Heidegger and the Media by Taylor Paul A. Gunkel David

Author:Taylor, Paul A., Gunkel, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

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IN MEDIAS RES

INTRODUCTION: FIRST THINGS FIRST

Meanings inspired only by remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions – if by any intuitions at all – are not enough: we must go back to ‘the things themselves’.

Husserl 1975 [1970]: 252

Heidegger’s doctrine of the thing is a puzzling combination of deep insights and idiosyncratic esotericism.

Feenberg 1999: 194

What is a thing? We all know what things are; we deal with them every day. Indeed, one way to characterize being in time is by the colloquialism ‘Same thing, different day.’ Things are and persist across time. Some things stay the same; other things change from one day to the next. Despite this, no one, or almost no one it seems, would be confused, confounded or perplexed as to what a thing is. Yet, as Husserl (Heidegger’s teacher) points out above, authentic understanding requires that we must go back to the things themselves. In Heidegger’s terms, we need to pay close attention to our dealings with entities within-the-world. If we do not, there is a very real risk that, by taking things for granted (in a very literal sense), we allow ourselves to be governed by ‘remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions’. The danger of succumbing to such intuitions is particularly important when one considers that, as we have previously emphasized, the media mediate; they position themselves between us and things in ways we frequently do not perceive or acknowledge.

‘The question of things, Heidegger remarks at the beginning of a 1935/6 lecture course later published as Die Frage nach dem Ding [The Question Concerning the Thing], is one of the most ancient, venerable, and fundamental problems of metaphysics’ (Benso 2000: 59). Notwithstanding the importance Heidegger imputes to the question ‘What is a thing?’, he is well aware that it appears, at least on the face of things, to be an absurd if not comical inquiry. In fact, at the beginning of the lecture, the normally sober and serious Heidegger engages with the comic aspects of this question by doing something quite uncharacteristic – he tells a joke or what he calls ‘a little story … Plato has preserved in the Theaetetus’:

The story is that Thales, while occupied in studying the heavens above and looking up, fell into a well. A good-looking and whimsical maid from Thrace laughed at him and told him that while he might passionately want to know all things in the universe, the things in front of his very nose and feet were unseen by him. Plato added to this story the remark: ‘This jest also fits all those who become involved in philosophy.’ Therefore, the question, ‘What is a thing?’ must always be rated as one which causes housemaids to laugh. And genuine housemaids must have something to laugh about. (WIT: 3)

This is, as is often said of observational humour, ‘funny because it is true’.

The question ‘What is a thing?’ appears to be one of those inquiries that causes philosophy to look bad, or at least comical. Only philosophy could get hung up on this question as

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