The Auron MacIntyre Show - An Introduction to Phenomenology ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 5⧸2⧸25

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00:01:36.440 So I have been delving into Heidegger.

00:01:40.040 Heidegger is a very complex philosopher, one that I found particularly challenging, but it

00:01:45.860 definitely opens up a lot of interesting things.

00:01:48.220 I had definitely read a lot of Dugan previously, and Heidegger underlies a lot of what he talks

00:01:53.740 about, so it's great to have that context now and better understand these things.

00:01:57.900 And I thought it would be good to do an introduction to the idea of phenomenology, because it is

00:02:03.300 a different way of looking at philosophy, I think a way that many people are not familiar

00:02:06.600 with.

00:02:07.260 And I think it would be good if we had a general understanding of the movement and how it led

00:02:11.340 up to people like Heidegger and what it's done to modern philosophy.

00:02:14.960 So joining me today is Michael Millerman.

00:02:17.280 He teaches philosophy, has a great school of his own, has written many books on both

00:02:21.700 Heidegger and Dugan.

00:02:23.120 Thank you for joining me, man.

00:02:24.780 Thanks for having me.

00:02:26.520 Absolutely.

00:02:27.180 So I guess we'll just start at the beginning.

00:02:29.260 What is phenomenology?

00:02:31.300 Where did it start?

00:02:32.880 And how is it different from the philosophy that most people are probably familiar with?

00:02:38.140 Well, phenomenology is a method of doing philosophy, you could say.

00:02:42.800 And it differs from regular.

00:02:46.960 So if people think about philosophy, they may think about concepts, arguments, logical relations

00:02:52.220 between concepts and arguments, answers to questions like why be moral or what is justice?

00:02:57.960 Is there a God?

00:02:59.360 Those kinds of questions.

00:03:01.060 A phenomenology is a little bit different in the sense that the aim is to describe things

00:03:06.700 as they are clearly.

00:03:08.480 And behind that aim, there's the recognition that for the most part, we don't do that.

00:03:14.860 We put something in between ourselves and the world that we're perceiving or the world

00:03:20.240 that we're experiencing.

00:03:20.980 We put in our assumptions, our opinions, our judgments, and most damningly, in some sense,

00:03:28.140 our theories.

00:03:29.520 And so the intuition or the hunch of the phenomenologists is that we don't see things clearly

00:03:34.980 because we have too many things in the way and we also move too quickly.

00:03:39.080 And therefore, the task of phenomenology is to remove things that are impediments to our clear vision

00:03:45.340 and to slow down and describe the world as it is for us or the world as it occurs to us.

00:03:51.420 And that's why at times the descriptions can seem, they can seem so simple as almost to be self-evident.

00:03:57.560 But in a way, the whole point is that things that should be self-evident to us are buried

00:04:02.360 under so many obstacles that we just need to work on restoring that first contact in a way.

00:04:07.720 That naked apprehension.

00:04:11.040 Yeah, I think for a lot of people first looking at this, and I certainly have some amount of

00:04:15.220 that reaction myself, you look at this and you say, oh, well, this is just overcomplicating

00:04:19.460 the obvious, right?

00:04:20.400 These are things that I should know already, or we already know this.

00:04:24.020 Why are we going back and looking at this?

00:04:26.020 This is already so clear.

00:04:27.160 This is like basic 101 stuff.

00:04:29.640 Why am I always going back and breaking this down and adding layers of complexity to something

00:04:34.400 that should be basic and obvious and simple?

00:04:36.400 But the more you look at it, the more you look at the way that they are analyzing these

00:04:42.080 instances, I think it does make sense.

00:04:44.460 But it takes a little bit of time to get your brain to start moving in that direction or

00:04:48.900 to stop leaning on all those assumptions that you had already had.

00:04:52.520 And I want to get deeper into, obviously, where this got started.

00:04:55.720 But before we do, let's hear from today's sponsor.

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00:05:52.900 All right.

00:05:53.680 So like I said, this is a very different way to look at philosophy, and it takes probably

00:05:59.380 a decent amount of hubris to say, well, everybody else has gotten this wrong, and I need to start

00:06:04.060 stripping all these assumptions away because, you know, all of philosophy before this is

00:06:09.180 an impediment to this kind of understanding.

00:06:11.580 So who decides to take this step for the first time?

00:06:14.360 When do we start to see phenomenology come on the scene?

00:06:18.360 So there's, you know, a history of the thinkers who went through this process, but I would

00:06:24.200 say that the easiest way to think about it is starting with Descartes, and it's interesting

00:06:29.800 because you said, you know, who are we to cast aside how philosophy has been done or what

00:06:33.600 we've thought, and Descartes is known for his radical doubt of all received wisdom and

00:06:38.100 even the radical doubt of what we take to be obvious and trivial, namely that we exist

00:06:44.340 that there's a world out there.

00:06:46.220 So Descartes, by radically doubting to the very roots of all questions, he discovered

00:06:52.780 this realm of the consciousness.

00:06:55.960 Everybody roughly knows, even if they haven't followed Descartes' actual steps for themselves,

00:07:01.120 which, by the way, I want to say here parenthetically that it is important in phenomenology to reproduce

00:07:05.120 the steps, so that if people can do it for themselves and see it for themselves, that's

00:07:10.360 going to be the best way to see what the method yields.

00:07:12.900 Same with Descartes.

00:07:13.940 So he asks us to radically doubt even the existence of external objects of ourselves and all the

00:07:20.580 way up to basic mathematical truths.

00:07:22.840 In doing so, he discovers this fundamental fact that in order for there to be doubt, there

00:07:27.280 must, you know, I am the one who doubts.

00:07:29.160 So, you know, the I exist because there's no doubt, you know, there has to be the somebody

00:07:34.540 doubting and so on.

00:07:35.440 So when Descartes puts everything under the question and discovers this realm of consciousness,

00:07:41.840 he goes back to now offer arguments for the existence of God and so on.

00:07:46.240 But some of his readers, like Edmund Husserl, who's extremely important for Heidegger and

00:07:50.740 who in some sense is the most important root here of phenomenology, he stopped and said,

00:07:55.660 wait a minute, Descartes, you've discovered this realm of consciousness where we can actually

00:08:01.000 stay a little bit longer before bouncing back out to our proofs of the external world and

00:08:05.240 objective world and of God.

00:08:07.780 So Husserl takes the results of Descartes' inquiry and says, let's stay for a minute in

00:08:13.220 that state of doubt where we have uncovered the consciousness, but we haven't yet, as it

00:08:19.060 were, reconstructed the external world.

00:08:21.520 Okay.

00:08:21.680 So the connection between Descartes and Husserl is very important.

00:08:25.760 And then the next, the simple, you know, if you had the three greats to my mind, that

00:08:29.200 line up here would be Descartes to Husserl, Husserl to Heidegger.

00:08:32.640 But if we stop for a minute with Husserl, he suddenly says something like the following.

00:08:38.040 So just imagine whoever's listening to this, wherever you are and myself and yourself, we

00:08:44.000 put aside the question of the quote unquote objective existence of the external world.

00:08:49.300 We're still left with our experience of something.

00:08:52.660 I mean, I still see you, my computer, pen, coffee cups, right?

00:08:55.560 I mean, there's still a world of appearance that's there for me, even if I don't have a

00:09:00.100 judgment about its actual existence.

00:09:02.460 And for Husserl, that's the way the world is for us in our consciousness, independently

00:09:08.420 of the questions of its existence.

00:09:09.640 And we can now sort of map out that terrain.

00:09:12.740 So what's happening in my acts of consciousness when I look over there or look over here?

00:09:18.280 Again, it sounds very basic, but the idea is that these basic structures, in some sense,

00:09:23.660 like I said, we're, we take them for granted so often that we've never really identified

00:09:28.640 their structures.

00:09:29.380 And so Husserl made it his aim to identify these structures.

00:09:34.140 So for instance, when you hear a piece of music at any given time, all you're hearing in the

00:09:39.740 piece of music is that, you know, the specific note, let's say that's playing.

00:09:43.680 And yet, you know, phenomenologically, you also have the experience, the memory of the

00:09:48.140 previous notes and the anticipation of the coming notes.

00:09:51.160 So everybody listens to music, but not everybody has tried to describe the structure of the

00:09:57.220 experience of time perception in listening to music.

00:10:01.020 So that's sort of the level.

00:10:03.020 And I just want to add one important detail here.

00:10:05.480 So how we get from Descartes to Husserl, again, Descartes discovers this realm of

00:10:09.360 the, of consciousness by doubting everything and discovering that something remains despite

00:10:15.980 the doubt.

00:10:16.840 Husserl examines that whole realm of consciousness, tries to map it out and sort of exhaust the

00:10:23.380 description of its structures.

00:10:24.640 But then Heidegger does something amazing.

00:10:26.660 Heidegger says, the phenomenologists have put us on incredible ground here by describing

00:10:32.520 things that we take for granted and helping us to see what we are.

00:10:35.440 But there's something that they are taking for granted, which is putting a limit on what

00:10:39.620 they can actually bring to light.

00:10:41.340 They are taking for granted that the basic human experience or the basic category or the

00:10:46.180 basic realm or domain is consciousness.

00:10:49.200 And that's, that's accurate.

00:10:50.900 I mean, that they do sort of do that.

00:10:52.720 They treat consciousness as the fundamental ground.

00:10:56.180 And the world that we have in our consciousness is the one that they examine.

00:10:59.900 And Heidegger, quote unquote, radicalizes phenomenology.

00:11:04.960 That's his presentation of it by saying that, no, consciousness itself is something that we're

00:11:10.440 presupposing and taking for granted.

00:11:12.520 Like, in other words, the phenomenologists, they assume less than the other people did,

00:11:16.780 but they still assume too much by assuming consciousness.

00:11:19.100 So Heidegger pushes us into being and existence.

00:11:22.220 And suddenly a whole world opens up for him that is even broader than just what's happening

00:11:27.820 to and with and for consciousness.

00:11:30.680 So yeah, Descartes discovers the territory, Husserl maps it out in more detail.

00:11:33.980 Heidegger radicalizes it, breaks through the barriers of consciousness as the basic

00:11:39.780 domain and brings us into existence, human existence.

00:11:45.140 And therefore, not just perception, but emotion, attitude, comportment, and all of these other

00:11:50.760 human experiences.

00:11:53.380 Yeah, I feel like the one trick that the phenomenologists keep playing is that the new one

00:11:57.860 says, no, you took a little too much for granted.

00:11:59.920 And the next one says, no, you took a little too much for granted.

00:12:02.400 That's always the discoveries.

00:12:03.780 There's one, one more thing that you took for granted that I'm not going to, and I'm going

00:12:07.500 to, I'm going to analyze there.

00:12:09.440 That's true.

00:12:10.080 There is a sort of like one-upsmanship.

00:12:11.580 And, you know, I discovered something that you presupposed and that makes me superior to

00:12:15.320 you.

00:12:15.500 So that's a possible pitfall.

00:12:16.960 And I think maybe every philosophical method has these pitfalls.

00:12:19.820 Again, they, they culminate in comic situations, you know, like you can say, you know, you can

00:12:24.760 spin out a whole comedy about who presupposed more and who presupposed less.

00:12:27.780 But I do think that Heidegger's insights about the limitation of taking consciousness as the

00:12:32.800 ground is a genuine breakthrough.

00:12:34.740 Heidegger obviously himself omitted many things from his primary area of interest.

00:12:38.780 So in a sense, it's very important as we read these thinkers.

00:12:41.780 And as we think about them, you know, the two pitfalls are like, we reject it too soon

00:12:45.700 or we accept it too completely.

00:12:47.080 That's always the case.

00:12:48.500 So Heidegger, you know, as his intelligent readers noted, he doesn't write very much about

00:12:53.080 morality as though morality is not a part of human life.

00:12:55.500 Whereas, you know, it is a part of human life and it needs to be understood.

00:12:58.980 He was monomaniacally focused on the, on getting away from consciousness as the ground and going

00:13:04.620 to being as the ground.

00:13:05.640 And in his obsession, he made incredible discoveries that have touched every field and every thinker,

00:13:11.200 even though he left some things out of sight.

00:13:13.200 So that's just what we have to work with.

00:13:16.080 Although you're right that there's that sort of comic one-upsmanship too.

00:13:21.640 So we've got Descartes, as you point out, who's got this separation of experience, the

00:13:26.700 object and the subject.

00:13:27.860 You could say probably someone like Kant, obviously making a pretty important contribution

00:13:34.020 there as well.

00:13:35.320 Though, obviously, then when you get to, you know, someone like Husserl, that's a very big

00:13:41.140 shift.

00:13:41.660 So what shift is occurring?

00:13:43.300 Obviously, you said we're moving from consciousness to being.

00:13:45.960 But what other shifts are occurring as you move away?

00:13:47.920 Because obviously Heidegger has a lot to say about Descartes.

00:13:52.600 You know, he goes in quite a bit of detail, critiquing, talk about what he got right and

00:13:57.660 wrong.

00:13:58.260 So what are the big shifts there between those two schools?

00:14:03.240 Yes.

00:14:03.500 And about, Heidegger says a lot about Kant as well.

00:14:05.800 I mean, for Heidegger, a lot of these thinkers, he can, he puts them into periodizations or

00:14:10.600 into categories and buckets.

00:14:11.960 I mean, the whole of Western philosophy is like the biggest category that has been a mistake

00:14:16.400 from Plato until Nietzsche.

00:14:17.880 Within that, there are certain phases and for sure, you know, Descartes is a phase and

00:14:22.980 Kant is a phase. 0.66

00:14:24.120 In some sense, Kant culminates the phase that Descartes started because he's still too, he

00:14:31.320 still can't, there's still, they meet a limit, a limit point.

00:14:34.920 So without getting overly theoretical about it, let's just walk it back again for a minute

00:14:39.520 to their basic hunches, intuitions, and aims.

00:14:41.880 The, like for Kant, we don't have to answer the question about the, what is the external

00:14:49.220 world?

00:14:49.660 Actually, we don't have access to it.

00:14:51.260 So here he shares the view that all that we have access to is the way the world occurs

00:14:54.940 to us or the way the world appears to us in brackets in consciousness or for transcendental

00:15:00.740 subjectivity to use some of the jargon from Husserl and, uh, and Kant.

00:15:05.080 But it's important to understand, uh, I think it's important to understand as people think

00:15:08.920 about this, that in order to get this as the phenomenologists do, you can't treat them

00:15:15.040 as theories.

00:15:15.580 You have to link it to yourself.

00:15:17.300 So again, there's like, okay, let's start from the basic thing.

00:15:21.100 You see a world around you that's indisputable for everybody, right?

00:15:24.020 As I said, catalog the things around you.

00:15:26.060 Okay.

00:15:26.580 Then you can ask all kinds of questions about it.

00:15:28.700 So take a very basic one that interested Kant.

00:15:30.940 Um, if I, I have cause and effect relationship.

00:15:34.380 Okay.

00:15:35.180 I set this thing on fire.

00:15:36.360 It burns.

00:15:36.900 I lift this thing up and let go of my hand.

00:15:38.440 It falls.

00:15:39.360 So the notion of a cause and effect relationship seems like something that is a rational relation

00:15:45.660 and discovery that applies not just because I happen to have derived it from my experience

00:15:51.180 of the world empirically, like tomorrow, maybe cause and effect will break down just like

00:15:57.000 tomorrow.

00:15:57.440 Maybe the sun won't rise.

00:15:59.280 Kant said, no, wait a minute.

00:15:59.980 That can't be right.

00:16:01.580 Empiricists like David Hume had argued that cause and effect.

00:16:04.200 We don't actually know that it, it's not a law.

00:16:06.480 It's just something that we've, you know, you've perceived it X amount of times, like

00:16:11.300 you and I woke up today.

00:16:12.860 Hopefully we'll wake up tomorrow.

00:16:14.300 One day we won't wake up.

00:16:15.820 Sorry to say, you know, so cause and effect works today.

00:16:18.520 It works tomorrow, but maybe one day it'll stop working.

00:16:20.800 Kant said, no, that can't be right because that seems to deprive the world of rational

00:16:24.560 relations.

00:16:25.720 And it just, it doesn't seem right.

00:16:27.280 Because if you think through your experience of the world, not just cause and effect, but

00:16:31.440 unity, difference, existence, change, sameness, number, these basic rational categories seem

00:16:40.320 to be something that don't come to us from the world, but that as it were, we impose on 0.99

00:16:45.340 or bring to the world.

00:16:46.400 So these philosophers, they think through this puzzle that there's a relationship, not

00:16:50.540 just between, like I said, we can sort of bandy it about more or less trivial, trivial, or

00:16:55.180 people can treat it more or less trivially subject to the objectivity, but it's like all

00:16:59.220 of the categories of thought or rational categories that we bring to bear on our experience of the

00:17:05.260 world.

00:17:06.220 And again, if we derive those from the world, that would be very strange, but then how do

00:17:10.920 we impose them on the world?

00:17:11.940 That's also kind of weird.

00:17:13.680 And so for instance, I, I feel myself sitting in this chair.

00:17:17.280 I see myself sitting in this chair.

00:17:18.780 I know that I'm in a chair and in a room.

00:17:20.580 So I'm like one of the things in this room, but at the same time, my reason is not in this

00:17:29.780 room.

00:17:30.120 It, it imposes the categories of existence onto this room.

00:17:33.700 So that idea that we have one foot in the world and one foot, as it were making the world

00:17:40.340 constituting and configuring the world, giving the world its law, the laws of reason and

00:17:45.520 rational categories, that split between the empirical self and the transcendental self

00:17:51.500 is a huge problem for philosophy, for philosophers, for Heidegger and for Kant.

00:17:57.980 Kant had certain points that he reached where he talked about, I could tell you the jargon,

00:18:02.100 transcendental unity of a perception.

00:18:03.660 But basically it's again, this point where somehow these two worlds meet, but without

00:18:08.980 really be being able to say how it's a mystery.

00:18:12.220 It is a profound mystery that we're, we have one foot in and one foot out of the world.

00:18:16.200 And, you know, Heidegger tried to deal with that mystery.

00:18:18.360 Hustrel tried to deal with that mystery and it, it duplicates or divides the self into the

00:18:23.700 empirical self and the transcendental self.

00:18:25.340 And one of the things that Hustrel did, he has a work called Crisis of the European Sciences,

00:18:29.560 where he says, look, um, we scientific moderns have a model of the world that is primarily

00:18:36.360 mathematical.

00:18:37.740 Um, you know, it's, it's algebraic, geometric, it's, we have like a mathematical world projection,

00:18:44.240 you know, you can cast the mathematical net over the whole world and suddenly it's, you can

00:18:49.840 deal with it because it's measurable, it's predictable, you know, it's happening a billion

00:18:52.660 miles away and so on, but he said, you know, what is it in the human experience that allows

00:18:59.380 us to produce a mathematical model of the world?

00:19:02.940 You actually, that's another one of those things that you cannot just take for granted.

00:19:07.700 So Hustrel tried to sort of spell that out.

00:19:09.440 He's like, we we're left with this problem that in order to have a modern man, in order

00:19:15.480 to have a solid foundation, self-understanding and foundation of the world has erected a theoretical

00:19:20.960 construct, which is solid so far as it goes, but it rests on this invisible, mysterious

00:19:27.920 and, and, uh, puzzling foundation.

00:19:31.900 How does human subjectivity produce a model of scientific universality and rationality?

00:19:37.440 So that gave way to a crisis.

00:19:39.660 That's why Hustrel's books called Crisis of the European Sciences.

00:19:41.800 That's why Heidegger and Being and Time at the start, the first, whatever, 10, 20 pages,

00:19:45.300 he says, the sciences are in a crisis.

00:19:47.340 The foundations of the sciences are in a crisis everywhere is in a crisis.

00:19:51.700 And this crisis forces us to go back to the basics, you know?

00:19:55.620 And again, the crisis is that we seem to have a solid foundation, but on the other hand,

00:20:00.180 it rests on nothing.

00:20:01.000 And we can't give an account of how the nothing gave right, you know, it's kind of like, how

00:20:04.380 did God create the world from nothing?

00:20:05.800 You know, how, how does scientific modernity create a universal model from the mystery of

00:20:10.680 human subjectivity?

00:20:11.780 You're left with a puzzle.

00:20:12.800 So people who think that religion is less rational than science, they're create the puzzle

00:20:16.620 of creation of the, of the making of the world exists in both cases.

00:20:19.920 Just in one case, God is the maker.

00:20:21.260 In the other case, man is the maker, but the mystery of the making of the world remains.

00:20:24.560 So these are the sorts of puzzles that pushed Heidegger and Hustrel into like, okay, wait,

00:20:30.400 wait, wait, wait, wait, right.

00:20:31.200 We can't, and Kant in a way, because Kant also had to say, you know, we can't answer questions

00:20:35.800 about the quote unquote real world because we don't have access to it.

00:20:38.200 We have to limit our inquiry to what we actually have access to.

00:20:41.380 So then the question is where they place the limit, why they place it there, and whether

00:20:44.540 they ultimately overcome these mysterious puzzles.

00:20:47.820 All right.

00:20:48.340 Well, we're going to dive deeper into the phenomenology itself, but before we do, let's hear about

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00:21:51.720 So as you pointed out, we have Husserl, who is kind of probably the pivotal figure, probably

00:21:58.840 the first person to be using this method in the way that we would recognize it now.

00:22:04.860 But then you have Heidegger, who was his student and is writing in large amount in response to

00:22:12.040 what Husserl had been doing.

00:22:13.460 What significant changes, what would be the differences between the phenomenology of Husserl

00:22:20.480 and the phenomenology of Heidegger?

00:22:24.300 So again, to my view, in radicalizing, as he puts it, Husserl's emphasis.

00:22:29.920 So let's take what would a Husserl approach to phenomenology simply stated, okay, because

00:22:35.040 Husserl wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of pages, right?

00:22:37.360 It's dense, difficult work as you get into this, but very simply stated, again, like

00:22:43.720 the example of the music, right?

00:22:45.360 Analyzing the structure of what's retained and what's anticipated in a perceptual act.

00:22:52.680 And even just recognize, so even for example, again, if people try to replicate this, it

00:22:58.680 would be the best, but I guess it's hard to do on the spot.

00:23:00.420 So like, what are the acts of consciousness?

00:23:02.540 So for example, I can attend to something.

00:23:05.620 I can give something my attention.

00:23:07.360 Right?

00:23:07.940 So Husserl actually thought it was important to catalog the acts of consciousness.

00:23:11.800 So I can attend to something directly.

00:23:13.940 Maybe I can be roughly aware of something happening.

00:23:17.900 That's another way of comporting my consciousness, right?

00:23:21.320 There can be a rough awareness of something.

00:23:23.240 There can be a direct awareness of something.

00:23:24.980 One of the breakthrough discoveries, this again, I believe that it may sound weird to people.

00:23:28.900 It sounded weird to me too at first because it seems so trivial, but it ended up being

00:23:32.380 quite interesting, is that all acts of consciousness are directed.

00:23:37.360 Which means that, and he calls that intentionality.

00:23:41.320 So for example, if I'm listening, my act of listening has the structure of listening to

00:23:46.600 or listening for.

00:23:48.400 Or listening despite.

00:23:51.740 There's a structure to these acts of consciousness.

00:23:53.800 In fact, one of the strange things when people read, I think Heidegger, for example, or Dugan's

00:23:59.020 Heideggerianism or Husserl is they'll sometimes, you'll see in their writing, it'll say, you'll

00:24:05.000 see a formulation like listening for dot, dot, dot, or listening to dot, dot, dot.

00:24:09.220 You know, and normally we take dot, dot, dot to mean, you know, I'm passing over something,

00:24:12.920 I'm skipping over something.

00:24:13.940 But here it's because they're like, we can't fill in the blanks because we're just discussing

00:24:17.340 the structure of the act itself.

00:24:19.380 You know, so attending to something, listening for something, listening to something and so

00:24:24.740 on.

00:24:25.820 Ignoring something.

00:24:26.800 So he catalogs the acts of consciousness in that sense.

00:24:29.560 Again, tries to understand the relationship of one to another and so on.

00:24:34.980 Setting aside Heidegger for a minute, I want to say something else here about Heidegger.

00:24:39.620 There are two sort of two important operations in Husserl's world, which is that number one,

00:24:48.980 the doubt, doubting the existence of the external world.

00:24:51.980 Like that's a necessary step in order to get into the world of phenomenology.

00:24:55.220 In some sense, you have to go through that trial by fire of actually for yourself doubting

00:24:59.320 the existence of the external world.

00:25:00.480 So I'll give you an example.

00:25:01.760 If I talk to my wife or if you talk to your neighbor, you talk to anybody who doesn't really

00:25:06.520 care about philosophy or do philosophy, they do not have the natural view of the world

00:25:13.080 that the world is there for them in consciousness or for consciousness.

00:25:16.860 It's like, no, here's my camera.

00:25:18.720 Here's my phone.

00:25:19.280 Here's my paper.

00:25:19.880 It's just the natural attitude to the world is objects, stuff.

00:25:25.440 When you radically doubt the existence of the external world, you sort of bring everything

00:25:30.880 into the ambit or circle of consciousness.

00:25:34.100 You're now treating it as for you, for the mind, for, as an appearance and so on.

00:25:39.820 So that is called, that's one of the operations that Husserl does.

00:25:44.260 But then there's another operation.

00:25:46.240 Okay.

00:25:46.380 So again, one is bringing the world from object of existence to phenomenal existence.

00:25:50.240 But then there's somehow an even more interesting thing, which is you go from describing the

00:25:55.260 objects and your perception of objects or things in your perception of things to now describing

00:26:03.000 your, like the circle turns back on it.

00:26:07.940 The arrow turns back on itself.

00:26:09.520 So let's say normally my attitude is outward.

00:26:12.680 Okay.

00:26:13.260 My arrow of intentionality, my, my sort of directionality of action and attention is outward.

00:26:19.480 Then you put your attention on the relationship between attention and things.

00:26:23.540 And then somehow gradually to use a phrase that I first heard from Dugan, maybe he stole

00:26:27.760 it from somewhere else.

00:26:28.400 Doesn't matter.

00:26:28.960 I'm taking it now because I really like it.

00:26:30.600 Climbing the waterfall.

00:26:31.660 It's a beautiful image because the waterfall takes us out into the world.

00:26:35.560 It pushes us into the world of things.

00:26:38.120 Climbing the waterfall means phenomenologically trying to get closer to the source of intentionality,

00:26:43.720 closer to the center of existence, closer to the core of consciousness.

00:26:48.280 And here there's an element where phenomenology, even in Heidegger, although in a slightly different

00:26:52.600 way becomes almost as it were mystical or religious, because when your primary focus is the world

00:27:00.180 out there and analysis of the relations of your attention towards the world out there,

00:27:04.700 that's one thing, very valuable.

00:27:06.000 It's sort of like describing a periphery of consciousness.

00:27:08.540 But as you gradually climb the waterfall, so to speak, back into the center of consciousness,

00:27:13.400 you discover these hidden realms of human subjectivity or interiority that classically is where man meets God.

00:27:21.980 So there's a religious dimension here.

00:27:23.620 And I hope you and your listeners won't mind me mentioning Dugan once more because he has a brilliant

00:27:28.860 lecture series, unavailable in English, okay, only in Russian, called Phenomenological Readings of

00:27:34.320 Aristotle, where he actually goes through all of this in a way that I find very helpful.

00:27:37.920 And the beautiful thing, this helps us to see that there's a, you can take phenomenology and

00:27:42.780 its modern versions and reread some of the older thinkers, including Aristotle, including Augustine,

00:27:48.620 including a Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian mystics, and others, and now try to

00:27:53.960 understand what they're saying from the perspective of a phenomenological model.

00:27:58.860 Again, the model, this beautiful image, just imagine a circle, outside of the circle are

00:28:04.060 the objects of the external world.

00:28:05.600 We bring them onto the periphery of the circle where we treat them as objects of conscious

00:28:09.640 perception.

00:28:10.480 And then we go towards the center of the circle as we pay attention to what it means to have

00:28:14.860 consciousness at all.

00:28:16.020 And in that center of the circle, as it were, in some of these mystic or religious accounts,

00:28:20.320 we meet a different intentionality, angelic or divine.

00:28:25.040 And in some cases, a demonic or satanic intentionality.

00:28:30.600 So you can do sort of like a phenomenology of satanic possession and stuff like that as well.

00:28:35.940 One other thing I have to say very briefly is that even though you have the serious phenomenology

00:28:40.620 of Husserl and Heidegger, the term phenomenology has also become popularized.

00:28:46.400 And now you can have like, you know, phenomenology of whatever, right?

00:28:51.680 Phenomenology of being poor, phenomenology of a foodie, phenomenology of a foodie, right?

00:28:57.260 Like phenomenology of anything, which just means I'm going to describe my lived experience,

00:29:01.960 okay?

00:29:02.260 Phenomenology of being an oppressed minority and so on.

00:29:04.120 So that's kind of like the trivialization.

00:29:06.760 But the idea there is I'm going to describe my experiences in a lot of detail.

00:29:10.220 Um, but I would say the more serious approaches is, uh, the one that we've discussed.

00:29:15.120 Yeah.

00:29:15.600 If you Google, what is phenomenology or put, put it into YouTube, like the third video you

00:29:20.600 get is black phenomenology right away.

00:29:24.600 So that, that, I mean, that's important too, because the idea there is, look, we're going

00:29:29.000 to describe our experience as it occurs to us.

00:29:31.700 We have maybe uniquely, uh, privileged access to that experience.

00:29:35.860 And, uh, and you need to understand the life world of a person.

00:29:39.840 You can only get it through their description of it.

00:29:41.800 And I think there are like a million dissertations now that are like that, like the phenomenology

00:29:45.500 of a hungry graduate students who's working on their dissertation, dissertation is the

00:29:48.720 dissertation itself.

00:29:49.700 So like this description of one's own experiences.

00:29:52.220 Uh, so there's something to that.

00:29:54.200 Obviously it become, it can become, um, it can become trivial if it doesn't actually aim

00:30:02.140 to discover what for Husserl and Heidegger is the important thing to discover.

00:30:05.420 Like what are the underlying structures, right?

00:30:07.160 What can we learn about God, man, and the world?

00:30:10.460 Um, not just how can we justify our perspectives, um, by describing them from a first person point

00:30:16.580 of view.

00:30:17.920 So this is probably a good time to acknowledge that Heidegger, uh, you know, one of the

00:30:22.240 reasons I felt I just had to read him was that basically everything in one way or another,

00:30:27.180 uh, seemed to be referencing back to him, you know, just kind of, uh, he seemed to be a,

00:30:31.920 a, so when you clearly had to tackle in one way or another, uh, before, before understanding

00:30:36.880 a lot of what was going on in modern philosophy, unfortunately, this means that, uh, his work

00:30:42.080 is often used to create this like extreme relativism.

00:30:45.660 This is where, you know, some people will use it to justify kind of the woke, uh, mindset,

00:30:50.660 these kinds of things, uh, you know, and, you know, because we're just, we're just shattering.

00:30:55.280 He, he has, uh, broken down reality.

00:30:58.460 He has deconstructed reality and therefore reality is fake and we can construct our own

00:31:02.460 and we can, you know, we can manufacture this.

00:31:04.520 It's all power and it's all, uh, you know, whatever we want to manufacture that, that is

00:31:08.580 something that can, people can take away from this.

00:31:11.660 Uh, so what do you think about the way that perhaps the left or the deconstructionists have

00:31:16.660 used Heidegger?

00:31:17.480 Do you feel like that's something that Heidegger would have hated or he would have acknowledged

00:31:21.340 is, is a consequence of his work?

00:31:23.020 What would you think would be the response to that?

00:31:25.280 So first I want to say, I think this is a great topic.

00:31:27.800 It is the topic of my dissertation and book beginning with Heidegger, where I treat receptions

00:31:31.580 of Heidegger across the political spectrum, intelligent, I hope receptions of them, including

00:31:35.900 Dugan's, including thinkers on the left, like Rorty and Derrida and, uh, and, uh, Strauss

00:31:41.220 on the right, I would say.

00:31:42.500 So first thing, any great thinker will give rise to many different responses.

00:31:47.780 I think that's natural.

00:31:48.760 I mean, given the variety of readers and the richness of a great work, you can expect

00:31:55.240 there to be many different interpretations.

00:31:57.640 That's natural.

00:31:58.940 Then you do have the phenomenon of the use and abuse, uh, like Nietzsche said, the use

00:32:02.360 and abuse of history for life.

00:32:03.580 There's also such a thing as the use and abuse of philosophy, you know, to provide legitimation

00:32:07.420 for an ideological, uh, um, position at times.

00:32:11.600 I think even Dugan can be guilty of that.

00:32:13.060 Although, you know, everybody I think is, and can be.

00:32:16.340 So number one, Heidegger's work is just so rich.

00:32:18.640 It can be taken in many different directions.

00:32:20.460 Heidegger's influence on French leftism is a fact, a documented, hugely indisputable,

00:32:26.120 massive fact.

00:32:27.160 And indeed many American, uh, academics learned Heidegger indirectly through the reception

00:32:34.700 of Heidegger on the French left.

00:32:36.960 So for them, Heidegger is almost like equivalent to Derrida's version or to some other version

00:32:41.980 or, you know, to even more watered down versions.

00:32:44.740 So I don't think that's good.

00:32:46.920 I think that if a person's impression of Heidegger is at a few steps removed from what seems

00:32:54.460 like a dominant ideological source, there's a huge benefit in just going back to Heidegger

00:32:58.660 and seeing what adds up.

00:32:59.860 And in fact, like my interest in this question is funny because at one in the same time as

00:33:05.180 a graduate student, I was doing a class on leftist political theology, which owed a lot

00:33:11.460 to Heidegger as I was discovering through my readings.

00:33:14.240 And I was translating a Dugan book on Heidegger, which owed a lot to Heidegger, obviously, in

00:33:18.900 a completely different way.

00:33:20.100 So I was like, how are both of these people considering themselves Heideggerians, whereas

00:33:24.280 they actually probably think of themselves as mortal enemies?

00:33:26.980 What's going on here, right?

00:33:27.940 So what is the left leaving out, so to speak?

00:33:30.620 What is the right leaving out, so to speak?

00:33:32.280 And how can we triangulate and figure this all out and see, you know, like who's just

00:33:36.240 abusing it, who's making a legitimate discovery, and what accounts for these radical differences?

00:33:42.060 It's a, you know, again, that's, I thought it was an interesting enough question to do

00:33:44.760 my dissertation on it.

00:33:46.100 So the, I would say this about the leftist deconstructive Heideggerianism, okay? 0.99

00:33:51.100 Some of it is very stupid and can just be dismissed. 0.98

00:33:54.660 Some of it is pretty interesting and can be treated as such. 0.99

00:33:58.120 And some of it is like quite thoughtful and a high level and deserves our attention.

00:34:03.480 So my personal opinion, you know, Derrida, when he writes about Heidegger, is up there

00:34:07.240 at that high level, and I just pretty much ignore the other two categories, okay?

00:34:11.160 But it's true that there are a lot of people who have just weaponized their understanding

00:34:14.800 of, like they've done with Nietzsche.

00:34:16.280 You know, there's a phenomenon, I learned this from Alan Bloom's book, Closing of the American

00:34:19.660 Mind.

00:34:20.040 His phrase encapsulated it for me for all time, the Nietzscheanization of the left, right?

00:34:24.520 Same with Carl Schmitt.

00:34:25.300 There are left Schmittians, so there's always somebody who's willing to weaponize, but they, 0.77

00:34:29.020 the question is, what did they leave out?

00:34:32.080 So in the case of Heidegger, I mean, Heidegger has, there's quite a bit that they, that they

00:34:35.660 left out, but schematically, Heidegger argues that Western philosophy has come to an end.

00:34:41.640 It had a beginning, had a middle, has an end.

00:34:43.440 Nietzsche's the end, and Heidegger assesses the significance of that end, as well as the

00:34:47.260 significance of the whole history.

00:34:49.080 Leftists like that because the end of something sort of leaves them free to play, you know?

00:34:54.600 And they can always point to something in the past and say, oh, that's, that's, you thought

00:34:58.660 that that was a thing, but it's not a thing.

00:35:00.260 It's over.

00:35:00.760 It's done.

00:35:01.280 I've unpacked it.

00:35:01.980 I've deconstructed it. 0.92

00:35:02.780 It's, it's dead, dead on arrival.

00:35:05.040 And moreover, I can show you how it configured power relations and so on.

00:35:08.380 So they love the idea of an end because it leaves them free to play.

00:35:11.620 And they use that playfulness to mask in some sense, a will to power and whatever else

00:35:16.760 they may be doing.

00:35:17.380 But a huge component of Heidegger's thought is another beginning, another beginning of

00:35:22.660 philosophy, another disclosure of being to humanity, a new foundation, as it were, a new

00:35:27.640 revelation.

00:35:28.340 Okay.

00:35:28.460 He's an, he's an epochal thinker and who sees himself as inaugurating a new era or epoch.

00:35:33.120 They just ignore that because that's like, oh, that's too, whatever, right?

00:35:36.880 That's too fascist.

00:35:37.760 That's too this.

00:35:38.300 That's too that.

00:35:38.880 That's too self-aggrandizing.

00:35:40.240 So they conveniently leave that out.

00:35:43.660 Dugan, by contrast, just to give an example of the different modalities here of Heidegger

00:35:48.540 reception, Dugan puts the other beginning and Heidegger's thought as the centerpiece

00:35:52.900 of his understanding of Heidegger, the centerpiece of his interpretation and presentation of Heidegger.

00:35:57.720 In fact, Dugan's first English, first book on Heidegger, he published several, is called

00:36:02.880 Martin Heidegger, The Philosophy of Another Beginning, showing you how central this idea of

00:36:07.960 Another Beginning is and how much it distinguishes him from, you know, you could say that if

00:36:12.160 a leftist wrote a book on Heidegger's, again, roughly just to encapsulate the point, it

00:36:16.080 would be like the end of philosophy could be a normal title, whereas the philosophy of

00:36:21.040 Another Beginning shows you the different routes that they took here.

00:36:23.800 So my view is you have to read the best representatives of serious schools of disagreement and of

00:36:35.120 interpretation.

00:36:36.020 You know, so I learned from Rorty at the end of the day, even though I kind of despise his

00:36:40.660 attitude towards Heidegger.

00:36:41.760 I learned from Derrida, even though initially I went into the project really disliking Derrida

00:36:45.860 because I thought he was just a, you know, neo-Marxist, whatever Jordan Peterson calls him

00:36:51.580 these days, right?

00:36:52.380 Post-modern neo-Marxist, right?

00:36:54.100 So I'm like, you may think that a philosopher, you may think that an ideologue, let's say a

00:36:59.740 leftist, is always going to read philosophy in a way that's useful to his leftism.

00:37:03.760 That means that his politics comes first and the philosophy is weaponized.

00:37:08.220 That's what I thought I was going to find in Derrida.

00:37:09.820 That's not quite what I found.

00:37:11.320 So in the best case scenario, you find an intelligent thinker who takes the philosophy seriously

00:37:15.040 and who thinks through the relationship of the arguments to the political positions.

00:37:19.760 So because of Heidegger's greatness, because of his influence and importance, it's true

00:37:27.940 that pretty much every intelligent European intellectual, at least, read him, debated

00:37:32.860 him, discussed him, fought over him, fought over his legacy, you know, admired him, hated

00:37:37.040 him, whatever the case is.

00:37:39.700 That includes Jews, despite the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi.

00:37:43.200 You know, that includes Democrats, despite the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi.

00:37:46.560 OK, it includes everybody, because that's just, you know, you cannot get around a brilliant

00:37:51.440 thinker.

00:37:52.060 All that you can do is try to make sense of what it means.

00:37:56.320 And that's what these people did.

00:37:57.900 So to sum that all up, there's, again, a cheap appropriation, as there is of Nietzsche, which

00:38:03.960 Heidegger writes about comically too at times.

00:38:06.000 You know, there's a cheap appropriation of heroism, cheap appropriation of Romanism.

00:38:09.840 They're cheap appropriations of everything under the sun, of communism and of anti-communism.

00:38:13.460 Um, they're all somehow socially and politically significant, but intellectually, you know,

00:38:18.260 they just, uh, are curiosities.

00:38:20.240 But the best of the best thinkers, yeah, we should understand their disagreements over

00:38:24.260 Heidegger because they're significant.

00:38:26.520 Well, speaking of, I know that Leo Strauss is somebody who you highly respect and have

00:38:31.240 done a lot of work on.

00:38:32.680 And, and if I have it correct, uh, natural right and history is itself a response to

00:38:37.980 Heidegger, right?

00:38:38.840 In, in, in a way.

00:38:40.600 Uh, so this is obviously someone who he respected the thought of, but was, I don't think I'm

00:38:45.380 bored with a lot of what Heidegger is doing.

00:38:48.120 What do you think about the disagreements of those Strauss's reaction to Heidegger's work?

00:38:52.280 So this is another big and beautiful question.

00:38:54.440 Um, Strauss said some things about Heidegger that make it extremely clear how highly he

00:39:02.060 held him, you know, and he said, there's no, basically for him, Heidegger was an unprecedented

00:39:07.020 intellectual force.

00:39:08.540 Nobody had ever seen anything like it.

00:39:10.020 He made the intellectuals of the time seem like orphans.

00:39:13.020 These are all things that Heidegger, like intellectual orphans.

00:39:15.140 These are all things that Strauss wrote about Heidegger.

00:39:17.100 Okay.

00:39:17.400 He said, he's the greatest thinker of our time and so on.

00:39:20.380 So Strauss clearly thought that Heidegger was a, a brilliant man and a true philosopher

00:39:25.820 and an intellectual giant.

00:39:27.600 Um, there's a beautiful quote by Strauss, I maybe not, we'll not get it here word for

00:39:32.000 word where he said that, uh, he said that, um, liberalism is in a crisis, which by the

00:39:37.780 way, we all know now and are experiencing now and are sort of living through a specific,

00:39:41.980 um, iteration of this phase of the crisis of liberalism.

00:39:44.900 So he says, liberalism is in a crisis.

00:39:47.460 Only a great thinker can help us now.

00:39:49.340 But the great, but the problem is that the greatest thinker of our time is Heidegger

00:39:52.120 and anti-liberal.

00:39:53.080 So like liberalism needs some sort of intellectual support, but the greatest thinker of our time

00:39:57.980 is actually, you know, in some sense, the greatest critic of liberalism too.

00:40:01.480 So that's a puzzle.

00:40:02.400 And that puzzle is very important and, um, somehow of the greatest significance for Strauss.

00:40:08.320 Okay.

00:40:08.700 That's true.

00:40:09.240 It's a hidden dialogue in a certain sense, because, you know, Strauss, whereas he has books

00:40:13.680 on Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and all these other thinkers,

00:40:18.060 um, Heidegger is like more often than not an unstated, invisible force.

00:40:24.300 He does mention him a little bit.

00:40:25.520 He does write about him a little bit, but like he natural right in history doesn't say

00:40:28.680 I'm writing this against Martin Heidegger's being in time.

00:40:31.080 But if you know the intellectual scene and setup and scenario, then you know that Heidegger

00:40:35.840 is the target.

00:40:36.300 So, um, there, this is this, the details here, even in on tyranny, where Strauss has a debate

00:40:42.640 with Kojev, they both refer to Heidegger in that debate in a very important and, uh, and

00:40:47.740 famous way.

00:40:48.320 So here's what I would say.

00:40:50.760 Heidegger was monomaniacally focused on the question of being, as I mentioned earlier,

00:40:55.080 He thought it's the most important question because think about it.

00:40:59.700 You can't talk without saying this is, that was, I am, you are being saturates our language

00:41:06.760 and it saturates our life.

00:41:08.360 It saturates our soul.

00:41:09.500 Somehow it's the water in which we swim and yet we don't pay attention to it.

00:41:13.080 So Heidegger made it absolutely central.

00:41:16.100 That was his focus.

00:41:17.400 He said, I can't help, but be a man of one book, even though he wrote so many books,

00:41:21.060 his one book is the question of being, the meaning of being, being in truth.

00:41:25.420 Okay.

00:41:25.540 Being, being, being.

00:41:26.860 And when Strauss looked at this, he thought that Heidegger had made some important oversights.

00:41:33.880 Now we said that some philosophers are going to exclude something, but this isn't a case

00:41:36.940 of one-upsmanship.

00:41:37.860 This is a very important observation.

00:41:39.860 So whereas Heidegger looked at the history of philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche and then

00:41:43.620 another beginning with an eye to the various phases of the interpretation of being, Strauss

00:41:50.120 did the same thing.

00:41:51.980 He looked at the history of political philosophy from the beginning to the end and its various

00:41:57.660 phases to see the transformation of the key notion.

00:42:00.560 So for Heidegger, it's the history of philosophy and the key notion is being.

00:42:03.720 For Strauss, it's the history of political philosophy and the key notion in natural right

00:42:08.120 and history is nature.

00:42:09.980 How did Socrates and Aristotle talk about nature?

00:42:12.200 How did Hobbes, Machiavelli, Locke, and Rousseau talk about nature?

00:42:15.460 How does Nietzsche talk about nature?

00:42:17.280 And why has that shifted?

00:42:18.540 That becomes the central category, natural right.

00:42:21.340 Is there anything that is just by nature, anything that is right by nature?

00:42:24.520 That led Strauss through the whole canon of the history of political philosophy.

00:42:30.520 And if we see it like that, then the key question in a way becomes, why did Strauss make political

00:42:37.360 philosophy the center of his project?

00:42:40.740 So Heidegger made being the center of his project.

00:42:43.700 And that was his philosophy means the study of being for Heidegger in some sense.

00:42:47.420 It's not like you have 10 different things and being is one of them.

00:42:51.560 No, no.

00:42:52.100 Philosophy and being in some sense are equivalent for Heidegger.

00:42:55.700 So you have Heidegger philosophy being and Strauss political philosophy and these different

00:43:01.080 notions.

00:43:02.100 And so the whole puzzle is why did Strauss consider political philosophy to be so important?

00:43:06.680 And why did he think that Heidegger's overlooking the realm of the political was not just a moral

00:43:12.700 error, but a fundamentally philosophical or intellectual error.

00:43:17.280 Because you could say, look, as far as being goes, Heidegger got everything right.

00:43:23.260 The only problem is because he didn't care about morality or write about morality, he sort

00:43:29.440 of let other people not care about morality.

00:43:32.180 You know what I mean?

00:43:32.740 Like he, you look to him for guidance.

00:43:35.120 He doesn't give you any.

00:43:36.040 And therefore you have barbarism, Nazism, and, uh, and, uh, genocide. 0.73

00:43:40.900 If only Heidegger had cared more about morality, then we would have less guilt in celebrating

00:43:47.200 his philosophy.

00:43:47.840 So you can imagine a view like that, which just criticizes him for like failing to do

00:43:51.660 his moral duty.

00:43:53.000 But Strauss doesn't do that.

00:43:54.440 Strauss doesn't, as it were, reduce his criticism of Heidegger.

00:43:59.200 By the way, he doesn't have a criticism of Heidegger.

00:44:00.820 He has a, an understanding that he thinks is, is limited in some sense, but it's not quite

00:44:05.040 right to color criticism.

00:44:05.900 So it's not just that he says, Heidegger, you should have talked more about morality

00:44:08.660 than we could have avoided the Holocaust. 0.86

00:44:11.440 The question is this, is the domain of the political and adequate reflection on the domain

00:44:17.060 of political essential to philosophy?

00:44:21.460 In some sense, the answer for Heidegger is no.

00:44:24.380 And the answer for Strauss is yes.

00:44:27.140 And therefore we have to measure Strauss's response.

00:44:30.300 Strauss seems to think like Socrates, that the realm of the political is the

00:44:35.020 realm of our opinions about good, bad, just, unjust, beautiful, ugly, right, wrong, and

00:44:39.920 that we get to, as it were, wisdom, or at least we get to the life that seeks wisdom

00:44:46.400 only by passing through those opinions.

00:44:49.160 In other words, by going, by taking political life seriously.

00:44:52.880 You know, Plato has a work called The Laws.

00:44:55.680 Plato has a work called The Statesman.

00:44:57.220 Plato has a work called The Republic.

00:44:58.660 Plato cared about politics, political life, and its significance for philosophy.

00:45:03.500 You know, Heidegger, he just didn't in the same way.

00:45:09.040 And again, to try to state this as simply as I can, the real question is, is that primarily

00:45:17.320 a moral failure, if it is one at all, or is it primarily a philosophical failure?

00:45:22.240 And Strauss's main disagreement, so far as I can tell, again, there are details here, right?

00:45:26.440 It takes a long time to go through them.

00:45:27.380 But as far as I can tell, Strauss, unlike Heidegger, thought that political life, the notion of

00:45:33.280 the political was essential to philosophy, unlike Heidegger.

00:45:36.980 And by the way, that's not arbitrary.

00:45:39.300 Everybody who knows something about Plato probably knows Plato's cave allegory, probably have

00:45:43.780 some rough sense, you know, of that.

00:45:46.980 Well, that's in a book called The Republic, Politeia in Greek.

00:45:51.480 Plato presents, oftentimes, his philosophical ideas and insights and reflections in a very

00:45:59.440 political context and in reflection on political notions.

00:46:03.820 So Strauss, in that sense, is a proponent of Platonism, whereas Heidegger is an opponent

00:46:09.140 of Platonism because he sees that in Plato, our interpretation of being took a wrong turn.

00:46:14.700 So that's another way of understanding the difference between Strauss and Heidegger.

00:46:17.220 They have a very different attitude towards Plato.

00:46:18.780 And for all the significance we've given to Heidegger in this conversation, obviously,

00:46:22.700 infinitely important to understanding contemporary thought and the landscape of contemporary thought,

00:46:28.440 oftentimes, it's also an argument over Plato.

00:46:32.200 You know, again, Strauss wants to return to Plato and Heidegger wants to overcome Plato.

00:46:36.860 And that, in some way, is another way of putting their disagreement in a nutshell.

00:46:42.160 So, obviously, we've gotten to Heidegger and some of the reactions there.

00:46:47.520 We don't have a giant amount of time, and I know this could be a large question, so maybe

00:46:53.180 we'll do our best to kind of summarize it and come back and do some more discussion on the

00:46:58.520 topic because we could go on for quite a bit.

00:47:00.480 But what about the post-Heideggerian phenomenologists?

00:47:04.660 Are there people...

00:47:05.360 We've discussed Dugan a few times and his importance, but are there other people in the

00:47:12.780 tradition that we should understand after Heidegger?

00:47:15.300 So, yes, but I have to say I know less about them, okay?

00:47:19.640 So, I want to...

00:47:20.680 But I'll name probably the most famous one in a moment.

00:47:23.560 So, there's post-Heideggerian political philosophy, which I think should be isolated as a very

00:47:28.260 important trend.

00:47:29.180 All of these readers who read and debated with Heidegger with an intention to say something

00:47:34.480 about politics, ethics, and society.

00:47:36.540 And there are many thinkers there besides the ones we've mentioned.

00:47:38.960 There's Emanuel Levinas is one, for example, who said that he tried to...

00:47:42.740 He took Heidegger but tried to make ethics the center of his system instead of ontology.

00:47:46.900 There are all these French thinkers.

00:47:48.340 Again, it's the big, big world of people who read Heidegger in the realm of political and

00:47:52.200 social philosophy and in many other fields, incidentally.

00:47:55.760 In medical fields, even in business, leadership management, there are Heideggerians. 0.85

00:48:00.460 It's pretty incredible.

00:48:01.380 In artificial intelligence and computer science, there are tendencies in Heidegger study.

00:48:07.740 So, the Heideggerian AI, incidentally, is a very interesting, I would say, field.

00:48:10.440 Understanding Computers and Cognition is a book on that topic from the 70s.

00:48:14.100 But sort of like, strictly speaking, a philosophical phenomenology.

00:48:18.060 The big name for me, and I haven't studied him, but he would be the first person I go to

00:48:23.140 on this topic, is Merleau-Ponty.

00:48:24.940 So, Merleau-Ponty, I think, was a famous book.

00:48:26.920 It's called Phenomenology of Perception or something like that.

00:48:29.000 And he's somebody who said, just like we had in Husserl, sort of this attention to

00:48:34.460 cataloging and describing the acts of consciousness and their structures, in Heidegger, you had

00:48:39.440 categorizing and schematizing human existence and its structures.

00:48:45.280 So, I think Merleau-Ponty said, hey, there's so much more going on in perception that we

00:48:50.880 haven't quite cataloged accurately and haven't described in full detail.

00:48:55.520 So, Merleau-Ponty, he would be the person that I would turn to for that.

00:49:00.660 And I think he's the most significant name, at least like in my model of the schools of

00:49:04.440 phenomenology, independently of the specifically political reception of Heidegger.

00:49:09.320 Speaking of Heidegger in other disciplines, have you read Ian McGelchrist's work, The Master's

00:49:16.720 Innocentary?

00:49:17.380 So, I haven't read The Master's Innocentary, but I've listened to some of his interviews.

00:49:20.260 I have discussed his book with people who have read it, and I have incorporated some of

00:49:25.100 his insights into a separate curriculum that I made for philosophy and business, targeted

00:49:29.960 to entrepreneurs.

00:49:31.220 So, I think it's very interesting.

00:49:32.580 The only thing is, I found many parallelisms between what I heard about McGelchrist and

00:49:36.640 what I heard him say in his interviews, and some of these other thinkers, except that he

00:49:40.660 maps it all fundamentally onto the hemispheres of the brain, which is a very interesting model

00:49:46.240 and probably very insightful in many different ways, whereas for some of these, especially

00:49:51.220 German-trained thinkers, they wouldn't like that because it's too bodily of a starting 1.00

00:49:58.560 point.

00:49:58.860 They would see the hemispheres of the brain being a reflection of the division of the

00:50:01.940 soul or something like that.

00:50:03.460 They see it not as cause, but as consequence.

00:50:06.780 But yeah, he seems to be doing very interesting work.

00:50:09.060 You've been reading him lately or listening to him?

00:50:11.000 Yeah, I met him in London, and I didn't know who he was, and so I got introduced to

00:50:17.260 him, and he started telling me about his work, and I was like, oh, I'm reading Heider. 0.99

00:50:21.720 Do you have anything to say about that, like an idiot? 1.00

00:50:23.960 Have you thought about this at all? 1.00

00:50:26.480 Yeah, a little bit.

00:50:27.480 I might have put a little bit of time into it.

00:50:30.140 But yeah, I'm just finishing up his book.

00:50:31.780 I found it a very interesting companion to kind of be reading that alongside being in

00:50:37.980 time itself.

00:50:38.580 I think, as you say, it would probably be a little too biological reductionist in some

00:50:43.660 ways for people, but I think it's helpful, and ultimately, I don't think that's what

00:50:47.780 he's doing.

00:50:48.440 I think he's, I think, you probably want to read the book for yourself.

00:50:53.220 I think you'd find it interesting.

00:50:54.940 But that could be a longer, again, a much longer discussion, so I won't take us down

00:51:00.820 that track, but I don't think that's exactly what he's doing.

00:51:03.160 I think he's showing that many of the Heideggerian insights manifest themselves in the

00:51:08.520 scientific research of how the brain is perceiving the world, but not making the argument that

00:51:14.300 biology itself creates the phenomenon.

00:51:16.680 I'm sure you're right.

00:51:17.640 I'm sure that's the case.

00:51:18.400 I don't mean to suggest he's a reductionist.

00:51:19.740 Again, I haven't read the work, so I can't comment on it in detail.

00:51:22.520 But the parallelism seemed nice and interesting.

00:51:24.860 And I do want to put in here a plug for the importance of reading Heidegger, even if it

00:51:28.980 seems dense.

00:51:29.480 I know you just went through being in time, start to finish, so you can attest to its density

00:51:32.560 and difficulty.

00:51:33.600 But it's one of those things that, having read it, you'll now have a better understanding

00:51:40.380 of the many, many ways that Heidegger comes out.

00:51:42.840 So even in Jordan Peterson's Rules for Life, before he gets into the first rule, he has

00:51:48.840 like a, or I think in the first rule, he has a little footnote, again, either for the

00:51:53.140 preface or for the first chapter, where he actually credits Heidegger with his understanding

00:51:57.280 of the use of being that he's going to use throughout the book.

00:51:59.440 You know, and again, people in completely other fields, maybe, you know, they don't

00:52:03.740 care about politics, they don't care about Derrida or Dugan or Strauss or any of these

00:52:06.740 people, they go into, you know, psychoanalysis, or again, some medical field or some business

00:52:12.040 field, and Heidegger's insights are operative there.

00:52:15.360 I mean, one of the most interesting things for me, if I can say this super quickly, this

00:52:18.820 was always kind of funny for me, and always just unusual, given the circles in which I

00:52:24.340 travel, which is at one point, I discovered that there was like a self-help branch.

00:52:29.440 Of Heideggerian studies, you know, that has no interest in political theory and Nietzsche

00:52:33.920 and, you know, these debates, but that actually is like, you know, they took Heidegger and

00:52:38.660 they made group seminars designed to help people discover their own structures of existence.

00:52:42.820 And they're actually pretty interesting and insightful.

00:52:44.720 And the guy who made them, you know, he considers himself a Heideggerian too.

00:52:49.040 So all over the disciplines, Heidegger's influence is present, whether it's implicit or explicit.

00:52:55.200 So reading Heidegger is like, you know, all of that is going to be just better for people.

00:52:59.460 Here you encounter it in Ian McGilchrist, somebody else will encounter it somewhere else,

00:53:03.820 in film, in philosophy.

00:53:06.200 So it's, read Heidegger, it's worth the effort.

00:53:08.000 It's difficult, but maybe all good things are.

00:53:09.980 Yeah, it is certainly a climb, but if you put the time in, I think you will discover some

00:53:15.700 very, very interesting things.

00:53:17.560 All right.

00:53:18.000 Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.

00:53:20.240 Mr. Millerman, where should people be looking for your work?

00:53:22.940 Where can they get some tutoring, some classes if they would be wanting to learn more about

00:53:27.040 something like this?

00:53:28.260 So my online course is in private tutoring at millermanschool.com.

00:53:32.360 My book on Heidegger, you go, I think heideggerbook.com should take you there.

00:53:36.120 I have a personal site where you can learn more about my other writings.

00:53:40.160 That's probably the easiest way to get it is duganbook.com.

00:53:43.360 That's my Dugan book, but it also brings you to other things I do.

00:53:46.000 I'm on Twitter.

00:53:46.760 I'm on YouTube, youtube.com slash at Millerman, or just put Millerman into any search engine.

00:53:51.440 I think you'll find all my stuff that way.

00:53:53.440 But the school is millermanschool.com.

00:53:55.380 I have courses on, several courses on Heidegger, in fact.

00:53:57.920 And for people who don't want to buy a course, I have a lot of lectures on Heidegger on my YouTube

00:54:01.320 as well, because I'm just trying to introduce people to them all the time.

00:54:03.720 I think it's pretty satisfying and important.

00:54:05.020 So hopefully between those two options, people find something they like.

00:54:09.220 Fantastic.

00:54:09.740 All right, guys.

00:54:10.540 Well, if it's your first time on this YouTube channel, please make sure to go ahead and subscribe.

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00:54:18.900 Unfortunately, today is a pre-tape, so if you had any of your questions from the audience,

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00:54:26.720 But obviously, we won't be able to address them today, unfortunately.

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00:54:34.400 McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:54:37.320 Thank you, everybody, for watching.

00:54:38.540 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 02, 2025

An Introduction to Phenomenology ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 5⧸2⧸25

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