Heidegger and Gender?

 

 

how can heidegger's phenomenological ontology be used to convince non-believers to believe in concepts like gender?

Heidegger's phenomenological ontology, particularly his work in Being and Time, is complex and focuses on the question of Being (Dasein). It's not designed as a direct tool for persuading someone to believe in specific social constructs like gender. However, some aspects of his thought might be used in a nuanced and roundabout way to open up a conversation about the nature of identity and experience, which could indirectly relate to discussions about gender. It's crucial to understand that Heidegger himself did not explicitly address gender in the way we understand it today, and some interpretations of his work have been criticized for potentially reinforcing traditional gender roles.

Here's how some aspects of Heidegger's thought could be used in a very limited and careful way, keeping in mind the caveats above:

• Dasein and Being-in-the-World: Heidegger's concept of Dasein emphasizes our being-in-the-world as fundamentally embodied and situated. This suggests that our experiences, including how we understand ourselves and others, are shaped by our interactions with the world. One could argue that gender, as a social construct, is part of this world we're thrown into, and our understanding of it is shaped by our experiences and interactions. This isn't proving gender's existence, but it's pointing to the way our understanding of anything arises from lived experience.
• Authenticity and Inauthenticity: Heidegger discusses authentic and inauthentic ways of being. Authenticity involves confronting our own finitude and taking responsibility for our choices. One could argue that choosing to identify with a particular gender (or to reject traditional gender roles) could be seen as an act of authentic self-definition. Again, this isn't a direct argument for the existence of gender, but it's about the individual's relationship to their own identity.
• The They (Das Man): Heidegger critiques "the They," which represents the anonymous, conformist way of being where we lose ourselves in the expectations of others. This could be used to critique the pressure to conform to traditional gender roles. By questioning the "they," one could open up space for individuals to explore and define their own identities, including their gender identity, outside of societal pressures.

Important Caveats:

• Heidegger was not talking about gender in the modern sense: His focus was on the fundamental question of Being, not social constructs. Applying his ideas to gender requires careful interpretation and extrapolation.
• His work is complex and often dense: It's easy to misinterpret or misuse his concepts.
• Heidegger's personal life and political affiliations are controversial: His association with Nazism casts a shadow over his work and makes it important to approach his ideas critically.
• This is not about "convincing" anyone: Heidegger's philosophy is not about proving or disproving the existence of social constructs. It's about understanding the nature of human existence. The goal here is more about opening up a conversation and exploring different perspectives on identity.

In short: Heidegger's philosophy is not a tool for directly convincing someone to believe in gender. However, some aspects of his thought, when carefully interpreted, can be used to explore the ways in which our experiences and interactions with the world shape our understanding of ourselves and others, which can be relevant to discussions about identity, including gender identity. It's crucial to approach this with nuance, acknowledging the complexities of Heidegger's work and the limitations of applying it to this specific context.

 

But given that phenomenology is about the lived world and lived experience (think phantom pain of Merleau-Ponty), phenomenology could be used rhetorically to argue against supposed biological truth - which is a red herring anyway.

 

This is a fascinating point! You're absolutely right that phenomenology, with its focus on lived experience, can be a powerful tool for challenging the idea that gender is solely determined by biological factors.

Here's how phenomenology, particularly as explored by Merleau-Ponty, can be used to argue against a purely biological understanding of gender:

• Embodiment and Lived Experience: Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the lived body as the center of our experience.¹ Our bodies are not just biological entities, but are also shaped by our perceptions, actions, and interactions with the world.² This means that our experience of gender is not just about our physical characteristics, but also about how we feel, move, and interact with others in the world.
• Challenging the "Objective" Body: Phenomenology challenges the idea of a purely objective, biological body that exists independently of our experience. Instead, it suggests that our understanding of our bodies is always mediated by our lived experience. This opens up space for understanding gender as something that is not solely determined by biology, but is also shaped by our individual experiences and social interactions.
• Phantom Limbs as Evidence: You mentioned phantom limb pain, which is a classic example used by Merleau-Ponty. It demonstrates how our experience of our bodies can diverge from the physical reality. Even though a limb is gone, the person may still feel it, highlighting the role of perception and the body schema in shaping our bodily experience.³ This can be used as an analogy to argue that our experience of gender may not always align with our biological sex.
• The Intertwining of Subject and Object: Phenomenology emphasizes the interconnectedness of subject and object.⁴ We are not just passive recipients of sensory information, but actively engage with the world, shaping our experience through our actions and perceptions.⁵ This suggests that our understanding of gender is not just something we passively receive from biology, but something we actively create and negotiate through our interactions with the world.

Rhetorical Power:

Phenomenology can be rhetorically powerful in discussions about gender because it:

• Centers lived experience: It validates the experiences of individuals whose gender identity may not align with their biological sex.
• Challenges essentialism: It undermines the idea that there is a fixed, biological essence that determines gender.
• Opens up possibilities: It allows for a more fluid and diverse understanding of gender, recognizing the role of individual experience and social context.⁶

Important Considerations:

• Not denying biology: It's important to note that phenomenology is not about denying the existence of biological differences between sexes. Rather, it's about arguing that biology is not the sole determinant of gender identity.
• Nuance and complexity: Gender is a complex issue, and phenomenology offers one perspective among many. It's important to engage with other perspectives and avoid simplistic or reductionist arguments.

By emphasizing the lived experience and the interconnectedness of body and world, phenomenology can be a valuable tool for challenging purely biological understandings of gender and advocating for a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of identity.

 

now connect all this to gestalt psychology and the origins of phenomenology and Husserl.

 

You're asking for a fascinating connection! Let's weave together Husserl's phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and their relevance to the discussion of gender and lived experience.

Husserl's Phenomenology: The Foundation

Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, sought to describe the structures of consciousness – how we experience the world.¹ He emphasized intentionality, the idea that consciousness is always directed at something.² We don't just passively receive information; our minds actively shape our experience.³ Husserl's method involved bracketing (epoché) – setting aside our pre-conceived notions and assumptions to focus on the phenomena themselves, the things as they appear to us. This is crucial: it's not about the "objective" reality, but about how we experience reality.⁴

Gestalt Psychology: Perception and Wholeness

Gestalt psychology emerged in the early 20th century, partly as a response to structuralism, which broke down consciousness into atomistic elements.⁵ Gestalt psychologists argued that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.⁶ They focused on how we perceive wholes, patterns, and structures.⁷ Key principles include:

• Figure-ground: We tend to perceive some elements as the figure (the focus of attention) and others as the ground (the background).⁸
• Proximity, similarity, closure: Elements that are close together, similar, or form a closed shape are more likely to be perceived as a group.⁹
• Law of Prägnanz: We tend to perceive the simplest, most stable, and coherent forms possible.¹⁰

Connecting Husserl and Gestalt:

While distinct, there's a strong resonance between Husserl's phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. Both emphasize the active role of consciousness in shaping our experience. Husserl's focus on intentionality aligns with Gestalt's emphasis on how our minds organize and structure perception. Both reject the idea of a passive, objective observer. Gestalt psychology, in a way, provides concrete examples of how Husserl's phenomenological method works in practice, particularly in the realm of perception.

Bridging to Gender and Lived Experience:

Now, how does this connect to gender?

1. Challenging Essentialism: Just as Gestalt psychology challenged the idea of breaking down consciousness into separate elements, phenomenology challenges the idea of breaking down gender into separate biological or social components. It suggests that gender is experienced as a whole, a complex and integrated aspect of our being-in-the-world.
2. The Lived Body: Merleau-Ponty, influenced by both Husserl and Gestalt, emphasized the lived body as the center of our experience.¹¹ Our bodies are not just biological entities, but are shaped by our perceptions, actions, and interactions with the world. This means that our experience of gender is not just about our physical characteristics, but also about how we feel, move, and interact with others. Our bodily schema is itself a gestalt, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
3. Figure-Ground and Gender: Think about how gender operates in social situations. Certain cues (clothing, behavior, etc.) become the "figure," while other aspects become the "ground." This can influence how we perceive and categorize individuals. Phenomenology asks us to bracket these pre-conceived notions and attend to the lived experience of gender, rather than relying on pre-existing categories.
4. The "Natural Attitude" vs. Phenomenological Reduction: Husserl critiqued the "natural attitude," where we take the world for granted as it appears to us. He advocated for the phenomenological reduction (epoché) to get to the essence of experience. In the context of gender, this means challenging the "natural attitude" that gender is simply a biological fact and instead exploring the lived experience of gender in all its complexity.

In summary: Husserl's phenomenology provides the philosophical foundation for understanding how consciousness shapes our experience. Gestalt psychology offers concrete examples of this in the realm of perception. Merleau-Ponty's focus on the lived body connects these ideas to the experience of embodiment and gender. By bracketing our pre-conceived notions and attending to the lived experience, we can challenge essentialist views of gender and open up a space for a more nuanced and phenomenologically informed understanding of identity.

 

Birth via AI

If you haven't heard, this trumpet intro constitutes the birth of jazz. Of course it's Louis Armstrong's West End Blues:

Historians, upon analysis of musical styles, genres, innovations, feel that this is the moment...when jazz, as a separate and distinct musical genre, was born. 

Yours truly has been doing a lot of experimenting/communicating with AI of late, namely Gemini, Deep Seek, and Grok (via X), and it has been fascinating the level of depth I get in return from conversations about theology and philosophy. So on my lunchtime run I began thinking about Louis Armstrong and the birth of jazz, probably prompted by a Conversations With Christian (McBride) - a kindof History of Jazz in real time - where a veteran jazzer talked freely about Charles Mingus and his exploits. I still love the part in Ken Burns' Jazz, where one historian tells the story of Sydney Bechet pulling out a pistol during a gig...something akin to cutting your losses..."But not Bechet!"

I could go on.

Anyhoo, I ingeniously (he said with a sheepish grin) combined the two: let us try to see if AI can find the moment in time when something is born. In this case, let us not go with a genre, but with an artist. 

The question would be something like this: based on your analysis of music, when, at what musical moment in time did, let us use Eric Clapton to start, Eric Clapton stop emulating other players and idols and create the first musically Eric Clapton moment? 

So now, I'll go over to Gemini and ask and report back. 

Check it out: https://g.co/gemini/share/353200f3675e

Those Back Eyes Roll Over White - Ecstasy & Performance

 I attended my first-ever dance conference as my wife signed our daughter up for NYCDA in Boston. 

My daughter was taught routines in tap, ballet, hip-hop, and jazz Saturday morning and then performed on the big stage Sunday morning. She had a lot of fun.

Saturday evening we went down to the big stage to watch some performances. Some really connected with me but the overarching theme to me was one of commitment. Mostly these were teens but it was clear that they cared deeply about the routines and put in serious time and commitment to performing these routines. Just thinking about the basic stuff my six year-old daughter learned is mind-numbing for me. But the performances of the older groups are very involved, intricate, and beautiful. I especially enjoyed a tap routine because the sound became another dimension of the performance for me. 

Another thing that came to mind was how, probably, so many of these performers began at a very early age and how building a foundation and gradually building over time seemingly makes the impossible, possible. As Stuart Kauffman says in At Home In The Universe, “Time is the hero of the plot.” Now of course, time isn’t the only hero, dancers must commit. But also, one thing I’ve experienced over my “performance” and musical life, however amateurish it may be, I often felt pulled, instead of pushing. Training and practicing wasn’t a bore or something to “just do;” I could see the forest for the trees and incorporated the future performance into the present practice or training. I think a lot of the dancers probably feel/felt pulled. Even though the art is difficult. 

And, somehow many roads lead back to Plato, I think many of these dancers are trying to achieve being the open channel that artists like Derek Trucks is when he performs; where the music seemingly plays him, not the other way round. Now of course it doesn’t fully work this way; we don’t appreciate automaton artists, but the years, decades or training and honing and performing sometimes permit those moments where the performer (dancer, guitarist, poet,...) can let the body take over and the mind isn’t permitted to muck things up (F#, turn coming up, focus!). 

In short, I think sometimes the performer is in a state of ecstasy. Sublime awareness if you like–where the (years, decades of) practice and the performance converge. 

Or as Quint says in Jaws, “Sometimes the shark, he wouldn’t go away, and those black eyes, roll over white.” Sometimes the desire to dance is too strong, sometimes the desire to perform too overwhelming, because we know ecstasy may be on the other side.

I fear my performing days may be over, but you can bet I’ll be holding out for some moments where my black eyes roll over white, and the music plays me.

God Can't Be Reconciled

 Via the NYT I came across this: 

Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian Who Confronted Auschwitz, Is Dead at 98

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/books/jurgen-moltmann-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

In which I discovered these:

Well, I recently finished my readings for the Brown German Studies Course: Postcatastrophic Narratives: Memory and Postmemory in German Literature after 1945, and I have some questions.

How does god suffer or mourn without a body? Moreover, if god could mourn and suffer, isn't this all he would do? Does god read the papers? It's a shit show out there of epic (dare I say biblical) proportions. If god had a body with a brain and a limbic system to process emotions, he wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Moltmann's god would be depressed and powerless. 

Moltmann, like others from WWII, is trying to process and reconcile god with the world. Different from Adorno ("Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.") who jettisons god, and different from Sebald who can't trust god or memory, tries to anthropomorphize god for a reconciliation but doesn't follow the logic through. 

Putting god in the play makes him a schlub like the rest of us. Putting god in Germany makes him accountable. Giving god a body renders him subject to depression at best and entropy at worst. 

God can't be reconciled. At all. Not with WWII and The Holocaust, not with natural selection, not with entropy. 

 

Ice Cream and Trane

I took two of my kids for ice cream yesterday and on the way home John Coltrane's My Favorite Things came on Sirius Radio. I said something akin to, "It really gets going on his second solo."

My eldest, who plays piano and viola game me an inquisitive look. 

So I decided to drive around so we could hear it - the song is around 13 minutes. 

My son got into listening, even to the point of humming parts of the solo after hearing a passage. 

AWESOME.

It gets better.

During COVID, I would often take the kids to nearby Goddard park just to get out of the house...but we did it so often it got to be a "Not Goddard again!" kinda thing.

I could think of nowhere else to drive so we could hear the tune so I drove to Goddard. The song was ending just as I pulled up so I was just going to turn around and head home but get this: they wanted to go to Goddard and just pick up shells and skip rocks. 

AWESOME.

I don't have to many parenting wins but this was one. I'll take it. 

Baseball Ray! Baseball Jose! TV:(

Both my boys, ages 12 and 10, looove baseball. They've been in little league since t-ball and they currently are in Spring ball. 

I've tried to impart some things to them along the way though I was an average little leaguer and didn't play at the High School level. 

One thing I've talked about, especially with my 12 year old, is attitude, approach, mindset, and hustle. 

This is hard to get at below 12 when there are just so many walks and few chances to drive a good pitch or field a hard-hit ball, but now at 12 pitchers have more control and the baseball improves. 

When I grew up I was able to watch the Indians (now Guardians) on channel 43 for every game. The team stunk but I still remember watching Len Barker's 1981 perfect game with my mother from our tiny 8 inch in the kitchen. 

My boys rarely get to see baseball on tv because television has changed so much. We don't subscribe to cable and don't have an antennae for Red Sox games. 

Apple TV has a Friday night game (too close to bedtime), ESPN has a sunday night game (too close to bedtime) and MLB will occasionally have a free game.

Well the free game paid off...BIG TIME. And I am more than happy to report that it is because of José Ramírez of the Guardians. (I think I helped a smidge:))

He hustled (like his hair was on fire - something I like to tell the boys) to first base to prevent a double play and score a run. We watched the game together and I was excited when he prevented the double play and make a big deal about his hustle. 

Now cut to the little league games this week and check this out, both my boys hustling to first a la José Ramírez. It doesn't get better:

How can you not love this? Two youngins hustling to first like a pro.

Maybe MLB could offer more games so that kids can learn from the like of José Ramírez.

Who You Are is Who We Tell You You Are

Here is a discussion board prompt from my General Psychology:

Social Psych is by far my favorite chapter. One realizes how our sense of ourselves (our identity) is tied to other people.

This thought experiment will be easiser if you have seen the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks, because viewing that movie, one really gets the sense of what is means to be stranded and completely alone - something almost completely foreign to us humans beings.

But imagine you could have been born, like Tom Hanks in the movie, on a deserted island, and had enough food and nutrition to survive from baby to toddler, adolescent, adult BUT without the company of others.

This is hard to even imagine as we are born of others and usually surrounded and immersed in others.

But on this island, you have survived, without others to adulthood.

Now, the thought experiement is this: on this island, what adjectives could you assign to yourself? Are you funny? Are you smart? Are you pretty? Are you mean?

What are you?

This is fascinating because it shows you, if you earnestly engage the experiment, that your sense of self is almost completely bound to others.

Couldn't one argue that you are how other people see you? You see yourself as funny, or smart, or pretty, or mean only because other people have reflected this back to you. This is the Looking Glass Self concept. If you are on a deserted island, you have no adjectives because there are no comparatives and no other people to assign adjectives to you.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.  

Now check out this great response from a student:

In the thought experiment of being stranded on a deserted island from birth, devoid of any social interaction, the concept of self takes on a strikingly different dimension. Without the presence of others to provide feedback or validation, the development of one's self-concept becomes severely limited. In the absence of social comparison and interaction, the individual lacks the external perspectives necessary to form adjectives or descriptors about themselves.

This scenario underscores the profound influence of social interactions on the construction of our self-identity. As social beings, we often define ourselves in relation to others and through the feedback we receive from them. This concept aligns with the Looking Glass Self theory in social psychology, which posits that our self-concept is shaped by how we believe others perceive us. Without the presence of others to act as mirrors reflecting back our qualities or characteristics, it becomes challenging, if not impossible, to develop a nuanced understanding of ourselves.

In essence, the thought experiment highlights the interconnectedness between our sense of self and the social environment in which we exist. It emphasizes that our identity is not merely an internal construction but is intricately linked to the perceptions and interactions of those around us. Therefore, if stranded on a deserted island without the presence of others, the individual's self-concept would likely be devoid of the adjectives or descriptors typically used to define oneself in a social context. 

What say you?