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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.607)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Lee Braver, professor of philosophy at University of South Florida. And we're here to talk about his book Heidegger on Thinking, Elements in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Dr. Braver, wonderful to have you back on.
Lee Braver (00:18.732)
Thanks for having me again. I enjoyed the last time. This is going be another enjoyable conversation, I'm sure.
PJ (00:24.739)
Yeah, I want to publicly thank you. I think you were the first professor to really give me a chance. so, it definitely led me down a really interesting and exciting road. so, thank you. We were talking about maybe 40, 50 subscribers then. And so, it was really the start of something special for me. So, thank you.
Lee Braver (00:46.804)
It's a lot of fun.
PJ (00:48.709)
So just from the start, thank you for making this book, Heidegger on Thinking. I think it's really nice to have something this short and accessible for Heidegger. It's very difficult to do. But with that said, why this book? How did this project kind of come about? What was your purpose in making it?
Lee Braver (01:11.838)
Well, like with all my scholarship, was for the money, of course. This is a series with Cambridge. They're having a whole lot of elements. there's one of the series is on Heidegger and Daldahlstrom is one of the co-editors. And he asked me to write it. So that was the origin of it. But I, you know, as I say in the book, every philosopher
thinks about thinking to some degree. We're a very reflective discipline and what we're doing is thinking. And so it's just almost automatic to think about thinking to some degree, but I don't think anyone does it as, it's such a focused extended way as Heidegger does. So it has always been one of the, I think the most fascinating parts of Heidegger because although
On the one hand, you could see it as this narcissistic, self-closed in tiny little circle that all he's thinking about is what he's doing, just what is only of interest to philosophers. For him, thinking is, it's a cosmological event. It's something that's really taking place, and it's of greater importance than just about anything else could be, really.
It's a really fascinating topic.
PJ (02:41.701)
And so kind of start off, because I believe he has his You're working a lot off his essay what is called thinking Can you give us kind of an orientation of what is thinking according to Heidegger?
Lee Braver (02:55.906)
Well, you have write a book to answer that question. So one of the things that I do in the book as I go through the evolution of his views on thinking, because I think it does change, Heidegger is well known for having an evolution of views, most primarily this
PJ (02:57.157)
No pressure, yeah.
Lee Braver (03:22.69)
big change in the late 20s, early 30s, that's sometimes called Decara or the turn. And we call it early Heidegger and later Heidegger. But even in later Heidegger, he keeps changing and evolving. So there isn't any single definition of it. But he certainly, know, as philosophers have always made it a defining feature of what we are.
We are the the Zoonikon logicon, the animal with logos, which can be language, but also can be reason. And, know, Descartes, are the thinking thing. This has always been one of the ways to define humanity. So what you think of it is also to some degree for philosopher, what you think we are. And so it's very important for him as he loves questioning
the most fundamental presupposition that we have engaging with the history of philosophy, he's going to go at the traditional views of thinking. So that's, think, of reasons why, one of the other reasons why it's so central in the view. And in the early work, especially the division one of being in time, one of the presuppositions he's going at is this sense of thinking as this fully conscious,
articulated, rational, defining view. I mean, this is what comes out in the Platonic dialogues. When Socrates comes up to people, says, hey, you you're a general, well, you must know what courage is. So tell me what it is. And the general's never heard about it. comes to hems and haws and well, I guess this is no, no, no, but there's a problem there. Ha ha, you don't know what it is. then when the general can't do it.
The conclusion is, well, you lack the knowledge. You actually didn't know what it was. And so the definition of thought and knowledge in that case is having this internally consistent, articulated, rashly defensible against Socrates view this theory, definition. And that's what he's going against in Division I with this much more
Lee Braver (05:43.426)
tacit know-how of knowing how to hammer and knowing how to walk and things that we really couldn't articulate fully and yet they're they pervade every minute of our lives and he he builds up from that to a Knowing how to exist even knowing how to our way around the world knowing how to be a person And then the weird thing is I'll stop just just top of the early the weird thing is
Then Division Two, really kind of changes quite a bit. And he starts being fairly suspicious of that automatic engagement, you know, where you're hammering and you're not really thinking about anything, but you're doing it in an intelligent way. That's a paradigm of intelligence, of thinking what Dreyfus called skillful coping in Division One.
But then in Division Two, that becomes in this more existential sense, a way to fall asleep at the wheel of your own life and to get so absorbed into it that you forget to live. You're no longer living what Thoreau called deliberately. You know, you're just going with the flow and then you have to break out of that. So it's very strange that the hero in a sense of Division One becomes the villain of Division Two.
And there's one thing I actually pointed out to Dreyfus because he focuses so much on Division I and he praises that skillful coping to the skies and his work is wonderful. But then, you know, if we're talking about Heidegger, Heidegger has so much negative to say about it in Division II and it's very peculiar.
PJ (07:33.893)
Two of the terms that are big part of how Heidegger talks about thinking are wondering and dwelling. Can you talk a little bit about how wondering and dwelling, I mean you've kind of touched on it already. How do wondering and dwelling teach us to think better or to be better?
Lee Braver (07:55.97)
So first of all, I realized I didn't answer your first question because I went right to the early stuff and you were on time with the later. wonder is, mean, Plato and Aristotle both say that philosophy begins in wonder. And I think for Heidegger, philosophy ends in wonder in the sense that it is its goal. It is its telos. That's the point of philosophy is to instill
PJ (08:00.985)
No worries.
Lee Braver (08:25.942)
wonder in us. Because by and large, we just take things for granted. The motto of phenomenology, the philosophy in which he was raised and trained, I think it'd be just pay attention, wake up, look around, there's amazing stuff and you're only skating along the surface of your attention. There's so much more detail if you just pay attention. And wonder is something that
breaks us out of the purely practical, pragmatic engagement of just taking care of business, know, and want to be of care in being in time. You know, we just get so distracted by all the tasks that we have to do. And even when we're not doing tasks, then we look for distractions. And wonder is something that can bring that to a halt, very similar to the way anxiety and thinking about death and
called conscious do and vision to of being in time. And then bring to our attention what we are, what we have been taking for granted. So he has this claim, he's always talking about how we have this forgetfulness of being and that being withdraws in favor of beings. So if we apply that to thinking, which is very interrelated to that,
we are focused on our thoughts. I'm thinking about this cup, I'm thinking about the interview, I'm thinking about this, that, the other, and that's what my attention is on. that may, of course it is, that's what I'm thinking about. But by thinking about what I'm thinking about, I bypass and go straight past the thinking that's thinking about what I'm thinking about.
I'm so focused on the content, on the topic, on the subject, that I go straight past the fact of thinking about it, the fact that I can think about it, that I have this miraculous capacity to engage with the world in this peculiar way to think about it, to reason about it, to think about it, to pull out these...
Lee Braver (10:51.644)
argumentative chains out of experience, you know, that's, that's, it didn't have to be that way. It's contingent. Animals can't do that, perhaps. And so it's this, it's, it's, it's a little bit like, like, like phenomenological epicycle, but it's, it's a way of wonder is a way of, of changing our focus. Like when you kind of cross your eyes and you change where your focus is from
the things that we're thinking about to the fact of thinking. And that's like moving from beings to their being. And doing that, initiates that, but then that leads in this wonderful self-reinforcing circle, that leads to the greatest wonder of all. Because now we can really be
in awe of this fact and be tremendously grateful. And in this wordplay, which one of the very few that actually survived translation, he says, thinking is thanking. And it's in German as well as English. Because the thing that we should be most grateful for is the fact that we are capable of gratitude, that we have the capacity to have this feeling and this experience.
The way to be grateful to it. There's nothing to be grateful to. We're not being grateful to being like a God who has done something for us. He uses anthropomorphic language sometimes just because we don't have a vocabulary for it, but it's very, important. says, being is not any kind of being, including a God. But we have this capacity and the way to be grateful to it.
is to use it, is to celebrate it, is to relish it. Whereas we have been taking it for granted, we should be sinking our teeth into it. He calls it at one point a feast of thought, where there's food for thought, where we have a lot, but it's also a celebration. And so thinking
PJ (12:58.776)
you
Lee Braver (13:14.306)
as much as we can, as well as we can, with as much excellence as we can, in a of Aristotelian sense, that is our gratitude. It's not an expression of not separate, that is the way to be grateful to it. And that is the same as wonder.
PJ (13:38.199)
And he talks a little bit about, you mentioned it kind of near the end.
that we have to confront the abyss without, and I don't know if you use the word courage, but that kind of, there is this feel about that wonder and awe are the answer to the abyss and nihilism. if philosophy is doing what it should, it shouldn't end in, it should end in wonder, and that's really a question of courage. Is that a good reading of that? Am I tracking with you there?
Lee Braver (14:10.754)
I think that's definitely involved. mean, and that goes back a little bit to what I was just saying about there not being, not being A B. So we're always looking for, in being in time, the language you're is much more overtly appropriate to being in time, but there is something like that still in the later one. In being in time, what we need to kind of face up to, one thing we need to face up to is that
There's no kind of special task laid out for us. There's no quest waiting at the inn for us that will bring us meaning and fulfillment. And then, you know, there'll be this climactic Wagnerian entrance into Valhalla. And no, that's just not the way that life works, you know. And in the later work, there's also a deflationary moment, which is that
PJ (14:53.829)
You
Lee Braver (15:09.002)
the kind of the limitations of explanation. So for example, in What is Metaphysics? he ends this essay with the question from Leibniz, why is there anything rather than nothing? Nothing's a whole lot simpler. Seems like purely logically, it makes a lot more sense for there to be nothing existing. But instead, we have a lot of stuff. Why?
PJ (15:24.056)
Excuse me.
Lee Braver (15:37.108)
And Heidegger argues, well, look, no answer could answer that. Nothing could possibly answer that. Because anything you point to, well, this is why, that's why God created it, the Big Bang, that's another thing that exists. And so you're not actually accounting for all that exists, you're just pointing to something else that stands in need of explanation. All you're doing is kind of pushing this regress of explanation back one step.
that then needs another step. And it can't, you can't get out of that infinite regress by any explanation. Because whatever you point to will then stand in need of the same explanation.
PJ (16:18.113)
It's turtles all the way down. Yeah, right.
Lee Braver (16:19.746)
But for Heidegger...
If you are trying to explain it, you've misunderstood the nature of the question.
because the question is unanswerable in principle.
then we need to change our whole orientation to what it means to ask this question. Because it can't be like other questions where we just get an answer. It can't. So it has to function some other way if it's not to be nonsense. And for him, the way that it functions is precisely to instill us with awe and wonder at the fact that there is anything.
What the question does is it makes us conceive of the possibility that there could be nothing at all. Could be. And conceiving of that possibility really enables us to then experience the fact of everything. The fact of everything, the existence, the presence of the world to us.
PJ (17:14.212)
Okay.
Lee Braver (17:41.014)
We're not getting an answer, we're getting a transformation in our attunement, in our attitude, in our thinking, in the way that we relate to the world. That's the response, not the answer. But that, for traditional ways of thinking, that's terrifying. This is where I'm getting to courage. He says, right next, he says at one point something along the lines of,
a little bitty nudge transforms awe into terror. know, they're, they're gestalt switch. You can see the same structure as terrifying because there can be no explanation for why everything is. There can be no fundamental ground beneath our feet. It's a, it's an abyss. It's an obgroom, a groundlessness.
Because these ultimate questions, really Kant already showed all this, that we don't get the unconditioned final step in our looking for explanations, these are not available to us. This is a of a philosophical, theoretical version of Nietzsche's Death of God. We don't get those answers and we crave them. We desperately want them. Giving them up takes courage.
But the reward is this completely different way of relating to the world, this different experience. Because although having an explanation for the world is comforting intellectually, having a benevolent deity is comforting morally, it actually dispels the possibility for wonder.
Once we get an answer to question, the question's done. And there's nothing else to think about. It's deflated like the Macy's Day balloon afterwards. It's flat. There's nothing more to do with it. You're done. And that's what Plato and Aristotle said about wonder and questions too. We start with them, but then we solve the problem. We answer the question. And that's better. And that's the part that Heidegger disagrees with. Instead...
PJ (19:44.429)
Ha ha ha!
Lee Braver (20:04.578)
The unanswerable question is one that can continue provoking, continue making us think and make us think new thoughts. And that's what the history of philosophy is, is new answers to these questions. And he says, and the idea that God created the universe, just go very common answer to the question, why is there anything?
Well, that's not wondrous. That's obvious. What does a creator God do but create? That's Tuesday morning's inbox. That dispels all of the excitement over it. But the world just existing for no reason, us coming about without any guidance or creator, that is a miracle.
That's a miracle that can only be done by a dead God. Miracles can't be done by an actual God, because an actual God is omnipotent and doing miracles is nothing. That's not miraculous for a God to do miracles. Only the dead God can do miracles.
Only the absence of God can render the creation miraculous. And so we get wonder because there's no answer, because there's no source or cause. That's a vastly, and there are a number of these kind of atheistic evolutionary biologists who will say similar things that this is just so spectacular that evolution.
did this without anyone guiding so much more exciting. And so that's again, the wonder that starts and then massively increases. But you have to change the whole way you think about thinking.
PJ (22:11.595)
And so part of that is focusing on our finitude. That there are no answers, there is no certainty because even if we could have access, which we don't, to everything, we could not contain everything. Because it's just not possible. And this is why I think in being in time, it's not revolutionary to say this, that's why he focuses on death so much. Because the ultimate limiter is death.
So I want to make sure that I'm tracking with you. want to know if this is a good example for our audience. Part of the reason what I was doing with chasing Leviathan, like that whole image, is from Job 28, that the Leviathan cannot be caught. We can only chase, we cannot catch it. And underlying that too, I've always been fascinated by continental shelves. I don't know if you're familiar with continental shelves.
Lee Braver (22:57.996)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (23:09.231)
the tectonic plates that we are on as continents, they stop and they drop off. It's where the water goes from being, there's sunlight and then generally there's a drop. And when you look out over the drop, it's just pure, it's pure black. And we don't know what's swimming down there, right? And so a big moment for me was sometimes working through philosophy.
It really feels like that, Like there's just, like, it's, there's just, who knows what's swimming down there. And to look at that instead of looking at that with fear, looking at it with awe and wonder. Is that a, and I, in some ways, you know, because there is that lack of knowledge, it's almost exactly what we're talking about. But do think that's a good example of what we're talking about?
Lee Braver (23:59.254)
Well, it's a good image. mean, the disanalogy is that in principle, once we get better technology, we can find out a lot about it. Right now, they say we know more about outer space than we do the bottom of our own oceans. So right now, that works well. it's very important for, I mean, Heidegger says, we're finite and being is finite, right? Because being is only in relation to us.
PJ (24:06.341)
Right, right, Yes, that's true.
PJ (24:13.54)
Yes.
Lee Braver (24:28.602)
Scholars just through that. I very much believe that. And so these are questions that can't be answered. That's very important for Heidegger. It's not a matter of we haven't thought hard enough or we haven't gotten to a smart enough genius yet. It's built into the structure of the question that it can't be answered. But it's also important. mean, he says that it has.
I'm working on this notion of polysemy now, the meaning more than one thing at once. And for him, we need to look at these kinds of questions like, why is there anything rather than nothing? And we need to read it two different ways at once.
is very similar to what Kant, Kant's regulatory and constitutive ideals. Kant said, you know, the mind is, the concepts of the understanding are made up in such a way that they perpetuate themselves. And you will never get to the outmost, outermost part of space, that's part of intuition, the first moment, you'll never get to the first cause, because there's no knowing what caused that.
So they perpetuate themselves and therefore you'll never get to the end of them. And reason pushes us to try to get the whole thing to get the whole... And if we think we can get to the end, then we've misunderstood the nature of the mind and we take it as a constitutive ideal, we can't just get there, then we're gonna go into bad metaphysics. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should say, well, it's possible, then forget it. If we take it as a regulative idea,
I want to get to the very first instant of time. But we know we can't get there. But we still try. Then that's what fuels cosmology to get closer and closer and closer and getting these tiny, tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang. And they just keep going because they're trying to get to the first second. But Kant says they should do that while still knowing they can't.
Lee Braver (26:37.324)
Well, that's the way that we should treat these questions, Heidegger thinks. He doesn't use Kant's distinction, but I think it's that we can't just say, there's no answer, then screw it. Because trying to answer it is the thinking, is the way to engage with the world in this way. I it does provoke us to ask these questions. So as long as we realize that none of them will
fully answer it, finally answer it, completely answer it, then pursuing the answers is a fantastic thing to do. And it's a way to make the fact that there is anything more. We're taking the reality of things and we're reflecting it in thought so that we're adding
another dimension to reality. There's spatial dimensions or temporal dimensions. Well, now there's a conceptual dimension that the world is the way it is, and it is the way it is in thought. It is the way it is, you know, as lit up with light. It is the way it is in space. It is the way it is in thought. And this casting it into the medium of thinking for Heidegger
like I think for Hegel also, is a cosmological event. It's not that we are here and the world is here and we just have representations of it. We're part of reality. And we are, you know, reality's way of coming to know itself. We are reality's sensory organs, reality's mind in the way that it can now come to perceive itself conceptually. And so when we ask, why is there anything rather than nothing?
We are in a sense creating everything in this realm, in this medium. So why is there anything rather than nothing? Well, for one reason, for us, because right from the question. The question creates everything in this realm, right? Just by thinking through.
PJ (28:57.105)
And maybe I'm way off base here, but in some ways this is answer to, I believe it's Parmenides, question that like how can we conceive of nothing as soon as we think of it, it's not, it is something, but it exists in this conceptual dimension. So by thinking we give existence to nothing, is that an answer to that or am I off base there?
Lee Braver (29:20.992)
Well, I mean, the problem is we have to get into what we mean by nothing. Because we don't mean nothing. it's a huge, huge topic. mean, Heidegger's fascinated by it. He talks a lot about nothing, which of course many skeptics say, yeah, exactly. That's all he's talking about. But no, I mean, for Heidegger, as I understand him, being is...
PJ (29:24.293)
Maybe that's too big of rabbit hole.
Yeah, yeah.
PJ (29:38.905)
Right, right,
Lee Braver (29:50.786)
what as we experience it. There's no numeral realm and then our experience of it. No world in itself and then our experience of it. We don't have any, we can't talk about intelligently experience the world as it is apart from us. We're only talking about the world as we experience it. And the world as we experience it is shot through with nothingness in all kinds of different ways. So to say, well, nothing can't exist.
is a massive prejudice. It's a massive prejudging of what can exist. Where do you get that from? What are you basing that on? It's just this leaping into an assumption of what can and what can't exist. If we encounter nothingness, then why not? Why can't we say that it is? It has to be in a completely different way than being, of course.
but we can have this ontology of non-being, a non-tology, I guess, just as much as we can have an ontology. We just have to figure out the rules of it, the way it operates. And he's written books and books on that.
PJ (31:05.646)
And I think you've touched on here a little bit. Can you talk, now that we've talked a good deal about wondering, can you talk a little bit about dwelling?
Lee Braver (31:16.214)
Dwelling's harder. I think dwelling is kind of his later, the heir to the early notion of being in the world. So in the early work, there's definitely an existential thread to it. How much, how existential is a big debate, people argue about that, but there's something. And.
PJ (31:17.442)
Haha
Lee Braver (31:42.242)
One of the things he thinks that we need to confront courageously is the idea that there is no home on earth. We were thrown here. We just happened to be here. We just occurred. And there's no place provided for us. And that's what can lead to nihilism, this sense that there's just no reason for us to be here. There's no purpose. And so, you know, what's the point?
PJ (32:11.557)
.
Lee Braver (32:11.948)
there's no meaning to anything that can lead lead myelodism. He doesn't want that conclusion, but he very much accepts the premise.
In the later work, one of the things that's fascinating about the later work is that he takes those ideas from the early work and he very subtly inverts them. So thrownness in being time means we just happened, there's nothing special for us to do here. Anything you do is, you you have to give it the meaning that it has.
Unlike philosophers always said, this, you know, what it means to be human is to pray to God. What it means to be human is to think. What it means to be human is to be a citizen. No, there's nothing like that. In the later work, in letter on humanism, for example, it's very important. He says, we are thrown from being into this caring for being. So we actually, changes the notion of thrownness from just happening
into exactly the opposite. There is something for us to do, special, an Ergon, a distinctive function or distinctive activity in Aristotle's sense that makes us us. And what is it? It's thinking being. We're the only ones who can think, as far as we know, in the whole universe, nothing else has consciousness, has awareness. But...
When we become aware of the universe, like I said, this brings everything into the light. Everywhere else is dark. Everywhere else is silent. Here, this one little corner is awareness, is the universe become aware of itself. And the fact that we are able to respond to the world in this way gives us a responsibility. Nice little wordplay for him.
Lee Braver (34:15.17)
We have this kind of obligation, ethic, quasi-ethical obligation to attend to the world by paying it attention, to bring things into experience, to think them through, to experience language as much as possible. That's what the poets do. They are aware that they're using words, whereas most of us just take them for granted, don't pay attention to it. Are aware that we're thinking. That's what the philosophers do, and they think as well as possible.
That is our home in the world. That is our special activity, the thing that we are in a sense, with this whole, you know, I break my fingers for all the scare quotes I have to use here, because he's using these words in various ways. That is our destiny. That's the thing that makes us us. And so when we...
fulfill this activity with excellence, there's tons of Aristotle and Heidegger, then we're dwelling. Then we have a home in this world. We are at home. He says in the early work, he sees the term unheimlich, which means not being at home. It translates as uncanny.
weird, I think the word to be unsettled because it means not, unheim is not at home. So I think unsettling is the best one. No one else has picked that up anyway. And he says, well, we realize that we just aren't at home. We have have an essential not at home. In the later work, contemporary homelessness that we today don't feel at home, but not essentially. Essentially we have a home here.
PJ (35:48.995)
Hahaha
Lee Braver (36:07.554)
When we realize this very hard to conceptualize relationship with being that we are the ones bringing it to appearance, and that's what we are, not what we do, it's what we are, we need a whole other ontology to talk about that, then we see the meaning of our lives. Then we see our lives as meaningful. And that's how I think we overcome nihilism.
And that I think is dwelling. But there's a lot to say. He also says in building dwelling thinking, this essay where he talks a lot about that, that we dwell with things. So it's not just this, you know, sitting on a field, dropping acid and being, it's always about attending to individual things, individual experiences. And I think
PJ (36:52.686)
Yeah.
Lee Braver (37:07.532)
There's this strong farming analogy. He loves peasant farmers and things like that, where just like a farmer will plant a seed and they'll water it and they'll fertilize it and they'll care for it. And under that care, hopefully it will blossom and become what it should be, become what it is. Everything around us is like that under our attention.
So anything you point to, one of the things I often do in my phenomenology class, the first day I'll bring an apple in the class and I'll set it down and say, hey, take about a sheet of paper, describe this. And then, okay, nope, nope, nope, that's no good. Try again, look harder, look deeper, don't use the word apple, don't use the word thing. You know, we do it three or four times and finally they start seeing it's not red. You know, we have this picture of the red apple like this from the A for apple picture in kindergarten.
PJ (38:02.521)
Right.
Lee Braver (38:04.608)
And that's what we see, we map that onto the thing in real life. But when we get past that, we see all the flecks of gold and the dots of black and the misshapenness and all of those details. And what's happening there is that we're watering and putting water and light and fertilizer on the experience. We are tending it and it's blossoming. And that's our role, so to speak.
in reality and that's how we're increasing the being of being.
PJ (38:42.277)
And I think I had a couple questions I was gonna ask, but I'm gonna go out of order here because one of the final concluding remarks you make is that thinking is a craft. And I think you're quoting Heidegger there. So talk to us a little bit about how we can think better if we think, if we realize that thinking is a craft. I mean, that seems to dovetail nicely with what you're just talking about.
Lee Braver (39:07.106)
I think that's a great quote from him. I love that quote. And one of the things that it means, I think it means a number of things. For one thing, course, it's, you know, at the same time as he's so, you know, expansive and amazing, he's also very quotidian. I he's very mundane in many ways. I mean, I remember hearing this interview of the guy who made the
biopic of Johnny Cash a while ago. And he said, is there anything you want me to know at the end of this long interview, is there anything you want me to know about who's it? Yeah, this is how you pick up a guitar. He just picks it up and does it. It's a tool. You use it. There's nothing pretentious about it. And for instance, in the original work of art, this very important later essay, what he does is he's searching for a way to talk about art.
because they're a very distinctive kind of entity. They're not like anything else. For one thing, they're perfect examples of what I was just talking about, of blooming when we pay attention. When you pay attention to a painting, you stand there in the museum, if you're patient, it will change and you'll see all these details and it's come pouring out. And therefore it's a bad description to talk about as a thing.
that's inert and sitting there. No, it is an event. It's happening to you. It's expanding and swirling and changing. But what's fascinating to is the first third or so of the essay is his trying, apparently earnestly, to apply traditional categories to it. And
in particular to the categories from being in time, his own categories, and failing. And everyone says, well, it must be this kind of entity. It's a tool. And he tries it and it falls apart. No, I can't do it that way. Well, maybe a thing. No, no. And then he looks at a work of art and it just pours forth all these ontological terms and categories. And so he's literally understanding it in its own terms.
Lee Braver (41:30.668)
But what I love about this is that most, the vast, vast majority of philosophical writing is you get the finished polished product that a person has rewritten and rewritten and rewritten and polished and punched until it just shines. But you don't see any of that preparatory work. You just see the end result. And it's like, know, Aphrodite coming out of Zeus's head just fully formed.
PJ (41:58.97)
Ha ha.
Lee Braver (42:00.064)
And that's what you think when you're in grad school. That's what these people do. My God, they're so brilliant. They just open their heads and pour it out. there's a, and Heidegger in that essay is showing his process. He's taking us back into the workshop, not just in the gallery where he's got the finished works. He's taking them in the workshops and look, here's all the crap that I went through. Here, the wood shavings on the ground. Here's the bad for the bad for, and I had to go through all that.
to get to the conclusion, right? It was this dialogue with reality. And so I think that's one aspect of what it means to be craft is that it's worth.
and you have to stick with it. And he says this wonderful description. He talks about a woodworker.
And he says the woodworker, this is now in a different, this is from what is called thinking. He says a woodworker doesn't impose his or her will onto the wood. If you say, if you start off, I'm going to make this, I'm going to put it on the wood and I don't care, right? Then it's going to be inferior, could break someone. A great woodworker looks at the wood and sees what kind of wood it is, what properties it has.
even individual features, the grain of it, the bores, the words, all the aspects of it, and then adapts what they want to make to it. And it's a cooperation rather than a making or imposing on it. And that's how thinking needs to be, that we aren't striding forth and making arguments.
Lee Braver (43:53.262)
We are in this back and forth with the world and with ideas. It's very important for Heidegger that language speaks and thoughts think. We aren't just controlling me. If we control them, then we can make our arguments do anything we want it. But they have an opinion. They're fighting back and they resist. And it's always a dialogue. There are no monologues.
Because what it means to be a great poet is to listen, to listen to language. What it means to be a great philosopher, a great thinker is sensitivity to thoughts, receptivity. And I think that's also such a part of craftsmanship.
PJ (44:45.729)
And you talk about this difference between looking at the apple and looking at the work of art. You talk about watering and fertilizing when you look at the apple, but that's us as humans adding the conceptual dimension to it, because that's what we do. Whereas with art, the conceptual dimension is already there because it is worked on by humans. Am I reading that correctly? And two, is that why Heidegger is so fascinated by art?
Lee Braver (45:14.614)
Well, I'd say a couple of things. First of all, yes, the conceptual dimension is there to the apple because we're there, but we couldn't make it out of thin air. It has to have what, you know, in traditional language, would be the potential for that. So again, it's a cooperation, right? It's not that we are creating it, it's that we're drawing this potential out of it.
And then for the artworks, one of the things that Heidegger really, really emphasizes is that in a great work of art, you never lose sight of the materials it was made out of. So Van Gogh is his go-to artist and it works perfectly for Van Gogh. He wasn't going go with clay, but I think it works really well for Van Gogh. Van Gogh, his paintings have this incredibly vivacious scene that you see of the...
PJ (45:56.057)
Hmm.
Lee Braver (46:12.802)
roiling sky or a cafe at night or a self-portrait or whatever, but you see every single brushstroke also. So that, he calls it a strife, that back and forth between the raw materials, which are inherently meaningless, let's say, and the scene they make out of it, which is meaningful to us, that back and forth for him is indicative
or not symbolic, but it's kind of like a microcosm of how we live. I mean, our whole lives, we have the throneness, but then we have the ways that we engage with that, the ways that the patterns we make out of that. And one of his favorite examples in that essay is a Greek temple. And you think about religion. I mean, what is religion, but giving us rituals to
PJ (47:05.114)
Yes.
Lee Braver (47:11.836)
integrate what are inherently animal biological facts into a meaningful pattern of what a life should be. So we have birth, well, you that's just an animal thing falling out, right? But we make it a baptism. You have a puberty, so you have a confirmation or bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. You have mating, but you make it into a wedding. You have death.
Last rites, the funeral. So these are ways that the religion is an example of life being this strife, just like the scene is this strife, right? Where we have the biological events and then we have the way that we weave it into a pattern that allows us to be at home in the
PJ (48:11.781)
Forgive me, I would like to ask a follow-up application question at the end. I want to make sure that I'm being respectful of your time. But I do have to ask, it is like an introductory Heideggerian text, So you end in your conclusion, thinking is changing. So at the end here, what is the sound bite?
Heidegger's thinking because you have like you have this idea like at the end and you underline it and capitalize it the it seems to be like you're saying the the best that you can the the best short answer for what is Heidegger's? Thing on thinking is thinking is changing. Can you explain that a little bit?
Lee Braver (49:01.11)
Well, mean, throughout I have a lot of thinking is X and they're underlined. So that wasn't the only one, right? But it was very important. And it's a way, it's talking about his thinking, how his thinking changed, but it's also, it goes back to this point of thinking being sensitive to the subject matter, what it's thinking about.
PJ (49:06.372)
Yes.
Lee Braver (49:30.526)
It's reactive, it's responsive, it's not a one-way street. And it's very important for him. He thinks that the way that we've been thinking for like 25 centuries is metaphysical, is not wrong. That doesn't really make any sense, but it's kind of narrow and limited. And he wants us to open ourselves up.
to other possibilities. We've been so narrowly focused for so long. And there's so much more, just like the apple, we have the kindergarten A for apple picture, and we see that everywhere we see an apple. So we see, you know, basic logical, the way we've been thinking is metaphysics of a certain way that beings are, this way the thinking is, and it's useful, it's productive, but it's also very limiting.
There's so much more to it. And if we attend to our thoughts, the way we attend to a painting or the apple, it will teach us all kinds of new things. And that's what Heidegger's whole work is, is him just attending to these thoughts and following where they go. And Hannah Rent called it thinking without banisters. It means just going off the map where we have
where it's filled in and going to where it's unexplored. We don't know how to go around. don't know, you know, where he's intentionally getting himself lost. Because that's the only way we discover new territory. And, but the territory here is so different that we don't even know how to move in this space. And so we, and it's so exciting.
to follow along with him in these fundamentally different ways of thinking. So many philosophers, especially continental philosophers, talk about, well, metaphysics, logic, that's not the only way to think, right? What I've been doing lately, what I'm working on lately in the next couple of books I'm writing are an exploration of what these alternative ways of thinking writing actually are.
Lee Braver (51:55.326)
Not waving your hands, not IOUs, not there are, what are they? How do they work? Let's get the grammar book. Let's get the logic book. And of course, part of what they are is that there aren't grammar books and logic books, so it's a little problematic, but really explore in detail how these other ways of thinking work, because they do it. Nietzsche does it, Heidegger does it, Derrida does it. They're there. And I'm trying to kind of show
PJ (51:55.333)
Mmm.
PJ (52:18.895)
Mm-hmm.
Lee Braver (52:22.882)
how their thinking moves and how they put thoughts together in a very, very different way. And so thinking changing is crucial. We have to open ourselves up to that ability or Heidi will remain a closed book.
PJ (52:40.335)
The amount of times that I've heard continental philosophers say we need to think differently but then they don't think differently, that IOU is quite large.
Lee Braver (52:46.24)
Right, right, exactly. I mean, but what I'm trying to, in fact, I've just, in the introduction to the book I'm writing now, I say, you know, this is a page, there's a chapter from a grammarian book, a grammar book from the other beginning, what Haydn calls the other beginning, after this massive, massive change. This is a book of the grammar of it, how writing works.
how language works. So I'm giving the actual rules, again, you gotta do all 20 years, of the rules, the way that writing works in this alternate way. Because yeah, you can't just say that and then stop.
PJ (53:21.038)
Yeah.
PJ (53:31.907)
You can, but it's not very useful. Yeah, yeah, it's not. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lee Braver (53:35.114)
It's not satisfying and why should I believe you? Because these guys do it. They really do it. They really are. And the only, you can't rashly persuade someone to think in a different reason because the other reason won't be, those reason would hold water in the reason they're using now. That's all point of being different. The only way you do it is by thinking this other way, writing this other way and having people slowly acclimate themselves to it.
PJ (53:41.465)
Yeah.
Lee Braver (54:05.122)
And so I'm trying to be the oxygen tent, the midway point. I don't know how to do the metaphor. I'm trying to help with that acclimating because it's very, very hard. It's taken me decades, but it's amazing. It's exhilarating to see these different logics. It's the most exciting adventure I've had in my intellectual career.
PJ (54:30.329)
That sounds amazing. We'll definitely have to have you back on for that. So I want to be respectful of your time, but if you don't mind, just as a final question, what is something you, after listening to all this, you would recommend to our audience to either do or to kind of meditate on for the next week after hearing this episode?
Lee Braver (54:33.858)
Alright, great.
Lee Braver (54:52.546)
Well, what they can do is send me $20. Let's buy it. I mean, I think one thing is really this thing that that Heidi always wants to do is just he calls it staying with things. mean, try it as a real exercise just to sit and look at something and be patient because you're going to want to run off. You know, it's a little like meditating.
PJ (54:55.717)
Besides buying your excellent book, yes.
Lee Braver (55:20.738)
your monkey brain wants to go and just look at it and let it open up, let it unfold. Of course, it works best again with things like works of art, but in theory, it should work with anything. See how it goes, see what happens. I don't do it very much. It's time consuming, but it really is an incredible experience. And then the idea is,
take that attitude, that practice, and apply it to philosophy.
and delight.
PJ (56:00.594)
Dr. Braver, tremendous joy talking to you today. Thank you so much.
Lee Braver (56:04.866)
That was fun as always.