These days, now that I’m a card-carrying God-botherer, I find Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth a bit too cynical for my tastes.
That said, the book was quite an eye-opener as a history of management theory; especially when read in conjunction with Kiechel’s The Lords of Strategy. And the original essay still has a certain charm. Consider this:
As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger!
There has been the odd occasion when I’ve read everyone’s favourite Nazi windbag philosopher, for fun. Perhaps it’s just a matter of finding an occasion that’s sufficiently odd.
For example, I read Heidegger’s book on Parmenides whilst on a cruise holiday that I hadn’t wanted to go on. I deliberately chose this book on the basis that it was physically light, but would take a long time to read. (These were the days before ebooks, you understand.)
This particular book contains remarks characterizing the ancient Greek gods as “the attuning ones”. Here is the seed for American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus‘s account of divinity in Western history (as set out in his popular podcast lecture series “From gods to God and back”).
Recently on Ribbonfarm there’s been a discussion of the word attunement. It had a different sense there, perhaps not meaning much more than rapport. I’d like to say more, to see if there’s any connection here. But to do that I’d need to explain the Heidegger/Dreyfus concept of attunement, and I’m not sure I’m the right person to do that.
Let’s see if Heidegger’s own words (from Parmenides, p. 111) can shed some light:
Precisely because the “gods” are δαιμονες—ϑεαοντες and appear along with the appearance of the familiar and the ordinary, their uncanniness is so pure in measure and in mildness that when they appear αιδως and χαρις—awe and favor of Being—shine everywhere in advance, pointing while shining, and attuning while pointing. Although we are thinking the essence of the Greek gods more originarily if we call them the attuning ones, we should indeed name them this way since awe and favor and brilliance of mildness belong to Being, and these are experienced poetically in αιδως and χαρις and thoughtfully in ϑανμαστον. From this attuning and pointing light stems the brilliance of ϑειον, the shining.
Er, cheers Martin. Thanks for clearing that one up.
(If I’m being unfair, that’s partly due to being rather pressed for time. Whereas on the cruise I had the leisure to ruminate and slowly digest.)
Meanwhile, it sounds like the echos of “Heideggerian Artificial Intelligence” are still being heard. For example, in this paper by Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka:
Our bodies and their perceptually guided motions through the world do much of the work required to achieve our goals, replacing the need for complex internal mental representations. This simple fact utterly changes our idea of what “cognition” involves, and thus embodiment is not simply another factor acting on an otherwise disembodied cognitive processes.
In other words, we are encouraged to abandon the idea (had we ever held it) of thought being a process that is somehow independent of the world in which it happens.
Which leads me into one final place in this little ramble.
From time to time I’ve considered whether I should write something about Speculative Realism, given that I was present at the event at Goldsmiths College which gave this philosophical movement its name.
What stops me is a question that I can’t answer. This notion that mind is world-dependant, that thoughts are pervaded by their objects: is it correlationist, or anti-correlationist? Unless I could get that straight, I don’t think I’d have a useful contribution to make. (Perhaps I’d be happier with Operative Realism.)
It’s sometimes a relief to remember that I’m just an engineer, not a philosopher. It’s not really my place to worry about such things: no-one’s relying on me to have a coherent opinion about this, and it’s not like there’s a prize for being right. Plus, this was all a few years ago, and I’m sure the conversation must have moved on a bit.
I do wish that Graham Harman had said more about index cards, though. Just saying.
rdn32 
“I’d rather be reading Heidegger” has to be one of the best insults ever devised. I’m going to pocket it for use on some later occasion.
In school I had the distinct misfortune to find myself taking Dreyfus’s class on Heidegger. I managed to get through it with flying colors, but only by treating it as a system of arbitrary symbols, using raw (almost n-grammatic) pattern matching to string together sentences that were valid (I suppose) within the system. I still crack open my copy of Being and Time, every now and then, when I need to amuse myself. Usually a paragraph or so does the trick. I also take great pleasure in reading the various dismissals of his work, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger#Reception_by_Analytic_and_Anglo-American_philosophy
Do you have any thoughts on why his ideas continue to inspire devotion? It makes me uneasy whenever I feel the need to dismiss things out-of-hand, without properly understanding them. Surely there has to be *something* in there worth grasping at? My null hypothesis is there are some cult dynamics at play (cult of personality + being initiated in arcane terminology + feeling special for having slogged through a difficult experience + refusal to believe that experience was worthless). But I don’t know how much I really buy that.
I don’t really have a good answer for that. Apart from anything else, the only books of his I’ve read myself are Introduction to Metaphysics, and Parmenides – both of which are relatively short, and both of which were more ruminative than expository.
As you say, people will tend to value things more highly if they have to work hard for them. (This is the opposite phenomenon of people discounting things that come very easily to them.)
Academic philosophy is a bit of an odd subject (if you don’t mind me saying). It is sometimes said that the point of studying law (for example) isn’t just the specific content that one learns: one learns to think like a lawyer. Nonetheless, knowledge of the law, and learning lawyerly ways are conceptually distinct. Whereas with philosophy, what it means (or what it should mean) to think like a philosopher can appear to be the central philosophical question.
Anyway, with Heidegger, I’d say I struggled to make sense of the two books I read, but that this process was interesting in its own right. I think I got something out of it, although I’d be hard pressed to say what, exactly. Whilst I could agree or (more likely) disagree with particular comments that he made, I couldn’t really say I had any opinion on his general ideas: I only occasionally felt I understood what he was getting at, and then only in a though-a-glass-darkly kind of way.
As for being uneasy about dismissing things out of hand without first understanding them, my basic take is that life is short, and there are an awful lot of potentially interesting ideas in the world. Missing out on something good is inevitable, and so isn’t worth worrying about too much.
And then, as if by magic, this appears:
http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/heidegger-and-corporate-anthropology/
I broadly knew about corporate anthropology already, so in principle there’s nothing surprising in the story being linked to. But it’s an interesting story, nonetheless.
[…] corporate anthropology. This, along with Kevin Simler’s essay on start-up cultures, and the Heideggerian approach to market research at ReD Associates make for some interesting data […]
[…] leads me, in a rather meandering way, to another unexpected connection: business consultants who read Heidegger, specifically Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rasmussen of ReD Associates who’s book The […]