Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte - Volume 116, Issue 3, 2024

Experiencing bodies: Conceptual dualism and the computer metaphor

Human bodies are experiencing bodies that feel pain, pleasure and have a point of view. Our experiencing bodies are the natural starting point to develop a fully natural scientific account of our cognitive and experiential processes. However, accepting the experiential nature of our bodies is hampered by a long-standing pre-scientific conceptual dualism between mind and body. Nowadays, this dualism has been morphed into a modernlooking scientific version by the computer metaphor that interprets mind as abstracted, computational processes, while ignoring experience. In this paper, I will, first, sketch how experiencing bodies are a fact of life, second, discuss how the computer metaphor provides a conceptually dualistic and truncated interpretation of who we are, third, present three reasons why this conservative dualistic interpretation is problematical, and, fourth, argue that our experiencing bodies are straightforward natural phenomena that require a home in the general naturalistic perspective of the world.

In the name of freedom. The actuality of Heidegger’s question concerning technology

In his lecture ‘The question concerning technology’ (1953) Heidegger opens up a fruitful new sight on technology, when he understands its essence, not as a neutral instrument, but, with Aristotle, as a way of revealing. When the Greek technè is still a bringing-forth in the sense of poièsis, modern technology’s way of revealing has become a challenging, an ordering, a setting-up. For all things that are produced or touched by it, this means that they are ordered to stand by (bridging space), to be immediately at hand (bridging time), not for its own sake, not even for man’s sake, but only to be on call for a further ordering. Heidegger’s questioning reveals a more original concept of freedom, that of governing the open. In his lecture ‘Releasement’ (1955) he advocates a double attitude towards technology, that of releasement, a simultaneous allowing and letting go of the technical things and an openness to the secret of being.

Queer Ethics and the Face of the Other

In this paper I critically engage with Levinas’ ethical theory in order to formulate a queer ethics that is based on non-identity. Queer phenomenology shows us how our public space excludes bodies that do not fit within the heterosexual and cisgender norms and categorizes these bodies as disruptive forces to an orientated, stable space. In this paper I will develop an queer ethics that can offer a moral basis to queer phenomenology. I will use Levinas’ ethical relation to conceptualize an ethics of non-identity in which the other remains wholly other. I will show how Levinas’ sexualized phenomenology can particularly serve queer phenomenology. In his early work, Levinas describes the becoming of the self as a movement away from absurd, meaningless being (il y a). The movement away from meaningless being is seen by Levinas as the desire to usurp the world. The self wants to continue its own enjoyment and tries to secure its position in the world. It is in the end the Face of the Other that can peacefully resist the self’s tendency to usurp the world. I will show how the Face differs from the feminine Other and will show how the Face who falls outside of the heterosexual cisgender norms, can be seen as queer. In the end I will outline a queer ethics as a being questioned by the otherness or queerness of the other in which we are willing to give up our privileged position in the world.

Plea for a technical understanding of nature

Technology is often wrongly identified as the main cause of the current environmental crisis and the loss of biodiversity. Thinkers like Heidegger presented technology as an objectifying force that reduces nature to a mere exploitable resource stock. As a remedy, the hermeneutic method of understanding was promoted over and against technology. In contrast, this article argues in favour of techno-hermeneutics. Technically mediated listening methods take us into a multiverse of life expressions. In evolutionary perspective technology is part and parcel of the biocognitive spectrum. It is high time to curb old-fashioned control techniques with techno-hermeneutics.

Moving images of animals have been popular from the beginning of the medium of film and fascinate us from childhood, and they show the cultural image that exists in a (human) society of (other) animals. This essay outlines how Disney rose to prominence in the first half of the 20th century by strongly humanizing (or anthropomorphizing) animals in his animated films and not taking them very seriously as animals. In the second half of that century, the BBC had great success with nature series in which, on the contrary, scientific distance and the differences between humans and animals (‘anthropo-denial’) were central, and animals were seen primarily as objects. In recent decades, new insights into biology on the one hand and technological innovations in the media on the other have led to more diverse and ambivalent animal images. These reflect a growing awareness of the similarities between humans and other animals, with films and TV series using new images and stories to enable viewers to empathize with non-human living beings.

Detuning the climate: Thinking about climate change with Heidegger, Sloterdijk and Blok

This paper investigates the phenomenological importance of anthropogenic climate change by focussing on the double meaning of ‘climate’, namely (1) average weather condition and (2) social mood or atmosphere (e.g. political climate). The relation between global heating and social mood or atmosphere is investigated through a rethinking of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of moods and Peter Sloterdijk’s elaboration of Heideggerian phenomenology into his philosophy of spheres. Guided by Heidegger’s insight into the world disclosing function of moods, especially existential anxiety, we investigate whether climate anxiety has a similar disclosing function. We argue that climate anxiety involves an ecological world disclosure. We then turn to Sloterdijk’s elaboration of Heidegger’s phenomenology of moods into a wide-ranging theory of intersubjective attunement and life-world constitution in intersubjective ‘spheres’. Sloterdijk speaks of an intraspheric ‘greenhouse effect’, meaning that both the physical and the social climate within a sphere must be adequate for interhuman development. We argue that the catastrophic effects of runaway global heating threaten this intraspheric greenhouse effect, causing a fundamental increase in interhuman conflictuality. Finally, this paper also engages critically with Vincent Blok’s post-phenomenological, speculative ecology of the ‘earth in itself’ as necessitated by the disruptive event of climate change. Contra Blok it is argued that phenomenology is capable of uncovering the philosophical meaning of climate change, especially given the internal connection between climate as meteorological phenomenon and climate as world disclosing mood.