Rebecca Kukla: belief

Transcript context

…It’s like the Monty Python skits summarized Proust. Right. Okay, any of my Heidegger friends who hear this are going to think this is a ridiculously oversimplified caricature. But I’m going to do it anyway. I think that the core idea of Being and Time is that to understand what something is, ontologically, is not a question that can be answered unless we understand the context in which we’re asking the question. If what you’re trying to do is physics, then you’re going to break the world into the kind of objects that are useful for doing physics, independent objects that have the properties that physics needs them to have. If what you’re trying to do is — to use a very Heideggerian example — build a chair, then you’re not going to break the world into the objects of physics. You’re going to break the world into the tools that would be useful for you to build a chair. You’re going to think of the world in terms of things like hammers and saws and nails. You’re not going to care that much what the physical structure of the hammer is. What you’re going to care about is that the hammer is a good thing to use for making a chair at this moment, for banging in a nail. Thinking of things in terms of their tool-like functions versus thinking of them as physical objects. It’s not like one is more right, or one is more wrong. It’s also not some sort of spooky subjectivism. It’s just recognizing that our useful ontological categories are indexed to what we’re in the midst of trying to do. Furthermore, thinking of other people is yet another category. So it’s not most useful to think of other people as physical objects or as tools. It’s most useful to think of other people as entities who are engaged in certain kinds of projects and self-reflections and so on. That’s a whole separate ontology, where it’s not really an interesting question to think about how that does or doesn’t reduce to a physicalist ontology or some other kind of ontology. Was that at all comprehensible? I think so. Let’s try Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker.…

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