Heidegger and Realism

Posted on February 16, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | 4 Comments

Heidegger’s realism (or lack thereof) has been a topic of many blogs the past few weeks. Sadly it’s come right at what for me has been the second most busy time of the year. So other than the occasional comment at other blogs I’ve not said much. I still don’t really have time to say much, but perhaps I can chime in on a few things. Albeit briefly.

1/ Externalism. I think the big problem is that the traditional problem of realism is tied to the Cartesian divide. That is how this mind stuff, completely separate from other stuff, can have justified true beliefs about that other stuff. This is what leads to the particular kind of skepticism that Heidegger raises in Being and Time. When people raise the question of correlationalism or the like or tie Heidegger to Husserl or the neoKantians one must always keep in mind the issue of internalism vs. externalism. The argument in BT fundamentally is just recognizing that if one rejects the assumptions of internalism that one can’t even raise the skeptical claim. This doesn’t ground why one should be an externalist, but it’s impossible to raise many problems including correlationalism within externalism.

It’s important to not confuse this facet of externalism with say Reid’s direct realism. Reid is still working within the framework of internalism. However in externalism one doesn’t make a separation between the entities as experienced versus the entities themselves. So the problem of error (which is really what the skepticism and correlationalism is about) then has to be transformed.

One can debate whether Heidegger’s approach of considering Being as Truth works. (In a sense Heidegger’s take on Being is the very issue of externalism and what enables it) I do think it important to keep in mind what causes the problems that one traditionally found in philosophy. (I should add that I think this question of externalism is also key to Derrida although there its more broadly the problem of exteriority or how the outside always contaminates the inside)

2/ Time. Time is obviously important for Heidegger but what gets left out of the realism debate sometimes is the issue of time. Not in the old sense of whether time is real. Rather time as tied to the question of externalism. That is externalism breaches the mind/space divide. However the question then becomes whether it also breaches the mind/time divide. This is a non-trivial point and were I to raise criticisms about Heidegger I think this is much more fruitful ground.

3/ Realism in General. One thing I’ve noticed in all debates about realism (including those not tied to Heidegger in the least) is that it is very, very easy to become completely confused about what the issues really are. That’s why often you see a lot of subtle caveats and conditions on terms when people use this. Probably the nadir of the realism debate (IMO) can be seen in Dummett’s work. (I was once, in my early 20′s, quite taken with Dummett) It’s not that I want to pick on Dummett — just that I think he was quite characteristic in terms of how the debate went in the late 20th century.

4/ Pragmatism. Not unexpectedly I think the pragmatists, especially Peirce, offer the best way out of this debate. Not just because they tend to be clearer in their terms and discussion than what one finds in the Continental tradition, but because I think they offer a third way between the traditional poles of idealism and realism as traditionally thought. Put an other way, this debate was already held in early 20th century American philosophy. Only there the topic wasn’t Heidegger but Peirce and Dewey. But I think the same issues are present. (And that debate was in turn revived in certain ways by the self-described neo-pragmatists like Rorty or Putnam)

Related posts:

  1. Idealism, Realism and Minds
  2. Beyond Realism and Idealism
  3. Heidegger’s Realism
  4. Heidegger and OOO
  5. Realism and Naive Realism
  6. Levinas, Heidegger & Objects

Comments

4 Responses to “Heidegger and Realism”

[It seems that my comment disappeared into the darkness of the interweb. But if this is a double-post, please delete it.]

>However in externalism one doesn’t make a separation between the entities as experienced versus the entities themselves. So the problem of error (which is really what the skepticism and correlationalism is about) then has to be transformed.

I don’t know…doesn’t Heidegger set up a criterion of falsity in terms of the semblance being a modification of the phenomenon? Moreover, there seems to be plenty of places within Heidegger’s thought where he makes a distinction between entities themselves and our experience of such entities in terms of interpretation and the understanding of being. His externalism consists in discussing entities in-themselves not as something “outside” or “external” to an internal sphere of subjectivity, but rather, as something that envelops and surrounds us as an existential ground for the possibility of dwelling as finite beings on a finite planet.

Sorry Gary, there was a screwup with WordPress. The post didn’t show up properly either – I think most who saw it saw it via rss feeds. Anyway it is all fixed. My apologies for the error.

You’re completely right that in various ways Heidegger allows error. This is one of the key issues in say the On the Essence of Truth. But how error or semblance functions in externalist case versus the internalist one is quite different. (As I think that later text demonstrates) And even in externalism we can make a distinction between the entity and our experience of it. But once again how this functions in externalism and internalism is quite different.

In internalism you’ll always have a gulf between the thing and the self. Ultimately it is unbridgeable for internalists. This is why they always have to go to the question of correlationalism and then ask how well a pure internal sign corresponds to the external object. But all you have available is the internal object.

In externalism whether of the Heideggarian, Peircean, Sartean or other varieties this problem just can’t appear. Rather what one focuses in on are the various ways (modes) in which an entity can give itself to you. It is precisely the transcendence of this issue of giving that then provides Heidegger with his discussion of radical finitude. We are already dwelling with all these things, yet there is a sense in which we are not our own and a sense in which we can be our own. Effectively this is due to the blurring of the inside – outside distinction of Internalism. In Externallism you simply can’t make that distinction.

The two problems for an Externalist (and this is a place where I would attack Heidegger were I so inclined) is to explain how there can be something like consciousness if there isn’t a real outside. I rather like Heidegger’s attempts to deal with this but I can fully understand why they aren’t persuasive to many. The second issue is related. Why prefer externalism over internalism? And there I don’t think Heidegger necessarily offers as compelling a case over the empiricists or even the more middle ground of Husserl. I know why I prefer externalism. But like all metaphysical debates the evidence one can offer is always weak.

>how there can be something like consciousness if there isn’t a real outside

Imo, this requires a return to behaviorism in regards to “inauthenetic” existence and the experience of nonhuman animals. How perception “feels” is simply irrelevant to getting around in the world. It is only the unique human ability for higher-order reflection that makes sensation into something curious for we can reflect upon our gaze instead of just gazing. Otherwise, the “qualia” for normal animal life is simply the experience of being completely engaged with the world…which, in the case of “flow”, sleepwalking, and unconscious habit structure, feels like nothing at all. We are simply “outside”, as Heidegger suggests, dealing with things. Consciousness is a moot issue outside of higher-order introspection, which is unique to humans.

>Why prefer externalism over internalism?

It’s more parsimonious and explains the data without resorting to messy ontological distinctions between mind and world, inside and outside, etc. Ultimately, such distinctions need to be retained when dealing with introspective content, but for understanding primordial coping, I feel that externalism is the better explanation on multiple levels. Moreover, there is now a growing body of interdisciplinary research supporting the externalist paradigm. That’s gotta count for something.

Well I’m not sure I want to say what qualia is for an animal. That seems a horribly complex issue. As Nagel suggests, what is it like to be a bat? I think there isn’t a good argument for suggesting that one needs human higher order reflection for the “feel” of an experience to matter. It may in fact have quite a bit of unconscious effect. I think there almost certainly a middle ground between higher order (rational) reflection and it being irrelevant.

In more Peircean terms there is absolutely no logical reason why Firstness (or the pure feeling of an experience) can’t be the object determining some sign. To suggest this demands human higher order thinking is just unwarranted. Sign processes just needn’t be conscious ones. (And I’d argue most of the important ones aren’t)

Regarding externalism and introspection, I think once again that the pragmatists offer a much, much clearer approach here without requiring the kind of inside/outside Cartesian project. One merely speaks of signs which have an object and interpretant. But if the sign-process is continuous (as Peirce argues) then even here one can’t maintain absolute divisions. Further, as you note externalism is starting to have research supporting it from within cognitive science.

On a purely logical level it is also cleaner in that semiotics offers a much nicer way of handling all this without injecting the absolute ontological distinctions that are part and parcel of much philosophical discussion. (It makes a lot of Kant’s work largely beside the point IMO) I should note this is partially why I think Heidegger struggles with his language so much. He’s trying to speak about externalism but from within a Husserlian and neoKantian tradition. That’s hard.

Once you reject the Cartesian divide then you end up with the material world of objects being somewhat mental like and the mental world being somewhat object like. This bothers a lot of people and does perhaps verge upon a kind of panpsychic approach to the universe. But if one just calls this a sort of property dualism then one isn’t really doing much that Spinoza didn’t already do – albeit in a cleaner fashion.

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