by Greg Goode
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
Nietzsche (1976)
Michel Foucault related truth to a generalized idea of the circulation of power:
“Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.
“Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A “regime” of truth.
Foucault (2001)
Being at Home in the World
Recognizing the mind-dependence of the world can be so much more than just a dry philosophical insight. It can be the starting point for experiencing yourself and the world in a thoroughly interdependent (in other words, empty) way.
One way to see the world as interdependent with the mind is to recognize specific dependencies. Sometimes the interdependencies are profoundly meaningful. They can often transform our everyday sense of interconnectedness with the world. We can come to experience ourselves and the world as not two in an entirely practical, everyday sense.
In searching for these interdependencies, we will let Martin Heidegger be our guide. We will adapt a few insights on inter-connectedness from his masterpiece called Being and Time.
About Martin Heidegger
Heidegger is a highly original, radical, poetic and sometimes mind-blowing thinker. Although Heidegger would not have considered his work to be emptiness teachings, it nevertheless has a lot to offer you as an emptiness student. After all, emptiness is not just a new surface cosmetic; it is meant to reformulate your experience deeply. How else could emptiness be as deeply transformational as it claims? Heidegger’s work can help.
Some dislike Heidegger’s work with a passion, most prominently because he has been associated with the Nazi party. Nevertheless his philosophy has been appropriated by all sides of the political spectrum. Many people believe that his philosophy can be studied apart from his conduct, and that no matter what we study, we must begin with a generous and caring heart. Despite Heidegger’s well-known Nazi connections, he nevertheless became one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, along with Wittgenstein, Derrida and Quine.
One more word of caution. Heidegger has the reputation of being a tough read. In part, this is because he comes up with lots of new words. For example, for “human being” he uses the German word Dasein, which carries the literal German meaning of “being there.” To use Dasein for “human being” is not just the eccentric obscurity of a German university professor. Part of Heidegger’s purpose is to move past the dualistic Cartesian theory, in which a human being is a non-physical spectator trapped inside a physical body. For Heidegger, we are already “all there.” So the very invention of a new language, if well done, can open up our thinking about ourselves in fresh ways. You may appreciate his terminology as quite helpful and illuminating, once you gain some familiarity with it.
How Objects in the World Depend on Us
We’ll start with Heidegger’s famous analysis of tools as a guiding image for how we are already interconnected with objects in the world. He calls tools “equipment” for human purposes such as writing, cooking, building a house and doing astronomy. What makes a hammer the tool as it is, is that we know how to use it skillfully. We know how it fits into our human projects. This is what characterizes a hammer in our world. The hammer doesn’t show up for us as a mere physical object as the “correspondence theory” might tempt us to think. For Heidegger, to think of a hammer as a mere physical object would be an impoverished view of our actual, lived experience.
...[T]he less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is – as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific “manipulability”... of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses – in which it manifests itself in its own right – we call “readiness-to-hand”...
Heideger (2008)
For Heidegger, a book depends on us for more than just labeling it with the name “book.” The book comes to us as something much richer. It shows up as a fully-fledged object of human concern. A book is a thing that provides us with information; it can educate or entertain us. We know how to use it, such as to prepare for an exam. We don’t just encounter the book “in itself,” severed from the human projects it relates to. The human project is just as much part of the book as its color or its weight. In general, Heidegger argues that whatever shows up for us in the world, is already rich with human significance. This is a wonderfully holistic insight.
Let’s look at some examples of how things carry significance within our world. They may do so by relating to other tools, people, projects, goals, purposes, etc. In fact, it is a deep emptiness insight that there is no such thing as a description that captures something “as it really is,” apart from human purposes and other things. Descriptions of an object already take us into the world of relations. The relations include pragmatic, utilitarian tool-like relations as well. Here are some examples of how you can think of objects as they present themselves to you in everyday life:
A table serves food and is a gathering place for friends.
A computer is used for work and entertainment.
The spiritual books on my shelves connect me to the human project of seeking spiritual illumination and to the people who wrote and studied them in the past.
A house provides shelter to people and animals.
A burning lamp allows us to cook dinner and to read books.
The clothes I’m wearing carry the aesthetic vision of the designer.
A delicious cake carries the mark of the skillful baker.
The universe is a never-ending source of wonder and exploration not just for scientists but for lay people too.
A green field allows us to grow food; it can also soothe our minds.
A train takes us from one place to the next.
The lion is not just a biological creature, but also a symbol of strength and dignity.
A cell phone is a lifeline to family and friends.
Meditation – Using a Tool
Look around you and notice a tool, such as a pen. To what use can you put it? What are some other tools that it “refers” to? Paper? Ink? What are some of the purposes for which you’d use the tool? Writing a diary or a shopping list?
Take a few minutes and imagine a typical situation in which you are engaged in using this tool. Do you find that the tool as a separate object disappears into the background of your activity? Can you still feel the subject/object split when you’re immersed in using the tool? Or does that split diminish or dissolve?
Meditation – The Human Significance of Objects
Take a few minutes and think of any tool-like object that you can think of. Hammer. Bridge. Ambulance. Reflect on the meaning and purposes of this object in human life. Do this for a number of objects.
Now take a few minutes and think of an object that is not usually considered a tool or a human creation. Sunset. Rock. River. Quark. Moon. Can you even find human significance in these objects? Even an obscure object like a quark can be an inspirational thing for a scientist. A rock can be a thing of severe beauty or a symbol of intransigence or reliability. A sunset is a romantic thing for many of us.
Of course, the realist gestalt may have a reply to all this. It may say, “This doesn’t prove anything. Human significance is only what we add to the object – it is not w
hat we discover in the object.” But this is exactly Heidegger’s point. We can’t think of Dasein (us) and the world as independent of each other and thereby we can’t draw a line between what we discover and what we add. We enter the relationship with the object already thoroughly embedded in all these relationships. In addition, Heidegger argues plausibly that the project of explaining our full human experience by starting from a neutral, scientific view of objects fails.
Take a few minutes and see that we can’t draw such a line without inhabiting the (impossible) God’s-eye view.
How We Depend on Things in the World
So far we have seen how things in the world depend on us. Whatever we encounter already comes with human significance and thereby depends on us. Let’s look at the other side, at how we depend on things in the world.
Instead, [Dasein] never finds itself otherwise than in the things themselves, and in fact in those things that daily surround it. It finds itself primarily and constantly in things because, tending them, distressed by them, it always in some way or other rests in things. Each one of us is what he pursues and cares for. In everyday terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and things we take care of. We understand ourselves by starting from them because the Dasein finds itself primarily in things. ... Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world itself, its own self is reflected to it from things.
Heidegger (1988)
Finding ourselves “primarily and constantly in things” is a remarkable observation. Heidegger is saying that the world-related pursuits and cares are constitutive of our experience and thereby constitutive of us. We’re never separate from the world, because we’re made of it! We pursue, we care.
As this being-in-the-world, Dasein is, together with this, being-with-one-another, being with Others: having the same world there with Others, encountering one another, being with one another in the manner of being-for-one-another.
Heidegger (1992)
Heidegger coins another term that expresses this clearly. Our being is always already “being-in-the-world.” Remove the world and there’s no human being left!
This offers a very different approach to existence than the approach offered by the realist gestalt or the Cartesian dualist system. With Heideggerian holism, we are not internal knowers of an external world. We are “fully there.”
Dasein is that entity which is characterized as being-in-the-world. Human life is not some subject that has to perform some trick in order to enter the world. Dasein as being-in-the-world means being in the world in such a way that this Being means: dealing with the world; tarrying alongside it in the manner of performing, effecting and completing, but also contemplating, interrogating, and determining by way of contemplation and comparison. Being-in-the-world is characterized as concern.
Ibid
Heidegger says that we are “characterized by concern.” We are concerned about things in the world. We care. Concern is a deep, human form of interrelatedness. And that concern/interrelatedness characterizes us, makes us what we are. We are concerned about people and things. Our being is fundamentally a “being-with” and our relationship to others is characterized by care and solicitude.
Let’s investigate if that analysis holds in your experience.
Meditation – Concerns are About the World
Take a few minutes and think of any concern that you currently have, or a pursuit in which you are engaged.
Investigate: are your concerns and pursuits not already about some person or some thing in the world? Repeat this analysis several times, with different examples.
Can you find any significant concern in your inner life that is not about the world, not about its people and objects?
If you can’t think of anything unrelated, then this is Heidegger’s point – that you and the world are intertwined, and that you are being-in-the-world... This is a beautiful emptiness insight.
Is There a Division Between Me and the World?
What about perception? Doesn’t perception report the object in the world as it is in itself? Doesn’t perception support the realist gestalt?
Let’s look for a gap between us and the objects we perceive. Do we find a gap or a veil or any kind of block between ourselves and the objects in the world?
According to Heidegger, we don’t perceive the world across a gap or through a veil. For Heidegger, the world is as immediately available to us as anything could ever be. In our direct experience, there is no separation. We don’t perceive through “pure” sense perceptions. On the contrary, we are already in effortless, intimate contact with the world. To quote Heidegger again,
What we “first” hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling.
It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to “hear” a “pure noise”. The fact that motor-cycles and wagons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside “sensations”; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide a springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a “world”. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside what is understood.
Heidegger (2008)
Let’s test whether this is true in our own experience.
Meditation – The Seamlessness of Perception
Take a few minutes and look around the room. What do you see? Perhaps a lamp, a chair, a table, a wall? Do you experience them directly and effortlessly? Or does it take any effort?
Is there any dividing line in your experience between you and the objects?
Do you find yourself needing to translate a visual shape into a table? Or is the table simply there as a table in your experience?
Now close your eyes. What do you hear? Perhaps a fan, a bird, some traffic? Are these things already infinitely close to you in your experience and effortlessly there? Or do you first need to make an effort to translate from distance and sounds?
If you judge from the intimacy of your experience, rather than from your ideas about points in geometrical space, do you experience any distance between you and the objects of your perception?
Regaining a Fuller, Interconnected World
In the previous chapters, we noticed how objects in the world come along with significance. Oftentimes, we wish to use the spiritual pursuit to transcend significance and rise above the conditions of life.
But you may wish to explore whether your own life will be different if you bring that sense of significance more into the foreground of your experience. The following meditation is meant to help you do that.
Meditation – Re-Enlivening Your World
Take a few minutes and look at the objects around you. Take a look at them one by one. Try to find some significance they have within human life.
Here are some questions to help you do that:
What is the purpose of this object in life – not just my life but in the lives of others as well?
How does the object help not only me, but others?
In which areas of human life does the object play a role?
How does the object refer to other human beings? Did others make it? Have others used it? Does it perhaps bear the name, logo or label of a particular person?
How does the object refer to other objects?
After this meditation, does the place you have been examining feel different than before? Do you get a greater sense of interrelatedness between you and the world?
You can do this meditation many times, while at home, standing in line, waiting at a traffic light, during a boring meeting, or while walking through your town. Over time, it will transform your world and you will feel its effect even when you’re not actively doing the meditation.
This meditation will move you sweetly towards a more holistic way of being in the world and with other people. The realist gestalt will have less and less appeal, and you will feel lighter and more open. You will see the world and your relations to it as more ... empty!
Conclusion
In the first half of the chapter, we showed that defining truth as correspondence between sentences and mind-independent facts is hopelessly confused and unintelligible. In the second half of the chapter, we have been refuting the idea of mind-independent objects by suggesting a new, intimate way of relating to the world.
We have found that the realist gestalt makes no sense, and that it also doesn’t conform to our experience. We often believe that there is a gap between us and the world, but when we look intimately at our experience, we do not experience a gap at all. We do not add relations to pure experiences of objects in themselves. Instead, our experience is already richly related. “The purity of things in themselves” as something true, to which our sentences must correspond, is nothing more than a philosophical fiction. We are free to set it aside.
We hope that some of the meditations, with their “interdependence gestalt,” helped transform your world into a more wholesome, beautiful, peaceful and humane place.
A Final Heidegger Quote
Here is a remarkable excerpt from Martin Heidegger’s essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” It expresses how our experiential space is quite different from the Euclidian geometric space that we normally assume as constituting the spatial structure of our world.
Of course, we can use the geometric model of the world in engineering and architectural projects. But we do not have to believe that the geometric model corresponds to how the world is in itself. We do not have to regard the correspondence theory as “the true theory of truth.”
As a joyful ironist, you can use or even inhabit a model of the world without taking it literally or as something true in itself. As a joyful ironist, you find the entire realist gestalt (along with its ideas about the things in themselves and truth as correspondence) as an unhelpful way to think about the world.