Being and Existing: I
Continuing with cj...
The point about the being of an apple is interesting and I think it might be worthwhile to pursuit this point a little bit. According to Einsteinian physics, an apple is an event occupying all four dimensions of physicality. But fundamentally speaking, this has nothing to do with the being of the apple. The apple as an event only points to the fact that it objectively exists. On this point leads to a necessary distinction between "being" and "existing".
[What I'm about to say from this point on might be very Heideggerian, but please keep in mind that I have no command over Heidegger's philosophy.]
I have purposely used the word "existing" instead of "existence" because to the word "being" must be understood in the sense of "be-ing", grammatically parallelled to "exist-ing". We know what it means to "exist". But what does it mean to "be"? When Hamlet speaks "To be, or not to be, that is the question", what does he mean by "to be"?
With inadequate knowledge of modern physics, I will nevertheless assert the difference between "to exist" and "to be" is liken to the difference between "the objective" and the "subjective". A thing existing has objective ontological status. The apple is there, at a point within the space-time fabric which anyone can locate, regardless of the actual location located by a perceiver. On the other hand, a thing being has subjective ontological status. The apple is not there because I am not eating it, nor touching it, nor smelling it; my consciousness has no need to recognize its there-ness and therefore will not recognize its there-ness. For a thing to be, it requires an individual's consciousness to recognize its there-ness.
For those of you who have read Heidegger's works, you might remember in one of his essays, he gives the example of the bridge. Let me try to paraphrase that example. (If I am mistaken, please tell me.) I live in Richmond, and everyday I take the bus to school. Everyday the bus goes on the Oak Street Bridge to take me to UBC campus. Does the bridge exist? Yes: the bridge exists as a thing or an event (depending on how scientifically sophisticated you want to be). It has a specific location in space, and, for the aliens traveling at near light speed from another planet, time. It has existed since it was built, and it will continue to exist until something calls for its destruction. But does the bridge be? This is a very awkward question, but I can tell you for most of the time the bridge does not be. It is not. This is because whenever I'm on the bus I do not pay attention to the bridge. I'm only thinking about my Shakespeare papers, or my friends, or that girl with the nice dress. In my consciousness there is no bridge. It is a tool which I have become accustomed to. When the bus goes on the bridge, while my eyes are looking out at the Fraser River, in my consciousness I do not say "hey, I'm on a bridge".
But does the bridge never be in my consciousness? Well of course it does. It is just very rare. For example, when the traffic is terrible and the bus is going slow. I ask myself "what's going on?", and my automatic reaction is to look to the front of the bus to see the traffic on the bridge. Or imagine if one day the bridge collapses: then I am forced to recognize the former existence of the bridge, and the bridge now is in my mind. But much of the time we do not pay attention to the bridge.
One might perhaps object that this is just metaphysics in disguise, and aren't we, in the 21st century, with the triumph of science, way over metaphysics? Isn't consciousness just brain waves and hormones? To say this would be to totally miss the point. Consciousness exists as brain waves and hormones, but consciousness is consciousness, the undeniable ego that commands the body.
Perhaps we need not worry about the being of an apple. But what about human beings? I think this ties extremely well into my previous Marxist comment about labour and alienation. We exist, there is no doubt about that. The question is "Are we?" I think we can read Marx in this way, that we are not because, upon specialization, we have become mere tools. When we are doing our specialized jobs, we do not enter our own stream of consciousness; others do not put use into their own stream of consciousness. The bus driver is a tool, a machine. Nobody really cares if he is having a bad or good day; nor can he himself care, at least not during work: work is to be the best machine as possible. We can stop being machines when we stop working, when we go home and endure our own miserable lives. But something more terrible happens: when we are at home, just as we think we can be authentic, we've internalized the machine-mentality and we have our own expectations of what our family members should do - we start to behave according to ideology and conventional values. To mask the ideology, we start to confuse the meaning of "being" and "existence", thinking that if we exist, then we are. True we exist, but we are not. We are not authentically us. We exist, stuck to a web of ideology. In our consciousness we do not see ourselves but machines and ideology; we mistake that to be ourselves. Maybe my picture is a bit of a stretch, but from a simple discussion on the ontology of apple we have come to an astonishing analysis of social ideology.
On the other hand, if we are being, we will not be so easily engulfed by social ideology. My work is my life. We are intimately connected with who we are, what others are. Our world would be in our own terms.
The point about the being of an apple is interesting and I think it might be worthwhile to pursuit this point a little bit. According to Einsteinian physics, an apple is an event occupying all four dimensions of physicality. But fundamentally speaking, this has nothing to do with the being of the apple. The apple as an event only points to the fact that it objectively exists. On this point leads to a necessary distinction between "being" and "existing".
[What I'm about to say from this point on might be very Heideggerian, but please keep in mind that I have no command over Heidegger's philosophy.]
I have purposely used the word "existing" instead of "existence" because to the word "being" must be understood in the sense of "be-ing", grammatically parallelled to "exist-ing". We know what it means to "exist". But what does it mean to "be"? When Hamlet speaks "To be, or not to be, that is the question", what does he mean by "to be"?
With inadequate knowledge of modern physics, I will nevertheless assert the difference between "to exist" and "to be" is liken to the difference between "the objective" and the "subjective". A thing existing has objective ontological status. The apple is there, at a point within the space-time fabric which anyone can locate, regardless of the actual location located by a perceiver. On the other hand, a thing being has subjective ontological status. The apple is not there because I am not eating it, nor touching it, nor smelling it; my consciousness has no need to recognize its there-ness and therefore will not recognize its there-ness. For a thing to be, it requires an individual's consciousness to recognize its there-ness.
For those of you who have read Heidegger's works, you might remember in one of his essays, he gives the example of the bridge. Let me try to paraphrase that example. (If I am mistaken, please tell me.) I live in Richmond, and everyday I take the bus to school. Everyday the bus goes on the Oak Street Bridge to take me to UBC campus. Does the bridge exist? Yes: the bridge exists as a thing or an event (depending on how scientifically sophisticated you want to be). It has a specific location in space, and, for the aliens traveling at near light speed from another planet, time. It has existed since it was built, and it will continue to exist until something calls for its destruction. But does the bridge be? This is a very awkward question, but I can tell you for most of the time the bridge does not be. It is not. This is because whenever I'm on the bus I do not pay attention to the bridge. I'm only thinking about my Shakespeare papers, or my friends, or that girl with the nice dress. In my consciousness there is no bridge. It is a tool which I have become accustomed to. When the bus goes on the bridge, while my eyes are looking out at the Fraser River, in my consciousness I do not say "hey, I'm on a bridge".
But does the bridge never be in my consciousness? Well of course it does. It is just very rare. For example, when the traffic is terrible and the bus is going slow. I ask myself "what's going on?", and my automatic reaction is to look to the front of the bus to see the traffic on the bridge. Or imagine if one day the bridge collapses: then I am forced to recognize the former existence of the bridge, and the bridge now is in my mind. But much of the time we do not pay attention to the bridge.
One might perhaps object that this is just metaphysics in disguise, and aren't we, in the 21st century, with the triumph of science, way over metaphysics? Isn't consciousness just brain waves and hormones? To say this would be to totally miss the point. Consciousness exists as brain waves and hormones, but consciousness is consciousness, the undeniable ego that commands the body.
Perhaps we need not worry about the being of an apple. But what about human beings? I think this ties extremely well into my previous Marxist comment about labour and alienation. We exist, there is no doubt about that. The question is "Are we?" I think we can read Marx in this way, that we are not because, upon specialization, we have become mere tools. When we are doing our specialized jobs, we do not enter our own stream of consciousness; others do not put use into their own stream of consciousness. The bus driver is a tool, a machine. Nobody really cares if he is having a bad or good day; nor can he himself care, at least not during work: work is to be the best machine as possible. We can stop being machines when we stop working, when we go home and endure our own miserable lives. But something more terrible happens: when we are at home, just as we think we can be authentic, we've internalized the machine-mentality and we have our own expectations of what our family members should do - we start to behave according to ideology and conventional values. To mask the ideology, we start to confuse the meaning of "being" and "existence", thinking that if we exist, then we are. True we exist, but we are not. We are not authentically us. We exist, stuck to a web of ideology. In our consciousness we do not see ourselves but machines and ideology; we mistake that to be ourselves. Maybe my picture is a bit of a stretch, but from a simple discussion on the ontology of apple we have come to an astonishing analysis of social ideology.
On the other hand, if we are being, we will not be so easily engulfed by social ideology. My work is my life. We are intimately connected with who we are, what others are. Our world would be in our own terms.
posted by Tristan at 10:10 p.m.
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