Tag: Heidegger

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Philosophy

The swift flight of a single sparrow

After a couple of weeks of solid change – new house, new office, new term, new school year – I wrote to my old philosophy tutor the other evening.

He has written extensively on the ‘Episodic Life’ – a view that life as a story (the ‘Narrative Life’) isn’t actually how some people experience events; and may actually be something of a self-limiting straitjacket.

I’ve certainly found that a bit of letting go (à la Buddhism) and a bit of consciously setting out to enjoy new ‘episodes’ in life has got me through the last hectic fortnight. In fact I’ve quite enjoyed it!

Here’s what I wrote:

“After much denial I’m coming to the view there’s a lot to be said for the ‘episodic’ life. If Heidegger is right (and I think he is) that we wander as a tiny candle flame briefly through a dark, largely empty and uninterested universe – then why wouldn’t you see what every day on Gaia brings, and let the universe serve you up the answers for what fun to have next.

I’m starting think there’s a spot of hubris in my previous attachment to the ‘narrative’ life. A lot happened before us, little we do really affects the myriad lives and physical processes around us and we’ll all be gone before you know it.

I still think Aristotle’s fundamentally right; happiness is a life well lived – but maybe a slightly more eclectic approach to the journey might save me the angst of Kierkegaard and the earnestness of Bentham and Mill.

Keep writing Galen – I’ll catch up with your beautiful mind one day!”

And here’s what he wrote back – it’s rather lovely:

Thanks John. Heidegger … sounds like the Venerable Bede.

The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) records the story of King Edwin of Northumberland at the hands of the missionary bishop Paulinus.

Edwin was willing to hear the preaching of Paulinus and to convert at once, but he called together a meeting of his council of elders, which included his pagan high priest, Coifi. Paulinus presented the gospel to him, and one of the chief advisors replied with this observation:

“Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors.

In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a moment of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came.

Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.” 

Here’s an article on the ‘Episodic Life’:

https://aeon.co/essays/let-s-ditch-the-dangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story

Life, Philosophy, Science

Dasein

20140523-191853-69533252.jpg
Heidegger is a notoriously heavy read – and a controversial one, given he lived in Germany through two world wars and after. His concept of Dasein – the world as perceived and lived in by humans has made me think though.

It’s easy to imagine there’s a world without us. Of course there is. Surely? A world of maths, logic, science and mindless physical processes. Not to mention a less thought-filled living world of birds and beasts – nature red in tooth and claw.

So what’s so special about humans that Heidegger says we define our very own universe? I think I get his point. Everything we see, refer to, understand and know is in fact self-referring – it is based on human experiences, human timescales, human sensory apparatus and the human scale.

We can’t truly understand or describe the world from the point of view of an ant, let alone from the perspective of a celestial body. But a celestial body is dead, so it has no perspective surely? If I read Heidegger right – I think it does.

Knowledge, wisdom, trial and error, mindless and mindful – the course of the universe is to record more and more information in itself including embodied intelligence – information stored in physical forms.

In the same way as an ant contains within it information about carbon-based life, geological time and the process of evolution; even the most basic planet contains information about the elements, supernovae and stellar aeons which led to it.

From the blinding simplicity of the Big Bang to the unimaginably vast store of data which is a galaxy – let alone a universe of them – the course of ‘life’ has been captured, recorded, embodied and stored in both vast and minuscule stores of accumulated ‘relevant complexity’ – in effect: information.

As Heidegger suggests, our mentally comprehensible portion of this recorded information is determined by our embodied human faculties and timescales. But for the ant or the celestial body the ‘recording’ is at vastly different scales. Dasein or the ‘human universe’ is but a tiny portion of this. And what each of us sees and understands of it, is but the portion lit by our own tiny flickering candle.

That we see and understand even that much, is an accident of stellar and evolutionary history – our tiny illuminated moment in space and time. But for each of us it is a very fortunate and beautiful one. And Heidegger invites us to live it to the full.