So far we have seen how the “Western tradition” of thought has always been flanked by two mutually incompatible conceptions of the world. The mythological worldview has always been rivaled by a belief in the deity which is one, immovable, rational, and moral. Such a deity became the guarantee that the world is governed by eternal, always valid (i.e. non-temporal) and decipherable laws, based on logic, mathematics, and clear concepts of what is going on. The world, in its turn, became dead; it became a machine blindly “obeying” imposed rules. History or experience was dropped from such a well-behaved and constructed world, in which memory was reduced to material or digital imprints available for inspection to anybody. Only we humans are allowed to break out from this world-cadaver and put ourselves “outside” it to assume a god-like, supernatural position, from which we can inspect all the minutia of this deterministic, machine-like, predictable world; this observatory position is a gift from our Creator. Such a framework enabled the foundation in modernity of the natural sciences and technology, and the establishment of the metaphysical worldview we inhabit today. Science later simplified this scheme by deleting morality and by replacing deity with impersonal Nature and her “natural laws”.
If Dasein-with remains existentially constitutive for Being-in-the-world, then … it must be interpreted in terms of the phenomenon of care; for as “care” the Being of Dasein in general is to be defined. … But those entities towards which Dasein as Being-with comports itself do not have the kind of Being which belongs to equipment ready-to-hand; they are themselves Dasein. These entities are not objects of concern, but rather of solicitude.
M. Heidegger 1962, 121
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Notes
- 1.
Later, we explain why we do not consider so called emergence to be a genuine novelty.
- 2.
A similar line of thinking, protesting against historicism and the world-machine belief, was developed at the same time by F. Nietzsche. His impact in philosophy cannot, however, be compared with that of Darwin in science, and we shall not follow this line.
- 3.
A short notice from the Czech daily Lidové noviny (February 6, 2006) headed “Britons hesitate between science and faith” can serve as an illustration of such a benign wave: “Four out of ten Britons support the idea that religious interpretation of creation should be taught in schools, as an alternative to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Such is the result of a poll undertaken by BBC. … 44 per cent of respondents require teaching also of the Biblical version of creation, and 41 per cent supports teaching about intelligent control or intelligent design of the world. … Several scientists protested against such views. … [For example], Sir David Attenborough said that scientists should defend the borderland between science and belief and explained that science is based on exact proofs, whereas religious belief is not.” Why such an argument “either (science) – or (faith)” should go on at all is nobody’s concern. Even more perplexing is the fact, that some scientists feel it as their duty to “protest against such views”. See also Chapter 4.
- 4.
Likeness is one of the key notions of our text; it will be developed in Chapters 3 and 4.
- 5.
Framing or enframing are English translations of Gestell. In Heidegger (1993b) we can read: “Where do we find ourselves, if we now think one step further regarding what enframing actually is? It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the actual reveals itself as a standing reserve.” (328–329) … “[T]he setting-upon that challenges forth thrusts man into a relation to whatever is that is at once antithetical and rigorously ordered. Here enframing holds sway, regulating and securing of the standing-reserve mark all revealing. They no longer even let their own fundamental characteristic appear, namely, this revealing as such. Thus the challenging-enframing not only conceals a former way of revealing (bringing-forth) but also conceals revealing itself and with it that wherein unconcealment, i.e., truth, propriates.” (332–333) “It is precisely in enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the ostensibly sole way of revealing.” (337)
- 6.
In our history, even the most sophisticated coalitions of people (Dasein) who aimed for the petrification of their own version of the world beyond the limits of their own existence could not succeed for longer periods of time. Petrifaction would mean cancelling time, i.e. depriving heirs of the possibility of concern, and hence robbing them of their state of Dasein. All kinds of utopias play with this idea.
- 7.
Admittedly, Heidegger had good reasons for his definition of Dasein, and in particular he was himself compelled to simplify what would otherwise have been somewhat knotty analyses. For example, he bracketed out some categories of human race (like children or the mentally challenged), as well indeed as the rest of the biosphere.
- 8.
See, e.g., models of information processing provided by molecular biologists.
- 9.
See also Eco 1995; Hofstadter 1980.
- 10.
I. Prigogine (1980; Prigogine and Stengers 1985) upset this hierarchy when he showed that each of the particular domains of description has its autonomy. Communication between domains is bi-directional, but at the price of non-canonicity: the change of language between domains always brings about losses as well as gains. See also Havel 1996.
- 11.
Compare this with deterministic systems in statistical physics, which allow such moves both into the future and into the past. The solution does not lie in shortening the time interval between the actual state and the adjacent possible, for we would only end up in the realm of the uncertainty principle.
- 12.
This quotation holds as a definition of the “4th thermodynamic law”.
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Markoš, A., Grygar, F., Hajnal, L., Kleisner, K., Kratochvíl, Z., Neubauer, Z. (2009). Co-creators of the World. In: Life as Its Own Designer. Biosemiotics, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9970-0_2
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