Artem, guest extraordinaire, is back. He made us read Martin Heidegger’s essay The Age of the World Picture, and in this episode he achieves the impossible. Under his patient tutelage what had previously been an impenetrable, fastidious German hallucination became clear, meaningful, even actionable

Heidegger’s work does not stand alone - he’s building on millennia of philosophical tradition, most recently Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel, and on top of that he is reacting to his mentor Husserl. The Age of the World Picture, however, can be read independently of all that. There’s very little phenomenology, the subjective viewpoint and intentionality are not mentioned, and instead we get a straightforward discussion of what modern thinking is, how it differs from the ancients and medievals, the institution features of modern science, and how all this relates to our view of what is in the world and how we interact with it.

We did, however, want to understand a bit of what phenomenology is. A bit of intellectual context helps. Phenomenologists want us to stop thinking of senses as passive receivers. Instead our senses are reaching out into the world and constructing phenomena, applying pre-existing structures (redness, squareness) to help us make sense of what’s there. Our brains are modelling the world and checking that model against the input of the senses. We come to the world with a bunch of assumptions, and think about the world through these assumptions.

The Age of the World Picture describes how the modern way of thinking about the world is just one bunch of assumptions, but crucially a bunch of assumptions that is compatible with the notion that there are other other bunches of assumptions that could be used instead. This idea that there can be different worldviews, that your own view is just one and it is different from the views enjoyed by the Greeks and the medievals, is a key aspect of the modern world view. We are even able to use different ways of thinking about the world, different ground plans, to do different things. The way you approach a physics problem, the ground plan you apply to understand it, is completely different to the way you approach a biological problem, not to mention a historical problem. We shift how we think about the world depending on context, and as a result we’re fragmented, splintered, alienated from having to constantly context switch. We become relativist, and try to reintroduce normativity by creating “values” as objects in themselves that can give us some moral grounding. But as Heidegger puts it, “nobody dies for mere values”. We need to find a new way of thinking about the world if we are to move forwards.