Heidegger's Chalk

Once upon a time I was a humanities major.

There is a lot of discussion about whether one acts responsibly when one selects this major. To the detractors: I couldn't have done anything else.

Anyway, the School of Humanities at the university I attended sends out a little magazine a few times a year. And the magazine I received yesterday had an interesting anecdote about Heidegger:

During a 1935 lecture course at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger held a piece of chalk in his hand and noted its properties. It was "an extended, relatively hard, gray-white thing with a definite form." As a thing, he further observed, it exists in space and time, at least that is our initial impression and way of talking. But this attitude incorrectly assumes that "space and time are in some sense 'external' to things," Heidegger added. Space does not end where the chalk begins; rather space informs the chalk and is filled by it. By this time his students were wondering about the inside of the piece of chalk, and to satisfy their curosity, Heidegger broke the piece of chalk. He then asked, "Are we now at the inside?" Most people would probably say yes - we are now looking at the inside of the chalk. But Heidegger insisted that we are again looking at an outer surface, somewhat smaller and rougher than before, but an outer surface nontheless. We really didn't get inside because the moment we broke it in half to discover its inside, the chalk "closed itself off" by offering itself as an outer surface. We are still on the outside looking at an opaque piece of chalk, not experiencing chalk's inner space.

Heidegger then stated: "[We] were unable to find the space we were looking for inside the chalk, the space which belongs to the chalk itself. But perhaps we weren't quick enough. Let's try breaking the piece of chalk once again!" After snapping the chalk in half again with the same disappointing result, Heidegger asked, "So where on earth does the inside of the chalk begin, and where does the outside stop?"

-from David Grandy, "A Second Glance at Chalk in the Classroom," Humanities at BYU. Spring 2010, p. 8-12. Retelling an incident recounted in Graham Parkes, "Thoughts on the way: Being and Time via Lao-Chuang," Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp. 105-44.

What an interesting look at perspective, and at how taking a step back from our expectations can lead us to a more precise conclusion.

Coming up (hopefully soon): Thoughts on Hegel. I'm reading Hegel: A Very Short Intoduction by Peter Singer. Oxford University has a huge series of Very Short Introductions, and I have several on my reading list. I feel a bit like I'm reading Cliff's Notes, but at the same time, there is no way I could read and digest enough Hegel to understand the basics in the time I have. Plus reading even this takes my full concentration and brain power, so I'm looking at it as the university lecture for the class I'm not actually taking. It also has me wanting to read more Kant.

I'm also starting to read one of the TOK texts. So hopefully I'll update about that soon as well.

First Contact and Language as a Way of Knowing

I caught the tail end of today's episode of This American Life, in which Ira Glass speaks to Paul Davies, who is the go-to guy for figuring out how to communicate with aliens. And his answer (you guessed it) is that we should communicate mathematics (quantum mechanics) via binary code.

So when we are thinking about knowledge, there is a question about the link between knowledge and language - if we can't express it, do we know it? Put it on an intergalactic scale, wherein the best minds figure the only way to communicate in a first-contact situation is a way I personally cannot communicate. In that sense, what do I as an individual human really know? Nothing?

So perhaps the link between language and knowledge is overblown. Learning new languages, we may find ourselves provided with better nuances we can use to express with precision the knowledge we have, but does this make language an actual way of knowing? Is language nothing more than a way of sharing context? A system of symbols for putting us on the same page?

Is the feeling of being unable to put your finger on an idea a lack of knowledge or a lack of language for expressing knowledge - thereby blocking the knowledge from actualization and utilization? Is it one and the same? Is intuition knowledge without language?

(In reading over this post, my dependence on metaphor and idiom to express my ideas strikes me as pertinent, insofar as metaphor and idiom are so language- and even culture-specific, and so difficult to translate.)