Heidegger and Kuhn

Posted on May 12, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy | 3 Comments

One of the entries this month in the The 69th Philosophers’ Carnival was a post about normal and revolutionary science in Heidegger. That is the issue of some Kuhnian-like structures in Heidegger. As Bryan notes it is when there is a crisis that Being becomes most examined. I’m not sure this is necessarily quite the same as Kuhn’s paradigm shift. Rather I think that when something doesn’t “work” we notice it. While when it does work it tends to be invisible. I think this happens a lot in science – especially in physics. Scientists are able to do their work without being aware of many of the presumptions in their engagements with equipment and matter. It’s only when something goes wrong that they notice it. Now of course some can think through these issues independent of a failure. One might say that this is what philosophers of science often do. Which is, I think, a problem for reading Heidegger too much in light of Kuhn.

While not really related to the issue of paradigms and crises some might find my post on Heidegger and Kuhn from the old blog interesting. My focus was much more about the nature of Kant’s a priori as it relates to paradigms and then some approaches by Heidegger. I think this is the key point of the post:

For Kuhn one can’t ultimately explain how to get at reality itself in this individual way. One is always lost in the social. (“The They” to use Heidegger’s notion of inauthenticity) Because knowledge is in terms of the transcendental conditions which are social the question becomes what about the transcendental conditions of the real? But given Internalism can one make such a claim?

For Heidegger there are transcendental conditions, but these are the conditions in which Being lets the beings (the things) manifest themselves as the kind of beings they are. Inauthenticity is to fundamentally lose that “original” encounter with the beings. One gets trapped in social norms. This is Kuhn’s place. Yet in the authentic turning towards Being we can have this move from the essential to the individual. To use the later terminology of Heidegger, we talk about the Event or Happening of Being.

Clearly this individual moment of the encounter with things will transform our ontology. Thus the mathematical projection with which we understand beings is transformed and we understand beings in a new way. But they are the same beings. Thus Heidegger avoids the problem of the incommensurability of theories in Kuhn. Since the focus isn’t on the representation as in Internalism but on the beings within an Externalism the problem can’t occur. The focus isn’t ontology as providing a correspondence but ontology as letting us experience the beings.

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3 Responses to “Heidegger and Kuhn”

This sounds a lot like Hegel and the way in which our experiences become universalized. In many of our experiences people become place holders and just become a universal. As a result we lose our experience with them as particular beings. I think that unfortunately this occurs within our familial relationships all too often. People lose the ability to see the particularity of their wife or husband, because they have universalized all of their characteristics and the mind becomes desensitized to the experience of ones spouse. However, I think that either through a crisis or through reflection one may once again experience the particularity of an individual, as the post argues,

“It’s only when something goes wrong that they notice it. Now of course some can think through these issues independent of a failure.”

Regardless or who these ideas are related to it seems the mind has an innate ability and desire to summarize and universalize objects in the world. However, as quickly as this universalization occurs, or they are reduced to some mathematical projection, we lose the ability to see these objects for what they are, and it seems that this ability is lost until a crisis occurs or a point of reflection. Meditation also is used as a tool to reverse this process of universalization. All of this discussion also reminds me of Shklovsky Ostrananie (or defamiliarization) were the author responsibility is to make the rocks rocky again.

Thanks for the comments!

I think you are right to draw the distinction between Heidegger and Kuhn on what the crisis period really is. For Kuhn, it is a time that scientists return to doing philosophy, but this is only in attempt to find a new paradigm to work from. Heidegger seems to want us to stay in the crisis period because it allows clearer access to Being.

I don’t think internalism or the social becomes a real problem for Kuhn unless we really expect a “world-out-there” to exist in specifics. It seems to me that the Kuhn of the “Structure” period wasn’t concerned with ontology in any more way than as a boundary-condition. The world beyond paradigms only functions to limit and bound paradigms (not in a bad way). Of course, he does take a lot of this back later on in his career.

Yeah, that’s my view of Kuhn as well. As I recall he was rather influenced by the neo-Kantians so that probably explains a lot of that stance. And you’re right, reading Kuhn’s last works such as The Essential Tension is probably something everyone ought do immediately after reading Structure. If nothing else but to see that Kuhn recognizes the problems and equivocations within his use of “paradigm.”

The issue of internalism is interesting since I take Heidegger to be an externalist. I think some of Kuhn’s issues are only issues given internalism.

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