Reason Eclipsed

“Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.”—Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man,(1964)

For Heidegger the epoche is an abstraction missing the entire meaning of being-in-the-world for the two senses Heidegger uses the term Being within Dasein and Being itself:

"His quarrel is with the sort of thinking--on the part of philosophers, scientists, and others--that ultimately follows logic's lead in bracketing [Epoche] questions of being and existence, even as it supposes a particular answer to them. By virtue of its insistence on a uniform symbolism, classical logical thinking supposes either the constant presence of whatever it entertains (for example, meanings, references, entities, truth values) or, if the symbolism is meant to be disinterpreted, the potential presence of a range of objects in terms of which it may be interpreted or applied. In this supposition lies formal logic's normative but unreflected understanding of being"(The Scattered Logos: Metaphysics and the Logical Prejudice, by Daniel Dahlstrom).

Heidegger tracks back into history to discover the early Greek philosopher's sense-of-truth concepts and finds there are many other ontological categories in Greek thought and language that today's epistemology does not recognize. For example, in our Western system of logic and semantics there is the concept of "bivalence," or the principle that all meaningful sentences are determined to be either true or false. And there are other rules like the law of non-contradiction: A is not non-A. We can only understand meaning under these two truth conditions:

"Heidegger's complaint, then is that thinking that restricts itself to the structure of assertions and axiomatic principles of non-contradiction and excluded middle is left impotent to consider the meaning of "being" and "truth" that it presupposes. Herein lies the source of the assertions about being (or "logical form") as though the latter were just another particular being"(Ibid.).

So Heidegger is trying to find in history the origin of this switch in the concepts--or paradigm shift--in the meaning of "being" and "truth."

"Our questioning is after all only a psycho-spiritual process in us which, whatever course it may take, cannot in any way affect the essent [things that exist] itself. True, the essent remains as it is manifested to us. But it cannot slough off the problematic fact that it might also not be what it is and as it is.... Our questioning only opens up the horizon, in order that the essent may dawn in such questionableness. We still know far too little about the process of such questioning, and what we do know is far too crude. In this questioning we seem to belong entirely to ourselves. Yes it is this questioning that moves us into the open, provided that in questioning it transforms itself (which all true questioning does), and cast a new space over everything and into everything"(Introduction to Metaphysics, by Heidegger, 1953, Anchor Books edition 1961, page 24).

In ancient Greek mythology, all humans that crossed the mythical river Λήθη [ˈlɛːtʰɛː] ) entered the Underworld and lost all memory of their former lives. Lethe means "oblivion", "forgetfulness," or "concealment". This is the river the dead would drink from to forget that they were dead. They would be oblivious to their true state of Being. The letter ἀ is a negative prefix, or alpha privative. The Greek word for "Truth" is ἀληθείᾳ (alētheia) or the negation of forgetting--remembering the fundamental question of Being and awakening.

The “modern falsification” is to identify thinking (νοέω) with beings—a logical prejudice. The objectification of Reason itself is the most tragic. Heidegger’s diagnosis of modern industrial society: “The onset of nihilism casts the question of Being into oblivion by objectifying Being as a thing, an object of knowledge as the mere accumulation of information. Such objective information about Being then promises an accumulation and deployment of power for the sake of dominion over nature, both human and otherwise.” (The Scattered Logos: Metaphysics and the Logical Prejudice, by Daniel Dahlstrom.).

Heidegger goes into a discussion about the Ancient Greek language of Heraclitus and selects some key terms that represent important concepts of the Early Greeks and how those very same concepts changed to mean something else—something that has been forgotten.

Why is language the starting point? Human Language is part of the Logos that collects and brings together all beings. I am thinking here of how a paradigm collects particulars and unifies them into a world (κόσμος, or cosmos). Heidegger wrote, “Language is the house of Being.” Language is meaning itself and empowers us to ask what it means, “to be,” but language is objectifying and has been itself objectified. Language is viewed by modern philosophy as an object itself—a tool for calculation—another object of scientific investigation. Language is connected intimately to our understanding of Being. Words change our experience of the world by focusing on objects, things, and entities. Wittgenstein said that language is a public tool to understand our private life.

The Frankfurt School Philosopher Max Horkheimer wrote Eclipse of Reason (1947) in which he discussed how the Nazis were able to appear as reasonable because of the epistemic dominance of instrumental reason. “...the sole criterion of instrumental reason is its operational value or purposefulness, and with this, the idea of truth becomes contingent on mere subjective preference”( Wikipedia, Eclipse of Reason, by Horkheimer). Horkheimer warns of natural-scientific positivism, and the ideology of nihilistic scientism:

“Horkheimer argues that modern philosophy has increasingly advocated subjective rationality [focuses primarily on means] to the point of rejecting any form of meaning or objective rationality [focus is on the ends] and enabling technocracy. He associates the decline in objective rationality in philosophy with a mechanical worldview, disenchantment and the decline of a belief in a living or holistic nature. Although he denounces a wide range of contemporary philosophical schools of thought, Horkheimer asserts that these trends are epitomized in positivism, a term he defines broadly"(Ibid.).