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Dissertation Construction 09

Wilderness Matters: Understanding Intercontsituent Ecologies 

09

I aim to explicate an understanding of wildhood in terms of worldhood. This means that the understanding of wildhood as worldhood is rolled up and I want to unroll it. What does it mean to understand? What is worldhood? I have briefly gone into understanding previously when I stated that to understand something is to have clarity on the matter. In everyday speak, it is to "get it" in the sense of being "dialed in" or "on the wavelength" of the matter. 

Being-in-the-world

Before delving to deeply into worldhood we ought to get clear on being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world "stands for a unitary phenomenon" (BT, p. 78). Being-in-the-world is constituted by 1) world and its ontological structure of worldhood; 2) somebody in everyday dealings; and 3) Being-in as such. Before setting out, it's important to note that being-in-the-world is a unity that must be considered holistically even though the structures maybe be considered constitutively. Let's take the third constituent first. Being-in means being immersed in something or being completely enmeshed. To understand being-in-the-world takes consideration of what else shows up in that world. "Being-in-the-world--gets its ontological understanding of itself in the first instance from those entities which it itself is not but which it encounters 'within' its world, and from the being which they possess" (BT, p. 85). It is important to stress the co-constitution of somebody being-in the world. It is not the case that somebody dwells within a personal bubble that is transcended through representational thinking when knowledge is grasped. There is no encapsulation. For somebody [Dasein], "its primary kind of being is such that it is always 'outside' alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered" (BT, p. 89).

Worldhood

Worldhood has to do with being and it "stands for the structure of one of the constitutive items of being-in-the-world" (BT, p. 92). Heidegger unrolls worldhood "through an ontological Interpretation of those entities within-the-environment [within-the-umwelt] which we encounter closest to us" (BT, p. 94). To understand worldhood we need to have a clear grasp of average everydayness. Somebody is in average everydayness in the mode of undistinguished and unremarkable normal behavior emerges as "'dealings' in the world with entities within-the-world" (BT, p. 95). This means that understanding worldhood is done with a certain jumping off point and that jumping off point is the average everydayness of somebody dealing [Umgang]. This German term unites prefixes gang by um. Gang is the manner in which a human or animal goes. Colloquially, we can say it is how somebody "rolls". By adding um we get a signification of the manner in which somebody walks around or goes about in the world with entities within-the-world" (BT, p. 95).

This is how Dr. Steve Brule rolls.

These manners of going about in-the-world show up through our concern with entities in-the-world. Concern is the way in which somebody relates to entities that they are used-to. "Those entities... which are used or which are to be found in the course of production--become accessible when we put ourselves into the position of concerning ourselves with them in some such way" (BT, p. 96). We need a clear grasp of these entities being dealt with in-the-world. In a word, those entities encountered in concern are "das Zeug" (BT, p. 97), that is, those entities are gear.

We must be quick to point out that gear (translated as equipment by Macquerrie & Robinson (1962) do not show up individually. "Taken strictly, there 'is' no such thing as an equipment" (BT, p. 97). Gear shows up in a referential whole. Next we will turn to in order to as it is constituted by Verweisung. In doing so, we may gain a clear grasp on the way to understanding worldhood.

HEADS UP! for anybody interested, beginning on Monday, October 7, 2013. I will be blogging on my new site: http://wildhood.net/blog

Dissertation Construction 08

Wilderness Matters: Understanding Interconstituent Ecologies

08

The ontic definition of world is "as that 'wherein' a factical Dasein as such can be said to 'live'. "World has here a pre-ontological existentiell signification. Here again there are different possibilities: 'world' may stand for the 'public' we-world [Mitwelt], or one's 'own' closest (domestic) environment [Umwelt]" (BT, p. 93).

Ontic refers to specific entities. Ontological refers to the way of being of entities. Heidegger asks the question of the meaning of being. There is a perplexity and sense of wonder in the question of being. Sean Kelly differentiates philosophic wondering and scientific curiosity. The mood of wonder and perplexity characterizes the thinking that is dissatisfied by reduction of wonder to a description of material processes. If we wonder about being, what are we wondering about? Being is the ground of intelligibility as a background such that we rarely have an explicit understanding of being to the point that we take things for granted. However, we need the background of being to stand forth as a human being understanding ourselves and what we stand for in-the-world. The stand we take on our being is what we mean to be. Standing forth is how we co-constitute the way in which we matter in-the-world and the way in which things-in-the-world matter to us.

Dasein is factical, not factual. Factual refers to mere facts. Facticity, based on Kelly's interpretation (see previous link) is how somebody stands as a being against a backdrop of being in all that somebody's foreground and background understandings of themselves as a being. 

What does it mean to have a "pre-ontological existentiell signification"? To be characterized as existentiell relates to things that are existentialia. This is to be considered against a notion of categories. Categories are formal indications that attribute the factual aspect of entities. Existentialia are the basic structures of somebody's (Dasein's) mode of being. To have an existentiell signification refers to playing a role in the co-constitution of the way in which somebody matters in-the-world and the way in which things-in-the-world matter to somebody.

To have pre-ontological signification is to exist as something neither actively or passively. To say that the world is pre-ontological is to say that the world is neither a matter of a subject (somebody) taking on the world actively, nor is it a matter of a subject's passively being given it. It is a matter of somebody and the world coming together in co-constitution.  

Dissertation Construction 07

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Dissertation Construction 06

Wilderness Matters: Understanding Interconstituent Ecological Lifeworlds

06

Posthuman Ecology

I have once again rearranged my title by dropping wilderness in the predicate and inserting 'ecological' where it was. I have 'wilderness' in the subject so why say it twice. Also, I think I will move from tagging myself as a sociocultural ecologist to a posthuman ecologist. What in the world is that? Well, I suppose another option is Posthuman Dimensions of Natural Resourcismist, but let's not go there. I make the posthuman move in recognition that to be dasein is not only to be be human. To be somebody is to be anybody -- any body of matter. This relates to Heidegger's "in-order-to" and "for-the-sake-of" structures in "worldhood". It comes from Harman's (2002) takeaway in Tool-Being. And, What is Posthumanism we ask, well, luckily Carey Wolfe (2010) has given us a work entitled just that. 

Tool ecology

First, the 'towards-which' and 'for-the-sake-of-which'. These are both relational aspects of what we may call 'the equipmentality of equipment' or to use Harman's (2002, p. 25) term, "referentiality". It is significance (Bedeutung) and meaning (Sinn) that constitute referentiality. (Note: my investigation will be into the worldhood of wilderness (wildhood as the existential ontological structure of the wild) and to get at that worldhood requires an ontography of the significant entitities and the meaning erupting about them. This means an investigation into the ontological structure of the gear (Zeug as a rhetorical concept and literally in the German, ) that yokes together the constituent lifeworlds (niches) and at a greater scale, their worlds.) There are two senses of 'reference' and these may be mapped onto Heidegger's most foundational insight, the ontological difference. The two senses are of the 1) ontic (existence) and the 2) ontological (existential) and they are analogous to the two aspects of referentiality: in-order-to (Um-zu) and for-the-sake-of (Um-willen) which also map directly to significance and meaning.

"The tool's 'meaning' [significance] is nothing other than the visible termination of its underground action. Just as the meaning of a signal-arrow is the region to which it alerts us by point, just as a word evokes its meaning by deflecting attention away from itself,"....the "second, concealed [ontological] kind of 'meaning' is analogous to what I have called the tool-being of the entity, an act of primal effectiveness that eludes every possible view" (Harman, 2002, p. 26). 

Gear plays a role in the referential totality of the environment of somebody. That is, gear are signs with flickering significance pointing at the "in-order-to" structure of somebody's being. That is, gear are ontic references toward the ontological environment (Um-zu bracing the embrace of the Umwelt). The gear (Zeug) works to turn toward other gear that supports the lifeworld of somebody. The lifeworld is not the same as the world at large. Again the ontic-ontological relations come into play. Map the lifeworld to the ontic and the world to the ontological and we have another iridescent relationship of beings and being. 

Harman makes the posthuman move by insisting that dasein is not only a human capacity. All beings are dasein. It is not just the case that everybody is somebody. It is also the case that every body is somebody. To use Heideggarian language. Everything is somebody. Instead of fleshing out Harman's posthumanism, let's move to Wolfe's (2010) understanding.

Posthumanism

Wolfe first gives us what posthumanism is not. It is not the notion "that 'the human' is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether" (p. xv). That would be more of a transhumanism. He offers it with reference to Lyotard's regard for the postmodern. Posthumanism "comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prothetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms....it comes after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical" (p. xv).

Wolfe's work, (like that of other systems thinkers that (overtly or by insinuation) embrace a semiotic perspective, Luhmann, Maturana & Varela, and Brier) "enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social significance, and affective intruments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on.

As cryptic as it reads, posthuman ecology does what was done in the timelessness of the ancients, it couples the mother(board) Gaia with the blacksmith, Hephaestus. 

Dissertation Construction 05

Wilderness Matters: Understanding Interconstituent Wilderness Lifeworlds

05

Lifeworld (Umwelt)

The notion of umwelt goes back to Jakob von Uexkull (2010) and his pioneering work in animal ethology. The 1933 introduction to his work, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (where umwelt is translated as environment), keenly connects the Heideggerian notion of tools to Uexkull's project. He is critiquing a purely mechanistic theory of animality that in an oversight, "has stitched together the sensory and motor organs like machine parts (without taking into account their perceptive and effective functions" (p. 42). This mechanistic view omits "the machine operator who is built into the organs just as we are into our body" (p. 42). This view gives rise to a notion of creatures "whose essential activities consist in perception and production of effects"...."for everything a subject perceives belongs to its perception world [Merkwelt], and everything it produces, to its effect world [Wirkwelt]. These two worlds, of perception and production of effects, form one closed unit, the environment" [umwelt] (p. 42).

Dasein, umwelt, involvement, and significance 

What Dasein is already familiar with is not particular entities but rather a united lifeworld (umwelt). In the activity of dealing with gear Dasein "frees" the gear to stand out from the unity as the thing that it is in its relation to the referential totality of the lifeworld. The ontological structure of readiness-to-hand "has in itself the character of having been assigned or referred [Verwiesenheit]. An entity is discovered when it has been assigned or referred to something, and referred as that entity which it is. With any such entity there is an involvement which it has in something. The character of being which belongs to the ready-to-hand is just such an involvement. If something has an involvement, this implies letting it be involved in something. The relationship of the 'with...in...' shall be indicated by the term 'assignment' or 'reference' (Heidegger, 1962, p. 115).  This and what follows in Being and Time are crucial passages for my argument.

The assignment or referential character is the character of entities involved with Dasein in its lifeworld. The assignment character is the semiotic character of being-in-the-world. The "having been assigned" is the moment of withdrawl that is the 'turning towards' whatever it is assigned to or turns to; i.e., the being of the gear goes from being to having been turned (like a sign). This turning is related to what Harman has taken to be the tension between sensual objects (entities prior to withdrawl) and their real qualities. He relates it to eidos and the work of Husserl "in which the sensual object differs not from its shifting accidental facades (sensual qualities), but from the plurality of qualities that it truly needs to remain what it is from moment to moment" (2010, p. 98).

The worldhood of the lifeworld is much deeper than today's work will show. Next week, we go further into this through involvement and significance.

Dissertation Construction 04

Wilderness Matters: Understanding Interconstituent Wilderness Lifeworlds

04

Understanding

My aim is understanding interconstituent wilderness lifeworlds. What is understanding? What does interconstituent signify? What are lifeworlds?

Understanding is an existentiale. That is, understanding is a fundamental ontological characteristic of existence. Understanding is rooted in standing in the sense of standing forth (verstehen) and it relates to being constant and holding status. To understand something in the sense of the act of understanding is to let it stand forth. Ver-stehen is "forth-standing". To understand is to let a thing be as it is taking its stand. When we understand something it is clarified in the sense of being clear to us. Again, it is to let it stand forth, to give it status, to grant it clearance. It is "a clear grasp of a thing as a whole, but no necessary reference to any preceding process of thought" (Inwood, 1999, p. 234, quoting a Dictionary of German Synonyms, 1977). Inwood goes on (in his VERY helpful Heidegger Dictionary) to interrelate comprehension and understanding. Understanding is more primordial than comprehension; "one can understand being without comprehending it, but one cannot comprehend it without understanding it" (p. 234). 

I don't have the text to support it at this very moment, but I seem to recall that understanding is related to what Aristotle called phronesis, practical wisdom. This is related directly to what I gave (from Bogost and from Harman via Lingis) as a kind of "carpentry". Borgmann (1984, p. 44) has been onto this for a long time. He gave a specific carpenterial example by calling upon the work of Sturt (The Wheelwright's Shop). The wheelwright (wagon craftsman) understands his lifeworld and the role that wood plays (its status) in that world. The wheelwright has "knack" for working with wood and as such he is attuned to it in such a way that it is not a cognitive knowledge but more as an embodied or somatic "grasp of a thing as a whole". Going Greek, he is phronetically involved with the physis as phusis directly at hand. Okay, back up a bit before we get too far down that rabbit hole.

Let's get after interconstituency. A constituent is: a component (American Heritage Dictionary). For public lands, constituents are the human element that compose those people that hold a stake in a place (stakeholders). Constituents serve as part of a whole. The whole is not just the social aspect of public lands. The whole in this sense is the lifeworld of people, places and things as it is shared across all those spheres. To get semiotic, it is the semiosphere (Lotman) and this coincides with what Heidegger called the Verweissungsganzheit or the referential totality. Borgmann (1984) has it as a "web of relations".

Note how the wheelwright acts as the phronemos with his knack for understanding the referential totality of his world in this extended passage from Borgmann (1984, p. 44) quoting Sturt:

"As people adjust to the land, the land discloses itself to the people. There is 'a close relationship between the tree-clad country-side and the English who dwelt there.'... What takes the wheelwright into 'sunny woodland solitudes,' 'into winter woods or along leafless hedgerows,' and 'across wet water-meadows in February' is the search for timber. But 'timber was far from being a prey, a helpless victim, to a machine,' Sturt says, and continues: 'Rather it would lend its subtle virtues to the man who knew how to humor it: with him, as with an understanding friend, it would co-operate.'"