Exam 1 Response in PHL4020 Continental Philosophy, taught by Dr. Donovan Miyasaki

Andrew Correll  

February 18th, 2020  

Exam 1

1B:

Art to Heidegger sets up a world of connections in the viewer that contrasts with nature against which man strives against, thus revealing truth by revealing this state of strife. To Heidegger there are several types of things: mere things, equipment, and works of art. Stone would be an irreducible, “mere thing”1—the first category of Heidegger’s. This changes when it is fashioned into a tool or “equipment,” the second of his categories, when mere things take on usefulness and reliability in a human context. This relates to his contrast between the world, which is human-decoded reality (equipment), and the earth, which is what humans can’t know about physical, material reality (mere things). Most people don’t consider the things around them apart from their human context, as the “stone” in an “ax” (171) tends to “disappear… into usefulness” (171). 

However, artworks—the third category of thing—helps us consider things in their larger context. Art sets up a contrast or strife between the two previous categories of mere thing (earth) and equipment (world). For example, Heidegger says, “In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth” (172). This means that by art evoking human ideas—setting up a “world”— with the use of physical material the strife between human experience and non-human physical earth becomes stark. Heidegger says, “In strife, each opponent carries the other beyond itself” (174), which is similar to the Lego Batman movie where Batman’s definition as a hero is tied up with the joker being his opposition. In a similar way, art shows the world and earth’s opposition and dependence, how “the earth juts through the world” (174). A hero-villain analogy also illustrates how an imbalance would break down their mutual definitions.

When an artwork is “setting up…a world” (171) it is bringing relations into awareness of the viewer, which in the case of a temple (as art) would be ideas like “birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace” (167). At the same time, it “sets forth the earth” (172) by having “steadfastness… [which] contrasts with the surge of the sea” against it (168). The struggle with the sea exemplifies strife or contrast, kind of like how black letters in a meme are only visible against a light background.

By illuminating nature for what it is, art can also help reveal “equipmental being” (159-160) and novel uses for such materials. This is because the temple “draws up out of the rock the obscurity of that rock’s bulky yet spontaneous support” (157), where I might realize I can make bricks out of the rock or create gravel from this new-found perspective art provided. This is intuitive because almost anyone would agree that viewing art makes us more creative. 

This discussion of art elucidates Heidegger’s notion of truth, which he considers the “unconcealment of beings” (177). In other words, truth is depicting things accurately, which is what most people intuitively think of truth as. In science this is describing water’s relationship to molecular motion (45 degrees’ Celsius) or space (45 ml), but in art truth is revealed to the viewer by unconcealing strife between man-made concepts and nature. This truth is unlimited because connections are unlimited, so the work then is the “instigation of the strife in which the unconcealment of beings as a whole, or truth, is won” (180). While non-artistic forms of truth describe relationships in ways everyone can experience in relatively similar ways, with standards such as meters and kilograms, artistic forms of truth describe relationships that will be different 

in every observer. This is still truth because by viewing art people associate with the earth in a manner that conveys comprehension of the inherent struggle with it.                                                                                                                   

2A: 

Why do millions of people occasionally believe in something so strongly that they become oblivious to and even participate in horrifically damaging actions? Hannah Arendt thinks that the imposed order of the Nazis was accepted uncritically by those most used to following rules and that it was those who were more hesitant to follow along who were able to resist participation. 

Many would consider the Nazis sending millions of people to their deaths a collective, lawless act from a mass degradation of moral values. However, Arendt argues that they had a very logical schema, built “up with utter consistency and care”2, as how else would they have been able to work together so efficiently to take over most of Europe in a short period of time? This does not seem like a state of anarchy, since the “’words of the Fuhrer…had the force of law” (43), so the system the Nazis worked in was not “modern nihilism” (42).

But this morality encouraged genocide in a previously peace-loving society, and Arendt thinks the pliability of moral norms is the cause. Moral rules to her are no more than “mores” that can be “exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people” (43). Despite fluctuation, people can still deeply believe in these morals, and the Nazis so “believed in the ‘new order’” that killing became only “‘a medical matter’” (43) with no accompanying moral significance. Thus, she claims that “those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable” (45)—a strange claim because usually those who are loyal to a cause are described as dependent and “reliable.” 

But what if the basis upon which they so faithfully act changes? These people would likely yield “easily to temptation” (25) since they are in the “mere habit of holding fast to something” (45) when the charismatic leader pays for advertising space on any screen and wall available. Therefore, it was often the most influential in society, those who “were fully qualified in matters of morality and held…in the highest esteem” (25), who fell prey to Nazi ideology. These people were used to being fully and radically bought in to the zeitgeist of their society, which is how they rose to prominence before the Nazi reign and during it. The person no one particularly thinks is “cool” because they don’t jump on the bandwagons of the latest fashion trends, for example, would be like “the nonparticipants” (44) who “were the only ones who dared judge by themselves” (44) during the rise of Nazi values in Germany. These skeptics were “much more reliable” in their behavior than the impassioned blind followers in the sense that they had a tendency to “examine things and to make up [one’s] mind”’ (45).

She does not argue for a type of conscientious skepticism on the basis of some more legitimate source of morality but because it involves caution with a social element, guided by how you feel about one’s actions in relation to others. In focusing on how to live “together with ourselves” (45) in the future, the nonparticipants with this view judged their actions by the kind of person they would want to be around as a lifelong friend. This discourages those who disregard their natural feelings of empathy. Paying heed to the inner voice that the person you are about to kill is very much like you seems to be Arendt’s answer to the problem of how to prevent movements like Nazism from suppressing people’s reciprocal social natures.

She says skeptics “are used to examin[ing] things and…mak[ing] up their own minds” (45), but I think there are many people who have strong moral beliefs and are critical in their decision making. While being skeptical necessarily involves contemplating beliefs, one can contemplate what morality system to follow without being a skeptic. Many people, like Jeff Bezos, take significant care in thinking through how they can best donate money to programs that attempt to do wonderful things like curb climate change. It seems that people like him who donate to charities of their choice have strong moral sentiment—because they are putting their money on the line—yet still contemplate what morality to follow because they visit different organizations to see their strategies before they act with their wallets. Arendt might say that such an impassioned philanthropist would just as easily donate to a dictator out of habit of fervor, but they could strongly believe because they have considered things and deem the cause to be just.