Tag: Trinity Christian College

Posted on

The Comedy of Being: Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (“Being and Time”) often reads like a parody of philosophy.   The first 35 pages are replete with repetitive (in my opinion) insistences that before you can analyze reality in any sense you must apprehend the being-ness of being there in the radical sense of existential being, which everybody else has failed to do.

I consider the idea that Heidegger may be a massive fraud.  I think it’s a possibility.  He is very, very esteemed in the world of cool philosophy geeks, but it is quite possible that they are entranced by Heidegger’s incomprehensibility being confused for “mystique”, combined with the language that is almost poetically inane.  “The being of being is the beingness of not-being authentically in a non-thematic ontological context that cannot be known.”  Ok.  I made that up– but it’s close.

It is quite possible that he has hit upon something that everybody already knows in a certain valid sense and has taken to describing it as if it is hidden from everyone else and must be revealed to them.  Don’t you see that we are all breathing?!  We’re all sucking air in and out of our lungs!  This has profound implications for all of life.  Read him long enough and you begin to think about your breathing.  Maybe you try breathing differently.  Two exhales for every inhale.  Try breathing through one nostril at a time.  What if I stop breathing?  By golly, he’s right: breathing is incredibly important.  We all need to think about breathing.

He is his own best argument for Wittgenstein’s argument that the world is comprised entirely of facts.  What we believe to be reality is always and only a construct of the language we use to express our experience of it.   How does Heidegger know that everyone else does not know what he knows about being?  He offers no explanation.  He only knows the language that others have used to describe time and existence and phenomena but he really has no explanation of how he can possibly know that the way this language is used is inadequate to explain the authentic meaning of being.

He seems at times to assume we have a reason for believing there are others in the world, yet I have not seen the slightest discussion of the senses through which we experience others, and the world itself.  He seems to insist that we cannot really know if they have a real existence outside of our imagination, just as he doesn’t seem to be concerned about how time can be explained if we only barely understand the meaning of our own “being there” or Dasein.   Is time linear?  Is time atomic?  Is time continuous?  I’m at page 113.  I’ll let you know if I find an answer.

According to Heidegger, Western Philosophy has it all wrong because it has skipped the most essential truth which is that “being” itself, or “being there”,  or “Dasein”, is the proper subject of philosophy and has been almost entirely ignored, at least, since the Greeks.  He is going to rescue us from this terrible omission.  Get out of your car, burn your records and books, change your diet and haircut: we have  no way to experience the world.  Being there.

Let’s get this out of the way right from the start: Heidegger believes that Western Philosophy has forgotten the essential character of “Dasein” but what it is it has forgotten, he can’t seem to remember.

There it is.  I summed up Heidegger that way at Trinity Christian College 45 years ago and I stand by it.

What prompted this reflection is my reckless urge to revisit “Being and Time” now that I have experienced a lot more of both.  I am in my 60’s and haven’t looked at this book since I was in a philosophy course taught by Dr. John Roose at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, back in 1973.  It is the only course I ever took anywhere which I did not complete, and for which I received an “F”.   It wasn’t the difficulty:  “Contemporary Philosophy” taught by Dr. Vrieze was far more challenging– and satisfying– and of course I did well in it.  I still remember a considerable chunk of that course, on Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others.  Feyerabend was the first philosopher I read that convinced me that it actually was possible for 2 x 2 to not equal 4.  And Karl Popper’s discussions of paradigms is still very useful to me.

But here’s a line from Martin Heidegger that I think you might find as amusing as I do (from “Being and Time”, translated by Joan Stambaugh, page 35):

Because phenomenon in the phenomenological understanding is always just what constitutes being, and furthermore because being is always the being of beings , we must first of all bring beings themselves forward in the right way, if we are to have any prospect of exposing being.

In regard to Kant, one question that remains: if we can never know a thing in itself– only our empirical experience of that object– does it matter?  If we can never know the thing in itself, then, really, does it even exist?    And so if Heidegger insists that we don’t apprehend Dasein– being itself– does it even exist?  More critically, does it matter?  Heidegger seems to believe that we can encounter Dasein if we cast off our archaic beliefs.  This makes him a superman, since he is the only one who knows about Dasein and he is here to enlighten us.  (In fairness, he does credit some other philosophers– even Kant– with having a diminished idea of Dasein).  But again, given his explanations of how we are ignorant of the decisive importance of Dasein, how can he possibly know anything about others’ experience of it?

All this so far and I haven’t even mentioned that Heidegger was a Nazi.

 

 

Posted on

Sherry and Ray

She is just aching to get laid by Ray but he won’t do it.

When I was in college I knew a young woman named Sherry. She was voluptuous. Her face wasn’t as cute as some other women I knew, but it was pleasant enough. I had always thought of her as a moderately attractive young woman until the day I was out cutting the grass on a tractor and she happened to be sun-bathing behind the faculty apartments and when I came around from behind the apartment building, she was startled and had to jump up and reattach the top of her bathing suit. She was voluptuous. The sinuous curve of her hips. Her full, upright breasts. She looked pretty peeved as I drove by.  It was actually her stomach that appealed the most to me: flat, with languorous curves. 

She was a conservative little American girl. I was a Canadian and the Canadians tended to be socially liberal– we drank and smoked and swore and used pot– and the Americans tended to be rather conventional. Some of them had never been in a bar until they left home to go to college. But not Sherry. She didn’t go to bars at college either. Good girls didn’t do that.

The American guys like to wrestle each other and horse around with each other and pat each others’ behinds while playing touch football in the courtyard.  The Canadian guys like to wrestle Canadian girls. The American girls thought Canadian girls were rather rural in that regard. I’ll bet they secretly envied them. I remember wrestling for an extended time with an attractive blonde named Janet in the student lounge and a couple of my American friends, afterwards, expressed envy. They thought it meant she wanted to get laid.

I will note that my experience was that many of my American friends went to a bar to get drunk, while most of my Canadian friends went out to a bar for a drink or two and to socialize. To our American friends, there was no difference between drinking and getting drunk: they were both sins.  The Canadians were used to social drinking but thought it was not smart to get drunk.

Sherry was engaged to Ray, who worked in the administration. Ray was even more strait-laced than Terry. He was square, man. He wore suits. He had short hair. If Ray was coming down the hallway in the dorm, you hid the grass. But I had heard from a number of reliable sources that Ray had sewn his wild oats profligately in his first three years at college: girls were wild for him. He was tall and good-looking and rich. But when he met Sherry, the love of his life, he decided to reform. He would wait until they were married before they consummated their mutual passion.

He wanted to marry a virgin. He wanted her to be pure.

One day, I was chatting with Sherry’s roommate Lisa about something and the Sherry and Ray relationship came up. I made some off-hand remark about something and Lisa said this: “Sherry is going absolutely crazy. She is just aching to get laid but he wants her to be a virgin on their wedding day.”

She used a less kind word than “laid”.

I had two theories about this. Firstly, I thought that Ray was a raging hypocrite.

Secondly, I thought that maybe the stories about him being promiscuous his first years at college were untrue. Certainly, they were impossible to confirm. Maybe he really was pure.

Later, I talked to a young woman who had been a Resident Assistant at the time Ray was allegedly sewing his wild oats.  Oh yes, she said, everybody knew about Ray.  There were girls who had to leave college after he got them pregnant.  He was an asshole.

An American told me, if a girl put out, you took it, but you didn’t want to marry a slut.  He said it as if it was common sense, not that old double-standard we all know and love.

 

Posted on

Trinity Christian College – Dr. Martin Vrieze

Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, was founded in 1965 or thereabouts. It is a reformed Christian college, founded on the idea that science is not neutral, that all knowledge is influenced and shaped by a person’s worldview, and that Christians, therefore, need to study in a Christian College to reach an understanding of the world that is in harmony with their faith

You can buy it or not buy it. As a student, it was clear to me that the history and philosophy departments were trying their best to follow the program, but English classes seemed to me to be pretty well the same kind of classes you would be taking at York or the University of Toronto or the University of Western Ontario or the University of Chicago.

If you took art and needed to learn how to draw the human figure, you had to go to Saint Xavier University down the street to see a nude model because, apparently, Christians didn’t do nudes.  Well, at least not on Trinity’s campus.  I’m amazed we had a pre-med program– when did they ever get to look at a human body?

As for the business and accounting departments, they were all eager little capitalists who believed that religion was largely relevant to Sunday mornings. The philosophical perspective of my friends in these departments could be summed up thusly: “Hey, watch your language guys– there are girls around.”

Philosophy, at Trinity, was like the art: we didn’t do nudes. You had to go elsewhere to study the shapes and contours and shadows of an undraped human mind. We studied rationalism and humanism and scholasticism and Marxism and read Kant’s Transcendental Critique and always, near the end of the course, bang, biff, whap! we put them in their places.

Christian Reformed Doctrine held that all of us have a prior faith commitment which coloured all of our conclusions about science and truth. So Kant could write ten critiques if he wanted but he would be no closer to the truth because he was, at heart, a humanist. Geez, that’s a gross simplification. But it will have to do: I don’t have all day.

So, at the end of the course, our professors would expose these philosophers’ hidden biases, offer the “correct” Christian perspective, and then we would move on to the next great fraud.

Now, this Christian philosophy was not supposed to be the same as a reactionary, conservative philosophy. Heavens no! Even if, at the end of the long torturous journey through the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, and Herman Dooyeweerd, and Abraham Kuyper, we ended up, lo and behold, agreeing with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I didn’t get that at the time. I didn’t get it until I was at a Christian Labour Association of Canada banquet five or six years later where the guest speaker, Bernie Zylstra, attacked the media for attacking Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I didn’t get it until I realized that a lot of these devoted “Reformed Christian” thinkers were astoundingly similar, in outlook, to neo-conservatives like Daniel Bell, Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol. (Oddly, they opposed support for Solidarity in Poland at first, because they thought it was doomed to failure, and because they fervently believed that communist regimes never liberalize, while our cuddly U.S.-friendly capitalist autocratic regimes– like Pinochet in Chile, and Somoza in Nicaragua, and the Shah of Iran– do.)

Reformed Christian Philosophy…. in a word, we believed that truth was handed down from high, given to us in the Bible, but also– as per some Scholastics– through “general revelation”, evidence to be found in creation itself, and in natural law as divined through science. That explained why non-Christian scientists occasionally or often hit on a “truth” or two even while blinded by their own humanistic determinism– they were working from evidence from God’s own hands, his creation, which is an expression of divine will, and part of the way God communicates with us sinners.

I don’t mean to be too glib. Our professors, Dr. John Roose and Dr. Martin Vrieze, were respectful of their achievements, and properly awed by the depth and breadth of their insights. But we were convinced that the great reformed thinkers– Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd, Bob Goudzwaard, and others could hold their own with these mighty intellects. Especially Dooyeweerd who was rumoured to be almost as smart as Kant, and maybe even smarter, if not at least equally incoherent.

And then there was Contemporary Philosophy.  (Actually, it may have been “Philosophy of History”.)

I took this course in my senior year, I think it was, with a few philosophy die-hards, with Dr. Marten Vrieze. I have no idea why I thought this but I had the idea that Dr. Vrieze was a bit pissed off at the Reformed establishment for some reason. It may have been because, unlike some of the other reformational professors like Calvin Seerveld and Robert Vandervennen, he hadn’t been asked to sign on to The Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, one of the other, bigger Reformed Christian Colleges, or the new King’s College in Edmonton. I had a feeling he was fed up with something. Whatever the reason, the course was an eye-opener and it completely altered my perception of Christian philosophy.

There was no text-book, no digest, no over-view: content was taken from philosophical journals and books by the philosophers. These philosophers were not dusted off from their positions in the pantheon of all-time BIG thinkers, buffed and admired, then discredited. These were living, breathing philosophers, mostly, who were engaged with living, breathing currents of philosophy and were way ahead of the constructs and discredited frameworks of Hume, Descartes, and Kant.

It would be impossible to do justice to their ideas here, so I’ll do an injustice instead, just so you know what I’m talking about. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a logical positivist, believed that truth was a construct of language and formal structures of thought, within which we distilled our experiences of the world into a coherent narrative. It wasn’t so much the ideas that mattered, as the way the ideas were expressed, shackled, as they were, to the expression itself.

Karl Popper believed that we formulated our perspective on the world in a sort of complex of patterns and systems of thought called paradigms. A paradigm was “true” as long as it was useful. As human knowledge would begin to exceed the framework of this paradigm, it might be overthrown, and a new paradigm would take it’s place. Again, it didn’t really matter if a paradigm was really true or not– there probably was no such thing as a “true” paradigm.

Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend developed these ideas even further, and I remember, in particular, and argument from Paul Feyerabend that demonstrated, finally, to my satisfaction, that the idea that 2 + 2 does not necessarily equal 4 is not nearly as silly as it sounds. You can’t make any person who hasn’t taken advanced philosophy believe this.

What these gentleman called into question was the idea that you could measure a worldview, such as reformed Christianity, against it’s own reference points. Reformed Christianity would argue that even without the Bible, the evidence of creation is sufficient to explain a just and loving God and a purpose to life. Popper would argue that this world view prevailed only as long as it was “useful” to humanity. With the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, this paradigm was challenged, and eventually over-thrown.

More to come…

Some neo-cons like Irving Kristol support the idea of “intelligent design”. It’s very difficult to imagine that Kristol really believes in it. Maybe he does. Or maybe it just confirms the idea that neo-cons are just a bunch of neo-prudes with reactionary instincts who really don’t care for facts and information unless they can be marshaled in support of their conservative politics.

Forrest Gump is a neo-con’s wet dream of a movie.