I've been meaning to get back to the discussion of Heidegger's Analytic that I discussed a bit last month. The basic points that Carman makes are very much in tune with how I've long read Heidegger. Since they lead to a view of Heidegger so much more understandable and less mysterious, especially relative to reality, I thought I'd summarize a few of the points of his thesis.
First, for non-philosophers, we ought clarify what we mean by realism. The basic idea of realism is simply that the world is composed of mind-independent entities. That is, the truth of our reference doesn't depend upon what you, I or any group think about it. An other way of putting it is that how we represent entities does not determine the nature of entities. The two main views in the realism debate are realism and idealism. Realism suggests that our talk of entities makes sense independent of representation. Idealism suggest that our talk of entities is wrapped up in how we linguistically represent them and how we or our community think about them.
Now the traditional view of Heidegger is that he is an idealist. There are good reasons for this. For one, in Being and Time he appears to take practice as more fundamental than occurrent entities. That is Heidegger speaks of things ready-at-hand that allow us to understand things as present-at-hand. Thus a hammer is only such because we have a prior relationship of hammering.
All of this famously ends up into a discussion of Being, which Heidegger feels philosophy has neglected. That is, what does it mean to be? Now the way most read Heidegger is in seeing Being as a mysterious "entity" or quasi-entity that mystically sends entities to us. An other way of looking at Heidegger though is talking about the essences of human understanding that allow entities to be presented to us as the kind of entities they are. That is, a hammer as an entity is an entity. However we can only understand the hammer hermeneutically which means in terms of the pre-existing linguistic and practical frameworks we already find ourselves in. That is, to be, is really to ask the question of how things can be thought. That says nothing about entities independent of thought.
So the idealism attributed to Heidegger, while understandable, comes about due to this error.
Put an other way, far from making occurentness ontologically dependent upon practice, both are fundamental modes of being. The issue is rather how such entities become meaningful for us.
Carman has a great quote from Heidegger along these lines. (197, emphasis as in Carman)
Nature is what is in principle explainable and to be explained because it is in principle unintelligible; it is the unintelligible pure and simple, and it is the unintelligible because it is the deworlded world, if we take nature in this exteme sense of entities as they are uncovered in physics. (Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, 298, eng. tr. History of the Concept of Time)
Carman interprets this to mean, "that we need not strictly speaking interpret physical nature as occurrent in order to apprehend and even understand it as occurrent; rather, its minimal ontological intelligibility consists primarily in its being disclosed to us as a radically independent of us and as indifferent to any of our ways of interpreting it, which is to say understanding it explicitly."(198)
Put simply "being consists in the meaning of being. Being is what it means to be. Our understanding of our own being, for instance, is an understanding of what it means to be a human being. Our understanding of occurrentness is an understanding of what it means for an entity to be a mere object. In the absence of Dasein's understanding of being, however, there is no such thing as what it means to be anything, and in that sense there is no being. But what it means to be is neither an entity nor a property or feature of entities, so there is no problem about entities existing in its absence. In Dasein's absence, and so in the absence of any understanding of being, and likewise in the absence of its meaning anything to be an entity, entities would still be. Without Dasein, there would still be occurrent entities; indeed, they would have much (or at least more or less) the same ontic structure we find in them in our everyday encounters and in scientific inquiry. Occurrent entities would remain as they are, only there would be nothing to be understood about what it means to be such an entity. Without Dasein, nothing would mean anything. In the absence of any understanding of occurrentness, there would still be occurrent entities, but there would be nothing intelligible either in there being such entities or in their having the speicifc ontic structure they would have." (201)
Heidegger in the "Letter on Humanism" says,
But does not Being and Time (212), where the "there is" (es gibt) comes to language, say: "Only as long as Dasein is, is there being"? Of course. That means: onl as long as the clearing (Lichtung) of being happens (sich ereignet) does being deliever itself over (ubereignet sich) to man.... The sentence, however does not mean: the existence (Dasein) of man in the traditional sense of existentia, and thought in modernity as the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of the ego cogito, is the entity through which being is first created. The sentence does not say that being is a product of man. The Introduction of Being and Time (38) says simply and clearly, even in italics, "being is the transcendens pure and simple." (Wegmarken 167, quoted in Carman, 202)
Clark,
Great post, but I always end up feeling like these (legitimate) interpretations of Heidegger make him sound too much like a social constructionist (i.e., of Berger and Luckman fame). So, while giving allowance for our hermeneutic starting point, there's really real stuff "out there", with an ontic structure we can appreciate, albeit in the manner which befits occurrent entities, but the significance of most other beings is rooted in our social practices. Is this completely misinterpreting your/Carman's position?
Well, I've backed off a bit from Carman's position the last year or so. (This post is a year or so old)
I think that Being or its latter formulations end up being about the issue of how entities are understandable. That is how they have meaning. How it is for them to be able to be. So in that regard I think Carman's quite right. The fundamental issue though in this somewhat narrow topic is the nature of everydayness or averageness. I think things are intelligible only because of our social practices but not purely because of them. That is I read Heidegger (and many Heideggarians) as saying that there is an "eruption" into the social of the real. This, to me anyway, is the point of the authentic and inauthentic distinction. (Although clearly it is a tad more complex)
Where I've moved a way from Carman somewhat is that while one can argue that there is a kind of common social basis for our ability for things to be intelligible I'm not sure about the relationship between this averageness or everydayness and all linguistic unveilings of beings. In what sense are more particular, narrow or neologistic linguistic unveilings still parasitic on this averageness? Carman says they are very much parasitic. I'm just not sure they are.
But all of this is wrapped up in the nature of both Being and differance. (I tend to see them as different - even though I don't think Levinas and Derrida are actually that different from Heidegger overall) For something to be it must have that linguistic component. When I see an apple I don't simply see a blur of shapes and colors I then interpret as an apple. Rather I see it as an apple. But when I have a unique experience shared with others I think I can refer to it without using this average speech. I can develop a language out of the experience due to indexical relationships.
Put an other way, in more Peircean terms, in language we have both the iconic and the indexical. What I fear is that the focus on social externalism elevates iconic signs while perhaps repressing indexical signs.
I should add that when I reread the above post so as to post it as a kind of reprint I did note one perhaps controversial statement in it. I said, "the traditional view of Heidegger is that he is an idealist." That's certainly not true in the sense of contemporary Heidegger scholars. I think it is true of how philosophers in general over the years have seen him though. If we take the idealist vs. realist debate to be basically a debate between what is fundamental: representation or reference then I don't think Heidegger is either a realist or an idealist. Like the pragmatists he is something else. However I think his externalism is the way to avoid the realist/idealist divide since that dichotomy only makes sense in an internalist scheme. Externalism makes things simultaneously referential and representation (or perhaps neither). I think this comes out very well in Heidegger's later works like On the Essence of Truth.
The popular way to read Heidegger of late is through the lens of the late Wittgenstein. (Especially after Dreyfus' very influential classes and writings) I'll fully admit that I read both he and Derrida through a Peircean lens, for better or worse.
I just want to say how helpful these posts are, Clark--thanks for posting them and linking to them.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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