Denken wir an die Sonne. Sie geht uns täglich auf und unter. Nur die wenigsten Astronomen, Physiker, Philosophen - und auch diese nur auf Grund einer besonderen, mehr oder minder, geläufigen Einstellung - erfahren diesen Sachverhalt unmittelbar anders, nämlich als Bewegung der Erde um die Sonne. Der Schein jedoch, in dem Sonne und Erde stehen, z.B. die Morgenfrühe der Landschaft, das Meer am Abend, die Nacht, ist ein Erscheinen. Dieser Schein ist nicht nichts. Es ist auch nicht unwahr. Es ist auch keine bloße Erscheinung eigentlich anders gearteter Verhältnisse in der Natur. Diese Schein ist geschichtlich und Geschichte, entdeckt und gegründet in der Dichtung und Sage und so ein wesenlicher Bereich unserer Welt.It is hard to know where to begin. Husserl began his studies in astronomy, Heidegger his in theology. Here we have the themes of Heidegger against Husserl's Lebenswelt and Husserl's revision of Galileo on experience.
But noticing this is not enough. Start with the fallacy. The relation of orbiting planet to single central massive star is not an appearance. One Sachverhalt is that twice a year we experience equinox and another that we have mapped the two tropics against the points where the sun is overhead at noon on each solstice. A more important, decisive, state of affairs is that the moon in the southern hemisphere rises "upside down" and that above the arctic circle generally is not visible at night when the sun is not visible in the day. Yet another is the identification of Hesperus with Phosphorus. Above 60deg latitude there is not truly dark night sky in summer (not a concern to a Swabian peasant.) He does not mention the apparent retrograde motions of Mars or the Einstein correction for the actual orbit of Mercury.
Einstellung. I recently looked at a Plakat by an artist with a matrix of eight images of the moon in apparently sequential phases. Something was wrong. It was moments before I could see that I could not recognize this moon. The fallacy: a single image of the full moon had been "sliced" 8 different ways. This Scheibenkreis of replications do no appearances make. Bergson would have known better, or Valéry. Without the galilean views, the artist was ignorant of the radically different appearance of each phase of the moon due to incident light, elevations and immense shadows, albedo and the libration of the moon.
Venus never rises to the zenith. Not at the poles. Not at the equator. Venus can appear full, when Mercury appears in "quarter phase".
Husserl's loss of Reinach and his lovely son Wolfgang in WWI left him vulnerable to the approaches of Heidegger. How he came to inherit Oscar Becker later, I have not yet researched. What seems clear to me from his Prag lecture, is that he did not imagine the use Heidegger would make of the notions of lived experience.
America is not only notable for how few accept evolution of species as a fact: it is notable for light pollution at night and how few use a telescope or can distinguish a planet from a star. When Heidegger laments the passing of the gods, there is more that is "wahr" about Venus and Mercury that is not being preserved among us: in almost every American public library, books on astrology out-number books on philosophy (although not in the notable virtual libraries which our librarians so often lament.)
Der Schein in dem Sonne und Erde stehen is presented by the example of die Morgenfrühe der Landschaft, but nothing in descriptive phenomenology as practiced by, say, Karl Jaspers in his psychopathology, necessitates the Heideggerian "swing": contrary to the eco-Heideggerians, the "Boden" for Heidegger was not the planet, Terra. He was ignorant of the deforestation which had occurred due to peasants with axes. Simple pumps and simple shovels had been used to drain the bogs and marches of Europe long before the steam engines arrived.
The next fallacy: no rising of the sun is Geschichte. Not even on the day of Waterloo. That the morning was foggy and cold is not a matter of astronomy and is only an historical fact if documented or otherwise provable and standing in relation to some event or subject to which it has some relevance. The time at which the sun rose may be decisive - but that time is not historical (it is not as if its rising were unexpected, avoidable or not predicted.) More common are considerations of whether there was moonlight. Or whether there was an error in navigation at sea. But Heidegger knew hill country orientation and not high seas or even coastal navigation.
Few non-Islamic artists are able to sensibly discuss the evening appearance of the moon during the first 10 days after new moon and fewer still how the appearance of the waxing crescent moon varies with the seasons in our northern hemisphere. The full moon illusion - an important chapter in the subjectivity and science - is almost a mythical matter in the educated American suburbs.
Gratitude. It is not merely that I am so grateful to live on a planet with a single stable moon. The accident which gave rise to the moon and later events that helped clear debris from our orbit have all contributed to the the unique history of the appearance of mamalian, avian and cephalopod species on this planet.
How Aristotle would have coveted such ideas as we now cherish!
πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.
The dawn predates poetry. The morning light predates warfare in the name of the arising Volk. Those true ancients, pre-histroical, they too were human who were, oh, so modest, and marked with pigment on their bare but darkly tanned skin.
The dawn is also the elephant dawn. The evening finds the gorilla padding a new nest and the clever crows at roost. The morning light will dapple the coral in which the cuttle fish will hide today from the leaping dolphin, experienced at play in the Morgenfrühe. And above them all, the unsung moon.
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We now know from high-speed technology (Apollo) coming out of WWII Germany (von Braun et al) that the moon would be very dark but for the collsions which sequelae left it covered with fine beads of silicate glass: the wahrhaftes glassbead Spiel of lunar albedo.
ReplyDeleteThe moon viewed through the seasons from one location which faces western mountains would show that the new moon varies it's orientation to the horizons with the seasons: for this no telescope is required nor any compass measurements: all that is required is that the mountain peaks be distinctive and the evening sky often clear in the west just after sunset.
ReplyDeleteHeidegger avoided whether the moon is perceived as a spheroid. especially during partial elipses of the full moon. That the moon often sets "on edge" in the equatorial zone may have been unknown to Heidegger. Viewing the surface of the sun may only require a pin-hole "camera obscura" and no mathematized techniques. Heidegger may not have benn aware that pre-historic astronomy was not peculiar to Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians but a feature of many pre-historic cultures.
Jaspers philosophical diagnosis of Heidegger was that his great failing arose from his attitude toward science. Elsewhere Jaspers has insisted that a philosopher have a grounding in science. In our own day that has been exemplified by Hilary Putnam but few others (an exception in Paris are professional philosophers who are also practicing medecine - although that tends, as in Japsers case, to be psychiatry.) Few American philosophers spend summers or sabbatical years doing science. As Hugo Ott has learned, historians who approach philosphers and their doings had best be armed with a PhD. and a few publications. There are few ventures into the sociology of philosophy as a supplement or complement to metaphilosophy.
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