non-theoretical understanding

To anticipate, such non-reflective, non-theoretical understanding is the element of poetic language, e.g. how, for instance, would AI model Sophocles’ line, in the dramatist T om Stoppard’ s version: ‘Love, said Sophocles, is like the ice held in the hand by children’ (Stoppard 1997: 43)?)

is the idea that all theories of human life are made possible by a pre-theoretical relation to being that must always be assumed but which could never be fully conceptualized.

But he is arguing that all theories of human life are made possible by a pre-theoretical relation to being that must always be assumed but which could never be fully conceptualized.

is the idea that it is not the ear that hears, but ourselves. Of course we hear a Bach fugue with our ears, but if we leave what is heard only at this, with what strikes the tympanum as sound waves, then we can never hear a Bach fugue.

Such holism, as we shall see, informs Heidegger’s turn to art as a non-theoretical mode of knowledge. A lecture course of 1955–6 argues: ‘Of course we hear a Bach fugue with our ears, but if we leave what is heard only at this, with what strikes the tympanum as sound waves, then we can never hear a Bach fugue. We hear, not the ear’ (PR: 47).

is the idea that to understand a holiday does not involve some theory of the concept ‘holiday’ but an empathetic sense of the embodied human world, its limits, its weariness and its recreations.

Competence in getting about the world is not necessarily the application of some inner theory of it. Much human understanding depends upon an implicit, non-thematized shared mode of being – to recognize what a holiday is involves a sense of what work means, and to need a holiday or to feel tired. This involves not some theory of the concept ‘holiday’ but an empathetic sense of the embodied human world, its limits, its weariness and its recreations. This sense is not a theory at all.

is the vast range of contextual knowledge which is inherently unformalizable in human existence.

It is time to introduce some Heidegger more directly. What does this failure of AI show? First, that human existence involves a vast range of contextual knowledge which is inherently unformalizable, i.e. not just something very complicated but not the kind of thing that could ever be totalized into a set of algorithms in the first place. It is in Heidegger’s words a ‘background of . . . primary familiarity, which itself is not conscious and intended but is rather present in [an] unprominent way’ (H: 189).

is what makes up what is essential and mysterious about human intelligence, not those complex operations of arithmetic or symbolic thought we value so much.

Even as we go about such mundane activities as locking and closing doors we are not necessarily employing any sort of theory as to what we are doing any more, say, than walking or reading a line of poetry is the externalization of a theory of locomotion or a theory of poetics. Surprisingly, then, it is such utterly obvious, unthinking understanding that makes up what is essential and mysterious about human intelligence, not those complex operations of arithmetic or symbolic thought we value so much. (See Beth Preston (1993) for a further development of Hubert Dreyfus’ s Heideggerian argument.)

is the way all our intelligibility and all intelligent behavior must necessarily hark back to our sense of what we are, which is, necessarily, on pain of regress, something we can never explicitly know.

[I]n the last analysis all intelligibility and all intelligent behaviour must hark back to our sense of what we are, which is, necessarily, on pain of regress, something we can never explicitly know’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986: 81).

non theoretical understanding, n.All

non theoretical understanding