meditatively at all, then we would have forgotten the very essence of what it means to be human (Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics?, 32-33). It is about having and cultivating an openness to the mystery of Being and a free relation to it that allows the mystery of Being to reveal itself. Truth is open and un-concealing. It is revealing. Philosophy is meant to cultivate meditative thinking–it is a way of being, a way of life as Pierre Hadot suggests.
Zohar Atkins raises some interesting questions:
Why do we question? Because the world is dynamic and forces us to ask all kinds of things. We can answer technical questions, but never satisfactorily the question, Why am I here.
Something broke when we were kids and we discovered the world could be different. We learned to use a shoe for a hammer that was missing. We learned that rain doesn’t come just because we ask for it.
Each time our expectations broke (trauma, surprise), we became philosophical, contemplative. For people for whom the world is good enough, no need to question, but also no awe, no higher consciousness. Pain is the gateway to insight. Philosophy begins with “wo(u)nder”
Breaks from our expectations jolts us from being ready-at-hand to un-ready-at-hand. Trauma, one potential cause of the break, forces the individual into a two-choice bind. One can become fixated, that is-in Shoham’s terms, a vulnerability that causes a defensive flight to an earlier developmental phase, a defense mechanism. Or one can become more open, and remain true to themselves in a Heideggerian sense–a facet that is central to being human for him.
Truth as Unconcealing as Healing
Being in the world as a human consists of an “attunement” to and openness to the world. We are untrue when we assimilate into the masses or if we close ourselves off to the recognition of our facticity and thrownness. In other words, we are untrue if we conceal ourselves. Being authentic is to live in constant discovery of the mysteries of being instead of concealing the mystery. We must allow being to unfold and unconceal itself. To be untrue is to conceal and not allow another being to disclose itself freely. One could say that truth is the antidote to trauma, untruth, or concealment.
Broken expectations of ourselves, the world, or other people reveal the world as it is, so in one sense reveal the truth of the world. Our expectations concealed the openness of being. On the other hand, the hurt of the broken expectation also can conceal. It can either encourage calculative thinking, a Bayesian updating of our priors, or it can promote meditative thinking–an attunement to the fundamental questions of what it means to be human and an acceptance of the world-as-being—as something that has its own truth to reveal if we allow it to, healing both ourselves and our expectations and the world at large. Philosophy then, or cultivating meditative thinking, is medicine.