In the "Collective intelligence (Granger)" thread, Krimel said to David M:
Thinking can cover a lot of activities. We specifically focus on things that
don't work but I like to think that the brain is engaged in some way while
wielding a hammer. It may not be rational, verbal or focused but information
is being processed, don't you think?
Because DM had said:
Heidegger suggested we think when we are faced by things that don't work, if
the nails nail, we just get on with nailing.
dmb chimes in:
I'm gonna take this as a chance to speculate about the connection between
Heidegger's hammer and Zeno's arrow. Since nails are so loudly and
conspicuously hitting their target all the time, it stikes me that Heidegger
picked the image as an intentional parody. But I think it was Bergson who
used the fletcher's paradox to get at the difference between the continuous
flow of time as we experience it and the discrete increments with which we
conceptualize and measure time. (This paradox basically says that motion is
an illusion, because a loosed arrow will never reach its target. And it
never gets there because it travels half of the distance in half the time,
and then half again and again forever.) I think Bergson was the one who
suggested that the point of this absurdity is not to deny motion so much as
expose the limits of our conceptualizations. This problem arises only
because of the way we divide and measure things and the guy with an arrow
through his head will tell you that they most certainly do reach their
targets. If he can't tell you, try the guy with the nose glasses.
Berson illustrated the idea by comparing our conceptualizations to the way a
movie camera works. As I'm sure you know, they capture a rapid succession of
still images, little frozen bits of the original scene. This is analogous to
the way static concepts relate to dynamic experience.
Just for trivia points, Bergson had a long running debate about the nature
of time with Einstein. Apparently, a lot of it was published. He was also
pen-pals with William James and they had similar debates. James's radical
empiricism was very close to Bergson's ideas on the topic. These
conversations went on for years and years. He was a pretty big deal in his
day, winning a nobel prize for literature in 1929, I think. Despite all
this, he refused special treatment and insisted on standing in line (in the
rain) just like everybody else. When the Nazis were rounding up Jews to be
tagged as members of an "inferior" race. How do you spell poignant?
Anyway, Heidegger's carpenter strikes me as a bit like Pirsig's mechanic.
But I think Heidegger does not praise the unthinking worker a carefully
engaged Zen guy. If memory serves, this state of consciousness is associated
with his notion of "fallenness", which is a kind of existential
inauthenticity. But still, they share this idea that there is an important
distinction between engagement and reflection or experience and concepts, if
you prefer. (Although somehow it seems that its possible to be so engaged
even in reflection. It seems you can lose yourself in thought the way you
can lose yourself in motorcycle repair or hammering or painting or anything
else.) I'm thinking Heidegger pick the image of hammering, at least partly,
because its so repetitive. Nailers are fasteners and they're used to
construct things.
"That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had
seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the
rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who
had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was
that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the
rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality.
It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of
fixed, rigid way." paperback Bantam ZAMM 342
Thus, Zeno explained to his lover through logic and math and passionate
kisses galore how cupid's arrow could never reach his heart. Then he nailed
her.
dmb
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