Ping Pong 47: Taking the Responsibility
What does it really mean to be responsible? How can one behave responsibly in the world? To whom is one responding? Or for what? For one’s self? Or for the world? Heidegger’s great claim as a philosopher was that he came up with a new answer for this question. What one is responsible for is neither the world nor for ourselves, but rather for Our Being itself. This Being arises because we cannot perceive or even live without a conception of something else, of a world, in which we are caught up. But likewise, Heidegger points out, the world is nothing without us. It is our creation: That is, in our populations, histories and strivings we create that world that we perceive to be there. Or our Being, and the world’s Being are therefore caught up in the same crystal. They are, in a very deep sense, the same problem, so that to take responsibility for the one, is to own the other. One saves the planet to save the human.
However there is an additional complexity here. The same Being might give us our world and our selves, but that does not mean that we relate to ‘oneself in the world’ and ‘the world within oneself’ in the same manner. On the contrary Heidegger suggests, one needs to understand that Being has two different takes; The one asks - what is it for me to be within the world? and the other asks - what is that world in me? (what have I given to it, and what follows that giving?). Both of these different axes need then to be considered in turn.
Heidegger is very old fashioned. To live in the world is, he suggests, to live as a craftsman (his example is a clockmaker). It is therefore to inhabit a time (and a place) which is redolent with both use and memory. Tools are not lumps of metal but favourite items of use, and paths through the forest are favourite walks. The world I inhabit is therefore a world of likes and dislikes, a world of embodied passions. Being therefore appears to turn upon the small scale world of peasants and college professors, and have very little to do with the wider domain of politics. This last fact is both at once quaint (and frankly amusing) but also reveals a deep and far wider problem with the way that humans locate themselves with a world. It is quaint because in the end Heidegger’s grand theory comes down to saying that everyone ought to be like him and his particular cronies and idols. The world might be hustle and bustle away from the village, but that hustle and bustle matters little. Real value and real meaning are the special province of Heidegger and his particular friends in their villages.
But there are far grander issues at stake than the delusion of a provincial professor (however clever he might be). The image of a world defined within such small, highly nuanced parables, is one that haunts almost every great theory about the world. We therefore do not talk about the myriad (and highly complex) series of exchanges that form finance, but rather talk about a market, as if it were just about street trading. Likewise we do not talk about the complexities of living in a world where (partial) information is pooled between wide sections and subsections of the population, but rather talk of ‘a global village’. Or again we do not highlight the nuanced complexities that surround any political movement, but rather engage in more ‘knowable’ talk about the left or the right or Islam. Or world is therefore stuffed with over-burdened terms. Such things as an event or a simple circumstance, are therefore routinely transfigured and made to function as the explication for something much deeper, and much more profound.
Although Heidegger hated the discipline, nowhere is this seen to be more true than in economics. The entire rationale of economics is that the whole global (or at least regional) trading system can be summed up within a number of relatively trite little paradigms and concepts. It is therefore the discipline of the good housekeeper, and the canny trader; of balanced books and budgets, and prudence. In making this jump, we simply ignore the worrying fact that there is really no reason to suppose that the interaction of myriads of people’s behaviour is really synonymous with the behaviour of a household or even a community. There is then no real reason why this ought to be the same. On the contrary, large complex systems such as bodies and ecosystems usually have their own rules, which are utterly distant from the parts that make that system. If this is so for economics (and surely it has to be), then the entire system is founded on an illogicality: And rather than being surprised when it fails as a discipline, perhaps we ought to be shocked that it ever works (or appears to work) at all!
Heidegger rather unwittingly therefore put his finger on a very profound aspect of humanity’s being. To feel located within a world, humanity needs to reduce that world to rather a simpler level. It needs to make it folksy and manageable. Great theories are less explanation and more translation: the complexities of a world beyond explanation, are set within the stone of custom. To put it another way, our transfiguration into a world of Being, risks not making us special, but rather devalues Being itself: That is it undersells the point or moment at which it is different from us, and able to ‘do its own thing’. That is the moment when the weight of circumstances (which Heidegger derides as the ‘They’) presses in on events and shifts what they are and where they can act.
The second element of Being was that it only came into existence within the context of humanity. Here Heidegger innovates by making this tumble-into-being turn not upon perception so such as the future. Being breaks into any particular mind by forcing it to look to a future. One acts therefore now in the thought of what will be, or what is to come. One plans therefore a career, or worries about the status of a planet, based on this appreciation of change. This appreciation is then caught for our mind within the way that the past (Heidegger calls it ‘the having been’) is opened by the tumble of the future into it.
Events of the past therefore have no fixed meanings. The obscure acts of some Dark Age king becomes the stuff of a nationalism (long after they ought to have been forgotten). Or again the legacy of the empire or slavery is no fixed thing. Its meaning is rather caught up in the constellation of those futures which are tumbling in though that past. We look then at Obama and wonder what (if anything) it means have a ‘black American President’: In what sense is this history (or is it merely “Black man gets worst job in the world”?).
The Past is thereby set up by Heidegger as both a resource but also a burden. It is in taking up the past, that something, some new future is born. The orator or the great statesman or -woman is therefore someone who can make the past seem different, or force to sing in a new way. This is of course Obama’s power, but also the power of bin Laden; each rule though their ability to control a series of pasts, and so create their own people. However of course the same theory imposes a severe and rather problematic limit on what can be understood. What exists are the ways that futures tumble into pasts and transfigure them. If the future is too profound or too complex to be easily grasped in the past, then we are lost. To understand global warming therefore, we can do no better than look to the past of the planet or to that of other planets. Beyond these two models, it becomes difficult to define a paradigm. Likewise to understand the ‘global meltdown’ we need to ransack our own past to find precedents to understand what is happening now. Gordon Brown’s entire policy is therefore based on the policies of 1930’s America, while the Tories have not got out of 1980’s England.
The effect of this last fact is that the past itself repeats. That is, in demanding that it is what is repeated, I severely restrict or at least attempt to appear to restrict the sense of what can occur to a Being. What can occur within the future is that which the past allows. The problem here, is not really that this past might be blinkered and so will miss all the ramifications of what might be about to happen, so much as that its invocation restricts how we can understand the problem. That is once we understand any problem through a past paradigm, the entire issue of what it is and how we are located within it, is transformed. Being therefore transliterates problems into renditions of the past. Being moreover does not merely transliterate what it understands and attempts to make in universal (a move that ushers in radicalism and xenophobia just as much as community); but at the same time refuses to allow for the fact that the world might be tumbling into futures which cannot be easily predicted or held within its history. Or rather that the world is tumbling into futures whose nature is to utterly transform the past in such a way that cannot be easily grasped in any patchwork union of those pasts. Or to out it slightly differently, Heidegger simply does not allow for the fact that our pasts might not themselves be something that anyone, however great a statesman, can own and manipulate or even re-set. Maybe it is the past (or something else acting in it), that drives the entire process forward. If this was the case, then humans and their Being would be merely a secondary effect of this other becoming.
For example, the central problem of global warming is that it is very difficult for us to capture it within being human. We can talk about a planet warming up, we can invent paradigms for connecting some of our behaviour to that warmth, and yet we do not know the actual effect that that warming can have. More than that, we do not really know (as no one can effectively cost out), what is the effect of our taking measures to avoid the effects that we have (on global warming). That is, it is perfectly possible that in attempting to create great schemes which avoid one set of pollutions, we open up the way for another set of even worse pollutions to seep in. The entire system is ultimately not founded upon our minds, and our story. Its reality tumbles in from an elsewhere, an other-to-us. Our Being therefore comes up against this other, and feels itself lost or perpetually perplexed. The central problem of our time is then how to cope with or understand that very perplexity.
Indeed the problem is deeper than this. The only way that we can use the past to understand the problem of this ‘other’ that is manifesting in global warming, is to invoke our own history of technological development. We can therefore look forward to a time when the gadgets will exist that will allow us to be able to control our fate. Effective policy dissolves into vapid hope (a move which Heidegger would be very quick to condemn).
Taking responsibility for the world is therefore by no means as simple as all that. To take responsibility for one’s Being is to admit that the world acknowledges that one is there and important enough to take responsibility for it. Maybe it does not. One might say (although on a far more trivial level), that this is the difference between Obama and Brown. Obama has won an election where the people are minded (if not convinced) to trust him. They will therefore allow him his responsibility. Brown lacks this. All his trumping that he will not walk by, and will sort out our (and the world’s) economy, is empty if we are not willing to allow him the necessary responsibility. One of course at this point also (more cynically) notes that part of the trouble is that he (Brown) is rather selective about the responsibility which he takes. He blames everyone else in the world (the world finance system), but then claims the responsibility for solving the problem. ‘They’ are therefore feckless, and He is responsible (he therefore ignores his own effects and how he made the situation worse for ten years or so…)
This last point goes beyond mere cynicism. It captures the deep problem with Heidegger’s theory – the problem of what it is to be responsible. One owns up to what one thinks one can control (or could have controlled), and everything else can be ignored. Brown really would be innocent and his denial of being part of the problem would be convincing if he had not been Chancellor. Or maybe the world is only saveable if one can take responsibility for it (or elements of it). However the problem is perhaps that there are changes happening which have no clear responsibility either in cause or else effect. That is, these are changes that cannot be easily understood through the paradigm of our past, or even as solely the product of humanity, and its defined responsibilities. Or to put it another way, global warming might not have happened without us, but does mean that we are solely responsible for it in action? Or that our paradigm of being responsible, beyond that is the nice blame game and cod economics which it breeds, is enough to actually solve the problem? Maybe owning up and the solution are utterly different things.
Heidegger’s theory exists then as a curious cautionary tale about the problem of responsibility. Being responsible does not necessarily mean being just. One can, and usually does, claim more than one needs to (or less) in the simple declaration that one is to blame. Our problem is that we live in a world which has lost patience with our endless declarations of blame and innocence, and we need to adjust or attempt to understand that fact. A problem to which the next Rant will turn.
