[MD] Rather be a hammer than a snail

[david buchanan]

In the "Collective intelligence (Granger)" thread, Krimel said to David M:
Thinking can cover a lot of activities. We specifically focus on things that 
don't work but I like to think that the brain is engaged in some way while 
wielding a hammer. It may not be rational, verbal or focused but information 
is being processed, don't you think?

Because DM had said:
Heidegger suggested we think when we are faced by things that don't work, if 
the nails nail, we just get on with nailing.

dmb chimes in:
I'm gonna take this as a chance to speculate about the connection between 
Heidegger's hammer and Zeno's arrow. Since nails are so loudly and 
conspicuously hitting their target all the time, it stikes me that Heidegger 
picked the image as an intentional parody. But I think it was Bergson who 
used the fletcher's paradox to get at the difference between the continuous 
flow of time as we experience it and the discrete increments with which we 
conceptualize and measure time. (This paradox basically says that motion is 
an illusion, because a loosed arrow will never reach its target. And it 
never gets there because it travels half of the distance in half the time, 
and then half again and again forever.) I think Bergson was the one who 
suggested that the point of this absurdity is not to deny motion so much as 
expose the limits of our conceptualizations. This problem arises only 
because of the way we divide and measure things and the guy with an arrow 
through his head will tell you that they most certainly do reach their 
targets. If he can't tell you, try the guy with the nose glasses.

Berson illustrated the idea by comparing our conceptualizations to the way a 
movie camera works. As I'm sure you know, they capture a rapid succession of 
still images, little frozen bits of the original scene. This is analogous to 
the way static concepts relate to dynamic experience.

Just for trivia points, Bergson had a long running debate about the nature 
of time with Einstein. Apparently, a lot of it was published. He was also 
pen-pals with William James and they had similar debates. James's radical 
empiricism was very close to Bergson's ideas on the topic. These 
conversations went on for years and years. He was a pretty big deal in his 
day, winning a nobel prize for literature in 1929, I think. Despite all 
this, he refused special treatment and insisted on standing in line (in the 
rain) just like everybody else. When the Nazis were rounding up Jews to be 
tagged as members of an "inferior" race. How do you spell poignant?

Anyway, Heidegger's carpenter strikes me as a bit like Pirsig's mechanic. 
But I think Heidegger does not praise the unthinking worker a carefully 
engaged Zen guy. If memory serves, this state of consciousness is associated 
with his notion of "fallenness", which is a kind of existential 
inauthenticity. But still, they share this idea that there is an important 
distinction between engagement and reflection or experience and concepts, if 
you prefer. (Although somehow it seems that its possible to be so engaged 
even in reflection. It seems you can lose yourself in thought the way you 
can lose yourself in motorcycle repair or hammering or painting or anything 
else.) I'm thinking Heidegger pick the image of hammering, at least partly, 
because its so repetitive. Nailers are fasteners and they're used to 
construct things.

"That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had 
seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the 
rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who 
had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was 
that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the 
rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. 
It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of 
fixed, rigid way." paperback Bantam ZAMM 342

Thus, Zeno explained to his lover through logic and math and passionate 
kisses galore how cupid's arrow could never reach his heart. Then he nailed 
her.

dmb

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