Furthering Continental Philosophers in the Engineering Domain

Given the recent influx of attempts at forming a more coherent and aligned philosophy of engineering education, an opportunity to apply traditional continental methods has appeared. Even the definition of the field itself is available for scrutiny, and within that framework, a number of interesting paradigms can be challenged. This paper intends to expand upon previous attempts at integrating Heidegger’s, Husserl’s, and Jaspers’ works on epistemologies, and forward them in a more integrated way accessible to both the philosopher of technology and the engineering educator interested in a more grounded application of philosophical constructs. We start with previous work addressing Husserl’s Logical Investigations to help lay the groundwork for a classical understanding of consciousness and its intents. Then, we discuss Heidegger’s constructs of false thinking and Bodenständigkeit or autochthony – sometimes called groundedness. This work and its related thoughtlessness in continental philosophy has rarely been applied to engineering and even less frequently (if at all) been applied within the modern engineering education framework. While this may be a novel treatment, it does not go far enough in addressing Heidegger’s critics and contemporaries – something we will attempt through using a lens borrowed from Jaspers’ work – that of his interpretation of existence and meaning. In order to further ground this philosophical treatment, we will bring into play key arguments of Husserl’s metaphysics, which contain constructs still relevant to a modern engineering philosophy. Finally, we hope to integrate the three in a manner relevant colleagues within engineering education and beyond. Whereas recently I reflected upon the developments in engineering philosophy brought about by a few colleagues with reference to core constructs present within Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking,[1] this work aims to further that reflection with an introduction to another few differences between continental philosophers in the same vein. I had hoped to work with a Cartesian framework, but the works of the modern continental philosophers is more than adequate for this short digression. Previous to Heidegger – A Brief Note on Husserl’s Phenomenology Husserl’s Logical Investigations may be the least relevant within this current treatise, so I will touch upon them lightly and expand at a later time. Within this work, he outlines his approach to consciousness and intentionality. Here we find a divergence from what we may be accustomed to within engineering education – a classical use of the word phenomenology. Whereas within our subfield of engineering, authors toss around phenomenology and, of course, phenomenography, as research paradigms primarily influencing coding frameworks, within classical philosophy, the two words have radically different meanings and understanding them can help tease out novel tools and uses for them. To Husserl, phenomenology is the study of consciousness divorced from the existence of the objects involved. In other words, consciousness in Husserl’s philosophy is directed at an object. This of course presents an interesting threat to our field’s current understanding of phenomenology as a research paradigm – imagine how silly it would be for a qualitative research coding interviews to write in the margins, “I cannot place this statement into a category because I cannot divorce its essence from its causes or the physical reality of the object involved” ? The main thesis here isn’t a potential battle within the world of coding, it is the formulation of intent, consciousness, and given recent works in the field of engineering education, essence. Revisiting Heidegger In Heidegger’s Discourse, what we see is a divergence from other continental philosophies.[2] Not only does he must on the notion of false thinking, but that of Bodenständigkeit or autochthony. As a brief historical note, Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit, nearly universally known as “releasement,” is paired with autochthony, but perhaps infinitely more studied in treatments of continental philosophy and can be found in many texts. For Heidegger, the divide between lacking thought and not thinking are vast and he goes to great lengths throughout his later works to describe the two. For our discussion here, the main points on active thought have to do with Heidegger’s assertion that capacity of thought goes beyond reflection and thinking. In fact, he believes that in reference to false thinking, too often in education or in other endeavours, have we mistaken reflection as being present in active participation when we should not. An example of this would be in coding of design-in-process experiments. Certainly, understanding what one spends time doing within these experiments is important, but Heidegger is quick to rebuke us for assuming that these activities are truly reflection and more so, that these may not be indicators of an individual’s capacity of thought. Another construct endemic to Heidegger’s construction of capacity of thought and plays into the framework of false thinking is the notion of distraction and commemoration. Commemoriation is a construct for a placeholder for consciousness. It can also be considered a standard bearer. Commemoration is the submitting of our rational thought or consciousness to a lesser form of thinking. This can take place within routine life, rituals, or even subconsciously, but when a human being allows commemoration to guide his thought, he has ceased to expand (or augment) his rational thought. Distraction on the other hand, tend to be more general than commemoration, and refers to any action that allows human beings to actively think (or even passively think) while substituting for actually thinking. Why Jaspers and what is His Significance? Karl Jaspers’ work cannot be overstated in an engineering framework. While I have at length discussed a potential model given a more design-inspired framework,[3, 4] I have not discussed his Philosophy of Existence.[5] Jaspers gives us a number of interesting interpretations of how the world is created and things are brought about from the transcendent to the immanent, which, for an engineer, should be exciting because that is entirely the purpose of the mind’s eye for the engineer. Bringing that which is beyond our immediate corporeal grasp into the world is the subject of many philosophers from Aristotle with his daemons to Descartes and the notion of transcendentalism. Jaspers lays out a few of these ideas within his meditation on existence in what he defines as the basic philosophical operation. Not only does Jaspers believe that being, in the existential sense (or even Dasein – I think we are safe to say that he shows proper deference to Heidegger in his writings) can be separated from knowledge, he begins his description of the basic philosophical operation by explicitly separating the two. Furthermore, he provides a template for interpreting this decision. Jaspers divides thought into determinate and indeterminate domains. Unlike the division between metaand base analysis, (or sometimes in education theory referred to as Krippendorf’s construct of firstand second-order analysis), determinate and indeterminate thinking has to do with the envisioning in the mind’s eye of the subject of contemplation. His view of the all-encompassing world of thought that exists beyond that of the immanent is defined as the encompassing. The encompassing is not the horizon of knowledge, but the source we envision in the mind’s eye when directing our consciousness from the immanent to the transcendent. Jaspers’ manages to further this mode of thought by providing a way of envisioning this divide in thinking. He postulates that the way from the transcendant to the immanent in thought – from the incorporeal to the corporeal, so to speak – is best served by increasing one’s lucidity or awareness of being. In other words, Jaspers postulates that not only is the existential concept of bringing the being into form possible, but it is maximized through a meditation on being. Furthermore, he steps further by suggesting that the realm of the immanent can have an overburdening influence on our mind’s ability to separate determinate from indeterminate thought. The modes of encompassing are a series of meditations Jaspers uses to help flesh out this meditation on determinate thought. It is here that we see he again addresses knowledge starting with the Kantian divide between what we know is part of the immanent – or to quote Jaspers – “what we know is the world.” The logical fallacy he repeats from Kant is that it has been a long standing issue with continental philosophy to believe that because we can imagine the world in its entirety does not mean we can know the world in its entirety. Certainly, this was a minor battle for all of the existentialists, but it is important within our field as well. We could summon the ghosts of many educational philosophers here, but I would refer the interested reader to peruse the works of Eco on semantics or perhaps Bruner for a larger discussion on the limits of knowledge. Assembling the Encompassing So now that we have this tool that takes us not really from the immanent to the transcendent, but allows us to envision knowledge in a way that is determinate or indeterminate, we need to flesh out what Jaspers can tell us about the relationship between knowledge and his vision of the encompassing. Adding to the complexities of continental existentialism, Jaspers adds a layer to the mixture in the divide between encompassing and consciousness. Consciousness, in his view, has two forms in this piece: the traditional being the form of the world; and the encompassing that is inhabited by human beings. The first I have elaborated upon at length in a previous piece, but the second is one I have not focused on in Jaspers’ work. The idea that there is an encompassing of tho