Heidegger and Bricolage, Part 1

I’ve been thinking about Heidegger recently. I know that some people find him problematic because of his links with the Nazi party, but I think that it is possible to bracket this off (phenomenological reference intended) and talk about his philosophy without reference to that side of his thought. In any case, I  can’t unlearn the influence that thought has had on my own philosophy, and it would be academically wrong for me to try to ignore it.

While recovering from my PhD I’ve been digging deeper into the practices that are called remix, and that I’ve suggested we might call bricolage. Recently Wendy flagged up a Futurelearn MOOC Introduction to Phenomenology and its Application in Qualitative Research, and as I skipped through it I realised that using a Heideggerian lens could help me to make sense of what I was feeling my way towards.

It was Heidegger who introduced me to the concept of aletheia – the Greek word for truth, or disclosure. He also gives us (somewhere – probably in Sein und Zeit, it’s been a while since I read that properly) a description of a person pushing through the woods and coming to a clearing. So I understand his theory of knowledge as saying that understanding is something that happens in a space where there is a clearing, or an openness – as a type of opening one’s eyes and coming to an understanding. This reminds me of the stanza that someone wrote in our collaborative DS106 poem:

And this, I think, is one of the things that we do when we mix and remix – we chip away at concepts and uncover different senses of meaning (of truth?).