This film brings out nicely the trope of Heideggerianism, namely, hands. If Descartes privileged vision by using the natural light metaphor, Heidegger privileges the hand by using the, well, hand metaphor. And as a result, all the "masters" starring in this movie are masters at doing something with their hands: the musician, the cook, the boat-racer, the carpenter, the juggler.
Heidegger's philosophy is aesthetic philosophy in Collingwood's sense of the phrase. It is a reflection upon mind from the point of view of art. Collingwood, whose father was a painter, calls the essence of art the "total imaginative experience." This is also what Heidegger calls "authentic" and what this film captures well.
Now, the film does mention religion a little bit, but it does not mention Christianity. It also does not do justice to science. This is understandable, since the closer the mood of the film comes to thought (rather than intuition), the less the degree of excitement and imagination becomes. Besides, it is Heidegger's rather dogmatic assertion that human beings are world-disclosers prior to being thinking beings, and so naturally imagination, which is the life-spring of all that the mind is capable of doing, is given pride of place in his philosophy.
It is no accident that followers of Heidegger in the 20th century, especially the French thinkers, were chiefly aesthetic philosophers. They specialized in coining new terms in order to capture new images and emotions or even to create those. For art at its best is a formal act which, upon completion, retroactively creates the emotion of whose expression it is.
One way of detecting the limitation of a philosophical account is to see where the thinkers start using the language of "oughts" and "shoulds" instead of keeping to a calm description. In the case of this film, the main "ought" is that we must "resist the temptations of technology" and protect local practices. It feels good to agree with such a prescription, but at the same time this normative claim tells us something about the limits of a Heideggerian, aesthetic philosophy. In a technological way of being, there are no worlds, or rather, the world becomes worldless, filled with rules and standards and producing new ones. On the other hand, there is still the world of thought and of rational contemplation. There is science and history, not to mention capitalism. For those who are caught up in science, history, and capitalism, for those who are not artists and athletes, in short, for those who are not the agents of a total imaginative experience, Heidegger's aesthetic way of thinking might have little to offer compared to a colder, drier account of how to think and understand in such worldless situations.
Heidegger's philosophy is aesthetic philosophy in Collingwood's sense of the phrase. It is a reflection upon mind from the point of view of art. Collingwood, whose father was a painter, calls the essence of art the "total imaginative experience." This is also what Heidegger calls "authentic" and what this film captures well.
Now, the film does mention religion a little bit, but it does not mention Christianity. It also does not do justice to science. This is understandable, since the closer the mood of the film comes to thought (rather than intuition), the less the degree of excitement and imagination becomes. Besides, it is Heidegger's rather dogmatic assertion that human beings are world-disclosers prior to being thinking beings, and so naturally imagination, which is the life-spring of all that the mind is capable of doing, is given pride of place in his philosophy.
It is no accident that followers of Heidegger in the 20th century, especially the French thinkers, were chiefly aesthetic philosophers. They specialized in coining new terms in order to capture new images and emotions or even to create those. For art at its best is a formal act which, upon completion, retroactively creates the emotion of whose expression it is.
One way of detecting the limitation of a philosophical account is to see where the thinkers start using the language of "oughts" and "shoulds" instead of keeping to a calm description. In the case of this film, the main "ought" is that we must "resist the temptations of technology" and protect local practices. It feels good to agree with such a prescription, but at the same time this normative claim tells us something about the limits of a Heideggerian, aesthetic philosophy. In a technological way of being, there are no worlds, or rather, the world becomes worldless, filled with rules and standards and producing new ones. On the other hand, there is still the world of thought and of rational contemplation. There is science and history, not to mention capitalism. For those who are caught up in science, history, and capitalism, for those who are not artists and athletes, in short, for those who are not the agents of a total imaginative experience, Heidegger's aesthetic way of thinking might have little to offer compared to a colder, drier account of how to think and understand in such worldless situations.
