Natural Evil

[Angrboda]

@Godschild: The reference to Job was a direct response to . Thanks for not paying attention. Oh, and learn to edit your quotation or use hide tags, you hoser. How you came to that interpretation of Anthony's words is a mystery which likely will not be made clear until the end days.

THE READY-TO-HAND

For the most part, Dasein encounters entities that are not present-at-hand, but ready-to-hand. Dasein does not usually stare at things or analyze them theoretically, but uses them and takes them for granted. In any given moment, most of us are not thinking about the chair we are sitting in, the floor that supports it, the solid earth beneath the floor, the oxygen we breathe, or the heart and kidneys that keep us alive. Instead, we take these things for granted and focus our attention elsewhere. There is no such thing as “an” equipment, since all equipment is assigned to other equipment in a single gigantic system of references. A house refers to bad weather and to Dasein’s need to stay dry; the need to stay dry refers to our medical knowledge; this knowledge refers in turn to our fear of illness and to the ambitions that might be derailed by early death. The number of mutual references of equipment is infinite, and all equipment makes up a unified whole. In order to be what they are, tools must recede from visibility. The outward appearance of a thing does not give us an understanding of ready-to-hand entities — tools are not meant for looking at, since we usually just silently rely on them.

Furthermore, the significance of entities is not invented by Dasein in monkish solitude: equipment always belongs to a public world. For some people, sunset refers simply to peace and calm and the end of a long hard day, while for other Daseins it signifies the end of fasting during Ramadan. The readiness-to-hand of equipment is what we encounter first; it is not something that we inject into things after first seeing them as bare physical lumps. In fact,what we encounter initially is the world as a whole, not a group of scattered individual things that need to be woven together. Not only is Dasein woven together with the world — all parts of the world are fused into a colossal web of meaning in which everything refers to everything else.


BROKEN TOOLS

Of course, it is not quite this simple. Yes, equipment usually hides from us. It is inconspicuous or unobtrusive. Usually, only bad equipment makes us notice it frequently, such as when ceilings are too low and we bump our heads too often. But equipment also malfunctions sometimes. Cars break down; hammers fall apart or wine glasses shatter; bodily organs suddenly fail us. It is mostly in these moments that equipment first becomes conspicuous and draws our attention to it. There is also the case of tools that turn up missing: when our car is stolen, the bus fails to arrive, or we find that we have misplaced our shoes before leaving for work, these items of equipment are no longer quietly serviceable, but loudly announce their reality.

All such cases make tools present. However, it does not make them purely present-at-hand, since they are still deeply intertwined with world and significance: the broken hammer or vandalized windshield are now annoying pieces of failed equipment that we would like to shove aside. But normally, the items in the world do not announce themselves in this way. This is not merely a negative feature, but a positive one, since tools are actually getting some-thing done while they fail to announce themselves. This brilliant tool-analysis is perhaps the greatest moment of twentieth-century philosophy. Its primary target is obviously Husserl. What comes first are not phenomena that appear to consciousness. Phenomena are only rare cases of visible things emerging from a dominant silent background of equipment.


SIGNS AND SIGNALS

Heidegger speaks of another special case of readiness-to-hand: signs and signals. He refers to the automobiles of his time, which had just begun to use primitive turn signals in the form of adjustable red arrows. These arrows indicate the region of space where Dasein plans to turn its vehicle. Unlike the normal case of equipment, the turn signal does not unconsciously direct us toward the region where it wants us to look. Instead, the signaling arrow remains visible, openly declaring itself as a sign that wants us to notice one specific direction rather than the others. By contrast, a hammer is usually not a sign — unless an archaeologist interprets it as a sign that Neanderthals once camped here.

Most equipment disappears from view, but a sign or signal is equipment viewed “as” equipment. This is true even of tools whose use is unknown to us. If we enter a strange laboratory and fail to understand the purpose of all the vats and cages, or if we open up a television and have no idea what each of the parts do, we still understand that all of these things are equipment. We do not think of them as random lumps of plastic and metal, but either ask an expert to explain them, or turn away in boredom and despair. Just as with equipment, an entity’s use as a sign is not something projected onto it after we first encounter it as a mere physical lump. Heidegger asks us to imagine that a peasant regards the south wind as a sign that rain is coming. In this case, the peasant encounters the wind as a sign from the start. He does not just feel a rush of air in his face and later add the judgment that “rain must be coming.” Everything happens simultaneously.

— from Heidegger Explained by Graham Harman


ETA: There is an interesting inversion here as well. If I in my limited aspect cannot understand God in his omniscience, he reciprocally cannot understand me in my finiteness, for to do so, he would have to somehow "forget" everything he knows (which likely has unintended consequences as well). Since he cannot know what it is like to be a finite being in the absence of infinite knowledge (a problem for omniscience), he is in no position to pass judgement on my morals. (Infinites tend to have undesirable properties in general if not tightly formulated; if you apply Anselm's ontological argument to include being everything it /God can be, then my existence as not God is a mistake which Anselm's argument seems to dictate being swallowed up by God, erasing me. Every not God makes God less than God could be, which the logic of Anselm does not seem to admit. [this is likely symptomatic of a much larger issue with Anselm's argument, but I'll not entertain that as another further digression at this juncture.])

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Now that we have the text before us, please show where God is claiming that his moral judgements are beyond our ken.

In the text God repeatedly demonstrates that his knowledge exceeds that of Job. Job is forced to admit that he cannot answer any of God’s questions. Thus God’s judgments are based on more information than would be available to Job.

He does? All I see are a bunch of questions. Now if God had said parenthetically, that the reason he was asking these questions was to show how much greater his ethical understanding was compared to Job's, you might have something. But that's why I pulled out the declarative statements alone to show that God made no such statement. In order to conclude that your assertion was God's implied meaning, we would have to either know the mind of Job as God does, in order to know what understanding God expected Job to have, or know God's intent stolen from His very brow. Unfortunately, Job is long dead and left no further statements, so we can't learn from him. The only other person who knew what God's statements were meant to imply for Job is God himself, and since you've basically argued that we can't know the mind of God, you've effectively argued yourself into a corner from which we can't know the meaning of God's rather Socratic dialog with Job. Socrates, if I recall correctly, argued that his questions were a method of bringing forth knowledge that the subject already has, but is not aware of possessing; if this is the nature of God's dialog with Job, it's doubtful you can attach any determinate meaning to it.

(ETA: It occurs to me that there is an even greater problem with Job 38-39. Even if we believe we can make a reasonable guess as to what God's message to Job was, ignoring the possibility that that specific message was meant for Job alone, since this is the word of God, in order for us to take a determinate meaning from it, we must assume God had two messages, not one. The first, intended for Job, but also one intended for us, since God knew that we would be interpreting His words to Job in the context as God's message to us. Even if we accept God's message to Job as simplistically rhetorical in the sense you suggest, it doesn't tell us what God's message to us was meant to be. For that, we have to take into account the entirety of Job, a story with a lot in it, including a lot of commentary from some chatty Cathies. Telling what God's specific overall message in Job is to us is one that has eluded both professional and amateur commentators for millennia. That you, ChadWooters, feel confident to speak about God's meaning for us in giving us the story of Job is a most extraordinary claim. An extraordinariness not satisfactorily met by the caliber of your arguments.)

Regardless, you were asked for a scriptural support for the point, and your scriptural support has been found wanting. What else do you have?