Philanthro
The idea of a fragmentation of instinct. Instinct leaves room for a kind of freedom and undeterminateness. Only animals or forms of life that have a lack of determination in their behaviour are forced to come up with another solution, either by memory or intelligence, and association. Intelligence are ways in which the organism is trying to make up a loss of the primordial coherene in the world, which only exists in instinctual behaviour.
4th level of life: Praxical intelligence
Praxical intelligence is trying to make up a coherene of the world. Intelligence is problem solving behaviour which for Scheler is productive, creative and spontaneous. A possible solution for a problem appears in a kind of immediate insight to the mind of the organism – without training. Training is not necessary for inventing a solution. A solution pops up in the mind by itself. Scheler also uses the notion of cleverness and cunning.
”A living being behaves intelligently whenever it can act meaningfully without trials or new additions of trials. Such intelligent behaviour must take place over and against new situations, which are neither typical for the species nor for the individual living being concerned. It must also happen suddenly and above all it must occur independently of the number of previous trials.”
He explains intelligence by a sudden reorganisation of the perceptive field. When an animal sees a problem and counts on the problem, the desired object – the object itself – reorganises the perceptual field so that the object becomes the thing to eg. grasp. Things through intelligence become infused by a praxical sense – by a meaning. Wherever there is intelligence there is Bedeutung and Sinn. Everywhere where there is intelligence there must be meaning. All intelligent behaviour is meaningful behaviour in the praxical sense.
Distinction between practical and praxic.
Practical refers to the sphere of morality. Moral behaviour is a behaviour determined by a moral law that decides what you ought to do. Praxis on the contrary is related to the activity. To a behaviour in a non-moral sense. Everything that does not involve moral decisions.
You see things and you know what they are. You have a pre-non-linguistic understanding with which you orient yourself in the world. You see the stick as something to hit with, without necessarily thinking that it is a stick with which you may hit someone with. In the stick is already the associations inherent that it can be used for hitting with.
All of our memories from the past are recomposed into the behaviour that happens now.
We lack some examples in Scheler to make a clear distinction between associative memory and intelligence. It is very difficult to claim that there are animals that only have associative memory without praxical intelligence. Maybe some intelligence always goes hand in hand whenever there is associative memory.
There are two alternative solutions for making up the loss of instinct:
”While the nutritional drive’s goal of a fruit visually lights up to the animal, and sets itself sharply off from the environmental field, and becomes an independent drive-goal, everything in the environment transforms itself in a peculiar manner, especially the visual field lying between animal and fruit. In the visual field, the relationships among objects are so structured that they obtain a relative and abstrat relief, such that things, which are ordinarily just perceived or appear to the anmal as something indifferent, or just as something to bite in, or as something to play with, or as something to sleep on, obtain an abstract dynamic and relational character of ’thing to get fruit’.
The visual field becomes a new orientation, and has a new physionomy. Everything gets a relation in how well it can be something that can access the fruit.
Relief is a notion from gestalt philosophy. Thinking that a certain perceptive field is always the echo and effect of the aims that we bring with ourselves. If I want to give a lecture, I would be astonished if noone turns up to the lecture. We always react to the environment according to the aim we have. This is shared between humans and animals.
Animals don’t have access to the thing-as-thing. They don’t philosophise, they don’t see a substance that has certain properties. Either it is nothing, because it is not interested in the stick at all, because maybe it wants to have sex and not get a fruit, but as soon as the animal wants the fruit, the stick receives a value in virtue of being able to reach the fruit. What Scheler discusses here is similar to Uexkull. This is similar to Uk’s operative image. The sea-anemone appears in a different metaphorical color depending on the praxical sense in which it is needed. The operative image is nothing else than a praxical sense. The sea anemone at once appears as something to crawl into for the hermit crab, it can appear as something eat, and something to protect it against a squid. And each time this behaviour is determined by the goal that is running the animal’s behaviour.
Beyond th essence of life: spirit (Geist)
Animals and humans have in common tradition memory praxical meaning and intelligence.
All 4 layers are shared by human and animals. There is however an essential difference between man and animal, and geist is not necessarily a fifth layer of life. Scheler also calls it Vernunft.
”The new principle is beyond what we call life in the widest meaning of the word. What makes the human being a human is not a new level of life – and it is certainly not just the only form in which life manifests itself: the psyche. The new principle is, forst of all, opposite anything we call life, including life in the human being: it is a genuinely new, essential fact whichh cannot at all be reduced to the ’natural evolution of life’.”
Human beings have an activity or power which is contrary to life. We understand most fully what Geist is when we think of our capacity to commit suicide. We see what the genuine character of spirit is, when we understand someone who kills himself for the sake of higher reason. I don’t wanna life in a country where Trump is president, I kill myself. Many nazi leaders after WWII didn’t wanna live in the world without a third reich, so they killed themselves. Thanks, Till.
Geist is a kind of divine energy that is beyond life because of this. The notion of Vernunft is still too much related with rationality. Or even in the Kantian sense with the moral rationality. The difference between moral and theoretical reason. Reason is the power of the human being to come up with laws, and determine everything according to laws. This is why it is active in theory, science nad moral behaviour. Scheler’s notion of Geist says something more however.
”We wish to suggest another and more comprehensive term for this X. This term also contains the thinking of ideas a specific type of an intuition of primordial phenomena and essential contents, and it encompasses also a specific class of volitional and emotive acts such as kindness, love, repentence, awe, states of wonder, bliss, despair and free decision-making: this more comprehensive term is spirit.”
He refers to a core notion of phenomenology, essence, which in phenomenology are universals that can be seen. Universal determination. The essence of goodness in the platonic sense, we have a glimpse and understanding of, and this is what directs all our evaluative thinking. We can only say so because we have a primordial deep intuition about what goodness is. Geist makes it possible to see and reach out to values.
For Scheler these emotions are deeply anthropomorphic. Animals don’t have spirit. Spirit furthermore belongs to the person as the capacity of thinking of ideas. Animals are not persons, otherwise they would have legal rights. A person is a juridical term. A person has a legal status – you cannot kill a person in the moral sense, it is forbidden.
The person is the center of all these acts and emotions. Only a person, or a spiritual being (geistliches Wesen), can have them. It is independent of life.
”In this threefold structure (read up what the threefold structure is), the person of the human being has to be conceived as the center above the prolarisation of organism and environment.”
In the holistic relationship between the animal and its Umwelt we cannot encounter the spiritual being. It is only because it is beyond life, is not located in any spatial place, that is the reason that it remains disattached. When a human kills himself, they do that from beyond life. It is from the side of transcendence. It is a kind of gaze from nowhere – theory. We can think of the polar structure of the animal and its environment, this shows that we are not located in one place of the polarisation. Animals stay stuck in the configuration however.
”Hence a being having spriti is not tied anymore to its drive and environment, but is non-environmental or world-open (weltoffen). Such a being has ’world’. ”
It can see beyond the immediate needs of his organism, and see the openness of everything. Here world is referred by Scheler to the notion of openness, and this openness is the result of spirit. It means being beyond. They are not restricted to their enviornment, and are not restricted to a certain place of it. They are beyond the center.
Weltoffenheit is a fundamental term of Heidegger.
Scheler is a very christian thinker, though had problems with catholic church and was excommunicated for having too much sex.
The Umwelt is the instinctly enacted environment in which the individual only has a bit of consitutive behaviour based on the organs it has and how they interact with the umwelt. World depends entirely on the person and is made up of ’values’. The world has a different physionomy according to the fact of your profession. If you are a hunter your rifle has a different value and sense than if you are a pacifist. According to the habits and traditions to which you belong, different worlds are present, and these worlds are made up of values.
Scheler would say people can have higher ultimate values according to which you can live and die. Generally you only kill people according to your ideological values for example.
Ultimately humans also have access to objects. Understood in the neutral ontological sense. Ontological is the discourse over what is and what being is. There is a science of being and the science of being takes care of the most important properties insofar as it is. Altough being is not a property, being is still a condition of a thing that needs to be satisfied for it to be just that.
Ontology shows us what an object is. What the fundamental precondition is for something to be an object. Animals don’t have access to the question of what an object is. They only have access to praxically codifed entities. They have access to a multiplicity of praxical senses, but they never grasp the pure structure of the object. Humans have the Ding-und Substanzkategorie.
3 different forms of self-presence: sensitive impulse, instinct, and spirit.
Plants have ecstatic interiority, animals are given to themselves through proprioception and exteroception, but humans have self-consciousness. Humans are able to trascend life. Transcendence is a latin term often referring to God. The ultimate movement beyond everything. By being world-open, humans are trascendent beings.
”Insofar as he is a person, only the human being is able to soar far above his status as a living entity, from a center beyond the spatio-temporal world, make everything the object of his knowledge, including himself. It is in this sense that the human being as spirit is superior to both himself and to the world.”
Scheler is not a gradualist like Uk. But defends man’s extraordinary status. Sonderstellung des Menschen. This means man’s extraordinary position within the cosmos. The animal has a place in its environment, whilst the human being is beyond the environment, from a non-place, a place beyond all places.
Scheler’s anthropology is part of the logocentric tradition of western thought. Seeks to locase the specific trait of humanity in spirit or consciousness. He is very much a symptom of the humanist tradition. He goes in a very progressive manner, but then deviates and becomes incredibly traditionalist.
Heidegger. The human and the animal.
Uk and Heidegger were very close, and loved being nazi buddies. Heidegger made a reading of Uk.
He hates epistemological enquiries, contrary to Husserl. He thinks science is boring.
He reaches out to a lot of important existential topics that young philosophers often think about.
The lecture course comes 2 years after Heideggers Sein und Zeit.
Why did Heidegger have to approach the same topic he did in being and time in a new way. After being and time, he faced some systematic problems with his philosophy. First of all the problem of the world. The world in being and time is considered as a kind of addendum and suplementary product that attaches to the dasein (being-there, existence). Being there is the place in which being appears. A dasein is something that is. This thing that is, the human being, stands in the midst of being. Being is there for humans. Insofar as being is there, things are around us. If things are, that means we need to have a relationship to being as such. Heidegger searches for the sense of being, the meaning of it according to how it appears to us. A first way to begin the enquiry is to ask how the things around us. What does it mean for them to be? There is a chair, but what does the is-copula mean (Copula is latin for the logical connector of being)? So we use being all the time, otherwise we wouldn’t have an understanding of it. We need a primordial access to being to understand what it is that appears to us.
The world appears here in being and time as an addition to dasein. Dasein is something that stands in the midst of being, but the being of dasein is being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is the being of dasein. Insofar as dasein is, it is in the world. Thing that are around us are part and parcel of the world. There needs to be a horison under which things have to appear as what they are, and this is the world. The sense of my world is determined by the sense of what being is for me. We all have an authentic and personal quest to discover what being is for me. As a teenager you ask yourself what you are, what your profession is etc etc. and if you come up with an answer you have your authentic world. The world is the outcome of deep existential questions and answers to those. We are all singular human beings and can only answer our raison d’être by ourselves. The sense of the world is ultimately subjected or determined by the Worum-willen, the for-the-sake-of-which/what. Ultimately if you ask the question of being, you come up with a primordial reason for your existence.
The problem with this interpretation is that the world is something spat out by the existence of dasein, my singular existence, without being more than that. The world has a certain resistancy, and you cannot change the world. It is not in the individual’s own power to change the world as such.
Imagine that you have the carpenter with a perfectly created tool-world, but then there is a psychotic who sees the hammer as something to kill with or defend himself. The coherences of things change from their factual material objects. Things change their meaning if you go from one existence to another. There is for Heidegger the freedom however in principle to always change our direction of life. It is in the person’s freedom to change this.
But the world most have some necessity that constratins dasein. You have to constrain in a way the freedom and necessity of the world.
At the same time, there is this other theme in this lecture course. The whole time after Being and Time, is a very strange period in Heidegger, in which he is not anymore content with describing the world and the structures of existence, but wants to change the world. He wants to institute a new era of philosophy. He wants to change man fundamentally after 1927. In this lecture course, he sometimes brings up these transformations too, to change contemporary man.
The new understanding of the world should not be a supplementary aspect of dasein’s being, but the world should be the horison towards which dasein project itself, not just the result of the dasein’s projection. It remains in a certain way disconnected from dasein. It is that which binds and restricts every project (Entwurf). We project a fundamental sense according to which a whole segment of our life becomes predetermined. If I project myself as a professor, my life takes a certain direction. This is projection. The world then becomes what provides resistancy to the projections of the dasein.
The dasein is thrown into the world, and so the world precedes the dasein.
In Being and Time the dasein always, at every instance, has the capacity to overthrow what came before it, whilst this not so much longer the case in this lecture course.
The world is the manifestedness of beings as such, beings as beings. Wherever there is world there is openness, Offenbarkeit. World is amongst othter things the accessibility (Zugänglichkeit) of beings.
To think something as something, you are in the sphere of a discipline. All sciences consider things only insofar as they can be studied according to scientific method. Every studium is based on a certain reduction of their consideration under a certain sense.
Language is the outcome of our capacity to universally consider things under a certain perspective.
The most general science of all considers things insofar as they are. This is ontology. Heidegger even argues that philosophy is nothing else than the thinking of the ’as’ in the general theory of studium, the fundamental function of the world.
You always consider everything that appears as something, even if you do not know what it fundamentally is. Everything that appears appears as something.
”We attempted to undertake a dual approach: intiialy without orienting ourselves toward any particular metaphysical question, by awakening a fundamental attuenment of our daseion which is to say, in each case, transforming humanity of us human beings into the da-sein in ourselves. We then attempted converesly, without constantly or explicitly referring to this fundamental attunement, yet still tcitly recalling it, to unfold a metaphysical question under the ittle of the problem of world. This in turn occurred by way of the wider detour of a comparative examination using the thesis: the animal is poor in world. This thesis apparently brought us merely negtive results, until we proceeded to an interpretation of the thesis that man is world-forming.”
Attunements are strange emotional affective states in which our entire surrounding is tainted in a certain way. For instance joy or happiness. It is accessible by all like a physical thing, but emerge out of nowehere. There is a relationship to the totality of things, and at the same time the attachment to nothing. In being and time the fundamental mood is anxiety. In the fundamental concepts he thinks of boredom instead. According to Heidegger boredom emerges out of nothing, and while suffering boredom we have a glimpse of the totality of the world, insofar as nothing is accessible to us. Insofar as the relationship to any individual thing is cut off, the totality appears. It is like you have an immediate access to the background of the world. In our usual life we exist with the background-foreground dichotomy. To reduce the foreground, we have to inhibit it, and this is done through fundamental attuenments.
Heidegger analyses boredom to find access to the world. The outcome of the first part of the lecture is to give a phenomenological description of the world as manifestable to us. In doing that we transform the humanity of ourselves into the dasein in ourselves. So something happens to us. Humanity in us is transformed, we cross the bridge to a new humanity. This seems to be an innocent idea, but it has heavy consequences. In political time when Heidegger wants to ’make them wake up’ from ignorance and political slumber into political activity.
The animal then comes in as a differential phenomena from which we understand ourselves. We understand ourselves in distinction from the way in which the animal relates to its openness. Heidegger is not interested in the animal, but only in order to define the sense of the new human being’s world.
The animal is poor in world. But that poverty has positive traits.
He opposes the world-lessness of the stone, to the poverty of the animal. Two forms of negativity that are present. The negativity of the world in the stone is the pure absence, but the poverty in the animal is not a pure absence of the world. The stone has no umwelt, but the animal has access and relationship to beings, without these being beings as such. Because there is a certain openness to the animals we can transpose ourselves into them, but not the stone.
Living beings are organisms which means they have unity and wholeness in themselves. Machines are only related to a totality of involvement (Bewandtnisganzheit). The machine is itself part of a larger structure, whereas the animal has its whole structure in itself.